The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 54, April, 1862

His letters were reflections of himself,—full of thought, fancy, and pleasant humor, as well as of affectionateness and true feeling. Their character is hardly to be given in extracts, but a few passages may serve to illustrate some of these qualities.

"Ambrose Philips, the Roman Catholic, who set up the new St. Bernard Monastery at Charnwood Forest, has taken to spirit-rappings. He avers, inter alia, that a Buddhist spirit in misery held communication with him through the table, and entreated his confessor, Father Lorraine, to say three masses for him. Pray, convey this to T– for his warning. For, moreover, it remains uncertain whether Father Lorraine did say the masses; so that perhaps T–'s deceased co-religionist is still in the wrong place."

Some time after his return, he wrote,—"Really, I may say I am only just beginning to recover my spirits after returning from the young and hopeful and humane republic, to this cruel, unbelieving, inveterate old monarchy. There are deeper waters of ancient knowledge and experience about one here, and one is saved from the temptation of flying off into space; but I think you have, beyond all question, the happiest country going. Still, the political talk of America, as one hears it here, is not always true to the best intentions of the country, is it?"

Writing on a July day from his office in Whitehall, he says, after speaking of the heat of the weather,—"Time has often been compared to a river: if the Thames at London represent the stream of traditional wisdom, the comparison will indeed be of an ill odor; the accumulated wisdom of the past will be proved upon analogy to be as it were the collected sewage of the centuries; and the great problem, how to get rid of it."

In March, 1854, he wrote,—"People talk a good deal about that book of Whewell's on the Plurality of Worlds. I recommend Fields to pirate it. Have you seen it? It is to show that Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, etc., are all pretty certainly uninhabitable,—being (Jupiter, Saturn, etc., to wit) strange washy limbos of places, where at the best only mollusks (or, in the case of Venus, salamanders) could exist. Hence we conclude we are the only rational creatures, which is highly satisfactory, and, what is more, quite Scriptural. Owen, on the other hand, I believe, and other scientific people, declare it a most presumptuous essay,– conclusions audacious, and reasoning fallacious, though the facts are allowed; and in that opinion I, on the ground that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the inductive philosophy, incline to concur."

Of his work he wrote,—"Well, I go on in the office, operose nihil agenda, very operose, and very nihil too. For lack of news, I send you a specimen of my labors."—"We are here going on much as usual, —occupied with nothing else but commerce and the money-market. I do not think any one is thinking audibly of anything else."—"I have read with more pleasure than anything else that I have read lately Kane's Arctic Explorations, i.e., his second voyage, which is certainly a wonderful story. The whole narrative is, I think, very characteristic of the differences between the English and the American-English habits of command and obedience."

In the autumn of 1857, after speaking of some of the features of the Sepoy revolt, he said,—"I don't believe Christianity can spread far in Asia, unless it will allow men more than one wife,—which isn't likely yet out of Utah. But I believe the old Brahmin 'Touch not and taste not, and I am holier than thou, because I don't touch and taste,' may be got rid of. As for Mahometanism, it is a crystallized monotheism, out of which no vegetation can come. I doubt its being good even for the Central negro."

March, 1859. "Excuse this letter all about my own concerns. I am pretty busy, and have time for little else: such is our fate after forty. My figure 40 stands nearly three months behind me on the roadway, unwept, unhonored, and unsung, an octavum lustrum bound up and laid on the shelf. 'So-and-so is dead,' said a friend to Lord Melbourne of some author. 'Dear me, how glad I am! Now I can bind him up.'"

It was not until 1859 that the translation of Plutarch, begun six years before, was completed and published. It had involved much wearisome study, and gave proof of patient, exact, and elegant scholarship. Clough's life in the Council-Office was exceedingly laborious, and for several years his work was increased by services rendered to Miss Nightingale, a near relative of his wife. He employed "many hours, both before and after his professional duties were over, to aid her in those reforms of the military administration to which she has devoted the remaining energies of her overtasked life." For this work he was the better fitted from having acted, during a period of relief from his regular employment, as Secretary to a Military Commission appointed by Government shortly after the Crimean War to examine and report upon the military systems of some of the chief Continental nations. But at length his health gave way under the strain of continuous overwork. He had for a long time been delicate, and early in 1861 he was obliged to give up work, and was ordered to travel abroad. He went to Greece and Constantinople, and enjoyed greatly the charms of scenery and of association which he was so well fitted to appreciate. But the release from work had come too late. He returned to England in July, his health but little improved. In a letter written at that time he spoke of Lord Campbell's death, which had just occurred. "Lord Campbell's death is rather the characteristic death of the English political man. In the Cabinet, on the Bench, and at a dinner-party, busy, animated, and full of effort to-day, and in the early morning a vessel has burst. It is a wonder they last so long." But of himself he says, in words of striking contrast,—"My nervous energy is pretty nearly spent for to-day, so I must come to a stop. I have leave till November, and by that time I hope I shall be strong again for another good spell of work." After a happy three weeks in England, he went abroad again, and spent some time with his friends the Tennysons in Auvergne and among the Pyrenees. In September he was joined by his wife in Paris, and thence went with her through Switzerland to Italy. He had scarcely reached Florence before he became alarmingly ill with symptoms of a low malaria fever. His exhausted constitution never rallied against its attack. He sank gradually away, and died on the 13th of November. "I have leave till November, and by that time I hope I shall be strong again for another good spell of work." That hope is accomplished;—

"For sure in the wide heaven there is room
For love, and pity, and for helpful deeds."

He was buried in the little Protestant cemetery at Florence, a fit resting-place for a poet, the Protestant Santa Croce, where the tall cypresses rise over the graves, and the beautiful hills keep guard around.

"Every one who knew Clough even slightly," says one of his oldest friends, "received the strongest impression of the unusual breadth and massiveness of his mind. Singularly simple and genial, he was unfortunately cast upon a self-questioning age, which led him to worry himself with constantly testing the veracity of his own emotions. He has delineated in four lines the impression which his habitual reluctance to converse on the deeper themes of life made upon those of his friends who were attracted by his frank simplicity. In one of his shorter poems he writes,—

'I said, My heart is all too soft;
He who would climb and soar aloft
Must needs keep ever at his side
The tonic of a wholesome pride.'

That expresses the man in a very remarkable manner. He had a kind of proud simplicity about him singularly attractive, and often singularly disappointing to those who longed to know him well. He had a fear, which many would think morbid, of leaning much on the approbation of the world. And there is one remarkable passage in his poems in which he intimates that men who live on the good opinion of others might even be benefited by a crime which would rob them of that evil stimulant:—

'Why, so is good no longer good, but crime
Our truest, best advantage, since it lifts us
Out of the stifling gas of men's opinion
Into the vital atmosphere of Truth,
Where He again is visible, though in anger.'

"So eager was his craving for reality and perfect sincerity, so morbid his dislike even for the unreal conventional forms of life, that a mind quite unique in simplicity and truthfulness represents itself in his poems as

'Seeking in vain, in all my store,
One feeling based on truth.'

"Indeed, he wanted to reach some guaranty for simplicity deeper than simplicity itself. We remember his principal criticism on America, after returning from his residence in Massachusetts, was, that the New-Englanders were much simpler than the English, and that this was the great charm of New-England society. His own habits were of the same kind, sometimes almost austere in their simplicity. Luxury he disliked, and sometimes his friends thought him even ascetic.

"This almost morbid craving for a firm base on the absolute realities of life was very wearing in a mind so self-conscious as Clough's, and tended to paralyze the expression of a certainly great genius. He heads some of his poems with a line from Wordsworth's great ode, which depicts perfectly the expression often written in the deep furrows which sometimes crossed and crowded his massive forehead:—

'Blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized.'

"Nor did Clough's great powers ever realize themselves to his contemporaries by any outward sign at all commensurate with the profound impression which they produced in actual life. But if his powers did not, there was much in his character that did produce its full effect upon all who knew him. He never looked, even in time of severe trial, to his own interest or advancement. He never flinched from the worldly loss which his deepest convictions brought on him. Even when clouds were thick over his own head, and the ground beneath his feet seemed crumbling away, he could still bear witness to an eternal light behind the cloud, and tell others that there is solid ground to be reached in the end by the weary feet of all who will wait to be strong. Let him speak his own farewell:—

'Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not nor faileth,
And as things have been things remain.

'Though hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And but for you possess the field.

'For though the tired wave, idly breaking,
Seems here no tedious inch to gain,
Far back, through creek and inlet making,
Came, silent flooding in, the main.

'And not through eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow,—how slowly!
But westward—look! the land is bright.'"

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THEM?

We have many precedents upon the part of the "Guardian of Civilization," which may or may not guide us. Not to return to that age "whereunto the memory of man runneth not to the contrary," "the day of King Richard our grandfather," and to the Wars of the Roses, we will begin with the happy occasion of the Restoration of King Charles of merry and disreputable fame. Since he came back to his kingdoms on sufferance and as a convenient compromise between anarchy and despotism, he could hardly afford the luxury of wholesale proscription. What the returning Royalists could, they did. It was obviously unsafe, as well as ungrateful, to hang General Monk in presence of his army, many of whom had followed the "Son of the Man" from Worcester Fight in hot pursuit, and had hunted him from thicket to thicket of Boscobel Wood. But to dig up the dead Cromwell and Ireton, to suspend them upon the gallows, to mark out John Milton, old and blind, for poverty and contempt, was both safe and pleasant. And civilization was guarded accordingly. One little bit of comfort, however, was permitted. Scotland had been the Virginia of his day, and Charles had the satisfaction of hearing that the Whigs, who had betrayed and sold his father, and who had (a far worse offence) made himself listen to three-hours' sermons, were chased like wild beasts among the hills, after the defeat of Bothwell Brigg. But what Charles could not do was permitted to his brother. After the rebellion of Monmouth was put down, the West of England was turned to mourning. From the princely bastard who sued in agony and vain humiliation, to the clown of Devon forced into the rebel ranks,—from the peer who plotted, to the venerable and Christian woman whose sole crime was sheltering the houseless and starving fugitive, there was given to the vanquished no mercy but the mercy of Jeffreys, no tenderness but the tenderness of Kirk.

But the House of Stuart was not always to represent the side of victory. Thirty years after the Rout of Sedgemoor, the son of James, whose name was clouded by rumor with the same stain of spuriousness as that of his unfortunate cousin, was proclaimed by the Earl of Mar. The Jacobites were forced to drink to the dregs the cup of bitterness they had so gladly administered to others. Over Temple Bar and London Bridge the heads of the defeated rebels bore witness to the guardianship of civilization as understood in the eighteenth century.

Another thirty years brings us to the landing of Moidart, the rising of the clans, the fall of Edinburgh and Carlisle, the "Bull's Run" at Prestonpans, and the panic of London. If we are anxious to guard our civilization according to Hanoverian precedents, there is one name commonly given to the Commander-in-chief at Culloden which Congress should add to the titles it is preparing against McClellan's successful advance. The "Butcher Cumberland" not only hounded on his troops with the tempting price of thirty thousand pounds for the Pretender dead or alive, but every adherent of the luckless Jefferson Davis of that day was in peril of life and wholesale confiscation. The House of Hanover not only broke the backbone of the Rebellion, but mangled without mercy its remains.

We come now, in another thirty years, to the next struggle of England with a portion of her people. It is impossible, as well as unfair, to say what might have been done with "Mr. Washington, the Virginia colonel," and Mr. Franklin, the Philadelphia printer, had they not been able to determine their own destiny. We can only surmise, by referring to two well-known localities in New York, the "Old Sugar-House" and the "Jersey Prison-Ship," how paternally George III was disposed then to resume his rights. And without disposition to press historic parallels, we cannot but compare Arnold and Tryon's raid along the south shore of Connecticut with a certain sail recently made up the Tennessee River to the foot of the Muscle Shoals by the command of a modern Connecticut officer.

But as we were spared the necessity of testing the royal clemency to the submitted Provinces of North America, we had better pass on twenty years to the era of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland. In this country the Irishman need not "fear to speak of '98," and in this country he still treasures the memory of the whippings and pitch-caps of Major Beresford's riding-house, and other pleasant souvenirs of the way in which, sixty years ago, loyalty dealt with rebellion. There is no inherent proneness to treason in the Hibernian nature, as Corcoran and the Sixty-Ninth can bear witness; nor is Pat so fond of a riot that he cannot with fair play be a—well, a good citizen. Yet at home he has been so "civilized" by his British guardian as to be in a chronic state of discontent and fretfulness.

We must, however, hasten to our latest precedent,—England in India. The Sepoy Rebellion had some features in common with our own. It was inaugurated by premeditated military treachery. It seized upon a large quantity of Government munitions of war. It only asked "to be let alone." It found the Government wholly unprepared. But it was the uprising of a conquered people. The rebels were in circumstances, as in complexion, much nearer akin to that portion of our Southern citizens which has not rebelled, and which has lost no opportunity of seeking our lines "to take the oath of allegiance" or any other little favor which could be found there. We do not defend their atrocities, although a plea in mitigation might be put in, that these "were wisely planned to break the spell which British domination had woven over the native mind of India," and that they were part of that decided and desperate policy which was designed to forever bar the way of reconstruction. But toward the recaptured rebels there was used a course for which the only precedent, so far as we know, was furnished by that highly civilized guardian, the Dey of Algiers. These prisoners of war were in cold blood tied to the muzzles of cannon and blown into fragments. The illustrated papers of that most Christian land which is overcome with the barbarity of sinking old hulks in a channel through which privateers were wont to escape our blockade furnished effective engravings "by our own artist" of the scene. Wholesale plunder and devastation of the chief city of the revolt followed. The rebellion was put down, and put down, we may say, without any unnecessary tenderness, any womanish weakness for the rebels.

We have thus established what we believe is called by theologians a catena of precedents, coming down from the days of the Commonwealth to our own time. It covers about the whole period of New England history. And we next propose to ask the question, how far it may be desirable to be bound by such indisputable authority.

Is it too late to reopen the question, and to retry the issue between sovereign and rebel, less with respect to ancient and immemorial usage, and more according to eternal principle? We answer, No. The same power that enables us to master this rebellion will give us original and final jurisdiction over it.

But one principle asserts itself out of the uniform coarse of history. The restoration of the lawful authority over rebels does not restore them to their old status. They are at the pleasure of the conquering power. Rights of citizenship, having been abjured, do not return with the same coercion which demands duties of citizenship. Thus, to illustrate on an individual scale, every wrong-doer is ipso facto a rebel. He forfeits, according to due course of law, a measure of his privileges, while constrained to the same responsibility of obedience. His property is not exempt from taxes because he is in prison, but his right of voting is gone; he cannot bear arms, but he must keep the peace, he must labor compulsorily, and attend such worship as the State provides. In short, he becomes a ward of the State, while not ceasing to be a member. His inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable only so long as he remained obedient and true to the sovereign. Now this is equally true on the large scale as on the small. The only difficulty is to apply it to broad masses of men and to States.

It may not be expedient to try South Carolina collectively, but we contend that the application of the principle gives us the right. Corporate bodies have again and again been punished by suspension of franchise, while held to allegiance and duties.

The simple question for us is, What will it be best to do? The South may save us the trouble of deciding for the present a part of the many questions that occur. We may put down the Confederate Government, and take military occupation. We cannot compel the Southerners to hold elections and resume their share in the Government. It can go on without them. The same force which reopens the Mississippi can collect taxes or exact forfeitures along its banks. If Charleston is sullen, the National Government, having restored its flag to Moultrie and Sumter, can take its own time in the matter of clearing out the channel and rebuilding the light-houses. If a secluded neighborhood does not receive a Government postmaster, but is disposed to welcome him with tarry hands to a feathery bed, it can be left without the mails. The rebel we can compel to return to his duties; if necessary, we can leave him to get back his rights as he best may.

But we are the representatives of a great political discovery. The American Union is founded on a fact unknown to the Old World. That fact is the direct ratio of the prosperity of the parts to the prosperity of the whole. It is the principle upon which in every community our life is built. We cannot, therefore, afford to have any part of the land languishing and suffering. We are fighting, not for conquest, for we mean to abjure our power the moment we safely can,—not for vengeance, for those with whom we fight are our brethren. We are compelled by a necessity, partly geographical and partly social, into restoring a Union politically which never for a day has actually ceased.

Let us advert to one fact very patent and significant. We have heard of nearly all our successes through Rebel sources. Even where it made against them, they could not help telling us (we do not say the truth, for that is rather strong, but) the news. Never did two nations at war know one-tenth part as much of each other's affairs. Like husband and wife, the two parts of the country cannot keep secrets from one another, let them try ever so hard. And the end of all will be that we shall know and respect one another a great deal better for our sharp encounter.

But this necessity of union demands of the Government, imperatively demands, that it take whatever step is necessary to its own preservation. It is as with a ship at sea,—all must pull together, or somebody must go overboard. There can be no such order of things as an agreed state of mutiny,—forecastle seceding from cabin, and steerage independent of both.