Shelley Sees It Through
The Life of Shelley : ae comprised in The Life of Shelley by T. J. Hogg ; the Recollections of Shelley and Byron by E. J. Trelawny; Memoirs of Shelley by T. L. Peacock With an introduction by Humbert Wolfe. 2 vols. (Dent. 15s.) TDOM.AS JEFFERSON Hocc, from Durham, was admitted at University College, Oxford, on February 2nd, 1810 ; and on April 10th, Shelley also " subscribed " to the statutes, in the same register, his grandfather and his father having preceded him at that College. Hogg and Shelley became friends. Both were eccentric undergraduates. Hogg's intel- lectual promise was recognized ; but he " was most unpopular " ; Shelley's freaks of conduct and opinion were feared, " but all acknowledged him to have been very good- humoured and of kind disposition." In March, 1811, Shelley circulated anonymously a provocative pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism, which was hardly in accord- ance with the statutes. Called before a College meeting, which was apparently intended rather to warn than to punish, Shelley would say nothing. The exasperated Master dismissed him, and then Hogg came to declare that, if Shelley was punishable, he was punishable too. Both were expelled.
The companionship of Hogg and Shelley was violently
interrupted in October, 1811, by Hogg's attempt to seduce Shelley's young wife. By degrees Shelley recovered from this blow, and friendly intimacy continued. But Hogg, who was called to the Bar in 1817, was no longer Shelley's monopolist, and after Shelley left England he was not his most prominent friend. Shelley commended him, in a vivid characterization, to Mrs. Gisborne in July, 1820. Hogg became a tolerably successful barrister, surviving Shelley by forty years. In 1832 he contributed some recol- lections of Shelley at Oxford to Bulwer's New Monthly ; and when at length Shelley's son resolved to see an authentic and intimate biography of his father published, Leigh Hunt having declined with conscientious regularity, Hogg appeared to be the appropriate writer. His long acquaintance with Mary Shelley seemed an additional qualification.
The documents retained, and those gathered in, by the Shelley family were set before Hogg, who in 1858 published his first two volumes, dedicated to Lady Shelley. The dedication might seem to claim her acquiescence in the substance of the biography. But it did not require any extreme insight for the reader to see that this work would scarcely gratify the subject's family. In the preface, Hogg abruptly introduced the following instance of the Bathos : " Shelley was great as a roet—divine indeed ; great as a philosopher, as a moralist, as a scholar, as a complete and finished gentleman, great in every respect as a man ; but he was most conspicuously great in that particular excellence, which, in all ages and in all nations, has been invariably the characteristic distinction of the greatest of mankind— he was pre-eminently a lady's man." It was not the Bathos of this which alarmed the trusting souls at Boscombe Manor. In short, there was consternation over "Hogg's book " ; the materials were withdrawn from him, and (though he may have written more) no more of his Biography was published. Lady Shelley, rapidly putting forth the Shelley Memorials, asserted the family control of the subject anew.
Apart from the justice of his views on Shelley—a topic which finds in M. Humbert Wolfe, prefacing the present reprint of Hogg's performance, a spirited commentator— Hogg thoroughly deserved to be cut short after his two volumes. A less coherent or relevant production can scarcely have been printed in England, where, as the French formerly declared, we cannot write books. The reprint is indeed welcome, for, conspicuous as Hogg's name is among Shelley's biographers, his work has always been scarce. It now becomes really accessible. To say that it offers nothing of value would be an exaggeration ; it contains many singular and some celebrated passages, presenting if not Shelley, a piece of him completed by fancy and egotism into a sort of hero. Of Hogg's degree of. truthfulness, Mr. Wolfe does not think much, and he supports his opinion by citing Hogg v. Hogg, without going further ; he does enough. Allow Hogg his _reconstructive facility, attribute his peculiar outrages on Shelley's memory to whatever cause you will—and still, his book remains the most pre- posterous, incompetent -book. What had Hogg in mind ? He did not know from one hour to another. A life of Shelley, yes ; an autobiography of Hogg, certainly ; opinions of a gentleman, to be sure ; and, " show these scribbling varlets how to write "—that too. These aims recur capriciously in the book, which nevertheless has additional means of mazy confusion. Among the outbursts against Oxford and patronage, essays on nudity and on vegetarianism, descriptions of Hogg's failure to get gentlemanly food at Wayside inns and the rest, suddenly we find masses of corre- spondence, or fragments of prose or verse compositions, thrust in without annotation and abandoned without trans- ition. To what extent the letters were mangled by Hogg, we do not know ; that they were mangled is known through Bowden, who had an opportunity to see that much.
• Here then is the biography of Shelley by the elderly, selfish and bewildered Hogg, for everybody's reading ; and with it are republished two other related works, which have not been hard to obtain but which are very judiciously put forth together with Hogg's. Trelawny met Shelley late in his course, and stayed on himself until within living memory ; until, indeed, his own astonishing faculty for varying his statements about Shelley had become a byword. It is the narrative that he published in 1858 which reappears
in the present compendium. In the Recollections, we have a writer, and a designer of biography, infinitely beyond ,:the flummery of Hogg, and although Trelawny-may have forgotten much and dramatized accordingly, the whole effect is one of striking probability. Instead of garrulous dotage, he brings in a gusty intensity of light and air. The light of his intelligent energy is directed on a Shelley of consistent make : " it is the great merit of Mr. Trelawny," _wrote Richard Garnett in reviewing Trelawny's expanded 'reminiscences of 1878, " to have recognized that Shelley's life was a poem of which his works were but a phase, and to have concerned himself with it in this aspect to the exclusion of literary criticism, of which there is always enough."
The third work under notice, Peacock's Memoirs, began as a review of Hogg, Trelawny, and the unimportant compiler Middleton. Peacock writes with placid good sense,- quietly correcting some of Hogg's notions, and offering some recol- lections. Before he reached the second part of his papers, the Shelley Memorials had appeared, and in them Lady Shelley had announced the withdrawal of the Boscombe archives from Hogg.. Peacock continued his corrective reviewing and his recollections. His whole Memoirs are not extensive (an appendix of letters from Shelley increases their bulk), but they are impressive ; they come from a mind at ease, a mind of splendid penetration and experience in human qualities. So, theLife of Shelley by several hands becomes balanced and concluded handsomely. The repub, lication of these writings was a capital.idea, and the volumes will be found not only useful but beautiful. Mr. Wolfe's introduction relates principally to the misdeeds of Hogg, but it is one of his most attractive and succinct essays in criticism. There are many illustrations of persons and places, all excellent in themselves ; but the Roman-Emperor bust of Shelley (at Viareggio) employed for the frontispiece is a sample of apocryphal zeal shapelier than Hogg's, but
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