ABSTRACT
The extracts given below have been taken from The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. H. F. Lowry. Though only the last of these was written after Ambarvalia was published, they are all related to the contents of that volume, most of which Clough showed his friend in MSS.
The following extract from a letter Lowry dates ‘early December 1847’ is Arnold's reaction to reading in MSS. some of the poems Clough later included in Ambarvalia:
…I have had so much reluctance to read these, which I now return? that I surely must be destined to receive some good from them.—I have never been reminded of Wordsworth in reading them by rhythms or expressions: but of Tennyson sometimes and repeatedly of Milton—Little hast thou bested etc, e.g., [from ‘In a Lecture-Room’] sounds to me Miltonically thought and expressed.
I have abstained from all general criticism, but here and there put a word against an expression: but it was done at a first reading, these are to be very slightly attended to.—It would amuse you to see how treatments differ, if you saw some things in which I have come on the same topics as you: those of your 4th poem. 1st vol. e.g. [The 4th poem in the copybook is an earlier version of ‘Like a child/In some strange garden left awhile, alone’ (Lowry)].
—The 2nd poem in the 1st volume [A poem which begins ‘Enough, small Room: tho’ all too true/Much ill in thee I daily do.’ Clough never printed it.] I do not think—valuable—worthy of you—what is the word?
—And as a metrical curiosity the one about 2 musics does not seem to me happy [‘The Music of the World and of the Soul’].
But on the whole I think they stand very grandly, with Burbidge's ‘barbaric ruins’ smiling around them. I think too that they will give the warmest satisfaction to your friends who want to see something of yours. Stanley 1 will have the ‘calf’ one [‘The New Sinai’] by heart the day it appears.
(Letters, 61)
…rare as individuality is you have to be on your guard against it—you particularly:—tho: indeed I do not really know that I think so. Shakespeare says that if imagination would apprehend some joy it comprehends some bringer of that joy: and this latter operation which makes palatable the bitterest or most arbitrary original apprehension you seem to me to despise. Yet to solve the Universe as you try to do is as irritating as Tennyson's dawdling with its painted shell is fatiguing for me to witness: and yet I own that to reconstruct the Universe is not a satisfactory attempt either—I keep saying, Shakspeare [sic], Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is: yet this unsatisfactoriness goes against the poetic office in general: for this must I think certainly be its end. But have I been inside you, or Shakspeare? Never. Therefore heed me not, but come to what you can.
(Early December 1847, Letters, 63)
A growing sense of the deficiency of the beautiful in your poems, and of this alone being properly poetical as distinguished from rhetorical, devotional, or metaphysical, made me speak as I did. But your line is a line: and you have most of the promising English verse-writers with you now: Festus for instance. 2 Still, problem as the production of the beautiful remains still to me, I will die protesting against the world that the other is false and JARRING.
No—I doubt your being an artist: but have you read Novalis? He certainly is not one either: but in the way of direct communication, insight, and report, his tendency has often reminded me of yours, though tenderer and less systematic than you. And there are the sciences: in which I think the passion for truth, not special curiosities about birds and beasts, makes the great professor—.
(About 24 February 1848, Letters, 66)
… while I confess that productions like your Adam and Eve [an incomplete poem in MSS., first published in The Poems and Prose Remains, 1869, under the title ‘Fragments of the Mystery of the Fall’] are not suited to me at present, yet [I] feel no confidence that they may not be quite right and calculated to suit others. The good feature in all your poems is the sincerity that is evident in them: which always produces a powerful effect on the reader—and which most people with the best intentions lose totally when they sit down to write. The spectacle of a writer striving evidently to get breast to breast with reality is always full of instruction and very invigorating—and here I always feel you have the advantage of me: ‘much may be seen, tho: nothing can be solved’—weighs upon me in writing.
(20 July [1848], Letters, 86)This letter is headed ‘Friday’ and Lowry ascribes it to the early part of February 1849; Ambarvalia had appeared in January:
… If I were to say the real truth as to your poems in general, as they impress me—it would be this—that they are not natural.
Many persons with far lower gifts than yours yet seem to find their natural mode of expression in poetry, and tho: the contents may not be very valuable they appeal with justice from the judgement of the mere thinker to the world's general appreciation of naturalness—i.e. —an absolute propriety—of form, as the sole necessary of Poetry as such: whereas the greatest wealth and depth of matter is merely a superfluity in the Poet as such.
—Form of Conception comes by nature certainly, but is generally developed late: but this lower form, of expression, is found from the beginning amongst all born poets, even feeble thinkers, and in an unpoetical age: as Collins, Green and fifty more, in England only.
The question is not of congruity between conception and expression: which when both are poetical, is the poet's highest result:—you say what you mean to say: but in such a way as to leave it doubtful whether your mode of expression is not quite arbitrarily adopted.
I often think that even a slight gift of poetical expression which in a common person might have developed itself easily and naturally, is overlaid and crushed in a profound thinker so as to be of no use to him to help him to express himself.—The trying to go into and to the bottom of an object instead of grouping objects is as fatal to the sensuousness of poetry as the mere painting, (for, in Poetry, this is not grouping) is to its airy and rapidly moving life.
‘Not deep the poet sees, but wide’ [Arnold quotes from his own ‘Resignation’]:—think of this as you gaze from Cumner Hill toward Cirencester and Cheltenham.—You succeed best you see, in fact, in the hymn, where man, his deepest personal feelings being in play, finds poetical expression as man only, not as artist:—but consider whether you attain the beautiful, and whether your product gives PLEASURE, not excites curiosity and reflexion. Forgive me all this: but I am always prepared to give up the attempt, on conviction: and so, I know, are you: and I only urge you to reflect whether you are advancing. Reflect too, as I cannot but do here more and more, in spite of all the nonsense some people talk, how deeply unpoetical the age and all one's surroundings are.Not unprofound, not ungrand, not unmoving:—but unpoetical.
(Letters, 98–9)