Coming to Oxford for residence in the autumn of 1810, when Hogg had acquired status and character amongst the younger members of his academic house, the sensitive, simple, never worldly-wise Shelley entered University College with a strong appetite for general knowledge, and an intention to peruse many books on many subjects for his own amusement, but with no ambition for academic honours, no intention of competing for them, no purpose of becoming, in the academic and limited sense of the term, ‘a reading man.’ Hogg had not been three months in University College, before the tutors saw he meant to put his name in a ‘first class.’ Shelley, on the other hand, had not been three weeks in College before the tutors saw he meant to go out with the ‘pass men,’ and were doubtful whether he would take a degree.
As it must be held in some measure accountable for the influence he acquired over Shelley, readers must assign considerable weight to the fact that Hogg was qualified by several matters—his seniority on the College books, priority in residence, greater knowledge of the University, higher status in the lecture-rooms,—to play the part of academic superior to his new acquaintance. Superlatively trivial to men of the world, the matters that gave Hogg this precedence and superiority over Shelley in University College, are no light affairs in the small world of the University, the still smaller world of a single College. The sensitive Shelley would not have presumed to invite Hogg to his rooms after their first meeting ‘in hall.’ It was for Hogg to pay the compliment to the freshman in his first term of residence; and no old University man will doubt that Shelley felt he received a considerable attention, when so notable a personage amongst the first-year’s men as Mr. Hogg said to him, ‘Come and have wine at my rooms.’
As Hogg and Shelley sat over their wine in consequence of this invitation, the host took an opportunity to examine the aspect of his new acquaintance more minutely, and to observe that his girlish pink-and-white complexion was much freckled. ‘His complexion,’ says Hogg, ‘was delicate, and almost feminine, of the purest red and white; yet he was tanned and freckled by exposure to the sun, having passed the autumn, as he said, in shooting;’ a piece of description that is referred to by ‘the Shelleyan enthusiasts’ as an example of Hogg’s imaginativeness. No one (if we may credit Shelleyan enthusiasts) but a suspiciously imaginative historian would have ventured to say he could remember, after twenty years, the sun-spots of an old college friend’s complexion. I venture to say that the disfigurement is a good example of the kind of things, likely to live in the memory of certain observers.
In respect to a part of what he says of the freckles in Shelley’s skin, Hogg is corroborated in a remarkable manner by Medwin, who (his inaccuracy notwithstanding) was generally right in the main facts, and not always wrong in the details of his statements. ‘He,’ Medwin says of Shelley’s shooting in the winter of 1809 and the autumn of 1810, ‘had during September often carried a gun in his father’s preserves; Sir Timothy being a keen sportsman, and Shelley himself an excellent shot, for I well remember on one day in the winter of 1809, when we were out together, his killing, at three successive shots, three snipes, to my great astonishment and envy, at the tail of the pond in front of Field Place.’ The three successive and successful shots are good examples of the small incidents likely to live in a sportsman’s memory. What old sportsman, with snow upon his head, cannot remember quite as vividly just as small matters, that occurred long since on the moors or during a run across country?
Another of the small matters of Hogg’s Life, that unquestionably lived in his memory. He remembered how, in the early morning at the close of Shelley’s first visit to his rooms, after ‘lighting’ the poet downstairs with the stump of a candle, he ‘soon heard him running through the quiet quadrangle in the still night,’—adding in the words of truth’s own music, ‘That sound became afterwards so familiar to my ear, that I still seem to hear Shelley’s hasty steps.’
The evidence is clear that whilst Shelley, the freshman (ever a feminine creature on one side of his nature), regarded Hogg as an exemplary scholar, great thinker, and worthy leader,—the self-sufficient, hard-headed, cynical, humorous youngster from the North of England regarded Shelley as a delightful plaything, a brilliant absurdity, a piquant joke. When the ‘reading man,’ who rose from his bed every morning as the clock struck seven, had spent the first six hours of the day in strenuous study and attendance at lectures, he went to his ‘young friend’ for diversion, never before one o’clock, oftener when the clock had struck two p.m. It amused the north-countryman, as he lay back in the easiest chair of his young friend’s well-furnished and disorderly room, to watch his young friend work fiercely at the handle of his electrical machine, till the crackling and snapping sparks flew forth viciously; to see the youngster’s long locks bristle and dishevel into wildness, surpassing their usual disorder; to observe the animation of his countenance, the singular brightness of his prominent blue eyes, and to hear him talk volubly for half-hours together, in the thin shrill voice that often screamed as harshly as the voice of a highly excited parrot, about the blessings that would flow from chemistry to the ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-treated toilers of the human race.
The excruciating voice, that was so ‘intolerably shrill, harsh, and discordant’ to the north-countryman’s sensitive ear at the opening of his acquaintance with this eccentric and delightfully unconventional undergraduate, became less disagreeable, even in its sharpest notes, to the critical auditor as it grew more familiar. Moreover, the voice was not always at torture-pitch. It was only when he was under excitement that the youngster afflicted his hearers by ‘speaking’ (to use Peacock’s description of the poet’s vocal peculiarity) ‘in sharp fourths, the most unpleasing sequence of sound that can fall on the human ear.’ When he spoke calmly, the voice was not otherwise than agreeable; when he read poetry that delighted him, the voice became musical, ‘was good’ (says Peacock) ‘both in tune and in tone; was low and soft, but clear, distinct, and expressive.’ Hogg had not known his young friend many days without discovering that the voice could be no less melodious and charming than harsh and screeching. In these vocal characteristics, as in so many other matters, Shelley resembled Byron, who used to shriek and scream in his frequent paroxysms of hysterical rage, and yet had a voice sweeter even than his verse, when he gossiped contentedly with women, and prattled lovingly with little children.
It is not wonderful that the self-sufficient, critical, humorous Hogg’s interest in his young friend was composed equally of amusement and admiration, cynical curiosity and amiable contempt; a disposition to love him, and an even stronger disposition to laugh at him. There was so much to admire and love in the eccentric boy, who overflowed with pity for the miseries of mankind, and prattled with almost childish communicativeness about his cousin Harriett’s beauty and his sister Elizabeth’s perfections; so much that was inexpressibly ludicrous in the youthful chemist and scientific enthusiast who, believing in the ‘Elixir Vitæ,’ was at the same time an astronomer and astrologer—in the sceptical philosopher who, equally credulous and incredulous, spoke no less reverentially of dreams than irreverentially of the Scriptural miracles, could embrace any fable provided it were not one of ‘the delusions’ of Christianity, and had no doubt he ought to believe in ghosts, whilst deeming it questionable whether he ought to believe in God. Under Hogg’s tuition this last question was erased from the list of Shelley’s moot points. Having repudiated Christ at Eton, the freshman had not entered on his second term of residence at Oxford without finding himself under ‘the necessity’ of repudiating God; and, though he would probably have come to this conclusion by himself somewhat later in his career, it is certain he came to it the sooner for Hogg’s assistance and encouragement.
It is uncertain what Hogg’s real sentiments on matters pertaining to religion were at the close of 1810 and 1811. In later time he was one of those Tories who reflected with pride on the support their party had given Bolingbroke, and on the protection it had afforded Hume:—one of those Tories, of gentle birth and culture, who deemed it their peculiar privilege to think and say amongst themselves whatever they pleased on ecclesiastical polemics, provided they did nothing to weaken the popular belief in the doctrines of the Church of England, as by law established—doctrines that were so eminently conducive to social order, by disposing persons of the less fortunate classes to do their duty submissively in that state of life to which God had been pleased to call them. Whilst commiserating Shelley for being, by education and familiar conditions, one of those ‘buff-and-blue folks’ who naturally could not speak their own minds freely lest their words should be misconstrued into treason and infidelity, and could not, therefore, carry the poet safe through the difficulties arising out of his ill-advised publications, Mr. Hogg, the mature biographer, observed:—
‘As to my own family, and my immediate connexions, we were all persons whose first toast after dinner was invariably “Church and State!” warm partisans of William Pitt, of the highest Church, and of the high Tory party; consequently we were anything but intolerant, we were above suspicion and ordinances.... My relatives felt that they had margin enough, plenty of sea-room, that whatever might be said or done, their good principles could not be doubted, but would always carry them through.... If the Age of Reason had been republished by myself or one of my earliest friends, the world would have supposed that it was put forth merely to show the utter futility and impotence and vanity of the author’s arguments.’