‘I went away, indeed, before the lecture was finished. I stole away for it was so stupid, and I was so cold, that my teeth chattered. The Professor saw me, and appeared to be displeased. I thought I could have got out without being observed; but I struck my knee against a bench, and made a noise, and he looked at me. I am determined that he shall never see me again.’
‘What did the man talk about?’ Hogg asked.
‘About stones! about stones!’ answered the freshman (just then affecting to be an enthusiastic student of natural science). ‘About stones!—stones, stones, stones!—nothing but stones!—and so drily. It was wonderfully tiresome—and stones are not interesting in themselves!’
Discreditable to the youngster’s intelligence and scientific knowledge, the story is highly discreditable to his breeding. Instead of being ‘uninteresting things in themselves,’ stones are things of extreme interest. If the lecture was dull, he was bound by academic etiquette and common social courtesy, to remain to the end of it. As the lecture was poorly attended, he was especially bound by politeness to hear it out to the last word. Leaving the lecture as he did, blundering out of the room with noise so as to attract the lecturer’s attention, he was guilty of an extravagance of incivility and rudeness to one of the Professors[5] of his University. The freshman, who in the first week or ten days of his ‘residence in college,’ could behave in this way to the lecturer, who had bored him, was a freshman who on the slightest provocation would be ‘an Atheist’ at Oxford, in the same sense in which he had been an Atheist at Eton.
A few days after this incident, the freshman (the brilliant author of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne) discovered that the tutors of University College were ‘very dull people.’ One of these very dull people, in the performance of his official duty, sent for the freshman to speak with him about the subjects of study to which he should give his mind, and the lectures he should attend. The interview between the dull person and the brilliant Mr. Bysshe Shelley (author of Zastrozzi and certain Original Poetry that was not original) left the younger gentleman with a mean opinion of his intellectual adviser, and probably left the elder gentleman with a no less unfavourable opinion of his pupil. What took place at this interview shall be told here in the words of the pupil, whose ex parte account of the matter (given to his friend, Mr. Hogg) is by no means creditable to the narrator.—
‘They are very dull people here!’ the freshman remarked one evening soon after he came ‘into college.’ ‘A little man sent for me this morning, and told me, in an almost inaudible whisper, that I must read. “You must read,” he said many times in his small voice. I answered that I had no objection. He persisted: so, to satisfy him, for he did not appear to believe me, I told him I had some books in my pocket, and I began to take them out. He stared at me, and said that was not exactly what he meant. “You must read Prometheus Vinctus, and Demosthenes de Corona, and Euclid!” “Must I read Euclid?” I asked sorrowfully. “Yes, certainly; and when you have read the Greek works, I have mentioned, you must begin Aristotle’s Ethics, and then you may go on to his other treatises. It is of the utmost importance to be well acquainted with Aristotle.” This he repeated so often that I was quite tired, and at last I said, “Must I care about Aristotle? What if I do not mind Aristotle?” I then left him, for he seemed to be in great perplexity.’
The reader may be left to fill in and expand this brief sketch of an interview between one of the tutors of University College and the freshman, who acknowledged that the same tutors were ‘very civil’ to the undergraduates of the college. However, filled in and expanded, it must remain the account of an interview, in which the tutor, behaving with proper considerateness, and in no degree going outside the lines of his official duty, was treated with freedom, bordering on gross impertinence, by the pupil. Can anyone peruse the brief account without coming to the conclusion that Shelley gave and meant to give Hogg the impression, that he had treated the tutor saucily, smoked him elegantly (if I may use a word of obsolete slang), or, as school-boys would say, ‘cheeked him’ to his face. Of course Shelley’s words come to us through Hogg, who is stigmatized as a treacherous and false friend by the ‘Shelleyan enthusiasts.’ But even they will admit that Hogg (with a personal interest in making the world imagine that the authorities of University College treated him and Shelley with unprovoked harshness) was not likely to misrepresent Shelley in this particular matter to his disadvantage.
Having discovered that the tutors of University College were ‘dull people,’—a sentiment in which his familiar friend concurred,—Mr. Bysshe Shelley reminded Hogg on a subsequent occasion how very dull they were. Hogg was looking over one of his friend’s Latin exercises, a translation into Latin of a portion of a paper in the Spectator, when he drew Shelley’s attention to ‘many portions of heroic verses, and even several entire verses,’ observing that they were ‘defects in a prose composition.’ Smiling archly, the freshman replied in his peculiar piercing whisper, ‘Do you think they will observe them? I inserted them intentionally to try their ears! I once showed up a theme at Eton to old Keate, in which there were a great many verses; but he observed them, scanned them, and asked why I had introduced them? I answered, that I did not know they were there; this was partly true and partly false; but he believed me, and immediately applied to me the line, in which Ovid says of himself:
“Et quod tentabam dicere, versus erat.”’
It was thus that the modest and loyal Shelley (as he is styled by ‘the enthusiasts’) dealt with the tutors who were very civil to him,—putting blemishes into his Latin exercises, in the hope that, by overlooking them, the dull people would afford him another occasion for ridiculing their dullness. Surely the freshman, who dealt with and talked of his tutors in this style, was ripe and yearning to rebel against them, even as he had rebelled against his masters at Eton. ‘I answered,’ he says of his reply to Dr. Keate, ‘that I did not know they were there; this was partly true and partly false,’—words to remind the reader of the semi-delusions (as Peacock called them) of the poet’s later time. ‘This was partly true and partly false!’ What an admission respecting the Etonian Shelley, who (to use Lady Shelley’s words), was ‘more outspoken and truthful than other boys!’