by Edward Short
In June 1838, Clough met Newman at a tea-supper at Oriel with other undergraduates, though he left no account of it. Anthony Kenny, Clough’s most recent biographer, claims that Clough rejected Newman’s sacramental system, but there is no proof of this in either his letters or his diaries.14 Before Gell set out on his way to Tasmania, Clough gave him a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions. He had considered giving him something by Carlyle, despite his thinking him “somewhat heathenish,” but he thought better of it. Nevertheless, Clough clearly recognized that “all literature, old and new, English and foreign, which is worth calling literature” has something “heathenish” about it.15 Newman agreed, pointing out in The Idea of a University that “It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man. You may gather together something very great and high, something higher than any Literature ever was; and when you have done so, you will find that it is not Literature at all. You will have simply left the delineation of man, as such, and have substituted for it … man, as he … might be …”16 Newman and Clough were also alike in finding composition an ordeal. Clough wrote an amusing poem to confess his own struggles with the accustomed toil that he never found easy.
If to write, and write again
Bite now the lip and now the pen,
Gnash in a fury the teeth, and tear
Innocent paper or it may be hair
In endless chases to pursue
That swift escaping word that would do,
Inside and out turn a phrase, o’er and o’er,
Till all the little sense goes it had before,
If to be these things makes one a poet,
I am one—Come and all the world may know it.17
When Ward told Newman that he received “keen and constant pleasure” from writing, Newman was incredulous: “My own personal experience is the other way. It is one of my sayings (so continually do I feel it) that the composition of a volume is like gestation and childbirth. I do not think that I ever thought out a question or wrote my thoughts, without great pain, pain reaching to the body as well as the mind. It has made me practically feel that labour “in sudore vultûs ejus” is the lot of man; and that “ignorance” is truly one of his four wounds. It has been emphatically a penance.”18
By Clough’s second year at Balliol, he was already beginning to appreciate that the ethos to which he had pledged allegiance at Rugby was destined for a shake-up, though he would always retain his respect for Dr. Arnold. After he got word that his former headmaster had persuaded “godless” London University to conduct examinations in the Gospels and Acts, he wrote to Gell:
It must have been a very grand thing to see him get up among all those people, and declare that they must do something to show that they were Christians, and that it was a Christian University. I do not know how we shall get on in Oxford against those very opposite sort of enemies—the Newmanists—they are very savage and determined, and such good and pious men to boot … These people however have done a vast deal of good at Oxford, where anything so ‘ungentlemanly’ and ‘coarse’ and ‘in such bad taste’ as ‘Evangelicalism’ would never be able to make very much way. It seems just the sort of religious activity and zeal, which one would expect to develop … in an age of activity and shaking-up …19
Newman had equally kind things to say about the Arnoldians. Speaking of the Broad Church party at Oxford, in relation to the Tory party, he noted in his Apologia: “The Old Tory or Conservative party in Oxford had in it no principle or power of development, and that from its very nature and constitution: it was otherwise with the Liberals. They represented a new idea, which was but gradually learning to recognize itself, to ascertain its characteristics and external relations, and to exert an influence upon the University. The party grew, all the time that I was in Oxford, even in numbers, certainly in breadth and definiteness of doctrine, and in power. And, what was a far higher consideration, by the accession of Dr. Arnold’s pupils, it was invested with an elevation of character which claimed the respect even of its opponents.”20 Clough’s own settled estimate of Dr. Arnold was ambivalent. It is clear that Arnold made an ineradicable impression on him, though he could also see the liabilities of that impression. In the Epilogue to “Dipsychus,” Clough records a dialogue between the presumed author of the poem and his uncle, in which the former explains how the poem is about “the conflict between the tender conscience and the world,” but before he can elaborate, his uncle cuts him off, saying, “Oh for goodness’s sake, my dear boy … don’t go into the theory of it … I don’t understand all those new words … It’s all Arnold’s doing; he spoilt the public schools … They’re full of the notion of the world being so wicked, and of their taking a higher line, as they call it. I only fear they’ll never take any at all.’” When the author pooh-poohs this, his uncle has his answer ready: “Put [a fourteen-year-old boy] through a course of confirmation and sacraments, backed up with sermons and private admonitions, and what is much the same as auricular confession, and, really, my dear nephew, I can’t answer for it but he mayn’t turn out as great a goose as you …”21
After attending Newman’s “Lectures on the Scripture Proof of the Doctrines of the Church,” Clough wrote a friend how Newman had made his arguments in “a very fair and very candid manner,” but he also followed this up by saying: “One thing is clear—that one must leave the discussion of Newmanist matters all snug and quiet for after one’s degree …”22 In that same year, while reading Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, he confessed, “I incline to think that I ought to give up seeking much about the great Newman questions: for I have little or no earnestness.”23 This recalls something Newman told his older brother Charles as far back as 1825, when Charles was first considering throwing over Christianity for Owenite atheism: “I consider the rejection of Christianity to arise from a fault of the heart, not of the intellect …”24 For Newman, atheism was not an alternative to belief but a failure of faith.
After taking a Second at Balliol, Clough took the train to Rugby to tell Dr. Arnold in person that his golden boy had failed. Tait attributed the poor result to Clough’s examiners: “They had a man of genius before them and they were too stupid to see it.”25 Henceforth, Clough’s worldly career unfolded in a series of missteps, though he always managed to make them serve his poetry. In 1842, he won a much-coveted fellowship to Oriel but resigned six years later after he realized that he could not subscribe to the 39 Articles. In 1850, he became Principal of University Hall, London, after Newman’s brother Frank resigned the post but resigned himself when he found that he had no calling for guiding Unitarian youth. By the time he had left Oriel, Clough had apparently drifted far away from belief in Christianity—Kenny notes that he doubted the historicity of the Gospels—but his religious doubts were always accompanied with hankerings for faith, even though his faith was fitful and half-hearted.
One of the most striking things about Clough is how worldly adversity never rattled him. He was inured to failure because he was unimpressed with success. “He had a kind of proud simplicity about him,” Richard Holt Hutton wrote of his friend after his death, “singularly attractive, and often singularly disappointing to those who longed to know him well. He had a fear, which many would think morbid, of leaning much on the approbation of the world; and there is one characteristic passage in his poems in which he intimates that men who lean on the good opinion of others might even be benefited by a crime which would rob them of that evil stimulant.”26
Why, so is good no longer good, but crime
Our truest, best advantage, since it lifts us
Out of the stifling gas of men’s opinion
Into the vital atmosphere of Truth,
Where He again is visible, tho’ in anger.
Here, in this acknowledgement of the reality of sin, Clough parted ways with his Pelagian contemporaries. And yet Newman insisted that it was the penitent who could best testify to the tenacity of sin. “We cannot rid ourselves of sin when we would
,” he wrote in “Sins of Infirmity” (1838), “though we repent, though God forgives us, yet it remains in its power over our souls, in our habits, and in our memories. It has given a colour to our thoughts, words, and works; and though, with many efforts, we would wash it out from us, yet this is not possible except gradually. Men have been slothful, or self-conceited, or self-willed, or impure, or worldly-minded in their youth, and afterwards they turn to God, and would fain be other than they have been, but their former self clings to them, as a poisoned garment, and eats into them …” The only cure for this abiding poison, Newman insists, is penance, for, despite our infirmities, if “we can point to some occasions on which we have sacrificed anything for God’s service, or to any habit of sin or evil tendency which we have more or less overcome, or to any habitual self-denial which we practice, or any work which we have accomplished to God’s honour and glory; this perchance may fill us with the humble hope that God is working in us, and therefore is at peace with us.”27
Despite his professional and personal setbacks, Clough was a disciplined, innovative, prolific poet. In 1848, he wrote The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, a poem about an exuberant reading party in Scotland modeled after the parties Clough himself conducted when he was a don at Oriel. Into this sprightliest of poems, Clough poured his musings on love, life, nature, and philosophy in rollicking Homeric hexameters, which Arnold rightly praised for their “out-of-door freshness,” “naturalness” and “buoyant rapidity.”28 Although a narrative poem with a hero and heroine and a finely observed Caledonian setting, the Bothie also has a marked autobiographical element, as here where Clough might almost be describing the faith—the “name of his home”—that he was continually in peril of losing.
I was as one that sleeps on the railway; one, who dreaming
Hears thro’ his dream the name of his home shouted out; hears and hears not,—
Faint, and louder again, and less loud, dying in distance;
Dimly conscious, with something of inward debate and choice,—and
Sense of claim and reality present, anon relapses
Nevertheless, and continues the dream and fancy, while forward
Swiftly, remorseless, the car presses on, he knows not whither.29
In another passage, Clough echoes Thackeray’s respect for what Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus regarded as the one undeniable reality—amor matris—in lines that recall the propulsive rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
… There is a power upon earth, seen feebly in women and children,
Which can, laying one hand on the cover, read-off, unfaltering,
Leaf after leaf unlifted, the words of the closed book under,
Words which we are poring at, hammering at, stumbling at, spelling.30
Newman also saw a power in mother and children, the power of innocence, which, he recognized, too many of the educated scorned. “I suppose great numbers of men think that it is slavish and despicable to go on in that narrow way in which they are brought up as children, without experience of the world. It is the narrow way, and they call it narrow in contumely. They fret at the restraints of their father’s roof, and wish to judge and act for themselves. They think it manly to taste the pleasures of sin; they think it manly to know what sin is before condemning it. They think they are then better judges, when they are not blindly led by others, but have taken upon them, by their own act, the yoke of evil. They think it a fine thing to curse and swear, and to revel, and to ridicule God’s sacred truth, and to profess themselves the devil’s scholars. They look down upon the innocent, upon women and children, and solitaries, and holy and humble men of heart, who, like the Cherubim, see God and worship, as unfit for the great business of life, and worthless in the real estimate of things.”31
After finishing his bravura jeu d’esprit, Clough spent 1848 in Paris with his friend and confrere Emerson, witnessing the revolution that brought the world Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire and Baron Hausmann’s Paris. From Paris, he went to Rome, where he fell under the spell of Garibaldi, who, in the absence of Pius IX, briefly presided over the short-lived Roman republic. Out of this experience Clough wrote his masterpiece, Amours de Voyage (1848), an epistolary novel in verse (hexameters again), which is full of charm and élan, though he only managed to get it published ten years after he wrote it—proof of how little genius he had for practical affairs. In 1850, Clough went on to Venice, where he wrote Dipsychus, a dialogue, as he described it, “between the tender conscience and the world,” which captures the double-mindedness with which he approached the crises of life. Clough always drew inspiration from being abroad—one reason why the equally itinerant Graham Greene found him so congenial. Greene certainly knew what Clough meant when he said that travel offered escape from “All the assujettissement of having been what one has been.”32 He also shared Clough’s distrust of action—or perhaps one should say his fascination with its stakes. In The Quiet American (1955), Greene quoted these characteristic lines from Clough’s Amours de Voyage (1849):
I do not like being moved: for the will is excited; and action
Is a most dangerous thing; I tremble for something factitious,
Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process;
We are so prone to these things, with our terrible notions of duty.33
In taking up the theme of action, Clough entered ground Newman had made his own. In “The Danger of Accomplishments” (1831), he observed how “God has made us to feel in order that we may go on to act in consequence of feeling; if then we allow our feelings to be excited without acting upon them, we do mischief to the moral system within us, just as we might spoil a watch, or other piece of machinery, by playing with the wheels of it.” In “Wisdom, as Contrasted with Faith and with Bigotry” (1841) from his Oxford University Sermons (1843), Newman reminded his readers that belief required the same faithful action that any great undertaking required. Here he might have had in mind William Froude’s friend Brunel, the great engineer, so many of whose engineering projects required huge investments of faithful action. “There are men who, when in difficulties, by the force of genius, originate at the moment vast ideas or dazzling projects; who, under the impulse of excitement, are able to cast a light, almost as if from inspiration, on a subject or course of action which comes before them; who have a sudden presence of mind equal to any emergency, rising with the occasion, and an undaunted heroic bearing, and an energy and keenness, which is but sharpened by opposition. Faith is a gift analogous to this thus far, that it acts promptly and boldly on the occasion, on slender evidence, as if guessing and reaching forward to the truth, amid darkness or confusion …”34 For Newman, in whatever one sets out to accomplish, “Premises imply conclusions; germs lead to developments; principles have issues; doctrines lead to action.”35 And, in any case, “The multitude have neither the time, the patience, nor the clearness and exactness of thought, for processes of investigation and deduction. Reason is slow and abstract, cold and speculative; but man is a being of feeling and action; he is not resolvable into … a series of hypotheticals, or a critical diatribe, or an algebraical equation.”36 In The Tamworth Reading Room (1841), Newman might have been addressing Clough directly when he observed how: “Few men have that power of mind which may hold fast and firmly a variety of thoughts. We ridicule ‘men of one idea;’ but a great many of us are born to be such, and we should be happier if we knew it. To most men argument makes the point in hand only more doubtful, and considerably less impressive. After all, man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. He is influenced by what is direct and precise.”37 Since Clough also suffered from an abiding irresoluteness, Newman’s passage was especially apposite. He could also have had Clough in mind when he declared: “Life is not long enough for a religion of inferences; we shall never have done beginning, if we determine to begin with proof. We shall ever be laying our foundations; we shall turn theology into evidences, and divines into textuaries. We shall never get at our fi
rst principles. Resolve to believe nothing, and you must prove your proofs and analyze your elements, sinking further and further, and finding ‘in the lowest depth a lower deep,’ till you come to the broad bosom of scepticism. I would rather be bound to defend the reasonableness of assuming that Christianity is true, than to demonstrate a moral governance from the physical world. Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.”38 Once Newman converted and wrote that ebullient book Loss and Gain (1847), he recognized that another truth flowed from his understanding of the primacy of action. In the novel, Newman has Willis say to Bateman those words that so haunted Richard Holt Hutton: “‘when the time comes, and come it will, for you, alien as you are now, to submit yourself to the gracious yoke of Christ, then, my dearest Bateman, it will be faith which will enable you to bear the ways and usages of Catholics, which else might perhaps startle you. Else, the habits of years, the associations in your mind of a certain outward behaviour with real inward acts of devotion, might embarrass you, when you had to conform yourself to other habits, and to create for yourself other associations. But this faith, of which I speak, the great gift of God, will enable you in that day to overcome yourself, and to submit, as your judgment, your will, your reason, your affections, so your tastes and likings, to the rule and usage of the Church. Ah, that faith should be necessary in such a matter, and that what is so natural and becoming under the circumstances, should have need of an explanation! I declare, to me,’ he said, and he clasped his hands on his knees, and looked forward as if soliloquising,—‘to me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Masses for ever and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words,—it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evocation of the Eternal …’”39