Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (5 page)

Shelley had taken a regular evening walk to the Forum, where he admired the ‘sublime desolation of the scene’. Claude, the protagonist of
Amours de Voyage
, remains unmoved:

And what of the Colosseum, for Dickens that Niagara-equalling wonder?

Where others find splendour, Claude sees mere solidity:

Claude, like Clough, is a very un-Grand Tourist. He also finds himself in a city where, after a long slumber, history is beginning to happen again. Two months previously, in February 1849, Mazzini had declared the Roman Republic, which Garibaldi was now preparing to defend. On 22 April, Clough had an audience with Mazzini, handing over to the republic’s anglophile triumvir a cigar case, the gift of Carlyle. The next day he wrote to his friend F. T. Palgrave (the future editor of
The Golden Treasury
), describing a visit to the Colosseum. He reported not ageless magnificence, nor even shabby decrepitude, but a thoroughly modern event, a political rally with

Clough has often been treated as a marginal figure, both on the university English syllabus and in the English canon. Most people probably first come across him as the figure of ‘Thyrsis’ in Matthew Arnold’s memorial poem of that name – which, for a memorial poem, doesn’t seem to concentrate enough on the dead friend (Ian Hamilton called it ‘fundamentally a condescending, not to say complacent piece of work’). They might assume he was an Arnoldian poet who had died prematurely; or, given his authorship of the rousing ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’, put him down for a typical lesser Victorian. Nothing could be less true, though changing people’s assumptions at this late date isn’t easy. I once spent about five years trying to get a distinguished professor of English actually to
read
Clough: I sent him the books, and discovered that his own son was waging a parallel campaign on the poet’s behalf. Even so, this leading scholar didn’t eventually start on Clough until he had retired from teaching English literature.

The association with Matthew Arnold is misleading. They were friends and crypto-brothers (the schoolboy Clough, his family away in America, was taken into the Arnold household); they followed the same trajectory at Rugby and Oxford; but it was their differences that marked them. As undergraduates they even employed different symbols to mark the days when they succumbed to the ‘wretched habit’ of masturbation: Clough used an asterisk in his diary, Arnold a cross. Arnold, though four years younger, always behaved in letters as if he were both older and wiser. He judged Clough too excitable, too politically involved – teasing him as ‘Citizen Clough’ – and not standing back, as he himself did, to examine the ‘tendency’ of nations. When Europe blew up in continent-wide
revolution in 1848, Clough set off for France to witness events at first hand. Arnold would not be ‘sucked even for an hour into the Time Stream’. At the height of that year’s thrilling events, Arnold sent Clough a copy of the
Bhagavad Gita
, praising its ‘reflectiveness and caution’.

Such divergences transfer into their poetry. Arnold comes out of Keatsian Romanticism, Clough out of Byronism – specifically, the sceptical, worldly, witty tone-mixing of
Don Juan
. Nowadays, if you were to set Arnold and Clough anonymously side by side, you might guess there to be a generation or more separating them. Arnold is a sonorous, high-minded poet, one who defends culture against both anarchy and Philistia; but essentially one who refers us backwards, to the canon, to the great tradition of Western civilisation which began in Greece and Rome. Clough was equally aware of that heritage: and when Arnold offered him a prose tribute in his lecture ‘On Translating Homer’, it was to a poet ‘with some admirable Homeric qualities’ and a man marked by ‘the Homeric simplicity of his literary life’. Yet Arnold is here affiliating, assimilating – and taming – Clough. As he detected a neuroticism in Clough’s make-up, a ‘loose screw in his whole organisation’, so he thought there was also too much instability, too little hard-chiselled beauty, in Clough’s poetry. Arnold judged himself simply more poetic and more artistic than Clough, just as Keats had judged himself superior to Byron, whose
Don Juan
he found ‘flash’. (‘You speak of Lord Byron and me,’ he wrote to George Keats. ‘There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees – I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task. You see the immense difference.’) Yet what Arnold perceived to be the weaknesses of Clough’s poetry are precisely what over time have come to seem its strengths – a prosy colloquiality which at times verges on awkwardness, a preference for honesty and sarcasm over suavity and tact, a direct criticism of modern life, a naming of things as themselves. If Arnold had died before Clough,
and Clough had written an elegy for him, the dead friend would more probably have been called ‘Matt’ than christened after some Virgilian shepherd.

The poem of Arnold’s which speaks to us most directly today is ‘Dover Beach’ (though it was not one he especially rated himself). His analysis of our metaphysical plight in a godless world begins with nature description, proceeds by reference to Sophocles, then declares its central tidal metaphor before coming to its bleak conclusion with a Thucydidean allusion; while the diction by which it leads us there includes phrases such as ‘the moon-blanch’d land’, ‘the folds of a bright girdle furl’d’ and (famously) ‘a darkling plain’. It is stately, mournful and magnificent. At the same time, compare ‘darkling’ with ‘rubbishy’. Also, compare ‘The Latest Decalogue’, Clough’s own poem about religious belief and what has happened to it. This is cast as a sardonic parody of the Ten Commandments, and its freethinking (or blasphemy) precedes
Life of Brian
by over a century:

It is a poem which undermines both Church and State, and suspects the motives of every churchgoing Christian:

Mrs Thatcher famously urged us to rediscover ‘Victorian values’; Clough had already anatomised those values at the time:

Victorian money-culture and money-worship, so successfully reintroduced into this country over the last thirty years, received further treatment from Clough in
Dipsychus
, the last of his three great long poems. Today’s City traders, driving up motorways in flame-red Ferraris, and driving up their bills in Gordon Ramsay restaurants with four-figure wines, have their precise Victorian counterparts:

Amours de Voyage
is preceded by four epigraphs. The first three invoke the poem’s main themes – self-love, love, doubt, travel – while the fourth, from Horace, announces its manner: ‘Flevit amores / Non elaboratum ad pedem’ – ‘He lamented his loves / In unpolished metre’ (though Horace actually wrote ‘amorem’). Clough’s metre is ‘unpolished’ compared to Arnold’s; and in
Amours de Voyage –
as in his first long poem,
The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich –
he uses the rare hexameter.
This has more of a thumping stress than the polished and popular pentameter; but it also helps provide the spontaneous, conversational, unposh tone. Clough’s rhythms are travelling, chuntering, stopping-and-starting; he needs to be able to switch direction and tone, move from cultural history to love-gossip in a line, from high analysis to a quick joke. When Clough was planning his first book of poems, Arnold had complained about ‘a deficiency of the beautiful’, and wrote to Clough: ‘I doubt your being an
artist
.’ When he published
The Bothie
, Arnold found it too flippant: ‘If I were to say the real truth as to your poems in general, as they impress me – it would be this – that they are not
natural
.’ (This from Matthew Arnold …) He asked Clough to consider ‘whether you attain the beautiful’ and reminds him on ‘how deeply
unpoetical
the age and all one’s surroundings are. Not unprofound, not ungrand, not unmoving: but unpoetical.’ Arnold’s solution was to transcend or transmute – or avoid – the unpoeticality, Clough’s to represent it: he is the ‘unpoetical’ poet.

So
Amours de Voyage
is full of un-Arnoldian personnel – Mazzini, Garibaldi, General Oudinot – and paraphernalia: a copy of Murray’s guide and a cry to the waiter for a caffè-latte. It is absolutely contemporary, written at and about a moment when Italy was in the process of being painfully constructed; it includes gunfire and war and one of the finest literary representations of the confusion of murder – the mid-piazza ambush of a priest caught trying to flee the city and join the besieging army:

It is also a highly contemplative and argumentative poem, about history, civilisation and the individual’s duty to act. And it is, as the title tells us, a love story – or, this being Clough, a sort of modern, near-miss, almost-but-not-quite love story, with mismatching, misunderstanding, tortuous self-searching, and a mad, hopeful, hopeless pursuit leading us to a kind of ending.

Whether any part of Claude’s emotional trajectory also happened to Clough – in Rome and places north in that spring and summer of 1849 – is now, happily, unknowable. In any case, Clough sets up his narrator in ways which signal the differences between the two of them. First, Claude is made, in the opening canto, extremely dislikeable: snobbish, superior, world-weary, and deeply patronising to the bourgeois English family (including three unmarried daughters) whom he falls in with. For Claude, the middle classes are ‘neither man’s aristocracy … nor God’s’; his snooty nostrils sniff ‘the taint of the shop’, and he openly admits ‘the horrible pleasure of pleasing inferior people’. He is created this way, we assume, so that he may – like Austen’s arrogant males – be subsequently tamed and humanised by love of the supposedly inferior. Secondly, Claude is un-Cloughlike both in matters of religion – Claude is suspected of Romanism, while Clough leaned towards unbelief – and of politics. Claude has hitherto avoided public matters and scorned What People Think, preferring a detached, critical, aesthetic attitude to life – in which he is closer to the
Bhagavad Gita
-reading Arnold than to the liberal, event-chasing Clough who now, from Rome, signs another letter to Palgrave ‘
Le Citoyen malgré lui’
.

The poem’s narrative is activated when Claude’s
complacent presumptions and foppish idlenesses are suddenly overthrown. The Romans’ defence of their new republic against the French Army, who are besieging the city ‘to reinstate Pope and Tourist’, jolts Claude into the modern world of politics and war; similarly, his exposure to the Trevellyn family, who display all the enthusiasm he lacks (‘Rome is a wonderful place’, gushes Georgina) jolts him into a state of love, or – he being a self-conscious intellectual – near-love, or possible-love, or a state of mind in which whatever it is that love might be is subjected to furious internal debate. In one reply to his friend Eustace (whose own letters are not given, leaving only Claude’s reactions to them – a tactic which jump-cuts the narrative), he corrects a false inference: ‘I am in love, you say: I do not think so, exactly.’