Mari Magno, Dipsychus, and other poems E-Book

Arthur Hugh Clough

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

'The true haunts of the poetic powers,' Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) wrote to his friend Matthew Arnold, are no more upon Pindus or Parnassus but in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild Temptation. Clough explores the theme of temptation, and the question of how a young man should live, in his dramatic poem Dipsychus, a Faustian dialogue in which is staged, in Clough's words, the conflict between the tender conscience and the world. Mari Magno, written in the last years of Clough's life and drawing on his own travels in Europe as he attempted to recover his health, is a modern Canterbury Tales: a group of passengers on a transatlantic crossing exchange tales about love, exploring the various motives for marriage and the consequences that may follow. This book sets these two unfinished masterpieces alongside a selection of Clough's shorter poems. In his introduction, Anthony Kenny provides a wealth of detail about the textual history and autobiographical contexts of the poems included here.

Leseprobe

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

Mari Magno, Dipsychus, and Other Poems

Edited with an introduction by ANTHONY KENNY

FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.

FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.

Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,

Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

from ‘Thyrsis

CONTENTS

Title PageEpigraphIntroductionEaster DayDipsychusSeven SonnetsSongs in AbsenceMari MagnoorTales on BoardActaeonAbout the AuthorCopyright

INTRODUCTION

1. Arthur Hugh Clough

In the latter part of the nineteenth century it was not uncommon to canonise, as the great poets of the Victorian age, a quartet whose members were Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough. The reputation of the first three endured, but at the end of the century Clough was expelled from the pantheon. In the first half of the twentieth century Lytton Strachey sniggered at Clough’s association with Florence Nightingale, and F.R. Leavis exalted the talents of Gerard Manley Hopkins above all four of the original Victorian quartet.

In 1941 Winston Churchill, anxious to secure American co-operation in the fight with Hitler, broadcast some lines from ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth’ which ended ‘Westward, look, the land is bright’. This brought some at least of Clough’s poetry back to the national consciousness, and in the post-war years several critics were willing to hail him as the most modern of Victorian poets. The 1960s and 1970s saw a series of biographies and literary studies appear on both sides of the Atlantic. Changing fashions in English departments in universities have led, since 1980, to comparative neglect of Clough’s oeuvre, though popular editions of the principal poems have continued to appear regularly.

Arthur Hugh Clough was born in Liverpool on 1 January 1819, the son of a cotton merchant of Welsh extraction, and of the daughter of a Yorkshire banker. In the winter of 1822–23 the Cloughs, with their four children, emigrated to Charleston, South Carolina. The family continued to reside in America until 1836, but Arthur was taken back to England in 1828 and a year later entered Rugby school, where he formed a great admiration for the headmaster, Thomas Arnold. He was welcomed into the Arnold family circle where he began lifelong friendships with the headmaster’s two eldest sons, Matthew and Thomas.

In 1837 Clough went as a scholar to Balliol College, Oxford. His time at the college was one of religious and emotional crisis. He had been brought up in an evangelical tradition by his mother, and had imbibed liberal Christianity at Rugby, but now he fell for a time under the spell of John Henry Newman and the devotional and ascetic ideals of the Oxford Movement. His diaries and verses of this period show the great strain caused by enduring the pull of conflicting theological traditions. His academic work suffered; he postponed his final examinations, and when he sat them in 1841 he obtained only a second class. He walked to Rugby to tell Arnold that he had failed.

Clough competed unsuccessfully for a Balliol fellowship, but in the following year was elected to a fellowship at Oriel. Shortly afterwards he lost his father, his younger brother, and his second father Thomas Arnold. He was consoled somewhat by the presence in Oxford of the young Arnold brothers, with whom he enjoyed the Oxfordshire excursions later described so engagingly in Matthew’s Scholar Gipsy.

At Oriel, Clough found himself a colleague of Newman, but by this time he had ceased to feel any attraction to the Tractarian movement. Partly under the influence of Carlyle and German biblical scholarship, he had moved in the opposite direction, and now found Anglican orthodoxy burdensome. It was with reluctance that he subscribed to the Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles in 1844, and he began to seek alternatives to his Oriel tutorship, even though Matthew Arnold had joined him as a fellow in the spring of 1845. During his years as a tutor he was a conscientious teacher, and in the summer vacations he took reading parties of his pupils to Braemar and Loch Ness in Scotland. At the beginning of 1848, while his fellowship still had eighteen months to run, he resigned his tutorship, telling the head of his college that he could no longer adhere to the Church’s articles.

1848 was a year of revolution throughout Europe, and Clough spent the spring in Paris, witnessing the French revolution at first hand. He spent the summer writing a narrative poem seventeen hundred verses long, entitled The Bothie. The poem was published in November, a month after the final resignation of his Oriel fellowship.

The poem is set in the context of a Scottish reading party, in which the tutor and his pupils bear a strong resemblance to Clough and his young friends. The student hero is a radical poet, Philip Hewson, who combines a belief in the dignity of labour with a keen susceptibility to feminine beauty. After two abortive flirtations, he falls in love with a crofter’s daughter, Elspie, and emigrates with her to New Zealand, whither, in reality, young Tom Arnold had emigrated in the previous December.

The Bothie was well received by most reviewers; it sold well and quickly established its author’s reputation as a poet. Hard on its heels followed a second publication: in January there appeared Ambarvalia, a collection of verse by Clough and his Cambridge friend Thomas Burbidge. Most of its contents are short poems, recalling the trials of student years and the journeys of the religious doubter. ‘Qui Laborat, Orat’, admired by Tennyson, expresses the tension of prayer to a God who is ineffable; ‘The New Sinai’ dramatises the conflict between religion and science. There are poems of love and friendship in various moods and metres, and there is a surprisingly frank celebration of fleeting sexual impulse in ‘Natura Naturans’.

From April to August 1849 Clough was in Rome where, since the expulsion of Pius IX in 1848, Mazzini had presided over a short-lived Roman Republic. Clough’s letters give a vivid account of Garibaldi’s defence of the city against the besieging French army under General Oudinot. With astonishing speed he exploited this experience in poetical form, writing an epistolary novel in five cantos, Amours de Voyage. This poem, which is the most enduringly popular of his works, tells the story of Claude, a supercilious Oxford graduate who is initially contemptuous of Rome and of a young English woman he meets on the grand tour, Mary Trevellyn. By the end of the story Claude has fallen in love both with Mary and with the Roman Republic, only to lose them both, as the Trevellyns travel North without him and the French restore the rule of the Pope. The first draft was finished shortly after Clough’s return to England, but the final version was not published until 1858 when it appeared in an American journal, The Atlantic Monthly.

In the summer of 1849 Clough visited Naples. While there he wrote the most successful of his poems on religious topics, ‘Easter Day’. It is an unblinking denial of the Resurrection of Jesus, the central Christian doctrine, in words taken from the Christian scriptures themselves; it accompanies the denial with an unflinching vision of the hopes that are given up by one who abandons Christianity. Believers and unbelievers alike have admired its emotional and intellectual power.

In October of the same year Clough became the head of University Hall, London, a non-sectarian collegiate institution for students attending lectures at University College. He was not happy with his duties there, and he was disappointed in love. He spent the summer in Venice, in which he commenced work on the dramatic poem, Dipsychus. During this period he also wrote a sequence of seven sonnets.

At the end of 1851 Clough left University Hall. It was important for him to find alternative employment, because he was now in love with Blanche Smith of Combe Hall, Surrey, to whom he became engaged in 1852. In October 1952 he sailed with W.M. Thackeray to America, where he was warmly welcomed by Emerson, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton and other members of Boston literary society. During his travels he wrote a number of poems, which were later collected by his wife under the title ‘Songs in Absence’. He had no success, however, in finding a permanent job, and returned to England where his friends had found him a post as examiner in the Education Office, which enabled him to marry Blanche in June 1854.

What time Clough had to spare from his exertions in the Education Office was spent in assisting his wife’s cousin Florence Nightingale in her campaign to reform military hospitals. It was he who had escorted her to Calais in 1854 on her first voyage to the Crimean theatre of war. By 1861 his health had broken down, and he was given sick-leave for a foreign tour. He went to Greece and Constantinople, and began to write his last long poetical venture, a series of tales which was to become Mari Magno. After a few weeks at home in June 1861 Clough went abroad again, and spent some time in the Pyrenees with the Tennysons. The attempt to recover his health was vain, and he died in November in Florence, where he is buried in the Protestant cemetery.

2. The drama of Dipsychus

The verse drama Dipsychus was conceived at a very low moment in Clough’s life. During the summer vacation of his first unhappy year as Principal of University Hall he was due to visit Switzerland with Matthew Arnold, but he was let down as Matthew raced across Germany in pursuit of a woman. Instead he went alone to Venice. The dramatic date of Dipsychus is the feast of the Assumption, 15 August 1850. That was the exact date of the marriage of Matthew’s sister Jane to William Edward Foster. Jane had been the object of Arthur’s first disappointed love, and he had not yet met the woman who was to become his wife. The year was one when, as he told Thomas Arnold, ‘I could have gone cracked at times… with one thing and another’.

Clough revised his early Venetian drafts several times after his return to England, but never brought Dipsychus into a form that satisfied him. The poem was left in several incomplete manuscript versions on his death. It presented a difficult editorial problem for his widow, who undertook the posthumous publication of his unpublished poems. The problems presented by the manuscripts were made more severe for Blanche Clough by her distaste for parts of the poem that she regarded as licentious or irreligious. In her first posthumous edition of the poems in 1862 she printed several sections of the work as separate poems. The drama was first presented as a unit – in a highly censored version – in a private edition of 1865. It was offered to the general public in the same form in 1869.

In recent times fuller versions have been published in editions of Clough’s works, reproducing more of the material to be found in the manuscripts – notably the Oxford editions of 1951 (H.F. Lowry and others) and of 1974 (F.L. Mulhauser) and the Longman edition of 1995 (J.P. Phelan). It would be wrong to think that these later editions give the full text of a poem previously available in mutilated form. Given Clough’s changes of mind, and ultimate indecision, there is no such thing as the text of the poem. The situation is similar to that of some of Verdi’s operas, such as Don Carlos, where several differently structured scores can make an equal claim to authenticity.

In all versions the poem is a Faustian dialogue, set in Venice, between a young ingénu of tender conscience, who is trying to decide on a way of life for himself, and a mysterious but worldly wise interlocutor, who urges him to embark on a conventional career. In the earlier versions of the text the two characters are named Faustulus and Mephisto; in later revisions these names were altered to Dipsychus and the Spirit, and Clough began to use the title Dipsychus for the whole poem. The Greek word dipsychos is used in the Epistle of St James, for instance in I.8, a verse translated in the Authorised Version as ‘A double minded man is unstable in all his ways’.

The character Dipsychus in the dialogue is in some sense identified with the poet himself: he frequently quotes Clough’s previous poems as his own compositions. Is the Spirit character to be identified with the Devil, as the name Mephisto suggests – or are we to regard him as the other half of the two-souled man? Either identification would be rash. Dipsychus himself stresses the ambiguous nature of his interlocutor. Early in the dialogue he asks

What is this persecuting voice that haunts me?

What? Whence? of whom? How am I to detect?

Myself or not myself? My own bad thoughts,

Or some external agency at work

To lead me who knows whither?

And in a prose epilogue that Clough considered adding to the poem, the poet explains to his uncle:

Perhaps he wasn’t a devil after all. That’s the beauty of the poem; nobody can say. You see, dear sir, the thing which is attempted to represent is the conflict between the tender conscience and the world. Now, the over-tender conscience will, of course, exaggerate the wickedness of the world; and the Spirit in my poem may be merely the hypothesis or subjective imagination.

Like Dipsychus, the reader must remain throughout uncertain whether the Spirit is a force for good or evil, and must try to evaluate each of his suggestions on its merits. But whether the Spirit be a true devil or not, he certainly represents the flesh and the world, and at a moment of submission Dipsychus yields to all three: ‘the greedy flesh, the world, the Devil – welcome, welcome, welcome’.

Even in a self-portrait it is important to keep clear the distinction between portrayer and portrayed. The author of Dipsychus, though he is writing about himself, cannot, as author, be identified with either of the voices he creates. No doubt at various times and in various moods Clough would identify himself now with the ethereal idealism of Dipsychus, now with the jaunty worldliness of Mephisto. But in the poem as presented the criticism that each, by juxtaposition, makes of the other is as much an utterance of the authorial voice as either of the positions criticised.

I shall now summarise the progress of the drama through the succession of scenes as presented in the present edition. I should make clear that the structure of the poem is a matter of controversy. The sequence of some of the most important scenes is left uncertain by the manuscripts, and these scenes have been printed by successive editors in different orders. The order of the scenes is important for the overall interpretation of the poem: in the next section of the introduction I shall defend the ordering that I have preferred.

Act I Scene 1. In the Piazza San Marco, Dipsychus recalls ‘Easter Day’, and having surveyed the scene concludes that Christ is not risen in Venice any more than in Naples. The Spirit tries to detach him from his theological pondering, and encourages him to take part in the harmless pleasures of the evening – coffee, ices, and the music of Rossini.

Scene 2. Dipsychus admires the lively scene in the Giardini Pubblici. The Spirit informs him that the crowd is celebrating the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and draws his attention to the frank display of feminine beauty that is on offer. Dipsychus is ogled by a passing servant girl, but after some hesitation he declines her invitation.

Scene 3. Walking along the quays back towards his hotel, Dipsychus expresses remorse for having ever entertained the thought of fornication – first on the basis of an idealistic view of women as angels, then on a more realistic assessment of the likely fate that awaits a fallen woman. The Spirit encourages him to visit a prostitute, but he is an honest purveyor of sex and does not wish to paint its delights in too glowing colours. Casual fornication, he explains, is not an apple from the tree of knowledge; whatever virginal curiosity may imagine, it leaves one, for better or worse, much as before. The pair return to the Piazza where, as we learn in the following scene, Dipsychus does visit a prostitute, but pays her off without making use of her services.

Scene 4. Back in the hotel the Spirit suggests more socially respectable forms of flirtation: gallantry in the ballroom, followed by a judicious engagement. Dipsychus rejects the social conventions of courtship as tedious and hollow.

Scene 5. A Croatian soldier of the Austrian army of occupation shouts offensively at Dipsychus. The Spirit urges him to avenge the insult by challenging the soldier to a duel. The pair engage in a long discussion about honour, violence, peace, and war. Dipsychus, though willing to fight in some good cause, will not draw the sword because of some trifling offence. The Spirit mocks at Christian pacifists.

Scene 6. The two sail to the Lido. On the way Dipsychus sings of a dream, in which bells ring out the news that, for good or ill, there is no God. The poem spells out the consequences of atheism for sexual morality and for war and peace and civil order. The Spirit responds with a lively lyric, ‘There is no God, the wicked says’, which examines the motives which lead people to believe, or disbelieve, in God’s existence. A bathe on the Lido gives no pleasure to the Spirit, but greatly cheers Dipsychus. Whereas Act I began with Dipsychus’s quotation ‘Christ is not risen’ it ends with the Spirit’s ironic ‘’Tis Easter Day, and on the Lido / Lo Christ the Lord is risen indeed, O’.

There follows an entr’acte entitled ‘In a Gondola’. The scene begins and ends with a lyric of Dipsychus comparing and contrasting the pair’s three-hour gondola ride with the whole course of life. It is a succession of verses which could be (and in some cases were) published as independent poems: in context these are songs that the two companions sing to each other as the gondoliers take them in the evening along the Grand Canal and out into the Lagoon. Dipsychus’s social conscience makes him worry that they are exploiting the poor gondoliers, and the Spirit mocks him for his unworldly idealism. All the best verses are given to the Spirit, culminating in the Gilbertian patter-song ‘How pleasant it is to have money!’

Act II Scene 1 is entitled ‘The Academy’. It begins with a lyric which uses two paintings in an exhibition to make a contrast between the active and the contemplative life. Dipsychus wonders what way of life he should adopt: none of the careers he considers presents any attraction. He indicates that he is willing to negotiate a Faustian bargain with the Spirit (whom he addresses, initially, as Mephistopheles). The Spirit urges him to give up infidelity, and to enter a profession such as the Church or the Law. He offers to find a suitable lady for Dipsychus to propose to, for marriage is almost a sine qua non for worldly respectability.

Scene 2. Dipsychus retires to meditate on the Spirit’s advice, in a soliloquy of 160 lines of blank verse. A legal career disgusts him: lawyers make their money out of the dirt in other people’s lives. As for marriage, he had hoped for something better than an arranged match. In any form of action, the hardest thing is the choice of the right moment. He weighs up the contrasting dangers of premature action and of excessive delay, and laments the depersonalised nature of modern life. In the end he accepts that his hope of individual, unselfish, heroic action is a romantic dream: there is no alternative to taking a humble part in the world’s work. The Spirit, offstage, applauds this common-sense decision.

Scene 3. Once again in the Piazza San Marco Dipsychus contrasts his moods of contentment and disillusion. The Spirit, fearing that he is about to relapse from his resolve of submission to the world, describes the impotence and futility of Dipsychus’s life when left to his own devices. This leisured life of principled indecision must be renounced if anything is to be achieved in the world.

Scene 4. Once more Dipsychus tries to delay decision and prolong his present way of life, but the Spirit refuses to be dismissed. There is no alternative to coming to terms with the world of business. Neither poetry, philosophy, nor tutoring will provide him with a living. It is time for him to grow up and forsake dreams and delusions.

Scene 5. In final bargaining Dipsychus tries in vain to persuade the Spirit to take over less than his whole soul. He welcomes the world, and says farewell to his dreams, but tries to include the Faustian bargain itself as a dream. The Spirit reveals that his name is indeed Mephistopheles. But he has other names too, of which his favourite is Cosmocrator, ruler of the world – the world that Dipsychus has at last made up his mind to enter. However, Dipsychus claims that Scripture promises conquest over the world. The Spirit is content to leave time to test which of the pair of them is the stronger. He is willing to bet that Dipsychus, having agreed to submit to the world, will yield forthwith to the temptations he has hitherto resisted.

In the division into two parts, and in the order of the scenes, I have followed in the main the structure of the poem as presented by Blanche Clough in her 1865 edition. My Act I has six scenes instead of five, because she omitted Scene 3, as well as large sections of other scenes. The order of the other scenes in Act I is the same in my edition as in hers, and is indeed dictated by the MSS except for the placement of Scene 6. The scene that I print as an entr’acte appears in the MSS sometimes as belonging to the first part and sometimes as belonging to the second: in the 1865 edition it is the second scene of the second part. The five scenes of my second act correspond to Scenes 3, 4, 5, 6 and 9 of Blanche Clough’s second part. Her Scene 1 I regard as an alternative version of Act I, Scene 1, and I have omitted her short Scenes 7 and 8.

The 1974 Oxford edition of Clough’s works does not divide Dipsychus into two parts, because of uncertainty in the MSS about where one part was to end and the other to begin. It is clear, however, that Clough intended the poem to be divided, and there are a number of differences between the two parts. In the first part the action is firmly placed in Venice; in the second part the occasional references to Venetian surroundings are as often as not purely ornamental. In the first part there is no real converse between the characters: the Spirit merely adds ironic comments to Dipsychus’s soliloquies; in the second part the two engage in colloquy, and indeed in bargaining. In the first part the Spirit’s temptations are of a crude, and initially gross, kind: he is Belial rather than Mephistopheles. In the second part, by contrast, he speaks with the voice of Clough’s respectable seniors. In the first part, Dipsychus resists the Spirit’s suggestions, while in the second he in the end accepts the demand to ‘submit’.

In considering the division between the parts, the scene that editors have found most difficult to place on the basis of the MSS evidence is ‘In a Gondola’. I have resolved the problem by treating it as an entr’acte. It is indeed structured in quite a different way from the other scenes of the two parts, being a sequence of lyrics which seem to be connected only by free association, quite different from the interrupted monologues of Act I and the colloquies of Act II.

Dipsychus, in Act I, successfully resists three temptations: to carnality, to aggression, and to atheism. The tempter represents successively the flesh, the world, and the devil. But the triptych of temptation also corresponds to the classical triad of the three possible lives, familiar to Clough from his reading and teaching of Plato and Aristotle: the life of pleasure, the life of honour, and the life of thought. In classical psychology these three lives in their turn corresponded to three parts of the soul: the appetitive part, the irascible part, and the rational part. The first temptations allure Dipsychus’s appetitive part; the insult scene is the challenge to his irascible part; the philosophico-theological discussions concern his rational part.

While the temptations of Act I are such as beset all mankind, in one form or other, the problems of Act II concern the specific choice of a career for an individual with the gifts, ideals, and history of Clough himself. This part puts the question whether any of the careers on offer can be chosen without a betrayal of those ideals, and whether an idealist can frame his own life rather than fit himself into slots provided by the world. The movement of thought, and the duplication between the two parts of the poem, once again follow an Aristotelian pattern. In a similar manner, Aristotle, having commenced his ethical treatise with a treatment of the traditional choice between three lives, reduces the choice in the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics to the choice between the active and the contemplative life.

Dipsychus, in the end, opts for neither life. He explicitly, in the first scene of Act II, renounces the contemplative life of the poet, and in Scene 4 the heroic life of action such as Byron led in his last days. Instead he chooses to ‘submit’. To what? To Victorian respectability. This was what Clough himself did, in marrying and taking a job with the civil service, and effectively giving up poetry for several years. But this did not mean that he submitted uncritically to Victorian values. It is surely significant that in Dipsychus the case for respectability is placed in the mouth of Mephistopheles.

3. The text and the manuscripts of Dipsychus

The original MSS of Dipsychus are in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Eng Poet d.133-9). They were given titles by Mrs Eleanor Clough, the poet’s daughter-in-law, and they fall into three groups:

Clough’s Venice notebook, which contains drafts of many sections, plus other material (V).‘Longest First Copy’ version, in three notebooks, entitled Dipsychus A I/II/III.‘Second and latest copy (incomplete)’ entitled Dipsychus B.

There is evidence that these three groups represent successive stages of composition: many lines that appear as emendations in Dipsychus A are written out fair in Dipsychus B, and lines struck out in A fail to appear in B. But the evidence is not unambiguous, and in many cases it is clear that the poet changed his mind more than once.

The relation between the three notebooks of Dipsychus A is a matter of controversy. The Oxford editors labelled Dipsychus A II and III (Scene I.5 to end) First Revision and Dipsychus A Scenes I.1–4 Second Revision, assigning an order to the two on the basis of the naming of the characters Faustulus and Mephistopheles in II and III, and Dipsychus and the Spirit in I. Two things are misleading about the titles First and Second Revision. In the first place, given the chaotic nature of the Venice notebooks, with no indication of divisions or order of the poems, and no title given for the whole, Dipsychus A I–III represents the very first redaction of the drama, not a revision. Secondly, it is doubtful whether there is any case for regarding A I as later in time, simply on the basis of the nomenclature. Clough does not seem until a final stage to have made up his mind about the naming of the characters. S and M appear as alternative names in a passage of the Venice notebook, and F and M occur alongside D and S in A III. In fact, the three notebooks are best treated as a single recension, as the Oxford editors in practice did.

However, J.P. Phelan, in his edition of selected poems (Longman, 1995) argued that a considerable time elapsed between the composition of the two halves of A. The second portion, A II–III, he wrote, was almost certainly written before Clough left for the USA in 1852, but A I cannot have been written before late 1854. For the latter part of the last century critics seem to have accepted the Oxford editors’ judgement that, apart from some late revisions to the song ‘As I sat at the café I said to myself’, Clough ‘seems to have put the poem aside, unfinished, after 1851’. All this changed when Phelan published an article, ‘The textual evolution of Clough’s Dipsychus and the Spirit’, in which he claimed that six scenes were not written until 1854 at the very earliest.

Phelan offered two principal arguments for this. In the Gondola scene there is a long passage in which the Spirit praises Palladian churches in preference to Gothic buildings, and makes a reference to ‘Ruskin’s d—d pretence’. Phelan sees this as a reference to the attack on Palladio in Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, of which the relevant volumes did not appear until late 1853. However, in context, ‘Ruskin’s d—d pretence’ does not concern Palladio, but only the Doge’s Palace; and the ‘pretence’ consists in exaggerated praise. Such praise is easy to find in the Seven Lamps of Architecture, published in 1849, and its hyperbolic nature was later admitted by Ruskin himself.

Phelan believed that he had found another allusion that is unambiguous in its reference to late 1854. The Spirit, in Scene 3, defends prostitution as providing women with a way of starting to earn a living. They go on to marry, or superintend, or are sent out by Sidney Herbert to colonise. This passage, Phelan argued, refers to Herbert’s tenure of office as Secretary of War at the time of the Crimean War, during which he asked Florence Nightingale to superintend an expedition of nurses to Scutari. Sidney Herbert did become Colonial Secretary in 1855, but it was not at that time that he sent women abroad. Earlier, in 1849, he and his wife founded the Female Emigration Fund to provide assisted female emigration to the colonies so that women could marry and breed a white population there.

In the absence of further evidence we cannot conclude that A was written any later than 1850. One might well argue, however, that B was written after Clough’s return from the United States, and perhaps after his marriage. We know that during Arthur’s absence in America Blanche came across a MS called Dipsychus. She disliked what she saw, and Arthur was horrified that she had seen it: ‘please don’t read it yet’ he wrote to her. While in the US he wrote a piece called ‘Dipsychus continued’ (its American origin was established by Katherine Chorley on the basis of the watermarks of the paper on which it was written). In this piece Dipsychus, now an elderly Lord Chief Justice, is confronted by a beggar woman, an ex-prostitute, with whom he had consorted in earlier days before his marriage. ‘In old times / You called me Pleasure – my name now is Guilt’.

The piece is a mawkish one, rightly described by Blanche when she was editing it for the 1865 edition as ‘most unsatisfactory’. It seems clearly aimed at conciliating those (including Blanche herself) who were repelled by the more licentious parts of the original Dipsychus. For our present purposes the thing to note is that such a palinode, while relevant to MS A, would be quite inappropriate to MS B in which no prostitute appears. It is natural to conclude that while A was complete before Clough left for the US and was the MS that Blanche saw and disliked, manuscript B dates from after his return.

Whatever its precise date, it is a matter of general agreement that B, though incomplete, is the latest of the MSS. It might be thought therefore that it is the version to publish, as representing the latest stage of authorial intention. Blanche Clough’s 1865 edition is indeed closer to B than it is to A, and closer to B than any modern edition is. Modern editors have rejected B because of its obvious marks of bowdlerisation. Phelan published A in its entirety; while the Oxford editors used B as the basic text for the scenes it contains, but supplemented it with material from A which they judged had been suppressed on grounds of impropriety. Accordingly, the Oxford editions correspond to no stage of Clough’s own development of the poem.

Both A I and B can be seen as alternative supplements to A II and A III. It is not easy to grasp the relationship of the different MSS, and it may be helpful to compare the poem to a pantomime horse. The manuscripts give us one pair of back legs, and two pairs of front legs, one pair being larger than the other. Different editors have differed in their choice of which of the front pairs was the fittest match for the back pair. In the earliest edition Blanche Clough started from the smaller front legs – a new and improved pair, in her view – and trimmed the back legs to bring them into line. The Oxford editors opted for the smaller front legs, but patched them from time to time with material from the larger pair. Phelan opted outright for the larger pair of front legs.

My own edition is, like the Oxford one of 1974, a hybrid one. It differs from it in four ways. First, I have made much fuller use of early material from the Venice notebook when I thought it presented a better text than the later editions. Second, I have also included passages which were cancelled by the poet in MSS A and B when I thought his first thoughts were better than his second. Third, I have omitted two scenes (Scenes VIII and XIII in the Oxford text) that seemed to me to reduplicate material already better presented elsewhere. Finally, I have dispensed with the prose prologue and epilogue with which at one time Clough intended to frame the drama.

I conclude by listing the sources of the texts offered for each scene:

Act I

Scene 1: B, except for lines 24–80, 94–96 and 107–108, which are from A.

Scene 2: Lines 1–66 from B, lines 67–96 from A.