Clough
aouGH is the first Victorian poet to become an Oxford English Text. This noble series is, of course, a repository of great scholarship as well as of great literature, and from the standpoint of pure literary scholarship he probably needs re-editing more than any of his con- temporaries. He published little in his lifetime, and in preparing their posthumous collections Mrs. Clough and her advisers were not too strictly concerned with textual accuracy. The manuscript read- ings were sometimes altered and " improved," and certain lines and passages were considered too outspoken to print. Fortunately all the material has been preserved ; the present editors have examined it afresh, presenting as far aS-possiblethe text of what appeared to be the latest manuscript. They have rescued some previously unpub- lished poems and restored all omissions (notably a whole scene of Dipsychus, which throws new light on the poem), and they have provided 130 pages of variant readings.
But that Clough is a deserving subject for such magisterial editing can scarcely be said to be what American critics call " received opinion." It is not so much that his reputation has declined as that he has been saddled with a misleading one. Mr. Norrington in his preface remarks that " the 1869 volume placed Clough among the eminent Victorian poets." And the fact-that the first draft of "..Say not " is here produced. as a frontispiece rather tends to fix him in that category. Those statesmanlike verses have helped to create Oofigh's reputation for earnestness, and though we no longer regardeminent Victorians as figures of fun, there is still something rather fofbidding about an earnest eminent Victorian. It isn't difficult to find poems which lend some support to this idea of him ; it is much easier to turn to Amours de Voyage, The Bothie and Dipsychus and discover how misleading it is. If it persists it can only be due to simple ignorance of his work. Lytton Strachey's account of him—the youth who " thought of nothing but moral good, moral evil, moral influence and moral responsibility," who lost his faith and " spent the rest of his existence lamenting that loss, both in prose and verse " —is a vulgar travesty, based obviously on distorted second-hand evidence. It is impossible to believe that he could have read any of that " prose and verse " ; even he, for all his prejudice, would surely have responded to Amours de Voyage- " .Dulce it is, and decorum, no doubt, for the country to fall—to Offer one's blood115 oblation to Freedom, and die for the Cause
yet Still, individual culture is also something, and no man Finds quite distinct the assurance that he of all others is called on, Or would be justified, even, in taking away from the world that Precious creature, himself."
There are dull stretches in Clough, particularly among the shorter poems—poems in which he drearily mulls overihis doubts in an almost obsessional way, or writes so colourlessly that the lines are quite empty of feeling. They contrast strongly with the work in which he comes to life—where, directly or indirectly, he '' laments his loss of faith " with an adult irony and intelligence, a vivacious worldly feeling for reality that must quite confound anyone whc thinks of him as a prig. Amours de Voyage is his masterpiece. Its psychological perception is remarkable ; and so, too, is the presen- tation of the background of the over-civilised Claude's intellectua, conflicts—the French siege of Mazzini's Roman Republic, at which Clough himself was present. Claude's eye-witness account of the lynching of the priest (letter VII in the second canto) is a beautifully
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