CLOUGH, klrif. ARTIluit HUGH (1319-61). An English author. He was horn in Liverpool. but when only four years old was taken by his father, a merchant, to Charleston, S. C. He re turned to England, however, in 1828, and was at Rugby under Doctor Arnold, whose strenuous appeal to moral responsibility in boys probably had an effect upon Clough's tempera ment. naturally high-strung, with a tendency to more or less morbid introspection. His oxford career had an even more decisive influence on his life. He entered the university at the height of the •Traetarian Movement,' with one of whose most brilliant men, William George Ward. he was intimate. For a time he Was carried away by the new current, but the reaction took him further in the opposite direction. He held a fellowship at Oriel College from 1843 to 1848, but relinquished it when it became clear to him that he could no longer subscribe to the reli gious doctrines invol•ed—becoming later an ex aminer under the Education Department. like Matthew Arnold, with whom he had touch in common. His temperament was essentially skep tical—ill no mere negative sense, but in that of reverent and anxious seeking for the truth at all costs. It is this characteristic which dominates
the whole of his literary work, whether verse or prose. In his three longer poems. Di psych us, The Both-ic of and Amours de voyage. the analysis of character disturbed by spiritual conflict is the main interest: though he shows a perfect consciousness that the habit of self-analysis and suspense of judgment nay be carried too far. ' After his death, which oc curred on a tour in Italy, lie was commemorated in one of the noblest elegies in the English lan guage—Arnold's Thy•sis; and Lowell (whom, with Emerson, Longfellow, and other eminent men, he had met on a visit to America) expressed the feeling that lie would "be thought a hundred years hence to have been the truest expression in \ erse of the moral and intellectual tendencies, the doubt and struggle toward settled convic tions, of the age in which he lived." His Poems and Prose Remains, with letters and a memoir by F. T. I'algrave, were published the year after his death.