clough worshipped truth with more than the passion of a lover, and his writings are, for the most part, the tragic records of a life-long devotion to a mistress who steadily refused his embraces; but as it is greatly better to have loved without attaining than to have attained without loving, so clough’s ardent and unrewarded stumblings in the dark towards his adored though unseen divinity are greatly more attractive and edifying to those who have shared, successfully or not, the same passion, than is that complacent fruition of her smiles which she often accords to those who are contented to be no more than her speaking acquaintances. regarded from a purely intellectual point of view, clough’s utterances on religion, duty, etc., are little better than the commonplaces which in these days pass through the mind and more or less affect the feelings of{119} almost every intelligent and educated youth before he is twenty years of age; but there are commonplaces which cease to be such, and become indefinitely interesting, in proportion as they are animated by moral ardour and passion. speech may work good by warming as well as by enlightening; and if clough’s writings teach no new truth, they may inflame the love of truth, which is perhaps as great a service. though he professes that he can nowhere see light where light is most necessary and longed for, his mind is utterly opposed to the negative type; and he exactly exemplifies the class of believer whom richard hooker endeavours to comfort, in his great sermon on “the perpetuity of faith in the elect,” by the reminder that a longing to believe is implicit faith, and that we cannot sorrow for the lack of that which we interiorly hold to be nonexistent. a question that must suggest itself to most readers is, what is the use and justification of these endless and tautological lamentations over the fact—as clough conceived it to be—that, for such as him at least, “christ is not risen”? the reply is, that the responsibility of the publication of so much that is profoundly passionate but far from profoundly intellectual scepticism was not his. with the exception of some not very significant critical essays, his prose{120} consists of letters, which were of course not meant for the public; and the greater part of his poetry remained to the day of clough’s death in his desk, and would probably never have left it, with his consent, unless to be put in the fire.
those who recognise in the “bothie” clough’s almost solitary claim to literary eminence must somewhat wonder at the considerable figure he stands for in the estimation of the present generation. the fact is that clough, like james spedding, was personally far more impressive than his works; and the singularly strong effect produced among his friends by the extreme simplicity and shy kindliness of his life and manners, and the at once repellent and alluring severity of his truthfulness, gave his character a consequence beyond that of his writings with all who knew him though ever so slightly; and the halo of this sanctity hangs, through the report of his friends, about all that he has done, and renders cold criticism of it almost impossible. no one who knew clough can so separate his personality from his writings as to be able to criticise them fairly as literature; no one who has not known him can understand their value as the outcome of character.
the impressionable and feminine element, which is manifest in all genius, but which in truly effective{121} genius is always subordinate to power of intellect, had in clough’s mind the preponderance. the masculine power of intellect consists scarcely so much in the ability to see truth, as in the tenacity of spirit which cleaves to and assimilates the truth when it is found, and which steadfastly refuses to be blown about by every wind of doctrine and feeling. the reiterated theme of clough’s poetry is that the only way of forgetting certain problems now, and of securing their solution hereafter, is to do faithfully our nearest duty. this is no new teaching: it is that of every religion and all philosophy. but clough had no power of trusting patiently to the promise, “do my commandments, and you shall know of the doctrine.” this was the ruin of what might otherwise have been a fine poetic faculty. a “problem” will not sing even in the process of solution, much less while it is only a hopeless and irritating “pons.” clough was curiously attracted by emerson, of whom he spoke as the only great contemporary american. now emerson, at his very best, never approached greatness. he was at highest only a brilliant metaphysical epigrammatist. but a religion without a dogma, and with only one commandment, “thou shalt neither think nor do anything that is customary,” had great attractions for clough; to whom it never seems to have occurred that the{122} vast mass of mankind, for whose moral and religious welfare he felt so keenly, has not and never can have a religion of speechless aspirations and incommunicable feelings, and that to teach men to despise custom is to cut the immense majority of them adrift from all moral restraint. the promise that we shall all be priests and kings seems scarcely to be for this world. at all events we are as far from its fulfilment now as we were two thousand years ago; and we shall not be brought nearer to it by any such outpourings of sarcastic discontent as go to the making of such poems as the tedious mephistophelian drama called “dipsychus,” which clough had the good sense not to publish, though it is included with many others of equally doubtful value in posthumous editions of his works. this class of his poems possesses, indeed, a lively interest for a great many people of our own time, who are in the painful state of moral and religious ferment which these verses represent; but it is a mere accident of the time that there is any considerable audience for such utterances, and in a generation or two it is probable that most men will feel surprise that there could ever have been a public who found poetry in this sort of matter.
the “bothie of tober-na-vuolich” is the only considerable poem of clough’s in which he seems,{123} for a time, to have got out of his slough of introspection and doubt and to have breathed the healthy air of nature and common humanity. in spite of many artistic shortcomings, this poem is so healthy, human, and original, that it can scarcely fail to survive when a good deal of far more fashionable verse shall have disappeared from men’s memories. the one infallible note of a true poet—the power of expressing himself in rhythmical movements of subtilty and sweetness which baffle analysis—is also distinctly manifest in passages of the “bothie,” passages the music of which was, we fancy, lingering in the ear of tennyson when he wrote certain parts of “maud.” the originality of this idyl is beyond question. it is not in the least like any other poem, and an occasionally ostentatious touch of the manner of “herman and dorothea” seems to render this originality all the more conspicuous in the main. another note of poetical power, scarcely less questionable than is that of sweetness and subtilty of rhythm, is the warm and pure breath of womanhood which is exhaled from the love-passages of this poem. clough seems to have felt, in the presence of a simple and amiable woman, a mystery of life which acted for a time as the rebuke and speechless solution of all doubts and intellectual distresses. these passages in the{124} “bothie,” and, in a less degree, some others in the “amours de voyage,” stand, in the disturbed course of clough’s ordinary verse, like the deep, pure, and sky-reflecting pools which occasionally appear in the course of a restless mountain river.
