Read Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) for Free Online

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-widerevolution 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