But what was Lady Shelley about, when she—drawing her information from ‘authentic sources,’ and proclaiming the superiority of her book to all Shelleyan biographies from ‘unauthentic sources’—allowed the three lines of Mr. Packe’s letter, and other equally faulty lines of it, to go before the public as sure and trustworthy information? If biographies from ‘authentic sources’ are made up in this fashion, readers may with reason come to prefer biographies ‘from unauthentic sources.’ As Lady Shelley has forced her literary method and address into contrast with those of the man of letters, whom she discharged with strange discourtesy, she must not resent the assurance that the comparison she has provoked is not to Mr. Hogg’s disadvantage.
In the sufficient evidences respecting Shelley at Eton, critical readers make the acquaintance of two very different Shelleys:—the girlish Shelley (of Mr. Walter Halliday’s letter) who ‘was not made to endure the rough and boisterous pastime at Eton,’ never ‘joined in the usual sports of the boys, and, what is remarkable, never went out in a boat on the river,’ but preferred to ramble about Clewer, Frogmore, and Stoke Park, by himself, or with a single companion of congenial gentleness; and the combative Shelley, whose unruliness and contumacious behaviour to his masters gained for him the office and title of ‘The Atheist’ of the school. Differing little from the moping and discontented lad of his last year at Sion House, the girlish Etonian exhibits several points of resemblance to Byron in the earlier part of his unhappy time at Harrow; and in like manner when he has risen to be the arch-rebel of the school, the saucy and combative Etonian reminds one of the combative Byron, leading the riotous Harrovians, and rising with atheistical impudence against Dr. Butler’s authority.
In one respect Shelley entered Eton under circumstances far more advantageous than those that caused Byron to hate his public school in the opening terms of his connexion with it. Unlike Byron, who went to Harrow, so badly prepared for its studies, that, had it not been for Dr. Drury’s sympathetic consideration, he would have been put (to his poignant humiliation) in a form of quite little boys, much younger than himself, Shelley went to his public school well grounded in Latin and Greek. ‘He had,’ says Medwin, ‘been so well grounded in the classics, that it required little labour for him to get up his daily lessons.’ Medwin’s testimony on this point is sustained by the evidence of Messrs. Packe and Halliday, two of the poet’s contemporaries at Eton.
During his stay at the public school, Shelley seems to have resided successively at two different houses. Getting his information from old Etonians, who had known the author of Laon and Cythna at Eton, Mr. Middleton certifies that the future poet boarded, in 1807, at the house of Mr. Hexter, the writing-master, ‘one of those extra masters, some of whom resided at the College, and, holding an amphibious rank between the tutor and the dame, were allowed to take boarders.’ Subsequently he is found in the house of Mr. Bethell, the tutor whom Mr. Packe (possibly with no more justice than generosity) described half-a-century later as ‘one of the dullest men in the establishment.’ What Mr. Packe’s qualifications were for passing judgment in this style on one of his former preceptors does not appear; but the solitary epistle, which gives him a place in these pages, would not warrant a confident opinion that brightness was Mr. Packe’s distinguishing characteristic. Fortunately, for school-masters, evidence given to their discredit by former pupils is never regarded as evidence of the highest quality by persons of discretion and judicial fairness. Possibly Mr. Packe was as wrong about Mr. Bethell’s intellect, as he was about the date of the publication of Zastrozzi. But an idle word to the defamation of the Eton tutor, with whom Shelley came into conflict, was no word for Lady Shelley to withhold from the world. It has long been the practice of the Shelleyan enthusiasts to think and speak the worst of every one with whom the poet had a difference,—to blacken every reputation that could be suspected of lowering the lustre of the poet, who under auspicious circumstances ‘might have been “the Saviour of the World.”’
That Shelley, on the girlish side of his nature, was no boy ‘to take kindly to fagging,’ and on the masculine side of his nature was precisely the boy to detest a system under which he might be licked with a bamboo or a leather strap for hard-boiling an egg which he had been told to boil lightly, no one is likely to question. But though it is certain he disliked being made to fag, and more than probable that he showed this dislike in ways to be resented, not only by the proprietors of fags, but also by the most infantile of Etonian conservatives, readers are under no obligation to accept for truth all the fine and melodramatic accounts of the efforts made, and sufferings endured by the poet, in order to put an end to so revolting a system of domestic tyranny.
Getting her fanciful notions of the matter from her husband’s lips, Mrs. Shelley would have us believe that repugnance to fagging was the offence which brought him so often to the block, and rendered him alike unpopular with masters and boys. It is even averred that to put down fagging he organized a conspiracy of the junior Etonians against the barbarous practice. That no such conspiracy was begotten and fostered by Shelley is certain; for the old Etonians, of whom Medwin and Middleton certainly (Peacock and Hogg almost certainly) made inquiries about the matter, had never heard anything of a movement which could not have failed to come to their knowledge, had it ever been an incident of scholastic politics in their time. The truth underlying these fictions is that Shelley, like most junior boys, conceived a hatred of ‘fagging,’ suffered much from it, and having, unlike most junior boys, the rashness to declare the hatred, paid the penalty of his rashness, in being cuffed, licked, and silenced in various painful and exasperating ways. This seems to be the whole of the case, which he magnified in later time into a far greater affair. To Peacock, he used to speak of the cruelties practised upon him by senior boys at Eton, with a show of abhorrence only surpassed by his display of indignation and disgust at the monstrous barbarities done him by Lord Chancellor Eldon. In still later time he doubtless spoke even more passionately to his wife of the fires of Etonian persecution. Men sometimes say strange things to their wives; and, in certain moods, wives are even quicker to believe the strange things, than in other moods to suspect untruth in the commonplace things told them by their lords. After brooding for twelve years or more over the sorrows and wrongs he endured at Eton, the poet believed all he imagined about them.
Though Shelley suffered no little at Eton from ‘fagging,’ he suffered far more from the particular bullying that flourishes under the system he detested, quite as much as in schools where fags are unknown, and senior boys have no especial and peculiar slaves. In behalf of ‘fagging’ it is justly urged that if the master licks his ‘fag,’ he is quick on the score of dignity and ownership to protect him from maltreatment by other senior boys;—that if the ‘fag’ is bullied by his proper lord, he is secured by ‘the system’ from being bullied by a score of tyrants. None the less true is it that, though the system saves a junior boy from the tyranny of several tyrants acting individually and separately, it is powerless to guard him from the oppression of many tyrants acting conjointly and in mass. Subject to the certain tyranny (more or less severe and irritating) of a single despot, the fag is also liable to the uncertain tyranny of the playground (i.e., of the multitude of his schoolmates, acting in unison), a tyranny which his peculiar owner can do little or nothing to moderate. In his earlier time at Eton, Shelley suffered more than most boys of his age from the tyranny of the playground.
Boys are quick to discover the peculiarities of their companions, and no less quick to discover something offensive in those peculiarities. Having discovered the offensiveness, they conceive themselves morally entitled—and, indeed, by honour bound—to chastise the individual who by force of his disagreeable peculiarities offends them. Of all peculiarities likely to offend a multitude of schoolboys and set them at war with a junior boy, none is more certain to give offence than a ‘general queerness,’ allied with unsociability. The shy, nervous, moping boy from Field Place had not been a week at Eton before he was found guilty of ‘general queerness.’ He had not been there a month before he was found guilty of unsociability. These facts having been found against the boy who held aloof from other boys, the playground began to ridicule him, hoot at him, mob him. Under these provocations the nervous and excitable boy vented his rage with shrill screams of fury. Obviously, the boy who responded in this violent style was a boy worth the trouble of ‘baiting.’ It was good fun to hem him in, mimic his cries of rage, point derisive fingers at him, and burst into clamorous laughter, when he uttered a more than ordinarily shrill shriek of rage and anguish. When he clenched his fist, and rushed at the nearest of his tormentors with the intention of striking him, the playground fled before him—not in real terror, as Lady Shelley imagines—but with a mere show of fright simulated for his further annoyance, the promotion of general hilarity, and the maintenance of ‘sport.’
It was the practice of Etonians, in Shelley’s earlier time, to assemble on dark winter evenings under the cloisters, and amuse themselves in this droll fashion. The name of a particular boy (one known probably to be in the rear of the multitude coming from the playing-grounds) was shouted aloud, as though he were needed for some urgent business. The cry having been thus raised, it grew louder and louder from the increasing energy and growing number of the voices. On the appearance of the boy owning the name, the clamour was redoubled. Everyone drew to one side or the other to make a way for him. It was useless for him to proclaim his presence and beg the shouters to spare their lungs. No words of his utterance could be heard in the uproar. Could they have been heard, any words from him would only stimulate the shouters to shout yet louder. There was no course open to him but to walk straight on through two lines of excited faces to the point, where the demand for his presence had originated. On coming to that point he found (if he did not know it before) that nobody wanted him, and was received with peals of laughter. In its origin the game was doubtless a lively, piquant, and comparatively inoffensive practical joke at the expense of a lad, who, imagining himself called for some serious cause, hastened at full speed to discover he had been summoned for nothing. But it is in the nature of practical jokes to degenerate into cruel jokes, however amiable they may have been in the first instance. As soon as this particular joke had lost its newness, the boy thus shouted for knew that he was being made a fool of, felt himself insulted, grew angry; his anger being further stimulated by some new variation of the game of torture.
It having been discovered that Shelley suffered keenly from the ridicule of the playing-fields, he was selected evening after evening for this particular ‘baiting.’ Evening after evening the cry was raised of ‘Shelley, Shelley, Shelley!’ As he ran the gauntlet of derisive faces and voices, fingers were pointed at him. Not seldom he came in for rougher usage. If he was carrying books under his arm, a blow from behind scattered them on the ground. His clothes were pulled and torn. More than once a muddy football, deriving its impetus from a well-planted kick, came with the force of a spent shot down the narrow alley of deriders, caught him in his shirt-front, and bounding upwards, made his face as dirty as his frill. Mr. Middleton was assured by an eye-witness of these scenes that the fury, to which Shelley was goaded by his tormentors, ‘made his eyes flash like a tiger’s, his cheeks grow pale as death, his limbs quiver, and his hair stand on end.’ It is probable that the boy’s shrill screeches of rage, wild gesticulations, and frantic appearance, whilst he was thus baited and ridiculed by the whole school, first suggested to his persecutors that ‘mad’ was the fittest epithet to put before his surname. Anyhow, he was known in the school as ‘Mad Shelley,’ both before and after he had earned the less opprobrious designation of ‘The Atheist.’