In 1841, an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, took a respectable second-class degree after working consistently hard, and walked fifty miles to tell his old headmaster “I have failed.” Three years later, the headmaster’s son, also at Balliol, obtained a second-class degree after idling much of his time away and, far from being ashamed of himself or embarrassed for his father, did not seem to care much about it. The actors in this drama, of course, are Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61), Matthew Arnold (1822–88), and Arnold’s father, Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby School (1795–1842). Clough, who had been brought in to give extra coaching to his boyhood friend and fellow pupil, had predicted the result. “A worthy addition to our select band,” he concluded, with an attempt at bravado which should not deceive us. His penitential pilgrimage to Rugby says everything about the difference between him and Matthew Arnold. The Doctor never expected distinction from his son, but he regarded Clough as his star pupil, and the admiration was mutual. By contrast, when Arnold read the Poems and Prose Remains published posthumously by Clough’s widow, Blanche, in 1869, he was disconcerted by the “overtaxed religiousness” caused by Clough’s hero-worship of Dr. Arnold, even suggesting that Clough must have had “a loose screw.”

That last point apart, Clough was well aware of the situation, as we see from the prose epilogue to his uncompleted masterpiece from the 1850s, Dipsychus and the Spirit. In a conversation between an uncle