Shelley: The Pursuit (11 page)

For Shelley, intoxicated by the freedom which the university gave in comparison to Eton, and yet suffocated by the atmosphere of entrenched, comfortable, and venal clerical
auctoritas
, Oxford rapidly took shape in his mind as a personal challenge, a fortress of superstition and mediocrity, which required above all rousing from its antiquated slumbers; it had to be outraged by sheer excess of behaviour, and taken by a dazzling intellectual storm. It was a Bastille of the spirit, and he had arrived in person to open its gates.

Shelley was not much affected by the official life of the college, for he swiftly organized his own, making a point of keeping an outlandish timetable, frequently reading sixteen hours a day, and often sleeping between 6 and 10 in the evening curled up like an animal on his hearthrug in front of the fire, then getting up to talk and conduct chemical experiments throughout the night. It was also noted that the talking would sometimes take place in his sleep ‘incoherently for a long while’.
⁵
Very occasionally he held informal parties, and a note has survived inviting a fellow-undergraduate, James Roe, to ‘wine & poetry in my room’.
⁶
He detested dining in evening Hall, and missed it (by oversleeping) as often as possible. He pushed out of the very few lectures he attended before they were over; and had a trick of leaping up the moment morning chapel was finished, so that he was demonstrably the first out, effecting ‘a ludicrously precipitate retreat to his rooms’.
⁷
To complete the public image of a brilliant young heretic, Shelley grew his hair long at a time when the cab-man crew-cut was fashionable, and purchased from his ‘Oxford Taylor’s Messers Dry’, one ‘superfine olive coat with Gilt buttons’ and a set of memorable striped marcela waistcoats.
⁸

The one institution at Oxford which Shelley was disposed to take seriously was Slatter and Munday’s, and having introduced the proprietors to
Zastrozzi
, he was soon planning a whole series of new publications. To start with there was his second gothic romance
St Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian
. It had been printed by Stockdale, but December saw it prominently displayed on Slatter’s shelves
under the anonymous authorship of ‘A Gentleman of the University of Oxford’. Besides the lurid horror and violence of the previous book, it contained dashes of erotic melodrama and flickerings of progressive social theory from Condorcet, Paine and Godwin. Ginotti, its sinister Italianate protagonist, had a double identity and was also cursed with the secret of Eternal Life, another Wandering Jew, and in his long, raving monologues, one can recognize the mental features of his undergraduate creator:

From my earliest youth, before it was quenched by complete satiation,
curiosity
, and a desire of unveiling the latent mysterious of nature, was the passion by which all the other emotions of my mind were intellectually organised. . . . Love I cared not for, and wondered why men perversely sought to ally themselves to weakness. Natural philosophy [
i.e. physical science
] at last became the peculiar science to which I directed my eager enquiries; thence I was led into a train of labyrinthine meditations. I thought of
death
. . . .
⁹

Copies were distributed to his Oxford acquaintances, to various relations in Sussex, anonymously to a number of university Fellows and to his small circle of admirers at his sisters’ school in Clapham — including the beautiful girl who had been nominated to enact Venus in the
Fête Champêtre
¹⁰
and whose name he later learnt was Harriet Westbrook. But it took sterner stuff to shake Bodley’s dome.

It was through fierce argument about the relative merits of Italian and German gothic writers that Shelley made his one close friend at Oxford. Shelley first met Thomas Jefferson Hogg at one of the detested dinners in Hall early in November; and started a discussion which led back to his rooms, where Hogg was duly impressed and stayed on until dawn. Visits were reciprocated, and Hogg soon learnt to recognize the familiar sound of Shelley’s footsteps ‘running through the quiet quadrangle in the still night’.
¹¹
A shared feeling of ridicule for the college authorities, and a mutual enthusiasm for speculative opinions and heretical tastes rapidly drew the two young men together, and the friendship became by far in a way the most important influence on Shelley at Oxford; while Hogg was later to call Shelley ‘a whole university in himself to me’. Hogg was Shelley’s first real intimacy outside the world of Field Place, and the friendship was to grow into a passionate attachment, so that far more truly than Harriet Grove, one can say that T. J. Hogg was Shelley’s first love affair.

At the time of their meeting, Hogg was aged 18 like Shelley, but had already spent a summer term at University College. He was a broad, stocky figure beside Shelley’s tall elegant outline, and a silhouette of him wearing the academical tasselled cap shows a curling, rather supercilious lip, and a fine, prominent
Roman nose, with his head tilted in a sharply inquisitorial manner. His background was very different from Shelley’s, coming from solid professional middle-class stock in northern England, where his father, John Hogg, was a lawyer and administrator with respectable connections with the clergy of Durham Cathedral. The large family lived at Norton Durham, and young Hogg was intended for the Law. Shelley was attracted by his wide reading in contemporary literature and political philosophy, and his acutely logical mind which frequently produced savage humour at the expense of opponents, and also of the college authorities. At the same time there was something curiously gullible and bovine about Hogg’s temperament, which made him both a loyal admirer of Shelley’s extravagance, and the perfect, tireless audience for Shelley’s nocturnal fantasies and speculative monologues. Hogg would listen to these entranced, egging Shelley on with his own suggestions and ironic asides, and years later in
The Life of Shelley
[1]
he recorded them with immense gusto as if he could remember every word:

The galvanic battery is a new engine; it has been used hitherto to an insignificant extent, yet has it wrought wonders already; what will not an extraordinary combination of troughs, of colossal magnitude, a well arranged system of hundreds of metallic plates, effect? The balloon has not yet received the perfection of which it is surely capable. . . . Why are we still so ignorant of the interior of Africa? — why do we not despatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction, and to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks? The shadow of the first balloon, which a vertical sun would project precisely underneath it, as it glided silently over that hitherto unhappy country, would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate slavery for ever. . . . ‘What do you say of metaphysics?’ I continued. . . . ‘Ay, metaphysics,’ he said, in a solemn tone, and with a mysterious air, ‘that is a noble study indeed! If it were possible to make any discoveries there, they would be more valuable than anything the chemists have done, or could do; they would disclose the
analysis of the mind, and not of mere matter!’ Then rising from his chair, he paced slowly about the room, with prodigious strides, and discoursed of souls with still greater animation and vehemence than he had displayed in treating of gases — of a future state — and especially of a former state — of pre-existence, obscured for a time through the suspension of consciousness — of personal identity, and also of ethical philosophy . . . until he suddenly remarked that the fire was nearly out, and the candles glimmering in their sockets, when he hastily apologised for remaining so long.
¹²

Shelley and Hogg would frequently study in each other’s rooms, and work on chosen authors simultaneously. Hogg casually revealed that he too had written a romance, provisionally entitled
Leonora
, and Shelley eagerly read the manuscript, relishing the atheistical undertones. He promised to send it instantly to the obliging Mr Stockdale. When Shelley slept on the hearthrug, Hogg would read on quietly at the table, and he was always amazed by the way Shelley would abruptly awake after a few hours, rubbing his hair wildly and launching without pause into a rapid and highly involved discussion of some abstruse problem.

In the afternoons they usually walked out together in the countryside round Oxford, encountering various bizarre adventures, which Hogg liked to recall as episodes out of Cervantes with himself as the solid Sancho Panza and Shelley as the amiably lunatic Don Quixote. Once there was a boy beating a donkey; then a gipsy waif begging for milk; a dog in a farmyard that bit off Shelley’s coat-tail; and a secret garden into which Shelley trespassed, overcome by the enchantment, and then fled precipitantly away through a hedge. Then there were Shelley’s strange pastimes, playing endless ducks-and-drakes on the mere below Shotover Hill; sailing paper boats on every available pond and puddle until Hogg turned blue with cold and irritation in the winter air; and the inevitable half hour of shooting practice with a fine pair of duelling pistols which Shelley tucked into his topcoat, the favourite target being the round parliamentary franking on letters sent from Field Place pinned up against a tree.
¹³

The fascination with fire-arms was one of many elements in Shelley’s character which Hogg, a very down-to-earth personality despite all his masterly sarcasms, could never really account for. Another was Shelley’s almost maniac disregard, on certain occasions, for the commonplace decencies of normal public behaviour, as the time when he seized a baby out of its mother’s arms while crossing Magdalen Bridge and began earnestly to question it about the nature of its Platonic pre-existence so that he might prove a point in an argument he was having with Hogg concerning metempsychosis. A third, and even more significant facet, which Hogg all his life tended to discount as mere comic ‘fancy’, was Shelley’s natural and sometimes overwhelming sense of the macabre.
Hogg remembered with surprise Shelley’s reaction to one of his own heavy-humoured remarks about reading too much, without really appreciating its significance. ‘ “If I were to read as long as you read, Shelley, my hair and teeth would be strewed about on the floor, and my eyes would slip down my cheeks . . . or at least I should become so weary and nervous that I should not know whether it were so or not.” [Shelley] began to scrape the carpet with his feet, as if teeth were actually lying upon it, and he look fixedly at my face, and his lively fancy represented the empty sockets; his imagination was excited . . . .’
¹⁴
Four years later Shelley was to induce violent hysteria in a girl by exactly the same piece of quaint ‘fancy’.

But in the ripening friendship of Shelley and Hogg, these were mere details. Their real identity of purpose and outlook was formed in the furnace of political discussion, and although Hogg chose not to recall the fact in after years, it would seem that the young legal-minded egalitarian from Durham was highly influential in introducing Shelley to new texts and doctrines. From Shelley’s few letters of the period, and his expression of political views, their intellectual diet seems to have been a richer and richer one of sceptics and radicals: David Hume and Gibbon, Voltaire and Condorcet, Paine and Franklin, Rousseau, Godwin and even the political economist Adam Smith.
¹⁵
Shelley also began to fasten on all the political news he could gather; he became familiar with Leigh Hunt’s
Examiner
, William Cobbett’s plebeian troubleshooter the
Political Register
, and he followed the struggles of Sir Francis Burdett, the radical MP for Westminster, and the trial of Peter Finnerty, an Irish journalist who had reported scathingly on the military expedition to Walcheren in the Low Countries.
¹⁶
The Whig alignment that he had inherited from his Sussex background of Sir Bysshe and Timothy and the Duke of Norfolk, gradually fell away in the heat of their night-long discussions, and he moved towards the extra-parliamentary groups of intellectuals and French-inspired revolutionary activists. Hogg described an undergraduate ‘stranger’, knowing only of Shelley through his political disputations and the ‘short argumentative essays which he composed as voluntary exercises’, imagining that he had become totally possessed by the spirit of Hume, ‘ “or rather, he represents one of the enthusiastic and animated materialists of the French school, whom revolutionary violence lately intercepted at an early age in his philosophical career” ’.
¹⁷
Gradually Shelley realized that his next appearance on Slatter and Munday’s shelves would have to be in a more radical cause, aiming openly at public authority.

Yet there was far more growing between Shelley and Hogg than simply political sympathy. Hogg found Shelley remarkably frank about his own private feelings and affairs, and he talked for hours about Field Place, and his concept of the ideal woman which he would discuss with ‘a curious fastidiousness’. He
talked of the differences between physical and extra-physical passion, and in long, thoughtful self-examinations, which Hogg also apparently remembered in detail, Shelley tactfully introduced the presence of his sisters:

‘The love of the sexes, however pure, still retains some taint of earthly grossness; we must not admit it within the sanctuary.’ He was silent for several minutes, and his anxiety visibly increased. ‘The love of a mother for a child is more refined; it is more disinterested, more spiritual; but,’ he added, after some reflection, ‘the very existence of the child still connects it with the passion which we have discarded,’ and here lapsed into his former musings. ‘The love a sister bears towards a sister,’ he exclaimed abruptly, and with an air of triumph, ‘is unexceptionable.’
¹⁸