Lyric Moments and the Historicity of the Verse Novel: Amours de Voyage

Just beyond the edge of the failed romance plot of Arthur Hugh Clough's verse novel, Amours de Voyage (1849; 1858), lies a persistent thematic preoccupation with the accretion of history. Near the end of the poem's first canto, Claude, an Oxford-educated skeptic, finds himself reflecting on the twin figures of Castor and Pollux, the colossal pair of horse tamers who flank the Fontana dei Dioscuri in Rome. The fountain is a blend of salvaged antiquities and copies of historical sculptures that stand beneath a forty-eight-foot-high obelisk adorned with a cross. As in the case of many Roman sites, the cross indicates the effort of papal authorities to mark the spiritual dominance of the Christian God over the Pagan statues below. Yet, for Claude, this peculiar act of cultural appropriation falls short. Writing to his friend Eustace back in London, Claude addresses the statues in a moment of lyric contemplation:

Ye, too, marvellous Twain, that erect on the Monte CavalloStand by your rearing steeds in the grace of your motionless movement,Stand with your upstretched arms and tranquil regardant faces,Stand as instinct with life in the might of immutable manhood,—O ye mighty and strange, ye ancient divine ones of Hellas,Are ye Christian too?¹

The poetic force of this passage derives in part from its use of anaphoras. While anaphoric repetition may highlight conviction, its rhythms can also provide a means to generate and interrogate ambiguity. In this instance, Claude's repetition of "Stand" in three successive lines calls attention to the radical alterity of classical myth by effectively bringing the motion of the poem to a halt. Paralleling the "motionless movement" of the statues themselves, Claude's use of anaphora arrests the reader's progression while nevertheless moving onward in textual space, highlighting the slow and ongoing transformation of objects that initially appear static.

From this moment of temporal arrest, the second half of this sixteen-line epistle extends the radical alterity of Castor and Pollux to other statues that the Catholic Church has appropriated. Addressing the figures of "Juno and Ceres, Minerva, Apollo, the Muses and Bacchus" (I: 196) that "encircle the walls of the stately Vatican chambers" (I: 195), Claude expands upon his inquiry through a similar arrangement of anaphora and caesura, asking:

Ye unto whom far and near come posting the Christian pilgrims,Ye that are ranged in the halls of the mystic Christian pontiff,Are ye also baptized? are ye of the Kingdom of Heaven?Utter, O some one, the word that shall reconcile Ancient and Modern!Am I to turn me for this unto thee, great Chapel of Sixtus?

(I: 197–201)

Whereas the previous use of "Stand" incorporates repetition to arrest the listener in time, here anaphora calls attention to the display of the statues in relation to their audience and curator—that is, both the throngs of "Christian pilgrims" who come to study them and the "mystic Christian pontiff" whose authority they should solidify. The use of not one but two questions in the caesuric break that follows suggests that this process is incomplete, an idea that is further extended in the subsequent lines' cry for "the word that shall reconcile Ancient and Modern!" In the poem's final line, Claude's reference to the Chapel of Sixtus, or Sistine Chapel—one of the signature accomplishments of the Italian Renaissance—alludes to the possibility of such a fusion. Yet, by ending the poem in the form of a question, he hints at his own doubt in the Sistine Chapel's ability to extend that fusion into the present.

In this sense, Claude's writing can be said to display a profoundly historicist suspicion of the symbolic logic by which the Catholic Church has sought to integrate Roman history and culture into its identity. Rather than accept the power that the Church claims over the art and architecture of ancient Rome through these symbolic "conversions," Claude's lyric meditations call attention to the very assertion of that power as a product of history that...