Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) Read Online Free PDF Page B

him in the autumn. He was a classicist as well as a poet, and so we might expect Rome to produce a similar effect on him as it had on his literary predecessors. But neither the city of the ancient Romans nor that of the modern popes impressed him. He wrote to his mother:
    St Peter’s disappoints me: the stone of which it is made is a poor plastery material; and, indeed, Rome in general might be called a
rubbishy
place; the Romanantiquities in general seem to me only interesting as antiquities, and not for any beauty … The weather has not been very brilliant.
     
    If you want a one-word introduction to the tone, sensibility and modernity of Arthur Hugh Clough, you have it in that single, italicised (by him, not me) word:
rubbishy
. He will not subscribe to the required tenets of his country’s established religion if his conscience and intellect tell him otherwise; similarly, he will not subscribe to presumptions of grandeur and beauty if his eyes and aesthetic antennae tell him otherwise. Nor was this some initial irreverence, the grumpy consequence of baggage loss or digestive calamity. It was an opinion Clough confirmed by writing it into the opening canto of a poem he composed during his three-month stay in the city:
    Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand, but
    Rubbishy
seems the word that most exactly would suit it
.
    All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings
,
    All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages
,
    Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future
.
    Would to Heaven the old Goths had made a cleaner sweep of it!
    Would to Heaven the new ones would come and destroy these churches!
     
    Shelley had taken a regular evening walk to the Forum, where he admired the ‘sublime desolation of the scene’. Claude, the protagonist of
Amours de Voyage
, remains unmoved:
    What do I find in the Forum? An archway and two or three pillars
.
     
    And what of the Colosseum, for Dickens that Niagara-equalling wonder?
    No one can cavil, I grant, at the size of the great Coliseum
.
    Doubtless the notion of grand and capacious and massive amusement
,
    This the old Romans had; but tell me, is this an idea?
     
    Where others find splendour, Claude sees mere solidity:
    ‘Brickwork I found thee, and marble I left thee!’ their Emperor vaunted;
    ‘Marble I thought thee, and brickwork I find thee!’ the Tourist may answer
.
     
    Claude, like Clough, is a very un-Grand Tourist. He also finds himself in a city where, after a long slumber, history is beginning to happen again. Two months previously, in February 1849, Mazzini had declared the Roman Republic, which Garibaldi was now preparing to defend. On 22 April, Clough had an audience with Mazzini, handing over to the republic’s anglophile triumvir a cigar case, the gift of Carlyle. The next day he wrote to his friend F. T. Palgrave (the future editor of
The Golden Treasury
), describing a visit to the Colosseum. He reported not ageless magnificence, nor even shabby decrepitude, but a thoroughly modern event, a political rally with
    a band somewhere over the entrance playing national hymns. At the end of the great hymn, of which I don’t know the name, while the people were clapping, vivaing and encoring, light began to spread, and all at once the whole amphitheatre was lit up with – the trois couleurs! The basement red fire, the two next stories green, and the plain white of the commonlight at the top. Very queer, you will say; but it was really very fine, and I should think the Colosseum never looked better …
     
    Clough has often been treated as a marginal figure, both on the university English syllabus and in the English canon. Most people probably first come across him as the figure of ‘Thyrsis’ in Matthew Arnold’s memorial poem of that name – which, for a memorial poem, doesn’t seem to concentrate enough on the dead friend (Ian Hamilton called it ‘fundamentally a condescending, not to say complacent