ABSTRACT
Love is just as problematic for Hugh Clough as for Tom Arnold, but it is also an ineluctable force of continuity rather than at best a comforter of alienation and at worst a distraction. It is precisely in the difference between their attitudes to the world's multitudinousness that the incompatibility between Clough and Matthew Arnold lies. It is problematic for Clough because he accepts its impersonality, and impersonality is problematic not because it threatens a spurious individualism, but because it challenges the contractual relationship demanded by the social structure between the inner and the outer world. Love changes both - it destroys both the buried self and 'duty'. For Arnold, the buried bonds must be manifested in the social actuality. Human solidarity is not a consolation for social oppression, it is a reality whose fulfilment demands the complete overthrow of the social structure, and the creation of a new society.
