Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861)

Arthur Hugh Clough, perhaps even more than Coventry Patmore, would make a great example if you were looking for a paradigm of the not-quite-top-rank Victorian poet. He was at Rugby under Dr Arnold and at Balliol with Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold, Frederick Temple and all the rest; he had Doubts that ruled him out of academic life; he became a civil servant in the Education office (like Matthew Arnold); he had one foot in North America; he even had some pretty robust feminist credentials, show more by the standards of the time - his sister and his daughter were both principals of Newnham, and he himself worked for years as unpaid secretary to Florence Nightingale (a relative of his wife's). He died of malaria whilst on a tour of Italy in 1861.

Clough even had his own Wordsworthian "bliss was it in that dawn" moments, being in Paris for the événements of 1848 and in Rome for those of 1849. The latter gave him the inspiration for Amours de Voyage.

Quite why Clough thought the world needed a romantic tragi-comedy framed as an epistolary novel in verse is not entirely clear, and Clough, notoriously shy of publishing his work, perhaps didn't really care what the world needed - in any case he kept it in a drawer for nine years before sending it off to a magazine. It's astonishingly low-key verse: apart from the passages in italics that top and tail the five cantos, Clough rigorously avoids any suggestion of high poetic style, sticking to very everyday and somewhat long-winded mid-Victorian English shoehorned cunningly into his free-running hexameters (usually a very difficult meter to get away with in English - for some reason we always feel more comfortable with an odd number of stresses). Clough is possibly the only serious poet ever to attempt to get away with using words like "superincumbent" and "juxtaposition" in metrical verse:
Well, I know there are thousands as pretty and hundreds as pleasant,
Girls by the dozen as good, and girls in abundance with polish
Higher and manners more perfect than Susan or Mary Trevellyn.
Well, I know, after all, it is only juxtaposition,—
Juxtaposition, in short; and what is juxtaposition?

Letters from a young man called Claude to his offstage friend Eustace(*) are interspersed with others between various English young ladies. Claude is holidaying in Rome in the spring of 1849, trying to devote himself to the study of classical antiquities and develop the proper protestant indignation at Catholic excesses, but he keeps getting distracted from his aesthetic pursuits by sex, in the shape of the young English Trevellyn sisters, and by politics, in the euphoria of the new anticlerical, anti-absolutist Roman Republic and the panic due to the approach of the French army on its way to put it down. His serious reflections on Roman art and architecture comically alternate with letters in which he pours his heart out to the long-suffering Eustace in a rather endearingly immature way - am I in love or just imagining it? should I not stay single and devote myself to art? but becoming a bachelor uncle can't be much fun, can it? am I just being snobbish because their daddy's a provincial banker? - and so on. And then he's suddenly brought down to earth by witnessing, with his guidebook still under his arm, a riot in which a priest believed to be an Austrian spy is killed by a republican mob.
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 with 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.

But it's not long before he's off again - his Mary has left town for the comparative safety of Florence, and he hurries to catch her up and explain that he wasn't being standoffish, just shy. But by the time he gets to Florence her party has moved on, and there's a comic and increasingly frenetic chase around Northern Italy, interspersed with the growingly depressing political news as the French and Austrians wipe out remaining pockets of political freedom...

A lovely little, very approachable Victorian period piece.

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(*) I'm sure this must be where P.G. Wodehouse got the names for Bertie Wooster's irresponsible cousins from! show less

A delightful example of Victorian narrative poetry, focused on the frustrated love affair of an English flaneur who finds himself in the middle of the Risorgimento in Rome. Claude is a close relative of other disappointed, dissatisfied and ultimate cowardly egotists that populate the XIX century in Europe (like Oneguin or Frederic Moreau). Clough is very adept at presenting Claude's numerous strategies of self-deceit, and the letters are more like monologues in the Browning mode. Canto 3 is show more particularly masterful, a series of philosophical musings that are slowly revealed as masks of Claude's guilt and remorse for not proposing to the girl he loves. The poem deserves to be better known, and the Persepone Books edition is excellent. show less

In 1849 Arthur Hugh Clough, an English poet, was in Rome during the Risorgimento when French forces came to the aid of the papacy against the revolution led by Garibaldi. While somewhat confined to his hotel, he wrote the Amours De Voyage. This epistolary poetic story chronicles the abortive wooing of a wealthy English merchant's daughter, Georgina Trevellyn, by a dithering aristocratic dilettante named Claude, whose letters to his friend Eustace, narrate his attraction and distraction. show more Clough satirizes the English abroad while glancingly sympathetic to the Italian revolutionary forces. An interesting peek into Victorians abroad, but nothing of great weight here.

"Talk of eternal ties and marriages made in heaven."

"But for his funeral train which the bridegroom sees in the distance,
Would he so joyfully, think you, fall in with the marriage procession?
But for that final discharge, would he dare to enlist in that service?
But for that certain release, ever sign to that perilous contract?
But for that exit secure, ever bend to that treacherous doorway? --
Ah but the bride, meantime, -- do you think that she sees it as he does?
But for the steady fore-sense of a freer and larger existence,
Think you that man could consent to be circumscribed here into action?
But for assurance within a limitless ocean divine, o'er
Whose great tranquil depths unconscious the wind-tost surface
Breaks into ripples of trouble that come and change and endure not, --
But that in this, of a truth, we have our being, and know it,
Think you we men could submit to live and move as we do here?
Ah, but the women, -- God bless them! they don't think at all about it."

Claude has such a lovely sensibility.... show less