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The Editorial Problem in Clough's Adam and Eve
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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Clough's poetry poses editorial problems that, if not special in kind, are certainly special in degree. The problems arise from Clough's way of writing and rewriting, so that one “poem” could in different stages be rewritten with widely divergent poetic intentions. The description that his own Mephistophelean Spirit gives in Dipsychus could stand for much of his experience in composition, and it well describes many of his manuscripts:
don't be sure — Emotions are so slippery … write verse, Burnt in disgust, then ill-restored, and left Half-made, in pencil scrawl, illegible.
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References
NOTES
1. Dipsychus, XI, 127–33Google Scholar, in Mulhauser, F. L., ed., The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 276–77Google Scholar, hereafter cited as Poems.
2. See, e.g., Gollin, Richard M., “The 1951 Edition of Clough's Poems: A Critical Re-examination”, Modern Philology, 60 (1962), 120–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mulhauser's response (in Poems, pp. vi–ix).Google Scholar On the general question of Clough's rewriting, see my review in Arnoldian, 4:3 (1977), 7–14Google Scholar, and, more fully, “A Study of Re writing in the Poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1976).Google Scholar
3. The first Oxford edition (1951) had used Mrs. Clough's title, for which it was sharply criticised by Gollin, (as in note 2 above, pp. 122–23)Google Scholar, because “there is repeated evidence that Clough, Mrs. Clough, and Matthew Arnold always called the poem ‘Adam and Eve’” (and cf. Gollin's criticism of Chorley, Lady in Essays in Criticism, 12 [1962], 429).Google Scholar Since Gollin's reviews, most scholarly commentary has accepted the notebook title.
4. Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, edited by his wife (London: Macmillan, 1869), II, 43 ff.Google Scholar
5. Ibid.
6. From the fuller version of the memorandum, in Bodleian Ms.Eng.Misc.c.359, ff. 120–23. A second version is laid in Bodleian Ms.Eng.poet.d. 125 (Adam and Eve Notebook II), between ff. 13 and 18, and is printed in Poems, p. 663.Google Scholar Both versions are written on the same bright blue paper. I am indebted to Miss Katharine Duff, to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and to the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, for permission to quote manuscript materials.
7. Dates have ranged from 1847–48, in Johari, G. P., PMLA, 66 (1951), 417Google Scholar, to later than Clough's, Dipsychus (1850)Google Scholar, in Johnson, Jacqueline and Dean, Paul, Durham University Journal, 38 (1977), 253.Google Scholar
8. Cf. Smith, Eric, Some Versions of the Fall (London: Croom Helm, 1973), p. 17.Google Scholar
9. E.g., Chorley, Katherine, Arthur Hugh Clough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 125Google Scholar; for dating Clough's study of economic questions, see Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Mulhauser, F. L. (Oxford: Clarendon, Press 1957), I, 130Google Scholar, hereafter cited as Correspondence.
10. Balliol Ms.441(a), ff. 4V and 5V. Chorley, Lady (p. 107)Google Scholar prints this passage with materials from elsewhere in the notebook, and assigns it to 1849; Biswas, Robindra K., Arthur Hugh Clough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972)Google Scholar prints it in its context and dates it 1845. Clough's interest in the progressive Unitarians and the transcendentalists is discussed by Greenberger, Evelyn Barish, Arthur Hugh Clough: the Growth of a Poet's Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 102–04.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The manuscript notebook here quoted is sometimes cited as the 1849 (Roma) Notebook, but is clearly labelled by Clough “GrasmereL[ong] V[acation] '45/Roma – MDCCCXLIX” (Poems, p. 654)Google Scholar, and much of the material is from the earlier date.
11. Clough noted that he had seen this number, in a letter of 21 Sept. 1845 (Correspondence, I, 155Google Scholar, which misprints “3” as “8”). Copies of the first three numbers were listed among his books after his marriage (list in Bodleian Ms.Eng.Misc.c.359, f. 155). The same number also included articles on Dr. Arnold, and on Blanco White (the Unitarian ex-Fellow of Oriel), which would make Clough's interest still more probable.
12. [Kenrick, John], Prospective Review, 1 (08 1845), 335–55, esp. pp. 342 and 348–50.Google Scholar Authorship identification for this and the next item from Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, volume 3. The word “mythus” had been used in English for some years, but always in a specialized context relating to German scholarship (see O.E.D., esp. examples from Coleridge and Carlyle). References to Adam and Eve in parentheses in the text are to the scene and line numbers in Poems, pp. 165–87.Google Scholar
13. [Wicksteed, Charles], Prospective Review, 1 (08 1845), 445–64; pp. 450–51.Google Scholar With the last sentence, cf. Clough's later “Notes on the Religious Tradition” (c. 1850), in Selected Prose Works of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Trawick, Buckner B. (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1964), p. 291.Google Scholar
14. Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Lowry, H. F. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932; repr. 1968), p. 86 (20 07 1848); and p. 87 (late 07/ early 08 1848).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15. Both the letter(8 Sept. 1848) and verses are printed by Mulhauser, F. L., “An Unpublished Poem of James Anthony Froude,” English Language Notes, 12 (1974), 26–30.Google Scholar
16. Chorley, , p. 182.Google Scholar
17. Houghton, Walter E., The Poetry of Clough (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 80 and n. 3.Google Scholar
18. Bodleian MS.Eng.poet.d.125, which contains fair copies (rectos only, ff. 1–13) of scene I and scene II, lines 1–78.
19. Bodleian Ms.Eng.poet.d.124.
20. Clough himself, for instance, had had in 1844 to subscribe to the XXXIX Articles of Religion, and among them Article IX, which affirms a belief in “Original or Birth-Sin” that “mutually is engendered of the offspring of Adam.” Cf. also “Thou bidd'st me mark,” in Poems, p. 137.Google Scholar
21. Balliol Ms.441(a), ff. 38r, 36V.
22. I have noticed besides Byron the following treatments of the Cain story: Gessner, Solomon, The Death of Abel (1761)Google Scholar; Hall, W. H., The Death of Cain (1809)Google Scholar; Montgomery, James, The World before the Flood (1813), Book VIIGoogle Scholar; Blake, William, The Ghost of Abel (1822)Google Scholar; Coleridge, S. T., “The Wanderings of Cain,” in his Poems (1826)Google Scholar; Reade, J. E., Cain the Wanderer, a Vision of Heaven (1829)Google Scholar; Yorke, C. J., Cain and Abel: A Poem (1836)Google Scholar; Harper, William, Cain and Abel (1844)Google Scholar; Chadwick, Adam, Cain and Abel (1845)Google Scholar; and “A Cambridge Wrangler,” “Cain,” in Poems of Early Years (1851).Google Scholar This list is certainly incomplete. When W. E. Aytoun wished to satirize the Victorian “Spasmodists,” he made his hero a poet who was attempting “to paint the mental spasms that tortured Cain” (Firmilian, 1854, I, 96Google Scholar, in Poems of William Edmonstoune Aytoun, ed. Page, Frederick [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921], p. 299).Google Scholar
23. Poems, p. 667.Google Scholar
24. Cf. Scott, Patrick, ed., Amours de Voyage (St. Lucia: Queensland University Press, 1974), pp. 7–9 and p. 39.Google Scholar
25. Loose sheet laid in Balliol Ms.441(a).
26. Bodleian Ms.Eng.poet.d. 133.
27. In this reconstruction, “My father” (which opens the 1869 line 1, but which is, on the manuscript f. 4V, separated by a dash from “Abel is dead”) is taken to be a note of the fact that lines 7–9 precede the inserted material; scansion reinforces the interpretation, though it is admittedly conjectural. Arrow brackets < > surround deleted material, italics indicate Clough's substitutions, and square brackets [ ] indicate editorial additions or expansions.
28. With this passage, cf. I Peter 5:6: “be clothed with humility … humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God.”
29. The lyrics are printed in Poems, pp. 215–17Google Scholar, and the extra scene is in the notes to Poems, p. 665Google Scholar; the loose sheet is foliated f. 14 of the notebook. There was also at least one further draft scene no longer extant; the words remaining on the stubs of the excised leaves (e.g., ff. 5v and 6r) do not correspond to the ends or beginnings of any printed lines.
30. This same notebook also contains the remnants of a once-substantial hexameter poem about a Highland ferry-girl (in Poems, pp. 447–48)Google Scholar, which is much earlier in date – subsequent to 3 Aug. 1847, yet almost certainly predating The Bothie (09 1848).Google Scholar These hexameters, however, need not determine the date of the Adam and Eve material, since they work from the opposite end of the notebook, and where the two overlap (e.g. on f. 43r), the Adam and Eve material fits round the hexameters on the page, not the other way about.
31. Biswas, , p. 263.Google Scholar
32. Cf. Amours de Voyage, III, 176Google Scholar (Poems, p. 119Google Scholar), and Dipsychus, v, 66 and 75Google Scholar (Poems, p. 239).Google Scholar
33. Adam and Eve Notebook I, f. 33V; cf. Poems and Prose Remains (1869), II, 69Google Scholar, and Poems, pp. 666–67.Google Scholar
34. Poems, pp. 215–16.Google Scholar
35. Adam and Eve Notebook I, f. 2V; Poems, pp. 216–17 and p. 681.Google Scholar Line 21 of this lyric (recorded as “illegible” in Poems) reads “In the well forgets the ill,” and line 22 reads “Cheerily, so cheerily,” not “oh cheerily.” I am grateful to E. P. Wilson of Worcester College, Oxford, for collating this Ms. for me.
36. Poems, pp. 214–15 and p. 680.Google Scholar
37. Barish, Evelyn, “A New Clough manuscript,” Review of English Studies, NS 15 (1964), 168–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
38. Adam and Eve Notebook I, f. 43r.
39. Cf. Houghton, , pp. 88–89.Google Scholar
40. [Henry Sidgwick], in Westminster Review, 92 (10 1869), 375–76Google Scholar; repr. in Thorpe, Michael, ed., Clough, the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
41. Waddington, Samuel, Arthur Hugh Clough, A Monograph (London: George Bell and Sons, 1883), p. 310.Google Scholar
42. Johnson, and Dean, (see note 7 above), p. 251n.Google Scholar