‘I wrote,’ he says, ‘a short note to the Master and Fellows, in which, as far as I can remember a very hasty composition after a long interval, I briefly expressed my sorrow at the treatment my friend had experienced, and my hope that they would reconsider their sentence, since, by the same course of proceedings, myself, or any other person, might be subjected to the same penalty, and to the imputation of equal guilt. The note was despatched; the conclave was still sitting; and in an instant the porter came to summon me to attend, bearing in his countenance a promise of the reception which I was about to find. The angry and troubled air of men, assembled to commit injustice according to established forms, was then new to me; but a native instinct told me, as soon as I entered the room, that it was an affair of party; that whatever could conciliate the favour of the patrons was to be done without scruple; and whatever could tend to impede preferment was to be brushed away without remorse. The glowing Master produced my poor note. I acknowledged it; and he forthwith put into my hands, not less abruptly, the little syllabus. “Did you write this?” he asked, as fiercely as if I alone stood between him and the rich see of Durham. I attempted, submissively, to point out to him the extreme unfairness of the question; the injustice of punishing Shelley for refusing to answer it.... When I was silent, the Master told me to retire, and to consider whether I was resolved to persist in my refusal.... I had scarcely passed the door, however, when I was recalled. The Master again showed me the book, and hastily demanded whether I admitted or denied that I was the author of it. I answered that I was fully sensible of the many and great inconveniences of being dismissed with disgrace from the University, and I specified some of them, and expressed a humble hope that they would not impose such a mark of discredit upon me without any cause. I lamented that it was impossible either to admit or deny the publication,—no man of spirit could submit to do so;—and that a sense of duty compelled me respectfully to refuse to answer the question which had been proposed. “Then you are expelled,” said the Master angrily, in a loud, great voice. A formal sentence, duly signed and sealed, was instantly put into my hand; in what interval the instrument had been drawn up I cannot imagine. The alleged offence was a contumacious refusal to disavow the imputed publication. My eye glanced over it, and observing the word contumaciously, I said, calmly, that I did not think that term was justified by my behaviour.’
This is the substance of Hogg’s prolix account of his own expulsion; an account at conflict in one important particular with Shelley’s narrative of his expulsion, and affording several grounds for declaring it untruthful. Two writs—one of them certainly a writ of expulsion, and the other presumably a writ of expulsion—having been drawn up before Shelley entered the common-room, and Hogg having been told that whilst the one writ was given to Shelley the other was reserved by the ‘dons,’ the north-countryman had good ground for thinking the writ so reserved was the writ eventually given to him. If his account of the affair was truthful, in respect to the brevity of the conference and quickness of the proceedings, a third writ could not have been made out and sealed during so short and stormy a conference. There is no reason (apart from certain words of Hogg’s narrative that seems to have been written disingenuously) for thinking a third writ was substituted for the reserved writ. Hogg cannot be supposed to have thought a third writ was so substituted. He must have assumed at the time that the writ, put into his hand, was the reserved writ of which Shelley had told him. In suggesting that the writ put into his hand was drawn up during the warm colloquy (in what interval of it he could not imagine), Hogg must be thought to have written disingenuously, the object of the disingenuous writing being to cover a misdescription of the instrument itself. The writ having been penned before Shelley entered the common-room, it cannot have alleged that the sentence of expulsion was consequent on a ‘contumacious refusal to disavow the imported publication.’ Possibly the offence was not specified in the document. But if it was mentioned the instrument must have declared the sentence consequent on the atheistical writing. Hogg’s motive for misdescribing the document is obvious. Smarting under the imputation of atheism, the Church-and-State Tory freethinker to the last represented himself to society as a sufferer from loyalty to his friend, and he misdescribed the writ so as to make it harmonize with the creditable view of his case.
The evidences are conflicting in some particulars and deficient in others, but the case may be stated thus:—Hogg and Shelley were the joint authors of the atheistical pamphlet, the former being on the whole the more culpable. This tract was put in circulation, and announced for sale, in Oxford. Having obtained proof that the tract was the production of the two undergraduates, the authorities of University College determined to expel the joint-authors as soon as the work should be offered for sale within the academic bounds. Acting on this resolve they sent in the forenoon of Lady-day for the culprits, summoning Shelley first as the one who had employed the printer, and been the busier in putting the tract in circulation. To put himself in a position to say that he had not been expelled for writing the atheistical tract, but merely for declining on grounds of principle to say whether he was concerned in the publication, Shelley refused to answer ‘ay’ or ‘nay’ to the Master’s questions. For this contumacy alone the authorities would have been justified in dismissing him from the college. But using the writ drawn up before the refusal to answer questions, they expelled him as the joint author and promulgator of an atheistical work. Hogg was dealt with in like manner, and for the same reason, although he tried at the time to put his inevitable punishment on another ground, and subsequently took credit to himself for standing chivalrously by his friend, when he might (as he averred) have escaped punishment by a less generous course. That he knew he was under sentence of expulsion before he wrote the insolent letter to the ‘dons’ is sufficient proof that he was actuated by no chivalrous motive in writing the epistle. To urge that the ‘dons’ prejudged the case and acted with indecent precipitation, because they drew up the instrument of expulsion before sending for the offenders is absurd, because they knew the delinquents could not clear themselves. Events justified the action of the ‘dons.’ The culprits offered no defence, could not offer any, did not venture to say that they were innocent of the charge. The ‘dons’ had traced the offence to its actual doers before dismissing them from the college. No one who apprehends the legal constitution of the University, the obligations of the authorities, and the obligations of the undergraduates, can question that the writers of the tract were properly dismissed from University College, as persons who were no longer members of the Church of England, or deny that the Master and Fellows were under the circumstances bound to tell the pamphleteers to go about their business.
In his letter, dated 16th February, 1857, from Torquay (a letter already referred to more than once in these pages), Shelley’s cousin, Charles Henry Grove, says, indeed, of The Necessity of Atheism and its consequences, ‘The pamphlet had not the author’s name, but it was suspected in the University who was the author; and the young friends were dismissed from Oxford, for contumaciously refusing to deny themselves to be the authors of the work;’ words of evidence that Shelley’s attempt to misrepresent the cause of his dismissal from the University was not unsuccessful within the lines of his domestic circle; or at least of evidence that his near relatives liked to attribute his expulsion to contumacy rather than to atheism.
The account, given by Shelley of his expulsion to Peacock, differed notably in certain particulars from the substantially accurate account he gave on the morning of its occurrence to his fellow-collegian. To Thomas Love Peacock, the poet averred that ‘his expulsion was a matter of great form and solemnity,’ and that ‘there was a sort of public assembly, before which he pleaded his own cause in a long oration, in the course of which he called on the illustrious spirits who had shed glory on those walls, to look down on their degenerate successors.’ Yet further, in confirmation of this extravagant story, Shelley showed Peacock an Oxford newspaper, or what appeared to be an Oxford newspaper, containing a full report of these theatrical proceedings, together with his own oration at great length.
‘His oration,’ Peacock adds (vide Fraser’s Magazine, of June, 1858) ‘may have been, as some of Cicero’s published orations were, a speech in the potential mood; one which might, could, should, or would, have been spoken; but how in that case it got into the Oxford newspaper passes conjecture.’
To the young gentleman, who made the Bishop imagine him a lady, and had confidential relations with John Munday (the Oxford bookseller and printer of the Oxford Herald), it is no injustice to suggest that, instead of being a veritable copy of the Herald, the paper exhibited to Hogg may have been a ‘bogus’ copy of the journal, made up in accordance with Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s instructions, for his private use. No reader, acquainted with Oxford and the ways in which things are done in the University (and in ‘the city’ whose people stand, or used to stand, in wholesome awe of the academic authorities), can need assurance that the business of the expulsion was a strictly private affair; that no proceedings in the case afforded diversion to a public assembly; that Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley delivered no grand oration on the degeneracy of collegiate establishments; and that it is highly improbable any Oxford printer ventured to offer the readers of any bonâ fide Oxford journal any ‘such speech in the potential mood.’
On the morning following their expulsion (the morning of 26th March, 1811), Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg, formerly of University College, Oxford, made the journey to London on the outside of a stage-coach. Thus Shelley passed in disgrace from his University at the close of his second residence-term; an event that may be regarded as the termination of the first period of his literary career. What a disastrous period it was! How fruitful of misadventure, ridicule, catastrophe, and shame! No literary aspirant, destined for imperishable fame, ever made a more inauspicious beginning. In his first voyages on literary waters, Byron encountered stormy weather and rough usage. His first book of poetry resembled Shelley’s maiden volume, in being suppressed for fear of consequences. Ere his first razor had lost its edge, he was assailed by the Edinburgh Review. But having weathered the gale, that almost wrecked The Hours of Idleness, he enjoyed merry seas and favourable breezes. A notability before starting for Greece, he returned from the ‘pilgrimage,’ to spring to the highest pinnacle of fame. On leaving Oxford, Shelley had produced the Victor-and-Cazire book (suppressed for want of originality); two of the feeblest and absurdest novels ever written in the English tongue; the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, that, despite all Hogg says to the contrary, made him the laughing-stock of Oxford; the advertisements of the Poetical Essay that never saw the light; and (with Hogg’s help) the little syllabus that brought him to great grief,—to about the greatest disgrace a young man can undergo at manhood’s threshold, without falling in the grip of the criminal law.