Arthur Hugh Clough was born in Liverpool, England, January 1, 1819. When a small boy he accompanied his father on a business visit to the United States. In 1828 he was sent to Rugby, where he soon excelled in scholarship and was a leading contributor to the “Rugby Magazine.” From Rugby he went to Oxford, where he gained a scholarship at Balliol, and afterward a fellowship at Oriel. While at Oxford he wrote a long poem entitled “The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich,” which was published in 1848. Clough gave up his fellowship in 1848, and travelled in France and Italy. On his return he was appointed principal of University Hall, and professor of English literature, in University College, London. In 1852 he resigned this chair, crossed the Atlantic, and became a private tutor in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1853 he returned to England to accept a place in the Education department of the Privy Council, married, and settled in London, devoting himself for several years to the hard work of his office, and giving his leisure hours to a revision of Dryden’s translation of Plutarch, which was published in 1859. In 1861 his health gave way, and he went to travel on the Continent; but he died at Florence, Italy, November 13, and was buried there. His “Amours de Voyage,” a story in verse, was published in the “Atlantic Monthly” in 1858. His collected poems, with a memoir by Charles Eliot Norton, were published in Boston in 1862, and his complete works, with a life by his widow, in London, in 1869.

Personal

  Here was a man who loved truth and justice, not coldly and afar off, as most, but with passion and intensely;… who walked the world’s way as matter of duty, living a life, meanwhile, hidden with higher and holier things…. Plainer living and higher thinking were the texts on which he gave us many a humorous and admirable lesson…. His influence was always towards whatever should incline others to a liberal view of the questions of the day, of the claims of the feeble, and the feelings of the poor.

  People seem very fond of Arthur, and to think a great deal of him; but Arthur does not seem to mind much about people here; they don’t seem to suit him exactly, and he gets wearied and worn out with the continual talking about religious matters; and I think, too, the pomp and grandeur trouble him. He does not appear at all to fancy coming to live in London.

  Clough came in the afternoon. I like him exceedingly; with his gentleness, and his bewildered look, and his half-closed eyes.

  I was glad to see Clough here, with whom I had established some kind of robust working-friendship, and who had some great permanent values for me. Had he not taken me by surprise and fled in a night, I should have done what I could to block his way. I am too sure he will not return. The first months comprise all the shocks of disappointment that are likely to disgust a newcomer. The sphere of opportunity opens slowly, but to a man of his abilities and culture—rare enough here—with the sureness of chemistry. The Giraffe entering Paris wore the label, “Eh bien, messieurs, il n’y a qu’une bête de plus!” And Oxonians are cheap in London; but here, the eternal economy of sending things where they are wanted makes a commanding claim. Do not suffer him to relapse into London. He had made himself already cordially welcome to many good people, and would have soon made his own place. He had just established his valise at my house, and was to come—the gay deceiver—once a fortnight for his Sunday; and his individualities and his nationalities are alike valuable to me.

  That is a loss which I shall feel more and more as time goes on, for he is one of the few people who ever made a deep impression upon me, and as time goes on, and one finds no one else who makes such an impression, one’s feeling about those who did make it gets to be something more and more distinct and unique. Besides, the object of it no longer survives to wear it out himself by becoming ordinary and different from what he was. People were beginning to say about Clough that he never would do anything now, and, in short, to pass him over. I foresee that there will now be a change, and attention will be fixed on what there was of extraordinary promise and interest in him when young, and of unique and imposing even as he grew older without fulfilling people’s expectations.

  A man of very shy demeanour, of largish build about the head and shoulders, with a bland and rather indolent look, and a noticeable want of alertness in his movements—such, to a stranger meeting him casually, appeared that Arthur Hugh Clough, of whom, till his death the other day at the age of forty-two, all those who knew him intimately were wont to speak in terms of such unusually high regard. Many persons to whom the name of Clough was only beginning to be adequately known when a premature death removed him will now take up with interest the beautiful little volume in which his “Poems” are first collected, and in which they are introduced by a brief “Memoir” from the pen of his friend, Mr. F. T. Palgrave.

  Clough was five feet ten in height, well made, inclining to burliness; he had a handsome frank face, dark-eyed, full-chinned and ruddy complexioned, the nose being straight and rather short; his head, which was early bald, ran deep from front to back, and showed a graceful domed outline. In manner he was quiet, grave, and reticent; usually speaking little, by no means from want of sympathy, but in part, we should say, from a wish both to hear and reply with gravity and exactness, and also from a feeling of instinct of personal dignity and refinement which belonged to him in high degree. He carefully avoided all risk of intrusion, either on his own part or his interlocutor’s, and kept in constant check every merely impulsive movement. It is probable that a more than commonly sensitive temperament was controlled and calmed into this habitual quietude of demeanour, which was not at all of the drowsy or thick-skinned sort, but living and palpitating. It would have been hard to find a readier friend, in little matters or great.

  He lies buried in the little Protestant cemetery, just outside the walls of Florence, looking towards Fiesole and the hills which he loved and which he had gazed on as he entered Florence, little thinking he should leave it no more. “Tall cypresses wave over the graves, and the beautiful hills keep guard around;” nowhere could there be a lovelier resting-place. The memory of Arthur Clough will be safe in the hearts of his friends. Few beyond his friends have known him at all; his writings may not reach beyond a small circle; but those who have received his image into their hearts know that something has been given them which no time can take away, and to them we think no words will seem fitter than those of the poet, happily also his friend, which have cherished the memory of another beautiful soul:—

  He had a beautiful, spiritual face and delicate, shy manners; such a face and such manners as are dimly seen in morning dreams. One may be sure that such a rare being, if real flesh and blood, would at some time be found at Elmwood.

  Of Clough Carlyle had formed the very highest opinion, as no one who knew him could fail to do. His pure beautiful character, his genial humour, his perfect truthfulness, alike of heart and intellect—an integrity which had lead him to sacrifice a distinguished position and brilliant prospects, and had brought him to London to gather a living as he could from under the hoofs of the horses in the streets—these together had recommended Clough to Carlyle as a diamond sifted out of the general rubbish-heap.

  The memory of Clough remains, with those who had the happiness of knowing him in life, distinct and precious. It is that of one of the highest and purest souls. Sensitive, simple, tender, manly, his figure stands as one of the ideal figures of the past, the image of the true poet, the true friend, the true man. He died too young for his full fame, but not too young for the love which is better than fame.

  Apart from the gifts of imagination and mental analysis, Clough was of a noble, pure, and self-controlling nature. His friends felt certain that the temptations to excess which assail young men, at Universities and elsewhere, had by him been resolutely and victoriously resisted. His clear black eyes, under a broad, full, and lofty forehead, were often partly closed, as if through the pressure of thought; but when the problem occupying him was solved, a glorious flash would break from the eyes, expressive of an inner joy and sudden illumination, which fascinated any who were present. For though his sense of humour was keen, the spirit of satire was absent; benevolence in his kindly heart never finding a difficulty in quelling ill-nature. It will be said that there are many satirical strokes in “Dipsychus,” and this is true; but they are aimed at classes—their follies and hypocrisies—never at any individual, except himself. His mouth was beautifully formed, but both it and the chin were characterised by some lack of determination and firmness. This deficiency, however, so far as it existed, was harmful only to himself; those who sought his counsel or help found in him the wisest of advisers, the steadiest and kindest of friends…. On the moral side he was firm as a rock.

  Her whom all his contemporaries counted certain to take a commanding place in the higher life of England sank into comparative insignificance. He began by failing of that First Class, which was the undoubted meed due to his knowledge and ability. He went on always hoping, longing to do some great thing, yet never doing it. For years he held his tutorship and fellowship, doubting whether he ought not to give them up since he no longer held the faith supposed to be their indispensable condition. At last he resigned them both, but not to give his splendid talents work to do for any high ends outside the circle of the University. One petty appointment after another he held—petty, that is, in comparison with what his intellectual endowments qualified him for,—but always questioning whether this was or was not what he ought to be at. At last peace seems to have come to him only by giving up finally and forever all such noble ambitions for the bettering of the world as had inspired his early youth, quietly settling down into a useful, if somewhat narrow, Government office, and taking all his joy from the homely love of wife and children. And yet this was a good man, a religious man, of whom I have been speaking, a man far better and more religious than many who have shone conspicuously as patriots and heroes, a man in the highest degree lovable, a man who inspired others to a strenuousness of which he himself failed, a man whose intellect was held in honour by the most intellectual.

  Mr. Clough arrived in Boston, furnished with excellent letters of introduction both for that city and for the dignitaries of Cambridge. My husband at once invited him to pass some days at our house, and I was very glad to welcome him there. In appearance I thought him rather striking. He was tall, tending a little to stoutness, with a beautifully ruddy complexion and dark eyes which twinkled with suppressed humor. His sweet, cheery manner at once attracted my young children to him, and I was amused, on passing near the open door of his room, to see him engaged in conversation with my little son, then some five or six years of age.

The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, 1848

  I write to you now merely to thank you for having given me a great and unexpected pleasure, by leaving with me “The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich,” which Mrs. Arnold, too, had recommended me to read. I was very unwilling to commence it, for I detest English hexameters, from Surrey’s to Southey’s; and Mr. Clough’s spondaic lines are, to my ear, detestable too,—that is, to begin with. Yet I am really charmed with this poem. There is a great deal of mere prose in it, and the worse, to my taste, for being prose upon stilts; but, take it for all in all, there is more freshness of heart and soul and sense in it than it has been my chance to find and feel in any poem of recent date,—perhaps I ought to say than in any recent poem of which the author is not yet much known; for I have no mind to depreciate Alfred Tennyson, nor any other man who has fairly won his laurel.

  Why did you not send me word of Clough’s hexameter poem, which I have now received and read with much joy. But no, you will never forgive him his metres. He is a stout, solid, reliable man and friend,—I knew well; but this fine poem has taken me by surprise. I cannot find that your journals have yet discovered its existence.

  His “Bothie” is a rare and original poem, quite Homeric in treatment and modern to the full in spirit. I do not know a poem more impregnated with the nineteenth century or fuller of tender force and shy, delicate humor.

  Here certainly was as healthy a burst as Goethe himself could have desired to see, out of the “subjective” into the “objective.” Who does not know the “Bothie”—in its form, a new feat in our literature, inasmuch as it really settled in the only true way, namely, by a capital example, the question, still argued, whether hexameter verse will do in English; in its matter, such a hearty and delightful story of the adventures of a reading party of young Oxonians, who have gone, with their tutor, to the Highlands for the long vacation, and, in particular, of the marriage theories of one of them, Philip Hewson, ending in his love for the demure Highland maiden Elspie, whom he at last marries and takes with him to New Zealand? Or, if there are any of our readers who do not yet know the “Bothie,” they are to be envied the pleasure which remains for them of a first acquaintance with it.

  There is no weakness in his longer poems. “The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich,” which was the first of these to appear, is an idyl of country-life, as fresh as a breeze in summer, into which is woven a social problem of love-making such as Clough was fond of introducing into his more ambitious poems. With even its decided merits, it is less characteristic of the author than one piece written in the succeeding year, 1849, which first saw light, nine years later, in the earliest pages of “The Atlantic.”

  His “Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich,” which bears the reader along less easily than the billowy hexameters of Kingsley, is charmingly faithful to its Highland theme, and has a Doric simplicity and strength. His shorter pieces are uneven in merit, but all suggestive and worth a thinker’s attention. If he could have remained in the liberal American atmosphere, and have been spared his untimely taking-off, he might have come to greatness; but he is now no more, and with him departed a radical thinker and a living protest against the truckling expedients of the mode.

  In spite of many artistic shortcomings, this poem is so healthy, human, and original, that it can scarcely fail to survive when a good deal of far more fashionable verse shall have disappeared from men’s memories. The one infallible note of a true poet—the power of expressing himself in rhythmical movements of subtility and sweetness which baffle analysis—is also distinctly manifest in passages of the “Bothie,” passages the music of which was, we fancy, lingering in the ear of Tennyson when he wrote certain parts of “Maud.” The originality of this idyl is beyond question. It is not in the least like any other poem, and an occasionally ostentatious touch of the manner of “Herman and Dorothea” seems to render this originality all the more conspicuous in the main.

  His “Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich” is his chief title to fame. It is the narrative, in hexameters, a style exceedingly difficult to manage in English.

General

  I quite agree in what you say of poor Clough. A man more vivid, ingenious, veracious, mildly radiant, I have seldom met with, and in a character so honest, modest, kindly. I expected very considerable things of him.

  Clough’s work, in tone, more resembles the great masters of simplicity and majesty to whom he always turned with increasing reverence—Homer, or Sophocles, or Milton, or that earlier Englishman who in the “Tales” renewed, or seemed to renew, the very genius of the “Odyssey.” Nor, however vast the difference in realized poetry, is his poem unworthy these splendid models. A sense of fresh, healthy manliness; a scorn of base and selfish motives; a beauty and tenderness of nature; a frank acceptance of common life; a love of earth, not “only for its earthly sake,” but for the divine and the eternal interfused in it—such, and other such, are the impressions left. These noble qualities are rare in any literature; they have a charm so great that, like Beauty before the Areopagus, they almost disarm the judgment. Viewed in that aspect, Clough’s work is wanting in art; the language and the thought are often unequal and incomplete; the poetical fusion into a harmonious whole, imperfect. Here, and in his other writings, one feels a doubt whether in verse he chose the right vehicle, the truly natural mode of utterance. His poetry, in a word, belongs to that uncommon class in which the matter everywhere far outruns the workmanship.

  Of one metre, however,—the hexameter,—we believe the most accomplished judges, and also common readers, agree that Mr. Clough possesses a very peculiar mastery…. Whether any consummate poem of great length and sustained dignity can be written in this metre, and in our language, we do not know: until a great poet has written his poem, there are commonly no lack of plausible arguments that seem to prove he cannot write it; but Mr. Clough has certainly shown that in the hands of a skilful and animated artist, it is capable of adapting itself to varied descriptions of life and manners, to noble sentiments, and to changing thoughts. It is perhaps the most flexible of English metres. Better than any others, it changes from grave to gay without desecrating what should be solemn, or disenchanting that which should be graceful. And Mr. Clough was the first to prove this, by writing a noble poem in which it was done…. The sort of conversation for which he was most remarkable rises again in the “Amours de Voyage,” and gives them, to those who knew him in life, a very peculiar charm. It would not be exact to call the best lines a pleasant cynicism; for cynicism has a bad name, and the ill-nature and other offensive qualities which have given it that name were utterly out of Mr. Clough’s way. Though without much fame, he had no envy.

  From the higher mind of cultivated, all-questioning, but still conservative England, in this our puzzled generation, we do not know of any utterance in literature so characteristic as the poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, “sometime fellow of Oriel College, Oxford.” Freely he thinks and speaks; yet always as an Englishman. His sympathies are general, but his tastes and standards are still national.

  He was greatly beloved by those who knew best the rare qualities of his genius, and his friendships were with the best men and women. There was an attractive blending of scholarly shyness, melancholy, and geniality in the impression he made; and he had the fullest sympathy with the freedom and the promise of American life. But his sad self was relentless. He could not escape the old wonder and questioning. What he wrote in poetry and prose had a strain of sincere, child-like pathos, wholly unsurpassed in contemporary literature. And it characterizes all his writings. It is not a pathos of sighs and sobs, and elegiac weeping and wailing, but a melancholy like that of the Autumn in Nature, a primeval sadness.

  The whole range of our literature shows no poet whose writings so fully and faithfully represent the man as those of Clough. We know none who so freely and entirely gives us himself. There is not one of his poems in which we do not find the personal outcome of his nature. His songs he sings out of his own heart. To give expression to his own thoughts and feelings was the motive of his music. No doubt his deep and genuine feeling for all that was human, and his marvellous power of analysis, could not fail to make him capable of entering into the characters of others. The portraits of the Trevellyns (though sketchy, and meant to be no more), of Hobbes, of Elspie, of “the grave man nicknamed Adam,” are all true and forcible; while, of the voyagers in “Mari Magno,” the lawyer, and “the rural dean,” are as perfect in their way as any of the Canterbury pilgrims. Yet in none is there that complete reticence of self which is demanded by the best descriptive, as well as the best dramatic, poetry. In every character there is something of Clough himself. We find among his verses few or no “dramatic lyrics,” little of the working of the historical imagination, that delights to place itself in other conditions, and to speak with other tongues. Even in the poems cast in a quasi-dramatic mould,—“The Mystery of the Fall” and “Dipsychus,”—it is, for the most part, Clough who, in varying moods, utters himself by turns through the mouths of each of the interlocutors. It is not merely form and colour, but material substance, that are supplied from within. Hence the study of his poems is the study of Clough himself.

  The oftener I return to Clough’s unfinished but striking poems, the more I am struck by something in their fresh natural handling, and a certain lustre of sunlight on their surface, which suggests to me a modern and intellectualized Chaucer; and I think the same homely breadth and simplicity were strongly marked in his countenance…. I do not think that any competent judge who really studies Clough’s Remains will doubt for a moment that he was one of the most original men of our age, and perhaps its most intellectual, and buoyant, though very far, of course, from its richest, most musical and exquisite poet. There is a very peculiar and unique attraction about what I may call the physical and almost animal buoyancy of these subtly intellectual rhythms and verses, when once the mass of the poet’s mind—by no means easy to get into motion—is fairly under way.

  Clough’s “Dipsychus” I consider the most really remarkable contribution we have had; but the poetry, like all else, is going post-haste to the Devil just now.

  There will always be a great charm, especially for Oxford men, in the “Long Vacation Pastoral,” “The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich.” Humour, pathos, clear character-drawing, real delight in nature and a power of rendering her beauties, above all a sense of life, of “the joy of eventful living”—it has all these, and over the whole is thrown, through the associations of the hexameter, a half-burlesque veil of academic illusion that produces the happiest effect…. Clough holds a high and permanent place among our poets, not only because, as Mr. Lowell says, he represents an epoch of thought, but because he represents it in a manner so rare, so individual. He is neither singer nor prophet; but he is a poet in virtue of the depth and sincerity with which he felt certain great emotions, and the absolute veracity with which he expressed them.

  Of “Dipsychus” in its entirety, we must confess that it is, when beheld in its present state, simply a cul-de-sac;—or if the reader prefer it, a suite of richly-adorned chambers, but not a perfect palace. If Clough had lived he might, like Goethe, have gradually, through a period of thirty years, developed his works, and at the age of sixty have delighted the world with the publication of another masterpiece,—another palace of art, or “lordly pleasure-house” for the soul.

  He failed to carry out any large design, and his poetry is deficient in form and polish; yet it has a greater charm for congenial minds than much poetry of superior refinement and more exquisite workmanship. It reveals, without self-consciousness, a character of marked sweetness, humour, and lofty moral feeling. Though Clough was in part a disciple of Wordsworth, he shows the originality of true genius in his descriptions of scenery, and in his treatment of the great social and philosophical problems of his time. If several contemporaries showed greater artistic skill, no one gave greater indications of the power of clothing serious contemplation in the language of poetry.

  Clough worshipped Truth with more than the passion of a lover, and his writings are, for the most part, the tragic records of a life-long devotion to a mistress who steadily refused his embraces; but as it is greatly better to have loved without attaining than to have attained without loving, so Clough’s ardent and unrewarded stumblings in the dark towards his adored though unseen divinity are greatly more attractive and edifying to those who have shared, successfully or not, the same passion, than is that complacent fruition of her smiles which she often accords to those who are contented to be no more than her speaking acquaintances.

  Clough expresses the changes which the Christian faith has undergone, and the perplexities of conduct.

  Even more out of place in such good company is the weary and wearisome laureate of Oxonicules and Bostonicules, the late Mr. Lowell’s realised ideal and chosen representative of English poetry at its highest in the generation of Tennyson and Browning. Literary history will hardly care to remember or to register the fact that there was a bad poet named Clough, whom his friends found it useless to puff: for the public, if dull, has not quite such a skull as belongs to believers in Clough.

  Arthur Hugh Clough united in happy and sympathetic association, healthy mental and physical life. Though given to psychological inquiry and introspective analysis he took the keenest delight in the enjoyment of the physical world, and so maintained in even balance the two parts of his remarkably vigorous and harmonious nature. In an equipment so complete a sense of humour could not be lacking, and Clough gives ample evidence of possessing it in a rare degree.

  There are few names in this century which have had, for young men especially, greater attractive power than that of Arthur Hugh Clough. This power has never been widely, but in many cases it has been deeply, felt. It has its source more in the nature of the man and in the conditions of his life than in his work, although the latter is full of the elevation, the aspiration, and the beauty of a very noble mind. But it is not as a finished artist, as a singer whose message is clear and whose note is resonant, that Clough attracts; it is rather as a child of his time, as one in whom the stir and change of the century were most distinctly reflected. There was an intense sympathy with his age in the heart of Clough, a sensitiveness to the tidal influences of thought and emotion, which made his impressionable nature, for a time at least, a prey to agitation and turmoil; and there is no more delicate registry of the tempestuous weather of the second quarter of the century than that which is found in his work.

  Far less polished than Arnold’s, Clough’s poetry yet shows in some respects a freer and broader power. His outlook on modern society is more manly, as more specific in severity; and his pungent gift of mockery is foreign to Arnold’s pensive grace and musical despair. But the spiritual attitude of the two is wider apart than their artistic or social temper. We read Arnold’s laments over the past, his intense longing for steadfastness and peace, and the conviction grows upon us that his keenest regret is not faith but assurance, less the truth which the world has forfeited than the tranquility which the truth produced. He craves with an almost querulous desire the unquestioning and serene spirit, which has fled never to return. Passing to the pages of his friend, we find pain of a different order—the agonized desire for a faith that is lost, and for a distant God. Tranquility is the supreme end of Arnold’s ambition; the Truth alone could satisfy the soul of Clough.

  Mentally sane, honest, intrepid to the last degree—so his life and his words alike describe him: a clear and direct thinker; a man impatient of shams and figments of every kind; frank with himself no less than with others; intolerant of self-deception; with a temperamental horror of the vague, the mawkish, the sentimental; always resolutely determined to see fact and to make the best of it;—such was Arthur Hugh Clough—in the noblest sense of that much-abused term, a genuine seeker after truth…. It may be pointed out in passing that Clough’s poetry as a whole is naturally marked by a persistent sense of impermanence, instability, and transition—by the forward-reaching spirit of a man who, himself falling upon an epoch of upheaval, experiment, and widespread intellectual unrest, stands tiptoe to catch if may be some hint of unrealized things. It is a poetry of anticipation, dominated throughout by the presentiment of the morrow—the keen foretaste of impending and inevitable change…. The note of fluctuation, the attitude of eager watchfulness, the mood of inquiry, thus become characteristics of the great body of Clough’s work in verse…. His poetry is the poetry of moods—moods of comparative hopefulness, moods of weariness and despair, moods of mere inquiry and deliberate reserve. To the superficial reader, turning over the pages of his collected works, there might even seem to be the strangest inconsistencies in the utterances of some of his shorter poems; for his sensitive nature catches up and repeats, though always in tempered tones, now the sad wail of some who mourn over the rapid dissolution of the world’s great heritage of belief, and now again the glad shout of others who, boldly and trustfully, press forward to meet the coming day. But the wail and the shout—the song of sorrow and the song of promise—alike belong to the man himself, and, far from being discordant or incompatible, are in their own ways equally expressive of his relation to the great issues of the time.

  On the whole, Clough is one of the most unsatisfactory products of that well-known form of nineteenth century scepticism which has neither the strength to believe nor the courage to disbelieve “and have done with it.” He hankers and looks back, his “two souls” are always warring with each other, and though the clash and conflict sometimes bring out fine things,… though his “Latest Decalogue” has satirical merit, and some of his country poems, written without undercurrent of thought, are fresh and genial, he is on the whole a failure. But he is a failure of a considerable poet, and some fragments of success chequer him.

  His nature was of rare superiority alike of character and intellect. His moral integrity and sincerity imparted clearness to his imagination and strength to his intelligence, so that while the most marked distinction of his poems is that which they possess as a mirror of spiritual conditions shared by many of his contemporaries, they have hardly less interest as the expression and image of his own individuality…. It became impossible for him to accept, however they might be interpreted, the doctrines of any church. He would not play tricks with words nor palter with the integrity of his soul. This perfect mental honesty of Clough, and his entire sincerity of expression, were a stumbling-block to many of his more conventional contemporaries, and have remained as a rock of offense to many of the readers of his poetry, who find it disturbing to be obliged to recognize in his work a test of their own sincerity in dealing with themselves. With how few are conviction and profession perfectly at one! The difficulty of the struggle in Clough’s case, the difficulty of freeing himself from the chains of association, of tradition, of affection, of interest, which bound him to conformity with and acceptance of the popular creed in one or the other of its forms, has led superficial critics of his life and poetry to find in them evidence that the struggle was too hard for him and the result unsatisfactory. There could not be a greater error. Clough’s honest acceptance of the insolubility of the vain questions which men are perpetually asking, and his recognition of the insufficiency of the answers which they are ready to accept or to pretend to accept, left him as regards his most inward soul one of the serenest of men.

  Arthur Hugh Clough was in no respect a “man of letters.” Literature was not his business. It does not fall to the lot of those who may have to deal with his life and his work to be compelled to trace out a perhaps sordid and coarse personality beneath the robes of an almost regal success in the world of letters. There is little that Clough has left us that is not transparent and natural. But within this we find so attractive a personality that we may perhaps be in some danger of exaggerating the merely literary importance of the forms through which that personality expressed itself. We find that personality ever most sensitively alive to everything in nature that is gentle and beautiful, ever tenderly tolerant towards every kind of human defect or shortcoming, but at the same time severely and inexorably just towards itself. It is this mixing of tenderness and severity, coupled as it is with the utmost sensitiveness to every beautiful and ennobling impression, that gives the distinctive charm to one of the very few men of the present century who can claim to be studied, not for what they did, but for what they were.

  Clough was a most fascinating character, thoroughly genuine, but so oppressed with the problems of life that it was difficult ever to get a smile out of him; and if one did, his round ruddy face with the deep heavy eyes, seemed really to suffer from the contortions of laughter. He took life very seriously, and made greater sacrifices to his convictions than the world ever suspected. He was poor, but from conscientious scruples gave up his fellowship, and was driven at last to go to America to make himself independent without giving up the independence of his mind. With a little more sunshine above him and around him he might have grown to a very considerable height, but there was always a heavy weight on him, that seemed to render every utterance and every poem a struggle. His poems are better known and loved in America, I believe, than in England, but in England also they still have their friends, and in the history of the religious or rather theological struggles of 1840–50 Clough’s figure will always be recognised as one of the most characteristic and the most pleasing.

  Clough proved that the world cannot satisfy the conscientious spirit. He expressed sovereign contempt for those who sought to nourish themselves upon the ashes of this life and of the senses; such seemed to him to be abandoned to the most deceptive dreams. He found society and traffic full of falsehood and dissimulation, covering ruthless selfishness, and this discord between the real and ideal, between what things and relations are in social life and what they ought to be, falling upon his highly developed conscience and acute intellect, struck from them some of the most cutting satire of his day.

  There is perhaps no poet of the Victorian era in whom the Agnostic spirit has found more distinct and articulate utterance than in Arthur Hugh Clough. To him, the very essence of all religion worth having consists in the firm, resolute, unswerving conviction that nothing can be known of the Supreme. Providential schemes, creeds and certainties are all in his estimation a profane pretence of knowledge, and are to be strenuously resisted, as so many temptations to Baalism and idolatry. The only recipe he feels himself justified in prescribing, and he is never weary of recommending it, is “contentedness not to know.”

  Clough’s work is controlled by no prevailing sense of beauty, like Goethe’s; he has movements of greatness, and may perhaps still claim to have written three or four of the finest English hexameters; but it is almost as certain that he has to answer for a hundred or more of the worst.