No wonder that the biographer who dealt thus frankly with his friend’s infirmities is distasteful to the enthusiasts of Mr. Buxton Forman’s school. No wonder that his book was perused for the first time by Sir Percy Florence and Lady Shelley ‘with the most painful feelings of dismay.’ Their dissatisfaction with the biographer would have been more painful had all four volumes of the Life been published on the day, that saw the publication of the earlier half of the book. Fortunately for Sir Florence and Lady Shelley the biographer at the end of the second of the two published volumes was only coming to the part of the poet’s story which they were especially desirous he should handle with extreme delicacy. There is much about William Godwin in the two volumes, and a little about his daughter. But the second volume closes at the moment when Shelley is only at the threshold of his passion for his familiar friend’s sixteen-years-old child,—closes before he has told the ‘marvellous tale’ of his father’s cruelty, and barbarous purpose of shutting him up in a madhouse, to the generous-hearted girl, in order to induce the naughty child to fly with him to the Continent in the company of her sister-by-affinity. It was obvious to Sir Percy Florence and Lady Shelley that they had chosen the wrong historian to write about Mary Godwin, the judicious treatment of whose scarcely edifying story was so needful for the honour of the Castle Goring Shelleys. It had been hoped by Field Place that Mr. Hogg would varnish ugly facts with specious phrases. Disappointed in this hope, it was obvious to Field Place that the indiscreet biographer must be sent about his business. Hogg having failed to write the Life into harmony with the pretty picture facing the title-page, as Arthur Pendennis wrote the verses to suit the picture of the country church, it was manifest to the authorities of Field Place that they must discharge their man of letters, and hide their time till they should find a fitter instrument and happier season for their purpose. This was done. Hogg was dismissed, and in these later years of grace Field Place has found in Mr. Anthony Froude a man of letters, capable of writing about the poet’s flight with his intimate friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, as nothing worse than ‘the sin of acting on emotional theories of liberty;’ capable of smiling at their concubinage as a pleasant passage of romance, because they were so young and enthusiastic.
Though a grievous injury was done to English literature when Hogg was treated in this manner, it must not be imagined that his book is devoid of serious faults. Containing numerous trivial inaccuracies, it contains also some grave blunders. The confusion of its materials may be compared to the state of disorder in which the author found his friend’s room at the commencement of their acquaintance. The biographer was unwise to reproduce in the book his early Papers on Shelley at Oxford without first revising them carefully. Though he would have done ill to keep himself as much as possible out of view, and was right in regarding passages of his own story as part of his friend’s story,—a part of it, moreover, that could not be omitted without serious injury to the biographical narrative,—he says far too much of himself. In some places, the biographer’s egotism is grotesquely garrulous. It is no sufficient excuse for such egregious self-consciousness and self-intrusiveness, that the egotist is a droll, piquant, racy, exquisitely humorous egotist. None the less true, however, is it that,—their eccentricities and extravagancies notwithstanding,—the two volumes give us a substantially truthful view of Shelley in his youth and earlier manhood, and, in so doing, bring us face to face with the Real Shelley. No intelligent and impartial peruser of the two volumes ever closed them without feeling that Hogg’s portraiture of Shelley is a performance, from whose lines no biographer of the poet can depart widely, without going widely astray.
There is no need to say more of the confusion, in which Hogg offered the excellent materials of his book to the world. But so much has been said about his dishonest treatment of letters, that some notice should be taken of his various ways of dealing with evidential documents.
It must be admitted that his printed transcripts of epistles are often inaccurate; a considerable proportion of the inaccuracies being slips, for which the printer is not to be held accountable.
The letters are, in some cases, mis-dated, through the biographer’s carelessness in taking a postal-date, or the date of an addressee’s endorsement, as the date of the letter itself. Occasionally, also, he errs by giving, as an ascertained and exact date, what appears, on examination, to be nothing else than his own calculation of an approximate date.
Regardless of the paragraphical arrangement of a letter, when he is desirous of saving space, he does not hesitate to bring several written paragraphs into a single printed one,—an unobjectionable practice, when it does not affect the force of the written words, in the case of letters that are not exhibited in type as examples of epistolary style.
It is his practice to condense a letter, by picking out its most important passages, and putting them together (without points indicative of omitted words), as though they followed one another on the written paper, precisely as they appear on the printed page:—a most objectionable practice.
After condensing a letter in this manner, he sometimes exhibits the abridgment in a way to make readers think it an entire letter:—also a most objectionable practice.
In the case of one most important and interesting letter (of whose contents more will be said in a subsequent chapter), he changes names for purposes of concealment and mystification; but a fair consideration of his reasons for thus tampering with an important evidential writing, acquits him of dishonourable conduct in the curious and suspicious business.
Attention must also be called to the grounds for the gravest charge, that has been preferred against Hogg’s editorial treatment of evidential writings. He has been declared guilty of altering such evidences by inserting in his printed transcripts entire sentences that do not appear in the manuscripts; and it cannot be denied that there are primâ-facie grounds for the serious accusation. On careful examination, some of the printed transcripts of the Life are found to contain passages (some of them long passages of several sentences) that do not appear in the originals of the transcribed documents. As these passages appear without any typographical indication that they are no part of the original writings, and have every primâ-facie show of being part of the transcripts in which they are inserted, they may be fairly described as ‘interpolations.’ It is not, therefore, surprising that Hogg has been charged with one of the gravest forms of editorial dishonesty. The reader’s attention has already been called to one of these editorial notes,—a note printed, indeed, within brackets, but followed by no indicatory initials. In subsequent chapters, examples will be given of similar notes, printed without either brackets or initials. For the present, it is enough to say they may be found in several of Hogg’s printed copies of documents. How can they be accounted for in a way, to clear the biographer of reasonable suspicion of misrepresenting the contents of evidential writings?