What more can readers require in the way of evidence that, in respect to the morbid notion which caused his transient quarrel with Hogg, Shelley was the victim of monstrous hallucination? Those who require more evidence on this point, are persons to whom The Real Shelley will never be known.
In arguing this case, I have striven to argue evenly on both sides, as though I were retained by both plaintiff and defendant to discover the truth. I have kept cautiously within my evidences. Possibly, evidences touching the matter have not come under my notice. But I do not think I have missed any writing likely to affect my arguments or conclusions materially. All reliable information respecting the affair must come to us in some way or other from Shelley, Harriett, or Hogg. Any additional statement from Shelley to Hogg’s disadvantage would be the mere statement of a sufferer from delusion. Possibly, papers exist, in which Harriett, whilst stating precisely that Hogg attempted to seduce her, gives minute particulars of the alleged attempt. Let us assume that, in her correspondence with Miss Hitchener, and other persons, she was thus communicative, and that Field Place is in a position to produce a bundle of letters, in each of which she accuses Hogg of trying to seduce her, and describes minutely the means by which he tried to achieve his purpose. Such letters, however numerous and precise, would be the mere statements, in chief, of a witness, whom it is impossible to cross-examine,—a witness whose veracity is not unimpeachable; a witness who has been freely charged by Shelleyan apologists with untruth, in respect to several of her numerous statements to her husband’s discredit; a witness, moreover, who, to use Mr. William Rossetti’s words, was, in her seventeenth year, philosophized by Shelley himself out of the ordinary standard of feminine propriety. It is no uncommon thing for a young woman to imagine an attempt has been made on her honour, when no such attempt has been made. Women have been known to imagine themselves the victims of seduction when no one has seduced them. A case occurred no long while since in one of our law courts, where evidence of a woman’s criminal intercourse with her alleged seducer was afforded by notes, made in her own hand-writing, in her private diary, and yet it was proved conclusively that her own written confessions of guilt were romantic and purely imaginative records of incidents that had never really taken place. Some women have a curious aptitude for suspecting men of wishing to seduce them; and it would not be unfair to suggest that the sixteen-years-old school-girl, to whose thoughts Shelley had given an unwholesome direction, was capable of entertaining such a suspicion groundlessly. Moreover, the discovery of such letters should neither occasion surprise, nor dispose the judicial reader to regard them as conclusively evidential of Hogg’s guilt; because, if she wrote about the matter at all in her letters, the girl who, from terror or motives of policy, or from imaginative influences, certainly acquiesced in the charge against Hogg, even if she did not deliberately conspire with her sister to trump it up, would naturally write in accordance with the accusation, to which she was a party.
How about Hogg,—the third of the sources of information? He denied the charge. His way of dealing with the Keswick letters was a denial of the charge,—as clear, precise, and strenuous a denial as he could give to the accusation, respecting which he could not, for Shelley’s honour’s sake, speak precisely to the whole world. He denied the charge again by the way in which he took to himself the dedicatory note to the Essay on Friendship. He could not have denied the charge more precisely to the coteries, and every individual cognizant of the vile slander, without exhibiting the poet to the whole world’s derision.
What if evidence should even yet be produced that Hogg actually made the attempt? For argument’s sake, let us conceive what is in the highest degree improbable, and suppose that letters, written by Hogg himself to Shelley and Harriett, are, even now, put before the world by Field Place, to the conclusive demonstration of the writer’s guilt,—letters placing it beyond question that he really made the attempt. What then? The result would comprise the absolute destruction of Shelley’s right to be rated with men of honour, or even with men of common decency. Such letters would prove that, within a few days of an attempt on his wife’s virtue, and in sure cognizance of the attempt and the maker of it, Shelley wrote in terms of passionate affectionateness to the culprit. They would prove that, knowing Hogg had, only a few weeks since, tried to debauch his bride, Shelley wrote to him, ‘You are my bosom friend.’ They would prove that in less than fourteen months from the attempt, Shelley survived his faint annoyance at the affair so completely as to be capable of throwing himself into Hogg’s arms, saying to him, ‘Let us think no more of that unlucky business,’ and forthwith inviting him to renew his intimacy with the girl, whom he had tried to seduce. What is the only construction to be put on the conduct of the husband, who brings again into familiar intercourse with his wife the very man whom he knows to have recently tried to seduce her? It cannot be urged that Shelley acted thus on sufficient proof that Hogg was an altered man; for there had been no intercourse between them, by letter or otherwise, since Shelley left Keswick. Yet more,—such evidence of Hogg’s guilt would prove that, in introducing him to Mary Godwin, Shelley brought into close intimacy with his second spouse, the man whom he knew to have tried to seduce his first wife within a few weeks of her wedding. Such evidence would, of course, cover Hogg with dark disgrace. But it would, at the same time, cover Shelley with blackest infamy. The Shelleyan enthusiasts would have been less eager to prove Hogg guilty of the attempt, had not animosity against Hogg blinded them to what would ensue to Shelley’s reputation, should they succeed in proving the charge.
END OF VOL. I.
LONDON:
Printed by Strangeways & Sons, Tower Street, Upper St. Martin’s Lane.
Footnotes:
[1] This extract from Charles Grove’s letter is taken from the printed copy of the epistle in Hogg’s second volume; and the reader should give his attention to the words between brackets which are no part of the letter, but one of the explanatory notes, which the biographer indiscreetly put into the body of his transcripts of original documents, instead of printing them as foot-notes. It was his rule to bracket such editorial notes, and insert his initials after the second bracket. But the careless scribe, and still more careless proof-corrector, sometimes forgot to insert his initials, sometimes forgetting also to insert the brackets. Hence the so-called ‘interpolations’ of original evidences, for which he has been unfairly reproached by his detractors.
[2] The right name of this seat seems to have been Hill Place. In the Beauties of England and Wales (1813), Sussex, p. 97, it is written, ‘In the same direction on the right of the road, is an old seat called Hill Place, formerly the property of the late Viscountess Irwin, but now belonging to the Duke of Norfolk.’ ‘Lady Irwen’s Hill Place’ would be naturally abbreviated after her death into ‘Irwen’s Hill,’ which again would be corrupted into ‘Irving’s Hill,’ the familiar designation of the place in Shelley’s boyhood.