Book Review

Modern voice of Victorian doubt

Arthur Hugh Clough: a poet’s life

It sometimes seems as though there could be no more honourable distinction for a nineteenth-century Englishman than to have attracted the sneers of Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians. The poet Arthur Hugh Clough, Dr Arnold’s star pupil at Rugby, is presented in that work as a priggish schoolboy with weak ankles and solemn face, given in later life to maundering hopelessly over his loss of his faith, before ending his career tying up brown-paper parcels for Florence Nightingale.

By contrast, in Anthony Kenny’s excellent new biography of Clough we discover not only a delightful man but also a subtle and witty poet, whose irony is at once good-humoured and biting. As for the weak ankles, they did not prevent the schoolboy scholar from distinguishing himself in the pitched battles that went under the name of football at Rugby. Later in life, moreover, Clough enjoyed 30-mile walks and plunging into icy northern seas. It is difficult to imagine Lytton Strachey keeping up, either physically or intellectually.

Yet Clough did share one thing with Strachey: he was both obsessed by and remarkably frank about sex, albeit of the heterosexual variety. Kenny takes us through a series of episodes: the maladroit schoolboy flirtations with cousins; the all-too-easily interpreted asterisks in the undergraduate diary; the powerful attraction given off by an anonymous woman on a train; and (it would seem) the experiments with prostitutes in Venice. In his last months – he died at 42 – Clough worked feverishly on a verse tale of guilt-ridden infidelity; and on his deathbed he dictated to his wife a story hinging on an Oxford don’s seduction of a Scottish girl.

This sexual turmoil was surely intensified by Clough’s religious doubts. He arrived at Balliol in 1837, when Newman’s influence was at its height, but though he met the great enchanter several times, he never fell under his spell. A young man who had so deeply imbibed the Broad Church views of Dr Arnold could gain no foothold in dogmatic Christianity. Yet, although Clough drifted towards scepticism, he never lapsed into complete atheism. This halfway position left him divided between duty and licence, an unhappy dilemma which, paradoxically, he was able to explore in sparkling verse. Thus in Dipsychus (“double-minded”) Clough presents an internal dialogue in which his Arnoldian conscience struggles with the temptations offered by the streetwalkers of Venice. The tinkling and tolling of bells successively suggest through their different rhythms both the potential liberation and the likely disappointments of irreligion:

Ting, ting, there is no God; ting, ting,
Come dance and play, and merrily sing –
Ting, ting a ding; ting, ting a ding!
O pretty girl who trippest along
Come to my bed – it isn’t wrong
Uncork the bottle, sing the song!
Ting ting a ding: dong, dong.
Wine has dregs, the song an end
A silly girl is a poor friend
And age and weakness who shall mend?
Dong, there is no God; Dong!

We are a long way here from Clough’s most anthologised poem, “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth”, a brave and eloquent attempt to conjure hope out of failure. Dipsychus, however, represents the essential Clough, a man who is certain of very little beyond the untrustworthiness of his own thoughts and feelings. The same mood prevails in Amours de Voyage, an epistolary verse novel dealing with the amatory failure of an over-intellectualised Oxford don in Rome; and to a lesser extent in “The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich”, a rather more bracing poem based on an under-graduate reading party in Scotland.

The last two poems were written in hexameters, an extraordinarily difficult verse form to handle in English. Clough, however, discovered in its rhythms an ideal vehicle for description, as well as for conveying the ebb and flow of thought and feeling. Sometimes, it seems, we are almost in the world of Prufrock:

Ah, and I feel too, Eustace, she cares not a tittle about me!
(Care about me, indeed! and do I really expect it?)
But my manner offends; my ways are wholly repugnant;br> Every word that I utter estranges, hurts and repels her;
Every moment of bliss that I gain, in her exquisite presence,
Slowly, surely, withdraws her, removes her and severs her from me.

No doubt Matthew Arnold had a point when he complained of “the deficiency of the beautiful” in Clough’s poetry. But could Matthew Arnold ever have assaulted the Victorian conscience in such irreverent terms as this?

And if ’twere only just to see
The room and an Italian fille,
’Twere worth the trouble and the money.
You’ll like to find – I found it funny –
The chamber où vous faites votre affaire
Stands nicely fitted up for prayer;
While dim you trace along one end
The Sacred Supper’s length extend,
The calm Madonna o’er your head
Smiles, col bambino, on the bed
Where – but your chaste ears I must spare –
Where, we said, vous faites votre affaire.
They’ll suit you, these Venetian pets,
So natural, not the least coquettes,
Really at times one quite forgets –

The voice seems to belong to modern rather than Victorian Britain, and it is therefore fitting that Anthony Kenny’s should be the sixth study of Clough’s short life to have appeared since 1962. As a former Catholic priest and Master of Balliol, Kenny could hardly be better qualified for understanding this divided soul. He relishes the complexities and contradictions in both the man and the verse, making a strong case for his view that Clough was the most intellectual British poet of the nineteenth century. Kenny’s straightforward chronological approach, together with his admirable clarity and common sense, make this book an ideal introduction to Clough. Only the editing is sometimes at fault. There are too many misspellings in the text, and it would help if the dates mentioned more often included the year as well as the month.

The final impression of Clough is of a man who, however uncertain and indecisive, never failed in integrity. How many other Oxford dons, one wonders, abandoned their fellowship because they could not bring themselves to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles? Furthermore Clough, so tortured by lust as a youth, eventually made a happy marriage, with a decidedly unromantic emphasis on “fellow service”. The same ideal lay behind his selfless work for his wife’s cousin, Florence Nightin-gale.

Endearingly hopeless as a money-earner, Clough nevertheless seemed more at home in America than in Victorian Britain. Kenny speculates that he might have done better to prolong his visit to the United States, where he had many admirers. In the event his health failed mysteriously. Worldly failure, however, never prevented him from being loved by his friends and adored by children. Anthony Kenny shows us why.

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