John Cordy Jeaffreson

“ My conception of the Oxonian Shelley is that he was an impetuous, unruly, combative young scatterbrain; disloyal and deceitful to his parents; certainly capable of falsehood in comparatively small matters to other people; but I cannot believe he could have been so false to his own soul, so prodigiously false to his own convictions on the most awful of all solemn subjects, as to write and seek a publisher for a serious argument against the belief in God, whilst he himself believed in the Deity. ”

“ Englishmen like people to be truthful, and in the long-run never fail to honour the man, who, having the courage of his opinions, proclaims them fearlessly, even though they may quarrel with him for a season, because he tells the truth too pugnaciously, or persists in telling them truths they don’t wish to think about. To commend him to lovers of truth, the Shelleyan idolaters declare the poet to have been, from his boyhood till his death, daringly, unfalteringly, unwaveringly, invariably truthful. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Addressing the great without sycophancy, he lived in good-fellowship with all men. Instead of trying to force his son’s affections, he would have been content to see him marry Harriett Grove,—a girl of no fortune, and of a family something nearer doubtless, but only something nearer, the aristocracy than the small squireens and gentle yeomanry from whom he was himself descended. All he had asked of the boy, who with good conduct would succeed to a noble fortune, was to marry a gentlewoman, fit to be his mother’s daughter and the sister of his sisters. ”

“ Having no wish to see the Lady Olympia die in so unsuitable a place, Wolfstein, instead of calling for Megalena, replies, ‘Dearest Lady Olympia, compose yourself, I beseech you. What, what agitates you?’
‘Oh! pardon me, pardon me,’ exclaims the Lady Olympia, with ‘maniac wildness,’ ‘pardon a wretched female who knows not what she does! Oh! resistlessly am I impelled to this avowal; resistlessly am I impelled to declare to you, that I love you! adore you to distraction!—Will you return my affection? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The kindly gentleman, who declared he had furnished Archdeacon Paley (or ‘Palley,’ as the Member for New Shoreham pronounced the name) with all the main arguments for the ‘Evidences,’ could persuade himself that his smile or frown determined the course of Ministers and Administrations. Whilst the Oxonian Shelley liked to imagine himself in parliament, his father delighted in imagining himself the very soul of parliament. So imaginative a father was not likely to vacate his seat for the advantage of so imaginative a son. ”

“ Of course the lady, who gave money to her two children as they wanted it, was aware that, to control them for any considerable period, she must be mindful of their humours and govern them with gentleness; that to retain her power over them she must drive with a light rein and seldom crack the whip. Having opened Shelley’s eyes to Hogg’s iniquity, she was clever enough to see and say what he saw and said on questions of poetry and social science. ”

“ Is it not conceivable, also, that in their sympathy with his distress for the loss of Harriett Grove, and in their affectionate desire to restore him to his usual cheerfulness, the sisters at Field Place conspired to remind him that their cousin Harriett was not the only beautiful Harriett in the universe, and to lure him into consoling himself for Harriett Grove’s disdain with Harriett Westbrook’s devotion? No doubt Miss Hellen Shelley and Miss Mary Shelley were full young for match-makers. But girls sometimes take to match-making, no less than to flirtation, before their teens. ”

“ The work of creating the romantic Shelley, and endowing him with personal and moral graces, never conspicuous in the real Shelley, was begun not long after the poet’s death, when Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams induced Clint to compose the fancy picture, to which the world is, through the engraver’s art, indebted for its very erroneous conception of Shelley’s personal aspect. Who has not, through the engraver’s art, gazed on the face of that charming portraiture: a face so remarkable for gentle delicacy and symmetrical loveliness? ”

“ When ‘society’ is invited to consider and pass judgment on a new mésalliance, it is in the nature of things for the unpleasant and reprehensible features of the affair to be magnified and multiplied by social sentiment. On hearing that young Shelley of Field Place had surpassed all his previous offences by running off to Scotland with an innkeeper’s daughter, to his father’s unutterable wrath and his mother’s grief and dismay, the Sussex families imagined something far more shocking than the actual incident. ”

“ Harriett was well educated,—writing excellent letters of gracefully fluent penmanship: so familiar with French, that during her six weeks’ stay at Edinburgh, she found a congenial occupation in translating one of Madame Cottin’s novels into English; fond of reading sound literature by herself, no less than to attentive auditors; and possessing so much taste and aptitude for study that Shelley delighted in teaching her Latin, and brought her so quickly forward in it, that before the end of 1812, she was reading the Horatian Odes with interest, if not without difficulty. ”

“ It was natural for her to think no young man could approach her beautiful sister without regarding her passionately, and seizing the earliest occasion for the gratification of his desire. Taking this view of Hogg and his peculiar intimacy with Harriett, it is conceivable that Miss Westbrook was at times less mindful of her strictly personal reasons for disliking the young gentleman, than of the dangers from which she desired to save her sister. It is not surprising that she resolved to put an end to an intimacy so likely to tarnish Harriett’s reputation, and even make her a faithless wife. ”

“ In proportion as she is young and foolish, a bride is apt to regard her husband’s closest male friend with jealousy and antagonism. Harriett was a mere girl, and no wiser than most girls of her age. Of her own mere motion she would have been sure to think Hogg was overvalued by her husband. Living so much under Eliza’s influence she necessarily wished him to stand lower in her husband’s favour. But I cannot think she did or said anything for the purpose of causing Shelley to imagine Hogg had made an attempt on her virtue. ”

“ There is a wide difference between a demand for the renunciation of opinions and a demand for abstinence from noisy and aggressive assertion of them; and the father who requires a youngster in his nonage to hold his pen and tongue on certain subjects of difficult and perilous controversy is guilty of no despotic excess of paternal authority. The forbearance which Mr. Timothy Shelley had required of his son was in truth nothing more than the forbearance which William Godwin was already urging the youngster to exercise for his own advantage. ”

“ Bysshe Shelley had already begun to build the egregious Castle which he never finished, though he is said, by the unreliable Medwin, to have spent 80,000l. upon it.
If he ever hoped for happiness in his later time, the hope was disappointed. After he had married his daughters, and sent his sons into life, the passion for money, which had long overpowered the other forces of his nature, developed even to miserly madness. In other respects the strain of insanity, that had given him a lunatic for an uncle, displayed itself in his manifold eccentricities. ”

“ Like the Byron of Southwell and Cambridge, the Shelley of Field Place and Oxford, seized every convenient occasion for blazing away with powder and ball, and perfecting himself in the use of ‘the hair-trigger,’—a practice that would have been more remarkable in each of the poets, had it not been usual in the days of duelling for youngsters to regard pistol-practice as an important part of the education of every gentleman, who in his way through life might at any moment be invited to exchange shots at ten paces. ”

“ To escape the disagreeable necessity of thinking him deliberately untruthful, Thomas Love Peacock had recourse to the notion that his friend was the victim of ‘semi-delusions.’ With all his desire to palliate his friend’s besetting frailty, so as to relieve it of the odium of sheer untruthfulness, Peacock, in his inability to rate the delusive fancies as sincere and perfect delusions, came to the conclusion that they were only ‘semi-delusions;’ that the mis-statements of the poet’s mouth and pen were referable in equal proportions to delusive fancy and influences distinct from delusion. ”

“ Possibly the sister, whom he used to adore and extol to Hogg, had been a creature of his imagination. Obviously it was his duty to put this view of the case before Hogg, so that so excellent a man should not be under misconceptions, arising from a friend’s imaginativeness and delusive speech, link himself for life with an uncongenial and miserably insufficient spouse. To Shelley it was no small trouble that his pen was powerless to make Hogg believe, either that Elizabeth was greatly altered, or that she had been greatly misrepresented to him. ”

“ It does not follow, however, that the Life is disfigured by no statements to be fairly rated as deliberate misrepresentations. Resenting the calumnies, that have been poured on Hogg since his death; resenting more especially the malice of those, who would fain extort evidence to the biographer’s infamy from what is mere evidence of one of Shelley’s wildest and most unwholesome delusions; I wish I were in a position to declare the volumes altogether pure of falsehood. ”