Part 3

‘In the summer of 1842, while I was reading in a retired part of Wales with two or three others, Clough, then wandering through the Welsh mountains, one morning looked in on us. I took a walk with him, and he at once led me up Moël Wyn, the highest mountain within reach. Two things I remember that day: one, that he spoke a good deal (for him) of Dr. Arnold, whose death had happened only a few weeks before: another, that a storm came down upon the mountain when we were half-way up. In the midst of it we lay for some time close above a small mountain tarn, and watched the storm-wind working on the face of the lake, tearing and torturing the water into most fantastic, almost ghostly shapes, the like of which I never saw before or since. These mountain sights, though he did not say much, he used to eye most observantly.

‘Early in the autumn of 1843, Clough came to Grasmere to read with a Balliol reading party, of which I was one. He was with us about six weeks, I think staying till towards the end of September. This was his earliest long vacation party, all things on a smaller scale than his later ones by Loch Ness, or on Dee-side, but still very pleasant. He lived in a small lodging immediately to the west of Grasmere church; we in a farm-house on the lake. During these weeks I read the Greek tragedians with him, and did Latin prose. His manner of translating, especially the Greek choruses, was quite peculiar; a quaint archaic style of language, keeping rigidly to the Greek order of the words, and so bringing out their expression better, more forcibly and poetically, than any other translations I had heard. When work was done we used to walk in the afternoon with him all over that delightful country. His “eye to country” was wonderful. He knew the whole lie of the different dales relatively to each other; every tarn, beck, and bend in them. He used, if I remember right, to draw pen-and-ink maps, showing us the whole lineaments of the district. Without any obtrusive enthusiasm, but in his own quiet manly way, he seemed as if he never could get too much of it--never walk too far or too often over it. Bathing too formed one of his daily occupations up in a retired pool of the stream that afterwards becomes the Rotha, as it comes out of Easedale. One walk, our longest, was on a Saturday, up Easedale, over the Raise by Greenup, Borrowdale, Honister Crag, under the starlight, to Buttermere. In the small inn there we stayed all Sunday. Early on Monday morning we walked, by two mountain passes, to a farm at the head of Wastwater to breakfast. On the way we crossed Ennerdale, and up the pass close under the nearly perpendicular precipices of the Pillar--a tall mountain, which is the scene of Wordsworth’s pastoral of “The Brothers.” From the head of Wastwater, up past the great gorge of the Mickledoor, to the top of Scawfell, then down past the east side of Bowfell towards Langdale Pikes, and so home to Grasmere. As we passed under Bowfell a beautiful autumn afternoon, we lay a long time by the side of the lovely Angle Tarn. The sun, just before he sunk beside Bowfell, was showering down his light, which dimpled the smooth face of the tarn like heavy drops of sun-rain. Every now and then a slight breeze would come and scatter the rays broadcast over the little loch, as if some unseen hand was sowing it with golden grain. It was as memorable an appearance as that different one we had seen a year ago on Moël Wyn. These things, though Clough observed closely, and took pleasure in, he did not speak often about, much less indulge in raptures.

‘Some of our party were very good hill-men. One day, five or six in all set out on a race from our door by Grasmere Lake to the top of Fairfield. He was the second to reach the summit. His action uphill was peculiar; he used to lay himself forward almost horizontally towards the slope, and take very long strides which carried him quickly over the ground. Few men, so stout as he then was, could have matched him up a mountain.

‘Shortly after this time at Oxford, somewhere that is between 1843 and 1845, I remember to have heard him speak at a small debating society called the Decade, in which were discussed often graver subjects, and in a less popular way, than in the Union. Having been an unfrequent attender, I heard him only twice. But both times, what he said and the way he said it, were so marked and weighty as to have stuck to memory when almost everything else then spoken has been forgotten. The first time was in Oriel Common-room; the subject proposed--“That Tennyson was a greater poet than Wordsworth.” This was one of the earliest expressions of that popularity--since become nearly universal--which I remember. Clough spoke against the proposition, and stood up for Wordsworth’s greatness with singular wisdom and moderation. He granted fully that Wordsworth was often prosy, that whole pages of the “Excursion” had better have been written in prose; but still, when he was at his best, he was much greater than any other modern English poet, saying his best things without knowing they were so good, and then drawling on into prosaic tediousness, without being aware where the inspiration failed and the prose began. In this kind of unconsciousness, I think he said, lay much of his power. One of the only other times I heard him speak was, about the same time, when a meeting of the Decade was held in Balliol Common-room. The subject of debate was--“That the character of a gentleman was in the present day made too much of.” To understand the drift of this would require one to know how highly pleasant manners and a good exterior are rated in Oxford at all times, and to understand something of the peculiar mental atmosphere of Oxford at that time. Clough spoke neither for nor against the proposition; but for an hour and a half--well on two hours--he went into the origin of the ideal, historically tracing from mediæval times how much was implied originally in the notion of a “gentle knight”--truthfulness, consideration for others (even self-sacrifice), courtesy, and the power of giving outward expression to these moral qualities. From this high standard he traced the deterioration into the modern Brummagem pattern which gets the name. These truly gentlemen of old time had invented for themselves a whole economy of manners, which gave true expression to what was really in them, to the ideal in which they lived. These manners, true in them, became false when adopted traditionally and copied from without by modern men placed in quite different circumstances, and living different lives. When the same qualities are in the hearts of men now, as truly as in the best of old time, they will fashion for themselves a new expression, a new economy of manners suitable to their place and time. But many men now, wholly devoid of the inward reality, yet catching at the reputation of it, adopt these old traditional ways of speaking and of bearing themselves, though they express nothing that is really in them.

‘One expression I remember he used, to illustrate the truth that where the true gentle spirit exists, it will express itself in its own rather than in the traditional way. “I have known peasant men and women in the humblest places in whom dwelt these qualities as truly as they ever did in the best of lords and ladies, and who had invented for themselves a whole economy of manners to express them, who were very ‘poets of courtesy.’”

‘His manner of speaking was very characteristic, slow and deliberate, never attempting rhetorical flow, stopping at times to think the right thing, or to feel for the exactly fitting word, but with a depth of suggestiveness, a hold of reality, a poetry of thought, not found combined in any other Oxonian of our time.

‘It must have been in the autumn of 1845 that Clough and I first met in Scotland. One visit there to Walrond’s family at Calder Park I especially remember. On a fine morning early in September, we started from Calder Park to drive to the Falls of Clyde. We were to spend the day at Milton Lockhart, and go on to Lanark in the evening. Besides Walrond and Clough, there were T. Arnold, E. Arnold, and myself. It was one of the loveliest September mornings that ever shone, and the drive lay through one of the most lovely regions in south Scotland, known as “the Trough of Clyde.” The sky was bright blue, fleeced with whitest clouds. From Hamilton to Milton Lockhart, about ten miles, the road keeps down in the hollow of the trough, near the water, the banks covered with orchards, full of heavy-laden apple and other fruit trees bending down till they touched the yellow corn that grew among them. There is a succession of fine country houses, with lawns that slope towards lime trees that bend over the river. It was the first time any of us but Walrond had been that way, and in such a drive, under such a sky, you may believe we were happy enough. We reached Milton Lockhart, a beautiful place, built on a high grassy headland, beneath and round which winds the Clyde. Sir Walter Scott, I believe, chose the site, and none could be more beautifully chosen. It looks both ways, up and down the lovely vale.

‘As we drove up, near ten o’clock, we found the late Mr. J. G. Lockhart (Scott’s biographer) walking on the green terrace that looks over the river. The laird himself being from home, his brother was our host. Soon after we arrived, his daughter, then very young, afterwards Mrs. Hope Scott, came out on the terrace to say that breakfast was ready. After breakfast she sang, with great spirit and sweetness, several of her grandfather’s songs, copied into her mother’s books by herself, when they were still newly composed. After listening to these for some time, her brother, Walter Scott Lockhart, then a youth of nineteen or so, and with a great likeness to the portraits of Sir Walter when a young man, was our guide to an old castle, situated on a bank of one of the small glens that come down to the Clyde from the west. It was the original of Scott’s Tillietudlem in “Old Mortality.” A beautiful walk thither; the castle large, roofless and green with herbage and leafage. We stayed some time roaming over the green deserted place, then returned to a lunch, which was our dinner; more songs, and then drove off late in the afternoon to the Falls of Clyde and Lanark for the night. It was a pleasant day. Clough enjoyed it much in his own quiet way--quietly, yet so humanly interested in all he met. Many a joke he used to make about that day afterwards. Not he only, but all our entertainers of that day, Mr. J. G. Lockhart, his son and daughter, are now gone.

‘In the summer of 1847, Clough had a reading party at Drumnadrochet, in Glen Urquhart, about two miles north from Loch Ness, where, about the beginning of August, I, along with T. Arnold and Walrond, paid him a visit. Some of the incidents and characters in “The Bothie” were taken from that reading party, though its main scenes and incidents lay in Braemar. One anecdote I specially remember connected with that visit. On our way to Drumnadrochet, T. Arnold and I had made a solitary walk together from the west end of Loch Rannoch, up by Loch Ericht, one of the wildest, most unfrequented lochs in the Highlands. All day we saw only one house, till, late at night, we reached another on the side of the loch, about six miles from Dalwhinnie. It was one of the loveliest, most primitive places I ever saw even in the most out-of-the-way parts of the Highlands. We told Clough of it, and when his reading party was over, later in the autumn, he went on our track. He spent a night at the inn at the west end of Loch Rannoch, called Tighnalyne, where he met with some of the incidents which appeared in “The Bothie.” He also visited the house by the side of Loch Ericht, a small heather-thatched hut, occupied by one of the foresters of the Ben Aulder forest. He found one of the children lying sick of a fever, the father I think from home, and the mother without any medicines or other aid for her child. He immediately set off and walked to Fort William, about two days’ journey from the place, but the nearest place where medicines and other supplies were to be had. These he got at Fort William, and returned on his two days’ journey, and left them with the mother. He had four days’ walk, over a rough country, to bring medicines to this little child, and the people did not even know his name. On these occasions in Scotland, he told me that he used to tell the people he was a “Teacher,” and they were at once at ease with him then. I doubt whether he ever mentioned this to any one but myself, and to me it only came out casually.

‘If I am not mistaken, it was from this place that he took the original name of what is now Tober-na-Vuolich. In this year he visited the West Highlands, and went through “Lochaber, anon in Locheil, in Knoydart, Moydart, Morrer, Ardgower, and Ardnamurchan.” In the first edition this line was--“Knoydart, Moydart, Croydart, Morrer, and Ardnamurchan.” But he discovered afterwards that Croydart was only the way that the Gael pronounce what is spelt Knoydart. During this wander he saw all the country about Ben Nevis, westward to the Atlantic--

‘Where the great peaks look abroad over Skye to the westermost Islands.

He walked “where pines are grand in Glen-Mally,” and saw all the country which in a few lines here and there he has pictured so powerfully in “The Bothie.” The expression about Ben Nevis, with the morning sprinkling of snow on his shoulders, is absolutely true to reality.

‘In this expedition he came to Glenfinnan, at the head of Loch Shiel, the place where Prince Charles met the Highland clans, and unfurled his standard. Here there used to stand a nice quiet little-frequented inn, where one could live for weeks undisturbed. But at the time when Clough reached it, a great gathering was being held there. The Queen had gone to Loch Laggan, and the ships that escorted her to Fort William were lying at the head of Loch Linnhe. McDonald of Glen Aladale had invited all the officers of these ships to have a day’s deer-stalking on his property of Glen Aladale, down the side of Loch Shiel, and to have a ball at the Glenfinnan Inn after their day’s sport. Clough came in for the ball. It was a strange gathering--the English sailors, officers, a few Highland lairds, Highland farmers and shepherds, with their wives and daughters, were all met altogether at the ball. Clough and one of his reading party were invited to join the dance, and they danced Highland reels, and went through all the festivities like natives. The uproar was immense, and the ludicrous scenes not few. He often used to speak of it afterwards, as one of the motliest, drollest gatherings he had ever fallen in with.

‘Often afterwards he used to speak of his Scotch adventures with great heartiness. There was much in the ways of life he saw there that suited the simplicity of his nature. Even when Englishmen would laugh at the baldness of our Presbyterian services, he would defend them as better than English ritualism and formality.’

To these reminiscences of Principal Shairp’s may be added some notes supplied by Professor Conington, of his recollections of the speeches made by Clough in the debates of a society at Oxford, called the Decade. Mr. Conington was himself the secretary of the society at the time of which he speaks. ‘The first occasion of my meeting Mr. Clough at the Decade,’ he says, ‘was on February 14, 1846, when I myself brought forward the subject for discussion. The subject was--“That means ought to be adopted by the Legislature for recognising formally the social and political importance of the manufacturing interest.” Sir Robert Peel’s change of policy about the corn laws had just been announced, and those of us who were on the movement side were naturally more or less enthusiastic in favour of the manufacturers, who appeared to us as the winners of a great social victory. My proposal, if I remember rightly, was to the effect that they ought to be made peers, just as great landowners were. In this the bulk of the members present at that meeting do not seem to have concurred with me; but I had Mr. Clough’s support. I do not recollect thoroughly a single sentence of his speech, but I can recall his commanding manner, and the stately serene tones in which he delivered a kind of prophecy of the new era which in a few days was to be inaugurated, and told us that “these men” (the manufacturers) “were the real rulers of England.” The next occasion was some months afterwards, on June 9, 1846, when the question for debate was--“That any system of moral science, distinct from a consideration of Christianity, is essentially imperfect.” Mr. Clough is reported as having spoken for this motion in part. He eventually moved a rider, which, with the motion, was unanimously accepted--“But the existence of moral science is recognised and presupposed by the idea of a revelation.” The only point which remains on my mind is an application by him of the text “comparing spiritual things with spiritual;” “that is,” said he, “comparing the spiritual things in a revelation with the spiritual things in one’s own mind.”

‘I see there were five other occasions, in 1847 and the early part of 1848, on which Mr. Clough appeared at the Decade during my membership. One dwells in my memory with tolerable distinctness--a speech made in a debate on March 6, 1847, the subject being--“That the study of philosophy is more important for the formation of opinion than that of history.” I see that he made five speeches on that evening. I have entered him as supporting the motion “with qualifications,” a common mode of registering opinion in our debates: but I remember that, as the debate grew warm, his qualifications seemed to disappear, and in the speech which I happen to recollect, few if any of them were visible. “What is it to me,” he said, “to know the fact of the battle of Marathon, or the fact of the existence of Cromwell? I have it all within me.” Correcting himself afterwards, he said, “I do not mean that it is of no importance to me that there should have been such a battle or such a person; it is of a great deal: but it is of no importance that I should know it.”

‘The only other occasion when I recollect anything of Mr. Clough which seems worth recording was a conversation which I had with him in the autumn of 1848. He had given up his fellowship, and was living for a few weeks in small cheap lodgings in Holywell Street, Oxford, where I remember finding him without a fire on a cold day. His “Bothie” was just about to be published, and he gave me some account of it, particularly of the metre. He repeated, in his melodious way, several lines, intended to show me how a verse might be read so that one syllable should take up the time of two, or, conversely, two of one. The line which he instanced (altered, I think, from “Evangeline”) was this:--

White | naked | feet on the | gleaming | floor of her | chamber.

This was new to me, as I had not risen beyond the common notion of spondees, dactyls, and the rest. So I asked for more explanation. He bade me scan the first line of the “Paradise Lost.” I began, “‘Of man’s:’ iambus.” “Yes.” “‘First dis-’”----There I was puzzled. It did not seem an iambus or a spondee: it was nearly a trochee, but not quite one. He then explained to me his conception of the rhythm. The two feet “first disobe-” took up the time of four syllables, two iambic feet: the voice rested awhile on the word “first,” then passed swiftly over “diso-,” then rested again on “be-,” so as to recover the previous hurry. I think he went on to explain that in the next foot, “dience and,” both syllables were short, but that the loss of time was made up for by the pause required by the sense after the former of the two, and that finally the voice rested on the full-sounded word “fruit.” Possibly this last impression may really be the result of my own subsequent use of the clue which he then gave me. But a clue it was in the fullest sense of the term: it gave me an insight into rhythm which I had not before, and which has constantly been my guide since both in reading and writing.’

In June 1842 occurred the death of Dr. Arnold, which was a severe shock as well as a great grief to Clough from its suddenness as well as from the intense reverence and affection he felt for him. ‘He was for a long time more than a father to me,’ were his own words, and no doubt the sensitive boy, exiled from his own family in his childhood, clung with even more of filial feeling than is common to the teacher to whom he owed so much. He heard the news at Oxford, and came home immediately, seeming, as his sister describes him, completely stunned by the blow, incapable of realising or speaking of what had happened, and unable to rest. He soon left home, and wandered away among the Welsh hills, where Mr. Shairp tells us of their meeting.

Later in the summer he had some pupils in Ireland, but left them to come over to bid farewell to his brother George, who sailed for America in October 1842. He was deeply attached to this his youngest brother, whose lively spirits combined with most affectionate devotion to him had done a great deal to cheer him even in his darkest moments. And this was, as it proved, their last meeting. The poor young fellow, only just twenty-two, was struck down by fever at Charleston, when away from all his own family, and died there, after a very few days’ illness. His father had sailed for America, intending to join him, before the news of his illness reached England, and arrived in Boston only to hear that all was over. The shock was a dreadful one to the unhappy father, and came with a double force, because he relied on his son’s help at this moment in a period of great anxiety concerning business. He never recovered the blow, and in the following summer, in 1843, he returned home much shaken by grief and very ill in health, and after lingering on for a few months, during which time he was most tenderly nursed by all his family, including Arthur, he also died.

During his father’s illness, and the years that immediately followed, Arthur spent much of his time with his own family; and when he was away from them, he always took an active part in all plans and arrangements for their comfort and happiness. He had never become estranged in any way from his home, as is often the case with sons and brothers whose calling separates them from their families. Essentially tender and domestic in his feelings, and full of consideration for others, it always seemed natural to him to enter into their interests, and to undertake trouble and responsibility for their sakes.