Scott1981 PDF
Scott1981 PDF
Scott1981 PDF
BY P. G. SCOTT
of religious doctrine and the Fall doctrine particularly, this third num-
ber of the Prospective Review gives the immediate background for
Clough's Adam and Eve. In a sense, Clough's first version of the
poem seems to have originated as a transcendentalist-inspired,
Adam-centred, answer to Elizabeth Barrett's more orthodox and
Eve-centred Drama of Exile.
The possible terminus a quo of thatfirstversion must, therefore, be
brought forward, to the autumn of 1845, for the notebook entries
show he had already begun thinking about the topic. He need not, of
course, have commenced composition at so early a date, and the ter-
minus ad quern for the completion of any kind of substantial draft
runs to the summer of 1848, some three years later. By that time,
Clough had a poem which he called Adam and Eve in clear enough
form to show to some friends. During July 1848, the poem is twice
mentioned in Matthew Arnold's letters to Clough, Arnold comment-
ing that "the treatment... rather offended" him.14 Arnold was, dur-
ing that spring and summer, helping Clough select poems for his pro-
jected volume Ambarvalia, published early in 1849; he looked over a
number of Clough's earlier compositions, so the date of his comments
need not imply that Adam and Eve was still a brand-new work. A
recently-discovered letter and some verses from James Anthony
Froude, dated September 1848, show that he too had seen Clough's
poem, and that it was fairly extensive. Froude wrote to Clough:
there is a broad sinew about you that I can only hopelessly envy - you can cut
down. I believe I shall never manage more than poison.... I think, though, you
may give our first parents & polish without hurting the sharpness of the chiselled
edge.15
Grasmere Notebook Balliol MS.441(a); scenes marked with an asterisk may be late in-
sertions
Loose Sheet Sheet in Balliol MS.441(a), with a draft of the Amours de Voyage
"L'Envoi" on the verso
Venice Notebook Bodleian MS.Eng.poet.d. 133
Adam and Eve I Bodleian MS.Eng.poet.d.124
Adam and Eve II Bodleian MS.Eng.poet.d. 125
List in Adam and Eve /, f. 43 r
CLOUGH'S "ADAM AND EVE" 87
and Eve to the Fall, and forms the semi-ironic counterpart to Eliz-
abeth Barrett's Drama. There is a gap in this notebook's draft scene
iv, after line 18, suggesting that the scene was planned as two sep-
arate sections; the two parts were never put together as a continuous
dialogue by Clough himself, only by Mrs. Clough in 1869, and scene
HI, which follows scene iv in the notebook, may have been drafted to
replace the fragmentary first eighteen-line section she used to begin
scene iv; certainly it would come awkwardly before it, since Eve in
the opening of the fragmentary scene iv section bewails that "I was
godless then," while in scene in she has not been noticeably less re-
ligiose than usual. Adam and Eve would, then, in its first version,
have consisted of three sections, like this:
(i) Adam alone, soliloquizing on his own mixed reactions to the
Fall, and conscious that Eve's explanation (which the reader al-
ready knows, from his own orthodox Victorian upbringing) is
merely her "imaginings"; in Mrs. Clough's text, scene n;
(ii) Adam and Eve together, Eve happy about the birth of her
first child, Adam warning her that the child inherits "human
trouble," is like them in nature, and "therefore is not pure"; in
Mrs. Clough's text, scene in;
(iii) Adam and Eve together, Eve asserting the doctrine of Orig-
inal Sin, and Adam countering that this is a "misconstruction"
of his earlier warning; in Mrs. Clough's text, scene iv, part 2
(though possibly including part 1, and waiting some reworking
there).
Such a first version would well merit the title Adam and Eve used
in Arnold's letters, and would run to 263 lines, long enough to give
plausibility to Froude's advice that Clough could shorten it. The
poem would have ended on a note of complex contextual irony, with
Adam warning Eve not to put her "religious crotchets" into the "ten-
der brains of our poor young ones," when many well-intentioned Vic-
torians systematically instructed the young in just those doctrines he
was dismissing, the innate sinfulness of even the most " innocent"
baby.20 It will be noted that these early scenes do not presuppose any
continuation of the drama, since Cain is introduced only as a talking-
point, the "first baby" of fallen parents, "earthy as well god-like"
(iv, 94; in, 51). It makes a humorous and witty, as well as a searching
88 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES
poem, and its focus isfirmlyon the conflict of ideas between the adult,
questioning, realistic Adam, and the proto-theological, myth-making
Eve.
There are two further short passages in this notebook, which do not
fit with the first-version "poem" that I have postulated. These two
" scenes " both refer to an adult rather than an infant Cain, and clearly
belong to a plan in which the murder of Abel would be included. Their
placing in the notebook, however, suggests that they did not form part
of the original sequence of composition. Scene v, a scrap of only eight
lines in which Adam warns Cain and Abel not to quarrel, was a late
insertion on a page of the notebook opposite scene in, lines 77-93,
with which it has no direct connection, while the short portion of
scene x n (lines 77-93 only), part of Adam's farewell speech to Cain
after the murder, occurs on a separate page where it has no thematic
link with the adjacent material.21 In summary, therefore, an analy-
sis of the "Grasmere / Roma" notebook, together with the scraps of
external evidence, suggests that Clough first composed a coherent,
though unpolished, poem solely on the Adam and Eve theme, and
that this was the poem completed by the summer of 1848.
The second stage in Clough's treatment of the Fall and its conse-
quences came when he turned his attention away from Adam and
Eve, to the Byronic hero, Cain the murderer. This was a much more
conventional poetic theme for the period, and Clough's tone loses its
witty poise and becomes more melodramatically angst-ridden.22 The
shift of focus from Adam and Eve to Cain (especially in scenes ix and
xin) introduced a rather different set of questions about sin; the shift
is one from presenting sin as normal human frailty to presenting sin as
inexpiable crime. Clough himself changed, not so much his basic be-
liefs, as his tone and outlook, between his later years at Oriel, and his
subsequent experience in London as Principal of University Hall.
The change can be summarized as the difference between the confi-
dence of The Bothie ofToper-na-fuosich (1848), and the darker view
of human kind offered in the middle sections of Amours de Voyage
(from 1849) and in Dipsychus (from 1850). The drafting of the Cain
scenes, then, should perhaps be seen, not so much as a development
of focus within the sequence of a single poem, but rather as a develop-
ment of the writer's attitude, leading to his dramatisation of a different
Genesis story.
CLOUGH'S "ADAM AND EVE" 89
There are three reasons for thinking that this development dates
from 1849. First, it was early in that year that Clough wrote his other,
much more coherent, poem on the Cain theme, "The Song of La-
mech."23 Second, if the two short drafts in the "Grasmere / Roma"
notebook relating to an adult Cain are, as suggested above, later than
the other scenes there, they are still likely to have been drafted before
July 1849, for by that time the spare pages of the notebook must have
been filled up with drafts of Amours de Voyage (written during the
siege of Rome, April-July 1849).24 Thirdly, and most importantly,
one crucial scene of the new Cain drama was drafted on a loose,
folded sheet of paper that carries, on its "fourth" side, a draft of
" L'Envoi" for Amours de Voyage: both items on the sheet are in sim-
ilar handwriting.25 Since "L'Envoi" appears in an expanded version
in the first full-length manuscript of Amours, completed by October
1849, it seems evident that this scene (Cain alone with the body of
Abel - scene ix in Mrs. Clough's text) must date from summer 1849.
Since scene ix appears on a separate sheet of paper, it could, of
course, have originally been intended as a separate dramatic mono-
logue, but, apart from the two short scraps in the " Grasmere / Rome"
notebook, all the other Cain scenes were obviously intended to stand
together, and they were drafted in a single sequence near the begin-
ning of a second notebook of mixed material, conventionally called
the 1850 (Venice) Notebook.26 This conventional short title is rather
misleading, however, for the notebook contains not only sections of
Dipsychus (drafted in Venice in 1850), but also sections of Amours
de Voyage drafted a full year earlier; there seems no particular reason
for assigning the Cain sequence to 1850, and several for assigning it
to 1849, though either date would fit adequately into this reconstruc-
tion of the poem's history. The drafts in the Venice notebook must,
however, be later in date than the Cain scenes in the "Grasmere /
Roma" notebook, because, in drafting scene x m , Venice gives the
text only as far as line 77, ending with a catch-line there (the fragmen-
tary beginning of a new sentence), indicating that the rest of the scene
(lines 77-93, only in " Grasmere / Roma") had already been drafted.
To understand these draft-sequences, one must know something of
the way Clough characteristically used his poetic notebooks in the
late eighteen-forties. He drafted poems, often very scrappily, on the
recto pages only. The verso pages he initially left blank, and they
90 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES
were later filled up in one of two ways - either when he went through
the original drafts adding extra material opposite the appropriate
lines, or when he wrote a completely new series of drafts, often for
quite different poems (in which case he usually reversed the note-
book, working from the opposite end, with the old versos becoming
his new "rectos"). Both the "Grasmere / Roma" and the Venice
notebooks are of this kind, and in any individual notebook the draft-
ings are likely to include material in at least two sequences, often a
year or more apart; similarly, on any particular opening of the note-
book, the facing verso and recto may represent two distinct stages of
composition - a draft (recto) and subsequent interpolations (verso).
From the necessarily compressed format of a conventional textual
apparatus, it is very difficult to reconstruct the arrangement of the
draft-material within any individual manuscript source, yet such re-
construction is essential to understanding Clough's developing plans.
The first section to occur in the Venice notebook is the latest in the
drama's chronological sequence, scene x m , and it is very roughly
drafted indeed. It seems originally to have been intended as a simple
set-piece, with just two long speeches, Cain's confession and Adam's
reply. The recto-pages of ff. 5-7 carry Cain's lines as a single long
speech, while Adam's earlier interjections, together with some short
additions to the Cain speech, are all written as isolated segments on
the verso-pages, suggesting they were second-thought insertions by
Clough.
Unfortunately, when Mrs. Clough came to transcribe the scene for
the 1869 edition, she thought that the jerkiness of the dialogue, and
the many gaps and breaks that were necessarily left on the verso
pages by Clough's procedure, were the normal signs of an unrevised
early draft, and she therefore took each page as it came, verso and
recto, verso and recto, making a muddle of Clough's line-ordering.
Even more unfortunately, both the first and second Clarendon edi-
tions followed Mrs. Clough's line-order from 1869, correcting only
individual words in her transcription. The notebook is, of course,
fairly messy, but it seems clear enough what Clough's own ordering
was meant to be. In the opening exchange, for instance, the 1869 text
produces near-nonsense, because Cain, in lines 7-9, makes no direct
response to Adam's speech (lines 2-6), while in line 10 he responds
to it directly. In the manuscript, f. 5 r begins with lines 7-9, then has a
CLOUGH'S "ADAM AND EVE 91
sign for an insertion, and then proceeds with lines 10ff.The half-line
of Cain's speech (line 1), and Adam's speech (lines 2-6), are on the
facing verso, f. 4 V . The opening should therefore be re-ordered as
lines 7-9, [1], 2-6, 10 ff., and would then read:
Cain. Curse me, my father, ere I go. Your curse
Will go with me for good; your curse
Will make me not forget. Abel is dead.
Adam. My son, 'tis done, it was to be done; some good end
<Henceforth shall> Thereby to come, or else it had not been.
Go, for it must be. Cain, I know y[ou]r h[ear]t,
You cannot be with us. Go then, depart;
But be not over [scrupulous,] my son.
Cain. Alas, I am not of that pious kind,
Who when the blot has fallen upon their life,
Can look to heaven and think it white again.27
Similar reordering is needed later in the scene, inserting the extra
lines from f. 5 V (lines 23-24, 28-29) into the sequence of Cain's
speech on f. 6 r . Here Clough's intended order is less clear, though the
problem of sense left by the 1869 reordering is apparent enough; fol-
lowing from line 22, the order might be lines 25-27, 23-24, 28-29,
and 30 ff. Alternatively, lines 23-24 might have been intended for the
lacuna left between lines 18 and 19 on the preceeding page (f. 5 r ).
Still later in the scene, between lines 58 and 59, there is another gap,
perhaps intended for material drafted elsewhere. The editorial prob-
lems raised by this scene illustrate the real difficulty in establishing a
Clough text - Clough himself never made a further copy of this scene,
and all we have to go on is this rough notebook draft, where the inser-
tions and revisions would have been clear enough to the author, but
were never marked in for another reader or transcriber to follow.
The other scenes in the Venice notebook, drafted after scene x m ,
were planned to introduce the two major Cain set-pieces, scene ix
drafted on the loose sheet with " L'Envoi," and scene x m itself; they
do not form any effective bridge between the old Adam and Eve
scenes and the new Cain material. After the last page of scene x m ,
there follows, first scene vm, headed "ante," and then scenes x and
xi, headed "Multo-post / Inter-monologue." No speaker is given for
scene x, a short soliloquy by Adam. Scene xi, between Cain and Eve,
raises the same kind of difficulties about line-ordering found in the
92 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES
manuscript of scene x m , for, as in that scene also, Clough seems to
have started by drafting a long Cain speech, and only inserted the first
few Eve interjections (on the facing verso) in the course of composi-
tion. In this instance, Clough's intentions are very unclear from the
draft. Lines 3-5 appear to have been meant to come between the two
parts of line 1 ("my perfect son" in line 5 being alternative, not addi-
tional, to "my holy child" in line 4). Eve's speech, in lines 9-13, ap-
pears on the verso off. 10, opposite lines 14-28 of Cain's speech (on
f. l l r ) , but there is no indication of its proper placing within that
speech. In lines 34-35, the words "in penitential prayer" replace the
false draft start of "your soul," making the rhythm more subtle by al-
tering "prostrate " from a verb to an adjective, and leaving a more reg-
ular blank verse line:
Beware! prostrate <your soul> in penitential prayer,
Humble your heart beneath the might hand
Of G o d . . .
(xi, 34-36)28
Eve's pleading with Cain in this scene, for penitence and atone-
ment, leading to God's forgiveness of the murder, contrasts pointedly
with Adam's advice that it is Time which "healeth all," in scene x m
(xm, 29).
The various Cain scenes together totalled some 217 lines, though it
is not clear which scenes Clough would have thought of as mere pre-
liminary sketches he would not bother with further, and which of the
shorter scenes he hoped to use in the edited and revised work. The five
or six sections of the group make up a sequence like this:
(i - possibly) Adam warning Cain and Abel (scene v);
(ii) Adam discussing the sacrificings with Eve (scene vm);
(iii) Cain alone with the body of Abel (scene ix);
(iv) Adam alone, soliloquizing on the murder (scene x);
(v) Cain with Eve, the "religious" conclusion (scene xi);
(vi) Cain with Adam, the "human" conclusion (scene xm).
Whether these scenes were planned as a separate work from Adam
and Eve, or whether they were intended as a parallel poem to it (a
kind of second act of the dramatic conflict between realism and re-
ligiosity), the change of focus and tone in this second composition-
stage remains clear.
CLOUGH'S "ADAM AND EVE" 93
Clarendon editors note, Adam first described the idea of the Fall to
Eve as coming
Forth from your brain, its crater, hurrying down
(Or was it, my beloved, from the womb?)
(i, 75 f.)
Rather similarly, in Adam's condemnation of her guiltiness, Note-
book I uses a stronger, more colloquial expression:
I hear a Voice, more searching, bid me 'On!
'On! on! it is the folly of the child
'To choose his path and straightway think it wrong,
'And turn right back, or lie on the ground to blub.
'Forward! go, conquer! work and live!'
(i, 107-11)
The strength of Adam's assurance in this opening scene provides
the key-note against which we can judge the fluctuating and varying
attitudes he and others express in subsequent scenes. The early intro-
duction of the idea of death as an eternal fact of the human condition,
like Eve's refusal to recognize the normality and inevitability of
death, provides a link between the early Fall scenes and the crushing
fact of the murder which dominates the second part of the combined
drama.
With the ending of the work, Clough apparently had much more
difficulty. Robin Biswas has commented on the varying tonalities of
Adam's final speech in the 1869 text, and in particular has character-
ised the last five lines as " a disappointing conclusion to the poem."31
This third-stage notebook seems to contain several different ideas for
the ending. What we now call scene xn, for instance, may represent a
false start for a final dialogue between Cain and Adam, in which
Adam would reveal to Cain the true origin of Eve's doctrine of the
Fall, thus linking back to the new prologue. But there is even doubt as
to the point in the notebook at which the fully-drafted conclusion,
scene xiv itself, should end, and some difficulty as to the ordering of
its lines. Clough did not compose it all in one running sequence of
composition; there are several breaks in the text, and he seems to
have "ended" several times. The lines that Dr. Biswas finds disap-
pointing may not have been Clough's finally-intended conclusion.
The draft is laid out in Clough's usual fashion, with a basic draft on
CLOUGH'S "ADAM AND EVE 95
the recto pages, and additional material on the versos. The verso sec-
tions of the text include two more-or-less self-sufficient passages,
lines 1-13 (on f. 31V), and lines 3 7 ^ 5 (on f. 32V), neither group fill-
ing its page. The rectos carry lines 14-31 as a single sequence (line
14 at first began "And," not "Then"), but thereafter, on f. 33 r , there
is a complicated series of redraftings for the rest of Adam's speech.
This includes, in order: (i) lines 32-35; (ii) two drafts of line 50,
crossed out; (iii) a draft of lines 47-50; (iv) a gap; (v) lines 46-48 in
the version finally printed. The first part of the speech to be drafted,
therefore, was probably lines 14-36, which Clough prefaced with the
new section of lines 1-13, and concluded with an echo of line 1 in the
draft of line 50. Then followed the decision to expand this conclusion
to incorporate the "Life has been beautiful" passage (lines 47-50,
echoing Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus),32 only after that did
Clough draft the stronger and darker lines 37-45, and redraft lines
46-48 to run on from them. The order followed in presenting this
speech in the Clarendon edition seems to me the most likely one,
though the possibility has to be considered that Clough intended a re-
petition of the " Life has been beautiful" lines, not the replacement of
one draft with the other; repetition of reverberant phrases is a com-
mon device in Clough's poetry.
Adam's speech ends on the recto off. 33 of the notebook, while im-
mediately following, on the verso of the same leaf, come these lines,
which were wrongly incorporated into Adam's own speech by Mrs.
Clough in 1869, and then relegated to the textual notes by the Claren-
don editors:
As he hath lived, he dies - My comforter,
Whom I believed not, only trusted in,
What had I been without thee? how survived?
Would I were with thee wheresoe'er thou art!
Would I might follow & be with thee still!"
The passage is a typical Clough draft, with no less than three differ-
ent versions sketched in for its second line alone. The Clarendon edi-
tors, in their note, assign the speech to Cain (the only other speaker
earlier in the scene), and so imagine a rather unironic, stoical-wistful
conclusion, with the murderer as loyal son; if one reassigns it instead
to Eve, this possible ending would retain some pathos, but would also
96 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES
catch up again the irony of the early scenes, by showing Eve able to
begin mythologizing even Adam's death ("wheresoe'er thou art").
But Clough did not, in fact, conclude his draftings at that point.
After that speech, on f. 34 r and the two succeeding pages, comes a
twenty-eight line lyric headed "Chorus." 34 Mrs. Clough evidently
failed to see its relevance to the Adam and Eve materials, and the
1951 and 1974 Clarendon editions, in following her structure for the
longer poem, separated the shorter one from its parent work. It ap-
pears to follow on directly from scene xiv, and to form some kind of
elegiac conclusion, both to that scene and to the drama as a whole:
Now the birds have ceased their singing
And the sun has sunk below
And the bedtime bell is ringing,
Let us go!
Let us go!
Business ceases, joy decreases,
We have had enough, we know;
Where our slumber soft and peace is
We will go,
We will g o ! . . .
The image of the birds ceasing their singing seems to link to Adam's
wish for sleep (xiv, 49), while the lyric's refrain," Let us go!," with its
conjoint overtones of desire for action and for release and freedom,
fits with the theme of the drama as a whole. Since this lyric is followed
in the notebook by part of the draft for the "Prologue" (on f. 36 r ),
there seems little doubt that Clough wrote it as an ending to the ex-
panded and combined version of Adam and Eve.
But the introduction of a lyric into what would otherwise be wholly
a blank-verse drama raises intriguing possibilities. Elizabeth Bar-
rett's Drama of Exile, consciously modelled as a Greek tragedy, had
interspersed lyrics and choruses among its blank-verse speeches.
Goethe had used lyrics in his Faust, and Tennyson had, in February
1850, issued the third edition of his Princess, in which he had added
the songs. Clough himself had framed the more prosy hexameter let-
ters of his Amours de Voyage with lyrical elegiacs for the prologue
and epilogue to each canto, and his Dipsychus was to mix dramatic
and lyric elements throughout. Clough may well, therefore, have
been contemplating other additions of this type to the Adam and Eve
CLOUGH'S "ADAM AND E V E " 97
drama, and two further lyric poems survive that link thematically to
this revision-stage, though there is no real documentary evidence for
such a connection and it is impossible to do more than conjecture as
to their possible placing in the full-length sequence. Both poems, like
the "Chorus," have previously been printed as separate works, un-
connected to Adam and Eve. One, in fact, comes from Adam and
Eve Notebook I, and describes the difference between man's and wo-
man's work. It seems a direct commentary on the contrasting atti-
tudes of Adam and Eve, in the earlier scenes of the drama, as well as
drawing on the different consequences of the Fall for woman and
man, as stated in Genesis 3:16-19:
To his work the man must go
Cheerily, oh cheerily....
In the house the woman bide
Wearily, oh wearily,
Waiting for the eventide.
In her heart a nameless pain
Fitful fancies in her brain
Wearily, oh wearily.
If he tumbles, up he gets;
Though he grumbles, though he frets,
Still he labours & forgets.35
These sacrificings
Epilogus What fallen —
Curse me my mother
my father —
Abel is dead —
The use of the technical terms "Prologus" and "Epilogus" is in-
teresting when one remembers the titling of the "Chorus" lyric also,
and suggests a conscious remodelling of the drama as a classical trag-
edy. Perhaps this was also the inspiration for the careful parallelism
of speeches in the second half of the work. The handwriting of the list
appears to be Clough's own (e.g. in the formation of the "g's"), and
this identification is reinforced by the fact that such short notes could
be used for the separate scenes (e.g. "crotchet" for scene iv, part 2;
cf. iv, 22). If this had been a rough list made by Mrs. Clough, it would
CLOUGH'S "ADAM AND EVE 99
have needed fuller titles or first lines for the scenes, and would have
included all of them, not just a selection. The lefthand column ap-
pears to give a list for the new framing scenes and the early Adam and
Eve exchanges, while the righthand column spells out the order for
the Cain and Abel scenes that were now to form the second part of the
work. If this list is accepted as genuine, it gives a plan for the poem
like this:
(i) Prologue — scene i;
(ii) scene n — cf. "O fool!" in line 5;
(iii) scene in — the birth of Cain;
(iv) scene iv, part 2 only (from line 19" Moping again, my love?
. . . With some religious crotchet in your head");
(v) scene vi — Abel alone — possibly with its parallel soliloquy
from Cain (scene vn);
(vi) scene v m — "These sacrificings" (line 1);
(vii) scene ix — Cain's speech, beginning "What? fallen?";
(viii) scene xi — "Curse me, my mother";
(ix) scene x m — the parallel scene with Adam, which in the
line-order suggested above begins "Curse me, my father";
(x) possibly scene x — it begins "Abel is dead" (though the
opening lines of scene x m also include the phrase "Abel is
dead," and if the note refers to that, then scene x was to be omit-
ted);
(xi) Epilogue — scene xiv, perhaps with the extra Eve speech
and the concluding "Chorus," as suggested above.
For convenience, I have indicated these scenes in the final column
of the table of manuscripts. It will be noticed that this list gives a very
similar overall structure for the work to that deduced by Mrs. Clough
and Symonds with "nothing but the sense to guide" them; where it
differs is in the omission of the first part of scene iv, the whole of
"scenes" v and xn (both short and scrappy), and the possible omis-
sion of scenes vn and x.
If genuine, this plan demonstrates a real attempt by Clough to bring
together the two different stages of original composition into a single
dramatic poem, but the two-column layout of the plan makes evident
once again the fundamental premise of this study, that Clough was
trying to combine material he still thought of as falling into two sep-
100 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES
arate groups. The final notebook for the project, Adam and Eve Note-
book II, is the beginning of Clough's fourth composition-stage, re-
copying and reworking the sections of the poem to follow out the plan;
he never in fact got further with this fourth stage than copying out the
first scene and a half. This fourth stage would, if carried through, have
allowed Clough the chance to work over the unevennesses of tone
and to tie up other loose ends in the narrative inevitably left after such
a conflation of two very different sequences of original drafts.
NOTES
1. Dipsychus, xi, 127-33, in F. L. Mulhauser, ed., The Poems of Arthur Hugh
Clough, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 276-77, hereafter cited as Poems.
2. See, e.g., Richard M. Gollin, "The 1951 Edition of Clough's Poems: A Critical Re-
examination," Modern Philology, 60 (1962), 120-27; and Mulhauser's response (in
Poems, pp. vi-ix). On the general question of Clough's rewriting, see my review in Ar-
noldian,4:3 (1977), 7-14, and, more fully, "A Study of Re writing in the Poetry of Arthur
Hugh Clough," unpublished Ph.D. thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1976).
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), 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 Lady Chorley inEssays in Criticism, 12 [1962],
429). 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.
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 Note-
book II), between ff. 13 and 18, and is printed in Poems, p. 663. Both versions are written
on the same bright blue paper. I am indebted to Miss Katharine Duff, to the Bodleian Li-
brary, Oxford, and to the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, for permission to quote
manuscript materials.
7. Dates have ranged from 1847-48, in G. P. Johari, PMLA, 66 (1951), 417, to later
than Clough's Dipsychus (1850), in Jacqueline Johnson and Paul Dean, Durham Univer-
sity Journal, 38 (1977), 253.
8. Cf. Eric Smith, Some Versions of the Fall (London: Croom Helm, 1973), p. 17.
9. E.g., Katherine Chorley, Arthur Hugh Clough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962),
p. 125; for dating Clough's study of economic questions, see Correspondence of Arthur
Hugh Clough, ed. F. L. Mulhauser (Oxford: Clarendon, Press 1957), I, 130, hereafter
cited as Correspondence.
10. Balliol MS.441(a), ff. 4V and 5V. Lady Chorley (p. 107) prints this passage with
materials from elsewhere in the notebook, and assigns it to 1849; Robindra K. Biswas,
Arthur Hugh Clough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) prints it in its context and dates it
CLOUGH'S "ADAM AND EVE 103
1845. Clough's interest in the progressive Unitarians and the transcendentalists is dis-
cussed by Evelyn Barish Greenberger, Arthur Hugh Clough: the Growth of a Poet's Mind
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 102-04. The manuscript note-
book 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), 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 (Corre-
spondence, i, 155, 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. [John Kenrick), Prospective Review, 1 (August 1845), 335-55, esp. pp. 342 and
348-50. Authorship identification for this and the next item from Wellesley Index to Vic-
torian 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.
13. [Charles Wicksteed], Prospective Review, 1 (August 1845), 445-64; pp. 450-51.
With the last sentence, cf. Clough's later"Notes on the Religious Tradition" (c. 1850), in
Selected Prose Works ofArthur Hugh Clough, ed. BucknerB. Trawick (University, Ala.:
University of Alabama Press, 1964), p. 291.
14. Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. H. F. Lowry (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1932; repr. 1968), p. 86 (20 July 1848); and p. 87 (late July / early Au-
gust 1848).
15. Both the letter(8 Sept. 1848) and verses are printed by F. L. Mulhauser, "An Un-
published Poem of James Anthony Froude," English Language Notes, 12(1974), 26-30.
16. Chorley,p. 182.
17. Walter E. Houghton, The Poetry of Clough (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1963), p. 80 and n. 3.
18. Bodleian MS.Eng.poet.d.125, which contains fair copies (rectos only, ff. 1-13) of
scene i and scene n, 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.
21. BalliolMS.441(a),ff. 38r, 36V.
22. I have noticed besides Byron the following treatments of the Cain story: Solomon
Gessner, The Death ofAbel (1761); W. H. Hall, The Death of Cain (1809); James Mont-
gomery, The World before the Flood (1813), Book vn; William Blake, The Ghost ofAbel
(1822); S. T. Coleridge, "The Wanderings of Cain," in hisPoems (1826); J. E. Reade,
Cain the Wanderer, a Vision of Heaven (1829); C. J. Yorke, Cain and Abel: A Poem
(1836); William Harper, Cain and Abel (1844); Adam Chadwick, Cain and Abel (1845);
and "A Cambridge Wrangler," "Cain," inPoems ofEarly Years (1851). This list is cer-
tainly 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, 96, in Poems of William Edmonstoune Aytoun, ed. Frederick Page
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921], p. 299).
23. Poems, p. 667.
104 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES
24. Cf. Patrick Scott, ed., Amoursde Voyage (St. Lucia: Queensland University Press,
1974), pp. 7-9 and p. 39.
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 ex-
pansions.
28. With this passage, cf. /Peter 5:6: "be clothed with humility . . . humble yourselves
therefore under the mighty hand of God."
29. The lyrics are printed in Poems, pp. 215-17, and the extra scene is in the notes to
Poems, p. 665; 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. 5 v and 6 r ) 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), which is much earlier in date -
subsequent to 3 Aug. 1847, yet almost certainly predating The Bothie (September 1848).
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. 43 r ), the Adam and Eve materialfitsround the hexameters on the page, not the other way
about.
31. Biswas, p. 263.
32. Cf. Amours de Voyage, in, 176 (Poems, p. 119), and Dipsychus, v, 66 and 75
(Poems, p. 239).
33. Adam and Eve Notebook I, f. 33V; cf. Poems and Prose Remains (1869), n, 69, and
Poems, pp. 666-67.
34. Poems, pp. 215-16.
35. Adam and Eve Notebook I, f. 2V; Poems, pp. 216-17 and p. 681. 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 Col-
lege, Oxford, for collating this MS. for me.
36. Poems, pp. 214-15 and p. 680.
37. Evelyn Barish, "A New Clough manuscript," Review of English Studies, NS 15
(1964), 168-74.
38. Adam and Eve Notebook 1, f. 43 r .
39. Cf. Houghton, pp. 88-89.
40. [Henry Sidgwick], in Westminster Review, 92 (October 1869), 375-76; repr. in
Michael Thorpe, ed., Clough, the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul,
1972), p. 280.
41. Samuel Waddington, Arthur Hugh Clough, A Monograph (London: George Bell
and Sons, 1883), p. 310.
42. Johnson and Dean (see note 7 above), p. 25 In.