THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

(Such as one fancies may be in a stream when the wave of the tide is
Coming and not yet come, — a sort of poise and retention);
So I turned, and, before I turned, caught sight of stragglers
Heading a crowd, it is plain, that is coming behind that corner ...
. . . . . . .
and now the
Crowd is coming, has turned, has crossed the last barricade, is
Here at my side. In the middle they drag at something. What is it?
Ha! bare swords in the air, held up! There seem to be voices
Pleading and hands putting back; official, perhaps; but the swords are
Many, and bare in the air. In the air? They descend; they are smiting
Hewing, chopping — At what? In the air once more upstretched! And
Is it blood that’s on them? Yes, certainly blood! Of whom, then?
Over whom is the cry of this furor of exultation?
Claude’s conversational tone here, commas, dashes, questions, and all, allows for a sense of incomprehending
urgency. Elsewhere, his detachment becomes almost mocking, variously shifting his tone from one of polite chit-chat
to discussions of religion, from a disillusion with Roman monuments to sexual flirtation, from artistic discrimination
to political nonchalance. As its title suggests, Amours de Voyage is a love-poem, or rather it is a poem about casual
love-making and love-doubting. Its fragmentary nature and its revolutionary setting establish an awareness of the
transitory and arbitrary nature of human contact and human experience, something which had been less successfully
dealtwith in Clough’s earlier narrative experiment The Bothie of Tober na Vuolich (1848). Shifting perspectives and a
fascination with religion and with the failure of the religious impulse also mark Clough’s best lyric verse, such as
‘The New Sinai’ and ‘Bethesda: A Sequel’. His real enough sympathy with the Italian Risorgimento is clear in
politically committed poems such as ‘Peschiera’ and
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‘Alteram Partem’; his playful, mildly provocative wit shines through his jests about money, in ‘Spectator ab Extra’
(with its chorus ‘How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!’), and his commentary on moneyed middle-class
misinterpretations of the Ten Commandments in ‘The Latest Decalogue’.
Clough’s poems were collected posthumously in 1862 and 1869 when the impact of his religious and social
agnosticism was heightened by sympathetic echoes in the work of other distinctly ‘modern’ writers. From the 1860s
onwards the writing of the century’s greatest art critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900) assumed an equally challenging new
edge. Ruskin’s ‘agnosticism’, if it can properly be described as such, consisted of a gradual rejection of the narrow,
strident Protestantism of his childhood and early manhood and in a discovery of a puzzling multifariousness in the
natural, industrial, spiritual, and human worlds. In 1860 he had begun publishing in the newly founded Cornhill
Magazine a series of essays, entitled Unto This Last, concerning the economic and social integrity of mid-Victorian
Britain, but the challenges he threw down to the readers of the journal proved offensive to middle-class palates and he
was obliged to abort the series (the essays appeared in book form in 1862). The essays attempt to redefine value by
moving beyond economic theory into moral speculation. Ruskin expresses himself with a bald, almost innocent,
simplicity, steadily establishing his premisses and drawing conclusions which demolish a complacent economic and
social laissez faire. His basis is firmly Christian, deriving much of its language and metaphoric power from the
parables of Jesus, but his definitions were intended to apply not simply to an ancient agrarian economy, but to a
modern industrial society blinded by acquisitiveness. Definitions of value, he insisted, must be related to whatever
‘avails towards life’. The ‘real science of political economy’ as he defined it, had to be distinguished from an existing
‘bastard’ science of economics in order that it might teach nations both ‘to desire and labour for the things that lead to
life’ and to ‘scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction’. Ruskin’s moral teaching, like his art criticism, was
not to be confined and defined by accepted dogmas, disciplines, and sectarian interpretations. Unto This Last applies
basic Christianity to a mechanized and urban civilization that he increasingly found morally and aesthetically
repugnant. It later became one of the pillars of a very English, untheoretical Socialism.
Ruskin’s literary career consisted of a hugely expanding, but interconnected, series of experimental essays. He
began in Modern Painters (1843, 1846, 1856, 1860) by ambitiously attempting to place the paintings of J. M. W.
Turner in various contexts, most startlingly of all in relation to extensive and multifarious definitions of Truth,
Beauty, Imagination, Representation, and Nature. The third volume of Modern Painters (1856) is broadly, typically,
and somewhat disconcertingly, subtitled ‘Of Many Things’. The vast learning and the range of literary references in
Modern Painters still allows for substantial and carefully worked descriptive passages where Ruskin’s wonderfully
emotive mastery of a lucid style is most evident. The slow evolution of the often sprawling