Chapter XVIII: Shelley's Quarrel with Hogg (2)

(6.) Migrating from York to London, when he had passed twelve months in the chambers of his first legal instructor, Hogg became a Middle Temple law-student in the late spring, or early summer, of 1812. Eating his dinners in the hall of his Inn, and spending his days in the chambers of the Special Pleader with whom he was reading, the hard-working student usually passed his evenings in rooms he occupied in a lodging-house, at some distance from the Inns of Court. Having recently returned from the country, at the close of the Long Vacation of 1812, Hogg was sitting in his quiet lodgings late one evening at the beginning of November, with a book under his eyes and a tea-pot near at hand, when he heard a violent knocking at the street-door. Another minute and some one ran furiously upstairs. Another instant, and Percy Bysshe Shelley rushed into the student's room. Certainly for more than nine months, possibly for eleven months, Hogg had received no letter from his friend, had heard nothing of his movements. For so long a period--a long period in the life of the young--there had been a total severance of the two friends. How much Hogg knew then of Shelley's reasons for ceasing to write to him does not appear. But he knew Shelley was deeply offended with him, and knew the displeasure was connected with his attentions to Harriett. Though, from concern for his friend's honour, he could not tell the ludicrous and painful story outright in pages designed to commemorate the poet's finer and nobler qualities, Hogg indicates thus much in the _Life_ with sufficient clearness to all readers capable of reading 'between the lines' of a printed record. For more than nine months, possibly for eleven months, the friends had lived asunder; and now they were together again, by the act of the one who had caused the severance. Having got the better of his hallucination, and come to London in his right mind, Shelley had hunted for Hogg at Lincoln's Inn; hunted for him at the Temple; discovered the chambers where he was a student; declined to wait till the morning for the much-desired interview with his old college chum; constrained 'the clerk at chambers' to give him Hogg's address; and gone off impetuously in quest of the incomparable Hogg at his lodgings, though it was already near the hour when quiet lodging-houses were usually closed for the night. Thus it was that Shelley returned to the friend whom he had charged with trying to seduce his wife. Surely, this return to friendly relations with the man whom he had imagined capable of such iniquity should be regarded as a declaration of Hogg's innocence, as an avowal by Shelley that he had misjudged his friend, and in consequence of monstrous misconception had calumniated him.

(7.) Shelley's merciless, slanderous idolaters say otherwise. These 'friends' (may heaven preserve all future poets from such friends!) insist that, when he thus threw himself into his friend's arms, Shelley still believed Hogg had tried to seduce his wife; still believed him capable of trying to seduce her, and was only showing his superhuman generosity and his divine faculty of forgiving, when he thus _forgave_ the man who, twelve months since, had tried to perpetrate so foul and revolting a crime. Not by the men who are mindful of his human infirmities, but by the men who declare his virtuous nature had no alloy of evil, is it asserted that Shelley rushed into Hogg's arms with these words on his lips: 'It is true you strove to corrupt my bride twelve months since; but I forgive you that little error; so let by-gones be by-gones, and once again let us be "friends for ever!"' Superhuman generosity! divine faculty of forgiveness! If this is divine forgiveness, I can only say that, so far as I am concerned, divine beings are welcome to their monopoly of so vicious a virtue. It is a matter for congratulation that human nature is seldom capable of such generosity. I am alive to Shelley's failings, but I decline to join with his idolaters in crediting him with so peculiar a generosity--a generosity only to be possessed by the meanest of mankind.

(8.) Having thus returned at a late hour of the evening to Hogg's heart, Shelley insisted the next day on taking him to an hotel near St. James' Palace, in order that he should there be re-introduced to Harriett, and once again brought into close and affectionate intimacy with her. Can I be wrong in saying that, in thus re-introducing Hogg to his wife, Shelley declared his previous conviction of his friend's guilty purpose to have been pure misconception?--that Shelley could not have been so careless of his wife's honour, her virtue, his own honour, as to have thus restored Hogg in the November of 1812 to his previous intimacy with Mrs. Shelley, whilst still believing he tried to seduce her in the October of 1811? The Shelleyan zealots declare me altogether wrong. They maintain that in the November of 1812 Shelley still believed Hogg made an attempt on Harriett's virtue in October, 1811, still believed him capable of so dark a crime. They admit it was strange and remarkable that, under these circumstances, Shelley should have again invited Hogg to live, and made him live, in close intimacy with Harriett--still in her eighteenth year. But they insist that a sufficient explanation of conduct so strange and remarkable is afforded by Shelley's superhuman generosity and divine faculty of forgiving.

(9.) Having thus returned to friendship with Hogg, Shelley lived in friendship with him to the last;--so living in friendship with him (the Shelleyan zealots insist) whilst he all the while believed him to have tried to seduce Harriett within eight weeks of her marriage.

(10.) After breaking with Harriett, and joining hands in Free Love with Mary Godwin, Shelley took an early occasion for inviting Hogg to live as intimately with Mary, as he had in former time lived with Harriett. Is it conceivable that Shelley would have invited to this intimacy with his second spouse the man whom he still believed guilty of trying to corrupt his first spouse?

(11.) By his will (dated 18th February, 1817, when he, Hogg, and Mary Godwin were living in affectionate intimacy: and proved more than twenty-two years after his death, _i.e._ on 1st November, 1844), Shelley left Hogg a legacy of 2000_l._--a substantial proof of the affectionate regard in which Shelley to his last hour held his old college friend. It is unusual for a testator to bequeath 2000_l._ to a man whom he believes to have tried to seduce his wife.

(12.) Declaring by acts, and by steady persistence in the friendship never again to be broken or shaken, that he had misjudged Hogg and quarrelled with him through misconception, Shelley by his pen put it upon record that he had wronged his early friend in thinking him vile and treacherous. Of all the egotisms of _Laon and Cythna_, few are of greater biographic value than the stanzas in which the author, speaking of himself in the character of Laon, records how in his youth he was so far misled by envious and deceitful tongues as to bewail the falsehood of his heart's dearest friend, and in due course discovered that, instead of having been really found false, his comrade had only seemed so. In the second canto of the poem it is written:--

'Yes, oft beside the ruined labyrinth
Which skirts the hoary caves of the green deep,
Did Laon and his friend on one grey plinth,
Round whose worn base the wild waves hiss and leap,
Resting at eve, a lofty converse keep:
And that his friend was false, may now be said
Calmly--that he like other men could weep
Tears which are lies, and could betray and spread
Snares for that guileless heart which for his own had bled.'

It is not till he has been torn from Cythna, confined on the column's dizzy height, freed from bondage, cured of madness, and despatched to lead the revolutionary patriots of the Golden City, that Laon encounters again the friend from whom he parted in grief and misconception, and discovers how wrong he was to think evil of him. Recounting in the poem's fifth canto the incidents of his first night and morning in the patriots' camp, Laon says:--

'And now the Power of Good held victory,
So, thro' the labyrinth of many a tent,
Among the silent millions who did lie
In innocent sleep, exultingly I went;
The moon had left Heaven desert now, but lent
From eastern morn the first faint lustre showed
An armèd youth--over his spear he bent
His downward face.--"A friend!" I cried aloud;
And quickly common hopes made freemen understood.

I sate beside him while the morning beam
Crept slowly over Heaven, and talked with him
Of those immortal hopes, a glorious theme!
Which led us forth, until the stars grew dim:
And all the while, methought, his voice did swim,
As if it drownèd in remembrance were
Of thoughts which make the moist eyes overbrim:
At last, when daylight 'gan to fill the air,
He looked on me, and cried in wonder--"Thou art here!"

Then, suddenly, I knew it was the youth
In whom its earliest hopes my spirit found;
But envious tongues had stained his spotless truth,
And thoughtless pride his love in silence bound,
And shame and sorrow mine in toils had wound,
_Whilst he was innocent, and I deluded_;
The truth now came upon me, on the ground
Tears of repenting joy, which fast intruded,
Fell fast, and o'er its peace our mingled spirits brooded.'

Thus it was that, in the poem written during the six brightest months of 1817 (_i.e._ of the summer following the execution of his will), Shelley gave a penitential account of his quarrel _with_, and transient severance _from_, his heart's best friend, taking all the error and shame of the miserable affair to himself; acknowledging he did his friend black injustice in thinking him false, confessing his weak submissiveness to the false and envious tongues that misled him; declaring himself altogether _deluded_, and Hogg altogether innocent of the offences charged against him--altogether blameless in the whole wretched business, unless it was that he had been silent from a proud sense of injury, when by free and candid speech he might have utterly discredited the 'envious tongues,' and dispelled the misconceptions and delusions resulting from their slanderous activity. In the way of poetry, what fuller acquittal, what larger acknowledgment of the wrong done him, could Hogg require than the single line: 'Whilst _he_ was innocent and I deluded?'

(13.) Some readers may think the acknowledgment would have been more effective in simple prose,--may think the avowal suffers in force from the artificiality of its terms,--may think it a pity Shelley did not say in less artful language what he put so gracefully in verse. One may be sure the impetuous Shelley poured the same confession in half a hundred forms of vehement speech into Hogg's private ear. Moreover, he did not pass from the world without putting the same pathetic confession and prayer in less than forty words of strenuous prose. When Hogg, some thirty-five long years after the poet's death, came for the first time on the MS. of _An Essay on Friendship_--the essay mentioned in a previous chapter of this work--he found these dedicatory words on the paper: 'I once had a friend, whom an inextricable multitude of circumstances has forced me to treat with apparent neglect. To him I dedicate this essay. If he finds my own words condemn me, will he not forgive?' In Shelley's hand-writing, these words may well have affected Hogg acutely and profoundly! Penned for his eye, they penetrated his heart! No writer (that I am aware of) has ventured to deny boldly and honestly that this dedicatory note was meant for Hogg, or even to question seriously whether it was not intended for some one else; but petty scribblers by the score have sneered at Hogg's egotism and impudence in taking to himself the dedicatory note, that certainly was meant for no one else.

What more can readers require in the way of evidence that, in respect to the morbid notion which caused his transient quarrel with Hogg, Shelley was the victim of monstrous hallucination? Those who require more evidence on this point, are persons to whom The Real Shelley will never be known.

In arguing this case, I have striven to argue evenly on both sides, as though I were retained by both plaintiff and defendant to discover the truth. I have kept cautiously within my evidences. Possibly, evidences touching the matter have not come under my notice. But I do not think I have missed any writing likely to affect my arguments or conclusions materially. All reliable information respecting the affair must come to us in some way or other from Shelley, Harriett, or Hogg. Any additional statement from Shelley to Hogg's disadvantage would be the mere statement of a sufferer from delusion. Possibly, papers exist, in which Harriett, whilst stating precisely that Hogg attempted to seduce her, gives minute particulars of the alleged attempt. Let us assume that, in her correspondence with Miss Hitchener, and other persons, she was thus communicative, and that Field Place is in a position to produce a bundle of letters, in each of which she accuses Hogg of trying to seduce her, and describes minutely the means by which he tried to achieve his purpose. Such letters, however numerous and precise, would be the mere statements, in chief, of a witness, whom it is impossible to cross-examine,--a witness whose veracity is not unimpeachable; a witness who has been freely charged by Shelleyan apologists with untruth, in respect to several of her numerous statements to her husband's discredit; a witness, moreover, who, to use Mr. William Rossetti's words, was, in her seventeenth year, philosophized by Shelley himself out of the ordinary standard of feminine propriety. It is no uncommon thing for a young woman to imagine an attempt has been made on her honour, when no such attempt has been made. Women have been known to imagine themselves the victims of seduction when no one has seduced them. A case occurred no long while since in one of our law courts, where evidence of a woman's criminal intercourse with her alleged seducer was afforded by notes, made in her own hand-writing, in her private diary, and yet it was proved conclusively that her own written confessions of guilt were romantic and purely imaginative records of incidents that had never really taken place. Some women have a curious aptitude for suspecting men of wishing to seduce them; and it would not be unfair to suggest that the sixteen-years-old school-girl, to whose thoughts Shelley had given an unwholesome direction, was capable of entertaining such a suspicion groundlessly. Moreover, the discovery of such letters should neither occasion surprise, nor dispose the judicial reader to regard them as conclusively evidential of Hogg's guilt; because, if she wrote about the matter at all in her letters, the girl who, from terror or motives of policy, or from imaginative influences, certainly acquiesced in the charge against Hogg, even if she did not deliberately conspire with her sister to trump it up, would naturally write in accordance with the accusation, to which she was a party.

How about Hogg,--the third of the sources of information? He denied the charge. His way of dealing with the Keswick letters was a denial of the charge,--as clear, precise, and strenuous a denial as he could give to the accusation, respecting which he could not, for Shelley's honour's sake, speak precisely to the whole world. He denied the charge again by the way in which he took to himself the dedicatory note to the _Essay on Friendship_. He could not have denied the charge more precisely to the coteries, and every individual cognizant of the vile slander, without exhibiting the poet to the whole world's derision.

What if evidence should even yet be produced that Hogg actually made the attempt? For argument's sake, let us conceive what is in the highest degree improbable, and suppose that letters, written by Hogg himself to Shelley and Harriett, are, even now, put before the world by Field Place, to the conclusive demonstration of the writer's guilt,--letters placing it beyond question that he really made the attempt. What then? The result would comprise the absolute destruction of Shelley's right to be rated with men of honour, or even with men of common decency. Such letters would prove that, within a few days of an attempt on his wife's virtue, and in sure cognizance of the attempt and the maker of it, Shelley wrote in terms of passionate affectionateness to the culprit. They would prove that, knowing Hogg had, only a few weeks since, tried to debauch his bride, Shelley wrote to him, 'You are my bosom friend.' They would prove that in less than fourteen months from the attempt, Shelley survived his faint annoyance at the affair so completely as to be capable of throwing himself into Hogg's arms, saying to him, 'Let us think no more of that unlucky business,' and forthwith inviting him to renew his intimacy with the girl, whom he had tried to seduce. What is the only construction to be put on the conduct of the husband, who brings again into familiar intercourse with his wife the very man whom he knows to have recently tried to seduce her? It cannot be urged that Shelley acted thus on sufficient proof that Hogg was an altered man; for there had been no intercourse between them, by letter or otherwise, since Shelley left Keswick. Yet more,--such evidence of Hogg's guilt would prove that, in introducing him to Mary Godwin, Shelley brought into close intimacy with his second spouse, the man whom he knew to have tried to seduce his first wife within a few weeks of her wedding. Such evidence would, of course, cover Hogg with dark disgrace. But it would, at the same time, cover Shelley with blackest infamy. The Shelleyan enthusiasts would have been less eager to prove Hogg guilty of _the attempt_, had not animosity against Hogg blinded them to what would ensue to Shelley's reputation, should they succeed in proving the charge.

END OF VOL. I.

LONDON:

Printed by STRANGEWAYS & SONS, Tower Street, Upper St. Martin's Lane.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This extract from Charles Grove's letter is taken from the printed copy of the epistle in Hogg's second volume; and the reader should give his attention to the words between brackets which are no part of the letter, but one of the explanatory notes, which the biographer indiscreetly put into the body of his transcripts of original documents, instead of printing them as foot-notes. It was his rule to bracket such editorial notes, and insert his initials after the second bracket. But the careless scribe, and still more careless proof-corrector, sometimes forgot to insert his initials, sometimes forgetting also to insert the brackets. Hence the so-called 'interpolations' of original evidences, for which he has been unfairly reproached by his detractors.

[2] The right name of this seat seems to have been Hill Place. In the _Beauties of England and Wales_ (1813), _Sussex_, p. 97, it is written, 'In the same direction on the right of the road, is an old seat called Hill Place, formerly the property of the late Viscountess Irwin, but now belonging to the Duke of Norfolk.' 'Lady Irwen's Hill Place' would be naturally abbreviated after her death into 'Irwen's Hill,' which again would be corrupted into 'Irving's Hill,' the familiar designation of the place in Shelley's boyhood.

[3] Shelley, as we shall see, was in London, and in urgent need of more money, in October, 1811.

[4] Hogg describes Shelley's rooms as 'being in the corner next the hall of the principal quadrangle of the University College.' 'They are,' he continues, 'on the first floor, and on the right of the entrance, but by reason of the turn in the stairs, when you reach them, they will be upon your left hand.'--HOGG'S _Life_, v. 1, p. 67.

[5] The first Reader in Mineralogy of the University of Oxford, with a Grant from the Crown, was William Buckland, B.D., subsequently the famous Dean of Westminster. From the Oxford University Calendar, it appears that a Crown Grant was assigned to this famous Professor for lecturing on Mineralogy in 1813. Probably the same lecturer gave lectures in the same department of science before receiving the grant, and was the gentleman whose 'dullness' was so afflicting to Mr. Bysshe Shelley.

[6] Biographers differ in spelling Harriett in the case of Miss Westbrook, and also in the case of Miss Grove. Hogg says Harriett Westbrook signed herself 'Harriet,' though Shelley instructed Mr. Medwin the elder to give the name a second _t_. Like Mr. Rossetti, I comply with Shelley's wish. Miss Grove's Christian name is spelt with a second _t_ in the Grove genealogy of Burke's _Landed Gentry_, a record corrected by the representative of the family.

[7] There has been uncertainty about this lady's name. Styled 'Emily' in at least one of Shelley's letters, she is usually styled Eliza in Shelleyan biography. But her real Christian name was Elizabeth. In her affidavit of 10th January, 1817, preserved at the Record Office, the name is so spelt. It has already been remarked in this work that, though usage has made the two several and different names, 'Eliza,' 'Elizabeth,' Isabel, and Isabella, are various forms of the same name, Iza.