Play no tricks upon thyself, O man; Let fact be fact, and life the thing it can. That was the maxim upon which he acted, following the light of an absolute sincerity, no matter where it might lead him. It is not necessary, nor indeed would it be just, to characterize the present time as an age of shams. An age that has, with all its shortcomings, accomplished so much that is real cannot with justice be thus spoken of. Nevertheless, having regard to the increasing intensity of competition, and to the very general acceptance of mere success as a test of merit, it ought to be, and can hardly help being, serviceable to be able to turn to the example of one man at any rate, a man intellectually gifted far above the average, to whom success was nothing, and to whom absolute and unswerving sincerity to his ideals of thought and conduct was everything.

How did this nature, this attractive and striking individuality, come to be developed? What was there belonging to it by heredity, what was there from time to time in its environment, that combined to produce such a result? The stock from which Clough sprang was on both sides a little remarkable. The Cloughs were an old Welsh family whose representative stood well in the country early in the sixteenth century, that era of English mercantile expansion, while his mother belonged to one of those old Yorkshire families which may be said to constitute the backbone of English nationality. One seems, through the glimpses afforded by very fragmentary biographical recollections, to get an impression of the father, James Butler Clough, as a man not too successful in the business-that of a cotton merchant in Liverpool and Charleston-which he had adopted, his lack of marked success, even in days when it was not considered necessary for every man to become a millionaire, being not improbably associated with a sensitiveness that disabled him from taking advantage of the more risky

somewhat prolonged absences from his family, who were left at Charleston while he was in Liverpool, as well as general changes of residence from Liverpool to Charleston, from Charleston back to Liverpool, and finally from Liverpool to Charleston again, seem indicative of some degree of family uncertainty and anxiety. Under these conditions, it was perhaps to be expected that the ruling influence in the family should come from the mother's side. There can be no question that this was the influence that did most to mould the character and fix the intellectual bent of the child who, before he was seven years old, was regarded as the genius of the family. The development of conscience, the love of lofty and heroic ideals, came naturally to a boy of Clough's imaginative and sensitive temperament. Possibly, too, the influence of climate was not without its effect. Those who as children have lived in a semi-tropical atmosphere have not seldom been known to develop in later years what may be called an intellectual laziness. The picture one gets of him, as a boy of eight, lying on his bed through the hot afternoons in Charleston, devouring books of adventure and travel, seems a little suggestive of a certain physical incapacity for that life of hard competition which was to him in after-life so repulsive, and yet which is usually the price that has to be paid for any marked success. One can hardly help suspecting that when Clough, in the epilogue to his "Dipsychus," speaks sceptically as to the existence of scruples in the mind of “a roundabout boy" of twelve or fourteen, "with his three meals a day inside him." he was having a little laugh at himself. For certainly, at twelve or fourteen, that was exactly what he was not, and it is quite possible to imagine his mind lighting up with a humorous notion that it might have been better for himself, in some ways, if at twelve or fourteen he had been a little more "round about" and a little less scrupulous. The humorous realization of some altogether different self is a pastime not

disposition.

at

What might have been the effect upon the life of Arthur Hugh Clough if he had remained much longer the darling of an affectionate family circle is a question not altogether without its interest. Indications do not seem to be wanting that, as often happens with clever boys who remain long at home, he was inclined to become a little what shall we say? Well, perhaps a little "old-mannish." That, however, was not a real and genuine feature of his character, which found itself completely in harmony with the breezy freedom and manly influences that were to be met with in the Rugby of Doctor Arnold. To Rugby Clough went in the summer of 1829, when he was ten-and-a-half years old-rather young, one would think, for launching into the life of a great public school. Under the influences that centred Rugby, however, his nature expanded rapidly, the possession of a somewhat delicate physique proving no bar to his taking part, with no small credit, in the school games, football especially, in connection with which his name has been handed down as that of the best goal-keeper on record. And here, while acquiring an increased physical and moral robustness, he found the value of the early literary training which had come to him in the old days at Charleston. It is generally supposed that the "Arthur," the delicate boy who figures so effectively in "Tom Brown's School Days," was suggested by the late Dean Stanley. There was, however, another "Arthur" in the school who was quite as capable of being the hero of the incident that led to the famous fight between Tom Brown and "Slogger" Williams. Certainly Arthur Hugh Clough, by reason of his sensitive nature and his early acquaintance with Greek literature from its poetical side, was just the sort of boy one might expect to feel the pathos of the passage he was set to construe in class. There can be little question that it was his previous acquaintance with, and admiration of, the legends which to most boys who

or existence at all, that enabled him to gain that reputation for sound and elegant scholarship which, though not nearly as profitable as it might have been, followed him through life.

The influence of Rugby, the Rugby penetrated through and through with the moral earnestness of Arnold, made itself felt in other ways. It had not been merely the love of the heroic and romantic in literature that had come to Clough through the early influences of home life. Coupled with this, he had acquired a high sense of moral duty and moral responsibility. His letters to his younger brother, George, written from Rugby in 1835, when he was himself realizing the responsibilities attaching to the position of the senior boys in a great school, are characteristic. In one of these letters, dated the 13th September, 1835, he warns his brother against being indolent. "You recollect," he says, "what I told you about that family failing"-a failing which he seems disposed to attribute to influences from his mother's side of the family. The temptations resulting from constitutional indolence certainly beset himself; but it does not strike one that he was necessarily correct in regarding this constitutional indolence as proceeding from the Yorkshire Perfects

and not from the Welsh Cloughs. Here, however, is a passage from this same letter which is worth quoting:

No doubt you will feel very much the loss of any one to talk to about religion, but let this, my dear George, only make you keep more close to God: and if still

you want some one to talk to, you have only to write to me, and I shall be sure to answer you within a week or two. Remember, too, that if the school is bad, it is no reason, no excuse, for you to do as they do. Remember, they are not many, and Jesus said that a little leaven leavens the whole lump. Now, do not think that I am telling you to put yourself forward as a kind of apostle or missionary to them. Only go on without fearing or shrinking in any point from your duty; do not mind their knowing that you are trying to serve God.

In some respects, perhaps, that is not such a very remarkable letter. One has to remember, however, when it was written and by whom it was written. It was written at a time when Arnold, whose traditions have come down as the best natural inheritance of all the great schools in England, was regarded as an educational heretic, whose aberrations from the then accepted methods of school discipline were the object of attack by Tory newspapers. It is Arnold's spirit and influence that breathes through the letter-a letter, too, not written by one who had failed to fall into his place as a healthy and energetic schoolboy, but by one who was a leader in all that pertained to the natural activity of school life, and who was immensely popular among his school-fellows. Indeed, he found this popularity a little dangerous, for he complains in one of his letters, written about the same period, that he finds "associating with fellows for their good" a "more dangerous employment" than he had looked for. The danger lay partly in the alternations of excitement and depression caused by the conscious efforts on behalf of school-fellows and of the school, and partly by the calls it made upon his time. He complains that he really had not the time to be acquainted and intimate with a great many fellows. "And here," he adds, "is another advantage on the side of evil, that bad characters are also idle, whereas good characters are industrious, so that when a fellow wants a companion he is much likely to pitch on a bad than on a good one." An experience this, surely, which Doctor Watts has expressed more epigrammatically.

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It was in the full blaze of a brilliant reputation that Arthur Hugh Clough, in 1837, migrated from Rugby to Oxford. The winner of the Balliol scholarship, the gainer of every honor which Rugby could bestow, what might not be hoped from him? Certainly no one ever went into residence at Oxford better qualified to fulfil and to adorn all the traditions that cluster round the

was

banks of the Isis, and it seems probable that if he had fallen apon Oxford life at any other time his passion for scholarship would have proved the dominating influence of his academical career. Oxford, however, when Clough came into residence, in October, 1837, not the Oxford of academic calm. It was an Oxford agitated and rent by the whirlwind of the Tractarian movement. The prolonged barometric depression, if it may be called so, of the evangelical school of thought—a school originally founded in much earnestness and through much suffering-had invited the reaction of which Newman was the chief expression, and of which the High Church party, now covering nearly the whole area of the Church of England, was the result. How was it possible for such a nature as Clough's not to be interested in a conflict of this kind? With him the passion for scholarship always walked side by side with a passion for truth and sincerity. The boy who had, at the age of sixteen, written to his younger brother urging him not to be afraid to let it be known that he was "trying to serve God," could not, in the maturer life that realizes itself so rapidly at twenty, have stood still on the brink of the tumult, "the fringy edges of the fight," contenting himself with what would have seemed to him a mere selfish effort at self-development. He was bound to plunge into "the pell-mell of men." And in this necessity of his nature lies the true answer to those who, like his friend Mr. Ward, have regretted that he could not keep himself from "plunging prematurely," as they expressed it, "into the theological controversies then so rife at Oxford." Had he held himself aloof, he might, in the opinion of these friends, have been saved from all injury to the gradual and healthy growth of his mind and character. “It is my own very strong impression," Mr. Ward has written, "that, had this been permitted, his future course of thought and speculation would have been essentially different from what it was in fact. Drawn, as it were, peremptorily. when a young man just coming up to

All which may be true, perfectly true; and yet one feels that, true though it may be, it misses the mark. It reminds one of Dominie Sampson's lament over the restored Harry Bertram: "He should have been a calligrapher; but Heaven's will be done!" In what field of thought, in what kind of a theological paddock, would those who thus affectionately deprecated the influence of the Tractarian tempest have wished or expected to find their friend? Clough as a High Churchman, playing tricksas he would have said-upon himself, would have been an impossibility. And if not as a High Churchman, then as what? In what other field could the friend of Arthur Stanley and Matthew Arnold have found himself, save in the field in which, with him as with them, earnest moral and intellectual effort were the main thing-something approaching to the "summum pulchrum," if not indeed the "summum pulchrum" itself and the hold upon formularies merely subsidiary? It may be that these three, animated by the same cultured earnestness, though differing from each other in respect of personal idiosyncrasy, were the brightest outcome of that Oxford tribulation-a tribulation which coincided, in point of time, with social and political tribulations that more or less affected them all.

Stanley, with his deep religious and imaginative nature, not altogether untouched by something of the mystic, found his place at Westminster, where he kept the bridge against the hosts of dogmatism, burning to eradicate all that savored of liberty in religious thought. Arnold, animated by a sincere and cultured disbelief in popular movements and popular cries, was able to hold himself aloof from upheavals, the force of which he strangely miscalculated. Clough, however, with per

and influenced by a conscientiousness that might almost have been called hyper-sensitive, could not have tolerated in himself either the conformity of Stanley or the social scepticism of Ar nold. It would be difficult to say that he was socially much more earnest than Arnold. Those, moreover, who appreciate Clough from the religious side of his character, and deprecate the sacrifices he made in his anxiety to clear himself from any suspicion of religious insincerity, possibly fail to some extent to realize the fact that social problems occupied even a wider space in his mind than religious problems. As regards religious problems, his ruling principle was clear and complete"Let fact be fact, and life the thing it can." But the "riddle of the painful earth," in its social aspects, was continually attracting him, his reflections leading him to conclusions that even now social reformers are barely venturing to hint at.

How shall I laugh and sing and dance?
My very heart recoils,

While here to give my mirth a chance,
A hungry brother toils.

There is a whole system of Christian Socialism in those lines, which find a place in the mouth of Dipsychus; and though Clough was not actually himself Dipsychus, though he clearly recognized the element of exaggeration that was needed to give force to the contrast in what is perhaps his characteristic work, yet he was near enough to the spirit of his sensitivesouled hero to feel in the keenest man

most

ner the pain of the social inequalities and injustices that he found floating about in the world.

Herein, indeed, in his deep and at times almost painful appreciation of 1 There is a characteristic quotation from Arnold "As Matt says, the in one of Clough's letters. millennium will not come this bout." It is curious, however, that this sceptical remark with regard to the millennium was uttered just about the time when Arnold, according to his recently published letters, had limited the existence of the Established Church to five years.

the inequalities and unrealities of social existence is to be found the true key to Clough's work and character. A religious reformer, a religious enthusiast, he never could have been. With him these matters lay far too deep to be dragged into the dust and heat of the arena of controversy. He had his own way of regarding them, and it is in the exquisite sincerity and profound faith that possessed him that one of the noblest lessons of his life is to be found. The Spartan simplicity of his dealings with himself, his resolve to accept no idea or conviction merely because it was comfortable, is well illustrated in a letter written to his sister in 1848, just after he had resigned his fellowship:

It is far nobler [he says] to teach people to do what is good because it is good simply than for the sake of any future reward. It is, I dare say, difficult to keep up an equal religious feeling at present but it is not impossible, and is necessary. Besides, if we die and come to nothing, it does not therefore follow that life and goodness will cease to be in earth and heaven. If we give over dancing, it does not therefore follow that the dance ceases itself, or the music. Be satisfied, that whatever is good in us will be immortal; and as the parent is content to die in the consciousness of the child's survival even so, why not we? There's a creed which will suffice for the present.

pastoral," so human, so touching, so deep, so humorous. Was that inappropriate to the revelation he had been experiencing in his own life and surroundings? Not in the least. It is really the story of the development of an Oxford undergraduate into a social reformer-a reformer, too, who had the courage to entrust his own life and happiness to the principles which he had come to approve.1 Clough, in resigning his Oxford appointments, had stepped out of bondage into free air. and it is free air that blows through all the story of Philip Hewson and his wooing in the wilds of Rannoch. There is no need to tell the story; the story is one that can only be told in the poet's own language. Yet it is impossible not to feel the influence of the profound and enthusiastic social faith that gives the keynote to the whole, and equally impossible to doubt that it is the poet himself, who through the mediumship of another, is pouring out his own corvictions. Here is a comparison which is useful. Here, first of all, are six lines from one of the "Poems on Life and Duty:"

Go from the east to the west, as the sun and the stars direct thee,

Go with the girdle of man, go and encompass the earth.

Not for the gain of the gold, for the getting, the hoarding, the having,

But for the joy of the deed, but for the Duty to do.

tion and action,

A religious reformer or enthusiast Clough was not, and that is why those who expected to see his resignation, first of his tutorship and then of his fellowship, associated with the publication of some theological pamphlet were disappointed. Instead of this, what had they? They had "The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, that "long vacation

With the great girdle of God, go and encompass the earth! The enthusiasm of those lines, warm with the poet's deepest feeling and conviction, finds an echo in the impatience of the poet and radical, Philip Hewson, when his friend the tutor. "the grave man nicknamed Adam," had written to him urging the importance of “trusting in Providence," and abiding and

1 It is a tradition that Philip Hewson, the poet and Radical, was sketched from Thomas Arnold, Matthew Arnold's elder brother. But it seems impossible to avoid the conviction that here, too, as in the case of "Dipsychus" it is largely with Clough himself that we have to do.