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MAREEAGE AS A METAPHOR 0F

QMMTTMEMT EN THE ‘LOHG POEMS

0F ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

Thesis "for the Degree of HT; D.
MTCHEGAN STATE UNWERST
IARRELLA D’KELLEY.

 

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Michigan State
University

   

This‘is to certify that the
thesis entitled

MARRIAGE AS A METAPHOR OF COMMITMENT

IN THE LONG POEMS OF ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

presented by

Jarrell A. O'Kelley

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph.D. degree ianglish

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Major professor

Date November 13, 1970

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ABSTRACT

MARRIAGE AS A FETAPHOR OF C Ol-flflTl-‘EXTT

IN THE LONG POEMS OF ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

By
Jarrell A. O'Kelley

Arthur Hugh Clough was regarded, in his own century, as a
failure, and has been variously considered by contemporary scholars as
an interesting but troubled spirit, as a brilliant social satirist, and
as a man ahead of his time. It is contended that Clough was too complex
to be accurately described by any of these labels, and that, indeed, his
works both treat and exemplify the characteristic problem of the
Victorian Era: the conflict between the impulses toward intellectual
integrity and social responsibility.

Clough's shorter poems reveal a salutary balance of tensions as
he studiously avoids the extremes of withdrawal from the world and
compromise with it, which would vitiate, respectively, meaningful
activity and creative thought. It is in his long poems however that
we find, in Clough's use of "marriage," both as a theme and as a
pervasive metaphor, an attempt to state, if not necessarily to resolve,
the most perplexing paradox in the Victorian mind: that knowledge,
needed as the basis for social and moral commitment, is the very thing

which makes commitment hard to achieve.

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The theme of marriage is introduced in Adam and Eve where Adam

 

‘is forced to renounce a life of philosophical speculation which is
'irreconcilable with his domestic obligations. "Marriage" becomes a

full-blown metaphor of commitment in The Bothie 2f Tober pg Vuolich,

 

whose hero, Philip, finds in marriage a resolution of both his personal
and political difficulties. He seeks, and finds, a wife with whom he
will enjoy the spiritual rapport maintained as an ideal for the
Victorian home, but in the choice of whom he bears witness to his
democratic social views. Neither personal happiness nor political
conviction has to be sacrificed in the interests of the other for they
are mutually supportive in the great commitment which marriage represents
in this poem.

Claude, the anti-hero of Amgugg dg‘ygyggg, fails to achieve a
marital commitment and in so doing fails in all other commitments.
Visiting Rome in 1849, Claude is sympathetic toward the short-lived
Roman Republic. He is attracted to an English girl, but cannot justify,
intellectually, his love for her, feeling that their relationship is a
product of "juxtaposition" only, lacking any underlying "affinity."
Neither can he justify overt actions on behalf of the Roman Republicans.
Failing to recognize, as Philip does, that affinity is‘fgugg in
juxtaposition, he is too insecure in his personal life to trust his
intellectual judgments, and too hesitating in his judgments to trust his
emotions. Claude could have achieved self-realization in marriage, both
in personal and social terms, but does not.

In the Dipsychus dia10gues Clough carries the bifurcation of
impulses into the soul itself. Dipsychus is tempted by “the Spirit" to

compromise with the world through a nominal commitment to religious or

‘:‘

political belief or to professional obligations. In place of a true
marital union, he is offered either the gratification of passion or a
marriage of convenience. His final capitulation is seen as a
"marriage" with the world of eXpediency and pragmatic values.

Clough's final long work, Mari I‘Eagno, depicts a series of
imperfect marital commitments wherein his characters, lacking Philip's
success, generally achieve greater rapport between the internal and
external elements in their lives than does Claude. Edmm, the hero
of one of the poems, concludes it with the observation that " . . .
love is fellow-service . . . ," a cherished belief of Philip in the
29.332.19.- Thus Mari Magno fittingly completes the cycle of Clough's long
poems with the metaphor of marriage which is representative, in these
works, not only of all types of human commitment but of the process by

which commitments are made mutually supportive.

.I'EARRIAGE AS A METAPHOR OF COIfi'fL TI‘IEN T

IN THE LON G POEMS OF ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

By

. f
Jarrell AX O'Kelley

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PPILOSOPHY

\ Department of English

. 1970

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© Copyright by
JARRELL ARLEN O'KEHEY

1971

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INTRODUCTION . o .

CHAPTERI ...

CHAPTER II . . .

CHAPTER III . . .

CHAPTER IV . . .

CHAPTERV ...

LIST OF REFERBICES

TABLE

OF CON TEN T3

.23

. 107

.118

und-

INTRODUCTION

In the century which has elapsed since the death of
Arthur Hugh Clough, critical opinion concerning both the poet and
his work (and in Clough studies the two have seldom been divorced) has
often affirmed, and sometimes denied, but has never ignored the belief
expressed by Walter Bagehot. "Mr. Clough in his time,” Bagehot
cemented in 1862, “felt more than mo st men the weight of the
unintelligible world. ”1 Clough is generally thought to have revealed,
through the hesitation with which he approached both marriage and the
choice of a career, through his inability to accept any doctrinaire set
of religous beliefs, and through the frequent ambivalence of his
poetry (with the perplexing antitheses of M _D_ay, ESE-9.3.9 M and
§_a§t__e_1; 23.1 E, and the unresolved conflicts of the W dialogues)
that he lacked the ability to make decisions, practical or intellectual.

Lytton Strachey, in his treatment of Dr. Thomas Arnold, did not
hesitate to exhibit Clough as an example of what too much moral
earnestness, of the sort inculcated at Rugby, might produce: ”Perhaps
it was not surprising that a young man brought up in such an atmosphere
should have fallen a prey, at Oxford, to the frenzies of religious
controversy; that he should have been driven almost out of his wits by
the ratiocinations of W. G. Ward: that he should have spent the rest of
his existence lamenting that loss, both in prose and verse; and that

1 Walter Ba ehot, "Mr. Clough's Poems," Literary Studies, Vol. II
(Iondon, n.d. , p. 289.

2

he should have eventually succumbed, conscientiously doing up brown
paper parcels for Florence Nightingale."2
Lady Charley subtitles her biography of Cloughlihg Uncommitted

M3 and while her Freudian treatment of such poems as "Sweet
streamlet bason" is rather extreme,“ her picture of Clough, as driven
ultimately into the role of a spectator in life by the agony of
commitment which would necessarily have attended the adaption of any
significant professional career, is not an unusual one. Clough's
principal charm as a poet lies in his unwillingness to absolutize, as
‘Whlter Houghton has observed.5 And this quality is a natural
concomitant to his avoidance of commitment to party, creed, and calling.
In Michael Timko's Innocent Victoriag,6 Clough is seen as withheld by
his liberalism and his militant integrity from any compromise with the
truth as he saw it. Such an approach is valid inasmuch as it identifies
the moral and intellectual atmosphere in which Clough's decisions were
made, or defaulted. But the net result is a minimizing of the inner
tensions both in his life and his poetry. Take away his "poised
‘skepticism,“ as Houghton calls it, and Clough is healthier, perhaps, but
less interesting and ultimately less significant. For to regard him as

2 Lytton Strachey, "Dr. Arnold,” Eminent Victorians, (Garden City,
11.1., n.d.). pp. 235-236.

9% gatherine Charley, Arthur Hugh Cloyght The Ungggnitted Mind (Oxford,
1 2 .

4 Charley, p. 3A6, Clough is seen here as expressing a desire to
return to the womb.

5'Whlter E. Houghton and E. Robert Stange, Victorian Poetgzgggd
ngtics, 2nd ed. (New York, 1968), p. 351.

6 Michael Timko, Innocent Victorign (Athens, Ohio, 1966).

3
merely a liberal, capable of a "scientific" suspension of judgment, is
to reduce the significance of his poetry. And it is no less a
minimization of Clough' s achievement to say, with the Uncle in the prose
"Epilogue to Dipsychus," "It's all Arnold's doing . . . " and thus
reduce the poet's peculiar genius, as Bagehot and Strachey virtually
did, to an excess of moral scruple resulting from his Rugby education.
There were many liberals, there were other Rugbians, but there was only
one Clough.

Whether or not Clough wanted to "return to the womb, " he did face
decisions which he found difficult. But what is more important, he
produced a body of work in which, more than in the poetry of any of his
contemporaries, one sees the subjective aspect of one of the great
problems of the Victorian Age: the conflict of value systems whose
claims seem to be approximately equal. The ”two worlds” of Arnold's
”Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, ” the " . . . one dead, / The other
powerless to be born,” image the feelings of the period. Behind lay
an age of largely unquestioned faith and of noble virtues; ahead loomed
science, with its endless questions, and lower social classes demanding
greater social equity. Conscientious minds envisioned a world which
made the best of both: a religious faith, freed by science from myth
and superstition and illuminated, as Clough says in his ”Epi-Strauss-ium,”
by a light which, “Is, if less richly, more sincerely bright,” and a
social order in which the proletariat would receive not only the
franchise, but the aristocratic tradition of rectitude and refinement as
well. But this seemed difficult in a society dominated increasingly by
a middle class which had everything backwards, clinging stolidly to
traditional religion, but substituting the business ethic for the more

a

traditional moral values of noblesse gbligg and social concern.
Furthermore, many young men of the 40's, and not merely the pupils of
Dr. Arnold, had acquired a sense of moral earnestness which made them
eschew easy answers. If they saw little to cleave to in a game-keeping
aristocracy, an avaricious bourgeoisie, or in the democratic rabble
forming ranks below, and if they found little solace in the religion of
"high and dry” churchmen of the eighteenth century variety, agnostic
science, or the pronouncements of German liberal theologians who seemed
gleefully to be throwing the baby out with.the bath, it is little wonder
that many felt confusion and despair.

One finds in Clough's poetry the dilemma of the individual who,
having despaired of finding fixed values anywhere, approaches even such
personal decisions as the choice of a mate with fear and trembling.
Whether made with stoic resolution, scientific impassivity, or spiritual
travail, choice is a recurrent theme in Clough's work. Seen in the
light of a life whose very earnestness made it difficult by demanding
certitude in a world where it is rarely found, the problem of choice, in
Clough's poetry, becomes a major feature of Victorian sensibility.

A.still persistent myth of Clough's ”failure" grew out of the
disappointment expressed by many of his associates at what he managed
to accomplish during his 42 years. Obsession with this idea has led to
excessive attention to his biography on the part of Clough scholars. The
implication seems to be that little distinction is to be made between
the man and the poet and that Clough's work is to be read largely as an
autobiographical expression of his personal deficiencies. Indeed, such
an approach is avowedly used by Katherine Charley in the most recent and

most complete Clough.bi0graphyt "Clough wrings his criticism of life out

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5

of his own experience. And this brings us back to the enigma of his
personality. His poetry cannot be fully understood until the solution
of this enigma has been found."7

And even for Clough's most ardent twentieth century apologists,
the myth of his failure as the key to his literary achievements remains
very real, as can be seen by the reactions which it produces. Frederick
Bowers, who questions the myth, makes a brilliant case for Clough's
modernity, but in so doing seems to suggest that Clough was really too
far ahead of his time to speak to it.8 Timko, 1h emphasizing the
liberal and positive elements in Clough's work, inevitably plays down
the "troubled note" which Matthew Arnold found and lamented therein.
And the resulting implication is that Clough's ”problems" £S‘W611 as
the difficulties he might have faced in solving them, are also part of
the wth.9

All these approaches, in one way or another, tend to deny Clough
his rightful place: that of a poet of keen (if not morbid) sensibilities
whose work speaks £9; itself.tg the major problems of his period. The
question of his "success" or ”failure” (as man, not as poet) is
significant only in that his personal problems can be said to have
prepared him to deal, with unique effectiveness, with the problems of
his age.

E. D. H. Johnson has declared the salient feature of the Victorian

7 Charley, p. 7.

8.Frederick Bowers, "Arthur Hugh Clough: The Modern Mend," Studies in
W Literature, Vol. 6, pp. 709-16, Autumn, 1966.

9 kaO. 220 fie

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literary'mind to be " . . . a conflict, demonstrable within the work
of the writers themselves, between the public conscience of the man of
letters who comes forward as the accredited literary spokesman of his
‘world, and the private conscience of the artist who conceives that his
highest allegiance must be to his own aesthetic.sensibilities."lo This
is a statement, in artistic terms, of something even broader: the
general cleavage between personal integrity and social usefulness,
between the private and communal aspects of one's life, which has
characterized the last century and a half. These more comprehensive
implications of Johnson's concept of ”alienation" should be borne in

mind as one reads further.

At the core of the malaise which pervades so much that is best
in Victorian literature lies a sense, often inarticulate, that
modern society has originated tendencies inimical to the life
of the creative imagination. By mid-century the circumstances
of successful literary production had begun to make demands on
'writers which strained to the breaking point their often very
considerable capacities for compromise . . . . A new generation
. . . was to resolve the dilemma by an outspoken assertion of
the artist's apartness; but for the writers who came of age in
the 1830's and 18AO's no such categorical disavowal of social
commitment was admissible. As a result, there is recognizable
in their work a kind of tension originating in the serious
'writer's desire to communicate, but to do so without betraying
the purity of his creative motive . . . traces of the initiating
conflict remain imtedded in what they wrote; and it is these
constantly'recurring evidences of a twofold awareness which,
perhaps more than any other trait, giie its distinctive quality
to the writing of the Victorian Age.

And in no other Victorian poet do we have so clear an example
of the bifhrcation of impulses as we discover in the work of’Cloughs
toward faith or agnosticism, toward social involvement or detached

10 E. D. H. Johnson, Ihg Alien Vigion‘gf Victorian Poetr , pp. ix, x.
11 Johnson, p. xi.

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7
objectivity, toward passionate love or intellectual solitude. For
Clough was less "guilty" of the uneasy compromise which Johnson sees
in the work of Browning, Tennyson and Arnold.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that " . . . the test of a
first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two Opposed ideas in the
mind at the same time, and still be able to function. One should", for
example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined
to make them otherwise."12 Though recognized neither by Clough's
contemporary detractors nor by some of his admirers today, this is the
quality, characteristic in a degree of all the major mid-Victorian
poets, which he most uniquely exemplifies. A. O. J. Cockshtrttmakes a
distinction which, if somewhat precious, is nevertheless useful: ”Many
Victorians changed sides, experienced conversion to Christianity or a
new form of it, or a kind of anti-conversion against it. But once the
process was completed, though pain and anxiety often continued, doubt
generally ended. Newman' s words 'A thousand difficulties do not make
one doubt' might have been echoed by Pusey, by Huxley, by Mill, by men
of all schools of thought. The useful stock phrase 'Victorian doubt' is
seen on examination to mean rather, spiritual moiety, crises of
conversion, pain of intellectual separation from friends.13

Yet there were exceptions, in whom doubt was an abiding quality.
"Clough and Tennyson are the only eminent exceptions I can recall, and
the fascination of each of these two cases is heightened by the fact

12 F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-Up,” Literatureifgg'writing, ed.
fligfiteinmann, Jr. and Gerald Willen (Belmont, California, 1962),

13 A. o. J. Cockshutt, ”Clough: The Real Doubter," The Unbelievers;
English.Agpostic Thopght 1840-1820, (London, 196A), p. 32.

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8

that they are complementary, Tennyson's doubt possessing a vague
preponderance of Christianity, and Clough's an agnostic flavour."14
To Cockshutt, Clough is "the real doubter," carrying his skepticism
further than any of his contemporaries.

Indeed, one might rather say of Clough that he was 5213 to
suspend judgments than that he was Eggblg to make decisions, however
uncomfortable the process of living with doubt might have been. Clough
possessed the ability to explore antithetical modes of human eXperience,
both as artist and as critic, without rejecting either out of hand. In
his review, ”Recent English Poetry," Clough praises " . . . something
substantive and lifelike, immediate and firsthand . . . " which he
finds in Alexander Smith's A Lifg‘gggmg, but expresses reservations about
its "rude vigor.” In the same essay he rejoices in the ”hope, light and
Apersistence” of Matthew Arnold's first two published volumes, but wonders
if they be not, perhaps, the product of sensibilities so refined that
they are "too delicate . . . for common service." Clough resolves this
apparent ambivalence of critical judgment in a statement which affords
a clue to his purpose not only as a reviewer but as a poet. "Individuals
differ in character, capacity, and positions; and, according to their
circumstances, will combine, in every possible variety of degree, the
two elements of thoughtful discriminating selection and rejection, and
frank and bold acceptance of what lies around them. Between the
extremes of ascetic and timid self-culture, and of unquestioning,
unhesitating confidence, we may consent to see and tolerate every kind

and gradation of intermixture.h15

1“ Cockshutt, pp. 32-34.

15 Buckner B. Trawick, Selected Prose Works 2f Arthur Hggh Clou h,
(University, Alabama, 1964), p. 163.

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9
Such a belief made Clough a sympathetic reader; taken as a

keynote of his own literary efforts it establishes the polarity which
marks all of his long poems: the need for social commitment as opposed
to the need to preserve intellectual integrity. The agony of steering,
through uncharted waters, a course equidistant from these two poles is
the distinctive characteristic of Clough's heroes. They hang suspended
in the middle of a dialectical pattern whose synthesis is not always
forthcoming and hence may seem 10gically incomplete. But if Clough was
a failure as a logician he was a good psychologist. Call it what one
will, "anxiety" or "doubt," Clough makes the fullest statement of the
dark night of the Victorian soul.

For what is ultimately to be discovered in Clough's work is an
explicit statement of the implicit problem in much Victorian literature.
How can the soul survive in a world whose empiricism denies its
existence, whose pragmatic belief begs its most insistent questions,
whose merely conventional ethics truncate its high moral aspirations,
and whose vulgarity frustrates its esthetic sense? And in such a world
it must survive, for withdrawal from it stultifies the very impulses
which it seeks to keep pure. Clough was not prone to ask, with Arnold,
for "toil unsevered from tranquility" but to recognize toil and
tranquility as polar Opposites, both potentially destructive, which can
hepefully be maintained in a dynamic (never a static) balance. When
Tennyson's soul, in "The Palace of Art” turns the key on what began as
a museum but, bereft of relevance to the world outside, has become a
chamber of horrors, £923,113 nevertheless 39 m, we have an example of
the sort of ambivalence characteristic of Clough: the evidence is not
yet all in and a position, rejected in i_t_s_ extremit , may not remain

permanently untenable. Another example can be found in Browning's

.D-

10
"Bishop Blougram's Apology" where (as one might well read the poem)
Gigadibs, without accepting the bishop's arguments, is forced to
question the validity of his own liberal position, and emigrates to
Australia (a prospect which Clough once entertained and which became
a recurrent theme in his works) and will seek to complement intellectual
pursuits with action.

The quality which made Clough eclectic in his criticism became,
in his verse, both a structural and a rhetorical device. Isdbel
Armstrong, in her analysis of the popular "Say not the struggle naught
availeth" shows it in action.

The old, welldworn metaphor of battle could easily lead to facile
optimism and superficial heroics, but there are none here. Instead,
with a peculiarly firm diffidence, he states that fear, just as
much as hope, can be deceptive. The very structure of the lines
reflects an empirical balance in the thought and prevents
attitudinising -- "If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars." "Say
not" is Clough's celebration of a heroic ideal, and yet is rooted
in common sense reality. Its strength is that it holds two moods
in equipoise. There is a tension between the sense of achievement,
and certain triumph, and the weariness of dOgged, tired effort --
"For while the tired waves, vainly'breaking.. . . ” .The emotional
force of this image is just prevented from dominating the whole
poem. 1% does not counteract the equally powerful rejection of
defeat.1

Multiple examples of this "balance" can be found in Clough's
shorter poems. The concluding lines of "Hope evermore and believe"
present with equal force, and to an extent reconcile, the conflicting
impulses toward satisfaction with one's role in society and toward
aspiration to higher things: "This that I see is not all, and this that
I do is but little; / Nevertheless it is good, though there is better

than it. (25-26)

16 Isobel Armstrong, Arthur Hggh,Clopgh, (London, 1962), p. 16.

11
The Opening quatrain of another poem, best known for its refrain,
poses one of the many problems which Clough envisions as corollary to
the central prOblem of meaningful commitment versus personal integrity.
In this case it is the conflict between traditional wisdom and new

insight:

Old things need not be therefore true;
0 brother men, nor yet the new;
Ah! still awhile the old thought retain,
And yet consider it again!
And the only reconciliation in the poem is a reiterated appeal for
reconsideration, in a world.which is little inclined to reconsider.
The image employed in "Why should I say I see the things I see
not" preserves the same balance of tensions. Here Clough sees life as a
street dance. One must join the dancers because
Who standeth in the street
Shall be hustled and justled about;
And he that stops 1' the dance shall be spurned
by the dancers' feet, -- (I, 5-7)
but there are "two musics unto men" and the "loud and bold and coarse"
music to which the dancers move must not drown out "the other, soft and
low,” ”the bare conscience of the better thing."
On a somewhat grander scale are Easter Day, Naples, léfifi and
Easter 232:22. The former, taking a "scientific" point of view and
aware of the questionable historicity of the gospels, denies the

resurrection:

12

No more with pleading eyes,

And sobs of strong desire,

Unto the empty vacant void aspire,

Seeking another and impossible birth

That is not of your own and only Mother Earth.

But if there is no other life for you,

Sit down and be content, since this must even do:

He is not risen. _ (29-36)
E53121; 22.1 _I_l; introduces the duality of "Why should I say I see the
things I see not." "I with my secret self held comming of mine own,"
the poet says. In the previous poem he had listened to one voice, now
"in a later hour I sat and heard / Another voice that spake another
graver word." And this voice reveals that the truth of the gospel is,
to use a twentieth century term, extra-historical and independent of
empirical evidence. "In the true Creed / He is yet risen indeed" says
the voice, and reminds the poet that "Life yet is Life and Man is Man."

It has been widely assumed that one or the other of these poems

is "the real Clough" and that £55439; gay I; is (depending on how one
feels about the poet) either (a) a rather mawkish attempt to salvage
something from the orthodoxy demolished by the forthright unbelief in
m _I_Dgy, ELM, l8_’~_l;2 or (b). a courageous statement of faith
reaffirmed on a new basis, the skepticism of the other poem being
largely rhetorical. But the poems assume greater significance when
neither is read as cancelling out the other. The poems, taken together,
do not constitute a theological tract (a charge which might be made
against Tennyson's "The Two Voices") but rather a study in the
subjective feelings attendant upon a loss of faith and its reaffirmation.
The conclusion arrived at seems almost irrelevant to the powerful
qualitative sense of two moods, both common in the experience of modern

man. One finds a similar quality in Hopkin's "The Leaden Echo and the

13
Golden Echo" where, again, the reader can join the poet in his
exploration to two emotional states without necessarily accepting or
rejecting, philosophically, his conclusion that one is more valid than
the other.17 It should further be noted that neither of Clough's two
poems is untainted by the emotional atmosphere of the other. The former
is as effective as it is because it actually deals with the will to
believe, constrained by an inescapable positivism. The latter, hopeful
but not jubilant, reveals a vague disappointment in a faith which, if
ethically sound, lives only in the metaphors of its unhistorical
”creed.”

As with Clough's poetry, so with his prose. A question like that
of militarism.versus pacifism takes the form of the standard Cloughian
polarity.18 The arguments for force and for “passive endurance" he
states Objectively, concluding (without arriving at an absolute ethical
judgment) that, since society’ is as little likely to abandon all sorts
of force as it is to abandon the exercise of political power of any
kind, a purely defensive militia of citizens is a lesser evil than a
permanent military establishment which stimulates enmity abroad and a
bellicose spirit at home. Reduced to its simplest terms, the conflict
here is one between individuals, who can at least gggk to preserve
their moral integrity by eschewing violence, and society, a collective
entity’which can only preserve its values by'a mass application of

17 Hopkins' simultaneous awareness of what it is like to be damned
and not to be damned, as seen in the concluding lines of "I wake and
feel the fell of dark," is also suggestive of Clough.

18 Trawick, "The Militia,” p. 214.

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force. And Clough's rather tentative "conclusion" is merely the
suggestion that force is less onerous when adopted, as a necessary evil,
by’individual moral choice than when it is institutionalized and even
idealized by'society. But the suggestion is strong that both the
pacifistic and militaristic positions are self-defeating: the pacifist
is in danger, in his attempt to preserve his moral values, of
sacrificing not only his life but the society which led him to those
values: the militarist, in his violent defense of his society’s values,
may'find that he has lost the values in preserving the society.

And in Clough's prose, as in the Eggtgg.ygy'poems, we often find
an argument curiously diluted by'a lurking sense of the validity of the
counter-argument. Always more sympathetic toward political radicalism
than.Matthew'Arnold (his friends gave him such nicknames as "Yankee
Clough” and ”Citizen Clough") he could, in his Addresslgn Socialism,
question many'of the premises of the Christian Socialists, then reveal
that he had given them a resumé'of the arguments that they should learn
to refute, and finally sign himself, "Citoyen."19 Or in the Oxford
Retrenchment Pamphlet, one of the most spirited of Clough's prose
pieces, while nominally listing his objections to the means employed by
the Retrenchment Association in Raising money to ease the plight of Irish
and English laborers, he could make such statements as " . . . whoever
is born into the world has a just claim to demand therein and therefrom
work and wages for work; is bound to do his part in the labour, and

entitled to expect his proportion in the fruits . . . "20 and.”No such

19 Trawick, p. 248.

20 TraWiCk, Po 233a

15
thing can there be as a right to do what you will with your own."21
The impression which the reader receives most strongly from these
pieces is that Clough had a deep sense of the need for social equity
yet an equally deep sense of the hazards which beset any attempt to
institutionalize the drive toward social reform.‘

One always returns to the same underlying perplexity in Clough's
work: to perceive the good, the true, and the beautiful is an individual
matter: to make these perceptions fruitful is a social matter; and in
the modern world, whose vast scientific and scholarly resources foster
analytic thinking, the insights of the individual are more often than
not in conflict with the conventional modes of thought and action
prescribed by'society, Clough was as anxious as Arnold to discover
”the buried.1ife" but saw the discovery not so much as a solution to
the prOblem of nineteenth century man as the establishment of one of the
terms of the prOblem. When Clough characterizes Arnold's Empedocles as
" . . . weary of misdirected effort, weary of imperfect thought, impatient
of a life which appears to him a miserable failure, and incapable, as he
conceives, of doing any thing that shall be true to that proper interior
self . . . "22 he is stating the prOblem faced, in one way or another, by
characters in all of his long poems. To have achieved some glimmerings
of Truth with a capital "T" is, paradoxically, both a necessity'and a
liability in the realization of lower case "truths." Without vision
there is no escape from the pragmatic belief, the ethics of expediency,
and the unimaginative vulgarity of the world. But Eigh vision can come

21 Trawick, p. 237.
22 Trawick, p. 153.

'55

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16
the fear of contamination through compromise, the sin of intellectual
pride, and a sense of the obstacles which.must be overcome which is
so intense that it vitiates the will to act or even to live.

But for a fully develOped view of the plight of the Victorian
intellectual, neither Clough's prose, his shorter poems, nor his
correspondence will suffice. The eclecticism recommended in the first
Parepidemus letter (”The Evolution of Criteria in Art and Literature")
and in "Notes on the Religious Traditionf'wherein, respectively, open
canons of secular and religious literature are envisioned as ways of
simultaneously liberalizing tradition and enriching current intellectual
activity, almost begs the question. ‘flgg is it to be achieved? The
shorter poems are restrained by their rhetorical balance from much
display of an emotional imbalance which they'imply'might exist. And
Clough's letters, often very helpful in revealing the origin of a poetic
image, are, as Armstrong has Observed, peculiarly impersonal and often
reveal much less than we wish of the poet's inner tensions.23

‘It is in ClOUgh's narrative and dramatic poems that we find not
abstract antitheses, but convincing characters grappling with intensely
felt perplexities and the perplexities are of such a sort that one
cannot refrain from identifying them, to an extent, with those of the
poet who, after leaving Qxford.becauee of religious problems, spent
years looking into unrewarding occupations and procrastinating in the
matter of his marriage, as he pursued what obviously was a life-long
ggggt for truthein-action, whether it is to be regarded as a success or

not.

23 Armstrong, p. 11.

17

The two-fold problem of choice and "commitment" (a much-used
term in Clough criticism) is of central importance in all of Clough's
long poems. His heroes are faced with the choice of a mate, a belief,
or a life-style: or of all three. Beyond more choice lies commitment,
with its implication of action, which transforms choice from the simple
statement of preference or assent into a vital principle which governs
conduct and subordinates some values to others. And it is precisely in
the contraction of commitments that the intellectual isolation of the
Victorian man of letters is felt most keenly} Marriage, the most
ubiquitous of human commitments, is thematic in three of the four major
long poems and a recurrent subject in Dipsychus. But, more than a mere
theme, it emerges as the one pervasive metaphor in these works: a
metaphor of commitment. That ”marriage" is eminently suited for such
employment can hardly be denied: the depiction of the Church as the
bride of Christ is an outstanding example of this archetypal metaphor.
But Clough's use of the metaphor makes it a peculiarly apt one for the
representation of the commitment problems of nineteenth century man.
For the marital commitment, as Clough and his contemporaries understood
it, involves the fixing of one's deepest personal feelings in a locus
outside the self (necessitating, perhaps, the sacrifice of certain
private ambitions and enthusiasms) and, through commitment to the basic
societal unit, a partial acceptance (at least) of the prescriptions of
society}

What was one to do if he felt obliged to bear witness to his own
unique perceptions of truth, longed to be sustained in his prophetic
office by'a loving companion and helpmate, but felt that the surrender

of his vision was a prerequisite to the adoption of the generally held

.
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18
pattern of marital happiness? Clough, whose capacity for doubt
precluded his accepting the oversimplified views of either the
mysoginist or the woman-worshipper, was peculiarly sensitive to the
pathos of this problem.

The popular literature of the period presented marriage as the
ultimate in human bliss. At a more belletristic level, Patmore and
Rosetti celebrated, in verse, their "spiritualized" and "romanticized"
views (respectively) of the marital relationship. Love stood high in
the Victorian hierarchy of values and "love," as opposed to ”lust,"
reached its fulfillment only in marriage. 'Walter Houghton has made a
singularly lucid statement of a very complex matter: the peculiar fervor
with which even the Victorian thinker sought love as an anodyne in what
was (to borrow the cherished phrase of Joyce's Gabriel Conroy) “ a

thought-tormented age.”

Love is not associated normally with the intellectual life.
The prOphets might recommend it, as they did, to cure the evils
of sensuality and the marriage market, but that they themselves
should have made it an idol is not what we should have eXpected.
Yet under the circumstances it was natural enough. In an age
of transition in which crucial problems, both practical and
theoretical, exercised the thinking mind at the eXpense of the
sensibility and in which baffled thought so often issued in a
feeling of impotence and a mood of despair, the thinker could
find in love a resolution of psychological tensions, and a
religion, naturalistic or Platonic, to take the place of
Christianity. This is the source, primarily, to which we owe
the major love poetry of the age, and Browning's in particular.

The formation of Browning's ideas on the subject can be
studied in the early philosophical poems. Paracelsus had subdued
his life to one purpose, the aspiration to KNOW . . . . But
knowledge attained had brought no happiness, and he . . . is
ready enough to welcome Aprile, who has aspired only to LOVE, and
to draw the conclusion that both aspirations are necessary for
the full development of man . . . .

19

For the intellectual burdened with a sense of weakness,
stemming partly from the lack of "blood" and partly from the
frustration of long analysis and reading and debate, the image
of woman could take the character of a Phidian statue. She
could.become an incarnation of the simplicity and force of
elemental nature, possessed of the verZ'strength man lacks --
and to which he eagerly turns . . . .2

Houghton calls attention to ”the attitude of worship and

dependence" which characterized Browning's relationship to Elizabeth

Barrett, an aspiration toward union of will and vision. He then adds:

It would be foolish to push the argument too hard, either in
Browning's own life or in the period. There are many psychological
factors which.lead to a masculine dependence on a strong feminine
will, real or imagined, and turn a woman -- and a wife -- into a
guardian angel. II only suggest that one of them was the weakness
consequent upon a baffled search for truth.

At its extreme, the intellectual struggle could result, as we

know, in a sick state of skeptical negation. ‘Without a theory of

life or action to sustain the will to live, lost in a wasteland of

loneliness and despair, the sensitive mind could only'turn to love

as the only value left to hold onto. Here at least was an anchor

fer the soul and a refuge from cosmic and social isolation.25

Clough, whose skepticism outstripped that of most of his

contemporaries was uniquely'susceptible to the appeal of marital.love as
an anchor in the seas of doubt. But so complete was his skepticism, so
searching his analyses of all human emotions that he feared love because
it 33; an escape from the thankless task of seeking intellectual

commitment. He could write, to Emerson, that ” . . . like the rest of

24 Walter E. Houghton, 1:3 Victorian Frame 9;: Mind 1830-1820 (New Haven,
1957). pp- 385-389-

25 Houghton, Victorian Frame‘gf Mind, pp. 388-389.

20
mankind, I wish to be married . . . . "26 or to his fiancee, Blanche
Smith, that "What I had looked forward to originally . . . was
unmarried poverty and literary work . . . . But I find myself utterly
reluctant to enter on that sort of career quite independently of you."27
But he could also see that love, as an escape, was a delusion, and that
the marital commitment, if faced honestly, was not a refuge from the
struggle to perceive order in the universe, but rather a rededication
(albeit a mutual one) to that struggle. And in such a mood he could

write these rather startling lines to Miss Smith:

Do you think that though you and all womanIdnd tOgether cast me
off that Truth would not be true, earth beautiful, the sky
bright, honour honour, and work work -- only a little harder. I
tell you, yes: take it as you will. I ask no girl to be my
friend that we may be a fond foolish couple tOgether all in all
each to the other. If one that has dreamt of such unreality
will open her eyes and look about her and consent to be what
alone in plain fact she can be, a helpmate -- that is a
different thing. I will ask no one to put off her individuality
for me; nor will I, weak and yielding as I am, if I can help it,
put off mine for anyone. We are companions -- fellow-labourers
-- to the end of our journey here, and then it will not have
been in vain: we shall still be something, I think, to each
other. But as for everlasting unions, and ties that no change
can modify, do not dream of them -- God knows, he only: it is
no evidence for them that the exacting hearts of girls would
fain believe in them, and make their lovers (mostly) pretend to
do so. There, that is my creed: expect no other of me, even
though in nu weakness I belie myself . . . . “28

The appeal of marriage as an escape was not limited to the
Victorian man of letters. It was, in fact, strengthened for him by a

generally accepted notion that family life was a refuge from extramural

intellectual and moral perplexities. Widely held " . . . was the

26 Frederick L. Mulhauser, The Corregp_ondence 91' Arthur Hugh Clo h,
(Oxford. 1957). P- 314-

27 Mulhauser, p. 303.
28 Mulhauser, p. 301.

21

conception of the home as a source of virtues and emotions which were
nowhere else to be found, least of all in business and society. "29 To
many a sensitive young intellectual, battling his way through to a
personally acceptable position in matters of faith and politics, it
must often have seemed strange that the deepest of all commitments, the
one which was supposed to provide the foundation stone for his adult
life, should be thus irrelevant to his other concerns. Should not
marriage be contracted not only in accord with one's other beliefs, but
in such a way as to enhance and vivify them? As the commitment of
commitments, marriage becomes, for Clough's heroes, an index of their
ability to achieve harmony between and within their lives and their
views.

Clough's ”success” in lh_e_ §9_t_hi_§ 9}: Toberna-Vuogch, Amour-g g9
Vo e, Di 5 hus, and flag 12933 can be fairly assessed only on the
basis of the logic inherent in Cloughian skepticism. To the extent that
he is able to keep in balance commitment (epitomized by the marital
mion), as a desideratum, and the difficulties which seem, inevitably,
to prevent its perfect realization, Clough must be regarded as highly
successful -- on his own peculiar terms. It is to be contended that he
does, through a sldllful mutual reinforcement of matter and manner,
maintain such a balance. At no point is the dynamic equilibrium of the
poet's overview completely upset, even though the necessity for making
Visible the Ideal, its inevitable limitations, and ambiguities attendant
upon its partial realization, make him appear to move from genial

optimism to hapeless pessimism, and finally to facile compromise.

29 Houghton, Victorian Frame _o_f_’ Mind, p. 3’43.

22
"DevelOpment" in the sequence of Clough's long poems largely, then, is
a matter of the refinement of techniques for posing clearly the

problem, in his own thought and that of his age, which had been there

from the very beginning: commitment.

CHAPTER I

A mint d'appg for the discussion of the marriage metaphor in
Clough's long poems is the incomplete verse drama referred to variously
as $ng _g_n_d_ fig, The Mystery _o_f gig Egg]; and Fragments 91' the Mystery _9_f
935 21g. Its original conception coincides approodmately with that of
priority over that poem in the present discussions. In the first place,
marriage is used--twice--as a simple and obvious, but not insignificant,
metaphor on the collection of scenes, but falls short of emerging as
their theme. These metaphors can be examined more easily than can the
broad metaphorical significance of marriage in the £93113 and, therefore,
are valuable in understanding the unique force of the metaphor in this
much more important poem. They further afford the simple evidence that
marriage, as a metaphor of commitment, was, indeed, in Clough's mind at
the time the m was composed.

While Adam glad Egg is undoubtedly indispensable in arriving at a
full understanding of the philosophic ”direction" of Clough's longer
works, it has deservedly received little attention as poetry. Lines such
as Adam's "How could I ever, ever, could I do it," (II, 2)2 would seem to
Justify the low esteem in which the poem has been held; nor do its recent

1 Katherine Chorley, m m Clough: _ng Uncommitted first (Oxford,
1962), p. 182.
2 This, and all subsequent citations of Clough's poetry, are from

£133 Poems 9; Arthur Hggh Cloygh, ed. H. F. Lowry, A. L. P. Norrington,
and F. L. Mulhauser, (Oxford, 1951).

23

24

defenders, Walter Houghton3 and Lady Chorley,“ praise it on stylistic
grounds. It should not be startling, then, that what is to emerge as a
major metaphor in his more sustained works appears only rather baldly
in ism _a_n_d _Egg, with little of the power which it later achieves.

Houghton has quite accurately observed that the title Adam _a_n_d

 

_Eye is more appropriate than The Mystery 21: the Fall, because the
emphasis is on the relationship between the two and what they symbolize,
rather than upon the doctrine of the Fall pg: _§_§.5 It is perhaps
needless to state that the poem is most un-Miltonic.6 Certainly Adam
and Eve never engage in mutual recriminations. In characteristic
Cloughian fashion, Adam is not always certain that a fall has occurred,
nor does he know exactly what he and Eve might be guilty of if it has.
And to heighten the ambivalence still more, Clough' s Adam makes a very
explicit statement of the idea of "the fortunate fall":

That which we were we could no more remain

Than in the moist provocative vernal mould .

A seed its suckers close and rest a seed;

We were to grow. (I, 13-16)
Eve occupies the role of temptress only to the extent that her
preoccupation with a calamitous vision may have evoked in Adam a mere
illusion of some transgression, the specific terms of which he cannot
'mderstand. It is not, then, as an espousal of sin, that Adam's

3 Walter E. Houghton, TheP o___gtgy of Clo oggh: AnE 5351— in Revaluation,

(New Haven, 1963), p. 80, where Houghton calls— it " . . . one of Clough's
major poems, being the fullest eXpression he ever made of his
religio-ethical philosophy . . .

1+ Chorley, p. 182, where Lady Chorley speaks of it as " . . . in some
ways the most profound Poem Clough ever wrote. ”

5 Houghton, Poetgy g; Clough, p. 81.
6 Houghton, Poetry 2;; Clo h, p. 82.

25
relationship with Eve represents a commitment. It is when Adam
experiences an epiphany, moving from glilt to God-like insight which
takes him beyond the limits of self, that we see his marriage employed in
a symbolic sense. For Adam cannot remain for life in the rarefied
atmosphere of pure thought. He has obligations which preclude living
such a life. Although he might be able to share this atmosphere with
Eve, it would be detrimental to her for him to do so. Mundane,
practical considerations, identified with marriage, force Adam away from

the mysticism into which he might fall:

Really now, had I only time and space

And were not troubled with this wife of mine,

And the necessity of meat and drink--

I really do believe,

With time and space and prOper quietude,

I could resolve the problem in my brain.

But no: I scarce can stay one moment more

To watch the curious seething process out.

If I could only dare to let Eve see

These Operations, it is like enough

Between us two we two could make it out.

But she would be so frightened--think it proof

Of all her own imaginings. 'Twill not do;

So as it is

I must e'en put a cheery face on it,

Suppress the whole, rub off the unfinished thoughts
for fear she read them . . . (II, 50-66)

We thus have, contrasted, the life of contemplation, painless because of
its detachment, and the life of homely commitment which is placed in
jeOpardy by too much speculation. Houghton sees Adam as the
representative of liberal ethical philOSOphy and Eve of Christian
orthodoxy.7 They undoubtedly do have these functions, but their symbolic

roles are more complex than that. In Clough's poetry, orthodoxies,

7 Houghton, Poetry 2; Clough, p. 81.

26

conventions, and belief itself possess a pragmatic value which must not
be overlooked. Sometimes the pragmatic appeal is to be resisted as an
unwarrantable compromise with truth. Such is the case with the appeal
for nominal belief in Di 5 chus, and such was frequently the case in
Clough's own life. But the appeal remains and in other cases assUmes
the force of a moral imperative. Claude, the snobbish and indecisive
hero of _Am_ql_l_r_s_ 5.1.9. Vo a e, can make compromises with neither bourgeois
manners nor the realities of power politics and finds himself left with
nothing but his own pallid integrity. This is not Adam's mistake. His
acquiescence in Eve's vision of the fall is an acceptance of the values
of involvement, with its inevitable taint of the sordid, as Opposed to
those of a lofty detachment. It is not wholly insignificant that the
first acknowledgement of a commitment we encounter in Clough's long
poems is made by the first man.

A second marriage metaphor, in this instance ”metaphor" in the
strictest sense of the term, appears in Adam's final speech to Cain.
Abel, who as Houghton notes, has some irritating affinities with
Browning's Johannes Agricola, is convinced of his own sanctity. He
enjoys repentance so much that he would sin for the joy of repenting
were it not that he knew

. . . that Thou abhorr'st and hatest it,
And will'st, for an example to the rest,
That thine elect should keep themselves from it.
(VI, 18-20)
Yet his hypocrisy he also repents, presumably deriving a filll measure of
satisfaction from Lhig repentance: It is with some show of justice,
then, that Cain defends his manhood against the oppressive piety of his

brother. Cain believes he has achieved ae'victory, and justifies his

2?

deed on the grounds of the principle of forceful self-affirmation that
he has established:

If we are wronged, why we can right ourselves;

If we are plagued and pestered with a fool

That will not let us be, nor leave us room

To do our will and shape our path in peace,

We canberid ofhim. . . (IX, 7-ll)
He regrets that Abel struggled so little, but never repents the act
though Abel, considered as a person and apart from what he represents,
he would gladly bring back. He substitutes for repentance an
unwillingness ever to fggget the enormous, but inevitable, cost of this
manifestation of his own integrity. Requesting the curses of both
father and mother, he goes out into the world possessing, at least,
self-knowledge. He concludes his final speech by saying that " . . .
when / I shall deny the thing that I have done, / I am a dream."
(XIII, 61-63)

Adam, who would seem to rec0gnize in Cain's self-manifesting "sin"
an analogue of his own, falls back upon the marriage metaphor in terms of
which he has charted his own course of compromise between immediate and
ultimate reality. Cain is right in being reconciled to his own nature,
yet his "Murderer" posture can itself become a basis for withdrawal and
impractical speculation, the alternative to which is acceptance of the
commitments one is ordinarily called upon to make in life. ”My son, /
What shall I say?” asks Adam.

That which your soul, in marriage with the world,
Inbreeds in you, accept;--how can I say

Refuse the revelation of the soul?

Yet be not overscrupulous my son,

And be not over proud to put aside

The due consolements of the circling years.
(m1, 614-69)

28

The interaction between world and soul is seen as a nuptial relationship
and.what is engendered thereby is of survival value, though it may'not
be God-like wisdom. If Clough ” . . . was not content to gain a belief
'by going on living'"8 as Bagehot comments, Clough's Adam certainly was,
and the metaphor of his commitment to "living” is that of ”marriage."

Although the reader is, in Adam gag Egg, introduced to marriage
as the image of commitment, it is not (nor can it have been intended to
be) a metaphor of choice. The union of the only two people in the world
would be a ludicrous symbol of choice, for obvious reasons, and the
$3335; decision, if any,'which has caused them, as a couple, to fall, is
treated so obliquely by Clough as not to represent choice effectively
either. Adam's marriage to Eve has been inevitable: she constitutes an
aspect of his own nature. The only choice which confronts him is whether
or not to repudiate part of himself. The persuasive pragmatic arguments
he uses on Cain are those with which he has already convinced himself.
The impulses to understand life and to live life are both legitimate,
and Adam has felt both: he will not wholly renounce either, nor should
Cain. Both should try to be themselves.

But Adam's case is a special one. United with Eve in their
mutual emergence as human beings in the fullest sense, he cannot
abandon her to cultivate, in himself, the intellect which they have
awakened in each other. Nor can he lead her with him.in the furthest
unplorations of his own peculiar intellect. He can, however, imagine
something he will never have: an Eye who could share his speculations
so that his commitment to her happiness would demand, rather than

preclude, his quest for a philosophic vision. Adam's compromise,

8 Bagehot, "Hr. Clough's Poems," Literagy Studies, Vol. II, p. 274.

29
however ”right" it may be, is an uneasy one: in 939}; to he himself he
must settle for a narrower selfhood than, ideally, he might attain to.
Clough's heroes, uncommitted but seeking commitment, will be haunted
henceforward by Adam's dream of an Eve in whose person mundane and
spiritual commitments coincide.

CHAPTER II

It is when one departs from the microcosmic society of A_d_a_m _a_n_d
_E_v_g_ that commitment develops a new dimensionality. What if marriage
represents not only the honoring of a commitment but also the choice,
among many, of a commitment to honor? What if being oneself poses, in
the face of conflicting demands, a question as to who the real self may
be?

Such are the questions dealt with in T_h_e_ _B_o_thi_e_ 9; 10133;: jg
Vuolich. For Philip Newson, the hero of the poem, the establishment of
identity, the choice of a mate, and the adoption of an honest social and
political posture constitute a vicious circle: the solution of any one
of these problems seems almost to presuppose the solution of the other
two. Somehow the problems are solved simultaneously. The poem is both
more and less optimistic than Adam and Eve. Adam is forced to surrender
part (but only a part) of his vision because it would be unacceptable to
Eve, i.e., he has already defined himself in terms of a commitment which
now precludes a pursuit of certain theoretical truths, seemingly lacking
in pragmatic value. Philip, on the other hand, makes a choice, 93; 1.313
Lag}; of his vision (which is refined thereby), of the woman who most
nearly is a fulfillment of that vision and with whose aid he will
hepefully find relatively little cleavage between theoretical and
practical truth. To this extent is £13 figthig optimistic. It is
pessimistic in that it assumes that commitment is arrived at through
the agony of choice, rather than, as in Adam's case, sparing one such an

agony.

30

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31

"Which things are_§n allegory” is the cryptic admonition of
Hobbes to Philip at the conclusion of The Bothie. He draws an analogy
between the story of the wives of Jacob and any marriage. It is not the
first time Rachael and Leah have been mentioned in the poem. Hobbes
himself has, in the third Canto, employed the same story in a somewhat
different way. But Rachel's beauty has been seen in the second Canto in
that of highland girls at work. Though the hexameters and the mock
heroics oflghg‘figthig are classical, the poem's images are biblical,
with scriptural couples such as Ruth ahd Boaz, or Jacob and Rachael,
providing literary prototypes for the ever present metaphor of choice
and commitment which the seeking and discovery of a mate become in this
poem.

Yet it is the story of Jacob, in particular, that provides the
scriptural analogue in The Bothie: Philip's quest is for his Rachael,
the bride of his heart. Hobbes, who combines the wisdom of Adam, the
tutor, with the cynicism of Lindsay, ”the Piper,” speculates that Philip
may'find that he has won Leah instead. ‘When Philip has at last made a
choice, founded upon hardrbought knowledge as well as desire, and has
avoided Jacob's fate, Hobbes still reminds him that even the person who
contracts the most perfect marriage finds that he has his Leah as well
as his Rachael. Leah, the element of mundane imperfection which taints
the ideal, must be accepted as Adam accepts Eve. Jacob contracted for
one wife, but got two. He also'pgig for two. The Leahs in life must
not only be accepted as part of the package, but paid for too, as part
of life's cost.

But is Philip a Jacob? Clough was obviously interested in the

story of Jacob, who, after working seven years to pay the bride-price

15:1

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n4

32

of his beautiful cousin Rachael, is tricked by his wily uncle, Laban,
into marrying her unattractive older sister and, though he is allowed
to marry Rachael also, must labor an additional seven years for her.1
But Clough's two poems, Jacob'gs; Wives, and £992, are of only moderate
help here. In the former poem, a classic example of what Ivor Winters
called Laforguian irony, Rachael and Leah tell their stories in
alternating passages. There is no resolution of their conflicting
claims upon Jacob. Jacob, in the poem which bears his name, has
nothing to say about marriage. But he does decry the loss of that
”antique pure simplicity" which existed prior to his generation in this
age of conflict. He concludes by saying

. . . I have striven all my days

To do my duty to my house and hearth,

And to the purpose of my father's race,
Yet is my heart therewith not satisfied.

(95-98)
Taken together, the two poems do tell us this much: Jacob lives in a
world'of conflicting social, political, and familial claims, and dies
perplexed by his inability to reconcile them. An age of easy faith, the
age of Abraham and Isaac (and of Adam!) is over. Jacob is, in fact, a
nineteenth century man .

Philip Hewson, then, who seems to arrive at the end of 2113 M
with at least the hope of a practical solution of Jacob's problems,
appears not to be a Jacob. At any rate, he is a Jacob only to the
extent that 5;; _m_ep_ are: he lives in a world of difficult choices,

involving commitments which are never wholly satisfactory.

1 Genesis 29.

33

As previously noted, Philip's problem, seen in the broadest
terms, is that of finding a comprehensive view of life in which his
social philosOphy, his patterns of practical conduct, and the tone of
his most intimate personal relationships find mutual enhancement and
reinforcement. He succeeds through intelligence and good will (both
of these evidenced by himself and others) and no small measure of good
luck. He suffers, and profits, from his several mistakes. If he
ends happily and thoroughly ”connnitted," it is because the critical
part of his quest was aimed at finding and in fact creating his identity.
Adam (of Adam 933;; Egg) recognizes the necessity of being one's self,
and he would have agreed with Philip that ”Any way beautiful only to be
the thing one is meant for.” But Philip has yet to determine exactly
what he is meant for. Adam eschews philosophical speculation because it
might frighten the wife to whom he is committed; Philip must choose a
wife in accordance with the dictates of his philosOphy, but must also be
committed to a wife in order for that philosophy to be fully meaningful.
It isthe timing, which permits all the pieces of Philip's puzzle to fall
into place at once, which constitutes the element of good fortune.

Philip emerges rather gradually in the opening sections of the
poem. He is not even ”on stage” as the reader is introduced to other
members of the Oxford reading party while they dress to attend a highland
festivity, rich in tradition and bristling with class distinctions.
Lindsay fears that his friend, ”Philip Hewson a poet, / Hewson a radical
hot” will embarrass the assemblage with some of "his eternal political
humbug." For Philip hates lords and ladies and opposes violently ”Femial
tenures, mercantile lords, competition and bishops, / Liveries, armorial

bearings, amongst other matters the Game-laws.” (I, 127-128) And, indeed,

3).;
if little offense is taken when Hewson ends his speech with a sarcastic
innuendo about game preservation, it is only because hardly anyone has
understood him. It is only in the second Canto that "Hewson, the
Chartist" begins to materialize as that member of his group about whom
we are to be particularly concerned. By that time, as we shall later
see, other stones have been laid in the foundation of this beautifully
structured work, for, almost without Philip's notice, two themes have
been introduced that ultimately will mean more in his moral and
intellectual development than does the rather doctrinaire egalitarianism
which he expresses in the opening pages of the poem.

Philip prefers water to tea or coffee for breakfast. This may
or may not brand him an eccentric liberal after the fashion of Francis
Newman. But it suggests that possibly both his politics and his diet
are faddish. Certainly he spends a great deal of time engaging in what

” and however much a

later generations called ”parlor socialism,
twentieth century liberal may sympathize with his views they are, to

begin with, largely untried. An orphan with a modest income, he has
little invested in "the establishment." So it is not surprising that,

as one of the most thoughtful and idealistic members of his group, he

has been excited and inspired.by new social views. But the real depth

of his commitment is in considerable doubt, and that depth,

significantly, is gauged by the particular nature of his relationship

with the Opposite sex. For we witness two abortive romances. The first
romance is with Katie, to whom he is attracted, it almost appears,

because he has decided to fall in love, on principle, with a working-class
‘woman. And the second attraction is his brief infatuation with Lady Maria,

an obvious reaction from the first. In justifying inequitable class

35
distinctions, he employs conspicuously faulty logic. The Opinions do
not, in any case, survive his removal from Lady M's presence.

Philip's Chartism is originally superficial and, as attested by
his brief conversion to aristocratic modes of thought during his stay
at Balloch, wavering. But the poem possesses an undercurrent of
genuine equalitarianism which is eventually to converge with the flow
of Philip's own thought. This undercurrent is manifested in conduct
rather than theory and, even though Philip is able to appreciate the
beauty and dignity of a highland lass digging potatoes, he will not
fully understand it until near the end of the poem. If Philip is in
love with the democratic ideal, he is also in love with love. And
here, too, there runs through the poem (on a course straighter than
Philip's, with its vagaries, but convergent with it) a series of
almost prephetic anticipations of the mature love which he will come
to feel for Elspie Mackaye when he reaches the Bothie of Tober na
vuolich. These undercurrents do not so much determine Philip's final
commitment as they simply reveal to the reader what, if the commitment
is to be made at all, it must be.

In_§m23;§‘gg Vo a e, dramatic irony makes one aware of how
essential a commitment, both to the Roman Republic and to Mary Trevellyn,
is to Claude's ”salvation." But he is capable of neither. In The Bothie
(where a similar commitment, involving life in both its public and
private aspects, is actually made), the non-dramatic character of the
poem necessitates another means whereby the poet's own sense of the terms
in which his hero's commitment will have to be made can be conveyed to
the reader. To an extent one can, as in the case of Claude, learn about
"the essential Philip" by reading between the lines of his speeches,

e.g., his rather hysterical eulogy on Lady Maria. But the reader must

Of

0‘!

36

also rely on a number of strategically placed events and observations,
whose function approaches the symbolic. It is through the cumulative
power of these that we develop a sense of forces outside Philip with
which he is in harmonyb-but not complete harmonyb-and which will pose
for him a choice that will involve no little suffering.

Of the two ”undercurrents" previously mentioned, that which is
complementary to Philip's egalitarianism.is the first to manifest
itself. At the festive gathering which begins the poem, where ”Highland

peasants gave courteous answer to flattering nobles,‘ one perceives,
while Philip is still nothing more than a name to us, a pattern that
pervades the entire poem; that in any actual juxtaposition of the
representatives of different classes, the members of the higher classes
may show themselves equal to, but never superior to those of the lower,
in intelligence, sensitivity, or simply natural dignity.

Such.is the case in the relationship between Philip and Katie
which Philip breaks off partly out of a rather condescending
sentimentality. Fascinated by the idgg of a romance that cuts across
class lines, he falls in love with a peasant girl. His pronouncements
about the dignity of work have led all of his friends to eXpect something
of the sort.

His speeches in Section II have left little doubt concerning his

013111101130

Oh, if our higheborn girls knew only the grace, the attraction,
Labour, and labour alone, can add to the beauty of women,

Truly the milliner's trade would quickly, I think, be at discount,
All the waste and loss in silk and satin be saved us,

Saved for purposes truly and widely productive . . . (II, 25-29)

If only his fellows could appreciate the pathos felt by'a man who sees a

37
lovely weman working, "toiling . . . for him, and the worl “ and is

moved not to remove but to share her burden, to lighten it by love.

0h, 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-helpmeet 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 knew it; we soon should see them abandon
Boudoir, toilette, carriage, drawing-room, and ball room,
Sandals of silk for clogs, for health lackadaisical fancies:
So, feel women, not dolls: so feel the sap of existence
Circulate up from the depths to the bud on the twig that is topmost:
Yes, we should see them delighted, delighted ourselves in the seeing,
Bending with blue cotton gown skirted-up over striped linsey woolsey,
Milking the kine in the field, like Rachel, watering cattle,
Rachel, when at the well the predestined beheld and kissed her,

(III 82‘98)

When he finds himself in a rather deep emotional involvement with
Katie, however, his reaction betrays the rather shaky foundation on which
his feelings were based. He falls back, certainly, upon a stock
conception of feminine fragility and, quite possibly, upon that of the
relationship between the young gentleman and the peasant maid, when he
feels guilty for having taken advantage of Katie's simplicity, Is there
not, in Philip's outcry that " . . . she is purity; I am the lost one.”
and in his altogether spurious sense of having corrupted her, a
condescension based on an implicit belief in an intellectual and moral
superiority'which obliges him to protect one who, not only by virtue of
sex but also of class, is less than himself?

Elspie later reveals to him that he has not only greatly
exaggerated Katie's frailty, but that he has, indeed, eXploited her,

though hardly in the way he imagines:

38

Katie is good and not silly} be comforted, Sir, about her;

Katie is good and not silly; tender, but not like many

Looking-up as in a cupboard the pleasure that any man gives them,

Keeping it out of sight, as a prize they need.be ashamed of;

That is the way, I think, Sir, in England more than in Scotland;

No, she lives and takes pleasure in all as in beautiful weather,

Sorry to lose it but just as we would be to lose fine weather,

And she is strong to return to herself and feel undeserted.

Oh, she is strong, and not silly; she thinks no further about you;

She has had kerchiefs before from gentle, I knew, as from simple.

Yes she is good and not silly; yet you were wrong, Mr. Philip,

'Wrong for yourself more than for her. (VII, 8-19)
Philip's choice of Katie was wrong because it involved the impulsive
application of a preconceived notion, and it had saddened Elspie (whom
he was then not even aware of) because she " . . . thought it all a
mistaking. / All a mere chance, you know, and accident,--not a prOper
choosing,--” (VII, Zh-ZS) and this he recognizes to be true. Philip has
taken advantage of Katie by falling in love with her, as it were, as a
testimonial of his beliefs; but his external behavior has always
remained that of a gentleman: if he has hurt anyone it has been himself
by flattering his ego (though it took the form of self-accusation) with
the thought that the simple rustic girl was more impressed with him than
she was.

The same motif, that of actual equality which speaks more loudly
than any'mere professions of equalitarian belief, runs through Philip's
early relations with Elspie. At the beginning of the eighth section of
the poem, Elspie ruminates on Philip's "indefinable graces." In a rare
and curious editorial intrusion, Clough asks not Elspie, but the hero
0! the poem, "Were they not hers too Philip?" The suggestion would seem
to be that Philip still shares, to a degree at least, Elspie's fear that
she is beneath him, and has not yet completely settled in his own mind

the question of the relative merits of "natural" and "acquired" virtues.

39
But the poet Obviously does not share these doubts. When, again, Elspie
is forced to remind Philip that she is not unfamiliar with books, it is
a gentle remonstrance for his excessive willingness to relegate her
better qualities, which he does recognize, to feminine intuition. That
she should even feel it necessary to appeal to her education can be
taken as an indication that Philip has communicated something of the
condescension which still lingers in his mind.

The note is sounded most clearly, perhaps, in the friendship
which develops between Adam, the tutor, and David Mackaye. The
affinities between these two wise and mature men are, if anything,
strengthened--certainly'not weakened-~by the differences in their
vocations and their eXperiences. This relationship is significant in
the design of the poem, for it is upon Adam's arrival at the Bothie that
Philip's love for Elspie takes on its final note of maturity, As the
two pairs strell in the evening, the Philip-Elspie relationship parallels
the AdamrDavid relationship in mutual respect. To Elspie, Adam tells
"Much of relations of rich and poor, and of true education." But it is
Philip, also, who has finally come to understand these things fully. The
reconciliation of refinement and simple goodness, as represented by
Adam and David respectively, is one of the problems that must be solved
to make possible Philip's personal commitment. David, considering Philip
as a potential son-in-law, sees the inner man

And the natural tune of his heart without misgiving
‘Went to the words oft that grand song of the Lowlands,
Rankisthegu_i_n_e_§s,but_t_}§m_an__§gm_a_n_£gg_a_1that.
TV‘I’II, 162-164)
But Philip, too, who has sought to learn this lesson, has mastered it as

never before.

40

The second undercurrent which runs through the poem is less
conceptual and more symbolic. It takes the form of a series of
references to the Bothie and of brief appearances by its inhabitants.
Five of the nine sections end with the name of, or someone's attempt to
name, the cottage which gives the poem its title. Before the reader
ever sees the Bothie, he has heard it recommended, made the subject of
jest, and speculated about. He has also met, without knowing it, two
members of the hackaye family. So pervasive is the sense of the Bothie's
"presence” that one is not as surprised as i§ Philip when it finally
appears as the point of convergence of structural lines in the poem and
heretofore unresolved tendencies in Philip's personal life. We do share
his sense of something almost inexorable drawing him:

Who would have guessed I should find my haven and end of my travel,
Here, by accident too, in the bothie we laughed about so?
‘Who would have guessed that here would be she whose glance at Rannoch
Turned me in that mysterious way: yes, angels conspiring,
Slowly drew me, conducted me, home, to herself; the needle
Which in the shaken compass flew hither and thither, at last, long
Quivering, poises to north. (VI, 49-53)
A few lines later, as Philip thinks about how he had twice danced.with
Elspie, before their portentous outdoor meeting at Rannoch, without even
clearly remembering her later, he observes that
I was as one that sleeps on the railway; one, who dreaming
Hears thro' his dream.the name of his home shouted out; hears and
hears not.-- (VI, 60-61)
but eventually, though he abandons this particular simile, Philip does
get off at the right station.

The ”thin man clad as a Saxon" who, at the conclusion of the first

section of the poem, volunteered directions to the Bothie, was none other

41

than its owner, David Mackaye. This we find out, of course, from
Elspie much later, at the beginning of section seven. Why was the
invitation made? Elspie was, from the first, attracted by the young
onnian but, like Katie, she is ”not silly." Nor is her father. But
someone in the Mackaye family does recognize in the radical student a
community of spirit with the Mackayes and what they'represent: it is he
and he alone to whom the Bothie is recommended by David. He is, in
effect, being invited to the place where he can achieve spiritual
fulfillment. He is being invited ”home,” but his homing instincts are
not sufficiently well develOped, for he finally gets to the Bothie
largely by'a lucky accident.

The cynical Hobbes, at the conclusion of the second section of
the poem, speaks more wisely than he knows when he says that Philip has
gone to ”Study the question of sex at the Bothie of What-did-he-call-it."
Philip is not at the Bothie, whose quaint name has captured the
imagination of all the members of the reading party, but he has
disappeared into the highlands to ponder questions of sex, politics,
love, duty, self, and society, and to make some abortive attempts to
combine action with belief, in a meaningful pattern of life. But it is,
indeed, at the Bothie that the study is to be completed.

And, to cite a final example, it is the look cast by Elspie at
Rannoch which drives him away from there and from his romance with Katie.
Elspie, only half recognized as someone he had seen before at the dinner
and even danced with more recently, appears as an epiphany to Philip.
Her look brings to focus amorphous feelings that Philip already has: his
quest for love and truth has gone astray. Despite her virtues, he could

never find happiness and fulfillment with Katie, whose rusticdharm has

42
fascinated him. He must leave her before he injures her. "Yes, there
he is still in his fancy,” Elspie's look seemed to say to Philip.
Letting drop from him at random as things not worth considering
All the benefits gathered and put in his hands by fortune,

Loosing a hold with others, contented and unambitious,
Trying down here to keep-up, know the value of better than he does.

*****

Doesn't yet see we have here just the things he is used to elsewhere;

People here too are people, and not as fairy-land creatures;

He is in a trance and possessed; I wonder how long to continue:

It is a shame and a pityb-and no good likely to follow.

(Iv, 136-139, 1u1-1tm)

He will discover that what he saw in Elspie's look was close to what she
felt at the time. For the time being, however, it is significant to
Philip as the occasion of a prophetic insight into himself. It starts
him on his quest once more. He has not yet "discovered” Elspie as a
person, nor are his Opinions yet very seasoned (his after-thoughts
concerning Katie are tainted with some of the same condescension which
he regrets having felt toward her in the first place, and he has still
to begin, and end, his infatuation with Lady Maria) but he is on his
way to the Bothie.

The converging motifs of equality and of the Bothie (as
representative of mature love) form, of course, the background for the
growth of Philip's own conscious attitudes, towards an enlightened
commitment. Whatever one may think of Philip, he is never really
guilty of intellectual arrOgance. "we must live and learn,” he tells
Adam, "we can't know all things at twenty." (V, 89) His vices are those
of youth and enthusiasm. He is ready for life: ready to choose both a
creed and a mate. Yet, in his brief relationship with Katie, for

example, something goes wrong. Convinced of the validity of his liberal

43

social ethic and physically attracted to the vivacious young woman, he
suddenly realizes that even the recOgnition of Katie's beauty‘ggd of
her worth as a human being do not provide a sufficient basis for the
only intimate relationship that is thinkable to him: marriage. He would
seem to have realized that his assisting Katie in building fires and
doing laundry is a parody of the doctrine of "needful work" which he
has expounded to his friends. He is playing at work and at love. The
relationship has not been unwholesome, but it has been casual, and
Philip is embarrassed at having thought it was something more.

His reaction has a violence which is characteristic of youth,
and it goes through two phases. First, beating a hasty retreat from
Rannoch, Philip tries to compensate for the lack of spiritual rapport in
his contacts with Katie by imagining a relationship of pure spirit.
”would I were dead,” he keeps saying, "that so I could go and uphold
her.” (IV, 43) But "spiritual” relationships are evasions of practical
prOblems rather than solutions to them, and Philip wants to live. He
next bobs up at the castle of Balloch with a whole new set of values.
If he brought, or risked bringing unhappiness, both to himself and to
Katie, perhaps it was a mistake to repudiate too hastily the world of
gentility with which he has been familiar. The need to venerate someone
is still present, and now it is the lovely'Lady'Maria who takes Katie's
place. Not only Philip, however, but everyone else must venerate Lady
Maria as well: He asks “ . . . shall hodmen in beer-shops complain of
a glory denied them, / Which could not ever be theirs more than now it
is theirs as spectators? /'Which could not be, in all earth, if it were

not for labour of hodmen?” (V, 60-62) The wealthy and the privileged,

if not prolific either in works or offspring, at least contribute

‘

pm

Quality to society

Often I find myself saying, old faith and doctrine abjuring,2

Into the crucible casting philOSOphies, facts, and convictions,

were it not well that the stem should be naked of leaf and of

tendril, ‘

Powerty stricken, the barest, the dismallest stick of the garden;

Flowerless, leafless, unlovely, for ninety and nine long summers,

So in the hundredth, at last, were bloom for one day at the summit,

So but that fleeting flower were lovely as Lady Maria. (V, 43-”9)
In a Carlylian parody he argues for an aristocracy who will inspire the
poor and in whom they can willingly live vicariously.

Philip, in writing of this to Adam, wonders if he is not, perhaps,
being ironic. He is. 'What is happening is fairly clear. His beliefs
exerted undue influence in his attachment to Katie, and now his
infatuation with Lady Maria has caused him to alter his beliefs. This
second stage is gotten through even more quickly than the first, and
Philip is soon to repudiate his briefly held aristocratic notions.
Though, it must be noted, he does not repudiate Lady Maria, whose
qualities, like Katie's, he is even better able to appreciate when he
can see them in a mature perspective.

Of primary'importance, of course, is the mutual love of Philip
and Elspie. Yet despite its many adumbrations, this love is not
introduced into the poem until the sixth of the nine sections, and
since section nine is, in fact, a sort of epilogue, relatively little
space is devoted to the actual winning of Elspie. But it is here that
the poem's rather remarkable economy is particularly in evidence. For
Philip's actions, throughout, can be viewed as the winning of Elspie and,
simultaneously, of himself. He must win his way through, past partial

truths, to the wholeness of insight which attends the conquest of his

2 That is, Philip's own liberal doctrines.

45

Rachael. If the way of true love seems not enormously difficult for
Philip after his arrival at the Bothie, it is because (in addition
to the fact that so few of the problems are external) he has already
dealt with several painful difficulties.

Philip has desired a wife whom he can respect because she
embodies all that his social ethics tell him is good. "Sick of the
very names of Your Lady Augustas and Floras / Am I," (II, l9-20) he
has told his friends. He wants a woman whose life is ennobled by
meaningful effort. But he also feels a need for the kind of veneration
excited by a lady of breeding and patrician bearing. He has felt
genuine respect for Katie, as well as a sentimental tenderness, and
has felt veneration for Lady Maria, along with a rather forced respect.
In giving up each relationship (presumablybdwe know more about the
former than the latter) he has suffered, because he seemed to be giving
up something of himself. What he has given up, however, has been in
either case a form of partial self-realization. Two types of lives,
each somewhat true to his inner self, have been rejected. Choice, in
this case the choice of a whole but yet unseen good rather than a partial
but proximate,one, has weighed heavily on Philip.

Though Philip's course, viewed in its totality, is fairly straight,
he nevertheless engages (in his relationships with Katie and Maria) in
a certain amount of dialectical "tacking" in order to reach his
destination, in which we have an anticipation of Claude, in Amgugg g2
vs a e, whose brilliantly analytic but rarely synthetic mind is so keenly
conscious of the polarities in life. Philip cannot remain with Katie
because, though he is susceptible to her charms and admires her

genuineness, she simply does not arouse‘ in him the quality, approaching

46
reverence, that is an essential ingredient in the Victorian formula for
marriage. ‘When, in his antithetical reaction, he finds that he can
begin to summon up this kind of feeling for Lady Maria, it is in a
situation of outmoded usages and artificiality to which he cannot blind
himself for long. The ultimate synthesis, which brings his course
straight again, is his recognition, perhaps not fully conscious, that
the woman he loves, and marries, must be one of "nature's aristocrats."

Philip has then, in a sense, chosen Elspie before ever arriving
at the Bothie. But like Childe Roland.who, after a lifetime of seeking
the Dark Tower is almost on top of it before he recognizes it, Philip
scarcely realizes the full significance of his love for Elspie, even as
he begins to declare it. For Philip, in another sense, still has his
most significant choice to make. ‘When, by luck rather than by design,
he arrives at the cottage of David Mackaye, he is still having prOblems
establishing his own identity. And the solution of these problems is
essential to his identifying himself with anyone else. As previously
noted, both forms of identification occur at the same time.

Philip could, at the time of his arrival at the Bothie, still fail
to achieve genuine commitment. He could, for example, simply be rejected
by Elspie, on whom so much.depends. And, indeed, he suffers agonizing
anxiety that, because he has previously made a fool of himself, she will
not accept him. The possibility also exists of his failing to bring his
personal feelings for her and his theoretical beliefs into the kind of
mutually supportive equilibrium that is necessary. In such a situation
he would find himself in a relationship that shared some of the bad
balance that characterized his two previous affections. And to the

extent that essential elements were out of balance, he would have found

47

his Rachael to be a Leah. The danger of something like this is seen
(along with the way in which the danger is averted) in the almost
metaphysical images of mutual connection which constitute some of the
most powerful and arresting passages in the poem. That many of these
images are put into the mouth of Elspie is especially significant.
Marriage, ideally conceived, involves a rapport so complete that "mine"
and ”thine” cease to be meaningful. Philip's commitment to Elspie and
the practical commitment of his talents to his own best impulses should
(again ideally) be two aspects of the same thing. It should not be
surprising, then, that the two lovers begin to think in strangely
coincident metaphors. It is not an oversight on Clough's part which
allows one of the lovers to anticipate, or recall, the images used by
the other. To the extent that their destinies are one, so are their
minds, and the images which properly describe their relationship are the
products, not of the isolated sensibilities of either, but of this
unity. And Elspie speaks with the voice of Philip's own best self when
she gives him the guidance he needs.

And Philip does need guidance. His compass needle may now be
turning to the north, but it must remain there in order for him to
chart a course through life. He still has, it has been observed, and in
fact will always have, some identity prdblems. He has argued with.Adam
about the maxim that each person should do the duties of his station in
life. To Philip, such a view of the various roles performed by mankind
seems like an invention of the privileged classes--justifying their
remaining complacently where they are. And, even after he has won Elspie
and received the consent of David to their marriage, he still will be

grappling with the problem of roles. Though he expounds to Adam.his new

48

doctrine of work in accordance with one's talents, whatever one's
station in life may be, he is nevertheless aware that these talents
carry'with them no specific indication as to exactly'how and where they
are to be employed. Adam would say that the indication is supplied by
Providence, but Philip disagrees. "Though I mistrust the Field-Marshall,
I bow to the duty of order / Yet is my feeling rather to ask, where is
the battle? (XI, 56-57) Philip is willing to be himself, but is not
absolutely certain who he is. His dogmatic Chartism has been subsumed
by a broader but less specific view of social responsibility. But one
level of difficulty is eliminated: he will at least not have to solve
his problems alone.

In opening himself to Elspie, Philip accepts her problems. She,
likewise, assumes his. When she tells him simply, "We will work
together," it is a testimony of both that they will belong to the ranks
of the usefully productive. What they will do and.where they will do it
has become a mutual problem: a function of their commitment to each
other and to a way of life that is the basis for their fundamental
accord.

Reference has been made to the power of the imagery in the
concluding portions of the poem. There are three major images or image
complexes which afford complementary metaphors of the marital
relationship between Philip and Elspie. Each accommodates itself to, and
illuminates, as will be seen, the "super metaphor" of marriage as a
commitment. The least celebrated of these images would seem to take
priority, because, though it is completed in the eighth section, it has
come into the poem somewhat earlier. It is the rather curious image of

a tree or plant that appears in connection with every one of Philip's

49

amours. It first is encountered when Philip, brooding over the largely
imagined wrong he has done to Katie, has a fragmentary insight into the
strength and prudence which Elspie is later to assure him that Katie
really does possess. He sees her, however, as infused with his 953
strength so that " . . . vigor of joy shall sustain her, / Fill the
brief winter o'er-past, her own true sap in the springtime, / Rise and
the tree I have bared be verdurous e'en as aforetime." (IV, 69-71) But
later on, still pondering the matter, he sees himself as having led
Katie so near to the brink of imprOpriety that she will now (the modern
eXpression is consonant with the spirit of Philip's metaphor) be a
"push over.” "Oh who saws through the trunk, though he leave the tree
up in the forest, / When the wind casts it down;--is _h;_i_s not the hand
that smote it?" (IV, 172-173)

In these passages, the common element is a sense of injury to
the living plant: it has been denuded of foliage (considering the
nature of Philip's unnecessary guilt feelings, one thinks of the word
"defloration") and its molester hgpgg that its verdure will return; or,
the plant is severed from its root and faces inevitable, though not
necessarily immediate destruction. Philip's short-lived passion for
Katie is predatory neither in fact nor in its intent, but in its
potential. Though he has willed the good, he lacks the vital commitment
which will make for good, and this is evidenced in the metaphors of
defoliation andgbstruction of the tree.

When the metaphor is used for the last time, it is not by Philip
but by Elspie. This is, again, indicative of the movement towards unity
between them which is essential to full commitment. She has feared, she

says

50

. . . that the one big tree might spread its roots and branches,

All the lesser about it must even be felled and perish.

Ho, I feel much more as if I, as well as you, were,

Somewhere, a leaf on the one great tree, that, up from old time

Growing, contains in itself the whole of the virtue and life of

Bygone days, drawing now to itself all kindreds and nations,

And.must have for itself the whole world for its branches.

No, I belong to the tree, I shall not decay in the shadow;

Yes, and I feel the life-juices of all the world and the ages

Coming to me as to you, more slowly no doubt and poorer;

You are more near, but then you.will help to convey them to me.

(VIII. 87-97)

Philip is invited to unite with Elspie as "members" of‘gg organic 32212
which is nothing less than the human enterprise, for the betterment of
which, through their mutual commitment, they will work.

Another metaphor, the most spectacular, is that of the uncompleted
bridge over the burn. It is virtually standard in twentieth century
Clough criticism.to regard the image as highly Freudian, nor would
anything be gained by trying to eXplain away what certainly appear to be
blatantly sexual overtones. But it should be observed that the Freudian
implications of the passage are much.mere noticeable when it is read out
of context than when it is examined in the light of the previously quoted
lines, which follow it. Elspie imagines herself as one half of an arch,
reaching out toward her counterpart which likewise extends itself toward

her 0

Sometimes I dream of a great invisible hand coming down, and

Dropping the great keyhstone in the middle: there in my dreaming

51

There I feel the great keybstone coming in, and through it

Feel the other part--all the other stones of the archway,

Joined into mine with a strange happy sense of completeness . . . .

(VII, 68-72)
To focus one's attention on the keystone is to miss most of the
significance of the passage. It is an image of union, and not sexual
union merely. Philip and Elspie will become part of the bridge of life
as well as part of the tree of life. That the union has its physical
dimension is undeniable, but the bridge metaphor should not be regarded
as more erotic than the tree metaphor. "Oh, I see it," Philip exclaims,
as he hears Elspie's words, "See the great keybstone coming down from
the heaven of heavens." It is Philip's "moment of truth": in their
vision of a life shared with each other and the world, he finds the
commitment he seeks. But Elspie later warns that the keystone cannot
be forced into place without injury to the archway. Her fear that they
will "Damage all our own work that we wrought, our painful upbuilding,"
is obviously not exclusively sexual in its meaning. A false move on the
part of either could jeOpardize, at this point, the quuisite y wrought
fabric of their relationship. Philip, who has rushed too eagerly into
relationships before, can understand.
The third metaphor employs an idea which seems to have had a

firm hold on Clough's imagination. In his most popular poem, "Say
not the struggle naught availeth," there is a vivid contrast between the
impressive inundation of a tidal estuary by'a flood-tide and the way in
which the waves of the same tide inch their way up a steep beach or
escarpment. The same image of the power of the sea, as it moves inland

through a lowblying channel, is used in this metaphor. Elspie, still

52
fearful of Philip's "strength," envisions this time a burnie (herself)
flooded by the waters of the sea which retreat, leaving rubbish and
contamination. But at Philip's entreaties she reconsiders. The sea is
the burnie's goal, after all, and its destiny is to answer the call of
the sea, with whose waters it is united. At the same time, the sea ia
dependent upon such tributary streams for its existence. If the sea
represented one man, an invader of her private integrity, Elspie might
well be fearful. But Philip is not, himself, the sea. They are being
drawn, together in their hard-bought mutual commitment, into the sea of
life.

That there is, in the process of image-maidng, a virtual fusion
of the identities of Philip and Elspie is shown by a letter which Philip
writes to Adam in Section II. Here Elspie's sea-image is employed by
him in such a way as to incorporate both their lives and a sense of
social commitment as well. Armstrong has called the passage " . . . one

of the finest sustained pieces Clough ever wrote."3

As at return of tide the total weight of ocean,

Drawn by moon and sun from Labrador and Greenland,

Sets-in amain, in the Open space betwixt Mull and Scarba,
Heaving, swelling, spreading, the might of the mighty Atlantic:
There into cranny and slit of the rocky, cavernous bottom
Settles down, and dimples huge the smooth sea- surface

Eddies, coils, and whirls; by dangerous Corryvreckanx

So in my soul of souls through its cells and secret recesses,

3 Isobel Armstrong, Arthur Hygh Cloggh, (London, 1952), p. 31+.

53

Comes back, swelling and spreading, the old democratic fervour.
But as the light of day enters some papulous city,
Shaming away, ere it come, by the chilly day-streak signal,
High and low, the misusers of night, shaming out the gas lamps--
All the great empty streets are flooded with broadening clearness,
Which, withal, by inscrutable simultaneous access
Permeates far and pierces to the very cellars lying in
Narrowhigh back-lane, and court, and alley of alleys . . .
--Such-- in me, and to me, and on me the love of Elspie!
(Ix, 73-88, 108)
It is significant that Philip and Elspie, in the concluding section of
the poem, decide to establish a home in New Zealand. The decision
suggests a similar one actually made by such sensitive and dedicated
spirits as Alfred Dommet (Browning's "Waring") and Clough's life-long
friend, Thomas Arnold. Pioneering in an antipodal world is appropriate
for a couple dedicated to the vision of a new life. V
The _Bothie, then, tells the story} of a man who, after a series
.of difficult choices, finds in marriage a commitment so complete and
so perfect that it subsumes all other commitments, moral and intellectual.
The Clough who could turn his back on Oxford and look for more vital work
could imagine such a commitment. But though commitment continues to be
a theme in the remaining long poems, and though marriage remains the
vehicle of the metaphor, the optimistic note will not be heard again.

Clough was never to write another Bothie.

CHAPTER III

Superficially, Clough's second major poem, Anours _dg Voygge
is to be contrasted with the Bothie in almost every way. Its setting
is urban and cosm0politan rather than rural and British, or, if one
prefers, Celtic. Its tone is realistic rather than idealistic, and,
indeed, it is Clough's sardonic realism which gives the poem its
tragi-comic character: lacking the happy ending of the Bothie while
incorporating much cynical humor of the sort associated mainly with
Hobbes in the earlier poem, the work is simply too candid to end on a
note of high comedy or high tragedy.1 It is a poem of defeat rather
than victory, of loss rather than gain. Yet the hero's finally
illuminating experience includes too much of the ludicrous to be
genuine tragedy.
The story, told in epistolary form, is rather shiple. Most of

the letters are from Claude, a young Englishman vacationing in Italy,
to his friend Eustace. The year is 18149 and Rome, under the leadership

1 Houghton has summed up beautifully what it is in the poem which,
though tragic, does not exactly constitute tragedy, when he says that

. . . something of supreme importance to Claude, and to Mary too, was
denied them by a combination of circumstances. Claude' s profound doubt,
even of love, his fear of the factitious, his feeling of shame about sex,
the long chain of circumstances that prevented him from finding Mary,
and his dedication to the intellectual life, all unite to thwart the full
growth of his nature, and therefore of hers. In the outcome we feel a
deep sense of waste. No lives that might have been enriched are left
poorer and narrower. It must often be so, however rarely recorded in

art." Walter Houghton, The Poetry p_f Cloggh: An Essay_ in Revaluation,
(New Haven, 1963), p. 154.

55

of Mazzini, has just declared itself a republic, independent of Papal
authority. Claude is sympathetic to the Roman cause, but does little
in its behalf. He has also been introduced to the Trevellyn family, to
one of whose daughters, Mary, he is eventually attracted. Distrustful
of any emotion which might compromise his integrity, Claude is a very
unsuccessful lover. Only after the unsettled political conditions have
forced the Trevellyns to leave Rome for the north does he realize the
depth of his feelings for Mary. But it is too late, and after a frantic
search for her, Claude resigns himself to his loss.

Other than Clough's flexible hexameters, the _A_m_c_>__1:_g_r_s_ and the Bothie

 

seem to have little in common except that each is concerned with a young
Oxonian involved in a quest for truth, and with Clough' s touchstone of
self-d1 scovery through commitment: marriage. Yet the basic point of
similituie serves as foundation for a series of contrasts which reveal
the increasingly realistic way in which Clough presents the process of
commitment: as achieved with less frequency, more difficulty, and at a
higher price than in the .1_3_9_th_i_e_.

Claude, the rather passive hero of the ;A__n_1_9_u_r_s_ Q m, has
affinities which have been observed with Hamlet and with J. Alfred
Prufrock. 2 He has the quality of non-involvement readily miderstandable
to readers in the latter half of the twentieth century: one tends to
regard him as an anti-hero. Having the temperament which humoral
psychology labeled melancholic, Claude belongs to a select body of
literary creations which include such varied figures as Hamlet and
Samw Rice in Nigel Balchin's The _S_;m_;_al_,_l_ 29g; £92m: a group of men

2 Michael Timko, Innocent Victorian: The Satiric Pgetry _gf Arthur Hggh
Clough (University, Alabama, 1932;), p. 1Z8

56

whose fatal flaw is their bewilderingly keen awareness of so infinite
a range pf possible courses, each envisioned with a full complement of
potential consequences, that impulsive action becomes a psychological,
if not a practical, impossibility. This is not to say, of course, that
the message which attaches itself to Claude is anti-intellectual in its

import. The Amours, begun soon after the completion of the Bothie,

 

envisions the ideal relationship between heart and head as one of
balance and mutual support, as does the earlier poem. But a new idea
is introduced, or, at any rate, an idea for which we must turn back to
Adam and Eve.

Adam recognized that, in his own case at least, the life of the
mind was irreconcilable with practical commitments. Perhaps the "fall"
is actually the discovery that speculative thought, which, alone, allows
human existence to transcend its physical aspects, is not an unalloyed
blessing because it creates, or at least reveals, the dichotomy between
feelings and ideas. The great good fortune of Philip Hewson in the
‘Egthig, in managing to make the claims of the mind and heart
complementary to each other, is not merely a rarity, it is the
manifestation of an ideal. It is Clough's testimony to an order of
truth which, if it can infrequently be realized, can at least be
approached. Yet even in the ggthig lurks the portly figure of Hobbes
with his warnings about Leah. In marriage, and in all commitments, one
almost inevitably discovers that his Rachel is tainted with imperfection.
we experience, at best, in all our commitments, the “good minute" of
Browning's "Two in the Campagna": a transcendent moment during which
the real and the ideal become identical, the memory or anticipation of

which sustains us during the long stretches of mundane imperfection

57
which intervene.

Adam admonishes Cain to cherish the product of the interaction
between the world and the soul, but is wary of an attempt, himself, to
"understan " when understanding can be bought only by violating the
commitments of the heart. For an ana10gue we might turn again to
Browning, whose Grammarian has, if one assumes that there is a
substantial element of dramatic irony in the poem, postponed the living
of life until he knows all about it, and has therefore never lived.
Commitments must be made, it would seem, somewhat blindly, and in the
face of imperfections which are only occasionally transcended. In being
subject to this condition, Adam is less atypical than Philip, who is
able to make his concepts and his emotions mutually supportive so that,
in yielding to the promptings of the heart, he is also making an
enlightened choice. It would seem that the " good minute" will be the
rule rather than the exception, in Philip's life with Elspie.

But suppose that an "Imcomdtted" Victorian were to see, in the
marital commitment, not the intellectual fulfillment that accompanies
Philip' 3 emotional fulfillment, but rather a thwarting of the intellect,
like that experienced by Adam. Though not the typical Victorian hero
(let alone any sort of Everyman) Philip does hold to a very characteristic
Victorian view of woman as man's helpmate, the source of his strength,
and the custodian of his, and his society's highest virtue. This is why
it is so important to Philip that the woman he chooses both understands
and exemplifies his social views. But our hypothetical "uncommitted
man," however, though he may share Philip's UtOpian dreams, has less
faith in the ability of any society to realize them. And he, being (also)

Victorian in his concept of womanhood, will see woman as the epitome of a

58
bourgeois society of which he is a rather cynical member. Thus, not
finding in love the confirmation of his nascent republican sentiments
as does Philip, but seeing it as a concession to a social order which
is generally inindcal to his intellect, he hesitates to involve himself,
and, in the process, misses whatever power love might have to vivify his
intellectual life.

Such a man is Claude. If Philip's story is a rather improbable
(albeit delightful) triumph of the ideal, Claude's story is the
eminently credible account of love dying on the vine because the hero
does not find, or finds only too late, the basis for a synthesis like
Philip's, which is what he really demands if he is to experience deep
commitment, but which, with an Adamite sense of the near irreconcil-
ability of mundane commitment with pure truth, he tends to despair of.
In short, Claude seems too busy observing life to live it, too fearful
of getting a Leah to claim successfully his Rachel, too abundantly
aware of the manifold hazards to any movement, to be able to take
effective and resolute action.

The stultifying effect of an intellect which cannot act on the
basis of a mere fifty-one percent of the evidence, but demands something
approaching absolute assurance, was something Clough had occasion,
undoubtedly, to observe in his own person. But what he had seen as a
tendency in himself he had seen as a destructive force in such a man as
Sidney Walker who, Clough wrote, " . . . passed fiftyh-one years, mostly
in isolation and poverty, shivering upon the brink, trembling, and
hesitating upon the threshold of life. Fearful to affirm any thing,
lest it haply might be false, to do any thing, because so probably it
might be a sin; to speak, lest he should lie; almost, we might say, to

59

feel, lest it should be a deception,--so he sat, crouching and cowering,
in the dismal London backstreet lodging, over the embers of a wasting
and dying fire, the true image of his own vitality. "3 This is not a
picture of the Claude we see; it is a picture of what he might become.

Claude is, of course, like Adam in feeling the tension between
thought and mundane obligation, but unlike him in that Claude has
withheld himself from practical involvements which would be a liability
in a quest for abstract truth. Adam, being already committed, can only
contemplate, imaginatively, the making of such a quest. But they do
share a sense of the isolation of the man who aspires to a life of
uncommitted objectivity. And, indeed, the Adam image is effectively
invoked several times in the Amggrg.

After castigating himself for his snobbish attitude toward the
middle class Travellyns, in Canto I, Claude sees himself in the role of
Adam.

Here in the Garden I walk, can freely concede to the Maker

That the works of his hand are all very good: his creatures,

Beast of the field and fowl, he brings them before me: I
name them

That which I name the, they are,--the bird, the beast, and
the cattle.

But for Adam,--a1as, poor critical coxcomb Adam:
But for Adam there is not found a help-meet for him. (I, 146-151)

This is an Adam without Eve, the archetypal taxonomist enjoying the
process of putting phenomena into their proper categories. But with the
brutally self-critical quality which characterizes the Claudes of this
world, he also sees himself as ridiculous. He pursues the task which
would have absorbed the intellect of a wifeless Adam, but to what

3 Buckner B. Trawick, Selected Prose Works 2f Arthur Hugh Clough
(University, Alabama, 1964), p. 168.

60

purpose? Claude is indeed free, as Clough's Adam was not, to engage
in limitless speculation. But he is aware that the Edenic existence
smacks strongly of solipsism, exclaiming " . . . how we walk a livelong
day, Great Heaven, and watch our shadows: / What our shadows seem,
forsooth, we will owselves be.“ (I, 83-85) .

The ambivalence of attitude which is so characteristic of
Claude is the key to his personality. It is an ambivalence with which
Philip Newson is not cursed. Philip does of course have two loves:
the girl of his dreams and the society of his dreams, but it is not
wholly correct to say that he feels a tension between these two loves.
It is better seen as a situation in which his two motivations advance,
along convergent courses, towards a mature view of life which will
incorporate both. When one starts to dominate the other, the latter
always shows signs of a falsity which is first perceived by the
reader, certainly, but eventually by Philip himself. When he is too
much dominated by theory, he falls in love with Katie not because of
37113, but because of 3%, she is. And reacting aginst this error, he is
germinely impressed by Lady Maria, but while under the influence of her
charms he briefly espouses a political theory which is completely at
variance with what he! has believed before and will believe later. With
much adjustment on his part, his two concerns merge: they are genuine
and mutually complementary. For Claude, however, there is a real tension.
His desire to preserve his intellectual integrity is his ruling passion.
Although he is reluctant to voice what appears to him a diametrically
opposed impulses to involve himself deeply in mundane concerns to which
he is emotionally drawn, he nevertheless reveals repeatedly that the

impulse exists and that he is not really content to live solely in the

61
realm of ideas. His periodic attempts to retrench himself in this
realm he recognizes as exactly what they are: retreats, and he is wont
to regard himself as a rogue and peasant slave because of his inability
to take effective action.

For Claude is not, at heart, a blandly noncommittal dillettante.
Nor can his pathetic story be properly assigned the simplistic label
that has been given to Hamlet's story: a "tragedy of intellect."
Claude's problem is not merely that he sees too much to assimilate it
all and to extract from it a fairly coherent system of values. It is
rather that, Hamlet-like, he is broadly perceptive of values which are
themselves in conflict. Both, indeed, the Elizabethan hero and the
Victorian anti-hero, are eager for commitment. But since such men are
agonizingly aware not only of alternative modes of action but also of
the full range of values implicit in either alternative, the
preservation of intellectual integrity, which heightens the ambivalence
of their feelings, is (paradoxically) necessary if they are ever to
achieve the one quality which will precipitate decisive action, and
that quality’is certitude.

Near the end of Canto V, having plumbed the depths of depression,
Claude recognizes a profound truth about himself: "Ah, the key of our
life, that passes all wards, Opens all locks, / Is not _I. gi_ll__, but I
M. I must,--I must,:-:and I do it." (V, 154.155) What Claude
needs, above all other things, is a sense of the imperative. But he
can be given a coercive impetus only by knowledge. That is, he must
effectively discredit all the vitiating alternatives to one compelling
course of action, and in the presence of an absolute assurance of the

essential "rightness" of his position he will not be hesitant in making

62

choices and assuming commitments. While such a sense of logical or
moral imperative is unlikely, it is not impossible, and indeed he
nearly achieves it. It is necessity, rather than caprice, inclination
or preference, which will activate Claude's will. This is the quality
which Claude shares with Hamlet and which makes the story of each, to
the extent that it .i_s a tragedy, a tragedy not of the intellect but of
the will.

Dependence upon necessity to whet an easily blunted purpose
becomes, for Hamlet, a heroic triumph wherein he surrenders his own
life at the culmination of that complex process by which he provides the
world with incontrovertible proof that Claudius is, categorically, a
murderer, because he is Hamlet's murderer. Then and only then is he
able to make what previously would have been a personal vendetta into
an act of retributive justice. The claims of the will are thus
satisfied, but since they have been reinforced by a hard-bought
certitude, the hero's integrity is satisfied also. Hamlet's tragedy
is that he will act only when he can do so on his own absolutistic terms,
and their cost is high. Claude faces a problem which is posed in much
the same fashion as Hanflet' I. He is confronted by possible commitments
(to Mary and to the Roman Republic) for and against each of which
plausible cases can be made. In such a situation, Claude can only
wait for the pressure of circumstances, or for logical necessity in the
form of some insight not previously achieved, to precipitate an act of
will. That the assurance comes too late for it to change Claude's life
very much, either for good or ill, but merely sends him running rather
pathetically arctmd the countryside, is the difference between tragedy

and tragiécomedy. He does, indeed, experience a measure of the

63

self-realization characteristic of the tragic hero, but returns
thereafter to a pattern of life which is as devoid of commitment as it
is of tragic dignity.

If Claude is " . . . not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be," he
is something more than J. Alfred Prufrock, to whom he has also been
compared. This is quite apprOpriate, because Clough stands between
.Shakespeare and Eliot and the concepts of the human enterprise held in
their respective centuries. Claude would like to squeeze the universe
into a ball and, indeed, makes the attempt, but he requires some
cohesive force outside his own will to hold the ball together, and as
he rolls it toward the overwhelming question it disintegrates. His
aborted commitment to many has at least a dash in it of Hamlet's tragic
heroism, but when he fails and subsides into a state of rather stoical
acceptance, he virtually accepts the Prufrockian answer that "That is
not it, at all," Yet Claude is made of sterner stuff than Prufrock. He
is not an effete courtier, but a man with an uncompromising passion for
truth. He is not, like Prufrock, fearful of looking ridiculous, but
kpggg that he and all men are ridiculous and tries, at least, to eschew
the half-truths most men settle for.

The foregoing paragraphs have outlined an interpretation of
Claude as he relates to the principal figures in the other Clough poems
discussed thus far and to the two other literary creations to which he
has been most often compared. It remains to demonstrate the
appropriateness of Clough's choice of such a figure as representative of
the problem which plagued both him and his age: the problem of making
and abiding by'a choice between (or among) alternatives whose claims

press with equal validity. And it must further be shown that marriage,

64
closely connected with politics in the Amgggg, can be seen as
metaphorically representative of political, personal, and religious
commitments in the poem.

Canto I largely defines the terms of Claude's problem. "The
first voice we hear" is that of the prologues and epilogues to the
cantos. It is a voice which, while falling short of omniscience, knows
Claude somewhat better than he usually knows himself. In the ten lines
preceding the first epistle in Canto I, we find a statement suggestive
of Emerson's famous "Traveling is the fool's paradise." This curious
editorial presence, itself quoting a "whispering voice," observes that
"'Tis but to prove limitation, and measure a cord, that we travel: /
Let who would 'scape and be free go to his chamber and think; / 'Tis but
to change idle fancies for memories willfully falser; / 'Tis but to go
and have been . . . " (I, 7-lO) At the outset, then, we find Claude
embarked, not altogether blindly, on a sort of fool's errand. ”Rome is
better than London," he is to observe, "because it is other than
London." (I, 27) Much.later, in Canto III, Claude will make the very
important distinction between "juxtaposition," about which he talks so
much, and affinity. Claude's difficulty, it will become clear, with
persons, with causes, and with places, is that he feels himself
"juxtaposed" with them, not symbolically, as Faulkner was wont to use
the term, but in the sense of mere proximity. Hungry for affinity,
Claude is nevertheless reluctant to cultivate it in situations where his
relationships seem merely fortuitous. Less than any of Clough's heroes
up to this point, is Claude willing to gain a belief by living it.

Another contrast between Claude and Philip can be instructive:

Philip is not in the Highlands because they are other than Oxford. He

65

is there to learn and can profit from travel because he need not
"go to his chamber" to think and is engaged continuously in the process
of seeking affinities. Claude, on the other hand, is frankly suspicious
of whatever he comes into contact with. As ridiculous as "critical
coxcomb Adam" may be, he is less ridiculous than he might become in
his own eyes if his will were to become subservient to mere sentiment
rather than to the inescapable, if seldom heard, voice of necessity. For
to act on impulse is to ignore the inevitable objections which the
critical judgment might raise against the position one has espoused,
and thus awaken, as its own nemesis, the outraged intellect. For Claude,
then, changes of scene seem to be little more than occasions for new
modes of skepticism. And probably of a tougher skepticism, because the
allure of the new is greater than that of the old. The concluding lines
of the epilogue to Canto I reveal the direct ratio which seems to exist
between Claude's attraction to a thing and his suspicion of it. Here is
his reaction to the grandeur of either Christian or pagan Rome, already
adroitly pUt down as "rubbish": "So through the city I wander,
unsatisfied ever, / Reverent so I accept, doubtful because I revere."
(I, 283-4) Travel is for Claude, then, not a resource for growth.but
rather a series of appeals to "factitious" emotion, to be resisted to
just that extent to which they do threaten to charm or edify.

Almost his only favorable comment about the eternal city (in
Canto I) is that he sees in its allegedly Christian art and architecture
"a positive, calm, Stoic-Epicurean acceptance." This remark is
interesting for at least two reasons. In the first place, it is an

excellent example of what Houghton simply, but aptly, refers to as

66

Claude's "cleverness."4 In seeing Catholic Rome as exemplifying not
pagan superstition but classical virtue, Claude is expressing an

opinion sufficiently "original," from the viewpoint of a Nineteenth
Century Broad Churchman, as to fall more into the realm of wit than of
conviction. The Observation may appear intellectually daring, but

like his off-hand dismissal of Luther as the perpetuator of theology

in the western world, it really leads nowhere, and is emotionally safe.
The comment is even more significant in that the "acceptance" which he
reads into the Roman treasures, which have endured so much history, is

a projection of his own willingness to "accept," rather than to risk
involvement. And it is to a phiIOSOphy of acceptance that Claude has
retreated again when he says, in the eighth epistle of Canto V "I will
go where I am led, and will not dictate to the chances." (V, 179) Unless
one, indeed, can believe that "it is better to have loved and lost" then
his whole pathetic adventure ends up, having gone full circle, and he
might well have simply gone to his chamber and thought rather than to
undertake a physical journey which he was somehow never perfectly able
to turn into a spiritual pilgrimage as well.5 But Claude's desire,
despite his fears, to root his intellectual honesty in a significant and
sustaining human relationship is a redemptive quality which makes his

ill-fated excursion meaningful.

4 Houghton, The Poetry.gf Clough, p. 120.

5 Clough's poem Peschiera, concerned also with the struggles of the
Roman republic, ends with these lines: "' 'Tis better to have fought
and lost, / Than never to have fought at all.'"

67

As we have observed, for two young men so similarly
"circumstanced" and with philosophical inclinations so nearly in
common, Claude and Philip abound in contrasts. Canto I is particularly
illuminating when read in the light Of these contrasts. Both men share

an aversion to artificiality in relationships with the Opposite sex.

Philip's distaste for "the giggling, and toying and coying' of young
ladies with whom one finds himself, "Dangling beside them and turning
the leaves on the dreary piano, / Offering unneeded arms, performing dull
farces Of escort," (II, 57-58) surely finds its counterpart in Claude's

categorization of his friend Vernon as . . . one of those natures
which have their perfect / Delight in the general tender domestic, /
So that he trifles with Hary's shawl, ties Susan's bonnet, / Dances with
all . . ." (I, 116-119) and in his reservations about Mrs. Trevellyn who
"somewhat affecteth the blue." Yet here the similarity ends. For
Philip's remark, just quoted, is part Of a harangue on the dignity of
labor as Opposed to the "Utter removal from work, mother earth and the
Objects Of living," (II, 61) while Claude is much.more class-conscious,
objecting to the Trevellyns mainly because they are "not wholly / Pure
Of the taint Of the shop" (I, 125-126) and to Mrs. Trevellyn's pseudo-
intellectuality'because it is expressed in a "slightly'mercantile accent."
Even here, however, the contrast is not exhausted. Philip,
desiring involvement in what he regards as vital, is precipitated into
a premature relationship (with.Katie) which he prudently terminates when
he realizes that it lacks the resources for permanent happiness for
either of the participants. He is stricken with guilt, after the fact,
when he realizes that he has fallen in love with the first genuine and

uncomplicated girl who came along. Claude, as we see him in the first

68

canto of the Amours, resists involvement, but at the same time is
emotionally drawn to the Trevellyn girls in spite of their offensive
bourgeois qualities. ‘Eig sense of guilt is simultaneous with the
awakening of his need for relatedness to other human beings. He
confides to Eustace that he enjoys the trivialities which his critical
intellect condemns.

Yet it is pleasant, I own it, to be in their company; pleasant,

'Whatever else it may be, to abide in the feminine presence.

Pleasant, but wrong, will you say? But this happy, serene

coexistence

Is to some poor soft souls, I fear, a necessity simple,

Meat and drink and life, and music, filling with sweetness,

Thrilling with melody sweet, with harmonies strange overwhelming,

All the long-silent strings of an awkward, meaningless fabric.

The "awkward, meaningless fabric" is the life of an Eveless

Adam. One can scarcely help being moved by the pathos of’Claude's urge
to live and love. Yet he finds himself on the brink of commitment and
immediately retreats. The remaining eleven lines of the epistle
constitute an ingenious "cop ou " wherein Claude sees himself in a
"peaceful avuncular function." This is, of course, the fear of sex which
Houghton has observed in Claude,6 but it is more. As kindly old
bachelor uncle Claude, he not only spares himself the embarrassment of
a carnal union with a woman, but enjoys, more significantly, an oblique
relationship with other peOple, affording just the right blend of
intimacy and detachment. The responsibilities of the role are vaguely
defined and its emotional commitments are insufficiently deep to be
disturbing. And still the guilt remains. A page more and Claude appears,
briefly, as his most snObbish self. "Is it contemptible," he asks
Eustace, ”the horrible pleasure of pleasing inferior peOple? / I am

6 Houghton, The Poetry 9; Clo h, p. 139.

69
ashamed my own self . . . " (I, 213-214). But he redeems himself for
his snobbery, or at least reveals the strange interplay of forces
within him, when he immediately tells Eustace that for the first time
in his life he is "living and moving with freedom."

The irony in all this, to return to the contrast with Philip,
is that Philip, certainly the more volitional of the two, first falls
in love "on principle," his emotional life influenced by his precepts.
Claude, however, who is apparently dominated by his intellect and who
finds refuge in "the great messy strengths of abstraction," finds
himself being drawn emotionally into a relationship which he does not
find intellectually acceptable. Neither relationship matures, though
Philip of course is able to advance beyond his, to a point where thoughts
and feelings are complementary.

The key to this paradox is to be found in the very substantial
difference in the conception of the two poems. It is a strength, and
not a weakness, of the §gthig that it presents a rather simplistic view
of life in general and of Nineteenth Century British society in
particular. The view, after all, is Philip's, and the poem itself is
unrealistic only to the extent that fortuitous events bring Philip and
Elspie together. And, of course, there is something of the ggug g;
machina in the antipodal world, free from class distinctions, to which
the pair>can escape. But.New Zealand is not wholly a figment of the
poet's imagination either. The hopeful ending, in a poem whose pattern
of relationship between action and meaning is as carefully worked out
as the Egthig, does not tax our credence and Clough certainly will not

abuse it through frequent use! It is easy to over-stress the

"development" of Clough's thought from one poem to the other. They are,

70
in a sense, complementary: the one depicting a commitment made under
something like laboratory conditions of innocence, single-mindedness,
good faith and (it should not be forgotten) igood luck, the other showing
an attempt at deep commitment under the conditions which CloUgh knew
only too well plagued sensitive and perceptive men in every age and
were particularly manifest in his own.

The paradox is resolved, then, when we realize that in Philip's
somewhat more structured world, where things tend to happen as they
should, the intellect can lead toward emotional fulfillment, while in
Claude's world (more complex and less rational) the intellect can lead
one into emotional sterility and the emotions into intellectual decay.

Canto I brings Claude into juxtaposition with women: he is
juxtaposed with politics in Canto II. Though avowedly apolitical he
could, he says, shed a tear for the Roman Republic. _I_J__ul_c;§ __e_t_ decorum
_e_s_t_ and all that, Claude says, but the Romans may not, themselves,
fight for their new-fmmd freedom, and besides it can be argued that he
owes it to the world to preserve his unique personality: he is no Byron
and will _r_1_9_t take arms for azcause in which he ggeg believe. Yet he
dreams of a sword at his side and a battle horse underneath him. And
here is the first movement in the dialectical pattern of this canto, and,
indeed, of the rest of the poem, a pattern which polarizes Claude into
intellect and emotion, a miniature Dipsyghus that begins to eXplore
the technique of interior dialogue which Clough will use so effectively
in the later poem.

In Epistle IV, Claude poses for himself one of the most complex
and amusing questions in the entire poem: "Am I prepared to lay down

11w life for the British female?" Superficially, it brings the question

71
of war nearer home. If Claude will not fight for the Romans, will he
fight for the members of the English colony in Rome? But the question
also involves Claude's ability to commit himself to the comfort and
safety of womanhood, as in marriage. For Claude, this is that
commitment to the unexamined life, to trivia, and to the factitious
which is the price of connubial bliss. What follows reveals a strange
pattern in Claude's thought: "Ah, for a child in the street I could
strike: for a full-blown ladyb- / Somehow, Eustace, alas: I have not
felt the vocation." (II, 76) There is some indication that Claude
believes concern for the immature is unlikely to be taken at more than
face value, that it is simple humanity rather than commitment. In
the avuncular role he imagined for himself in Canto 1, he saw himself
as befriending, but not begetting, children. Now he sees himself less
compromised, less guilty of mock heroics, as a protector of infantile
helplessness than of feminine dignity; And for what did he shed a tear?
The "poor little Roman Republic," an embryonic nation. Yet his
attitudes towards the British Empire would undoubtedly'have been
different: it is hard to imagine Claude as a chauvinist.
The epistle ends with a very clear statement of Claude's

dilemma: his demand for certitude.

Am.I not free to attend for the ripe and indubious instinct?

Am.I forbidden to wait for the clear and lawful perception?

Is it the calling of man to surrender his knowledge and insight

For the mere venture of what may, perhaps, be the virtuous action?

Must we, walking on earth, discerning a little, and hoping

Some plain visible task shall yet for our hands be assigned us,--

must we abandon the future for fear of omitting the present,

Quit our own fireside hopes at the alien call, of a neighbour,

To the mere possible shadow of Diety offer the victim?

And is this, my friend, but a weak and ignoble refining,

Wholly unworthy the head or the heart of Your Own Correspondent?
(II. 86-96)

72
The passage is of interest and not only because it so exPlicitly states
Claude's fear of surrendering his objectivity for a merely possible
good but because he is so objective that he suspects some subjective
flaw in his own demand for an unquestionably clear sense of truth.
Perhaps he is not god-like at all, but merely a coward. How
characteristic of Claude it is that he continues not only to raise
questions, but to question himself in the act of questioning: His will
can be stirred only by a "plain visible task."

The fifth epistle shows Claude as the world's worst war
correspondent. All that he really sees of the first French assault is
smoke: black from a burning building, probably, and white, from the
firing of artillery pieces, but he is not quite sure whose. He also
sees what may have been the flash of a bayonet on a distant slope. His
account of the fighting leaves much to be desired journalistically and
historically, because it is a brilliant piece of impressionistic
writing: he has seen exactly what an untrained and uncommitted observer
ggyld see. Claude, an eyewitness, is as surprised as anyone else when,
in his next letter to Eustace, he is able to report a Roman victory. He
is pleased, but it is a rather clandestine sort of pleasure which he
feels, closely akin to his private bellicose dreams. Claude remains
the bystander.

This passive role is vividly shown in the seventh epistle, in
which Claude relates to Eustace an incident which, significantly, he has
not shared with the Trevellyn daughters: he has seen death close at
hand. "Whom should I tell it to, else?--these girls?--the Heavens forbid
it:--" (II, 201) Is it mere deference to feminine squeamishness or his

own inability (akin to Adam's) to reconcile his awareness of the

73

eternal truths, such as Death, with his still condescending sense of
female sensibilities? At any rate he has been shaken. The reality of
war has come closer, but he is, if anything, less involved than before.
His is still a bystander's view. "So, I have seen a man killed! An
experience that among others3" (II, 164) (The understatement can be
forgiven, for it is undoubtedly deliberate irony). But even the
irony gives way before a characteristically Claudian qualification. He
reports, more accurately tha " . . . a man was killed, I am told, and I
saw something." (II, 168) There are times when, if his diffidence were
not so beautifully expressed, one might wish for Claude to be really
gygg of something. (Some fiftybfive lines are spent in telling what Egg
have happened.) But the wish, of course, is also Claude's. The person
who mg: have been killed.mgy'have been a priest trying to join the
besieging pro-Papal forces. Claude, dressed in black, does not tarry.
If he is not willing to fight for the Republic, he is certainly
unwilling to die by mistake at the hands of its partisans. ‘What Claude
actually'saw is reduced to one potent image: " . . . I saw through the
legs of the people the legs of a body." (II, 199) Again, Clough's
impressionism is perfect and admirably suited to Claude's peculiar
perceptions. The picture is an arresting one: a set of legs
perpendicular to all the others. But with what the eye sees the report
stops. One imagines Claude confounding his psychoanalyst by describing
the actual geometrical configurations of the blots in a Rorschach test.
Claude will not jump at conclusions, however strongly he may feel about
some possible reading of the data.

As Houghton notes, Claude does appear on "the terrible thirtieth

of April," if not for the protection of the British female, as a

7L»

"cause,' at least because it is, as he puts it, "but common civility"
to serve those who expect his aid.7 But there is little in Claude's
letters to suggest that he has developed a deep attachment to any of
the Trevellyn girls. Epistle IX concludes with a eulogy on the Romans
(”a nice and natural people"), their hopeless cause, and Guiseppe
Mazzini--"this dreadful Mazzini," as Georgina Trevellyn has called him.
And suddenly in Epistle X, we find Claude answering the charge that he
is in love: Eustace must indeed be adept at reading between the lines:
though Claude has confessed, ruefully, that he feels comfortable with
the Trevellyns, he has not mentioned Mary, in his letters to Eustace,
without mentioning Susan in the same breath. Are "those letters" to
which Claude refers communications to Eustace which are not included in
any version of the poem, or is the meddlesome George Vernon also in
correspondence with Eustace? Or does Eustace really detect some subtle
alteration of tone in the letters of his friend which he correctly
attributes to an emotional change? In any case, the question of how
Eustace got the idea is less important than Claude's reaction to it.
Claude does not think he is in love, "exactly." The rapport
which he enjoys with Mary sounds impressive, coming from.one as prone
to qualified statements as he. "It is a pleasure to converse with this
girl," Claude writes, because "she can talk in a rational way," And,
withal, she can "in perfection retain her simplicity.” (II, 256-258)
Her qualities sound, indeed, much like those which Philip discovered
in Elspie. Yet Claude is not sure that he is in love. One thinks again
of the curious contrast between these two Cloughian heroes: Philip can

think himself in love with Katie, when he is not, because it seems to

him that he should be, while Claude does not think that he is in love

7 Houghton, The Poetry 9: Cloggh, p. 135.

75

with Mary (though he is) because he suspects that he should not be.
Philip the doer acts prematurely through misapplication of a principle,
Claude the thinker forbears action because of the distrust of an emotion.
The need, in both cases, for a synthesis of will and idea, is obvious.
And, as previously noted, the happy ending of the Bgthig is, more than
anything else, a statement of the terms of such a synthesis, in those
happy situations in which it can be made.

Epistle XI returns to the plea for certitude made in Epistle IV,
but it is now more specific. It is a sense of some essential ”rightness"
in love that Claude craves here, an assurance that his emotions
constitute an extension, not a violation, of his integrity. This brief
but enormously important section of the poem is worthy of quotation in

full.

There are two different kinds, I believe, of human attraction:

One which simply disturbs, unsettles, and makes you uneasy,

And another that poises, retains and fixes and holds you.

I have no doubt, for myself, in giving voice for the latter.

I do not wish to be moved, but growing where I was growing,

There more truly to grow, to live where as yet I had languished.

I do not like being moved: for the will is excited: and action

Is a most dangerous thing: I tremble for something factitious,

Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process:

we are so prone to these things with our terrible notions of duty.
(II: 266-275)

The relevance of the passage to the rest of the poem and to the scheme
of Clough's longer works, is manifold. The first four lines might well
have been spoken to Philip by Adam, the tutor. The attraction that
"poises, retains and fixes and holds," is the sort which comes to

exist between Philip and Elspie, enhancing and unifying the best

qualities of each. That Claude recognizes the possibility of such a

commitment, and gives an affirmative vote for it, is an indication that

76

the essential nature of commitment, as it is viewed in the Bothie and
in the Amours, is the same. What Claude would make the basis of the
marital commitment, is just that assurance which Philip discovers in
his relationship with Elspie. But the question of priority is vexing.
Claude's gateway to happiness is no bigger than a needle's eye, if that
large, for he very nearly sets up as a prerequisite for commitment the
sense of certitude which comes to Philip as a result of his commitment.
Epistle XII, which immediately follows the lines just quoted, makes
even clearer Claude's reluctance to undertake anything other than a
"plain visible task."
Ah, let me look, let me watch, let me wait, unhurried, unprompted:
Bid me not venture on aught that could alter or end what is present:
Say not, Time flies, and Occasion, that never returns, is departing:
Drive me not out, ye angels with fiery swords, from my Eden,
‘Waiting, and watching and looking: Let love be its own inspiration:
Shall not a voice, if a voice there must be, from the airs that
environ,
Yea, from the conscious heavens, without our knowledge or effort,
Break into audible words? And love be its own inspiration?
.(11. 276-283)
Love, it would appear, must present itself to him with the proper
credentials before he can fully accept it. Yet the presentation of
the credentials would appear to Claude like the serving of a writ, and
'would threaten his personal dignity, [Mary, wise in her simplicity,
has a penetrating insight into this impossible situation. "He thinks,"
Mary'will say in Canto III, "that women should woo him: / Yet if a girl
should do so, would be but alarmed and disgusted." (III, 35-36)
There is, in Claude's rejection of the factitious, a nobility
which partakes of that of the philoSOpher or the prOphet. "Duty" here,

as in Clough's famous poem on the subject, is compliance, mindless

77

compliance, to the dictates of society. At its pggt it causes one to
do the right thing for the wrong reason. Duty, thus understood, is
what Philip has rejected in resisting the appeals made to him on the
basis of his learning or social status. The alternative to "duty” is
the recognition of human dignity in others and the cultivation of it
in oneself. But Claude's prOphetic vision is tainted by his contention
that "action / Is a most dangerous thing." It is statements such as
this which have laid Claude open to the not wholly justified charge of
cowardice. Action is, indeed, dangerous, because life itself is action
and life is a dangerous thing. To act is to decide to act, and not to
act is to decide not to act: Claude is at least partially aware of this.
One can, of course, withhold oneself from action, Hamletlike, until he
can fight with his own weapons. Probably this is what Claude feels that
he is doing. But, in reality, he out-Hamlets Hamlet in his narrowing
down of the acceptable alternatives. He professes himself unwilling,
actually, to do anything but wait until such time as his will is set in
motion by external forces so harmonious with his own nature that he can
accept them as part of himself. "Let love be its own inspiration," he
has begged, and has asked not to be driven out of Eden. But to stay in
Eden one must forego committing himself to an Eve who might offer him a
forbidden fruit:

What emerges in these lines, however, is not the whole Claude:
what they do constitute is a statement of the preferences, however
unrealistic, of a man who cherishes his intellectual integrity above all
other things. At odds with this militant integrity, however, is the
emotional Claude who, in his next letter to Eustace, despite his

somewhat inaccurate suspicion that Mary'dislikes him, his declaration

78
that (through no fault of hers) they are incompatible, and his sense
of the hopelessness of the whole situation, declares his intention to
follow her to Florence: Action may be dangerous, but Claude risks it
when he announces that " . . . she moves--I move, not to lose her."
(II, 291) ‘

In Epistle XIV Claude moves through a bewildering series of
postures: he is wooing 1* , though in an "unmanly" fashion, he is not
in love at all, he has the sort of temperament which does not need love,
and finally he hopes that Eustace can come to Florence to see Mary,
presumably to verify Claude' 3 high estimate of her charms: The
contention that he is emotionally independent is most interesting,
however:

It is an easier matter for us contemplative creatures,

Us, upon whom the pressure of action is laid so lightly;

We, discontented indeed with things in particular, idle,

Sickly, complaining, by faith in the vision of things in general

Manage to hold our way without, like others around us,

Seizing the nearest arm to comfort, help and support us.

(II. 309-314)

Claude is not being completely honest here, though the statement is
sufficiently plausible for him to be taken in by his own specious
reasoning. He is selling himself short when he paints this picture of
the easy-going, impractical dreamer who is fairly content with his own
company. Claude is many things, including at times a really irritating
prig, but he is never the person described in these lines, though they
sum up fairly accurately the externals of his conduct. The pressure
of action is mt lightly laid on Claude and however much we may decry
his willingness to commit himself, there is no questioning the

spiritual travail which it costs him. The reason why he should thus

79

demean himself should be obvious: like many hypersensitive peOple he
is seeking to forestall criticism by criticizing himself first. That
he will not seize the nearest arm for support (the matter of
juxtaposition again, dealt with at length in the next canto) is true,
but this does not mean that he has no desire for support or for an arm
to seize.

The editorial voice picks up the ambiguity of Claude's position
in the epilogue to Canto II, and in the prologue to Canto III where it
succeeds in piecing tOgether, so skillfully that the seams scarcely
show, the two tendencies now at conflict within Claude. 'We can, by
contemplation of such things as the Roman antiquities "exclude what is
meaner around us: / Yet, at the worst of the worst, books and chamber
remain; / Yet may we think, and forget, and possess our souls in
resistance.--" (III, 5-7) Surely this is the orthodox Claudian view.
But gradually a new note is infused, as escape from "the worst" is seen
not so much as the possession of one's soul in resistance but the sharing
of it in love. The prologue ends with one of the few unabashedly
romantic lines in the entire poem, as this voice which is wont to put
words into Claude's mouth says for him that he envisions himself "Under
the vineetrellis laid, O my beloved, with thee!" (III, 16).

And thus begins the third canto, in which the ambivalence of
Claude's "position," both personal and intellectual reaches its greatest
height. It is in the first epistle that Mary'makes her very accurate
assessment of the self-contradictory attitude toward love, previously
alluded to: that he virtually requires wooing so as to be assured that
his feelings are reciprocated, yet would react negatively to being

pursued, because any union to come out of such a pursuit would appear

80

to be based on emotion only, on "the factitious," on the kind of
attraction which Claude has said "disturbs, unsettles and makes you
uneasy," and on the sort of fortuitous coming together which Claude is
soon to condemn as mere "juxtaposition,“ in his most extended exegesis
of that word.

In the second epistle, Claude reveals what might seem to be, for
him, a new perspective. Yet one discovers, upon closer examination,
that he has simply found an image, and possibly a dangerous one, for
something whose existence he has always been cognizant of, but which
has failed to move him deeply, The imagery of the Amgugg is somewhat
less rich than that of the Bgthig. This difference is, like so many
of the other differences between the two poems, attributable largely
to the difference in temperament of the two heroes. Philip, much more
the romantic, is inclined to seek the appropriate metaphor to express
the essential significance of a situation. Claude, more analytic than
synthetic, is at pains to give a scientifically accurate account of
what he sees, even when he is being introspective. His most arresting
metaphor so far has been that of the "broad lofty spaces" (in Canto 1)
where his feet are planted firmly upon abstraction, from whence he may
occasionally descend to the turbulent world below, This is a matter
about which he has felt very strongly: Claude's intellectual integrity
has been an elevated headland of austere grandeur from which he could
avail himself of a more-than-human view of the land and of the wrinkled
sea beneath him. He now feels, with sufficient intensity that his
metaphorical powers are stirred again, a different sort of appeal: that
of life as it is lived at the lower altitudes.

The image is that of the seed in the furrow. It is quite

81

significant that at this point, when an image of natural vitality is
called for, as opposed to an image apprOpriate for the SOphisticated
logical constructs which have been the mainstay of Claude's
sensibilities, it is that of the living plant, used so variously and
with such effect in the m. For Claude, if not in love "exactly,"
is beginning to sense more and more strongly something that he finds it
difficult to justify rationally, but which Philip Hewson knew intuitively.
It is that life is fully meaningful only when the will and the critical
intellect are functioning aspects of an organic whole; when knowledge is
manifest in human relationships which simultaneously are informed by it
and attest its validity.

Claude is 'not, however, able to find a place for the intellect
in his picture of organic life. He is still too much the non-combatant
and the bachelor uncle to attempt, without grave misgivings, any
synthesis of the intellect with the vital will. For Claude, critical
judgment remains a debilitating force and though growth and vitality have
now begun to haunt his imagination he can only envision them as existing
in a realm which is innocent of knowledge. If the seed were Claude, with
his keen awareness of the manifold perils of life, it might never sprout
at all: "Would it have force to dev910p and Open its young cotyledons, /
Could it compare, and reflect, and examine one thing with another? / Would
it endure to accomplish the round of its natural ftmctions, I Were it
endowed with a sense of the general scheme of existence?" (III, l#3446).

On the surface, it would not appear that Claude has altered his
bearings very much: there remain two worlds, that of vital instinctual
involvement and that of lofty rational detachment. But one begins to

wonder which of these worlds is serene and which troubled. In the lines

82

quoted above, Claude has very nearly suggested that ignorance is bliss.
The notion is undoubtedly repugnant to him, but he has never before so
directly addressed himself to a situation in which the skeptical
intellect which he cherishes so much is seen as a palpable liability.
Claude is so near, and yet so far from learning the lesson which Philip
instinctively knew: Philip knew what he wanted, but had to learn how to
get it: Claude does not hear, or will not obey, his instinct until it
is too late.

So strong, and so evenly balanced are the tensions here, that
the dialectical movement is scarcely discernible. But the strain on
Claude is almost unbearable. He begins his next letter to Eustace
(III) by forswearing politics eternally. ”I cannot / Fight, you know:
and to talk I am.wholly'ashamed." Without adopting the participant's
role, he abjures that of the commentator. In terms of the polarities
which he sees, this is of course an absolutely impossible position,
but Claude is now trying much more desperately to m§k§_some sense out
of the situation in which he finds himself than to talk sense.

In Epistle IV we return to Eden where, with the first man, all
of Clough's heroes must, it appears, grapple with the curious
contradictions of the human condition. Genesis is wrong, says Claude,
there was only one tree in the Garden: the Tree of Life, at whose apex
the flgggg of.Knowledge blooms and withers fruitlessly, Being and
knowing are intimately related, but their relationship appears to Claude
to be a sterile one. It is worse than sterile, actually: it is
systematically self-defeating. And here Clough, still employing the

plant image, turns from Claude's unorthodox treatment of the Paradisal

83
trees to a classical story. Existence and awareness appear to Claude as
analogues to the growth and ultimate blasting of the cypress branches in
the myth of Laodamia. Men grow towards an inherent goal of
self-and-world-consciousness, but end up "Withering still at the sight
which still they grow up to encounter" (III, 90). At the conclusion of
the Epistle, Claude reiterates his earlier plea (III, 59) that there
be no more talk of growth. "Let us not, ” Claude might say, "mature."
Because we are still, like the seed, at a level of existence where
knowledge, to which we can attain fairly readily, is nevertheless
incompatible with our vitality. Thus growth, for humans who are neither
brutes nor gods, is ultimately a self-stultifying process.

Claude has long been conscious of, in fact has aspired to, the
life of disinterested intelligence. He is now, as a part of the
dialectical movement going on inside him, beginning to conceptualize
what he has (with misgivings) come to feel: the force of what is treated
metaphorically as now vegetable, now animal vitality. The question,
never quite posed by Claude himself because he is unable to balance
thesis against antithesis in such a way as even to suggest a synthesis,
is how to achieve an informed will, so that action, in prospect and in
retrospect, will be at least to some degree acceptable to the intellect.
In fact, Claude is far from this. He does not have the quality'which
Melville refers to as "trimming ship" by balancing the weights to
starboard and to port. Philip of course does: his brief relationships
with.Katie and.Lady Maria are instances of partially enlightened
movements, in opposite directions, in accordance with a large but

blurred vision. He achieves through them a higher enlightenment and a

clearer vision.

84

But Claude can only fluctuate, reversing his polarities in a
bewildering flow of alternating current. In Epistle VIII, Earth would
be beautiful were it not for the demon, "craving." The world, in this
letter, is Edenic, and Claude enjoys the Adamite role of contemplating
it. He even sees, and approves, lovers, though he does not become one.
The play of intellect over created things is, or would be, richly
satisfying were it not fer "craving." The attraction which makes one
"uneasy," the lure of a vital involvement which might betray the
integrity of the intellect, spoils his Eden. The only thing wrong with
life is having to live it. The only gthgg position which Claude can
imagine is at the opposite pole of vitalism and anti-intellectualism.
ffigpg this thinking . . . " he exclaims in the first line of Epistle X.
He will revert to a sub-human level where he will rid himself of the
one thing which disturbs human happiness: the mind: He begs the
Preserver of men to "Take from me the regal knowledge: / Let me,
contented and mute, with the beasts of the field, my brothers, /
Tranquilly, happily lie.--and eat grass, like Nebuchadnezzar:“ (III,
211-213)

But we must return to the sixth and seventh letters for what may
well be the most important concept in Claude's (and Clough's) treatment
of the problem of commitment. It is in these two epistles that we find
the most extended treatment of the word that looms so large in Claude's
scheme of things: "juxtaposition." Nothing disturbs Claude more than
the fact that so many commitments in life arise out of mere proximity.

Men avail themselves of what is nearest at hand, be it in the sphere of

faith, politics, or matrimony. They believe that they have made choices

85
when in actuality they have exercised as little selectivity as Adam had
in his choice of a mate. Claude is discussing an issue which far
transcends the problem of his own relationship with Mary. He might use
any of a wide variety of fortuitous contacts as illustrations of
juxtaposition. Yet the metaphor which he uses is that of marriage,
doubly significant here because Claude is not only employed by Clough,
as a character, in establishing the broad metaphorical implications of
the m, but Claude himself, the principal voice within the poem,
discovers the aptness of the metaphor. Suppose one were riding on a
train and struck up an acquaintance with the girl sitting next to him.
Would this merest of accidents constitute a basis for marriage? Yet
it sometimes leads to marriage, as do many other equally accidental
contacts. Surely such marriages are not made in heaven: They must
arise from the will-exciting kind of attraction which Claude eschews.
Yet in Clough's Mug Naturans he envisions just such a situation as
awakening in the hearts of a young couple a primal Hymeneal urge which,
though not Love, would someday be recognized by that name. Claude,
however, can only wonder if eternal verity can be made manifest in an
accident. He wonders how many marriages there would be if the tie were
indissoluble even by death. Claude is a little confused by his own
rhetoric here. He is not concerning himself with the scriptural
assurance that the dead " . . . neither marry, nor are given in marriage:
but are as the angels which are in heaven." What he wants to say is that
for the bulk of mankind, conmitments are made in the context of Time
rather than of Eternal Truth. Claude, of course, could commit himself
only in terms of the latter. Can you imagine telling your bride that

you love her because your paths happened to cross, because she was the

86

best you were likely to get? Yet the person who is ruled by
juxtaposition would, if honest, have to say these things. It is little
wonder that Claude, seeing mundane commitments as shallowly pragmatic,
is prone to reject them.

Yet what is the alternative? Claude recognizes that hurrans
" . . . as limited beings / Scarcely can hope to attain upon earth to
an Actual Abstract" (III, 131-132). Theoretically, the possibility
exists that love might "be its own inspiration," or that religious faith
or political conviction so present themselves to one's sensibilities that
they be free of "the factitious" and offer the certitude that Claude
demands. But the likelihood is small. Eustace supplies the word which
Claude needs: it is "affinity."

The distinction between the two almost synonymous words
"juxtaposition" and "affinity" is quite clear to Claude: indeed he has
been making it throughout the poem. As he understands the terms,
juxtaposition would seem to involve only a spatial relationship, while
affinity suggests another kind of "closeness": similarity and potential
rapport. What Claude does not recognize (and what Philip Hewson--
to say nothing of Clough himself-u-does) is that juxtaposition can be
the basis for creating, or at any rate discovering, the affinity which
Claude demands. Had he the assurance that in yielding to the inclination
of the moment he was also bearing witness to Abstract Truth, he could
act. If he knew that there was some inherent congrmty between his
social conscience and those of Mazzini and Garibaldi, if he were sure
that he and Mary stood, in relation to each other, like the parts of an
as yet unrealized whole, he could, in Rome, have become both warrior

and lover. But such proofs are hard to come by. And the possibility

87
always exists that in Rome a war and a girl made a factitious appeal to
Claude's emotions.

But shouldn't affinity at least be sought? Claude does, in fact
seek it, with Mary, but in discussing the tggm he makes another of his
characteristic evasions. There are all kinds of affinities, he says,
but so mixed with juxtaposition, and so subject to its vicissitudes, as
to confound any attempt to pursue them except in the broadest terms.
Sounding very pantheistic, Claude affirms his affinity with the natural
‘world. The affirmation is a safe one, because it entails no commitment.
But the question of juxtaposition versus affinity is not resolved here,
or even in.the rest of the Amggggz it will be raised, in one way or
another, in both Qypsyohus, where they appear as "chance" and "resolve,"
and Teri llama-

Epistle IX touches upon a corollary to Claude's distinction
between truth and action. Eustace has mentioned "Obligation" which to
Claude, along with "duty," is a "terrible word." The attempt to apply
moral truths to the affairs of men, reigned over as they are by
juxtaposition, is a necessary evil, probably, but the result of such an
application is much distortion and misunderstanding. Duty is less often
the whOlehearted response to a clear moral imperative than it is an
ill-considered acceptance of catchwords or folkways. Claude is an
intensely moral person, but he has striven to keep his ethical judgment
pure by withholding himself from those situations in which it might
become clouded. Now, as he feels himself being emotionally drawn towards
a state which he cannot understand or justify rationally, any suggestion
that he conform to a bourgeois ethic which is morally inferior to his
own is infuriating. ‘Eggy, he says, has never talked about obligations:

88

"it was this above all things, / This that charmed me, ah, yes, even
this, that she held me to nothing." (III, 196-197) For Mary, as Claude
will come to realize, knows a great deal about affinity. She is
unwilling to capitalize on juxtaposition and ggntg to make love its

own inspiration. Before this realization comes, however, obligation is
again invoked, and in such a way as to destroy even the shaky prospects
which the relation between Claude and Mary enjoys.

If good timing is a significant factor in the happy ending of
the Bgthig, bad timing certainly does much to determine the unfortunate
outcome of Claude's ill-starred romance. More, even, than the near
misses and unclaimed letters which must have turned Claude's wanderings
in northern Italy into a nightmare of frustrations, it is the meddling
of George Vernon which is the pivotal piece of bad luck for Claude, a
counterpart of the providentially lost horseshoe which brought together
Philip Hewson and Elspie.

With the Trevellyns leaving for Florence and with Claude (whether
or not in love exactly) ready to follow, Vernon, his own marriage to
Georgina now approaching, demands to know Claude's "intentions.“ He is
expected to "declare himself" and to embark on a conventional courtship.
The prospect of a love which accords with the dictates of society rather
than those of the soul is appalling to Claude. The vulgarity of a
"permitted flirtation" produces a characteristic reaction in Claude: he
hesitates, and is lost. Finding that George and Georgina, always a
would-be match-maker, are, alone, responsible for this attempt to move
him with loathsome conventional pressures, Claude again prepares, belatedly,
to follow Mary to Florence. How late he is he does not realize, at the end

of the third canto. Meanwhile (in Epistle XI) Rome's fall is imminent.

89

Claude has stood with the soldiers, still watching, as Hope was cheated.
What Mary will refer to as thgig "poor little hOpe" has been cheated also.
The prologue to Canto IV, echoing the phrases of the‘§gpg‘gf
Solomon, is a lyrical love-poem. The lover will follow his love wherever

she might be. Though Claude's comment, in the first line of the first
letter in the Canto, that not finding Mary in.Florence is "truly
provoking," seems at the very least restrained, it is merely
characteristic of Claude's capacity for ironic understatement. The
marked contrast is not between this comment and the prolOgue, but between
Claude's present movement and the elaborate rationalizations of his
inertia which filled the third Canto. It was in Canto II that he
announced to Eustace his intention to follow Mary, and the battle with
himself that has filled Canto III must be understood in the light of
this resolve.

Insofar as there is a supremely tragic moment in the Amggg§, it
is found in Epistle III of Canto IV. It is here that, apprOpriately,
Claude paraphrases Egmlgt, as he says that

There is a tide, at least in the 131g affairs of mortals,

Which, when taken at flood, leads on to the happiestfortune,--

Leads to the marriage-morn and the orange-flowers and the altar,

And the long lawful line of crowned joys to crowned joys succeeding,--

Ah, it has ebbed with me! Ye gods, and when it was flowing,

Pitiful fool that I was, to stand fiddle-faddling in that way!

(IV. 33-38)

Certainly this is the climactic point of the poem, and it appears also
to be a point of tragic recognition, but is it really Claude's "moment
of truth?" Apart from this passage the brief canto contains little of
Claude's wonted speculation: he simply gives an account of his ill-fated

quest for Mary in northern Italy and the tone of the canto is thus one

90
of rather feverish action. And it is action founded upon nothing more
than the intuitions of the heart and upon a hope which Claude has always
seen as prObably a vain one. There is really no way to justify his
pursuit of Mary, unless he can say with Tennyson "I have felt," and
this is the kind of appeal to the emotions which he will not allow
himself. So he in effect says nothing except that he has missed his
chance, a chance taken under conditions, and at the prompting of feelings,
which he has always looked at askance before. If, indeed, he were to
attempt a rationale of what has befallen him, which would be in keeping
with this obviously sincere outcry, he would virtually have to say'that
his fear of the factitious has led him to overlook the real and that,
although love very nearly became its own inspiration, he was frightened
away from the certitude he sought bwahat could best be termed a
factitious fear of the factitious. But Claude does not say this, and
we become aware just how little he has grasped in his moment of tragic
realization when, in the fifth and concluding canto, he does begin his
inevitable post mortem analysis of the affair.

Where do we go from here? This is the question asked by the
prologue of Canto V. It suggests, among other possibilities, a return
to England. (lg Rome, then, better, because "other," than London?)

One has a sense of having gone full circle. At any rate, when Claude
"speaks" it is in the tone of Canto III rather than of Canto IV. "Aptigg
L11 furnish Mp-hut will the belief be a true one?" (v, 20) This
is a problem he has put to Eustace before. "What one wants, I suppose,
is to predetermine the action, / So as to make it entail, not a
chance-belief, but the true one." (V, 22-23) This is the old paradox:

the assurance of truth, that must be won through action, is a

91

prerequisite to that action. And it appears that Claude is castigating
himself not so much for having failed to take more prompt or decisive
action as for having taken any action at all: Yet he does express
regret at having lost contact with the Ropers, his last link with Mary.
It is largely this reversion to his standard pattern of thought
which keeps Claude from being the tragic figure (albeit a minor one)
which he would have been had the poem been terminated at the end of
Canto IV. He resumes his old dialectical sparring with himself, altered
only by the addition, to his stock of conflicting values of the value of
Mary herself, which he is keenly aware of but which leaves no residual
commitment, not even that of the disappointed lover who is "carrying a
torch." "Let me, then, bear to forget her. I will not cling to her
falsely: / Nothing factitious or forced shall impair the old happy
relation." (V, 51-52) Claude sees his hope of forgetting Mary in a
return to objectiVity. Yet therein will he feel some sense of faint
rapport with her. Claude is inclined to entrench himself in a defensive
monism where, equally related to everything, he is not particularly
related to anything, and Mary can be worked into this pattern. ”Yet if
I do but aspire evermore to the Absolute only, / I shall be doing, I
think, somehow, what she will be doing;-- I I shall be thine, O my child,
some way, though I know not in what way. / Let me submit to forget her;
/ I must: I already forget her." (v, 59-62)
But the long fifth epistle begins, as we might expect, with a

repudiation of the vow, so lately made, to pursue the Absolute.

UttePIY'Vein is, alas: the attempt at the Absolute,--wholly.

I, who believed not in her, because I would fain believe nothing,

Have to believe as I may, with a wilful unmeaning acceptance.

I, who refused to enfasten the roots of my floating existence
It the rich earth, cling now to the hard, naked rock that is left me.--

92

Ah, she was worthy, Eustace,--and that, indeed, is my comfort,--
Worthy a nobler heart than a fool such as I could have given.
(V. 63—69)

The above passage is of particular interest for several reasons. First
because it does involve one of Claude's frequent reversals of polarity,
now the quest for the absolute is a vain one, and one almost hears
echoes of his earlier lflgng this thinking." 0f even greater immediate
interest is what he says in the second and third lines. Here he makes
one of the most candid and astute assessments of his problem that he is
ever to make: his failure to "believe" in Mary is an aspect of his
general unwillingness to believe. This is very close to what he might
have said at the climax of Canto IV. One is tempted to say that in
line 65 we should read "will-less" for wilful, but perhaps he is merely
saying that when he does believe it must be a self-hmpcement of that
excitation of the will which he abhors. Yet finally, in the concluding
lines, we have an excellent example of Claude's uncanny ability to
side-step the issue. Recognizing Mary‘s worth, he takes comfort in the
thought that, after all, she deserves someone better than he. While
this is undoubtedly what the psychologically minded call a defense
mechanism, it is something more than a way of stating the situation so
as to make it least unpalatable. It is also an assertion of what is
implicit throughout the canto, even with its shifts of mood: that
Claude's sin is not that he failed in love, but that he tried to love.
"I am a coward, and know it. / Courage in me could be only factitious,
unnatural, useless." (V, 8b-85) This comment, at the end of the next
section of the epistle, is Claude's ultimate extreme of self-criticism.
The relationship with Mary would have been a true one, not mere

juxtaposition. But Truth and Action achieve tangency only in a

93

dimensionless point, not subject to scrutiny, to be passed only by an
assertion of the will or an exercise of "courage." Therefore not even
truth, in its tangible manifestations, is accessible to "cowards" such
as he, and must be sought only in its abstract forms.

Though Claude has previously spoken, in an offhand skeptical
manner, about religion, he has dealt little with his personal religious
prOblems. It is at first rather surprising, then, when we suddenly find
him addressing himself to the question, not of love or of politics, but
of faith. He enjoyed a brief period of self-confidence, he has said
(just prior to the above quoted lines about courage and cowardice), and
we now find that in those moments, though their intensity and duration
may be exaggerated, Claude was on the verge of finding, within himself,
a religious as well as an amorous and a soical commitment. "What with
trusting myself and seeking support from.within me, / Almost I could
believe I had gained a religious assurance, / Found in my own poor
soul a great moral basis to rest on. / Ah, but indeed I see, I feel it
factitious entirely," (V, 95-98). And now a wife, a cause, and a creed
are all lost to Claude because of his own distrust of his desire for
them: and not merely lost, but justly so. In the future, Claude says,
he will deal with fact and fact alone, and he attempts to eXorcise the
force which would lure him away from Truth, addressed in the second
person as "thou subtle, fanatical tempterl" (V, 103)

What follows is the most specific adumbration of Dipsychus in
the entire poem. Claude will resist the temptation toward comforting
but factitious belief throughout his life, but will welcome it when he
lies on his deathbed. He thus anticipates the repeated assertion of

the Spirit in Dipsyohus that eventually one will fall prey to nominal

9H
belief and pragmatic morality. But had Claude, at thig point in his
life, yielded to the impulse to act he would seem not to have been
damned, but to have entered into the state of blessed assurance
enjoyed by Philip Hewson:

Nor is Claude really unaware of this. As the cause he favored
collapses, he grieves for Mary, in terms that are characteristically
self-critical. "Rome is fallen; and fallen, or falling, heroical
Venice. / I meanwhile, for the loss of a single small chit of a girl,
sit/ MOping and mourning here,--for her, and myself much smaller."

(V, 115-117)

It is after this that Claude vows to subordinate his will to
necessity, though one wonders if it has ever really escapgd this
subordination: He will henceforth do what he ”must" and will go where
he is led. For the last time, he dedicates himself to Truth.

Let us seek Knowledge;--the rest may come and go as it happens.

Knowledge is hard to seek, and harder yet to adhere to.

Knowledge is painful often; and yet when we know we are happy.

Seek it, and leave more faith and love to come with the chances.
(V, 199-202)

But one wonders if Knowledge, thus severed from all vital human
concerns, can ever be a source of happiness and if, indeed, it can really

be called Knowledge. With these questions, Clough is still to grapple,

in Dip snhus.

CHAPTER IV

'Written in 1850, during the brief period of years which saw the
composition of all three of Clough's more important poems, Dipsyohus
is certainly the most confusing of the three. Its stylistic diversity,
apprOpriate to its many changes of mood, includes the sprightly prose
of the Prologue and Epilogue, quotations from and parodies of not only
the hexameter lines of the earlier long poems, but also the "Easter
Day" poems, blank verse, and heroic couplets, and, in many of the
speeches of the Spirit, it equals the best English renderings of
Goethe's Knuttelvers. Structurally, it consists of a series of scenes,
dealing with a wide range of matter, and only exeptionally having a
specific locale, so that it lacks the narrative continuity and the
dramatic cohesiveness of the Bgthig and the Amgggg, respectively. Its
ambiguity admits, legitimately, a diversity of interpretations: one can
see the Spirit as anything from the Mephistophelean tempter which
Dipsychus calls him, to the alter-ego of the two-souled man who gives
the poem its name. In terms of its relationship to the two earlier
poems, too, Dipsyghus is Open to multiple readings. Is it part of a
dialectical pattern in which Clough has explored first action, then
contemplation, and now attempts, at least, a synthesis of the two in his
manrwith-two-souls? Or is it the conclusion of a straightforward
movement in which Clough despairs increasingly of a fusion of will and
intellect (through which, alone, any vital commitment is possible) and

is finally reduced to dividing man within himself?

95

96

Definite answers to these questions can prObably never be
arrived at, however, and it is undoubtedly part of the poem's appeal,
dealing as it does with the ambiguities of life, that it presents so
many of its own. Our present purpose is merely to examine, in content,
the marriage metaphor as it is used in Dipsyghus: the conclusions will,
of course, imply an overall view of the poem.

Dipsyghus was written after Clough had found, in the hOpefully
liberal surroundings of University Hall, London, no greater solace than
at Oxford, whose orthodoxy he had fled. As might be expected, the
poem does not show a return even to the qualified Optimism of the
‘Egthig. Its hero, however, is not subject to exactly Claude's problems
either, though his ambivalent temper and the Italian setting of the
poem, recreate much of the atmosphere of the §m2§;§.

Referring primarily to Dipsychus, Louis Cazamian has said, "No
one in England has expressed more clearly than Clough the essential
hesitation in modern thought, nor the conflict between the
intellectualism of pure philosophy and the ever-ready adaptation which
is the law of practical life."1 It seems not unreasonable to say that,
though Dipsychus has refined Claude's problems he has not necessarily
solved them. His chief difference from Claude, whose intellectual and
moral scruples he shares, is his recognition of the necessity for
action, which Claude so fears. He dislikes the factitious, but wants
to d2 something about it. "In terms of the natural as Opposed to the
artificial, Dipsychus is an example of one who, although unable to act
immediately, has come to realize the full import Of finding the proper

Emile Legouis, Louis Cazamian, and Raymond Las Vergnas, A.History

2; En lish Litgggtggg, trans. Helen Douglas Irvine (New Yerk, l96h,
p. ”.86.

97
relationship between the two."2 Since there is considerable question
as to whether he does find this relationship he is, perhaps, not so
different from Claude, after all. "Dipsychus is simply an older and
more introspective Claude, concerned like him with the problems of
independence or submission, only in a wider and more crucial area than
love, and with Claude's double awareness intensified and made central
to the character.”3 In a wider area, certainly. But the focus upon
love and marriage in the other long poems suggests that even here, as
we examine this mature and not completely inactive "Claude," we will
find love to be not too far from "crucial" in our understanding of him.
The first problem one encounters in coming to grips with

Dipsychus is in establishing, within limits at least, the identity of
the only other character in this series of dialOgues: the Spirit.
Walter Houghton, with his usual keen insight, points out that he is
neither Devil nor half of a schizoid personality, but merely Dipsychus'
own anticipation of what the vulgar world would say to him were he in
dialOgue with it.“ This view is borne out by Dipsychus' remark about
the Spirit, in Scene VIII. "I commune with myself; / He speaks, I
hear him and resume to myself 3 / Whatever I think, he adds his cements
to; / Which yet not interrupts me." (VIII, 31-34) Houghton further
suggests that Dipsychus is _n_<_)_t_ called Dipsychus because he communes with
the Spirit, but because, quite apart from his dialogue with the Spirit

2 Michael Timko, Innocent Victorian: The Satiric Poetry _o_f Arth___ur Hugh
Mg}; (Athens, Ohio, 1966), p. 152.

3 Walter Houghton, The Poetry _o_f_' Clough: & Essay .i_n_ Revaluation (New
Haven, 1963), p. 161.

1+ Houghton, Poetry of Clou h, p. 162.

98
he is engaged in a dialogue, much after Claude's fashion, with
himself.5 The only objection that one is moved to make to this
suggestion is that perhaps it does not go far enough. Dipsychus'
range lg broader than Claude's: he can not only see both sides in a
polarized argument but, through the course of the poem, eXplores many
points of view and should perhaps be "Polypsychus": .At any'rate,
however large the cast, the drama can be quite adequately understood
as taking place within the mind, whose doubts and moral perplexities
render superfluous a "prOper Devil."

A rather unconventional approach to Dipgychus is justified by
its peculiar structure. There is a great deal of psychological realism
in the generally circular motion of the poem, which, like the windmills
of the mind, revolves around and around the same issues as Dipsychus
mulls them over. It is quite possible, consequently, to select a series
of illustrative passages which represent the logical but not the
structural sequence of the poem.

The Spirit's appeal to Dipsychus-~the world's appeal, which he
must succumb to if he cannot summon the resources to resist it--is an
invitation to a life lived pragmatically, in the most pejorative sense
of that word. The Spirit recommends a life which is nominally but
indifferently religious ("Take your religion as 'twas found you, / And
say no more of it--confound you:") (VII, 64-65), discreetly amoral as to

sex, and which employs personal relationships and profesSional duties

5 Houghton, 1). 1570

99

(the Spirit suggests both Law and the Church for Dipsychus) as means
for advancement. Significantly, of these recommendations, the one
most offensive to Dipsychus is that concerning sex, but an alternative
is prOposed. It is a politic marriage. "A virtuous attachment formed
judiciously, / Would come, one sees, uncommonly propitiously." (III,
26-27) But this, too, fails to excite Dipsychus who, no less than
Claude, aspires to heights of pure thought. "Oh, could I shoot my
thought up to the sky, / A column of pure shape, for all to Observe:"
(IX, 139-190)

But Dipsychus, in some ways more like Philip than like Claude,
sees his intellectual aspirations as incomplete if they do not, somehow,
bear fruit in the form of some practical activity to which he is
inspired by them. If he can consider making any concessions at all to
"the world" it must be because the Spirit will offer him such activity
in return.

But action--look to that well, mind me:‘
See that some not unworthy work you find me;
If man I be, then give the man expression.
(VIII , 106-108)

o Dipsychus would like to hold out for genuine religious faith,
true love, and noble actions, but he discusses, at length, in the ninth
scene, the difficulty of maintaining the hOpe that he will really
experience any of these. The ability to believe, in an age when the
sea of faith is not at the full, is speedily if reluctantly dismissed

when Dipsychus asks himself

100

e e e if indeed it be in vain

To eXpect to find in this more modern time

That which the Old world styled, in old-world phrase,
‘Walking with God. It seems his newer will

“we should not think of him at all, but trudge it,
And of the world he has assigned us make

What best we can." (IX, 8-14)

Concerning love he is more detailed, obviously even more eager to
maintain, despite contrary evidence, the hOpe that the union of hearts
is more than an illusion.

I scarce can think

That these be-madding discords of the mind

To pure melodious sequence could be changed,

And all the vext conundrums of our life

Prove to all time bucolically solved

By a new Adam and a second Eve

Set in a garden which no serpent seeks.

And yet I hold heart can beat true to heart:

And to hew down the tree which bears this fruit,

To do a thing which cuts me off from hope,

To falsify the movement of love's mind,

To seat some alien trifler on the throne
A queen may come to claim--that were ill done.

(IX, 14-26)

' These lines, and those which immediately follow (wherein
Dipsychus defines love as " . . . the large repose / Restorative . . .").
deal more directly with love and marriage not only as a specific
commitment prOblem, but as symbolic of the whole commitment process, than
do any others in the poem. The images so frequently attendant upon the
marriage metaphor in the Egghig and in the Amgpgg, Eden and the living
tree whose fruitfulness is subject to destruction, are both present. And
we are, as it were, "brought up to date" on the development of the
metaphor thus far in the long poems. Could one, like Philip, find
himself in a serpentless garden, achieving so perfect a personal

commitment that his Eve becomes a Rachel, he would have discovered the

101
point d'aopui from which he could begin the solution of the other
"vext conundrums of our life." Having learned to believe in someone,
he would have established the basis for vivifying belief which makes
work meaningful and commitment to a cause possible. Dipsychus feels in
his heart that such a relationship can exist, but has observed, like
Claude, the appalling unlikelihood of its ever being entered into.
But love, the large repose

Restorative, not to mere outside needs

Skin-deep, but throughly to the total man,

Exists, I will believe, but so, so rare,

So doubtful, so exceptional, hard to guess;

When guessed, so often counterfeit; in brief,

A thing not possibly to be conceived

An item in the reckonings of the wise.

(XX! 30‘37)

And the old Claudian fear of the factitious vitiates the impulse toward
commitment.

It is worthy of note that the lines concerning the queen and her
throne are equally applicable to either of the temptations, relating to
love, which the Spirit offers to Dipsychus: sexual license and a
marriage of expedience. In either case some aspect of the total marital
commitment, amorous delight or domestic sanctity, are suggested as
substitutes for "the real thing." In love, as in all other things,
Dipsychus is tempted to settle for half. Philip was able to avoid this;
Claude was so fearful of it that he got nothing: Dipsychus is so anxious
for vital involvement (even at a cost) that he is willing to consider, at
least, the possibility of meeting the world of the factitious on its own
terms.

When Dipsychus comes to consider action he is "staggered." A

dilemma implied in Amours gg Voyage is stated explicitly here. 'Withdrawal

102
from the world might render him incapable of effective action when the

call of truth came; absorption in trivial activity might deafen him to

the call.

Oh, in this narrow interspace, this moment,
This list and selvage of a glorious time,
To despair of the great and sell to the mean!
0 thou of little faith, what has thou done?
Yet if the occasion coming should find.2§
Undexterous, incapable?
Oh what and if
E'en now by lingering here I let them slip,
Like an unpracticed spyer through a glass,
Still pointing to the blank, too high: And yet,
In dead details to smother vital ends
Which should give life to them; in the deft trick
Of prentice-handling to forget great art,
To base mechanical adroitness yield
The Inspiration and the Hope, a slave:
Oh, and to blast that Innocence which, though
Here it may seem a dull unOpening bud,
May yet bloom freely in celestial clime!
'Were it not better done, then, to keep off
And see, not share, the strife: stand out the waltz
Which fools whirl dizzy in? (X, 60-65, 70-8#)

Dipsychus' position seems an impossible one, but his feeling grows,
throughout the poem, that he might win out, yet, if he could make a
compromise with reservations, keeping a foot in each of two worlds, doing
the world's work but listening for the call of truth. Certainly he
cannot refrain from action. Inactivity will weaken rather than
strengthen his ability to resist the factitious. There is an echo of
Claude's fear, that he may, in his lonely old age, succumb to a pragmatic
belief, in the Spirit's suggestion that

. . . almost every one when age,

Disease, or sorrows strike him,
Inclines to think there is a God,

or something very like him (V, 181-185)

103

And a failure to accept love that has some vestige of beauty or dignity
about it may eventually result in a final, desperate, sordid
capitulation to lust, wherein he will "Sink are the end, most like the
hapless prey / of some chance chambermaid, more sly than fair,“
(X, lBfi-lBS) and suffer greater degradation than would result from
compromise.
But if inaction is unthinkable, what is there to provoke action?
It might be Claude who cries out
Oh, oh these qualms,
And of these calls! And, oh: this woman's heart,
Fain to be forced, incredulous of choice,
And waiting a necessity for God.
Yet I could think, indeed, the perfect call
Should force the perfect answer.“ (X, 51-56)
But the call does not come and Necessity is seen more and more not as
Divine imperative but as the pressure of the world, to compromise.
This stern Necessity of things
On every side our being rings:
Our sallying eager actions fall
Yainly against the iron wall.
Where once the finger points the way,
The wise think only to obey;
Take life as she has ordered it,
And come what may of it, submit,
Submit, submit: (X. 87-95)
Dipsychus feels that, in his wavering, he is betraying both (or all)
the aspects of his nature. "To thine own self be true, the wise man
says. / Are then my fears myself? 0 double self: / And I untrue to
both." (X, 62-64)
The old question of juxtaposition and affinity is raised again,

with no suggestion that it can be resolved. ”Chance and resolve, /

Like two loose comets wandering wide in space, / Crossing each others

104
orbits time on time, / Meet never." (XI, 9-12) Dipsychus submits. He
will accept the world as he finds it. The image is that of marriage, but
it is an inversion of all that the marriage metaphor has meant before.
"0 man, behold thy wife, th' hard naked world; / Adam, accept thy Eve."
(XII, 69-70) This is the nadir of despair in Clough's long poems.

And yet Dipsychus is holding something back. Knowledge which
Claude so praises, the cognitive faculty, cannot be compromised. "I
can but render of my will, / And behind it somewhat remaineth still."
(XIII, 26-27) Dipsychus will maintain an underground fight against the
world, even as he works in it. The Maria Magno tales will deal with
the potentialities for success of such an unwilling compromise.

While they do not touch upon the marriage metaphor, the prologue
and epilogue to Dipsychus cannot be ignored, even in this discussion of
what is, after all, only one of many themes in the poem. 'We find in
them not only Clough's most engaging prose style, but a notable example
of the characteristic Cloughian ambivalence.

A delightfully crusty uncle, presumably a bachelor, listens
without enthusiasm as his poet nephew reads his latest work. The
uncle has a mind akin to that of Samuel Johnson: he decries the pernicious
influence of Dr. Arnold on the younger generation. The pragmatic wisdom
of Dipsychus' "devil" he would find acceptable " . . . if only it
hand't been for the way he said it, and that it was he who said it . . . ."
His view of education is essentially practical, it is "Simply to make
plain to the young understanding the laws of the life they will have to
enter." Too much tenderness of conscience he sees as a positive liability.

The nephew, on the other hand, favors the moral earnestness so

characteristic of mid-nineteenth century education, though he is

105

cognizant of its occasional excesses. And here we begin to perceive
the balance of tensions. The nephew regards a period of preoccupation
with moral questions merely as a good thing " . . . to have passed
through . . . " and the uncle is reminded that both men show a distaste
for "idleness and listlessness," for "boorishness and vulgar tyranny,"
and for "brutish manners," qualities more in evidence since the older
man's youth and against which the Arnoldian morality is a reaction.
The views of the two are actually complementary, though they achieve
no real meeting of minds except to the extent that the nephew concedes
the validity of some of the uncle's claims. His poem, he observes, is
abggt " . . . the conflict between the tender conscience and the world
. . . ." The ambivalence of values which characterizes their discussion
of the work is, indeed, the subject of the work itself. Dipsychus
gropes, as Claude has groped, for a middle ground between Philistinism
and what Clough, in Recent English Poetry, calls " . . . an
over-educated.weakness of purpose . . . ."

Yet a further note of ambivalence is achieved in the uncle's
observations on the proper function of the poet. The nephew, it is
contended, jeopardizes his poetic role by too much theorizing. His
tendency to intellectualize could make a good poem bad and a bad poem
'worse. It is an oblique statement of the problem which E. D. H.
Johnson has delineated: the difficulty of all the Victorians in trying
to play the role of the social philospher without tainting their
poetic gifts. The nephew, then, has himself been subject, in presenting
the dilemma of Dipsychus, to a Dypsychian eXperience.

The discussion of Dipsychus is rendered even more complex by the

fragment entitled "Dipsychus Continued." In it, an older Dipsychus, now

106

a respected magistrate, is confronted by'a woman with whom he lost

his innocence thirty years before. Apparently he is damned, but the
implications of the brief dramatic episode as they relate to an
interpretation of Dipsychus proper, have always been perplexing to
critics.6 But if Dipsychus is, indeed, damned for having yielded to
the impulse toward moral compromise which he felt in the longer poem,
it is certainly significant that the imagery used in "Dipsychus
Continued" is sexual. Such a damnation can be seen as an unholy
alliance with Eve the temptress rather than a true marriage to the Eve

who is also one's Rachel.

6 Houghton, 3). 1570

CHAPTER V

As Adam and Eve is the prologue, so Mari Magno is the epiIOgue
to the canon of Clough's long poems. Separated from Dipsychus by a
decade which saw Clough's long postponed marriage but little poetic
activity, it has always received "mixed reviews."1 Like Adam and Eve
it suffers from stylistic weaknesses, which vary from triteness to
downright awkwardness of language. But these can perhaps be excused
in a dying man trying, sometimes very successfully, to recover his long
dormant creative powers. What would, if valid, be a much more serious
charge is that Clough, having "submitted" to a conventional marriage
and a mediocre occupation, reversed himself in the Egg; figgpg stories,
with their frequent happy endings and their occasional touches of
sentimentality; that he became the spokesman for the Torthodox" view
of marriage as an idyllic escape from the realities of the world, as
presented in the popular fiction of the day. While a superficial
reading of the stories might seem to justify such a verdict, and
external evidence to support it, a careful examination of the whole work
shows it to be a fitting, if slightly flawed, concluding statement in the
sequence .of Clough's long works.

To be sure Egg; Eggpg is concerned with the living of life
rather than with theorizing about it. Michael Timko, who lays great

stress on Clough's soundness of mind and essential practicality, notes

1 walter Houghton, The Poetry 9; Clough: Ag Essay 13 Revaluation
(New Haven, 1963), p. 211.

107

108

its deep concern with "the practical problems connected with love and
marriage.”2 But the stories are concerned with life as it is ggglly
lived and if the characters enjoy a measure of happiness it is because
some of the problems have been solved. Houghton has commented that

". . . on second scrutiny the happy endings are seen to be so
accidental as to suggest the one-in-a-million, and they scarcely
obliterate the previous suffering."3 Actually one worries little about
the probability of the stories. The sense of real pathos which they
create, a sense of man's capacity for a positive response to suffering,
keeps the generally "satisfactory" diSposition of affairs at the
conclusions of the stories from taxing the reader's credence.

‘With the exception of "My Tale" in which the narrator, a young
poet, has almost nothing to say about the subject, these tales, told
"on the great sea," are all concerned, specifically, with marriage.
Each ends on a positive note: that is, their characters, while seldom
ecstatically happy, are somehow makipg the best of what is obviously
not the best of all possible worlds. What is particularly striking is
that four of the seven stories (the longest: the two tales apiece
told by the Lawyer and the Clergyman) cover periods of time longer than
those covered by the action in the figthig, the 53933;, or that in
Di 5 chus, which, if one can ignore "Dipsychus Continued" can be
compressed into a moment of decision. The time which elapses in each of
these stories is a period of growth, actual, symbolic, or both. The
growth is never painless, yet always profitable. The marriage metaphor,
2 Michael Timko, Innocent Victorian: The §gtiric Poetrngf Arthur Hugh
912259 (Athens, Ohio, 1966), pp. 54'55.

3 Houghton, Poetry 2; Clo h, p. 223.

109
no longer limited to a point in time, is now eXpanded to include a
process of maturation wherein commitments are taken up belatedly,
betrayed but reaffirmed, or simply recognized too late as things which
might have been but whose absence, like Frost's choice of roads, "has
made all the difference." The two shortest tales (the Nate's and the
American's) deal with juxtaposition and suggest that even chance can
produce happiness, at least among people of good will.

In three of the stories the problems lie either in a misplaced
idealism or in a social ineptitude reminiscent of Claude's. The young
man in "The Lawyer's First Tale" could have loved his third cousin Emily.
But their childhood affection withers when, as a student, he embarrasses
rather than impresses Emily, her sisters, and her conservative vicar
father with the Claudian "cleverness" he has acquired through his
studies. The "busy argufying brain / or the prize schoolboy" (III, 37-38)
has little in common with Emily‘s more intuitive approach to life.

She had not studied, had not read,

Seemed to have little in her head,

Yet of herself the right and true,

As of her own experience knew." (II, 46-49)
When as adults, they meet again with Emily a wife and then a mother,
they achieve a partial recognition of what they were too immature to
perceive in each other before. But each is still wary of the other's
view of life. If Emily has, as he thinks, sought happiness in a
compromise with life, his ambition to be a university don seems to her
an escape from life. The resumption of their acquaintanceship awakens
wistful feelings in each, a measure of salutary introspection, and no

more a

llO

Edmund and Emma, in "The Clergyman's First Tale" are a lucky
Claude and Mary. Edmund aspires to pure truth, like Claude desires

certitude, and says: "Would ; could wish my wishes all. :99 rest,/ And

 

knew £9 wish the wish that were the besti" (50-51) He further believes

that love should be its own inspiration:

One love, one diety, one central sun.
As he resistless brings the eXpanding day,
So love, I held, on his victorious way. (98-100)

Claude's echoes are unmistakable here, his fear that Mary may not offer
him the intellectual rapport he would desire in marriage, coexisting with

the fear that he is, indeed, demanding too much.

How charming to be with her: Yet indeed

After a while I find a blank succeed:

After a while she little has to say,

I'm silent too, although I wish to stay;

What would it be all day, day after day?

Ah: but I ask, I do not doubt, too much;

I think of love as if it should be such

As to fulfil and occupy in whole

The nought-else-seeking, nought-essaying soul.
Therefore it is my mind.with doubts I urge,

Hence are these fears and shiverings on the verge:
By books, not nature, thus have we been schooled,
By poetry and novels been befooled:

Wiser tradition says, the affections' claim

Will be supplied, the rest will be the same.

I think too much of love, 'tis true: I know

It is not all, was ne'er intended so;

Yet such a change, so entire, I feel, 'twould be,
So potent, so omnipotent with me,

My former self I never should recall,--

Indeed I think it must be all in all. (131-151)

The fluctuations of opinion apparent in the above passage increase
rapidly in magnitude and Edmund is soon saying: "I do not love, I want,

I try to love: / This is not love, but lack of love instead:" (164-165)

At which point Edmund goes out into the world to learn about life and

lll
love from nature rather than from books.
And how much Emma sounds like the patient and perceptive Mary

Trevellyn:

Easy it were with such a mind to play
And foolish not to do so, some would say;
One almost smiles to look and see the way:
But come what will, I will not play a part,
Indeed I dare not condescend to art

(174-178)

Like Mary, Emma refuses to apply even the most subtle of pressures upon

her lover, and would accept him as he is.

Easy"twere not. perhaps, with him to live.

He looks for more than anyone can give:

So dulled at times and disappointed; still

EXpecting what depends not of my will:

My inspiration comes not at my call,

Seek me as I am, if seek you do at all
(184-189)

'When Edmund, after much travail, rediscovers Emma by'a happy accident,
he is prepared to seek her as she is. His idealism is not lost, but

transformed by'a new vision:

Not to provide,--I scorn it, I disdain,--
A kind, soft pillow for a wearying pain,
Fatigues and cares to lighten, to relieve;
But love is fellow-service, I believe.

No, truly not, it was not to obtain,
Though that perchance were happiness, were gain,
A tender breast to fall upon and weep,
A heart, the secrets of my heart to keep:
To share my hopes, and in my griefs to grieve;
Yet love is fellow-service, I believe.

Yet in the eye of life's all-seeing sun
‘We shall behold a something we have done,
Shall of the work together we have wrought,
Beyond our aspiration and our thought,
Some not unworthy issue yet receive:
For love is fellow-service I believe.
(265-282)

112

This is in the spirit of Philip, whose Elspie told him simply, "We
will do work together," and of Clough himself, who once wrote his

fiancee:

. . . What was the true apple? do you.know? I believe its
true name was 'Love is everything.' ‘Women will believe so, and
try and make men act as if they'believed so, and straightway,
behold, the Fall, and Paradise at an end etc., etc.

Love is not everything, Blanche: don't believe it, nor try to
make me pretend to believe it. 'Service' is everything. Let us

be fellow-servants. There is no joy nor happinfiss, nor way nor
name by which men may be saved but this . . . .

Edward, in "The Clergyman's Second Tale" is unfaithful to his
beloved wife Jane, during a period of forced separation. Confessing his
sin, he refuses to return to her, because unworthy, though her happiness,
and that of his family are at stake. The marital commitment is twofold:
it involves the rule of fidelity and the union of hearts. Edward has
violated both, but discovers in his penitential mood that he cannot do
justice to both. He can render a sterile penitence to abstract truth or
return in an attempt to fulfill anew his personal commitment to his
forgiving wife. Wisely, he chooses the latter course.

Somewhat different is "The Lawyer's Second Tale" in which a
commitment, honored in spirit though not in fact, is central to the lives
of the parties involved. A sort of Bothie-where-everything-goes-wrong,
the story has its hero, a young scholar vacationing in Scotland, leave
his highland lass with child, only to return and find her embarked for
Australia with her aunt and uncle. Years later, when he is happily
married to a noblewoman, his former love returns to England. Though both
are deeply moved the patterns of their lives remain unchanged: Lady

Mary, who with supreme graciousness and understanding

4 Frederick L. Mulhauser, ed., The Correspondence pf Arthur hugh
Clough, (Oxford, 1957), p. 300.

113
accepts the situation, has given him the genuineness he esteemed in his
highland love, while Robert, the girl's husband, who has loved both her
and her ellegitimate son, has shown himself capable of the gentility
she revered in her high-born lover.

"The American's Tale" and "The Nate's Story," both merely
anecdotal, are concerned with rather bizarre chance meetings which
eventuate in marriage. The former, with all the potentialities of a
farce, involves a couple who, through a confusion of hotel rooms,
unwittingly share a bed for the night. Without becoming either ribald
or mawkish, Clough allows the two innocent young people to meet again,
under more conventional circumstances, and fall in love. In the
latter, a kindly young sea captain saves a stranded French governess
from.”a life of shame" by a timely, but unexpected, proposal of
marriage. In both stories juxtaposition, which has created the
possibility of moral ugliness, is turned into something rather charming
by the curious mixture of refined sensibilities and a salutary sense
of humor which is possessed by the characters involved.

Far from being sentimental, Mari Magno exhibits a rather stern
ordering of values. Without their moral idealism, the six tales just
summarized would simply be the stories of one adulterer, one seducer,
and two intellectual prigs, along with two rather coarse, or at any rate
pointless, anecdotes. 0n the other hand, without the sense of mundane
practicality shown by characters in all the stories, they and those
associated with them would have endured greater suffering than they did,
ranging from humiliation to tragic isolation and unintentional cruelty.
The marital commitment is manifest in these stories as a recognition and

gradual adjustment of theoretical and mundane values which, by its

 

11“

very imperfection and incompleteness, reveals itself as something
living, erring, but always at least potentially self-corrective.

The work resembles the figthig in its optimism, but "Optimism"
here is a rather misleading term, meaning little more than a belief
that life is possible. In two cases, the couples succeed in building
only the abutments of the great bridge in Elspie's dream, but they
(and the world) are slightly better, because wiser, for it.

As Dipsychus echoes the language of earlier poems, Mari hagno
echoes the plots, themes, and even the philosophical problems which they
pose. Will and intellect again seek resolution, but they are now seen
to meet in a mark which is more readily discernible than a dimensionless
point, and if it is still difficult to hit the bull's eye, few people
miss the target completely. Knowledge, given priority by Claude at the
conclusion of Amgugs dg Egyggg, is sought by the characters,
unintentionally sometimes, as they go through the maturation process, and
they often find that faith and love do 'bome with the chances."
"Necessity," sought by Claude as Divine imperative and acknowledged by
Dipsychus as the crushing weight of worldly usage, becomes, in Egg;
[Eggpg, simply the stage: a set of limitations within which the players
exercise some powers of self determination, suggesting that life, like
politics, is "the art of the possible." Juxtaposition, too, is seen as
what it has always been, even though Claude did not realize it. It is
potentiality for commitment. It may or may not be gravely limited by the
absence of "affinity."

The inappropriateness of the tendency of critics to employ the
terms "optimistic" and "pessimistic" in reference to Mari Magno can be

seen if we examine carefully the charge that the work is too Optimistic.

 

115
Since this charge necessarily involves the assertion that happy endings
result from the abandonment of the quest for truth in favor of the
pursuit of more pragmatic values (in short, a triumph of the Spirit of
Dipsychus) this is a pessimistic view of the poem and of the conclusion
of Clough's career: It is more fruitful to think in terms of
tough-mindedness and tender-mindedness, the latter of which Clough is

seldom guilty. Mari Magno is never in serious violation of the rather

 

stern formula which governs the conceptual content of all Clough's

'works. It would run something like this. "Meaningful life is

impossible without vital commitment. Total commitment involves a
harmonious relationship between will and intellect, between the practical
and the theoretical. Since these two are reconciled only with difficulty,
and never perfectly, commitment is never easily achieved and often
involves a measure of compromise. All this takes place under perilous
conditions, in a world of chance and accident which, conditions
permitting, can be rendered tolerable by moral and intellectual

aspiration."

******

The metaphor of marriage-as-commitment binds together all of
Clough's long poems, and does so in adherence with the formula above.
Marriage is present, of course, as a theme, but it also lenct itself
perfectly to the representation of commitment of all kinds. Marriage
involves both a spiritual union and a practical commitment to
"fellow-service." It thus necessitates, literally and metaphorically,
the harmonization of the theoretical and the practical. It is never
perfect, as no commitment is, and the warning is sounded, as early as

the Bothie, that every man finds a Leah in his Rachael. The marital

ll6
commitment can go by default (like all commitments) when one demands to
enter it with greater assurance of success than this world ever allows,
as is the case with Claude, or it can become, through an excess of
compromise, a form without substance, which is the pervading danger to
marital (and other) commitments in Dipsychus.

Seen in terms of the marriage metaphor, Clough's long poems
constitute a well-unified totality, both as to concepts and images.
Though they undoubtedly reflect an increasingly mature view of the
problem of commitment, the consistent use of the metaphor strongly
suggests that there was less change in Clough's overall view than is
often assumed. The theme of marital commitment is stated in Adgm gag
.Ezg, presented in a rather "absolute" form in The Bothie pf 299g; pg
Vuolich, tested under conditions of internal and external stress in
Amgpggldg‘ygyagg and in Di 5 chus, and finally depicted as a necessary
if not always triumphant factor in existential living, in Mari Magno.
Embracing but going beyond this theme is the metaphor of marriage
which extends the implications of the poems into the social, political
and religious aspects of human commitment, rather than limiting them
merely to the domestic.

Theme and form are complementary in the poems and in each one
formal elements hold the personal and social needs of the characters in
a different kind of balance. In the Bgthig, the narrative pattern moves
toward a union of the two lovers which is symbolic of the sense of unity
which underlies the entire work: unity between classes of men, unity of
the contemplative and the active, even unity between social and natural
forces as suggested by the poem's singularly rich metaphors. In the

Amours, the epistolary form itself underscores a dearth of fruitful

117
contact between the characters. Conflicting pressures are
conceptualized but seldom responded to. The poem is analytic rather
than synthetic, and antitheses which are brilliantly stated are never

resolved. There is no marriage, there is no reconciliation, between

 

Claude and his beloved or between the tensions Claude feels within
himself. The marriage metaphor, as such, becomes peripheral in
Dipsychus, because the tensions are whglly internalized and an object
for marital commitment exists only in theory. The poem is really
concerned with a divorce within man himself and the dialogues between
halves of what should be an entity never arrive at a genuine
rapprochement. The episodic character of Mari Magno finally reveals
no grand formula for commitment, yet shows in several instances that
"love is fellow service" and that the marital commitment (a "type" of
all commitments) can be achieved through a never perfect balance-in-
tension of the claims of heart and intellect, of soul and society.

In seeking a key to the meaning of Clough's long poems, we
might well follow the advice of Hobbes, in the Bgthig, when he
admonishes Philip to concern himself with "Which things are an allegory."
Clough is not merely preoccupied with marriage as subject matter, but
employed it with consummate effectiveness as the "allegory" of the
problem he perceived most keenly in the life of his own century:

commitment.

 

. LIST OF Harm-aces

 

LIST OF REFERENCES

Armstrong, Isobel. Arthur Hugh Clough. London, 1962.
Bagehot, welter. Literary Studies. 2 vols. London, n.d.

Bowers, Frederick. "Arthur Hugh Clough: The Modern Mind," Studies i3
English Literature, VI (Autumn 1966), pp. 709-716.

Chorleyg Katherine. Arthur Hugh Clough: The Uncommitted Mind. Oxford,
19 2.

Cockshutt, A. 0. J. The Unbelievers: English Agnostic Thought 1840-1890.
Lemon , 1961+.

Houghton, Walter E. The Poetry 2; Clough:‘Ap Essay ig Revaluation.
New Haven, 1963.

Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame pf Hind 1830-;870. New Haven,
1957.

Houghton, Walter E. and G. Robert Stange. Victorian Poetry and Poetics
(2nd ed.). Boston, 1968.

Johnson, E. D. H. The Alien Vision pf Victorian Poetry. Princeton, 1952.

Legouis, Emile, Louis Cazamian, and Raymond Las Vergnas. ‘A History g:
English Literature (rev. ed.). trans. Helen Douglas Irvine. New
Lork, l96h.

Lowry, H. F., A. L. P. Norrington, and F. L. Mulhauser, eds. ‘Ihg Poems
‘2; Arthur Hugh.§lougg. Oxford, 1951.

Mulhauser, Frederick L., ed. The Correspondence 9f Arthur Hugh Clough.
2 vols. Oxford. 1957-

Stienmann, Martin, Jr. and Gerald Willen. Literature for Writing.
Belmont, California, 1962.

Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians. Garden City, N.Y., n.d.

 

Timko, Michael. Innocent Victorian: The Satiric Poetry 2; Arthur Hugh
Clough. Athens, Ohio, 1966.

Trawick, Buckner B., ed. Selected Prose Works 2; Arthur Hugh Clough.
University, Alabama, 1961+.

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