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    Amours De Voyage
    Amours De Voyage
    Amours De Voyage
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Amours De Voyage

    By Arthur Hugh Clough

    3.5/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 2007
    Amours De Voyage

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    Reviews for Amours De Voyage

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Arthur Hugh Clough, perhaps even more than Coventry Patmore, would make a great example if you were looking for a paradigm of the not-quite-top-rank Victorian poet. He was at Rugby under Dr Arnold and at Balliol with Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold, Frederick Temple and all the rest; he had Doubts that ruled him out of academic life; he became a civil servant in the Education office (like Matthew Arnold); he had one foot in North America; he even had some pretty robust feminist credentials, by the standards of the time - his sister and his daughter were both principals of Newnham, and he himself worked for years as unpaid secretary to Florence Nightingale (a relative of his wife's). He died of malaria whilst on a tour of Italy in 1861.Clough even had his own Wordsworthian "bliss was it in that dawn" moments, being in Paris for the événements of 1848 and in Rome for those of 1849. The latter gave him the inspiration for Amours de Voyage.Quite why Clough thought the world needed a romantic tragi-comedy framed as an epistolary novel in verse is not entirely clear, and Clough, notoriously shy of publishing his work, perhaps didn't really care what the world needed - in any case he kept it in a drawer for nine years before sending it off to a magazine. It's astonishingly low-key verse: apart from the passages in italics that top and tail the five cantos, Clough rigorously avoids any suggestion of high poetic style, sticking to very everyday and somewhat long-winded mid-Victorian English shoehorned cunningly into his free-running hexameters (usually a very difficult meter to get away with in English - for some reason we always feel more comfortable with an odd number of stresses). Clough is possibly the only serious poet ever to attempt to get away with using words like "superincumbent" and "juxtaposition" in metrical verse:Well, I know there are thousands as pretty and hundreds as pleasant, Girls by the dozen as good, and girls in abundance with polish Higher and manners more perfect than Susan or Mary Trevellyn. Well, I know, after all, it is only juxtaposition,— Juxtaposition, in short; and what is juxtaposition? Letters from a young man called Claude to his offstage friend Eustace(*) are interspersed with others between various English young ladies. Claude is holidaying in Rome in the spring of 1849, trying to devote himself to the study of classical antiquities and develop the proper protestant indignation at Catholic excesses, but he keeps getting distracted from his aesthetic pursuits by sex, in the shape of the young English Trevellyn sisters, and by politics, in the euphoria of the new anticlerical, anti-absolutist Roman Republic and the panic due to the approach of the French army on its way to put it down. His serious reflections on Roman art and architecture comically alternate with letters in which he pours his heart out to the long-suffering Eustace in a rather endearingly immature way - am I in love or just imagining it? should I not stay single and devote myself to art? but becoming a bachelor uncle can't be much fun, can it? am I just being snobbish because their daddy's a provincial banker? - and so on. And then he's suddenly brought down to earth by witnessing, with his guidebook still under his arm, a riot in which a priest believed to be an Austrian spy is killed by a republican mob. You didn't see the dead man? No;—I began to be doubtful; I was in black myself, and didn't know what mightn't happen,— But a National Guard close by me, outside of the hubbub, Broke his sword with slashing a broad hat covered with dust,—and Passing away from the place with Murray under my arm, and Stooping, I saw through the legs of the people the legs of a body.But it's not long before he's off again - his Mary has left town for the comparative safety of Florence, and he hurries to catch her up and explain that he wasn't being standoffish, just shy. But by the time he gets to Florence her party has moved on, and there's a comic and increasingly frenetic chase around Northern Italy, interspersed with the growingly depressing political news as the French and Austrians wipe out remaining pockets of political freedom...A lovely little, very approachable Victorian period piece. ----(*) I'm sure this must be where P.G. Wodehouse got the names for Bertie Wooster's irresponsible cousins from!
    • 4/5
      A delightful example of Victorian narrative poetry, focused on the frustrated love affair of an English flaneur caught in the middle of the Risorgimento in Rome. Claude is a close relative of other disappointed, dissatisfied ennuye and ultimate cowardly egotists that populate the XIX century in Europe (like Oneguin or Frederic Moreau). Clough is very adept at presenting Claude's numerous strategies of self-deceit, as the letters are more like monologues in the Browning mode. Canto 3 is particularly masterful, it is a series of musings that slowly reveal themselves as masks fof Claude's guilt and remorse for not proposing to the girl he loves. The poem deserves to be better known, and the Persepone Books edition is excellent.

    Book preview

    Amours De Voyage - Arthur Hugh Clough

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of Amours de Voyage, by Arthur Hugh Clough

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: Amours de Voyage

    Author: Arthur Hugh Clough

    Release Date: August 26, 2008 [EBook #1393]

    Last Updated: January 26, 2013

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMOURS DE VOYAGE ***

    Produced by Ed Brandon, and David Widger

    AMOURS DE VOYAGE

    By Arthur Hugh Clough

    1903 Macmillan edition

                              Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio,

                              And taste with a distempered appetite!

                              —Shakspeare

                              Il doutait de tout, meme de l'amour.

                              —French Novel

                              Solvitur ambulando.

                                              Solutio Sophismatum.

                                      Flevit amores

                              Non elaboratum ad pedem.

                              —Horace

    Contents

    AMOURS DE VOYAGE.

    Canto I.

      Over the great windy waters, and over the clear-crested summits,

        Unto the sun and the sky, and unto the perfecter earth,

      Come, let us go,—to a land wherein gods of the old time wandered,

        Where every breath even now changes to ether divine.

      Come, let us go; though withal a voice whisper, 'The world that we live in,

        Whithersoever we turn, still is the same narrow crib;

      'Tis but to prove limitation, and measure a cord, that we travel;

        Let who would 'scape and be free go to his chamber and think;

      'Tis but to change idle fancies for memories wilfully falser;

        'Tis but to go and have been.'—Come, little bark! let us go.

      I. Claude to Eustace.

      Dear Eustatio, I write that you may write me an answer,

      Or at the least to put us again en rapport with each other.

      Rome disappoints me much,—St Peter's, perhaps, in especial;

      Only the Arch of Titus and view from the Lateran please me:

      This, however, perhaps is the weather, which truly is horrid.

      Greece must be better, surely; and yet I am feeling so spiteful,

      That I could travel to Athens, to Delphi, and Troy, and Mount Sinai,

      Though but to see with my eyes that these are vanity also.

        Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand it, but

      RUBBISHY seems the word that most exactly would suit it.

      All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings,

      All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages,

      Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future.

      Would to Heaven the old Goths had made a cleaner sweep of it!

      Would to Heaven some new ones would come and destroy these churches!

      However, one can live in Rome as also in London.

      It is a blessing, no doubt, to be rid, at least for a time, of

      All one's friends and relations,—yourself (forgive me!) included,—

      All the assujettissement of having been what one has been,

      What one thinks one is, or thinks that others suppose one;

      Yet, in despite of all, we turn like fools to the English.

      Vernon has been my fate; who is here the same that you knew him,—

      Making the tour, it seems, with friends of the name of Trevellyn.

      II. Claude to Eustace.

      Rome disappoints me still; but I shrink and adapt myself to it.

      Somehow a tyrannous sense of a superincumbent oppression

      Still, wherever I go, accompanies ever, and makes me

      Feel like a tree (shall I say?) buried under a ruin of brickwork.

      Rome, believe me, my friend, is like its own Monte Testaceo,

      Merely a marvellous mass of broken and castaway wine-pots.

      Ye gods! what do I want with this rubbish of ages departed,

      Things that Nature abhors, the experiments that she has failed in?

      What do I find in the Forum?  An archway and two or three pillars.

      Well, but St. Peter's?  Alas, Bernini has filled it with sculpture!

      No one can cavil, I grant, at the size of the great Coliseum.

      Doubtless the notion of grand and capacious and massive amusement,

      This the old Romans had; but tell me, is this an idea?

      Yet of solidity much, but of splendour little is extant:

      'Brickwork I found thee, and marble I left thee!' their Emperor vaunted;

      'Marble I thought thee, and brickwork I find thee!' the Tourist may answer.

      III. Georgina Trevellyn to Louisa ——.

      At last, dearest Louisa, I take up my pen to address you.

      Here we are, you see, with the seven-and-seventy boxes,

      Courier, Papa and Mamma, the children, and Mary and Susan:

      Here we all are at Rome, and delighted of course with St. Peter's,

      And very pleasantly lodged in the famous Piazza di Spagna.

      Rome is a wonderful place, but Mary shall tell you about it;

      Not very gay, however; the English are mostly at Naples;

      There are the A.'s, we hear, and most of the W. party.

        George, however, is come; did I tell you about his mustachios?

      Dear, I must really stop, for the carriage, they tell me, is waiting;

      Mary will finish; and Susan is writing, they say, to Sophia.

      Adieu, dearest Louise,—evermore your faithful Georgina.

      Who can a Mr. Claude be

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