Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/60

 verse he chose the right vehicle, the truly natural mode of utterance." If that means that Clough would have perhaps done better to write in prose, I am sure, though it sounds bold to say so, that the critic is wrong. I have been surprised by the inferiority of Clough's prose to his poetry. His prose does not rise beyond the level of the ordinary review; his soul is not living in it. On the contrary, in his poetry, though it does want art, and does not seek for it, there is a spirit always moving—a delicate, fantastic, changing spirit; a humanity, with a touch here of Ariel, and there of Puck; a subtle sound and breathing such as one hears in lonely woods and knows not whence it came, and a melody of verse which his friend Matthew Arnold never arrived at; and these qualities prove, as I think, that prose was not the true vehicle of his thought, and that poetry was. I cannot conceive that even the mocking arguments of the Fiend in Dipsychus would be half as well expressed in prose. There is a short prose dialogue at the end of that poem. To read it and compare it with the poetry is proof enough of this. As to the impassioned utterances of the soul in Dipsychus struggling to hold its immortal birthright against the tempter who cries: "Claim the world; it is at your feet,"—some passages of which are quite remarkable in spiritual, I do not mean religious, poetry—they would be impossible in prose. Prose could not reach their feeling, nor the delicate interlacing of their thinking. It is in describing the half-tones of the