Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

790
SHELLEY
in October, Here he met a young Durham man, Thomas
Jefferson Hogg, who had preceded him in the university
by a couple of months; the two youths at once struck up
a warm and intimate friendship. Shelley had at this
time a love for chemical experiment, as well as for poetry,
philosophy, and classical study, and was in all his tastes
and bearing an enthusiast. Hogg was not in the least an
enthusiast, rather a cynic, but he also was a steady and
well-read classical student. In religious matters both
were sceptics, or indeed decided anti-Christians; whether
Hogg, as the senior and more informed disputant,
pioneered Shelley into strict atheism, or whether Shelley,
as the more impassioned and unflinching speculator,
outran the easy-going jeering Hogg, is a moot point; we
incline to the latter opinion. Certain it is that each egged
on the other by perpetual disquisition on abstruse sub¬
jects, conducted partly for the sake of truth and partly
for that of mental exercitation, without on either side any
disposition to bow to authority or stop short of extreme
conclusions. The upshot of this habit was that Shelley
and Hogg, at the close of some five months of happy and
uneventful academic life, got expelled from the university.
Shelley—for he alone figures as the writer of the “ little
syllabus,” although there can be no doubt that Hogg was
his confidant and coadjutor throughout—published anony¬
mously a pamphlet or flysheet entitled The Necessity of
Atheism, which he sent round, or intended to send round,
to all sorts of people as an invitation or challenge to dis¬
cussion. It amounted to saying that neither reason nor
testimony is adequate to establish the existence of a
deity, and that nothing short of a personal individual self¬
revelation of the deity would be sufficient. The college
authorities heard of the pamphlet, somehow identified
Shelley as its author, and summoned him before them—
“ our master, and two or three of the fellows.” The
pamphlet was produced, and Shelley was required to say
whether he had written it or not. The youth declined to
answer the question, and was expelled by a written
sentence, ready drawn up. Hogg was next summoned,
with a result practically the same. The precise details of
this transaction have been much controverted; the best
evidence is that which appears on the college records,
showing that both Hogg and Shelley (Hogg is there
named first) were expelled for “ contumaciously refusing to
answer questions,” and for “ repeatedly declining to dis¬
avow ” the authorship. Thus they were dismissed as being
mutineers against academic authority, in a case pregnant
with the suspicion—not the proof—of atheism; but
how the authorities could know beforehand that the two
undergraduates would be contumacious and stiff against
disavowal, so as to give warrant for written sentences
ready drawn up, is nowhere explained. Possibly the
sentences were worded without ground assigned, and
would only have been produced in terrorem had the
young men proved more malleable. The date of this
incident was 25th March 1811.
Shelley and Hogg came up to London, where Shelley
was soon left alone, as his friend went to York to study
conveyancing. Percy and his incensed father did not at
once come to terms, and for a while he had no resource
beyond pocket-money saved up by his sisters (four in
number altogether) and sent round to him, sometimes by
the hand of a singularly pretty school-fellow, Miss Harriet
Westbrook, daughter of a retired and moderately opulent
hotel-keeper. Shelley, especially in early youth, had a
somewhat “ priggish ” turn for moralizing and argumenta¬
tion, and a decided mania for proselytizing; his school¬
girl sisters, and their little Methodist friend Miss West¬
brook, aged between fifteen and sixteen, must all be
enlightened and converted to anti-Christianity. He there¬
fore cultivated the society of Harriet, calling at the house
of her father, and being encouraged in his assiduity by
her much older sister Eliza. Harriet not unnaturally
fell in love with him; and he, though not it would seem
at any time ardently in love with her, dallied along the
flowery pathway which leads to sentiment and a definite
courtship. This was not his first love-affair; for he had
but a very few months before been courting his cousin
Miss Harriet Grove, who, alarmed at his heterodoxies,
finally broke off with him—to his no small grief and per¬
turbation at the time. It is averred, and seemingly with
truth, that Shelley never indulged in any sensual or dis¬
sipated amour; and, as he advances in life, it becomes
apparent that, though capable of the passion of love, and
unusually prone to regard with much effusion of sentiment
women who interested his mind and heart, the mere
attraction of a pretty face or an alluring figure left him
unenthralled. After a while Percy was reconciled to his
father, revisited his family in Sussex, and then stayed with
a cousin in Wales. Hence he was recalled to London by
Miss Harriet Westbrook, who wrote complaining of her
father’s resolve to send her back to her school, in which
she was now regarded with repulsion as having become too
apt a pupil of the atheist Shelley. He replied counselling
resistance. “She wrote to say ” (these are the words of
Shelley in a letter to Hogg, dating towards the end of
July 1811) “that resistance was useless, but that she
would fly with me, and threw herself upon my protection.”
Shelley therefore returned to London, where he found
Harriet agitated and wavering; finally they agreed to
elope, travelled in haste to Edinburgh, and there, according
to the law of Scotland, became husband and wife on 28th
August. Shelley, it should be understood, had by this
time openly broken, not only with the dogmas and conven¬
tions of Christian religion, but with many of the institu¬
tions of Christian polity, and in especial with such as
enforce and regulate marriage; he held—with William
Godwin and some other theorists—that marriage ought to
be simply a voluntary relation between a man and a
woman, to be assumed at joint option and terminated at
the after-option of either party. If therefore he had acted
upon his personal conviction of the right, he would never
have wedded Harriet, whether by Scotch, English, or any
other law; but he waived his own theory in favour of the
consideration that in such an experiment the woman’s
stake, and the disadvantages accruing to her, are out of
all comparison with the man’s. His conduct therefore
was so far entirely honourable; and, if it derogated from
a principle of his own (a principle which, however con¬
trary to the morality of other people, was and always
remained matter of genuine conviction on his individual
part), this was only in deference to a higher and more
imperious standard of right.
Harriet Shelley was not only beautiful; she was
amiable, accommodating, adequately well educated and
well bred. She liked reading, and her reading was not
strictly frivolous. But she could not (as Shelley said at a
later date) “ feel poetry and understand philosophy.” Her
attractions were all on the surface; there was (to use a
common phrase) “nothing particular in her.” For nearly
three years Shelley and she led a shifting sort of life upon
an income of <£400 a year, one-half of which was allowed
(after his first severe indignation at the mesalliance was
past) by Mr Timothy Shelley, and the other half by Mr
Westbrook. The spouses left Edinburgh for York and
the society of Hogg; broke with him upon a charge made
by Harriet, and evidently fully believed by Shelley at the
time, that, during a temporary absence of his upon business
in. Sussex, Hogg had tried to seduce her (this quarrel was
entirely made up at the end of about a year); moved off