2 - A Man Killed: The Thought of History

Summary

WHAT

What! …

Armies … bleed; cities burn…

…

What!…

… die mistaken …?

(The Bothie)

What! shall the nation wait?

('Dipsychus Continued’)

For Clough, the thought of history always comes as something of a shock; we live, he insists, ‘amid the shocks of time’. Bleeding armies, burning cities, and waiting nations thus provoke not a questioning ‘What?’ but the exclamatory ‘What!’ Customarily, the word ‘what’ ushers in a question, most famously the philosopher's question ‘What is?’ - for example, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (Immanuel Kant), ‘What is Literature? (Jean-Paul Sartre) and, indeed, ‘What is History?’ (E. H. Carr). In Clough, the word ‘what’ does the very different, almost anti-philosophical work of exclamation. Tolstoy writes about the ‘question of history’ and Marx ‘the riddle of history’, but in Clough, who saw history for himself - first in revolutionary Paris and then in besieged Rome - history has little or nothing to do with the philosophical world of question and answer, riddle and solution.

This makes Clough very unusual in early-Victorian England, a culture that thought of itself as part of ‘the enquiring age’ in which the central enquiry was, to quote Carlyle, ‘Whence came it, and Why and How?’ If Reason was the master term for the mid-eighteenth century, and Imagination was central for the Romantics, for the early Victorians it was History that was beginning to take centre stage - for many, it was fast becoming the form of knowledge, the way to interrogate the world. Writing in 1830, Carlyle declares that ‘all learners, all enquiring minds of every order, are gathered round … [History's] footstool’. his view was echoed by one who sat on that footstool - namely, Clough's headmaster Thomas Arnold who, from 1841, sat upon the Regius Chair of History at Oxford, a post that in itself reflects the gradual emergence of History as part of establishment culture. Soon histories seem to be everywhere; in the late fifties Clough's letters refer to a whole number of histories - from Froude's History of England, through Carlyle's Frederick the Great, to Buckle's History of Civilisation. For Clough, though, history is not so much established as disestablished, if only because it has so little to do with civilization.