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

– 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:
    You didn’t see the dead man? No; — I began to be doubtful;
    I was in black myself, and didn’t know what mightn’t happen; —
    But a National Guard close by me, outside of the hubbub
,
    Broke his sword with slashing a broad hat covered in dust, — and
    Passing away from the place with Murray under my arm, and
    Stooping, I saw through the legs of the people the legs of a body
.
     
    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’scomplacent 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.’
    At the poem’s centre is a debate about ‘exact thinking’, and how such thinking translates into action, and whether emotion as opposed to reason is ever a justifiable ground for action, and whether action is ever worth it in the first place – though of course if it were to be so, then it must first be based on absolutely exact thinking – and, as any sensible reader will swiftly deduce, this is exactly the sort of overanalytical ‘pother’ (Claude’s word) which is most discouraging to a woman who might be inclined