There is a passion and intensity of emotion in all this which raises it above the level of the ordinary schoolboy friendship, even when we have allowed for the fact that this passage was written during the poet’s last years, and is therefore perhaps idealised. Still, in spite of the warmth of emotion, this idyll would not of itself, and taken apart from all corroborative evidence, show the poet’s fundamental inversion if it were not for the fact that Shelley cherished the memory of it in manhood. Many boys have a similar romance at that age, or a little later, but it is hardly remembered with emotion except by those who are in some degree inverted.
The bosom friend of Shelley’s early manhood was Thomas Hogg, for whom he had an extraordinary affection. During their short career at Oxford, the two inseparables spent almost all their time together. Every day they either breakfasted or lunched together, went for a country ramble, or sat in Shelley’s room, reading, or re-modelling the universe. When Shelley was expelled, Hogg voluntarily put himself in the same position, and the pair went to live together in London. Their parents separated them, but they maintained an intimate correspondence.
After Shelley’s marriage with Harriet, Hogg joined the couple at Edinburgh, and then took them to his house at York. Here he apparently began to pay unwelcome attentions to Harriet, who informed her husband. Shelley appears not to have expressed the normal feelings of jealousy, and freely forgave Hogg; but he was disappointed to find that his idol, Hogg, had feet of clay. Shelley took Harriet away from York, and went to Keswick. From here he wrote several letters to his friend, in which we find such passages as these: “But pray write often; your last letter I have read as I would read your soul.” “If I thought we were to be long parted I should be wretchedly miserable—half-mad!” “I never doubted you—you, the brother of my soul.” “I do not know that absence will certainly cure love; but this I know, that it fearfully augments the intensity of friendship.”
Later on Shelley renewed his intimacy with Hogg, though never on the old terms of ardent affection. It has been suggested that he was mistaken in his suspicions, and that Hogg was really quite innocent. This view is quite tenable, since the evidence is very slender, and delusions of jealousy often accompany delusions of persecution; which latter Shelley certainly suffered from.
While at Keswick he wrote several long letters to Miss Elizabeth Hitchener, whom for a few months he regarded as his dearest friend. In these letters he tells her of Hogg’s crime, of his confession, and of his demands to be allowed again to live with the couple. In one letter Shelley states: “I do not love him” (dated November 26, 1811). In December, however, he writes to Hogg: “Think not that I am otherwise than your friend, a friend to you now more fervent, more devoted than ever, for misery endears us to those whom we love. You are, you shall be my bosom friend.”[17]
Altogether this episode is complicated and confusing. The evidence against Hogg is confined to statements made by Shelley, in letters to Miss Hitchener, and these statements do not harmonise with Shelley’s extravagant expressions of affection for Hogg. The fact is that he both loved Hogg intensely and suspected him. For my own part, I think that Hogg was probably quite innocent of any great indiscretion, and that Shelley simply magnified some mild familiarity out of all proportion. That Shelley was subject to such mental exaggerations is well known, and the words which he imputed to the imaginary assassin at Tanyrallt: “By God, I will be revenged. I will murder your wife and ravish your sister,” sound very much like a stronger development of the idea that someone was making overtures to Harriet. As to his definite statements on the subject, they cannot weigh very heavily, as his statements were often only subjectively true. In addition, there are two stanzas in The Revolt of Islam which may refer to Hogg, and which, in that case, would indicate that Shelley did finally admit that he was mistaken.
In canto 2, stanza xviii:
And that this friend was false, may now be said
Calmly—that he, like other men, could weep
Tears which are lies, and could betray and spread
Snares for that guileless heart which for his own had bled.
But in canto 5, stanza v, the friends are reconciled again:
Then suddenly I knew it was the youth,
In whom its earliest hopes my spirit found;
But envious tongues had stained his spotless truth,
And thoughtless pride his love in silence bound,
And shame and sorrow mine in toils had wound,
While he was innocent and I deluded.