THE UNPOPULARITY OF CLOUGH.

THE appearance of Mr. Waddington's admiring and sympa- thetic " monograph " on Clough,*—why call, by the way, * Arthur Hugh Clough; a Monograph, By Samuel Wadeingtom Loudon

George Bell and flame.

a publication of this kind a monograph, which properly means a study of something artificially separated from its natural context P—affords us a good opportunity of asking why Clough is not better' known than he is in modern English literature ; why his fame is not greater, and his often

magnificent verse more familiar to modern ears. In Mr. Haweis's hasty and scrappy book on the "American Humour- ists," Mr. Haweis scoffs parenthetically at the present American Minister's curious notion that Clough was, after all, the great poet of the age " (" American Humourists," p. 83); and even one of Clough's most intimate friends, Mr. F. T. Palgrave, has lent some sort of authority to Mr. Haweis's scoff, by the remark,—tour as amazing as it appears to some good critics eandid,—that "one feels a doubt whether in verse, he [Clough] chose the right vehicle, the truly natural mode of utterance." We can only say, in reply, that Clough seems to us never to touch verse without finding strength, never to attempt to speak in prose without losing it, and becoming half-articulate. But there clearly must be some reason or quasi-reason in a view which a whole generation of lovers of poetry have not disproved, but to some extent verified, by the relative neglect in which, during a time when verse has secured an immense amount of attention, Clough's touching and often stirring and elevating poetry has been left. Mr. Waddington, we are sorry to see,does not address himself to this question, and throws but little light en it. And with all his genuine appreciation of Clough, his study is wanting in the strong 'outlines and massiveness of effect which might have done something to secure for Clough the public es- teem which he will certainly one day secure. Mr. Waddington is too discursive, and does not bring the great features of his subject into Sufficiently strong relief. His essay might increase the vogue of a public favourite, but will hardly win popularity for one who has never yet emerged from the comparative obscurity of a Sieger delightful to the few, though his name even is hardly recognised by the many.

For our own parts, though we should not assert that Clough ii the great poet of our age, we should agree heartily with Mr. Lowell that he will in future generations rank among the highest of our time, and that especially he will be ranked with Matthew Arnold; as having found a voice for this self- questioning age,—a voice of greater range and richness even, and of a deeper pathos, though of less exquisite sweetness and " lucidity " of utterance, than Matthew Arnold's own,—a voice that oftener breaks, perhaps, in the effort to express what is beyond it, but one also that attempts, and often achieves, still deeper and more heart-stirring strains. Clough had not Mr..Arnold's happy art of interweaving delicate fancies with thoughts and emotions. Poems like "The Scholar Gipsy" and " Thyrsis," like " Tristram and Iseult," " The Sick King of Bokhara," and the stanzas on "The Author of

Ober/loam,' " were out of his reach. And, no doubt, it is precisely poems of this kind, into which, across the bright web of rich and stimulating fancy, Mr. Arnold has woven lines of exquisitely-drawn and thoroughly modern thought and feeling, that have gained for Mr. Arnold his in- creasing, though not as yet overwhelming, popularity. Clough had nothing of this fanciful art. He was realist to the bottom of his soul, and yet, though realist, he looked at all the ques- tions of the day from the thinker's point of view, and not from the people's point of view. He did not frame his pictures, as his friend does, in golden margins of felicitous fancy. He left them almost without a frame, or, at 'any rate, with no other frame than that furnished by the plain outline of his story. This might have but increased his popularity, had Clough's subjects been like Burns's subjects, the common joys and sorrows of the human heart. But it was not so. His subjects, for the most part, have a semi-scholastic ring, but do not embody those elaborate 'artistic effects which soften a scholastic ring to the ear of the people. He was a self-questioner, who did not cast over his questionings that spirit of imaginative illusion which, in Mr. Arnold's poetry, sometimes makes even self-questionings sound like the music of a distant and brighter sphere. Clough's poetry is full of direct, home-thrusting ques- tioning—concerning character in the making, faith in the making, love in the making; and powerful as it is, this analytic poetry no doubt needs more than any kind of 'poetry, for its immediate popularity, the glamour which Mr. Arnold's artistic framing throws round it.

Nor is this the only difference. The charm of Clough's humour, the strength of his. delineation is so great that, if the only difference between him and Matthew Arnold were the difference between a plain and an attractive setting, that advan- tage of Mr. Arnold's might, we think, have been counterbalanced by the deeper pathos of Clough's pictures, and the stronger lines in which he draws. But there is another difference. Matthew Arnold, negative as the outcome of his thought too frequently is, never leaves you in any kind of doubt as to what he means. His lines are always sharply chiselled. He is dogmatic even in his denials of dogma. Lucid and confident to the last degree, he never leaves the mind without a very sharply-marked impression of a clear thought. And even where that thought is not popular,—even where it is the reverse of popular,—such sharp, distinct lines, gracefully graven, are likely to gain more readers and admirers, than lines of freer sweep, but more uncertain drift. Compare, for instance, some of Mr. Arnold's finest lines on the dearth of true revealing poets, with some of Mr. Clough's finest on the same subject. Mr. Arnold, after bewailing the loss of Goethe and Wordsworth, turns to the hermit of the Alps, M. de Saancour (his " Obermann "), and addresses him thus :—

" And then we turn, thou sadder sage, To thee ! we feel thy spell !

—The hopeless tangle of our age, Thou too halt scann'd it well !

Immoveable thou sittest, still As death, composed to boar ! Thy head is clear, thy feeling chill, And icy thy despair.

Yes, as the son of Thetis said, One hears thee saying now : Greater by far than thou are dead ; Strive not ! die also thou ! • Ah ! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood ; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.

The glow, he cries, the thrill of life, Where, where do these abound ?- Not in the world, not in the strife Of men, shall they be found.

Ho who bath wateh'd, not shared, the strife, Knows how the day bath gone.

He only lives with the world's life, Who hath renounced his own."

Now hear Clough, on the same subject :- " Come, Poet, come !

A thousand labourers ply their task, And what it tends to, scarcely ask, And trembling thinkers on the brink Shiver, and know not how to think. To tell the purport of their pain, And what our silly joys contain; In lasting lineaments pourtray The substance of the shadowy day ; Our real and inner deeds rehearse, And make our meaning clear in verse: Come, Poet, come! far but in vain We do the work or feel the pain, And gather up the seeming gain, Unless before the end thou come To take, ere they are lost, their sum.

Como, Poet, come!

To give an utterance to the dumb, And make vain babblers silent, come; A thousand dupes point here and there, Bewildered by the show and glare ; And wise men half have learned to doubt Whether we are not best without.

Come, Poet ; both but wait to see Their error proved to them in thee.

Come, Poet, come!

In vain I seem to call. And yet Think not the living times forget.

Ages of heroes fought and fell

That Homer in the end might tell ' O'er grovelling generations past Upstood the Doric fane at last; And countless hearts on countless years Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears, Rude laughter and unmeaning tears, Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome The pure perfection of her dome.

Others, I doubt not, if not we, The issue of our toils shall see; Young children gather as their own The harvest that the dead had sown, ' The dead forgotten and unknown."

One feels the difference at once between the picture of the lucid insight of solitary renunciation, and the ardent invoca- tion addressed to a new teacher of a dimly-anticipated lesson. The one poet is distinct, the other vague, and though the more

distinct teaching is the less hopeful, it sinks more easily into the reader's mind. Yet, for our parts, we find a richer music in

the vague hope of Clough, than even in the sweet, sad despond. ency of Arnold.

Further, Clough not only sings finely of the immature stage of moral character, but of the immature stage of faith, and the immature stage of love. He studies both in the making,— admitting it to be a riddle how that making will end. Here, for instance, is a fine poem on faith in the making, which will be popular one day, as describing a stage which many will then have passed through, but which has not found its popularity yet :—

" What we when face to face we see The Father of our souls, shall be, John tells us, doth not yet appear; Ah, did he tell what we are here!

A mipd for thoughts to pass into, A heart for love to travel through, Five senses to detect things near, Is this the whole that we are hero !

Rules baffle instincts—instincts rules, Wise men are bad—and good are fools Facts evil—wishes vain appear, We cannot go, why are we here ?

O may we for assurance' sake, Some arbitrary judgment .take, And wilfully pronounce it clear, For this or that 't is we are here ?

Or is it right, and will it do, To pace the sad confusion through, And say :—It doth not yet appear, What we shall be, what we are here ?

Ah yet, when all is thought and said, The heart still overrules the head; Still what we hope we must believe, And what is given us receive.

Must still believe, for still we hope That in a world of larger scope, What here is faithfully begun Will be completed, not undone.

My child, we still must think, when we That ampler life together see, Some true result will yet appear Of what we are, together, here."

And here, once more, is a curiously subtle passage on love " in the making," which must wait, we suppose, for its popularity till the human heart understands itself better, and is franker with itself, but which will have its popularity then. It is from " The Bothie, of Tober-na-Vuolich," the most buoyant and humorous poem of the higher kind produced in England during the present century. The enthusiast of the poem is descanting on the beauty which physical labour adds to the charm of women :-

Well, then, said Dawson, resuming; Laugh if you please at my novel economy ; listen to this, though ; As fur myself, and apart from economy wholly, believe me, Never I properly felt the relation between men and women, 'Though to the dancing-master I went perforce, for a quarter, Where, in dismal quadrille, were good looking girls in abundance, 'Though, too, school-girl cousins were mine—a bevy of beauties—

Never (of course you will laugh, but of course all the same I shall say it), Never, believe me, I knew of the feelings between men and women, Till in some village fields in holidays now getting stupid, One day sauntering 'long and listless,' as Tennyson has it, Long and listless strolling, ungainly in hobbkdiboyhood, Chanced it my eye fell aside on a capless, bonnetless maiden, Bending with three-pronged fork in a garden uprooting potatoes. Was it the air ? who can say ? or herself, or the charm of her labour ?

But a new thing was in me ; and longing delicious possessed me, Longing to take her and lift her, .and put her away from her slaving. Was it embracing or aiding was most in my mind P hard question ! But a now thing was in me, 1, too, was a youth among maidens : Was it the air ? who can say ? but in part 't was the charm of the labour.

Still, though a new thing was in me, the poets revealed themselves to me,

And in my dreams by Miranda, her Ferdinand, often I wandered, 'Though all the fuss about girls, the giggling and toying and coying, Were not so strange as before, so incomprehensible purely ; Still, as before (and as now), balls, dances, and evening parties,

Shooting with bows, going shopping together, and hearing them singing, Dangling beside them, and turning the leaves on the dreary piano, Offering unneeded arms, performing dull farces of escort, 'Seamed like a sort of unnatural up-in-the-air balloon-work (Or what to me is as hateful, a riding about in a carriage), Utter removal from work, mother earth, and the objects of living.

Hungry and fainting for food, you ask me to join you in snapping—

What but a pink-paper comfit, with motto romantic inside it ?

Wishing to stock me a garden, I'm sent to a table of nosegays ; Better a crust of blaok bread than a mountain of paper confec- tions,

Bettor a daisy in earth than a dahlia out and gathered, Better a cowslip with root than a prize carnation without it. That I allow, said Adam.

But he, with the bit in his teeth, scarce Breathed a brief moment, and hurried exultingly on with his rider, Far over hillock, and runnel, and bramble, away in the ehampaign, Snorting defiance and force, the white foam flecking his flanks, the Rein hanging loose to his nook, and head projecting before him.

Oh, if they knew and considered, unhappy ones!! oh, could they

see, could But for a moment discern, how the blood of true gallantry kindles, How the old knightly religion, the chivalry semi-quixotic, Stirs in the veins of a man at seeing some delicate woman Serving him, toiling—for him, and the world ; some tenderest girl, now Over•weighted, expectant, of him, is it P who shall, if only Duly her burden be lightened, not wholly removed from her, mind you, Lightened, if but by the love, the devotion man only can offer, Grand on her pedestal rise as urn-bearing statue of Hellas ;- Oh, could they feel at such moments how man's heart, as into Eden Carried anew, seems to see, like the gardener of earth uncorrupted, Eve from the hand of her Maker advancing, an help meet for him, Eve from his own flesh taken, a spirit restored to his spirit, Spirit but not spirit only, himself whatever himself is,

Unto the mystery's end sole helpmate meet to be with him '•— Oh if they saw it and know it ; we soon should see them abandon

Boudoir, toilette, carriage, drawing.room, and ball-room, Satin for worsted exchange, gros-do-naples for plain Linsey-woolsey, Sandals of silk for clogs, for health lackadaisical fancies!

So, feel women, not dolls ; so feel the sap of existence Circulate up through their roots from the far-away centre of all things, Circulate up from the depths to the bud on the twig that is top- most !

Yes, we should see them delighted, delighted ourselves in the seeing,

Bending with blue cotton gown skirted up over striped linsey-

woolsoy,

Milking the kine in the field, like Rachel, watering cattle,

Rachel, when at the well the predestined beheld and kissed her, Or, with pail upon head, like Dora beloved of Alexis, Comely, with well.poised pail over neck arching soft to the shoulders, Comely in graoefullest act, one arm uplifted to stay it, Home from the river or pump moving stately and calm to the laundry ; Ay, doing household work, as many sweet girls I have looked at, Needful household work, which some one, after all, must do, Needful, graceful therefore, as washing, cooking, and scouring,

Or, if you please, with the fork in the garden uprooting potatoes."

That is not a picture of love, but a picture of the initial stages of love, and of that which often prevents love from ripening. Nor can such pictures be popular while the mind shrinks from looking in the face the poor beginnings of its own highest powers. One day, however, Clough will vindicate the justice of Mr. Lowell's judgment on him, though that day may not be yet. Arnold will, perhaps, grow to even greater popularity, before the growth of Clough's popularity begins. But begin it will, and* wax, too, to a point as high, perhaps, as Arnold's ever will be, for Clough's rapture and exultation, when they reach their highest points, are beyond the rapture and exultation of Arnold, though his music is less carefully modulated, and his pictures less exquisitely framed.