BOOKS.

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.*

MRS. CLOUGH has done wisely in giving her husband's remains so frankly to the world, and all understanding readers will thank her sincerely for the true taste, perfect simplicity, and quiet literary skill with which she has edited them. These two volumes, as they now stand, contain as adequate a picture of the singular, but large, simple, and tender nature of the Oxford poet as is now attainable ; and it is one which no one can study without much delight and some pain, without much profit and perhaps also some loss, without feeling the high exaltation of true poetry and the keen pleasure caused by the subtlety of true scholarship, at every turn ; nor without feeling now and again the sad infection of those "blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized," which are scattered so liberally through these fine- poems of buoyant ardour, disappointed longings, and speculative suspense, and through these singular letters and reviews of reticent tenderness and rough self-satire. The new materials. now for the first time published, and many of them for the first. time printed, are of the highest interest in the contribution they give us to Mr. Clough's intellectual autobiography. And some of them will add greatly to his fame,—especially the strange and wonderful poem written at Naples in 1849, in which Mr. Clough starts from the precisely opposite point of view to Keble's. Easter hymn, and instead of singing,— "Oh, day of days ! shall hearts set free,

No minstrel rapture find for thee ?"

pours out the despair with which the poet infers from the multitude of servile hearts not set free from either guilt or meanness, that. "Christ is not risen." This poem will live, we believe, for ever in English literature, as the most burning and pathetic lament which an ardent love of Christ, amazed and ashamed and aghast at the spectacle of an utterly un-Christian world calling itself Christian,. and the despair of intellect naturally suggested by this spectacle,, ever produced. To our minds, this singular poem, short though it be, is not unlikely to be recognized as one of the greatest poems,— • The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, with a Selselion from his Letters, and a Metnoir. Edited by his Wife. 2 vols. With a Portrait. Vol. I. Life. Letters, Prose Remains. Vol. 11. Poems.. London: Macmillan,

if not in all English literature which is likely enough,—certainly of our day and generation. But as we hope to say something separately upon it, we will only say of it here that it is unquestionably the author's greatest achievement, and is not less remarkable for the patient realism and almost bitter intellectual precision, of the style, than for the molten stream of religious passion which it pours out. As a rule, Mr. Clough's lyrical poems are not quite so successful

in delineating the mood which they are really meant to delineate, owing to the chronic state of introspective criticism on himself in which he is too apt to write, and which, characteristic as it is, necessarily diminishes the linearity and directness of the feeling expressed, refracting it, as it were, through media of very variable density. As he himself, — no doubt in this stanza delineating himself,—says of one of his heroes :— " With all his eager motions still there went A self-correcting and ascetic bent,

That from the obvious good still led astray, And set him travelling on the longest way."

And in the same poem there are descriptive touches which very skilfully portray the nature of those dispersive influences, as we may call them, in his character which, while they may injure his lyrical, add a great wealth of criticism to his speculative and disquisitional poems :— " Beside the wishing-gate which so they name 'Mid Northern hills to me this fancy came ; A wish I formed, my wish I thus expressed : Would I could wish my wishes all to rest, And know to wish the wish that were the best ! Oh, for some winnowing wind to th' empty air This chaff of easy sympathies to bear Far off, and leave me of myself aware!'"

That is clearly self-portraiture, and it describes an element in Mr. Clough's nature which, no doubt, contributed greatly to diminish the number of his few but exquisite lyrical poems, and sometimes to confine even those to the delineation of feelings of a certain vagueness of drift, like the dim but characteristic stanzas which he has himself headed with Wordsworth's line, "blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized." Yet there was, besides this most subtle and almost over-perfect intellectual culture in Mr. Clough, much also of a boyish, half-formed nature in him, even to the last, which, when fully roused, contributed a great deal of the animation, and, when least roused, contributed not a little of the embarrassed, shy, half-articulate tone to some of the most critical passages of his finest poems. He describes this side of boyish feeling admirably in one of his "In Mari Magno " tales :—

"How ill our boyhood understands Incipient manhood's strong demands ! Boys have such trouble of their own As none, they fancy, e'er have known,— Such as to speak of, or to tell

They hold were unendurable,—

Religious, social, of all kinds, That tear and agitate their minds. A thousand thoughts within me stirred Of which I could not speak a word,— Strange efforts after something new Which I was wretched not to do ; Passions, ambitions lay and lurked, Wants, counter-wants, obscurely worked Without their names, and unexplained."

And even in his latest and most finished poems you see the working of this half-developed element of Mr. Clough's massive and rich but to some extent inert imagination ; and you see, too, how powerfully it operated to discontent him with his own productions, to make him underrate vastly their real worth. Rapidly as his genius ripened at an age when, with most men, the first flush of it would have passed over, there was something of conscious inertia, not unlike immaturity, in it to the last, which gives a tone of proud hesitation, a slowness of hand, to the literary style of his finest poems. He calls himself, in his Long Vacation pastoral, "the grave man, nicknamed Adam," and there is really something of the flavour of primeval earth, of its unready vigour and crude laboriousness, about his literary nature. Even when he succeeds best, the reader seems to see him "wipe his honourable brows bedewed with toil." And yet he is impatient with himself for not succeeding better, and despises his own work. He needed external stimulus, something of excitement in the atmosphere, for his best success. Thus, the siege of Rome during his residence there in 1849 was the stimulus which gave rise to his most original and striking poem "Amours de Voyage," which is brimful of the breath of his Oxford culture, of Dr. Newman's metaphysics, of .classical traditions, of the political enthusiasm of the time, and of his own large, speculative humour, subtle hesitancy of brain,

and rich pictorial sense. Yet so ill-satisfied was he with this striking poem, that he kept it nine years in MS., and published it apologetically at last only in an American magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. He himself says that what he doubted about in it was not its truth of conception, but its vigour of execution. Yet no execution could have been more perfect of the picture,—a picture of inehoacy, we admit,—which he intended to draw. Mr. Emerson has in some things shown himself a fine critic ; but he never made a more egregious bluVer than when he found fault with Mr. Clough for not making this poem end more satisfactorily. The whole meaning and drift of it would have been spoiled if it had so ended. His idea was to draw a mind so reluctant to enter on action, shrinking so morbidly from the effects of the "ruinous force of the will," that even when most desirous of action it would find a hundred trivial intellectual excuses for shrinking back in spite of that desire. His own explanation of the poem is contained in the final verse :— " So go forth to the world, to the good report and the evil!

Go, little book ! thy talc, is it not evil and good? Go, and if strangers revile, pass quietly by without answer.

Go, and if curious friends ask of thy rearing and age, Say, I am flitting about many years from brain unto brain of Feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days : But,' so finish the word, 'I was writ in a Roman chamber, When from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon of France.'"

And it is this brain of what the author chooses to call "feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days" that the poem is meant to delineate throughout,—their speculative discontent, their passion for the abstract, their dread of committing themselves to a course, their none the leas eager cravings for action and for the life that can only be reached through action, their drif tinge and their reactions ;—and all this is artistically contrasted with the great Roman stage on which so many great dramas had been enacted in years gone by, and one great revolutionary drama was going forward at that very moment. To our minds, the poem would lose half its character and meaning if the hero's incipiency of passion had been developed into anything but incipiency, if it had not faded away, just as it is represented as doing, with the first difficulties, into a restless but still half-relieved passiveness. The irony of the poem, with its background of Mazzinian and Gari- baldian achievement, would have been utterly spoiled by any other conclusion. How perfect a picture of the paralysis caused by too subtly speculative a nature, is there in such lines as these, for example, in which the hero declares his intention to abide by the indications of the first adverse throw of fortune :—

"Great is Fate, and is best. I believe in Providence partly. What is ordained is right, and all that happens is ordered. Ad, no, that isn't it! But yet I retain my conclusion. I will go where I am led, and will not dictate to the chances."

"Amours de Voyage" would indeed have been spoiled, if it had ended "prettily," like any other novel.

One of the most curious and original of the pieces published for the first time in this edition is that on the "Mystery of the Fall," to which we regret that Mrs. Clough has not appended any date. Most probably it was earlier than "The Bothie." As a poem it cannot rank high, for it is fragmentary as well as unpolished ; and the cautious but masculine transcendentalism displayed by Adam in reserving the doubt whether his dis- obedience was not in some sense or other divinely preordained,— the feminine despair of Eve, the thin saintliness of Abel, the impatient aggressiveness of Cain, are all somewhat grotesque,— even with the most liberal allowance for something of allegory,—as representatives of primeval man. Still, taken in connection with " Dipsychus," and, indeed, with a whole series of scattered hints ranging through both the letters and the poems, it is a very curious indication of the direction in which Mr. Clough was inclined to look for a solution of the mystery of moral evil. He evidently inclined to believe that though evil must be taken as absolutely evil for all practical purposes, there is some transcen- dental view in which it is necessary for the development of independent beings, and a part therefore of human destiny, rather than a mere product of human free-will. With the most exalted love for a pure morality, there is a slight vein of contempt for it, as something impracticably fastidious and fanciful, running through

most of Mr. Clough's works, and a fixed conviction that all actual life must be at best, in some sense, a conscious compromise between right and wrong. That is, we believe, an erroneous view, one at the root of whatever error there is in Mr. Clough's philosophy, and of

much of the melancholy of his thought ; but it is expressed with great power and originality in this strange soliloquy of Adam's, as he half -struggles with the overpowering sense of sin which over- comes him, treating his own remorse, if not as a weakness, at

least as belonging to a more superficial part of his nature than the lowest depth of all, and recognizing in himself something deeper than either evil or good, a personality above or, at least, nearer to the very centre of his being, than the sense of either good or evil. In a philosophical point of view at least, and as illustrating a yen of speculation very fundamental in Mr. Clough's writings, profound and eager as is his sense and abhorrence of evil, we cannot help giving a part of this remarkable soliloquy

• "Sam II.

"[Adam, alone.]

"Adam. Misery, oh my misery ! 0 God, God!

How could I ever, ever, could I do it ?

Whither am I come? where am I? 0 me, miserable !

My God, my God, that I were back with Thee!

0 fool! 0 fool : 0 irretrievable act !

Irretrievable what, I should like to know ?

What act, I wonder ? What is it I mean?

0 Heaven ! the spirit holds me ; I must yield ; Up in the air he lifts me, casts me down ; I writhe in vain, with limbs convulsed, in the void.

Well, well ! go idle words, babble your will ; I think the fit will leave me ere I die.

Fool, fool! where am I? 0 my God! Fool, fool !

Why did we do't? Eve, Eve ! where are yon? quick !

His tread is in the garden ! hither it comes !

Hide us, 0 bushes ! and ye thick trees, hide !

He comes, on, on ! Alack, and all these leaves, These petty, quivering and illusive blinds, Avail us nought : the light comes in and in ;

Displays us to ourselves ; displays—ah ! shame—

Unto the inquisitive day our nakedness. He comes ; He calls. The large eye of His truth, His full, severe, all-comprehending view, Fixes itself upon our guiltiness. 0 God, 0 God! what are we? what shall we be ?

What is all this about, I wonder now ?

Yet I am better, ton. I think it will pass.

'Tis going now, unless it comes again.

A terrible possession while it lasts.

Terrible, surely; and yet indeed 'tie true.

E'en in my utmost impotence I find A fount of strange persistence in my soul ; Also, and that perchance is stronger still, A wakeful, changless touchstone in my brain, Receiving, noting, testing all the while

These passing, curious, new phenomena—

Painful, and yet not painful unto it.

Though tortured in the crucible I lie, Myself my own experiment, yet still I,—or a something that is I indeed, A living, central, and more inmost I, Within the scales of mere exterior me's, I,—seem eternal, 0 thou God, as Thou; Have knowledge of the evil and the good, Superior in a higher good to both."

The prose writings—excepting the letters—now for the first time published, have not nearly the same importance as the poems. The letters, indeed, especially those written from America, are full both of depth of thought and of that grave simplicity which was the chief charm of Mr. Clough's personal talk. But the reviews, also chiefly written in America, are a little harum-scarum, and written almost as if they were thrown off in factitious high spirits. This is especially true of the letters of Perepidemus and the review of Mr. Newman's "Soul,"—essays the style of which was doubtless meant only to express a transient mood, though the latter, at least, contains solid conviction. But among the other criticisms, brief and unlaboured as they are, there are passages Of very great beauty and critical depth, as when he describes Wordsworth's great poetic work as consisting in this,—that he strove, "not unsuccessfully, to build the lofty rhyme, to lay slowly the ponderous foundations of pillars to sustain man's moral fabric, to fix a centre around which the chaotic elements of human impulse and desire might take solid form, and move in their ordered ellipses, to originate a spiritual vitality ;"—or where he thus describes the sphere to which in some moods one is disposed to limit the subject-matter of modern poetry, —" There are moods in which one is prone to believe that in these last days, no longer by 'clear spring or shady grove,' no more on any Pindus or Parnassus, or by the side of any Castaly, are the true and lawful haunts of the poetic powers ; but we could believe it, if anywhere, in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild Temptation, and the dire Compulsion of what has once been done,— there, with these tragic sisters around him, and with Pity also, and pure Compassion, and pale Hope that looks like Despair, and Faith in the garb of Doubt, there walks the discrowned Apollo, with unstrung lyre ; nay, and could he sound it, those mournful Muses would scarcely be able, as of old, to respond and 'sing in turn with their beautiful voices.'" Taken as a whole, these volumes cannot fail to be a lasting monument to one of the most original men of our age, and its most subtle, 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 we may call the physi- cal and ahnost 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 uuder weigh. Mr. Matthew Arnold and Mr. Clough both represent the stream of the modern Oxford intellectual tradition in their poems, but how different is their genius. With all his intellectual precision there is something of the boyishness, of the simplicity, of the vascular Saxon breadth of Chaucer's poetry in Mr. Clough, while Mr. Matthew Arnold's poetical ancestor is certainly no earlier than Wordsworth. There are both flesh and spirit, as well as emotion and speculation, in Mr. Clough, —w bile, in Mr. Arnold, soul and sen t iment guide the emotion and the speculation. There is tenderness in both, but Mr. Clough's is the tenderness of earthly sympathy, and Mr. Arnold's the lyrical cry of Virgilian compassion. Both fill half their poems with the most subtle intellectual meditations, but Mr. Clough leaves them all but where they were, not even half settled, laughing at himself for mooning over them so long ; while Mr. Arnold finds some sort of a delicate solution, or no-solution, for all of them, and sorts them with the finest nicety. Finally, when they both reach their highest poetical point, Mr. Arnold is found painting lucidly in a region of pure and exquisite sentiment, Mr. Clough singing a sort of rwin of buoyant and exultant strength :—

"But, oh, blithe breeze, and oh, great seas, If ne'or that earliest parting past, On your wide plain, they join again,

Together lead them home at last !

"One port, methought, alike they sought, One purpose hold where'er they fare, Oh, bounding breeze, oh, rushing seas, At last, at last, unite them there!"