by Edward Short
In 1852, after becoming engaged to Blanche Mary Shore Smith (1828–1904) of Combe Hall, Surrey, a cousin of Florence Nightingale, Clough sailed with Thackeray to America, where he and Emerson spent nine months trying to find some suitable teaching post that would give him the wherewithal to marry. Florence was very fond of the penniless poet and instrumental in getting his improbable suit approved with Blanche’s skeptical mother. Florence also helped Clough and Blanche with their precarious finances. As Florence’s biographer points out, “She worked out detailed budgets showing what Clough and Blanche absolutely required to live on, including a scale of provision for children, basing her calculations on the frequency at which they would be likely to arrive at the average birth-rate …”40 Clough’s letters to Blanche when they were courting are full of charm. “Here I am just back from Mazzini’s lecture,” he writes in one letter, “having deposited Mrs and two Misses Wedgwood (an old and a young) in one carriage and Mrs. Carlyle with a German Count and Baron in another. We dined with Mr. Darwin, which was pretty fair fun, with a spice of cynicism, champagne and moselle …”41 In another letter, he tells his intended, “Mr. Martineau’s article in the Westminster is extremely ill written. A bad style is as bad as bad manners—and bad manners you do admit do mean something. Awkwardness is a defect; and other faults are positive faults morally. Things really ill-written it does one a little harm to read—would you forgive bad music because it was well-meant?”42 Before departing for America, however, despite Florence’s ministrations, Clough nearly scuttled his engagement when he wrote the woman he meant to make his wife: “Love is not everything, Blanche, don’t believe it nor make me pretend to believe it. ‘Service’ is everything. Let us be fellow-servants.”43 Of course, he was telling a necessary truth but Blanche did not see it that way. For 15 months afterwards, she would not forgive him and ever afterwards referred to what she called “the terrible letter.”44 Although fiercely protective of her husband’s reputation after his death, Blanche was highly critical of the living man. “Is it necessary for men to coarsen their imaginations,” she asked him in one letter. “It is curious, how very seldom you read any poems—any book of any kind that does not in some degree offend.”45 Despite his fiancée’s prenuptial pique, on returning to England, Clough finally found work as an examiner in the Education Office, and on 13 June 1854, the feast of Saint Anthony, the quizzical poet and his censorious bride were finally married.
That same year Clough began to help Florence Nightingale in her campaign to reform hospitals and even accompanied her to Calais on her first trip to the Crimea. Speculating on the relationship that developed between the unhappy poet and the reforming nurse, Lytton Strachey wrote: “Though the purpose of existence might be still uncertain … here, at any rate, under the eye of this inspired woman, was something real … his only doubt was—could he be of any use? Certainly he could. There were a great number of miscellaneous little jobs which there was not a body handy to do. For instance, when Miss Nightingale was travelling, there were the railway-tickets to be taken; and there were proof-sheets to be corrected; and then there were parcels to be done up in brown paper, and carried to the post. Certainly, he could be useful.”46 Strachey’s heavy sarcasm notwithstanding, there was probably some truth to this picture. The Bloomsbury littérateur might have seen risible indignity in such tasks, but for Clough, who had known so much spiritual suffering in his life, there was nothing undignified about helping a woman reform hospitals, though such reforms could not cure his own ills. The only antidotes he found for himself were accidental and fleeting.
Comfort has come to me here in the dreary streets of the city,
Comfort—how do you think?—with a barrel-organ to bring it.
Moping along the streets, and cursing my day as I wandered,
All of a sudden my ear met the sound of an English psalm-tune,
Comfort me it did, till indeed I was very near crying.
Ah, there is some great truth, partial, very likely, but needful,
Lodged, I am strangely sure, in the tones of the English psalm-tune.
Comfort it was at least; and I must take without question
Comfort, however it come, in the dreary streets of the city.47
That hymns were a significant part of Dr. Arnold’s regimen at Rugby give this poem added poignancy. Later, in his last series of poems, entitled Magno Mari (1861), Clough took up the topic of marriage, specifically the difficulties that assail and dignify it, which shows that he did not entirely succumb to the permanent adolescence that might otherwise have been his fate if he had not met Blanche.48
Of marriage long one night they held discourse,
Regarding it in different ways, of course.
Marriage is discipline, the wise had said,
A needful human discipline to wed;
Novels of course depict it final bliss,
Say, had it ever really once been this?49
Sill, towards the end of his life, as Kenny observes, “Clough was finding even his most profound intellectual inquiries pointless.”50 To illustrate his own point, Kenny quotes these weary lines from Dipsychus.
To spend uncounted years of pain,
Again, again, and yet again,
In working out in heart and brain
The problem of our being here;
To gather facts from far and near,
Upon the mind to hold them clear,
And knowing more may yet appear,
Unto one’s latest breath to fear
The premature result to draw—
Is this the object, end and law,
And purpose of our being here?51
In 1861, when he was only 42, after junkets to Greece, Constantinople and the Pyrenees, where he traveled with Tennyson and his family, Clough’s ailing health broke down and he died on November 13th in Florence, where he was buried in the Protestant cemetery—a fitting final stop for the man whom one critic called “the poet of tourism.”52 Clough’s career was nicely summed up by D. C. Somervell, whose abridgement of Arnold Toynbee’s massive A Study of History (1934–1961) familiarized him with the often impracticable theories of men. “On the outermost frontiers of Broad Churchmanship may be placed those who had lost their faith, but could not be content to be without it; who retained, as it were, a fervent faith that faith was possible and necessary for men and might yet be possible for them. Of such was Arthur Hugh Clough, reputed the most brilliant of Arnold’s Rugby pupils.”53
Although much of Clough’s poetry is fragmentary, there is one striking exception and that is his best-known poem, “Say not, the struggle nought availeth.” Clough wrote it after the failure of the revolutions of 1848 to reaffirm not only the wisdom of hope but the folly of losing hope. It is one of those pellucid poems that balks commentary, a poem that Clough might have written to please the uncle in the Prologue to Dipsychus, who complains, “Nothing is more disagreeable than to say a line two, or, it may be three or four times, and at last not be sure that there are not three or four ways of reading, each as good and as much intended as another.”54 Here there is nothing “unmeaning, vague and involved,” to borrow another stricture from that sound avuncular critic.55
Say not, the struggle nought availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here, no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land
is bright.
Winston Churchill recited the poem on the radio in 1941 when he was trying to cajole the Americans into joining the Allies in the fight against Nazism.56 One can easily see why that indomitable man thought so highly of the poem: it is, after all, a poem about never losing heart, never despairing. Churchill committed it to memory during the Great War when he was in the trenches of France. Yet however distinct from Clough’s other poems, it epitomizes the poet’s work as a whole by showing how his own faith and hope, though severely tested, never entirely gave way. In “the war between conscience and conviction,” Clough was always mindful that “If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars.”
After Clough’s death, Arnold mourned his friend in “Thyrsis,” a highly Miltonic eulogy, which Clough, in his modest way, might have found overwrought. Walter Bagehot and Richard Holt Hutton also wrote reminiscences about the poet, in which they reiterated the common view that Clough’s career had been undone by religious mania, stirred up first by Dr. Arnold and then compounded by Ward and Newman. In a long essay on Clough published in 1897, the critic J. M. Robertson laid the blame for what he considered Clough’s personal and artistic failures squarely on what he called “the effeminate ecclesiastical atmosphere of the Oxford of the Newman epoch, when currents of febrile mysticism and timorous scepticism drew young men this way and that …” For Robertson, “not one in a hundred of those affected [were] able to attain a stable and virile philosophy. Clough himself said afterwards that for two years he had been ‘like a straw drawn up the draught of a chimney’ by the Newman movement; and it would not be going too far to say that if he were not one of those ‘wrecks’ declared by Gladstone to have been strewn on every shore’ by the academic tempest in question, he was at least left less seaworthy for life.” This view proved remarkably tenacious, though Robertson himself called it into question when he observed that “it seems a trifle strange in these days that one such as Clough, having realised the force of the rational criticism of the popular creed, should be unable robustly to readjust his life to the sane theory of things.”57 Here Robertson was right: Clough never did manage to readjust his life to the “sane theory of things.” His doubts may have tested but they never extinguished his faith. Clough’s best poetry always pits the “sane view of things” against the “popular creed” and finds the former wanting. Here is a good example from Dipsychus:
“THERE is no God,” the wicked saith,
“And truly it’s a blessing,
For what He might have done with us
It’s better only guessing.”
“There is no God,” a youngster thinks,
“Or really, if there may be,
He surely did not mean a man
Always to be a baby.”
“There is no God, or if there is,”
The tradesman thinks, “’twere funny
If He should take it ill in me
To make a little money.”
These are the customary attitudes of unbelief, ingrained and unexamined, that define “the sane theory of things.”
But country folks who live beneath
The shadow of the steeple;
The parson and the parson’s wife,
And mostly married people;
Youths green and happy in first love,
So thankful for illusion;
And men caught out in what the world
Calls guilt, in first confusion;
And almost everyone when age,
Disease, or sorrows strike him,
Inclines to think there is a God,
Or something very like Him.58
Clough returned to this pattern of denial and affirmation in a pair of poems that epitomizes his view of Christianity. “Easter Day” and “Easter Day II” were written after Clough left Oriel and before he sailed for America—that is to say, between 1848 and 1852. Katherine Chorley and Anthony Kenny discount “Easter II,” insisting that only the first of the poems expresses Clough’s settled view of Christian faith.59 But this is to misread not only the individual poems but the way they complement and complete one another. In “Easter Day” the case for unbelief is mounted as Lucifer might mount it, in language borrowed from Scripture, which makes for an impious pastiche:
And, oh, good men of ages yet to be,
Who shall believe because ye did not see—
Oh, be ye warned, be wise!
No more with pleading eyes,
And sobs of strong desire,
Unto the empty vacant void aspire,
Seeking another and impossible birth
That is not of your own, and only mother earth.
But if there is no other life for you,
Sit down and be content, since this must even do:
He is not risen!60
Kenny’s gloss on this ode to negation makes Clough sound like a Labour politician: “What, then, should we do? Service to the dead Christ must be replaced by service to the living in the workaday world. The women disciples must give up the hope of laying up treasure in heaven, and the apostles must abandon their ambition to be fishers of men.”61 Is this what Clough is saying? Or is he defining the confines of unbelief to expose its desolation?
Eat, drink, and die, for we are men deceived,
Of all the creatures under heaven’s wide cope
We are most hopeless, who had once most hope
We are most wretched that had most believed.
Christ is not risen.
Eat, drink, and die, and think that this is bliss!
There is no Heaven but this!
There is no Hell;—
Save Earth, which serves the purpose doubly well,
Seeing it visits still
With equallest appointments of ill
Both good and bad alike, and brings to one same dust
The unjust and the just
With Christ, who is not risen.
Rather than plead for unbelief, Clough descibes its condition, which gives his readers a chilling glimpse into what unbelief truly exacts.
Weep not beside the tomb,
Ye women, unto whom
He was great solace while ye tended Him;
Ye who with napkin o’er the head
And folds of linen round each wounded limb
Laid out the Sacred Dead;
And thou that bar’st Him in thy wondering womb;
Yea, Daughters of Jerusalem, depart,
Bind up as best ye may your own sad bleeding heart:
Go to your homes, your living children tend,
Your earthly spouses love;
Set your affections not on things above,
Which moth and rust corrupt, which quickliest come to end:
Or pray, if pray ye must, and pray, if pray ye can,
For death; since dead is He whom ye deemed more than man,
Who is not risen: no—
But lies and moulders low—
Who is not risen!
Newman was in the habit of saying that it was not so much the existence of God that was mysterious as the rejection of His existence.62 In this poem, Clough showed how entirely he agreed. Indeed, “Easter Day” might have been written to illustrate what Newman had in mind when he referred to “the all-corroding, all-dissolving scepticism of the intellect in religious enquiries.”63 Neither man was unmindful of how anathema religion is to the natural man. Newman explains why this should be the case in the Apologia, in which he sheds a good deal of light on what Clough is doing in “Easter Day.”
I have no intention at all of denying, that truth is the real object of our reason, and that, if it does not attain to truth, either the premiss or the process is in fault; but I am not speaking here of right reason, but of reason as it acts in fact and concretely in fallen man. I know that even the unaided reason, when correctly exercised, leads to a belief in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in a future retribution; but I am considering the faculty of reason actually and historically; and in this point of view, I do not think I
am wrong in saying that its tendency is towards a simple unbelief in matters of religion. No truth, however sacred, can stand against it, in the long run; and hence it is that in the pagan world, when our Lord came, the last traces of the religious knowledge of former times were all but disappearing from those portions of the world in which the intellect had been active and had had a career.64
If Newman himself chose faith over skepticism, it was not because he did not appreciate the allure of skepticism. For Newman, reason, unguided by faith, would always be inclined to deny God, to claim that He is unrisen. The implications of this were of pressing concern to Clough and indeed to Arnold, but they were even more so to Newman, who spoke of them with prophetic urgency.
In these latter days … outside the Catholic Church things are tending,—with far greater rapidity than in that old time … to atheism in one shape or other … . Lovers of their country and of their race, religious men, external to the Catholic Church, have attempted various expedients to arrest fierce wilful human nature in its onward course, and to bring it into subjection. The necessity of some form of religion for the interests of humanity, has been generally acknowledged: but where was the concrete representative of things invisible, which would have the force and the toughness necessary to be a breakwater against the deluge? Three centuries ago the establishment of religion, material, legal, and social, was generally adopted as the best expedient for the purpose, in those countries which separated from the Catholic Church; and for a long time it was successful; but now the crevices of those establishments are admitting the enemy.65