amours de voyage analysis

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23 Arthur Hugh Clough: The Reception and Conception of Amours de Voyage

Adam Phillips is an author, a psychoanalyst in private practice in London, and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the author of several books, including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (1994), The Beast in the Nursery (1998), On Balance (2011), and Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012).

• Published: 16 December 2013
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This article analyzes Arthur Hugh Clough’s poem, Amours de Voyage (1858). The poem is about the value of value—a theme that links the Victorians with the so-called great modernists. It tells a story of thwarted commitments, of a failed love affair between Claude and Mary Trevellyn, and of Claude’s unplanned witnessing of the failed defence by Mazzini and Garibaldi of a new Roman republic. It is a poem about the hero’s inconclusive attempts to love, to be politically engaged, and to be ‘open’ to what is going on around and inside him; but it also houses a more radical uncertainty about what it would be to change, and to change for the better.

Where are the great whom thou would’st wish should praise thee? Arthur Hugh Clough, Dipsychus and the Spirit   1

There is a consensus among critics of the last century that Clough is a poet consistently underrated and insistently misplaced. He is a greater poet than we have been able to acknowledge, and more a modern (or even modernist) poet than we take him to be. And it has been around Amours de Voyage —a contentious work from its initial publication in the Atlantic Monthly of February-May 1858—that the claims have been made. ‘To speak of Clough’s modernity’, Barbara Hardy wrote, ‘is understandable but misleading. Perhaps no other Victorian writer is so visibly imprisoned in his Victorianism’. 2 Hardy overstates the case as though the case won’t be properly made both for Clough as sufficiently confined, and for Clough as a man of his time. And there may be forms of imprisonment that force a broaching of the future. Isobel Armstrong sees Clough, and particularly Amours de Voyage , as both a sign of the times and of the times to come. Once again, as in the poem itself—which is so concerned to distinguish the imprisonings that are self-imprisonings from the imprisonings that are not—openness is the issue. ‘ Amours de Voyage ’, she writes, ‘approaches the condition of a modernist poem, a self-reflexive poem without closure, dwelling on its self-reflexivity. It has often been compared in this respect with T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. ’ 3 We are being warned that Clough’s apparent modernity helps and hinders our reading, that the poet and the hero of his poem are caught in something—are in some way stuck as representative men of their time, or of our time—and that we are likely to get the poetry wrong if we don’t read it as resolutely mid-Victorian and ineluctably modernist.

If what Philip Davis calls Clough’s ‘strange new realism’—‘By a strange new realism, the poetry reproduces, with honest unease, a disorientating sense of incongruously confused categories and languages and voices’ 4 —makes Amours de Voyage sound rather more like The Waste Land than Empedocles on Etna or Maud , it is because the poem seems to have been clarified by modernist poetics rather more than by the poetry (and the criticism) of its own time, as though it is a poem that has made more sense as time has gone on. And yet this has at once relegated its status, and relegated it to the status of influential precursor. ‘Clough has been given a good deal of attention in recent years’, John Goode wrote in what is still the best essay on the poem, ‘ but most of it seems to be of the wrong kind…if Clough does foreshadow Eliot…this really entitles him to no more than a paragraph in a history of Eng. Lit’. 5 All good roads lead to Eliot, which is one way of diminishing Amours de Voyage (and not only Amours de Voyage ), and one of Eliot’s contributions to the history of Eng. Lit. was famously to diminish the Victorians. The Victorian nineteenth century, Eliot wrote in a grand, dismissive sweep, ‘was a time busy in keeping up to date. It had, for the most part, no hold on permanent truths about man and God, and life and death’. 6 Leavis was to be the academic consolidator of Eliot’s charge that the ‘Victorian poetic tradition’ was nugatory (‘It was Mr Eliot who made us fully conscious’, Leavis wrote, ‘of the weakness of that tradition’). 7 If Amours de Voyage has been, as Goode intimates, one of the casualties of what became a certain Lit. Crit. orthodoxy, it is also very much a poem about the difficulty of making claims, of knowing what to value and how to value it, of what the whole process of evaluation involves us in, and reveals us as. Which is why its reception—the language in which it has been redescribed and revalued—is peculiarly important.

When evaluation, and especially the self-evaluation of its hero, are a poem’s abiding preoccupations—and Amours de Voyage is a series of inconclusive self-evaluations by Claude, the sound of whose name intimates someone being got at—the reader veers between being an antagonist and an accomplice (as one does with oneself). We need to take to heart, in other words, Clough’s epigraphs to Amours de Voyage , and perhaps particularly the first one from Twelfth Night , ‘Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio / And taste with a distempered appetite’. 8 One can be sick of self-love in two senses, and one sense can entail the other. Claude is sick of the way he loves himself—which seems to preclude loving anything and anybody else, and, indeed, of loving some of the things that might matter to him most—and sick because he loves himself. And what is being intimated is that something was wrong with the way contemporary people valued themselves—both with what they chose to value about themselves, and how they did it, how they cultivated and enacted such value as they had. This, as the letters and the biographical information we have confirm, seems to have been the abiding preoccupation of Clough’s adult life. In Amours de Voyage, Clough dramatizes the bathos and pathos of (modern) self-doubt; of the self imprisoned by the way it evaluates itself; of self-doubt as a kind of passionate and enervating self-love. The OED ’s first cited instances in the language for ‘bearableness’, ‘be-maddening’, and ‘untraitored’ are in Clough’s poetry (as are ‘busy-ish’ and ‘poeticism’, not unrelated to the narcissism of distraction). Claude can only be a modern master of defeatedness by finding ways of never quite knowing what matters to him.

Amours de Voyage is a poem about what became known as the value of value—a theme, so to speak, that links the Victorians with the so-called great modernists. And there is a paradoxical sense in which the claims made for the poem, both for and against, are of a piece with the preoccupations the poem explores. It is a poem, all of its critics insist in their different ways, that we are likely to get wrong, both as to its genealogy and its value. Indeed, the relationship between genealogy and value emerging in the nineteenth century was encountered as an essential perplexity. ‘The claim that must be made for Amours de Voyage ’, Goode suggests, ‘is not just that it is a masterpiece, but a major masterpiece…the major masterpiece of high Victorian poetry’. 9 When masterpieces have to be distinguished from major masterpieces, and major masterpieces distinguished from the major masterpiece, evaluation has become fraught.

We can place the writing of Amours de Voyage with some historical accuracy—the poem was begun in 1849 and worked on intermittently until its publication in 1858—but it has been, as we can see, a poem otherwise notoriously difficult to place. And this was also true for its contemporary readers and reviewers, and especially for Clough’s friends, friendship having been the mainstay of Clough’s life until his late marriage in 1854 (‘Clough’, Palgrave wrote in a memoir of his friend, ‘might be said not so much to trust his friends, as to trust himself to them’). 10 When his friends were not despairing—‘I would cast it behind me and the spirit from which it emanates’, Clough’s friend John Shairp wrote to him, ‘and to higher, more healthful, more hopeful things purely aspire…on the whole I regard Les Amours as your nature ridding itself of long-gathered bile’ 11 —they were baffled and dismayed. And yet in their misgivings they are strikingly engaged in the poem even when they are not engaged by it. As though it was the effect of the poem to inspire pertinent doubt in its readers, doubt about what became known as the foundations of knowledge and belief, in which it is newly assumed that nothing is but naming makes it so, or as Claude writes, in ironic allusion, ‘that which I name them they are’ (I. vii). As though convictions are replaced by impressions, and appearances can only be compared with each other, and not with anything beneath them or beyond them. In a straightforward unrhymed couplet—about how shadows no longer have anything to rhyme with—Claude makes an ordinary language dismissal of Platonism and Christianity: ‘What our shadows seem, forsooth, we will ourselves be. / Do I look like that? you think me that: then I AM that’ (I. iv). ‘Forsooth’, for the Victorians an antiquated term, a faux medievalism, is an affectation about speaking truly. The correspondence theory of truth, in which words are suited to reality, is the first casualty of this poem that takes the form of a correspondence. But the astounding verbal precision of this poem about failure, narrated by someone who, in his own words, has ‘always failed’ (I. xi), failed two of Clough’s closest friends, Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the most revealing of ways. For both men the poem lacked substance.

Arnold was famously dismissive of Amours de Voyage in a letter to Clough, though his misgivings about Clough’s poem were only known, of course, after the publication in 1932 of The Letters of Mathew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough . ‘We will not discuss what is past anymore’, Arnold writes, ‘as to the Italian poem, if I forbore to comment it was that I had nothing special to say—what is to be said when a thing does not suit you—suiting and not suiting is a subjective affair and only time determines, by the colour a thing takes with years, whether it ought to have suited or no’. 12 How long does it take before we know whether we value something? We know things and people can come, in time, to matter to us, but how can we include this acknowledgement in our judgements? This is worth wondering about, and worth wondering about a poem so troubled by deferral as at once a necessity, an alibi, and a failing. Being unengaged is recognition of a kind—to disidentify with something (or someone) is to have first identified something—but what Arnold doesn’t have to say about ‘the Italian poem’ is remarkable in the eloquence of its equivocations. We do not know now what the past is that Arnold doesn’t want to discuss in the letter, but we do know just how much being in Rome makes Claude wonder what about the past is worth discussing, and what we might be doing by discussing the past—what Nietzsche was to call in the 1870s the question of ‘History in the service and the disservice of life’, 13 and what Claude poses as a slightly camp demand, ‘Utter, O someone, the word that will reconcile ancient and modern’ (I. x). As Clough and Arnold as accomplished classicists would know, the ‘calling together’ of ancient and modern that is the Latin origin of ‘reconcile’ was not going to be the work of a word, or the Word.

The poem is not in Italian—‘the Italian poem’—and you can’t help but hear the bore in Arnold’s ‘forbore’. It is, though, very much a poem about Italy and what Italy, and especially Rome and Roman republicanism, had become to the English by the mid-nineteenth century. ‘If I forbore to comment’ keeps Arnold’s options open—and he does go on to comment—but to forbore is to ‘tolerate, endure…do without…to part with or from…to avoid, shun…abstain or desist from’( OED ), and these are the very things that Claude, the hero of the poem, does both to Rome and to the woman he desires, and indeed to his own desires. And then there is the reiterated ‘suiting’, a word Arnold picks up, wittingly or unwittingly, from the beginning and the end of Clough’s poem. In the first section of the first canto Claude sets what will become the distinctive tone of the poem, and of his own voice within it: ‘Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand but / Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it’ (I. i). Amours de Voyage is a poem in which nothing really works for Claude (it ‘seems’ the word but it may not be; and suits have seams that hold them together). But finding the word that suits at least reveals why Rome doesn’t suit him. Clough is interested, among many other things, in how it might suit Claude to see Rome as ‘rubbishy’—full of the rubbish of the past, full of the least beautiful things that need to be got rid of—and why Rome doesn’t suit him, and won’t. ‘Rome will not suit me’, Claude begins his last letter in the poem, ‘…the priests and soldiers possess it’ (V. x). Whether things and people are defined by who possesses them will also exercise Claude—as will the cumulative disappointment he is heir to as Amours de Voyage becomes an elegy for the modern self’s quest for an accuracy about itself. That exacting modern self-consciousness seems to produce no more than a vaunted sense of failure, one that is endlessly ashamed of feeling such shame. ‘I am ashamed my own self’ (I. xi), Claude declares, and the odd syntax breathes shock and disbelief. Rome, that will all too briefly liberate Claude—‘for the first time in life I am living and moving with freedom’ (I. xi)—will expose his shamefully inadequate sense of who he is, and what he might be capable of wanting. It is pointedly not his life he refers to but life, and the wording suggests that living with freedom—as an idea in one’s mind?—is not enough. One must move with it as well.

Rome ‘not suiting’ more obliquely refers also, at least for contemporary readers of the poem, to the Oxford Movement that Clough flirted briefly with at Oxford, and to Newman’s ultimately finding that Roman Catholicism suited him. Once again in this context, the word is used, allusively, to ironize certain gravities. Claude, like his author it seems, is a character for whom conversion, to anything, would be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. When, in 1842, Clough had to subscribe to the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England in order to take up his fellowship at Oriel (where Newman was one of his colleagues) he wrote to his friend John Gell, ‘It is not so much from any objection to this or that point as general dislike to [sic] subscription and strong feeling of its being after all…a bondage and a very heavy one, and one that may cramp one and cripple one for life’. 14 In the 1840s Clough was progressively subscribing to the idea that he must not subscribe to anything or to anyone, and to wondering what kind of success this might be, and what kind of failure. If the moral (and professional) life organizes itself around states of conviction, and states of conviction are a bondage, a cramping and a crippling for life, what kind of violence or violation is belief, religious or otherwise? Amours de Voyage , that is to say, is a mid-nineteenth century poem with what turned out to be startlingly modern preoccupations. Is some form of belief to be found, or is what William James called the will to believe itself the problem? Amours de Voyage was to be a poem vexed by subscription and its terrors—subscription that is itself a form of writing that is also a form of commitment, a self-declaration that is also a form of assent.

The poem tells a story of thwarted commitments, of a failed love affair between Claude and Mary Trevellyn, and of Claude’s unplanned witnessing of the failed defence by Mazzini and Garibaldi of a new Roman republic. It is very much about the difficulty Claude has in finding or knowing what suits him—socially or politically, as a tourist or as a lover—and of being able to act on such knowledge (whether the words suit the things, and whether the words and the things suit the people). Claude is the suitor who is never quite sure what will suit him. As Arnold implicitly acknowledges in his letter, the word itself, in all it entails—in its multiple and significant contemporary meanings—requires a certain forebearance, partly because it juxtaposes, to use another of the poem’s keywords, the overlapping preoccupations of Clough’s capacious poem itself, which pays attention to evolution and to manners, to marriage, and to miracles. The OED has for the verb ‘suit’: ‘To pay court to a woman…to set in due order, sort out…To make appropriate or agreeable to; to adapt or accommodate in style or manner…to be agreeable or convenient to…To be good for, to agree with’—all things Claude tries and fails to do and is confounded by in the poem.

Amours de Voyage is a poem about the hero’s inconclusive attempts to love, to be politically engaged, to be ‘open’ to what is going on around and inside him; but it also houses a more radical uncertainty about what it would be to change, and to change for the better. The poem is riddled with images and vocabularies of change—and disclaimers: ‘let us not talk of growth’ (III. ii)—but with Clough leaving us feeling that Claude has travelled without knowing, or indeed finding out, and what it would be to arrive. R. H. Hutton wrote of Clough: ‘the stronger the desire, he teaches, the greater is the danger of illegitimately satisfying the desire by persuading ourselves that what we wish to believe is true’. 15 In a melancholic parody of a quest romance, the traditional theme of the self defined by its dissatisfaction with itself—with its search for something essential that is missing—is replaced by a sense of the insufficiency of the self’s desire, and the insufficiency of its objects of desire. All that is left for Claude is the pursuit of a rather nebulous knowledge. By the end of the poem Claude has neither solved nor resolved any of his problems; he has not answered his questions, nor clarified them; he has not taken refuge in paradox or irony or the delights of indeterminacy, in the modern way. He has dispensed with Love, Scripture, Faith, and Art (‘I have no heart, however, for any marble or fresco’, the line wanting us to hear the ‘art’ in ‘heart’; V. x). The only thing he believes in now is the quest for Knowledge, something we were told in the second canto of the poem that women, and indeed Claude himself, have no appetite for: ‘woman’, he writes to Eustace, ‘has no heart for the timid, the sensitive soul; and for knowledge,—/ Knowledge, O ye Gods!—when did they appreciate knowledge? / Wherefore should they, either? I am sure I do not desire it’ (II. xiv). Neither women, nor the Gods—and the phrasing makes them indistinguishable—nor Claude ‘desire’ it, so what is it for? Is it merely a refuge from the real objects of desire, from the essential aspirations? The only real knowledge Claude has so far acquired from what the poem has told us—and if what the drama of the poem tells us is anything to go by—seems to be the knowledge that he is not suited to his life; or, if Claude is taken to be one kind of representative Victorian man, ‘we’ are not suited to our lives as we have thus far conceived of them: the dawning realization that haunted the nineteenth century. But the knowledge Claude seeks, if not actually redemptive, will bring some kind of value to his life—though he makes a characteristically rather vague assertion, a conclusion in which little is concluded. It has a rousing and resounding blandness in its half-hearted and clichéd description of the conventionally rigorous life: ‘Let us seek knowledge;—the rest may come and go as it happens. / Knowledge is hard to seek, and harder yet to adhere to. / Knowledge is painful often; and yet when we know we are happy’ (V. x). Claude notably doesn’t tell us what we should seek knowledge of but that, perhaps ominously, he is going to seek it ‘Eastward’ in Egypt (not, in other words, in the West: as though the West no longer had the knowledge he needed). But he does tell us, oddly, that this knowledge is the only thing that can make us happy. We are not convinced by this invoking, at the last minute, of the great utilitarian term, nor by this vague Orientalism—is it the antiquarian, the scholarly, the mystical, the scientific that Claude is now promoting?—and we are not supposed to be. It was this that made Clough’s other friend Ralph Waldo Emerson take against the poem in yet another letter.

For Emerson in ‘Self-Reliance’—and Clough was a keen reader of Emerson’s essays—‘Power…resides in the moment of transition…in the darting to an aim’. 16   Amours de Voyage , Emerson intimated, seemed (like Claude, like Rome) to be going somewhere—the paramount transcendentalist and pragmatic criterion—and then it misfired. Perhaps it even betrayed itself, and its readers. Just as Arnold did, Emerson takes in the poem, takes on the poem, by voicing his disappointment; as though the poem about things not really working or working out works, in an uncanny way, by not working for people. It seems to be about the way it disappoints, or fails to engage, or confounds, while being itself a poem about a character who disappoints and is disappointed, and fails to engage, and is confounded by himself. It is as though the poem is somehow contagious: it can’t ultimately be celebrated because it doubts celebration. It can’t ultimately succeed because success has become an unknown quantity. It can’t aim because it doesn’t have a target—as though Claude (and Clough’s) failure was that they had no picture of their satisfaction. This, at least, is what Emerson suggests in his letter of 1858. ‘When we began to build securely on the triumph of our poet over all gainsayers’, Emerson writes,

suddenly his wings flag, or his whim appears, and he plunges to a conclusion, like the ending of the Chancery suit in Bleak House, or like the denouement of Tennyson’s Princess. How can you waste such power on a broken dream? Why lead us up to the tower to tumble us down? There is a statute of Parnassus, that the author shall keep faith with the reader; but you choose to trifle with him. It is true a few persons compassionately tell me, that the piece is all right, and that they like this veracity of much preparation to no result. But I hold tis bad enough in life and inadmissible in poetry. And I think you owe us a retribution of music, and to a musical argument. 17

We should perhaps remember that Emerson would write ‘Whim’ on the lintel of his study, being a great believer in having the confidence of one’s whims and one’s genius (‘I shun mother and father and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim ’). 18 And we should also note that there is another ‘suit’ referred to here, in the context of a discussion—and Emerson allows the alternative view in—about how well suited the end of the poem is to the gist of the poem. The images are of failed agreements, broken promises, misleadings, tantalizations, and violent punishment. Something has gone badly wrong in a poem about things going badly wrong. ‘He may be right and I wrong’, Clough commented in a letter on Emerson’s verdict, sounding rather like Claude, ‘and all my defence can only be that I always meant it to be so and began it with the full intention of its ending so—but very likely I was wrong all the same’. 19 Right but wrong, wrong but right; both of them. That intentions are incommensurate with consequences is another thing that exercises Claude in Amours de Voyage . And also how wrong he is always likely to be, and the shame of not being able to be right. What are the cultural conditions, what are the inherited traditions that might have created this peculiarly modern kind of shame, and that might make knowledge, or the seeking of knowledge, seem like the self-cure? Claude describes the Christian faith in the first canto as involving ‘Aspirations from something most shameful here upon earth’ (I. iv), and shame, as we have seen, is a keyword in the poem. Emerson wanted Claude’s travails to have inspired him, transformed him, given him more life, more self-reliance. But all he has gained are losses, loss of love and loss of confidence in love, loss of religious faith and loss of that belief in culture that Arnold hoped would replace and better the religious faith of previous generations.

Arnold was not, he claimed, disappointed by the poem (as if he had had no expectations of it); he just had ‘nothing special to say’ because the poem didn’t suit him. This sets aside the rivalry that is everywhere in Arnold’s engaged disengagement with ‘the Italian poem’ (it is an interesting principle that when a poem works for a reader he has something special to say about it, something that seems special if only to himself). Emerson, though, felt betrayed, at least by the end of the poem, and felt that Clough had betrayed himself by concluding the poem in the way he did. And the parallels that come to mind are Dickens in Bleak House and Tennyson in The Princess . For Emerson, that is to say, the poem is evasive, and about evasion (another key word in Amours de Voyage ), about spurious resolutions and failures of nerve. For Arnold, it is about something not suiting. It is easy to feel that there is something evasive in Arnold’s insistent reiteration of ‘suiting’ as the suitable word, and in his question that is not entirely a question because it doesn’t have a question mark to identify it—‘what is to be said when a thing does not suit you’ ( Amours de Voyage is what might be said, or rather written, when a thing doesn’t suit you: the poem is, in this sense, an answer to his question). And it is not difficult to feel that, for Clough, in Amours de Voyage the satisfactions sought by Emerson were no longer possible, neither availing nor available. And that this too was the subject of the poem.

When Clough wrote to Mathew Arnold’s brother Tom, in 1848, about Emerson he was, in a sense, setting out his own project in Amours de Voyage ; and giving us an important clue about the civilization and its discontents that he was to explore in the poem. ‘He is much less Emersonian than his Essays,’ Clough wrote. ‘There is no dogmatism, or arbitrariness or positiveness about him.’ 20 Clough wanted to write in the way Emerson performed himself when he was not writing (Emerson’s essays are dogmatic, arbitrary, and positive, and it is part of their artful originality, as Clough knew, to reveal the links between these terms). He wanted to find out if there was a form of virtue, a version of the religious, or the political, or the moral life—and a style, a kind of writing—that was neither dogmatic, nor arbitrary nor speciously optimistic. So if, as has often been noted, Goethe’s Roman Elegies are in ironic juxtaposition to Clough’s Amours in their unequivocal commitment to sexual love—in their positive worship of Eros and the Priapic—Emerson’s Essays are the writings that Amours de Voyage most corresponds and argues with. Amours de Voyage is, among many other things, a counter-life to the life proposed and supposed by Emerson’s Essays —the counter-life of a poetry that, as Clough wrote in a review of recent English poetry in 1853, need not ‘content itself merely with talking of what may be better elsewhere, but seek also to deal with what IS here’. 21

What is there for Claude in Rome is the accumulated past of Paganism and Christianity that he sees, in his casual dismissal of Western culture, as ‘rubbishy’: ‘All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages / Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future’(I. i). It was, of course, Emerson’s view that we must not let the past diminish the present and the future, or not use it to do so; and that, as he wrote in his essay ‘The Poet’, it was the poet’s vocation to ‘ensure’ his ‘fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming’. 22 But through Claude, Clough announces the difficulty he has in affirming anything, and the difficulties inherent in affirmation itself (fidelity to an office of affirming is possibly what Clough meant by Emerson’s ‘positivism’). One of the difficulties inherent in affirmation is that it requires something to affirm; and Amours de Voyage begins by doubting what it proposes, by inviting us to go on a journey while warning us that travel is futile. Amours de Voyage , in its quest to deal with what is here, begins by wondering where here should be, so it begins with an urge to travel that is at the same time a scepticism about the lure of travel:

Come, let us go; though withal a voice whisper, ‘The world that we live in, Withersoever we turn, still is the same narrow crib; ’Tis but to prove limitation, and measure a cord, that we travel; Let who would ’scape and be free go to his chamber and think; ’Tis but to change idle fancies for memories wilfully falser; ’Tis but to go and have been’. (I)

In ‘Come, let us go’ we hear the beginning of Prufrock . But there also may be an allusion in this prologue to Macbeth in his ‘fit’, before the banquet, referring to himself as ‘cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in / To saucy doubts and fear’. 23 Macbeth has suffered from his ambition for change, and for changing places; and Claude will suffer from saucy doubts and fear (the OED has for saucy, ‘insolent towards superiors…smart, stylish’). But there is a stronger echo—not unrelated to this moment in Macbeth when the consequences of decisive actions begin to be fully felt—in Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance’, in which we are being encouraged to stay put if we want to get anywhere, and being grandly reassured that there is more to life than either idle fancies or memories wilfully falser. It is integral to the drama of the poem that at the very outset the enemy of promise—the voice that whispers, not unlike Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost , and insinuates that the only freedom is freedom of thought—invokes the always promising Emerson:

It is for want of self-culture that the Superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England and Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. The soul is no traveller, the wise man stays at home…He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he doesn’t carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things…He carries ruins to ruins. 24

Italy has been Claude’s destination after leaving England, and Egypt is to be his next destination. ‘Rubbishy’ is Claude’s word for the ruins, and Clough shows us the ruins Claude brings to these ruins: the ruination of a mid-nineteenth century scepticism in which everything can be doubted because nothing can be affirmed, and in which an obsession with failure is the secret sharer of the age of Empire and progress. What Emerson’s Transcendentalism can’t or won’t quite countenance—and this is part of its strength as well of its weakness—is that a person (or a culture) might actually be ruined. What Millicent Bell calls ‘the transcendentalist illusion that the disengaged spirit can keep itself free from constraining conditions, free from a design of life dictated by causes outside the sovereign self’ 25 is the illusion, or the true belief, that Claude can neither sustain nor wholly dispense with. Amours de Voyage was Clough’s attempt to straddle, or failing that to explore, this contradiction between Emerson’s infinitely self-reliant self, and the self conditioned by circumstance, situated by its history.

For Emerson in ‘Self-Reliance’ the risk of travel is imitation; the engaged travelling spirit simply has more to imitate. ‘What is imitation but the travelling mind?’ Emerson asks. ‘Insist on yourself, never imitate.’ 26 And Claude, significantly, is in two minds in Amours de Voyage about his seemingly infinite capacity for imitation which he sees, characteristically, as both an escape and a return: ‘I can be and become anything that I meet with or look at’ (III. vii). And yet, Claude feels, there is something evasive, or regressive about this ‘faint…but faithful assurance’ that he can lose himself in anything:

E’en from the stones of the street, as from rocks or trees of the forest, Something of kindred, a common, though latent vitality, greet me; And, to escape from our strivings, mistakings, misgrowths, and perversions, Fain could demand to return to that perfect and primitive silence, Fain be enfolded and fixed, as of old, in their rigid embraces. (III. vii)

Claude, taking Emerson’s injunction to its logical conclusion, as it were, sees his ability to imitate and identify with others—the non-human and, by implication, the human—as a death wish. But he sees as the alternative to this death-wish—in an implicit critique of Emerson’s injunction—‘strivings, mistakings, misgrowths, and perversions’. We should hear the two misses in the line, and the dread of desire and aspiration. At the end of the poem Claude’s quest is to rationalize his fear of wanting a woman. In his distress in the final canto at having lost Mary, Claude speaks a line that sounds rehearsed, and sounds like Prufrock, ‘I have had pain, it is true: I have wept; and so have the actors’ (V. viii). Imitation, and invoking the imitators, is now the only way. Claude began by apparently insisting on himself—which means asserting a mixture of Oxford-educated intellectual doubts and upper middle class English prejudices—but concludes by imitating. Apart from his grief he imitates (and by imitating attempts to affirm) a pale version of pagan belief. There is nothing else but imitation, it seems, and yet we can only imitate the past, that which already exists and is available to be imitated. These are Claude’s tacit conclusions, and they are, whatever else they are, an argument with Emerson and his Transcendentalist conceptions that opened up the future by not revering the past, that wanted the future to be an open invitation.

For Claude, in the first two cantos of the poem, falling in love and political engagement are forms of imitation, conventions he can disdain and do without. His questions are always—and they could be lines from one of Emerson’s essays—‘Is it an idol I bow to, or is it a God that I worship? / Do I sink back on the old or do I soar from the mean?’ (I. Epilogue). If we can’t tell the difference there may not be one. One answer to the first question is that an idol won’t tell us, and a God won’t need to. But if Gods and idols are similar, then we are never quite sure what we are valuing, and worship may be merely servility (and perhaps it is our abasement, our servility that matters most to us?). Claude is all too conscious that how we value what we value exposes us, and that uncertainty about values is radically depleting: ‘but guessing is tiresome, very. / Weary of wondering, watching and guessing, and gossiping idly, / Down I go…’ (II. v). The half-rhymes of ‘very’ and ‘weary’ and ‘idly’ and ‘I go’ make the necessary links. Clough is clearly worrying away here about liberalism, about whether we can have beliefs without believing in them too much, and if we can’t what we can do instead of believe, or have instead of beliefs. As Claude falls for the appropriately named Mary, and begins to be moved and involved by the republican struggle in Rome—that is, stops guessing, wondering, watching and gossiping—he gains not, as Emerson would have wished, a renewed sense of power, but suffers further disillusionment. ‘The Fates, it is clear, are against us’, he concludes, but with a marvellous phrase of blighted resignation, ‘I will go where I am led, and will not dictate to the chances’ (V. viii). Claude’s question has always been: what will I have to submit to? Marriage and family, political commitment, the class mobility of liberal democracy, art, learning, religious faith. And now he knows (Mary will find out what she has to submit to at the very end of the poem). If the Fates are against us then our projects count for nothing in the world as it is.

And yet, ‘Do I sink back on the old, or do I soar from the mean?’ is Emerson’s question—his continual warning about the tyranny of the past, about our regressive wearying drive to imitate the past, our using the past to diminish and disqualify ourselves. The pun on ‘mean’ reinforces the point, and by knowingly referring us back to Aristotle’s ‘mean’ in the Nichomachean Ethics , it is another sinking back on the old. Soaring is what Satan does in Paradise Lost , and the old as the mean—that which has become average, the costive, and ungenerous—is an Emersonian affirmation (whether or not Milton was of the Devil’s party, Emerson certainly was). For Emerson we believe simply by imitating believers. And as Claude (and Clough) knew, to submit to The Fates is to sink back on the old, to endorse (i.e. imitate) an ancient belief about the cosmos. The Bible may be what Claude at one point in the poem calls, in another arch archaism, ‘the olden-time inspiration’ (III. iv), but so, from Emerson’s point of view, is the wisdom of the ancients. ‘And when we begin to build securely on the triumph of our poet over all gainsayers’, Emerson wrote, ‘suddenly his wing flags…and he plunges to a conclusion’. 27 The end of Amours de Voyage was not uplifting in the Emerson way. It was not a journey with an unexpected, desirable outcome.

Just as Claude and Mary fail to rendezvous—keep, in both senses, missing each other—so Emerson too, like many of Clough’s contemporary readers, has a missed encounter with Amours de Voyage . He misreads Clough as having taken flight in the wrong sense. He sees the poem as, finally, a failure of nerve on Clough’s part, when the poem is rather a study of a man’s failure of nerve. Clough was speaking up in Amours de Voyage —as he was in many of his finest poems, most notably in Adam and Eve , Dipsychus and The Spirit , and some of the shorter lyrics—for the impossibility of whole-heartedness and the implications of this for relations between the sexes and for political engagement. New forms of self-division were appearing—new pictures of what was dividing the self, and of what it was divided into—and the sign of these self-divisions was a haunting sense of uncompleted or uncompletable actions, of desires spoiled by the conflicts they entailed, of beliefs undone by what the will to believe exposed.

What Claude articulates in Amours de Voyage is the narcissism of self-doubt, scepticism as a form of self-obsession. But this narcissism, this self-obsession, is the province of a certain kind of man, wherever he travels, and whenever he advises against it. It is this that makes Claude’s incredible ignorance about women in Amours de Voyage such an essential part of the poem. Claude is at his least convincing—is, that is to say, at his most starkly defensive—in his pronouncements upon women and what they want, and this too is something about the poem that has become more legible over time. Claude’s object of desire is his own unconvincing self; he is fascinated by his own gloomy uncertainty. Unlike Goethe’s Roman Elegies, with their spell-bound erotic attentiveness to the loved and desired woman, Amours de Voyage is an elegy for a love affair that never happened—and, on a larger scale, an elegy for a culture’s failed love affair with love itself. Claude, Clough wants us to see—like Goethe, but in a quite different way, an opposite way—couldn’t make the woman he desired real enough for long enough. And so, Clough suggests, he couldn’t make his desires real enough to himself. His own failings were more alluring than Mary was.

Incredible ignorance about women presumes, of course, a credible knowledge elsewhere. But I think Clough was impressing upon us, wittingly or unwittingly, both by his inclusion of women’s voices in the poem, notably minimized by Claude’s volubility—and through Claude’s clichéd musings about women—a picture of Victorian masculinity, one version of it, in which an obsessive, cultivated (in both senses) self-preoccupation is organized to preclude exchange with women. Cultural ideals may be self-obsession by other means. It is not incidental that after the first two sections of Canto I in which Claude pontificates interestingly but in rather self-important ways about Rome, Christianity, and the history of the West—what it was and what it should have been—the first words in the poem by a woman are Georgina Trevellyn’s to Louisa, ‘At last’ (I. iii); at last, an opportunity to speak (write), and at last, the reader might feel, a different kind of voice, a voice more exactly the kind of poetic voice that Clough was promoting in his review quoted earlier, a voice dealing with ‘what is here’, and not with what is, in the abstract, better and elsewhere. Claude writes of Roman history; Georgina writes of the practical actualities of travelling and family life.

We first hear Mary’s voice in a postscript to one of Georgina’s letters at the very end of Canto I in which we are given a description of Claude that is easy to assent to, both in its subtlety and its straightforwardness: ‘I do not like him much, though I do not dislike being with him. / He is what people call, I suppose, a superior man, and / Certainly seems so to me; but I think he is terribly selfish’ (I. xiii). The first line is what the reader tends to feel about Claude, but it is the casual suggestion that superiority in men is just a form of terrible selfishness that is arresting. It had been a culture of superior men that Clough had grown up in (though he notably devoted the last years of his life to a superior woman, Florence Nightingale). And it was as a critique of the idea of the superior man that he wrote Amours de Voyage . The second epigraph to the poem, from an unspecified but pointedly ‘French Novel’, ‘Il doutait de tout, même de l’amour’, is implicitly revised if not reversed by the end of the poem that has ‘amour’ in its title—to doubt love is to doubt everything.

Because Claude can’t deal with the obstacles to love—with love as an obstacle-course, in which resistance is the point and not the problem—he cannot love, and Mary sees this clearly. The women in the poem, as Clough surely intended, are more clear-sighted though less ‘cultured’ than the men: more clear-sighted, that is to say, as Clough intimates, by being less cultured, less educated in the masculine way. As though the men, and particularly the superior men, have been hugely distracted—and in Claude’s case paralyzed—by an education in self-love. Mary, Clough wants us to see, is much more exact, and therefore less speciously exacting than Claude. ‘Oh, and you see I know so exactly how he would take it,’ she writes,

Finding the chances prevail against meeting again, he would banish Forthwith every thought of the poor little possible hope, which I myself could not help, perhaps, thinking only too much of; He would resign himself and go. I see it exactly. So I also submit, although in a different manner. (V. xi)

‘Banish’, with its Shakesperean echoes—the word is used most often in Romeo and Juliet —is what the man does, to thought and possibility and hope, all implicitly linked. Claude’s resignation is a self-banishing, a refuge from his desire for Mary. Both Claude and Mary have to submit to the vagaries of Claude’s character but, as Mary writes, in a different manner.

In a review of Clough’s poetry in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1862, Clough’s friend Charles Eliot Norton wrote of Amours de Voyage that it was ‘at once established in the admiration of readers capable of appreciating its rare and refined excellence. The spirit of the poem is thoroughly characteristic of its author, and the speculative, analytic turn of his mind is represented in many passages of the letters of the imaginary hero’. 28 There were, we are reminded, readers not capable of such appreciation. And the speculative, analytic turn of the imaginary hero is taken, by his author, to be at best a mixed (and ironized) blessing. But there was another part of the author’s mind represented by his imaginary heroine, and she would have seen exactly the force of her author’s final epigraph to the poem, from Horace, about Anacreon—that is, about Claude—who ‘in simple metres deplored his love’ (to deplore being to grieve and to disparage). Or perhaps even more she would have known so exactly the truth of Thucydides, who provided an epigraph to Amours de Voyage from The Peloponnesian War that Clough ultimately discarded. Though it is, perhaps, a final word about Claude and, indeed, something Mary herself might have said: ‘What you are looking for all the time is something that is, I should say, outside the range of ordinary experience, and yet you cannot even think straight about the facts of life that are before you.’

Arthur Hugh Clough, Dipsychus and the Spirit in Clough: Selected Poems , ed. J. P. Phelan (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 181.

Barbara Hardy, ‘Clough’s Self-Consciousness’, in Isobel Armstrong, ed., The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 253.

Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 199.

Philip Davis, The Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 470.

John Goode, ‘ Amours de Voyage : The Aqueous Poem’, in Major Victorian Poets , 275.

T. S. Eliot, quoted in Christopher Ricks, ed., The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), xxvii.

F. R. Leavis, quoted in Ricks, Victorian Verse , xxviii.

Clough, Amours de Voyage , in Clough: Selected Poems , 77. All subsequent references give Canto and Letter number in the main text.

Goode, ‘Amours de Voyage’ , 276.

F. T. Palgrave, The Poetical Works of Clough (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1906), xxiv.

John Shairp quoted in Michael Thorpe, ed., Clough: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 122.

Matthew Arnold, The Letters of Mathew Arnold, Volume 1: 1829–1859 , ed. Cecil Y. Lang (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 259.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Unmodern Observations , ed. William Arrowsmith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 73–146.

Clough, The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough , 2 vols., ed. Frederick L. Mulhauser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), i. 124.

R. H. Hutton, quoted in Clough: Selected Poems , 3.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, in Essays: First Series (Boston: Phillips and Samson, 1850), 61.

Emerson quoted in Clough: The Critical Heritage , 124.

Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, 45.

Clough, quoted in Clough: The Critical Heritage , 124.

Clough, Correspondence , i. 216.

Clough, review in The North American (July 1853), cited in James Insley Osborne, Arthur Hugh Clough (London: Constable, 1920), 164.

Emerson, ‘The Poet’, Essays: Second Series, in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , 9 vols., ed. Joseph Slater et al. (Harvard, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971–), ii. 8.

Macbeth , III. iv. 24.

Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, 70–71.

Millicent Bell, ed., The Wings of the Dove (London: Penguin, 2008), xxx.

Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, 73.

Emerson quoted in Thorpe, Clough: The Critical Heritage , 124.

Charles Eliot Norton quoted in Thorpe, Clough: The Critical Heritage , 128.

Select Bibliography

Armstrong, Isobel , ed., The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969 ).

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—— Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993 ).

Arnold, Matthew , The Letters of Mathew Arnold, Volume 1: 1829–1859 , ed. Cecil Y. Lang (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1996 ).

Clough, Arthur Hugh , The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Frederick L. Mulhauser , 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957 ).

—— Clough: Selected Poems , ed. J. P. Phelan (London and New York: Longman, 1995 ).

Davis, Philips , The Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 ).

Thorpe, Michael , ed., Clough: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972 ).

Emerson, Ralph Waldo , Essays: First Series (Boston, MA: Phillips and Samson, 1850 ).

—— Essays: Second Series , in Joseph Slater et al, eds., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , vol. ii (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971 –).

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Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Amours De Voyage”: A Poetic Account of the 1849 Siege of Rome

Author: Cora Lindsay, School of Education, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom Email: [email protected] Published: December 8, 2017 https://doi.org/10.22492/ijah.4.si.03

Citation : Lindsay, C. (2017). Arthur Hugh Clough's “Amours De Voyage”: A Poetic Account of the 1849 Siege of Rome. IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities , 4 (si). https://doi.org/10.22492/ijah.4.si.03

In this paper I talk about Arthur Hugh Clough’s epistolary poem Amours de Voyage , which describes Clough’s first-hand experience of the events of 1840s Europe, a time of uncertainty and rising nationalist agendas. Amours de Voyage was largely written during Clough’s stay in Rome from April to July 1849, the brief period in which the Roman Republic existed and the city was under siege from the French. The poem is an unusual, unromantic and bemused depiction of nationalistic conflict. By the time it was finally published in Britain in 1862, the Italian struggle for independence had become one of the most celebrated and romantic causes of the century. Clough, with his questioning turn of mind, was inherently wary of such emotional responses. This poem epitomises the detached and constructive scepticism with which Clough approached political and national manifestos, questioning blind certainties and often undermining the pomposity of fanaticism through humour.

Sonderkommando, Arthur Hugh Clough, Risorgimento, 1849 Siege of Rome, Amours de Voyage

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Arthur Hugh Clough

Introduction, general overviews.

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• The Bothie of Toper-Na-Fuosich
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Arthur Hugh Clough by Samantha Matthews LAST REVIEWED: 02 March 2011 LAST MODIFIED: 02 March 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0016

The English poet Arthur Hugh Clough (b. 1819–d. 1861) is a representative figure of the mid-Victorian religious crisis and an innovative Victorian poet. He was a talented protégé of Rugby school’s charismatic headmaster Thomas Arnold. At Balliol College, Oxford, Clough witnessed the period’s religious controversies, defined by the theological establishment’s contests with Tractarianism (John Henry Newman’s High Church “Oxford movement”) and with the influence of the “Higher Criticism” of the Bible led by German textual scholars. Unable to subscribe to the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles, in 1848 Clough resigned as a tutor and fellow of Oriel College. In 1851 he resigned from a brief tenure as professor of English at University College, London, and made unsuccessful attempts to find academic employment in Australia and America. In 1854 his appointment as an examiner in the Education Office enabled him to marry. Clough turned from poetry to a life of service, working for his wife’s cousin Florence Nightingale, but failing health led to his early death at age 42, in Florence. He is the subject of his friend Matthew Arnold’s elegy, “Thyrsis.” Leaving Oxford gave Clough the freedom to experiment with less orthodox poetic subjects and forms, and with radical political and moral ideas. In an extraordinary burst of productivity from 1848 to 1852, he wrote the three long works on which his poetic reputation now largely rests. The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (1848) is a witty and reflexive modern pastoral set in the Scottish Highlands. He wrote his masterpiece, the epistolary verse-novel Amours de Voyage (1858), after witnessing the fall of Mazzini’s short-lived Roman republic in 1849. In 1850 he began Dipsychus , a Faustian dramatic dialogue that he never completed. Notable shorter poems include “Natura Naturans,” a meditation on erotic affinity that begins with an exchange of glances in a railway carriage; “The Latest Decalogue,” a satirical summary of modern unbelief; and “The Struggle,” one of the most celebrated instances of the Victorian fascination with the battle as a metaphor for life. Besides Matthew Arnold, Clough’s influential friendships included Thomas Carlyle, R. W. Emerson, and Charles Eliot Norton. His literary reputation, secured by the Bothie and consolidated by the posthumous publication of his literary remains, declined sharply in the early 20th century, and he was left in Arnold’s shadow. New editions and critical studies have complicated and enriched our picture of him, and confirm his distinctive presence in the poetic and intellectual culture of his time.

Fully integrated studies of Clough (giving equal weight to biography, intellectual development, and poetry) are rare, and the most substantial ( Veyriras 1964 ) remains untranslated. Armstrong 1982 and Harris 1970 are shorter surveys aimed at a mainly academic readership, with Armstrong stronger on Clough’s significance in literary history; Schad 2006 is a theoretically minded view of Clough as an intellectual. Houghton 1963 is still essential as a general account of Clough’s achievement as a poet, supplemented by Timko 1966 and Turner 1990 . Scott 1978 helpfully summarizes trends in critical reappraisal.

Armstrong, Isobel. “Arthur Hugh Clough.” In British Writers . Vol. 5. Edited by Ian Scott Kilvert, 155–171. London and New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982.

Short, pithy, and critically astute introduction in the Writers and Their Work series. Sees Clough as a “Janus-poet,” both affiliated with 18th-century poetic tradition and anticipating the modern. Includes a brief selective bibliography. Originally published in 1962 (London: Longmans, Green).

Harris, Wendell V. Arthur Hugh Clough . New York: Twayne, 1970.

Follows Twayne’s English Authors series format in giving broad survey of life and work; distinctive focus on Clough’s spiritual biography; less interested in poetic complexity.

Houghton, Walter E. The Poetry of Clough: An Essay in Revaluation . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963.

Groundbreaking critical reappraisal that takes issue with Clough’s reputation as a Victorian doubter and failed poet by eschewing biographical interpretation. Important in recuperating the three long narrative poems as Clough’s major work, and with useful chapters on the critical tradition and shorter poems.

Schad, John. Arthur Hugh Clough . Tavistock, UK: Northcote, 2006.

New introduction to Clough in the Writers and Their Work series, replacing Armstrong 1982 . Views Clough as the “anti-poet,” using poetry to mirror the troubled contemporary world. Useful as a rare theoretically minded reading of Clough, particularly strong on his intellectualism and relations to Continental thought.

Scott, Patrick G. “The Victorianism of Clough.” Victorian Poetry 16 (1978): 32–42.

Vigorous polemical attack on readings of Clough as proto-modernist, emphasizing the “Victorian” centrality and solidity of his opinions on sex, religion, and social morality. Somewhat partial in its own readings but stimulating and well documented.

Timko, Michael. Innocent Victorian: The Satiric Poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough . Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1966.

Argues for the constructive nature of satirical poetry. Emphasizes the “positive naturalism” or “moral realism” that Clough asserts through his satire, as part of the 1960s project to counter the myth of Clough’s failure.

Turner, Paul. “Clough.” In Victorian Poetry, Drama, and Miscellaneous Prose, 1832–1890 . By Paul Turner, 59–74. Oxford History of English Literature 14. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.

Short, sharp, and insightful survey, with good sense of literary context and Clough’s ironies. One of the first major Victorian reference works to treat Clough seriously as a major poet, rather than as an adjunct to Arnold.

Veyriras, Paul. Arthur Hugh Clough . Paris: Didier, 1964.

Substantial and detailed survey effectively combining critical commentary and biographical interpretation, and particularly good on the intellectual background. However, in French, with no English translation.

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Classics corner: Amours de Voyage

R ome, 1849. A republican government has declared itself in the Eternal City. An army of 9,000 French soldiers is on its way to restore the Pope's authority over the central Italian states. Garibaldi has arrived to fight for the Roman cause. Worst of all, the cafes have run out of milk. Into this chaos walks Arthur Hugh Clough: poet, dissenter, and revolution-chaser. Clough had been at Paris the previous year for the proclamation of the Second Republic and now, holed up in Rome, he began writing Amours de Voyage, one of the strangest works of fiction written by a sane Victorian.

Not quite a long poem, nor quite a novella, Amours comprises a series of letters in verse, mostly by a rather aloof young Englishman named Claude. Claude is in Rome as a tourist (or, as he characteristically puts it, a "pilgrim transalpine") and not much impresses him. St Peter's looks cheap. The Forum is dull. But what's this? Could he be falling in love with another English tourist? Isn't she rather vulgar? And now that she and her family have left Rome for safety, should he chase her? Is he man enough to defend her honour against the Italian peasantry? "Am I prepared to lay down my life for the British female?/ Really, who knows?"

Critical opinion has been kind to Clough of late and this new Persephone edition includes an admiring appraisal by Julian Barnes that neatly assesses his renewed appeal. There are a few design faults - in particular, the editors might have thought twice about breaking and indenting the poem's longer hexameter lines, leaving odd words dangling - but this curious poem has charm.

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Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage , and the Victorian Crisis of Action

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Stefanie Markovits; Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage , and the Victorian Crisis of Action. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 March 2001; 55 (4): 445–478. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2001.55.4.445

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Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage (1858) provides a revealing lens through which to explore the implications for genre of the changing status of action in the nineteenth century. For historical reasons, conceptions of action shifted in the Victorian period, leading most notably to a decrease in the legibility of deeds. The shift opened up a critical dispute concerning the relative importance of the Aristotelian categories of character and action in literature. This dispute resulted in an emphasis on a literature of inaction - both frustrated external action and heightened internal action - which in turn had consequences for the development of the novel as a genre concerned with character and states of consciousness. Clough's own Hamlet-like inability to act is the stuff of legend, and his hero Claude suffers from the same affliction, as is made manifest by the failed courtship plot of the poem. Amours de Voyage , as an epistolary novel in verse, in mock-epic hexameters interspersed with lyrical elegiacs, stands at the place where genres - and the different attitudes toward action that they represent - collide. Both its subject matter and its method reflect the Victorian crisis of action.

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Analysis of Amours de Voyage, Canto II

Arthur hugh clough 1819 (liverpool) – 1861 (florence).

Is it illusion? or does there a spirit from perfecter ages, Here, even yet, amid loss, change, and corruption abide? Does there a spirit we know not, though seek, though we find, comprehend not, Here to entice and confuse, tempt and evade us, abide? Lives in the exquisite grace of the column disjointed and single, Haunts the rude masses of brick garlanded gaily with vine, E'en in the turret fantastic surviving that springs from the ruin, E'en in the people itself? is it illusion or not? Is it illusion or not that attracteth the pilgrim transalpine, Brings him a dullard and dunce hither to pry and to stare? Is it illusion or not that allures the barbarian stranger, Brings him with gold to the shrine, brings him in arms to the gate? I. Claude to Eustace. What do the people say, and what does the government do?--you Ask, and I know not at all. Yet fortune will favour your hopes; and I, who avoided it all, am fated, it seems, to describe it. I, who nor meddle nor make in politics,--I who sincerely Put not my trust in leagues nor any suffrage by ballot, Never predicted Parisian millenniums, never beheld a New Jerusalem coming down dressed like a bride out of heaven Right on the Place de la Concorde,--I, nevertheless, let me say it, Could in my soul of souls, this day, with the Gaul at the gates shed One true tear for thee, thou poor little Roman Republic; What, with the German restored, with Sicily safe to the Bourbon, Not leave one poor corner for native Italian exertion? France, it is foully done! and you, poor foolish England,-- You, who a twelvemonth ago said nations must choose for themselves, you Could not, of course, interfere,--you, now, when a nation has chosen---- Pardon this folly! The Times will, of course, have announced the occasion, Told you the news of to-day; and although it was slightly in error When it proclaimed as a fact the Apollo was sold to a Yankee, You may believe when it tells you the French are at Civita Vecchia. II. Claude to Eustace. Dulce it is, and decorum, no doubt, for the country to fall,--to Offer one's blood an oblation to Freedom, and die for the Cause; yet Still, individual culture is also something, and no man Finds quite distinct the assurance that he of all others is called on, Or would be justified even, in taking away from the world that Precious creature, himself. Nature sent him here to abide here; Else why send him at all? Nature wants him still, it is likely; On the whole, we are meant to look after ourselves; it is certain Each has to eat for himself, digest for himself, and in general Care for his own dear life, and see to his own preservation; Nature's intentions, in most things uncertain, in this are decisive; Which, on the whole, I conjecture the Romans will follow, and I shall. So we cling to our rocks like limpets; Ocean may bluster, Over and under and round us; we open our shells to imbibe our Nourishment, close them again, and are safe, fulfilling the purpose Nature intended,--a wise one, of course, and a noble, we doubt not. Sweet it may be and decorous, perhaps, for the country to die; but, On the whole, we conclude the Romans won't do it, and I sha'n't. III. Claude to Eustace. Will they fight? They say so. And will the French? I can hardly, Hardly think so; and yet----He is come, they say, to Palo, He is passed from Monterone, at Santa Severa He hath laid up his guns. But the Virgin, the Daughter of Roma, She hath despised thee and laughed thee to scorn,--The Daughter of Tiber, She hath shaken her head and built barricades against thee! Will they fight? I believe it. Alas! 'tis ephemeral folly, Vain and ephemeral folly, of course, compared with pictures, Statues, and antique gems!--Indeed: and yet indeed too, Yet, methought, in broad day did I dream,--tell it not in St. James's, Whisper it not in thy courts, O Christ Church!--yet did I, waking, Dream of a cadence that sings, Si tombent nos jeunes héros, la Terre en produit de nouveaux contre vous tous prêts à se battre; Dreamt of great indignations and angers transcendental, Dreamt of a sword at my side and a battle-horse underneath me. IV. Claude to Eustace. Now supposing the French or the Neapolitan soldier Should by some evil chance come exploring the Maison Serny (Where the family English are all to assemble for safety), Am I prepared to lay down my life for the British female? Really, who knows? One has bowed and talked, till, little by little, All the natural heat has escaped o

Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 15, 2023

Arthur Hugh Clough

Arthur Hugh Clough was an English poet, an educationalist, and the devoted assistant to ground-breaking nurse Florence Nightingale.  more…

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Amours De Voyage, Canto V by Arthur Hugh Clough: poem analysis

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This is an analysis of the poem Amours De Voyage, Canto V that begins with:

There is a city, upbuilt on the quays of the turbulent Arno, Under Fiesole's heights,--thither are we to return? ... full text

Amours De Voyage by Arthur Hugh Clough

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Amours de Voyage

This work first appeared in print (in four monhly parts), in 'The Atlantic Monthly' during 1858. Its first appearance in book form was in Clough's Poems (1862). [Based on The Early Editions of Arthur Hugh Clough (1977), by Patrick Greig Scott , pp.61-75.]

• " Amours de Voyage, Canto 1 " in The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 1, Issue 4, February 1858
• " Amours de Voyage, Canto 2 " in The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 1, Issue 5, March 1858
• " Amours de Voyage, Canto 3 " in The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 1, Issue 6, April 1858
• " Amours de Voyage, Canto 4 " in The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 1, Issue 7, May 1858
• " Amours de Voyage ", in The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough Volume II., (1869)

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Amours de Voyage

Author: , original publication date: , editorial apparatus.

• A Note on the Text | by Monica Wolfe | Criticism
• Arthur Clough’s Amours de Voyage and the Revolutions of 1848 | by Gwenael Jouin | Criticism
• Arthur Hugh Clough: A Biography | by Matt Morgenstern, Emily Pearson | Criticism
• Editorial Introduction | by Alexandra Anderson, Dino Franco Felluga, Alyssa Fernandez, Gwenael Jouin, Matt Morgenstern, Allyn Pearson, Emily Pearson, Marybeth Perdomo, Stacey Smythe, Ayla Wilder, Monica Wolfe | Criticism
• Literary Cartography and Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage | by Alyssa Fernandez, Ayla Wilder | Criticism
• Reading Rhythm: Exploring Auditory Possibilities in Clough’s Amours de Voyage | by Alexandra Anderson, Allyn Pearson, Marybeth Perdomo | Criticism
• Robert Turnball MacPherson: Maker of Photos, Maker of Myth | by Stacey Smythe | Criticism

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• Amours de Voyage | Poetry
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Arthur Hugh Clough’s verse-novel,  Amours de Voyage  was completed shortly after the events of the 1849 Roman Republic, which Clough witnessed as a tourist.  Amours de Voyage  was first published in  The Atlantic Monthly  in four parts in 1858: Canto I in Vol. 1.4 (February, 1858); Canto II in Vol. 1.5 (March 1858); Canto III in Vol. 1.6 (April 1858); and Cantos IV and V in Vol. 1.7 (May 1858). This edition sets the poem in the historical and cultural context of the decade that is marked, on the one end, by the 1848 revolutions in Europe and, on the other, by the 1858 first publication of the poem.

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Les audiences du dimanche 21 avril pour les programmes diffusés en première partie de soirée.

Dimanche soir, le film diffusé sur France 2 n’a jamais aussi bien porté son nom. Papy fait de la résistance , réalisé par Jean-Marie Poiré, a, en effet, remporté le match des audiences de la soirée. Le long-métrage, sorti en 1983 avec Christian Clavier et Gérard Jugnot, a été suivi par 3,11 millions de téléspectateurs représentant 17 % du public selon Médiamétrie. Un joli score pour le film multirediffusé puisque, lors de sa dernière apparition sur le petit écran le 1er janvier 2023, il avait séduit 2,89 millions de Français.

À lire aussi Jean-Marie Poiré : «Pour financer “Papy fait de la résistance”, Christian Fechner avait hypothéqué sa maison»

TF1 arrive en deuxième position du soir avec Les animaux fantastiques : Les crimes de Grindelwald sorti en 2018. Le spin-off de la saga Harry Potter , avec Johnny Depp, a tenu en haleine 2,66 millions de personnes soit 16,1% du public. Un score en baisse par rapport à la première diffusion en clair, en avril 2022, qui avait rassemblé 3,83 millions de personnes.

France 3 se hisse sur la troisième marche du podium avec la saison 5 inédite de Hudson & Rex . Les deux premiers épisodes ont été suivis par 2,21 millions de téléspectateurs représentant 11,7% du public. Un chiffre plus important que la semaine précédente. Dimanche dernier, les deux épisodes inédits diffusés avaient passionné 1,94 million de personnes.

Arte termine au pied du podium avec la diffusion du film américain Les pleins pouvoirs de et avec Clint Eastwood qui a séduit 1,73 million de personnes soit 9,5 % du public.

M6 n’arrive qu’en cinquième position avec le lancement de sa série documentaire Au cœur du collège, un an à Jean Vilar qui suit le quotidien des élèves et des professeurs d’un établissement situé à Chalon-sur-Saône. Le premier épisode a attisé la curiosité de 1,45 million de personnes représentant 7,6 % du public.

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Audiences : France 3 leader avec une rediffusion de Cassandre , M6 sous les 900.000 téléspectateurs

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Audiences : Meurtres au paradis sur France 2 écrase Les Bracelets rouges sur TF1

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