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| John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781) Image source: Wikipedia |
had betrayed her two
years before by transferring his attentions to her younger sister. “But NOW..
mortification, grief, agony are all forgot”. Her exaltation in the feeling of
the moment is in that capitalized “now”. The bliss of
secret meetings during the heat of the summer was short-lived because the
younger sister was ill; and slowly dying. The older girl caught between two
loves, sisterly and erotic, had to decide who was owed the greatest love of
all, and in the act she believed would define her, refused to marry the artist,
who threatened to kill himself. So, in the autumn, shocked by his selfish
histrionics that profaned a family’s grief, she renounced him for ever.
Thomas Lawrence’s vacillations
over Sarah Siddons’ elder daughters, Sally and Maria, was more of a Romantic
psychodrama about narcissism and repressed sexuality than true love story, that
is like a rehearsal for Shelley and Byron’s experiments in free love eighteen
years later, practising on two young women equally intent on self-discovery and
testing the limits of self-determination.
The women were the casualties of
male egotism and narcissism, but they started on the adventure voluntarily, all
of them hoping for “an immortality of passion” and cheated “into a swamp, a
fire”3. Then, hurt, tormented by divisive emotions of jealousy and
guilt, they saw “what evil passion free love assured, what tenderness it
dissolves; how it abused affections that should be the solace and balm of life,
into a destroying scourge"5
The inspiring libertarian philosophy, shining imagery, the
swooningly seductive verse and solitary heroic attitudes of Romanticism were
pernicious when not accompanied by consideration for other people’s feelings.
Too often, these were treated as jarring details that would spoil the
aesthetic, like the stripes of Wellington’s military sash denoting his rank of Generallisimo
during the Napoleonic Wars that Lawrence blithely disregarded.6
In the end, on the path to reconciling humanity with its
existence, fact and reason would have to intervene in the life of sensations.
Keats, the least selfish in personal character of all the Romantic
poet-philosophers, tried to unravel this knot in Hyperion:
Knowledge
enormous makes a god of me,
Names,
deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions
The poet of instant feeling, of mystic union with external
essences, the worshipper of Beauty and belief in salvation through imagination,
is grappling with real political facts and events. Hyperion, abandoned by Keats partly because of its Miltonic artificiality
compared to the new, purer poetry he wanted to write, the deceptively
effortless music of To Autumn, was
his only poem approved of unreservedly by both Byron and Shelley, the classically
educated and far more politically engaged poets. “A fine monument”, Byron allowed,
even “sublime”.7
The main problem for Keats had been reconciling an objective
narration of the development of the intellect, with the personal and Romantic,8 the eternal dilemma of art to be detached and
immediate at the same time, to be the ocean and the drop. His poetic vocation
had been “to unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain”,9 the goal of every religion, and more than any of us can hope
for.
1 Shelley, Adonais
2 Sally Siddons’ letters
quoted by FMW Parsons, The Incomparable
Siddons
3 Keats, Endymion
4 Ibid.
5 Claire Clairmont’s memoir
discovered and quoted by Daisy Hay, Young
Romantics, Bloomsbury, 2010
6 Jacob Simon, Thomas Lawrence NPG research programme,
www.npg.org.uk
7 Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats p 409
8 Ibid. p408
9 Keats, Lamia
