Was it Arnold's doing?: A Psychological Study of Arthur Hugh Clough

Several generations of literary critics has found it virtually impossible to deal with the life and work of the mid-nineteenth century poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, without taking pot-shots at his famous schoolmaster, Dr. Arnold of Rugby. The intellectual temper of the times made this development practically inevitable, for the moral and cultural virtues for which the great headmaster stood were under attack from all sides. If Clough had not existed, such a handy weapon in the war of ideas as the sensitive poet's life-long struggle to liberate his genius from spiritual burdens imposed in childhood by an over-zealous schoolmaster, would have been invented.

Walter Bagehot set the framework for subsequent discussion of the Arnold-Clough relationship when, after observing that Clough was “one of the favorite pupils of Dr. Arnold,” he commented that while Arnold was probably an admirable master for the common, apple-eating English boy, his influence on the “susceptible, serious, intellectual boy” might have been less wholesome.1 Later, when the post- (and almost by definition, anti-) Victorians began to get in their licks against “all that,” the attacks became more savage. Humbert Wolfe maintained that Arnold “sought not merely to make Clough in his own image, but to breathe the breath of life into him.”2

With the passage of time this estimate of the Rugby influence on the poet's character has become almost a truism. As late as 1958 a reviewer for the New York Times found it expedient to take the customary side-swipe at Dr. Arnold before expressing the opinion that what the poet's troubles really were “we still don't know.”3 In Bagehot's day it was natural to exaggerate the role of education in molding character. So that, when Clough himself, by giving the uncle in “Dipsychus” slightly the better of the argument, conceded that the inability of his own “over-tender conscience” to come to