Page:The Poems and Prose remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, volume 2 (1869).djvu/184



'I don't very well understand what it's all about,' said my uncle. 'I won't say I didn't drop into a doze while the young man was drivelling through his latter soliloquies. But there was a great deal that was unmeaning, vague, and involved; and what was most plain, was least decent and least moral.'

'Dear sir,' said I, 'says the proverb—"Needs must when the devil drives;" and if the devil is to speak—'

'Well,' said my uncle, 'why should he? Nobody asked him. Not that he didn't say much which, if only it hadn't been for the way he said it, and that it was he who said it, would have been sensible enough.'

'But, sir,' said I, 'perhaps he wasn't a devil after all. That's the beauty of the poem; nobody can say. You see, dear sir, the thing which it is attempted to represent is the conflict between the tender conscience and the world. Now, the over-tender conscience will, of course, exaggerate the wickedness of the world; and the Spirit in my poem may be merely the hypothesis or subjective imagination formed—'

'Oh, for goodness' sake, my dear boy,' interrupted my uncle, 'don't go into the theory of it. If you're wrong in it, it makes bad worse; if you're right, you may be a critic, but you can't be a poet. And then you know very well I don't understand all those new words. But as for that, I quite agree that consciences are much too tender in your generation—schoolboys' consciences, too! As my old friend the Canon says of the Westminster students, "They're all