The Real Shelley. New Views of the Poet's Life. Vol. 1 (of 2)

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

Surely as he was speaking of the whole period, covering his own residence as well as Shelley’s residence (our residence is the biographer’s expression), Hogg was not without justification in speaking of an event, that had preceded his own entrance into residence by only seven weeks and one day, as a recent occurrence. Whilst censuring Hogg for errors of fact, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy persists in saying that Shelley did not go to Oxford, did not enter the University till the end of October, 1810, though he might easily have ascertained that the young poet went to Oxford, entered the University, put his name on the roll of University College, and as a member of the University visited the Bodleian in the preceding April, six months earlier than the time at which Shelley’s Early Life represents him to have joined the University. Mr. MacCarthy greatly overstates the case in declaring Hogg as inaccurate as Medwin. Mr. MacCarthy himself (though curiously inaccurate), is nothing like so inaccurate as Medwin. And Hogg (though he often trips and sometimes blunders seriously) is upon the whole nothing like so inaccurate as Mr. MacCarthy. There is no need to weary readers with a complete list of Mr. MacCarthy’s exhibitions of inexactness. It is enough to have shown that if Hogg is at times faulty, his censor is by no means faultless.

It is not surprising that Hogg’s memoirs of his old college friend are wanting in accuracy. Some nine years after the poet’s death, some twenty years after his expulsion from University College, in consequence of the growing admiration of his writings, the increasing interest in his story, and the general disposition of the literary coteries to regard his failings charitably, pressure was put on Hogg to recall remote circumstances, and tell the world what he could remember of his friend at Oxford in the time of their closest intimacy. The result was that the busy lawyer in 1832 contributed the Papers on Shelley at Oxford to the New Monthly Magazine, at that time edited by Mr. Edward Lytton Bulwer, afterwards Lord Lytton. It was in the nature of things that the Papers, written after so long an interval of time, not from notes made at the time of each recorded incident, but from recollection, assisted by a few letters, should be much less than precisely accurate in all their numerous details. To impart spirit to these reminiscences, to endow them with the charm of the poet’s personality, the writer every now and then called imagination to the aid of his memory. For instance, to enable readers to realize the disorderly appearance of the poet’s college-room, and the confusion of its multifarious contents, the author of the Papers, without exceeding the license of a descriptive illustrator, threw into the schedule of effects certain articles of furniture, scientific apparatus, and personal apparel, which he would no doubt have declined to declare in an affidavit to have been items of the medley. It is obvious that such a picture was in some degree an imaginative sketch, in respect its details. Yet Hogg’s detractor has dealt with it as though it were an auctioneer’s catalogue of lots. In judging the picture, the question to be asked is, whether the piece of descriptive writing gives the general appearance of the room, as Hogg remembered it more than twenty years afterwards. The very style of the writing is a frank announcement that the words must be trusted only for their general effect.

In like manner the conversations, which Mr. MacCarthy derides as ‘invented conversations,’ were of course given as nothing more than exhibitions of certain matters, and the kind of matters on which he remembered himself to have talked with the poet, and of the way in which they talked together to the best of his recollection after a lapse of more than twenty years. To the lawyer, familiar with questions of evidence, it never occurred that ‘the conversations’ would be read in any other way. To the humourist (and that Hogg was a racy humourist is admitted even by his enemies) the bare imagination that any supremely matter-of-fact mortal would read ‘the conversations,’ as one peruses a short-hand reporter’s notes of a legal cross-examination, would have been provocative of vehement laughter. The questions for the critic to ask about these conversations are, Do they faithfully exhibit the kind of subjects on which the two friends chatted?—the ways in which the talk flowed?—the sentiments and manner of the young poet? Are they, in fact, faithful exhibitions of what Hogg remembered, or believed himself to remember, after a lapse of more than twenty years, of the talk he and Shelley had with one another when they were undergraduates? No impartial and fairly intelligent reader of the Papers will hesitate to answer these questions in the affirmative.

However defective, the Papers on Shelley at Oxford were greatly beneficial to the reputation of the poet, whose writings had found few readers outside the literary coteries during his life, whose name was still associated in the minds of the majority of educated Englishmen with atheism, conjugal faithlessness, and dangerous politics, rather than with the highest poetry. Written lightly and circulated widely, the sketches, dealing only with the Oxonian Shelley, created an impression that the undergraduate had been treated harshly by the authorities of his college, and left readers in a mood to discover that he had been too severely punished for the indiscretions of later stages of his career. Henceforth, instead of being confined to the coteries, the desire for larger knowledge of the poet’s personal story found a voice in general society.

It was felt that the Papers should be followed up and superseded by a complete biography. By turns, and repeatedly, several of the persons, who had known him most intimately, were urged to produce a worthy record of so remarkable a poet. Mrs. Shelley, Peacock, Leigh Hunt, and Hogg, were all entreated to write the sufficient memoir. William Godwin’s daughter would have written the poet’s Life had not old Sir Timothy Shelley informed her that, if she ventured to publish anything in the way of biography about his family, she must go her way without the income he provided for her own and her child’s maintenance. Peacock declined to write the Life because he had a strong opinion that it would be impossible to tell the story honestly, without setting forth matters that, for the poet’s sake, had better be unrecorded. Leigh Hunt (eventually the author of a flimsy and unsatisfactory memoir of the poet whose pocket had yielded him so many guineas) was silent from the fear of provoking dangerous resentments.

‘The book,’ he remarked, in reference to Middleton’s Shelley and his Writings, in a letter dated to Edmund Ollier, 2nd February, 1858, ‘is a proof of what I have always said when applied to to write the Life myself, viz., that it would be impossible to give a complete account of Shelley and his connexions till the latter were all dead and gone; even if it was possible then for any person to be so thoroughly well informed or impartial as to do it, because facts would have to be so coloured as to misrepresent both living and dead, some one way and some another; or the living would be forced either to enter into the most unseemly and worse than useless wars with one another, or to maintain silences the most difficult and distressing to keep out of delicacy, and the most self-condemning in appearance with some, and in reality with others.’

Whilst William Godwin’s daughter was silent from pecuniary prudence, Leigh Hunt silent from fear of the consequence, and Peacock silent because he thought the book (which, if written, should be written honestly) had better not be written at all, Hogg was reluctant to produce the memoir, which the success of the Papers had caused most people to think should come from his pen. No one can charge him with intruding himself prematurely, or without invitation, into the chair, out of which he was thrust so discourteously by the very persons who had begged him to take it. The man of imperturbable temper and adamantine patience (as he is styled by Peacock) was not pricked into unauthorized action by the amateur biographers, who, sometimes without acknowledgment, and always without permission, pillaged his Papers. Medwin’s Life appeared in 1847; and smiling at the littérateur’s blunders, the man of imperturbable temper held his pen. He remained the man of adamantine patience, though rumours came to him that Mr. Middleton was at work on a Life of the poet, whom he had never known at all; that Trelawny was threatening to produce a book of gossip about the poet, whom he had known for only six months; and that the works of these gentlemen would be followed at no great distance by a work from the pen of the ‘metropolitan versifier’ (Leigh Hunt), of whom his in due course remarked in the preface to his two volumes: ‘If it were a question of assets, of faculties, of effects, the taking of an account of plunder,—an inventory of sums received, and of moneys to be received, refunded, and disgorged,—a mere calculation of the wind that had been raised, this indication of the person best qualified to be the biographer of a prince amongst poets would be judicious.’

It was not till Field Place felt the necessity of correcting the numerous misstatements about the man of genius by a complete and authoritative biography, that the largely employed lawyer declared his willingness to execute the difficult task, which had been deferred too long. Midway between sixty and seventy years of age, when he thus accepted the invitation of Sir Percy Florence and Lady Shelley, the man of many affairs, and an exacting avocation, did not set to work on the Life till nearly a quarter of a century had passed since the publication of the New Monthly Papers; till the poet had been dead nearly thirty-five years; till full forty-five years had passed since the poet, in the company of his future biographer, set their faces for London, on leaving University College, Oxford.

Though it took the outer world by surprise, the immediate result of the publication of Hogg’s two volumes was less surprising to the literary coteries, and no matter of surprise whatever to the few members of those coteries, who, knowing that Hogg was a robust enemy of shams, knew that no biographer would satisfy Field Place, which should fail to accord with the straight-nosed pictures, and with the notion that Shelley was a being of stainless purity and angelic holiness.

If, in writing the Life, Hogg’s first duty was to be thoughtful for the sensibilities of Field Place, his book must indeed be declared a bad one. Instead of giving readers the Shelley indicated by the frontispiece of the first volume, or the Shelley who, under auspicious circumstances might have been the Saviour of the World, or a Shelley who might have sobered down into a pheasant-shooting squire and Chairman of Quarter-Sessions, the biographer makes us acquainted with the wayward, freakish, impulsive, scarcely sane, and ever restless Shelley of the poet’s early manhood,—the Shelley, whose great wit was divided from madness by a strangely thin partition; the Shelley, whose earnestness was too often associated with perversity, whose winning candour was curiously allied with secretiveness, whose impulsive benevolence was perplexingly linked with indifference to the feelings and rights of particular individuals; the Shelley, whose several amiable and generous traits were attended by qualities that were neither beneficent nor agreeable. Showing that this whimsical Shelley was a frequent utterer of untruths that were altogether or partly referable to delusions, Hogg also shows by evidence of the most conclusive kind that this perplexing Shelley could also utter untruths, knowing them to be untruths—was capable of telling fibs to escape a trivial inconvenience,—was capable of writing false and wheedling letters to get money, and of admitting with a singular, if not absolutely unique, shamelessness, that he had told a lie, or meant to tell a lie for a very slight reason.