Having in the Christmas holidays scolded off his reasonable displeasure with his heir, and taken him once again into his favour, Mr. Timothy Shelley wrote the youngster letters of good advice, begging him to read hard and distinguish himself at the University; letters which the son and his friend turned to excellent fun. Whilst the Squire of Field Place thus evinced a disposition to live on better terms with his boy, there were signs of a corresponding disposition on Shelley’s part, to live on better terms with his father. Anyhow, it was partly to please the Member of Parliament for New Shoreham, that the undergraduate promised to compete for the next Prize Poem,—a promise that vastly delighted the elder Mr. Shelley, who honoured letters without being qualified to excel in them, and desired very much to speak of his son as an Oxford Prizeman. The subject for ‘the Newdigate,’ was Parthenon, and as soon as Shelley had consented to his father’s desire, so far as to say he would go in for the Prize (eventually awarded to Mr. R. Burdon, of Oriel College), the jubilant Squire of Field Place went off to his particular friend, the Reverend Edward Dallaway, Vicar of Leatherhead, and historian of Sussex, and begged the sound scholar and famous antiquary, to put his erudition at the service of the poetical undergraduate. The result of this kindly busy-bodyism on the part of an honest gentleman, who certainly sometimes did his best to be a good father to a worse than indifferent son, was that Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, of University College, received a long letter from Mr. Dallaway, together with charts, sketches, and documents, which might have been useful to the young poet, had he remained long enough at the University to complete the poem (which he began), and send it in to the judges.
In one respect, the present writer may have described Shelley’s academic life too favourably. Too much may have been said of the purity of the poet’s personal tastes, and of his aversion to pleasures that are fascinating only to the sensual. If he has erred in this particular, the writer has not failed through ignorance of matters, making for another and less agreeable view of the undergraduate’s ways of amusing himself at Oxford, but through a determination to say nothing on insufficient evidence to the discredit of a remarkable man, whose life affords too many occasions for necessary censure.
When anything is needlessly blurted to Shelley’s shame, the injurious statement is usually made by one of his idolaters, acting the proverbial part of a ‘candid friend.’ It is so in the case of what has been urged against the prevailing testimony to the purity and refinement of the Oxonian Shelley’s personal habits and tastes.
‘Accident,’ says Mr. Thornton Hunt—one of Hogg’s vituperators, and one of Shelley’s idolaters—‘has made me aware of facts which give me to understand that in passing through the usual curriculum of a college life in all its paths, Shelley did not go scatheless; but that, in tampering with venal pleasures, his health was seriously and not transiently injured. The effect was far greater on his mind than on his body.’
It is needless to specify the pleasures to which Mr. Thornton Hunt points. The pleasures which may be bought, and often attract young men in their hours of idleness, and sometimes result in consequences permanently injurious to their health, are not so numerous as to make the reader doubtful as to the nature of the pleasures thus boldly indicated. But Mr. Thornton Hunt’s statement has features which will dispose readers to question the sufficiency of his information. As Shelley never passed ‘through the usual curriculum of a college life,’ he can scarcely have passed through it ‘in all its paths’ (whatever that may mean):—but let that pass. It is enough that Mr. Thornton Hunt is unambiguous as to the class of the pleasures. It is not, however, so clear how those pleasures, which can only injure the mind through the body, should in Shelley’s case have been so much less baneful to the body than the mind. As Mr. Thornton Hunt seems to have gained his facts from a loose talker or writer, it is only fair and charitable to the poet to suppose that his ‘frank friend’ got his facts from an altogether unreliable reporter. It may, of course, be that in a transient fit of rakishness Shelley was so unfortunate as to encounter mischance, which habitual rakes may be so lucky as to escape. But the abundant evidences to the point satisfy me that ‘rakishness’ was foreign to Shelley’s general way of living at the University,—that, in respect to common kinds of dissipation, his habits accorded with the manners of Victorian much more closely than with the manners of Georgian Oxford.
To pass from a matter about which Mr. Thornton Hunt might as well have been silent, to an affair of several incidents, which, though notorious, must be recorded precisely and fully, because they have never been narrated correctly;—the incidents that closed with Shelley’s expulsion from University College, Oxford.
Whilst rejecting, with his usual good sense, Hogg’s apologetic and untruthful account of Shelley’s motives and purpose in writing and publishing (for he did both) The Necessity of Atheism, Mr. William Rossetti remarks:—
‘In this case, as in others, the honestest and boldest course is also the safest: and we shall do well to understand once for all that Percy Shelley had as good a right to form and expound his opinions on theology as the Archbishop of Canterbury had to his. Certainly Shelley differed from the Archbishop, and from several other students of, and speculators on the subject, past and present; but, as there was no obligation on him to agree with all, or any of them, so there is nothing to be explained away or toned down when we find that in fact he dissented.’
Had Mr. Rossetti been educated at Oxford or Cambridge in his boyhood, he would not have put these words in print. Like the Archbishop of Canterbury, or any other man, Shelley had, of course, a natural right to hold and declare what he believed to be the truth on questions of religion. In civilized communities, however, natural rights are in some cases necessarily put under limitations, or altogether taken from individuals,—are partially or wholly relinquished by individuals,—for the welfare and good order of the societies of which they are members. Archbishop Manners Sutton had, no doubt, like every other man, a natural right to his own opinions on matters pertaining to religion, and to proclaim those opinions. But this right was limited in his case not only by obligations put upon him as a citizen, but also by official obligations put upon him as Primate of the Anglican Church. So long as he remained in his sacerdotal office he was bound in conscience to hold no opinions at variance with the doctrines of the Church of England, and bound even more stringently in conscience, and by social law, to refrain from publishing opinions calculated to discredit those doctrines. Had he relinquished his sacred office and orders, he would have recovered that much of his natural right to think and say anything he believed to be true, which was not denied to him by mere obligations of citizenship. On returning as far as possible to the position and quality of a layman, he would have recovered the right of a layman to limited freedom of speech on matters of religion,—i.e. so much of the natural right to free thought and utterance as in his time was allowed by the law of the land to every person of his nation. But, so long as he remained Archbishop, his natural right to be heterodox, and to teach heterodoxy, was wholly dormant.
In like manner, as a member of the University of Oxford (a society he had joined of his own free will; a society from which he did not wish to be withdrawn when, in December, 1810, his father threatened to withdraw him from it), Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley was bound to act as though he were a sincere son of the National Church, and to do nothing that was likely to put his orthodoxy in suspicion. Far from being under ‘no obligation to agree with all or any’ of the doctrines of the Church of England (as Mr. Rossetti avers), he was under clear, strong, and stringent obligations to agree with every one of those doctrines. It may have always been, and recent legislation has declared that it was (if not in Shelley’s time, at least in later time) unjust and impolitic in the law of the land to confine the Universities within limits, and hold them under restrictions, that rendered them at most nothing more than superb seminaries for the larger part of the nation, instead of seats of learning for the whole nation. In the present work, however, there is no need to ask whether those limits and restrictions were ever needful, or whether they were salutary after ceasing to be needful, or whether they should have been removed sooner than the recent year (1871) that saw the abolition of the University Religious Tests. It is enough for Shelley’s biographers to know that, when the poet matriculated at Oxford, no one was allowed to enter the University without solemnly declaring himself a member of the National Church, and subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles in demonstration of the truth of his declaration. Conformity to the doctrines and uses, of the Church was the condition of admittance to the University. It was also the condition under which every matriculated student continued to enjoy the privileges and partake of the benefits of the University. Every member of the University, besides being a member of the Church, was required to be a communicant of the Church,—taking the Sacrament at appointed times in the chapel of his college.