Instead of making his editorial comments on his transcribed documents in paginal foot-notes, it was Hogg’s most objectionable and dangerous practice to insert them in the body of the transcripts. Of course, in doing so, it was his rule to put his initials after each editorial note, and to place each ‘initialed’ note between brackets. Thus exhibited between brackets, with the biographer’s initials put immediately before the second bracket, an editorial note is recognized at a glance by the most careless reader, as no part of the transcribed document, but a mere editorial elucidation of the preceding passage. Printed as Hogg intended them to be, no one of these editorial notes could have been mistaken, even momentarily, for a part and parcel of the writing, in whose body it was inserted. But, unfortunately, for the biographer’s reputation, these notes were not always printed as he intended them to be printed. In some cases the first bracket, in some cases both brackets, are omitted, though the initials are inserted. There are also cases where a scrap of editorial explanation is found without either brackets or initials. As Hogg was no regular author, but a slap-dash rough-and-ready legal draughtsman (plying his pen, in his proper vocation, with perfect confidence in the ability of solicitors and law-stationers to correct the literal slips of his compositions), he wrote copy for the press just as he slapt and dashed copy off for his ordinary clients. A careless writer, he was also a careless corrector of proofs. Hence it came to pass that editorial notes, which he meant to bracket and initial (notes, which, of course, should have been made at the foot, instead of in the body of his pages), came under the public eye without the brackets and initials, that should, and would, have distinguished them at a glance from the printed matter they were intended to elucidate. That this is the explanation of the interpolations in Hogg’s transcripts, appears from—(1), the biographer’s practice of peppering his transcripts with initialed and bracketed scraps of editorial comment; (2), the grammatical construction that distinguishes the interpolations from the text in which they are set; (3), the absolute inefficacy of the inserted passages for any end a dishonest interpolator could have in view; and (4), the conclusive fact, that, whilst it is a mere perplexing disturbance to the narrative, so long as it is taken for part of the transcript, each of the interpolations becomes an intelligible and more or less serviceable comment on the context, as soon as the reader puts it into brackets, and deals with it as an editorial note. In respect to these interpolations, and also in respect to all the other errors which the biographer’s enemies are pleased to regard as deliberate misstatements, Hogg must be acquitted wholly of dishonest purpose. Had he been duly mindful for brackets and initials, the interpolations, of which so much has been said to his discredit, would never have exposed him to a suspicion, much less to a direct imputation, of editorial knavery.
It does not follow, however, that the Life is disfigured by no statements to be fairly rated as deliberate misrepresentations. Resenting the calumnies, that have been poured on Hogg since his death; resenting more especially the malice of those, who would fain extort evidence to the biographer’s infamy from what is mere evidence of one of Shelley’s wildest and most unwholesome delusions; I wish I were in a position to declare the volumes altogether pure of falsehood. It would have been better for Hogg’s character in his life’s closing years, and far better for his posthumous fame, had he in his mature age written with candour and justice of the incidents that resulted in his academic disgrace, and of the individuals who only did their clear duty in bidding him and Shelley leave Oxford. But whilst lacking the courage to be truthful about matters even more discreditable to himself than to his friend, he wanted the highmindedness that would have enabled him to speak fairly of the Master and Fellows, whom he remembered to his last hour with a rancorous animosity that was singular in the man of usually even and placable disposition. The story of his academic disgrace was one of the very few subjects, on which the man of imperturbable temper and adamantine patience could not keep his temper. Whilst throwing off the papers for the New Monthly, Hogg surrendered himself the more completely to his animosity against the Oxford dons, because he could persuade himself that, in giving vent to his personal resentment, he was only vindicating the honour of his friend. The consequence was an account of Shelley’s academic misadventure, so veined with misrepresentation and loaded with untruth, as to defeat the purpose for which it was written. It is needless to say that the Shelleyan enthusiasts have never protested against the egregious perversity and falseness of this portion of the biography. Attacking the book for its inaccuracy, in respect to those of its passages that are substantially honest, they have adopted as good history those of its pages that are distinctly untruthful. That Field Place saw nothing to censure in the faultiest part of the biographer’s performance appears from the way, in which Lady Shelley reproduced some of its most glaring misrepresentations in her Shelley’s Memorials.
CHAPTER X.
AT OXFORD: MICHAELMAS TERM, 1810.
Hogg’s Toryism—Shelley’s Liberalism—In Hogg’s Rooms—Shelley’s Looks and Voice—Patron and Idolater—The Ways of Passing Time—Hogg’s Reminiscences—Nocturnal Readings and Conversations—Country about Oxford—Pistol Practice—Playing with Paper Boats—Windmill and Plashy Meadow—The Horror of it—Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson—University Tattle and Laughter—Eccentric Inseparables—Pond under Shotover Hill—Pacing ‘The High’—Dons’ Civility to Shelley—His Incivility to Dons—Uninteresting Stones and Dull People—‘Partly True and Partly False’—The Fiery Hun!—‘My Dear Boy’—Shelley offers his Sister to Hogg in Marriage—Hogg entertains the Proposal—End of Term.
Though I have spoken warmly of Hogg’s general honesty, and resent the calumnies that have been rained down upon him in the grave, I must admit that Hogg’s friendship was so injurious that it might almost be called disastrous to the Oxonian Shelley. Though the youth who had distinguished himself by unruliness at Eton, whose views of life had come to him chiefly from morbid romances, whose natural perversity disposed him to revolt against control of every kind, was far more likely to abuse the liberty and privileges of the academic course than to employ them to his advantage, the conditions are conceivable under which he would have passed through the University with honour—or at least without discredit. It depended chiefly on the friendships he should form immediately upon coming into residence at his college, whether, taking a new moral and intellectual ‘departure’ he would disappoint the evil promise of his Eton days, or whether he would persist in the perversities in which he had been encouraged by Dr. Lind. For his welfare in the University, it was needful that the young man, so sympathetic and fervid, but absolutely wanting in common sense and mental sobriety, should have for his especial friend a man devoid of moral levity, and should live in a set of young men who, together with tastes congenial to his own, possessed the steadiness of intellect and temper, calculated to restrain and correct the erratic forces of his peculiar nature;—young men who, by their example, rather than by their words, would dispose him to regard his University with pride, his College with affection, his tutors with loyalty. It was a great misfortune for Shelley that, on coming into residence, he found no such companions, and took for his chief associate,—indeed, his only familiar associate,—a young man, whose intellectual vigour and robustness were curiously allied with an intellectual levity and a cynical sprightliness, that rendered him a most baneful companion for a stripling of Shelley’s equally fervid and wayward disposition.
A stronger contrast of character is seldom witnessed than the contrast to be noticed in the two undergraduates, who, through meeting casually, and talking together freely at the same dinner table ‘in hall,’ formed at once a close friendship, that (with the exception of the brief period of estrangement, which renders the story of their intercourse more singular and interesting), endured till death divided them for ever. Whilst Shelley was a Liberal, whose liberalism even at the commencement of this friendship was revolutionary in its aims and enthusiasm, Hogg was a caricature of Eldonian Toryism, who held Dissenters in disdain, snapt his fingers at Catholic Emancipation, and smiled contemptuously at every reference to Irish grievances. In political sentiment the Hogg, who wrote the New Monthly Papers on ‘Shelley at Oxford’ differed from the Oxonian Hogg, only as the Toryism of a middle-aged man differs from the Toryism of a boy. The election that ‘had just taken place,’ when he entered University College was a choice he disapproved; though animosity against the Lord Chancellor, who deprived Shelley of his children, and animosity against those of the Chancellor’s supporters who expelled Shelley and Shelley’s friend from Oxford, caused him in later time to write of Eldon, as though the Chief of the Law were greatly inferior in culture and mental dignity to his victor in the academic conflict. Doubtless, on coming to Oxford immediately after the election of Lord Grenville, the young gentleman declared his disapproval of the triumph of the blue-and-buff faction:—not passionately, for passion seldom stirred his breast; but with much droll ridicule of a business so eminently ridiculous, for even from his boyhood Mr. Hogg (a born humourist and cynic) turned everything, even his own religious convictions, to jest.
Whilst the Oxonian Shelley, already a half-fledged republican, talked tenderly of the poor and the populace, Hogg ever a provincial aristocrat (and by no means devoid of provincial vulgarity), regarded the populace with disgust, and maintained that all the poor wanted was to be kept in their proper places and to their proper work. Ever impatient, Shelley was fervid as fire itself, whilst Hogg, from youth to old age, was remarkable for imperturbable temper and adamantine patience, on every question that had no reference to his academic misadventure. Coming from the North of England to Oxford in the autumn of 1809, some weeks before he donned cap and gown in February, 1810, Hogg entered the University with the purpose of taking honours, and had acquired the reputation of ‘a reading man’ before the long vacation of 1810.