THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife —
Fly hence, our contact fear!
Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood!
Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern
From her false friend's approach in Hades turn,
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude.
The student’s escape is into an unattached, gipsy rejection of the consequences of the urban civilization of the
nineteenth century (the Thames is still ‘sparkling’ as it had for Spenser and not the polluted sewer of Dickens’s
novels). Like Virgil’s Dido, he can spurn the representative of the progressive and inevitable future because that
restless future is not his. Arnold’s essential ambiguity about the present, and his poignant nostalgia for an easier and
idealized past are also evident in his elegiac monody for the dead Clough, ‘Thyrsis’ (1867). The poem returns to the
same contours of the Oxfordshire landscape, but now imbues them with reminiscences of the Greek and Roman
pastoral tradition which both Arnold and Clough had studied as schoolboys amid the old certainties of Rugby.
‘Thyrsis’ too is haunted by the ‘stormy note of men contention-tost’ and the restless soul of the dead poet is required
to act as an inspirer, an elusive bringer of joy to a world which, despite its physical beauty, has lost its spiritual way.
Arnold’s determined, but none the less vague, directions to future progress, like his conjuration of the spirits of his
father and of Clough, sound a note of desperate optimism. In the poem called ‘The Future’ (1853), the river of Time
has swept humanity from mountain fastnesses to the grubby, industrialized plain of the nineteenth century, ‘border’d
by cities and hoarse | With a thousand cries’. The immediate prospect is only of ‘blacker cities and louder din’, and
those on the river’s ‘flowing breast’ will never see ‘an ennobling sight, | Drink of the feeling of quiet again’. The
poem ultimately offers a vision of a future oblivion, blissfully and vaguely lost in ‘the murmurs and scents of the
infinite Sea’. The capital ‘S’ for the sea here both suggests God’s complicity and denies it. Arnold’s image can be
read both as implying something akin to a Tennysonian purpose in nature and as a passive drift into nothingness.
It is Arnold, rather than Arthur Hugh Clough, who was the true ‘too quick despairer’ of ‘Thyrsis’. Where Arnold
suggested the force of alienation, Clough strove for some kind of human and moral attachment; where Arnold sought
to associate himself with the spirit of the times and then agonized over its defective joylessness, Clough detachedly
accepted and exploited contradiction. Clough (1819-61) was described by another Rugby schoolfriend as having
received ‘into an unusually susceptible and eager mind the whole force of that electric shock which [Dr] Arnold
communicated to all his better pupils’. Clough’s later agnosticism retained a sometimes startling frankness and
honesty; his disillusion was, however, generally shaped by a diffidence, a wit, and an acceptance of the failure of
mission. He is a candid poet, rarely fretful but rarely confident; one who almost relishes the nature of doubt and the
anarchy of multiple ways of seeing. In his greatest poem, the sequence of verse letters Amours de Voyage (1858), he
announces its prospective irresolution in four brief epigraphs (in English, French, and Latin) which variously suggest
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self absorption, self doubt, the elusiveness of love, and the freedom of travel. The poems, written in hexameter, are
expressed in a relaxed, conversational manner and tellingly detailed with snatches of travelogue, dialogue, and
gestures of self analysis on the parts of the various correspondents. They are set against the background of the
disruptions of Italian politics, and particularly the brief establishment of a Roman Republic in 1848-9. Claude,
Clough’s male correspondent from Italy, seems bemused by human relationships and bewildered by the violence
which intrudes both into his Roman sightseeing and into his English political assumptions. In the seventh letter to
Canto II he describes the messy, almost casual murder of a priest by a Republican mob:
I was returning home from St Peter’s; Murray, as usual
Under my arm, I remember; had crossed the St Angelo bridge; and
Moving towards the Condotti, had got to the first barricade, when
Gradually, still thinking of St Peter’s, I became conscious
Of a sensation of movement opposing me, — tendency that way