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The Bearing of Science on the Thought of Arthur Hugh Clough

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Francis W. Palmer
Francis W. Palmer*
Affiliation:
Kansas Wesleyan University
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Extract

Arthur Hugh Clough died at the age of forty-two just two years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. The main body of his slender volume of work was done by 1859, and it is barely probable that he knew Darwin's epoch-making study or had even heard of it. But Darwin, one must remember, climaxed a period of continuing scientific research on the results of which speculation had abundantly fed. Clough's adult years coincided with the last twenty years or so of this period. Such circumstances as the appearance of Lyell's Principles of Geology or the impact on English religious thinking of Strauss and German higher criticism, on the one hand, and the emergence of the Oxford Movement with its appeal to the principle of authority, on the other, could not but evoke from sensitive and thoughtful minds some significant response. In the period that produced Tennyson's In Memoriam, Clough's response was equally or more significant. Though their inward struggles were not unlike, the resolution for Clough differs sufficiently from Tennyson's to repay careful study of his thought. I fancy that of the two Clough's mind and the upshot of his speculation are the more congenial to the twentieth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , March 1944 , pp. 212 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1944

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References

Note 1 in page 212 Clough's poems, letters, and essays are available in several editions. References hereafter to other than the Poems (London, 1895), and Prose Remains, ed. by his wife (London, 1888), are specifically indicated. With exceptions noted, letters are from the Prose Remains, henceforth designated by the initials P. R.

Note 2 in page 212 Darwin's Origin of Species appeared in 1859; the prospectus of Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy in 1860. Clough died in 1861. Spencer records in his Autobiography (New York, 1904), ii, 70–71, having seen a good deal of Clough during September, 1860, and having “already seen a little of him previously in London.” Clough at the time was started on a futile search to regain his broken health and “took little share in general conversation.” Recent loss of his mother may sufficiently account for his reticence. I find no indication that Clough knew Darwin at all.

Note 3 in page 212 Significant recent studies of Clough include: James Insley Osborne, Arthur Hugh Clough (London, 1919) ; Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. H. F. Lowry (London and New York, 1932); and Goldie Levy, Arthur Hugh Clough (London, 1938). My own reading having led to significant divergencies of interpretation, I offer this study as a contribution toward a juster appreciation of the poet. The consensus of criticism since Clough's death has erred in overemphasizing his doubt and consequently making him out a failure.

Note 4 in page 213 P. R., p. 57.

Note 5 in page 213 Emerson-Clough Letters, ed. H. F. Lowry and R. L. Rusk (Cleveland, 1934), Letter 30, dated March 23, 1857. The lectures to which Clough referred were on Fossil Mammalia and Conservation of Forces.

Note 6 in page 213 “Dipsychus,” Poems, p. 152.

Note 7 in page 213 “Seven Sonnets on the Thought of Death,” ibid., p. 322.

Note 8 in page 213 Vide John Stuart Mill, System of Logic (New York, 1873), p. 219 et al.

Note 9 in page 213 Letter to J. P. Gell, Oct. 8, 1843.

Note 10 in page 213 Letter to Charles E. Norton, Feb. 20, 1854.

Note 11 in page 213 “Development of English Literature,” P. R., pp. 347–348.

Note 12 in page 214 Ibid., p. 348.

Note 13 in page 214 Vide V. F. Storr, The Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1913), pp. 81 ff., for enlargement of this point.

Note 14 in page 214 Vide Arthur P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Dr. Arnold (New York, 1899), passim.

Note 15 in page 214 P. R., p. 15: Mrs. Clough's Memoir.

Note 16 in page 214 Dated 1839, ibid., p. 85. The parenthesis refers to William G. Ward.

Note 17 in page 214 Newman's Apologia (London, 1918), p. 288: “Liberalism [is] false liberty of thought . . . the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the external authority of the Divine Word.“

Note 18 in page 214 Ibid., p. 93: “. . . we were upholding that primitive Christianity which was delivered for all time by the early teachers of the Church, and which was registered and attested in the Anglican formularies and by the Anglican divines.” He would return “not to the sixteenth century, but to the seventeenth.“

Note 19 in page 214 Letter to J. P. Gell, November 25, 1844.

Note 20 in page 215 Letter to his sister, May, 1847.

Note 21 in page 215 “Review of Mr. Newman's ‘The Soul’,” Poems and Prose Remains (London, 1869), i, 303.

Note 22 in page 215 “Dipsychus,” Poems, p. 152.

Note 23 in page 215 It is true that Newman tried to justify doctrinal innovations in the Catholic Church by the theory of development, which he expresses in biological terms, and thus to reconcile religious and scientific thought. [An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London, 1846), esp. Chs. i and ii.] But by invoking the dogma of papal infallibility to determine the true course of growth, he employs a product of the development to exercise a function that could only be accomplished by an agency external to the process. Newman came to see, after he entered the Roman church, that the two ideas are incompatible, and abandoned the attempt. In many ways his essay remains, nevertheless, a lucid and highly suggestive study.

Note 24 in page 215 Clough refers specifically to Goethe, Schiller, Niebuhr, Kant, and Strauss.—As early as 1839, at the age of 20, he was reading German literature in the original. Letter to J. N. Simpkinson, December 21, 1839.

Note 25 in page 216 “Review of Some Modern Poems,” P. R., pp. 371–372.

Note 26 in page 216 Letter to J. P. Gell, May 2, 1839.

Note 27 in page 216 Idem, May 8, 1838.

Note 28 in page 216 Strauss's Leben Jesu appeared in 1835, but was not translated into English in a popular edition until 1845. I think it highly probable that Clough read it in the original German. Thomas Arnold, “Arthur Hugh Clough: A Sketch,” Nineteenth Century, xxiii (January, 1898), 105, recalls: “He became acquainted after coming into residence at Oxford with the writings of the Tübingen school, and seems to have held that the mythical theory of Strauss, and the New Testament chronology of Baur, were alike unanswerable. But on the spiritual side his Christianity was not so easily shaken.“

Note 29 in page 216 Stanley writes (op. cit., i, 53) : “In the study of this work, which was the first German book he ever read, and for the sake of reading which he had learned that language, a new intellectual world dawned upon him, not only in the subject to which it related, but in the disclosure to him of the depth and research of German literature.” On the other hand, Arnold was apparently averse to examining the New Testament in the same spirit as Strauss had done. Witness Arnold's letter to Thomas Burbidge, October 2, 1839.

Note 30 in page 217 Poems, pp. 189–190.—The poem ends significantly:

O blest, unless 'tis proved by fact
A dream impossible to act.

Note 31 in page 217 Quoted by Storr, op. cit., p. 177.

Note 32 in page 217 Cf. Edward Berdoe, “Browning as a Scientific Poet,” Browning Society's Papers, xxx; Lionel Stevenson, Darwin among the Poets (Chicago, 1932); Joseph Warren Beach, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (New York, 1936), Chs. xv and xvi; and Tennyson's In Memoriam, esp. liv–lvi, cxviii, cxx, cxxiii.

Note 33 in page 218 Osbome, op. cit., p. 153.

Note 34 in page 218 Poems, p. 262.

Note 35 in page 219 Italics are mine.

Note 36 in page 219 Beach, op. cit., p. 330 et al.

Note 37 in page 219 Aids to Reflection, in Works (New York, 1853), i, 180–181.

Note 38 in page 219 An allusion in Dipsychus to the mécanique céleste indicates that Clough knew something of Laplace's nebular hypothesis; but direct clues to the sources of Clough's knowledge about the theory of biological development have so far escaped me, despite close study of dough's own work and extensive reading in the literature about him.

Note 39 in page 220 Principles of Geology, 2 vols., 1st American, from the 5th London edition (Philadelphia, 1837). Although Lyell opposed the theory of mutability of species for a long time, in his Antiquity of Man (London, 1863) he agrees substantially with Darwin, maintaining, however, that the Creative Power proceeds by secondary causes. But Darwin himself makes the same distinction between the Creator (or First Cause) and secondary (i.e., natural) causes. [Origin of Species, Modern Library ed. (New York, n.d.), p. 373.] Lyell's change of view, exemplary at every stage of the noblest open-mindedness, offers an instructive chapter in the great volume of the history of human thought.

Note 40 in page 220 As in the seventeenth century Mosaic cosmography was for many an insuperable obstacle to acceptance of the new astronomy, so in the nineteenth century new scientific ideas made headway with difficulty against the inertia of preconceived and stubbornly held opinions based on Mosaic chronology. As Lyell observed, so long as physiologists supposed man to have existed on earth not above six thousand years (as he himself apparently had held in 1830), “they might, with good reason, withhold their assent from the doctrine of a unity of origin of so many distinct races“; but the difficulty of maintaining a single origin for mankind diminishes in proportion as the probable time of origin is removed. Lyell's research in the Antiquity of Man undergirds the theory of unity of origin. When independent creation of the races of mankind was no longer a tenable theory, the last stronghold against the “arguments of the transmutationists” had been yielded. The only alternative to accepting the new theory was to make a stand on the doctrine of independent creation. (Antiquity of Man, pp. 386–388.)

Note 41 in page 221 In a letter to Furnivall, October 11, 1881, Browning wrote: “. . . all that seems proved in Darwin's scheme was a conception familiar to me from the beginning : see in Paracelsus the progressive development from senseless matter to organized, until man's appearance.” —Letters, ed. Thurman L. Hood..

Note 42 in page 221 “Review of Mr. Newman's ‘The Soul’,” P. R., 1869 ed., i, 293.

Note 43 in page 221 Letter to his sister, May, 1847.

Note 44 in page 221 Poems, p. 95.

Note 45 in page 221 Letter to his sister, May, 1847.

Note 46 in page 222 Idem.

Note 47 in page 222 “Notes on the Religious Tradition,” P. R., p. 416.

Note 48 in page 222 Ibid.

Note 49 in page 223 Ibid., p. 418.

Note 50 in page 223 “Review of Mr. Newman's ‘The Soul’,” P. R., 1869 ed., i, 302.

Note 51 in page 223 Letter to——–, March, 1852; April 3, 18S2, P. R., p. 181.

Note 52 in page 223 Frederic I. Carpenter, Introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Men of . Letters series), p. xxv; “Transcendentalism . . . denied the ‘personality’ of God altogether, speaking of God as an impersonal force, which operated by means of ‘the moral law.’ In abandoning the personal conception of God, it accepted the findings of contemporary science and idealistic philosophy, basing its belief in God on the fact that the world was governed by law.” The term transcendentalism indicated “that beyond or ‘transcending’ the natural law a human or spiritual truth might be discerned.“

Note 53 in page 223 Job xi. 7.

Note 54 in page 223 Poems, p. 86.

Note 55 in page 224 “Qui Laborat Orat,” ibid., p. 85.

Note 56 in page 224 Letters to——–, March, 1852; Feb. 9, 1853, P. R., pp. 180, 202.

Note 57 in page 224 “Notes on the Religious Tradition,” ibid., pp. 416–417.

Note 58 in page 224 Poems, p. 87.

Note 59 in page 225 Letter to the Rev.———, January 4, 1849, P. R., p. 141.

Note 60 in page 225 Letters to Rev. J. P. Gell, October 8, 1843; J. C. Shairp, March 16, 1848; his sister, November 18, 1848.

Note 61 in page 225 Letter to Emerson, February 10, 1849, P. R., p. 140.

Note 62 in page 225 Letter to J. P. Gell, 1838, ibid., p. 81.

Note 63 in page 225 Idem, November 25, 1844, ibid., p. 97.

Note 64 in page 225 A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. James A. H. Murray (Oxford, 1888), i, ii, 1117.

Note 66 in page 225 P. R., p. 120.—Hampden, a liberal in theology, uncompromisingly opposed the principles of tradition and church authority which the Tractarians championed. When he was made Regius Professor at Oxford in 1836 and later when he was nominated to the see of Hereford in 1848, they consequently pilloried him for his heterodoxical views.

Note 66 in page 225 Essay on Heine.