THE EDITORIAL PROBLEM

IN CLOUGH'S ADAM AND EVE

BY P. G. SCOTT

CLOUGH'S POETRY POSES editorial problems that, if not special in

kind, are certainly special in degree. The problems arise from Clough's
way of writing and rewriting, so that one "poem" could in different
stages be rewritten with widely divergent poetic intentions. The des-
cription that his own Mephistophelean Spirit gives inDipsychus could
stand for much of his experience in composition, and it well describes
many of his manuscripts:
don't be sure —
Emotions are so slippery . . . write verse,
Burnt in disgust, then iil-restored, and left
Half-made, in pencil scrawl, illegible.1
For the many poems that Clough did not himself prepare for pub-
lication, it is often very difficult for an editor to work out how the di-
vergent intentions of the manuscripts can be brought to constitute a
defensible single text, and there has inevitably been considerable
controversy over the appropriate editorial policies.2 The appearance,
in 1974, of the splendidly-produced " Second Edition" of the Claren-
don Press Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough has greatly improved the
situation, but the very multiplicity of Clough's scrappy and indecisive
manuscript drafts seems to undermine one's confidence that an editor
can judge definitively between one reading and another, or establish a
single stable text from the instabilities of Clough's continual rewrit-
ing. The "uneditability" of many Clough texts is a major critical fact
about his poetry, part of its very mode of existence, and in some ways
79
80 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES
the revised Clarendon edition provides new impetus and new oppor-
tunities for still further textual work, not so much in re-editing, as in
investigating the patterns of thought and composition that could make
necessary its more than 250 small-print pages of (selected) variant
textual materials. For one work at least, Adam and Eve, Clough's ed-
itors, and the critics who have relied upon their labours, seem to have
overlooked the very fundamental textual significance of Clough's
characteristically divergent rewriting process, a process that explains
many of the critical difficulties in both the structure and the details of
the poem.
Adam and Eve was Clough's first attempt at a long poem, begun
while he was still a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. In its usual pub-
lished form, it consists of fourteen dramatic "scenes," some of them
brief soliloquies, and it covers very disparate material - Adam and
Eve themselves, with their contrasting responses to the Fall, sexual-
ity, and childbirth (scenes I-IV), followed by Cain's murder of Abel
and its aftermath (scenes v-xm) and Adam's deathbed speech (scene
xiv). The published poem, in fact, has a double focus (Adam and Eve
/ Cain), and as the focus shifts, so does the tone, from controlled irony
to the much more emotional, guilt-ridden scenes concerned with the
murder. This shift of focus is rather concealed by the present title,
preferred by modern scholars because Adam and Eve was the head-
ing on Clough's fair-copy notebook.3 Clough himself never prepared
from his various draft-sections any complete text for publication, and
the editors who did so after his death, his widow and John Addington
Symonds, discarded the notebook title for their own more accurate
but absolutely unauthoritative title "Fragments of the Mystery of the
Fall." 4 From its first publication in 1869, Clough critics have usually
prefaced their remarks with some acknowledgement of the work's un-
finishedness, but such acknowledgement has hardly seemed to im-
pede them in making quite detailed analyses of structure and meaning
in the poem. Meanwhile, Clough's modern editors, though they have
collated anew the various drafts, and have corrected Mrs. Clough's
transcription in many particulars, have continued to adopt, almost
without discussion, her identification and ordering of the scenes that
are to constitute the work. The modern revaluation of the poem,
therefore, has rested on editorial judgements made by a fairly unliter-
ary widow over a hundred years ago. The crucial but subversive edi-
 CLOUGH S ADAM AND EVE 81
torial question that needs at least to be posed is whether, or in what
sense, the multifarious notebook materials for Adam and Eve consti-
tute a single poem at all.
Mrs. Clough herself left ample evidence that she was working only
with the same materials that are available to the modern investigator.
The word "Fragments" in her 1869 title, and the footnote she ap-
pended to that redaction to explain that "the MS. of this poem is very
imperfect,"5 give a general warning, but a private memorandum she
wrote about her editorial problems provides much more specific evi-
dence, and significantly refers to plural MSS, not just to "the MS.," as
in the footnote:
The MSS of the 'Fall' are singularly fragmentary and interrupted. The poem
must have lain long in the author's mind, how long we cannot guess but certainly
during several years. The different scenes were found scattered up & down more
than one notebook [actually, four notebooks and one other manuscript], written
often in pencil, with no indications as to date, & nothing but the sense to guide us
as to their order Thefirsttwo scenes AHC had copied out fair & apparently in-
tended to preserve. Also in a less perfect copy he had written [originally: worked]
out Scenes vi & vn - xn & xiv. All the rest is collected from scraps & fouls— Yet
in spite of roughness and imperfection of expression, when one attempts the re-
construction ... There is hardly a doubt possible as to either general purport or or-
der; tho' there are often words missing, & others carelessly repeated & a good
many quite or nearly unreadable.6
The memorandum shows that Mrs. Clough and Symonds had to
act as far more than mere transcribers - they were consciously at-
tempting "a reconstruction" of a poem for which there was no fin-
ished or coherent manuscript. The rest of the memorandum gives a
list of the words they supplied to fill textual lacunae, and a systematic
survey of the manuscript sources available for each scene. Since it
states that they had "nothing but the sense" to guide them in the ar-
rangement of the scenes, there seems little reason to suppose that
Mrs. Clough had any special knowledge of her late husband's inten-
tions for these materials, such as might in theory derive from informal
discussion. The 1869 text, we may infer, was based solely on a care-
ful assessment of the still-extant manuscripts.
What follows is an attempt to throw new light on the editorial
problems in Adam and Eve, by reconstructing the evolution of "the
poem," stage by stage and manuscript by manuscript, and by consid-
ering the rather disparate impulses that seem to have lain behind the
82 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES
different composition-stages. Modern disputes over the dating of the
work, for instance, can be largely resolved if one refers the extrinsic
evidence to particular stages of the composition, rather than to the
work as a whole. 7 1 argue that, by following the 1869 recension, the
Clarendon editors reproduced certain scenes in a line-order that was
not Clough's own; I transcribe for the first time what I shall argue is
Clough's "editorial" outline for a coherent version of the poem, a
version he hardly began actually to write; and I suggest a possible ad-
ditional lyric section to form the ending to the work. Because of the
confused nature of the materials, such an attempt must necessarily be
provisional and tentative.

The story begins with Elizabeth Barrett. Poetic treatments of the

opening chapters of Genesis were much more common in the early
nineteenth century than one might suppose, but, perhaps because of
the looming example of Milton, perhaps because the theology of the
Fall itself had come to seem less sympathetic than the emotions of
post-lapsarian man, Romantic poets had tended to stay away from
Adam and Eve, and focus instead on the personal agony and Gothic
horror of Cain the murderer; the obvious example is Byron's Cain, A
Mystery (1821).8 One of the signs of a shift from Romantic to Vic-
torian culture is Elizabeth Barrett's return to a focus on Adam and
Eve, in her The Drama of Exile (1844), and Clough's own work had
its genesis when he read a review of her poem, in the autumn of 1845.
The evidence is quite specific. One of Clough's notebooks con-
tains, along with some of the Adam and Eve drafts and much else be-
sides, a series of prose memoranda, chiefly on economics, that all his
biographers assign to the Long Vacation he spent at Grasmere in
1845.9 Mixed in with them are some notes on the writings of the Bos-
ton Unitarian Dr. Channing, immediately followed by this startling
passage:
Is there anything in the notion of a Fall & a Redemption which is not conveyed
in the common philosophical] expressions—
So atonement & grace—
And 2ndly if so,= is it essential to connect these truths of human Nature with
the historical phenomena of Christ, & his life. May not Adam & Christ & their
 CLOUGH'S "ADAM AND EVE" 83
l0
stories be but a Time-Effigiation of the Untemporal Truth... .
That this passage also dates from 1845 is clear, not only from its
place in the notebook, but also because with it there is a note referring
the entry to the Unitarian Prospective Review, number 3, which was
published in August of that year.11
The primary reference to the Prospective is to an article on recent
Boston church disputes, which had argued the irrelevance of much
Christian doctrine to the practice of essential religion, but two other
articles in the same number also seem to have a direct relation to
Clough's notebook entry. One was a review of the German scholar
C. O. Miiller's Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, a
discussion of the imaginative and explanatory impulses that lay be-
hind the creation of "mythi" (tales told "without any intimation that
what is said or related is not true"); Muller's theory of the mythus
seems to lie behind the earlier scenes of Adam and Eve, especially
when Adam dismisses Eve's explanation for their recent experiences
as "the mighty mythus of the Fall," simply the result of" a vague and
queasy dream" during her first pregnancy (i, 78-80). 12
In the same number, however, was yet a third relevant article, a
rather belated review of Elizabeth Barrett's two-volume collection of
Poems. The reviewer proclaimed The Drama of Exile the piece de
resistance of the volume, and gave copious quotations from it, though
he went on to disagree with Miss Barrett's acceptance of so orthodox
a doctrine of the Fall:
we have long been convinced that the first curse pronounced upon m a n . . . was in
truth the first blessing conferred upon him; and in like manner now that we read
Miss Barrett's delineation of the remorse, and sorrows, and efforts and hopes
which grow out of the First S i n . . . - we cannot resist the idea that the serpent was
perhaps not so much mistaken, when he spoke of the knowledge of good and evil
turning us into gods, and that the life of temptation and struggling, victory and de-
feat, which we of this day lead, was most probably, in spite of divines, the kind of
life that the Omniscient Creator designed that we should lead, and that the first
sin was one of the first steps... in the rugged path of this educationary discipline.
. . . We take the august mythology as it stands - content that it holds, as within a
shell, a mournful truth, to which in one form or another all humanity must bear its
attestation - the truth, that our nature hath had a fall.13

In its suggestion of the possiblities in a scriptural drama about the

Fall, in its ideas about the nature of "mythus," and in its discussions
84 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES

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

The verses that accompanied this letter expressed, Froude said, a

" kindred" idea to the draft of Clough's he had seen, and Froude's last
stanza seems to echo Adam's great speech (in Scene n), when it as-
serts that even sin is part of the universal harmony of nature, and that
the sun "sees no Demon in the serpent's fang / Nor breaks't [its]
slumber for its victim's pang." Nowhere in either of Arnold's letters,
or in Froude's, is there any mention of Cain or Abel, though all three
comments are, admittedly, fairly brief.
The content and scale of this first version has been the subject of
widely-varying conjecture. Since Lady Chorley places all the extant
 CLOUGH'S "ADAM AND EVE" 85

manuscripts, scrappy though they are, at a date in 1849 or later, she

considers it probable that in 1848 "Matthew Arnold only saw a very
tentative sketch."16 Professor Houghton, on the other hand, who re-
lates the poem to Clough's resignation from his Oriel Fellowship
(October 1848), clearly thinks that a major draft must have been
completed, even if "some new scenes" were added in 1849 and 1850.
He suggests that "perhaps all that was written by July 1848 was
scenes i, n, vi, vn, xn, xiv." 17 This list plainly derives from Mrs.
Clough's 1869 memorandum, via the 1951 Clarendon textual notes,
but the shortened Clarendon version of the memorandum gives a mis-
leading abbreviation for the relevant sentences, which actually refer,
not to the earliest versions of the poem, but to the later fair-copy ver-
sions in the two Adam and Eve notebooks (cf. the longer memoran-
dum text quoted above). The table on the next page indicates a brief
note on the contents of each scene, and it seems obvious from such a
summary that the scenes Professor Houghton lists could never, by
themselves, have constituted a single draft of the work, because their
subject-matter is too heterogeneous. The two fair-copy notebooks, I
would argue, are both late in the development of the poem, and only
the second is a true fair copy; the first consists of relatively clear
drafts for scenes that occur in no earlier manuscript. Scenes i and n
occur together in Adam and Eve Notebook ID* because Clough was
there starting a never-completed final redrafting, while scenes i, vi,
vn, xn, and xiv occur together in Adam and Eve Notebook I,19 not
because they formed a single coherent version, but because they were
all extra to sequences already composed; these five scenes were all
composed at the same stage, but a late stage, to fill in the gaps in the
narrative when Clough began the attempt to bring together two ear-
lier and separate composition-stages into one poem.
TofindClough's earlier versions, we must look, not at the two note-
books chiefly devoted to Adam and Eve, but at the others, where
drafts of scenes from the poem are mixed in with other poetic and
non-poetic material. I have already quoted the prose-notes on the
Fall and Adam from the "Grasmere '45 / Roma 1849" notebook,
and a breakdown, scene by scene, of the poetic drafts in that manu-
script shows that the scenes there form a fairly coherent sequence,
far more than a "tentative sketch." This basic sequence (scenes n,
in, and iv) is solely concerned with the differing responses of Adam
 TABLE
THE MANUSCRIPTS OF ADAM AND EVE
Scenes as numbered Gras- Loose Venice Adam & Adam & List
and arranged by mere Sheet N'book Eve I Eve II
Mrs. Clough N'book
I (Adam & Eve) - - - I I I
II (Adam alone) II II, 1-78 II
III (Adam & Eve, III III
after the birth)
IV, 1-18 (Adam & IV(i) -
Eve)
IV, 19-102 (Adam IV(ii) - IV(ii)
&Eve)
V (Adam to Cain *V - - -
& Abel)
VI (Abel alone) - VI VI
VII _ 0
VII (Cain alone) -
VIII (Adam & Eve) - - VIII - VIII
IX (Cain alone with IX IX
Abel's body)
X (Adam alone) - - X -
XI
XI (Cain & Eve) XI
XII (Cain & Adam) - - - XII
XIII, 1-77 (Adam - - XIII(i)
& Cain)
XIII, 77-93 (Adam *XIII- -
to Cain) (ii)
XIV (Adam's vision - XIV XIV
to Cain)
[not included - Chorus
in 1869]

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

The subsequent history of "the poem" is the story of Clough's

plans tofittogether the two different groups of scenes from two rather
differently-conceived phases of composition into one coherent frame-
work. No continous manuscript was ever completed based on these
plans, but the new material needed for this third, "editorial," com-
position-stage had all been drafted in a yellow-covered copybook,
Adam and Eve Notebook I. It will be noted from the lists in the table
that none of the previously-drafted material was recopied into this
yellow book; Clough used the book instead to draft the framing and
linking scenes that would fit around the earlier material. The note-
book contains, therefore, a scattering of scenes from all the different
phases of the drama - the beginning, middle, and end, to fit round the
Adam and Eve, and Cain drafts. The scenes in this third-stage draft
are the prologue and epilogue (scenes i and xiv), two contrasting so-
liloquies from before the murder, illustrating the characters of Cain
and Abel (scenes vi and vn), and a short, fragmented and incomplete
exchange between Adam and Cain, which might be placed at any
point in the closing section of the drama (scene xn). Also included in
the notebook, following the Adam and Eve scenes, are some stanzaic
lyrics, which have previously been printed as separate poems but
which relate in theme to the longer work; a loose sheet of paper in the
notebook contains a short speech from a scene not used by Mrs.
Clough, in which Adam talks to Eve about their responsibility for
Abel's death.29 The strongest argument for placing this notebook as
the third stage in the poem's composition, rather than earlier as Pro-
fessor Houghton seems to place it, is the internal one; unlike the two
manuscripts previously discussed, the contents of this one do not
make any coherent grouping by themselves, but the discontinuous
spread of scenes does make sense if they were composed as the
framework for the earlier material.30
The new opening for the combined work (scene i, entitled "Pro-
logue" in this notebook) alters the light in which wefirstsee Adam, by
beginning the drama with his rationalising account of the origins of
the Fall mythus, and thereby making his "dipsychan" doubtings in
scene n a complication of the basic debate in the work, rather than our
first introduction to it. In this Notebook I draft, the force of Adam's
scepticism receives slightly stronger expression than in the subse-
quent fair copy of the scene in Adam and Eve Notebook II. As the
94 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES

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

The other lyric, much better known to Clough scholars, is "Youth,

that went, is come again"; this can be veryfirmlydated, since Clough
sent a copy (the only surviving manuscript) in a letter to his Oxford
friend J. C. Shairp, on 2 January 1850.36 Though Mrs. Clough
cleaned the poem up when she printed selected stanzas in 1869,
under the title "Solvitur Acris Hiems," the full text, first printed by
Evelyn Barish in 1964, has as its theme a middle-aged man's ambiva-
lence about intermittently resurgent sexuality, and the refrain is ad-
dressed to "Eva"; this is the name Adam uses for Eve in the short,
unused speech on the loose sheet of paper mentioned above.37

Youth is pretty and the song,

But the pleasure lasts not long
And we mustn't do what's wrong,
Oh no, E v a . . . .
A sensation now and then
 98 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES

Just to intimate we're men,

Men and women made . . .
This lyric, too, seems closely associated with Adam's early con-
versations with Eve, especially with scene n where they discuss on
the following morning the evening's sexual abandonment that will
lead in due course to Eve's pregnancy, and hence, in Adam's view, to
her mythus of the Fall. Though no extrinsic evidence is available, in-
trinsically these short poems seem to suggest that during the third
composition-stage Clough at least considered adding lyrics at inter-
vals throughout the dramatic sequence.
Fortunately, however, we are not wholly dependent on such con-
jecture for working out the shape of poem Clough intended to result
from this third or "editorial" stage in the development of the work.
On a blank half-page, later in Adam and Eve Notebook I, written
slightly at an angle, and apparently overlooked by earlier students,
there is what appears to be a list of headings for the coordination of
the various different scenes; it gives a very rough plan for the revised
work.38 The list is arranged in this pattern:
Prologus
Ofool
Ye birth
Crotchet — abel

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.

The curious composition-history of Adam and Eve leaves us with

considerable problems in interpretation, and would still do so, even if
the present published text were to be reedited to follow more closely
Clough's own manuscript-arrangement and his own third-stage selec-
tion for the sequence of the work. On the one hand, the literary critic
naturally wishes to study any work as a whole, in the author's most
ambitious and highly-developed version, and so do justice to the au-
thor's most complex poetic vision. On the other hand, the sections
from which any "final version" of Adam and Eve must be reconsti-
tuted are not only rough and fragmentary in form, but were actually
composed before the overall structure of the work had been con-
ceived; the individual sections, therefore, are not likely to be good
texts for the kind of close literary study that involves the tracing from
scene to scene of ironic contrasts, verbal echoes, or recurrent symbo-
lism. If scene vn, for instance, was not written for the same form of
the poem as the text in which we read scene ix, in what sense can we
use lines from scene vn for the clue to Cain's action in scene ix? If the
lines that have been published as " scene v" were left out of the third-
stage plan, and may never have been thought of as more than the
briefest doodle of the possibilities for such a scene during that second
stage when the Cain scenes were first imagined, in what sense can one
criticise scene v for handling "a highly dramatic situation . . . too
briefly and suddenly to be effective"?39
Criticism of the structure of the poem is even more difficult,
whether in praise or blame, than criticism of individual scenes.
Clough's intention of making the poem's focus change from sin to
crime, in effect creating a two-act drama, is clear enough, at least in
 CLOUGH'S "ADAM AND E V E " 101
the third composition-stage; but equally clearly he never completed a
text embodying this intention. Most of Clough's best poems are the
product of just this kind of multiple-stage composition process, and
much of their character comes from the successful bringing together
in the published text of the contradictory and divergent ideas in ear-
lier stages. The abandonment of Adam and Eve before any stable
version had been fully developed could, of course, have been the re-
sult simply of changed interests, other preoccupations in translation
work, or a more cautious attitude to religious issues, but it could
equally have been because Clough himself, after experiment, found
the treatment he had given to the two " acts" too different to be com-
binable or found the basic idea - reimagining Biblical characters in
terms of modern family conflict - to be too jokey to sustain a full-
length poetic drama. Arnold's comment, that the treatment of Adam
and Eve "offended" him, has already been quoted; Henry Sidgwick,
a generally sympathetic critic, was perhaps more perceptive when he
described the whole project of treating "antique personages" as ex-
hibiting modern self-consciousness, as "too whimsical." Sidgwick
noticed also the variation of tone within the drama when he suggested
that Clough's imagination was "inadequate" to deal with the murder
of Abel, and he concluded that the poem was unfinishable; "we
doubt," he wrote, "whether the poem could have been completed so
as to satisfy the author's severe self-criticism."40
At least one Victorian critic had no doubts that any literary criti-
cism of the poem was quite unfair to its poet. Samuel Waddington
wrote, in the 1880s, that:
This poem, in our judgment, does great injustice to Clough, and we do not
think that he would himself have published many portions of it as they at present
stand.... It is very hard on an author when an unfinished and imperfect composi-
tion, found after his death amongst the old papers in his study, is . . . printed and
published.41
This kind of caveat in effect preempts any kind of examination of
the poem, and one has some sympathy with those more recent critics
who roundly assert that "we can only criticise what we have got and
not what we have not got."42 The qualification one might, however,
offer to such New Critical fundamentalism is that "what we have
got" includes not just the words of "the text," but also the nature, and
sequence, and internal arrangement, of the manuscripts. Editors can
102 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES
usually assume the integrity and eventual stability of the text under
consideration. Such assumptions simply do not cover the textual sit-
uation in many Clough poems, which are unstable in structure, diver-
gent in the intentions of successive drafts, and unfinished in verbal
form. In such cases, even where the textual scholar's aim is not pri-
marily a genetic study of the poem's origin and development, his task
necessarily broadens from a narrow editorial focus. Criticism of such
texts can only be realistic if we get clear, not just the wording in the
manuscripts, but also, however provisionally and tentatively, their
nature.

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.