24 February: Boreham on Arthur Clough

A Poet of Courtesy
It was on February 24, 1828, that Thomas Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough first met. Arnold was master of Rugby: Clough was a new boy. But from the moment at which they looked into each others faces for the first time, Arnold was to Clough his ideal of masculine perfection and Clough was to Arnold the boy of his most optimistic dreams. Lowell once declared that Clough would be saluted by unborn centuries as one of the purest, one of the truest, and one of the greatest of our English poets. Clough really seemed, a hundred years ago, to be one of Nature's darlings. Everything marked him out for eminence; men felt him to be one of the aristocrats of the species.

In him humanity flowered into something almost approaching perfection. As a child, he was extraordinarily beautiful—an artist's dream. As a youth, he was tall, handsome, athletic, a veritable Prince Charming. As a man, he was knightly, magnetic, impressive, the beau ideal of Victorian chivalry. And the external graces that seemed so remarkable and so satisfying were more than matched by the delicate texture of his mind. Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, fought bravely against the admission to his heart of any sentiment that might engender favouritism, but in the presence of Arthur Clough his scruples collapsed like a house of cards.

Arnold admitted that he felt towards Clough as he never felt towards any other pupil. By all his achievements in school and in sport, the lad vindicated and intensified the great master's admiration. And it is on record that, when Clough left Rugby, Dr. Arnold, for the only time in his career broke the rule by which he invariably handed the boys their prizes in silence. In the presence of the whole school, he congratulated Clough on having gained every honour that Rugby could bestow.

Mr. A. C. Benson says that Arnold's treatment of Clough ruined him. The boy left school with aspirations too high and emotions too deep. The current fused the wire. Arnold infected Clough with his own intensity. Both Arnold and Clough lived at highest pressure, and, partly because, in the souls of each the flames burned so fervidly, both men died in their forties.

The Song Is The Soul Of The Singer
Nobody can exaggerate the authority that, for some years, Clough wielded. He enthroned himself in the hearts of the lordliest in the land. Of striking countenance, graceful carriage and elastic stride, his chaste and exquisite personality, coupled with his winsome manner and cultured mind, won for him the devotion and intimacy of men like Carlyle and Thackeray, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, Emerson and Lowell.

Carlyle, who was not easily swept off his feet, almost worshipped the ground Clough trod, and was never so happy as when the young poet was his guest at Cheyne Row. He used to speak of Clough as a diamond sifted from the general rubbish heap; whilst Matthew Arnold, most fastidious of critics, has given us in "Thyrsis," a eulogy of Clough which has been described as the loftiest tribute ever paid by one poet to another.

Why, then, is Clough, who was the hero of his age and the idol of his friends, so slightly remembered and so little read today? When they first appeared, his "Ambordalia," his "Dipsychus," and his "Bothie" were quoted with ecstasy and reviewed with enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic. Today, who could, without preparation, recite a dozen of his verses? His best known compositions are his "Green Fields of England," his "Where Lies the Land?" and the familiar lines:

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to
gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding
in, the main,
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes
in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward,
look, the land is bright!

But that is as for as it goes. In respect of general popularity Clough's fame is dead.

The Secret Of An Ephemeral Popularity
The reasons are not far to seek. To begin with, he did not live long enough to find his real self. Death at 42 found him still experimenting. Nor, even whilst he lived, did he strive at all strenuously to produce any great volume of poetry. He took his talent seriously, but he did not torture it by toil. He wrote only when he felt in the mood, and, as a result, he wrote comparatively little. For, during several years, he was in no frame of mind to sing. Out of employment, with the positions that he was unhappy and therefore silent.

Among these positions was a headmastership in Sydney. It is interesting to conjecture as to the gains that might have accrued to his own health, to Australian society, to the literature of the world in general, and of these southern lands in particular, had the post been offered to him and the transfer to Australia been effected. But it was not to be. His application was unsuccessful; his misery was deepened by his disappointment; and the period was lengthened during which the muse fretted in the sullen shadows.

Crushed by a sequence of such blows, Clough sought new vigour in new scenes; but; sickening and dying in the course of his futile quest, his bones were laid to rest on alien soil. In the little Italian cemetery, just outside the walls of Florence—the cemetery that holds the remains of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Savage Landor, and Theodore Parker—he also sleeps. The tall cypresses that wave in gloomy grandeur over his tomb, and the lonely hills, all smothered with wild flowers, that keep sentinel around, form a fitting memorial to his singular excellence and to his bright but transitory fame.

Like a sculptor who brings lofty conception and finished craftsmanship to purest marble, he worked with rare deftness and skill, embalming noble thoughts in chaste and delicate rhythm. He modestly aimed at being a "poet of courtesy," and his severest critics, even though they begrudge him any other meed of praise, will not deny him that pleasing title.

F W Boreham

Image: Arthur Hugh Clough