High Minds Page 26

  Clough’s was first published in the American art journal The Crayon in August 1855. It has had various non-theological interpretations placed upon it: such as being his lament for the failure of liberalising movements in Europe after the upheavals of 1848, which he had witnessed: Rome was still turbulent when he wrote. A draft appears in his notebook facing the opening page of a diary kept in Rome between 16 April and 17 July 1849, at the time of the downfall of Mazzini’s Republic. Yet given what we know of Clough’s obsession with his theological problems, ‘Say Not, the Struggle’ seems more probably to reflect the poet’s difficulties with faith rather than his sympathies with failed revolutionaries. There are five extant drafts of the poem: the fourth has the title ‘In Profundis’, which suggests something more spiritual than political.139

  ‘Dover Beach’ explicitly deals with faith: and both poets use the metaphor of the sea to suggest the ebbs and flows of devotion. Conflict, manifested as ‘struggle’, is in both poems: a reminder of the upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century and their effect on ‘eternal’ values. Clough’s poem is a regular scheme of quatrains with alternate lines rhyming, and its first effect is musical:

  Say not, the struggle naught availeth,

  The labour and the wounds are vain,

  The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

  And as things have been they remain.

  If 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 while the tired waves, vainly breaking,

  Seem here no painful inch to gain,

  Far back, through creeks and inlets making,

  Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

  And not by 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.140

  Arnold’s, by contrast, is free verse, with an irregular rhyme scheme, the sound and meaning of its words accentuated by irregular rhythmical effects, much like the sea it describes, and broadcasting a moral grandeur that, unlike Clough’s, is self-conscious:

  The sea is calm to-night,

  The tide is full, the moon lies fair

  Upon the Straits; on the French coast, the light

  Gleams, and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

  Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

  Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

  Only, from the long line of spray

  Where the ebb meets the moon-blanch’d land,

  Listen! you hear the grating roar

  Of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling,

  At their return, up the high strand,

  Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

  The eternal note of sadness in.

  Sophocles long ago

  Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

  Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

  Of human misery; we

  Find also in the sound a thought,

  Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

  The sea of faith

  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

  Retreating to the breath

  Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear

  And naked shingles of the world.

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.141

  Some scholars believe the poems are linked: that Clough’s uplifting message is a direct response to Arnold’s notion that faith is in permanent retreat. This would suppose ‘Say Not, the Struggle’ was written after ‘Dover Beach’, and that Arnold would inevitably have shown Clough his unpublished writings. There is no evidence, in this case, that it was, or that he did. ‘Say Not, the Struggle’ seems to have been written in 1849, when Clough was troubled after resigning his fellowship. He wrote out his poem for William Allingham on 13 October 1849, and posted it to Thomas Arnold, Matthew’s brother, in New Zealand a fortnight later.

  ‘Dover Beach’ is a much harder poem to date precisely. One interpretation is that it was the product of Arnold’s honeymoon in 1851.142 The Arnolds passed through Dover on 1 September 1851, Mrs Arnold telling her mother ‘the sea [was] as calm as a mill-pond and the night very warm.’143 This chronology raises a question that seems not to have occurred to those who claim Clough was answering Arnold: why should not Arnold have been answering Clough? This was a time of tension in their friendship. Arnold was highly critical of Clough’s poetry; Clough perceived distance opening between them. Perhaps Arnold was rebuking him magisterially for his assumption that things could only get better. D. A. Robertson, writing in 1951, felt ‘that Clough’s “main” may be Arnold’s “sea of faith” and that Clough’s “tired waves” may be those which in Arnold’s poem produce the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”.’144 Or it could be the other way round, or it could simply be a coincidence. It is clear from the correspondence of Clough and Arnold that they shared theological concerns. And scholars have found that the works of Thucydides and Sophocles both poets studied at Rugby were heavy with marine imagery.145

  Clough’s poem expresses optimism after a dark personal struggle has been resolved: resolved by the dilution of faith. Arnold’s depicts the struggle in progress, and is sceptical about the outcome. It is ironic that a man so weak as Clough wrote so strong a poem about the importance of fortitude; while one so strong as Arnold, who overcame his difficulties with faith, should have written one of apparent surrender. Clough’s poem is intensely personal: it is about overcoming defeatism, as Clough had to do after the setbacks caused by his religious feelings. Arnold’s is more outward looking, and relevant to a society rather than an individual. It moves from light to darkness; from calm to the clashing of armies. Robertson asserts that Arnold’s ‘love’ cannot have been his wife, since he would not have made a ‘plea’ to her to be true to him.146 But is it a plea? It could easily be read as an assumption, an exhortation or a simple statement of fact.

  Arnold was assailed by contemporary critics for the grandiloquence and self-absorption of his feelings about faith. However, they also grasped the common feelings of the rarefied intellectual about the problems that Arnold, as one such, had sought to articulate. One critic, R. H. Hutton, wrote that ‘when I come to ask what Mr Arnold’s poetry has done for this generation, the answer must be that no-one has expressed more powerfully and poetically its spiritual weakness, its cravings for a passion it cannot feel, its admiration for a self-mastery it cannot achieve, its desire for a creed that it fails to accept, its sympathy with a faith it will not share, its aspiration for a peace it does not know.’147 ‘Dover Beach’ fails to find a proper substitute for faith, as Arnold had always understood it. His ‘love’ and he, true to each other, are merely consolations, not replacements: they remain on the darkling plain, in turmoil; he turns his attentions to other concerns, as we shall see, while the eternal note continues to sound.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE RATIONAL MIND: INTELLECTUALS AND THE GROWTH OF SECULARISM

  I

  THOSE AFFLICTED BY religious doubt were but one group who leant towards secularism. It was also a product of the scepticism that had been a feature of British philosophical thought during the seventeenth and eighteenth centurie
s, and which in the nineteenth assisted at the birth of the philosophy of utilitarianism. This was a peculiarly British creed: Bertrand Russell wrote how native thinkers ‘remained almost completely unaffected by their German contemporaries’.1 Since these included Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, this was not intended as a compliment. As Christians found themselves under assault, they sought out targets for a counter-offensive. They quickly identified capitalism as an enemy, and attacked utilitarianism as the philosophy that was felt to have fed its fires. Jeremy Bentham, who at the start of the nineteenth century led the radical movement that created the creed, had been profoundly influenced by one foreign philosopher: the Frenchman Helvetius. In the mid-eighteenth century Helvetius had proclaimed that self-interest was at the root of human behaviour. Life, he felt, was a mission to avoid pain and seek pleasure. In Bentham’s hands, this influence was mixed with thought from Locke and Hartley, and reshaped as ‘the greatest happiness principle’. Bentham sought to create virtuous men: he therefore said that what was good was pleasure or happiness, and what was bad pain. Any circumstance in which pleasure outweighed pain was better than one in which the reverse was true: and the best was where pleasure exceeded pain by the greatest amount.

  Bentham did not invent this doctrine – it is in Locke, Priestley and Hutcheson’s thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bentham’s distinction lay ‘in his vigorous application of it to various practical problems’.2 One was his argument that the State should legislate in the interests of making the good of the individual coincide with the good of the multitude. It led to Bentham’s opposing the death penalty for minor crimes (for which it was still used in the early nineteenth century) because juries refused to convict obvious criminals whose offences did not, in the jury’s view, merit death. A lesser penalty would have ensured the crime was punished and justice served: so Bentham contended that abolition for lesser offences would serve justice better. Soon, his point of view prevailed.

  To some of the newly rich, Benthamism had a self-evident appeal, because to them the idea of the greatest happiness was entirely material. They argued that their employees became, if not rich, then certainly better paid than had they stayed on the land: in this there was some truth. Lacking was a support system for the hands and operatives on short time or laid off when trade declined, as in the Lancashire textile industry in the early 1840s. A philosophy driven by money and devoid of sentiment took no account of the sufferings of the working class. The ethical aspects of utilitarianism – or lack of them – drew its greatest critics, and inspired a branch of literature. And, because of the identification of the value of labour to those who employed it, utilitarianism also gave rise to socialism, early manifestations of which were seen in the Chartist movement and the trades unions.

  Bentham’s philosophy was based upon reason: everything, it seemed, could be calculated. He was forward thinking in some ways – he was a passionate exponent of equality and democracy, including votes for women – and backward in others, prizing security above liberty. As a rationalist he refused to believe in God, which made him a peculiar figure at the time. His great apostle was James Mill, towards whom Bentham acted also as patron, providing him with a house while he wrote his history of India. Mill brought up his son, John Stuart, in the educational methods advocated by Bentham, which made the young Mill a youth stuffed with knowledge but cursed with a narrow outlook. Fortunately for him, he realised that deficiency early on, and sought to broaden himself. Russell attacks James Mill for the ‘poverty of his emotional nature’: along with other utilitarians he hated romanticism and sentiment. Young John, when he grew up and wrote on the subject, employed what Russell called a ‘softened form of the Benthamite doctrine’.3 In the 1840s and 1850s, the younger Mill was the prime exponent of a new version of this philosophy, and as such became a target for those who disputed its sense and veracity.

  Mill admitted in his Autobiography that his atheism had been hereditary, since his father had realised that he could not believe in God, and had transmitted the feeling to his son. Mill denied that his father had been a dogmatic atheist: his atheism was, ‘moral, still more than intellectual. He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness.’4 He told Mill, when the latter was still a boy, that ‘the question “who made me?” cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it . . . I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it.’5 As for Carlyle, he was avowedly post-Christian, having embraced Goethe’s idea of a God immanent in everything, and being incapable of believing in the Christian miracles.

  The most famous attack in fiction on the utilitarians is also perhaps the most famous Condition of England novel: Hard Times, by Charles Dickens. Written in 1854, when Dickens was at the peak of his fame, it was (ironically) composed for the most utilitarian of reasons. Dickens’s weekly magazine Household Words had lost circulation, and the master himself wrote a new serial to pull in the crowds. He attacked the notion that a life based on rationalism and stripped of sentiment (Dickens was the pre-eminent sentimentalist of his day) would be miserable. His object lessons in the novel are Tom and Louisa, children of Thomas Gradgrind MP, a manufacturer, of Coketown in Lancashire. They have been reared in an educational ‘system’ that caricatures James Mill’s, with distressing effects. It is set out at the opening of the novel, by Gradgrind himself – ‘A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations.’6 His two younger children, in case any reader was slow to understand what was going on, are named Adam Smith and Malthus.

  Gradgrind tells a class at the school of which he is both benefactor and inspiration that ‘now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of service to them.’7 Gradgrind is bitten by the monster he has created. His daughter, apparently incapable of applying a feeling of sentiment to the marriage her father has arranged for her with his ghastly, vulgar and stupid friend Bounderby, has a breakdown and leaves her husband, to live unhappily ever after. Her brother rebels, becomes a wastrel, robs a bank, flees the country, and dies young. When these utilitarian masters treat their wives and children so cruelly, we may hold out no hope for their operatives.

  Hard Times becomes the tale of a wronged man – Stephen Blackpool, one such operative, who is not only suspected by the odious Bounderby (‘a man perfectly devoid of sentiment’, as Dickens describes him) of robbing his bank, but is publicly vilified by him as well when handbills offering a reward for his capture are put around Coketown. Bounderby is too obtuse, and too snobbish, to see he has in fact been robbed by his own brother-in-law, the wastrel. Blackpool inadvertently meets his death because of Bounderby’s persecution of him: a persecution that started because of Bounderby’s utter incomprehension of why Blackpool had refused to agree to strike, been sent to Coventry by his union, and become an isolated figure in Bounderby’s works. Bounderby vilifies his workers as having the ‘object in life’ of being ‘fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon’.8 But then he also believes that the mind-numbing, lung-wrecking work they do is ‘the pleasantest work there is, and it’s the lightest work there is, and it’s the best paid work there is. More than that, we couldn’t improve the mills themselves, unless we laid down Turkey carpets on the floors. Which we’re not going to do.’

  This description of the mill-owner as a monster is consistent with Dickens’s darkly comic intentions: but it is also typical of the attitudes by the non-industrial population (of whatever class) of the newly moneyed men who were making Britain the workshop of the world. Dickens attributes to Gradgrind the notion that ‘the Good Samaritan was a bad economist’, which strips him almost completely of humanity (though his humanity will retur
n when he is confronted with the damage done to his children by his ‘system’).9 However, Dickens, like Mrs Gaskell and, in the 1860s, George Eliot, shows equal contempt for the trades union movement, with its rabble-rousing determination to crush whatever individuality remains in a man after the masters have tried to wipe it out. When Slackbridge, the agitator, attacks the ‘grinding despotism’ of the likes of Gradgrind and Bounderby, it is not least because he has his own version of the same iniquity to use instead once the oppressors have been overthrown.10

  At the book’s grim conclusion – with almost Wagnerian levels of misery, death and disappointment – the only happy character is Sissy, a girl who refused to be cowed by Gradgrind’s system, but allowed herself individuality, imagination and sentiment. She also brought out the best in Gradgrind – his charitable instinct, when her father deserted her – which is more than anyone else managed. She is the only beneficiary of Dickens’s favourite theme, the decent but hard-pressed character on whom fortune, like a fairy godmother or beneficent uncle, shines. All else is wretchedness, which is what sets this short, vivid book apart from the rest of his oeuvre. By the time he wrote it (and he was followed in Household Words as a serial by North and South, with its less comic, more intense take on a similar theme), the worst for the operative class was over, as prosperity had returned to the cotton-mills of Lancashire and the wool-mills of the West Riding. But, just as Mrs Gaskell did in her novels, and even Kingsley in The Water-Babies, Dickens makes his readers conscious of his disdain for a philosophy at odds with the fundamentals of human nature, and the human spirit.

  Capitalism could not be allowed free rein. Peel’s government realised the importance of regulating business to protect investors and customers, as manufacturing and the railways grew. The 1844 Joint Stock Companies Act formed the basis of company law down to our own times. Before the Act it had required a Royal Charter or a private Act of Parliament to establish a business incorporated in law. Therefore, most new businesses spawned by the industrial and mercantilist revolution were unincorporated, sometimes with thousands of shareholders. Taking legal action against them was nearly impossible. The Act made it possible to register easily as a joint-stock company, giving those who dealt with such businesses easier redress if things went wrong. In 1855 limited liability was introduced, which further encouraged investment and economic growth by reducing unaccountable risks by investors. By the mid-Victorian period capitalists were being brought properly within the reach of the law.