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“Dover Beach” and “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Browsing from back to front through a Victorian anthology, I paused recently over two old favorites: first Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach,” and then Clough's “Say not the struggle nought availeth.” It occurred to me that there must be a direct relation between the two poems. Clough's lines, affirmative and challenging, sounded like a response to the melancholy poem by his friend. Examining the texts more closely, I found Clough's argument and imagery to be so relevant to Arnold's that I could hardly think of the parallel as fortuitous. On considering the probable dates of composition, I discovered no evidence against the theory that “Say not” may have been Clough's reply to “Dover Beach.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951
References
Note 1 in page 919 An interpretation of this sort is developed at length in Preface to Poetry, by C. W. Cooper, in consultation with John Holmes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), pp. 177–181.
Note 2 in page 921 C. . Tinker and H. F. Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1940), pp. 173–174.
Note 3 in page 921 A. L. P. Norrington, “‘Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth’,” Essays Mainly on the Nineteenth Century Presented to Sir Humphrey Mil ford (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948), p. 33. For this reference, and for several other suggestions, I am indebted to President Lowry.
Note 4 in page 922 Very little can be inferred from the punctuation of Clough's MSS. There is not enough of it. But the omission of a stop at the end of line 12 in all but one of the extant MSS. of “Say not,” together with the use of the conjunction “And” at the start of line 13, may perhaps be taken as supporting the opinion that stanzas 3 and 4 are to be read as a single sentence, in reply to Arnold's account of the tide ebbing by night.
Note 5 in page 922 Norrington (see n. 3), p. 35.
Note 6 in page 922 Parts of this letter were printed in Clough's Prose Remains (London: Macmillan, 1888), pp. 169–170; but “Say not” was omitted. For the opportunity to read the letters from Clough to the younger Thomas Arnold, I am most grateful to the latter's granddaughter, Miss Dorothy M. Ward, and to her nephew, C. Humphry Trevelyan. Miss Ward was authorized by Miss B. A. Clough to permit reference to the correspondence. This MS. of “Say not” should be added to the list of five described by Norrington.
Note 7 in page 922 Norrington, pp. 31–32, 34, 38. I find his arguments very weighty, but not necessarily conclusive.
Note 8 in page 922 See their letter to the TLS, 10 Oct. 1935, p. 631, and Poetry of Arnold, p. 173.
Note 9 in page 923 Two of the published suggestions bearing on the date of “Dover Beach” require that little weight, if any, be given to the chronology of Arnold's work on Empedocles. First, it has been suggested that the tidal imagery may owe something to one of Sainte-Beuve's Pensées: see C. C. Clark, “A Possible Source of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach,” MLN, xvii (1902), 242–243; Iris Sells, Matthew Arnold and France (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935), pp. 223–224; and Arnold Whitridge, “Matthew Arnold and Sainte-Beuve,” PMLA, liii (1938), 307–308. This would put the completion of “Dover Beach” after the publication of Sainte-Beuve's Derniers Portraits Littéraires, announced in the Bibliographie de la France for 14 Feb. 1852: see Jean Bonnerot, Bibliographie de l'Œuvre de Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Giraud-Bodin, 1937), i, 329. Second, it has been suggested that “Dover Beach” reworks imagery first used by Arnold in the “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”: see Louis Bonnerot, Matthew Arnold (Paris: Didier, 1947), pp. 369–372. This would put “Dover Beach” some months after Arnold's visit to the monastery on 7 Sept. 1851—and maybe, as Bonnerot suggests, as late as 1855, when the “Stanzas” were published.
Note 10 in page 923 Tinker and Lowry, Poetry of Arnold, p. 287.
Note 11 in page 923 On 29 Sept. 1848 Arnold informed Clough that he was planning to return from the Continent by way of Boulogne. Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. H. F. Lowry (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932), p. 91.
Note 12 in page 923 Ibid., p. 111.
Note 13 in page 923 “Obermann,” line 83. Arnold inserted 2 lines of this poem in his letter of 23 Sept. 1849 to Clough; and his note on the stanza in which Wordsworth is first mentioned states that it was written in Nov. 1849.
Note 14 in page 923 “Consolation,” lines 4–5, This poem was “Written during the siege of Rome by the French” (1849).
Note 15 in page 924 Cf. Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: Norton, 1939), pp. 126–127. I am indebted to Professor Trilling for a number of valuable comments.
Note 16 in page 924 See Alan Harris, “Matthew Arnold: ‘The Unknown Years,‘” Nineteenth Century, cxm (1933), 508-509. In The Buried Self (London: Peter Davies, 1949), Isobel Macdonald suggests that Mrs. Arnold, though not the “love” of the concluding lines of “Dover Beach,” was the person addressed in line 6: “Come to the window.” She fixes the composition of the first 28 lines of the poem on 1 Sept. 1851, at the start of the Arnold's deferred honeymoon trip to the Continent. But I find nothing in the opening lines to enforce a belief that the invitation was addressed to anyone in particular.
Note 17 in page 924 There is a tantalizing passage in Arnold's letter of 31 Jan. 1871 to his mother: “I am troubled at having nothing of Clough's except his name in one or two books. The one thing I had, a poem written in a letter, was asked for that it might be published, and has never been returned to me,” Letters, ed, G. W. E. Russell (London: Macmillan, 1895), ii, 55.
Note 18 in page 924 “Ibid., i, 117.
Note 19 in page 925 Letters to Clough, p. 129. Cf. the letter of 1847 in which Arnold told Clough of “all the exacerbation produced by your apostrophes to duty” (p. 63).
Note 20 in page 925 It has been suggested that “Dover Beach” was influenced by The Bolhie. See Paul Turner, “Dover Beach and The Bolhie of Tqber-na-Vuolich,” English Studies, xxviii (1947), 173–178, and . B. Trawick, “The Sea of Faith and the Battle by Night in Dover Beach,” PMLA, LXV (1950), 1282–83. This suggestion and mine do not exclude each other.
Note 21 in page 925 This letter was reprinted in full by John Carter, “Clough to Churchill,” Publishers' Weekly, 2 Aug. 1941, pp. 309–311. Cf. Clough's criticism of Arnold's poems in the North Amer. Rev. (1853)—especially the suggestion that, “upon the whole, for the present age, the lessons of reflectiveness and the maxims of caution do not appear to be more needful or more appropriate than exhortations to steady courage and calls to action” (Prose Remains, p. 372).
Note 22 in page 925 As Emery Neff suggests, Arnold may be said to have written his own comments on “Dover Beach” in such poems as “Courage” and “The Last Word.”