Out of the killing sun

PART FIVE OF ROMANTIC FICTIONS AND CASUALTIES

 Adam Buck, Two Sisters, print, 1796. London.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Sense and sensibility, reason and passion, love and illusion, neoclassicism and romanticism dancing on the eve of cataclysm.
During the years 1795 to 1797, while the two elder Siddons sisters were engaged in their own danse macabre with Thomas Lawrence, Jane Austen wrote her first draft of the novel that was eventually published in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility.

It should have been the end, the two beautiful girls consumed by passion and disease, but the Tragic Muse had another daughter, only nine years old when her eldest sister died, a child with a name like the peal of golden bells under a blue sky, a tiny Buddha with a ferocious will [1] and eyes that glared like a torch in the night on the charades and vacillations of grown ups. 

After Sir Thomas Lawrence, Cecilia Combe, (née Siddons), 1798. Lithograph by Richard James Lane, printed by Charles Joseph Hullmandel, published by Joseph Dickinson,
May 1830. © National Portrait Gallery, London. She glares out of the picture with fanatical fervour, lowering her brows like her mother did in dramatic parts.

Her resemblance to the second of her elder sisters was so close in "all the dazzling, frightful sort of beauty that irradiated the countenance of Maria" [2] that she made the Tragic Muse shudder.

She was designated the last companion of the goddess, the comfort of her melancholy age, and custodian of her shrine. For twenty-eight years the purpose of her existence was to serve her mother, who stared back at her with vacant eyes, in "apparent deadness and indifference to everything". [3]

But the youngest daughter had a flame inside her that would not be quenched.  She had a gift denied her sisters. She did not breathe the same fatal air as they had done. She outlived her mother to write her own last act. She was determined that it would be not be a tragic one.

Her sisters' ghosts haunted her girlhood, her memory of them based more on other people’s accounts than her own recollections; they were cautionary figures from myth, glimpsed in faded portraits and drawings, girls who should have been entwined in their youthful loveliness, but were sundered by bitterness, wraiths straying in the seductive heat of their mother's and an artist's imaginations, to fall and drown in the pool of Narcissus.

In 1798, the two elder daughters of the Tragic Muse had pursued love to give them individual identity in a revolutionary world that seemed to offer a new dawn to men and women. They had hoped, like the two young step-sisters who wnent on an adventure of free love with Shelley and Byron in the lakes and mountains of Europe sixteen years later, to find "an immortality of passion."[4]

Romantic Fictions and Casualties

Part Four:

The Prophetess and the Muse

Shortly after the death of the eldest daughter of The Tragic Muse, whom he had once thought he loved, in the same year of 1803, the artist found his ideal of physical and intellectual femininity personified in an elegant and composed woman, a refined and independent spirit who understood his temperament and his art. She was about the same age as the daughter of tragedy, perhaps a few years older, tall and dark like her, but uncomplicated by illness and sisters.

She was a model of discretion as much as beauty, a social sophisticate who made no demands on him. She did not need marriage to consummate their friendship so not a breath of scandal marred the artist's reputation ever again. Her gratification came from inspiring and guiding him to create works that would invest her with immortality by association. She was his perfect muse.

The shining culmination of the artist's love of his muse:

Sir Thomas Lawrence. Mrs. Jens Wolff, 1803 - 1815. 

© The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Kimball Collection.
At the time she first met Lawrence, Isabella Anne Hutchinson was unhappily married to the Danish diplomat and art collector Jens Wolff from whom she later separated in 1810.

He spent twelve years painting her portrait, and it was the most emotionally tender image of a woman he ever created.

The éclat of her splendid aquiline profile, gracefully bent in contemplation of Michelangelo's drawings, recalled the artlessly drooping head of the dead girl he had tried to love, listening to her own thoughts, composing her own songs. If he had been a woman, this was how he would like to have been painted, and loved.


The Tragic Muse carried on working for a few more years after her eldest daughter's death, but she had lost some of her elemental power. The people no longer worshipped as before. They demanded to see her in the same parts, then criticized her for using “her great guns” too soon, never caring that the goddess in person really was "in paroxysms of agony".[1]

Her presence had always been monumental, but now her body had grown so heavy that could not get up without help during performances. People felt sorrier for the woman herself than the characters she was playing.

William Blake,Hecate or the Three Fates c. 1795. Tate Gallery, London. 

Image source: WGA

Despite her habit of standing outside herself, so she could control the effect she was making, mortality had overrun her divine gift. Either her own emotions had burst their banks and flooded the character she was imagining, or public taste in deities was changing....

Romantic fictions and casualties

PART THREE: SILENCE

 Silence by Fuseli, 1799-1801
Oil on canvas, Kunsthaus, Zurich. Image source: WGA

The lightning struck, and receded, the earth quaked and settled again. Resolute, she never spoke again of love and betrayal. She began to believe that the artist had never loved her for her own sake, but more for the sensation of passion, a drama of love, in which she and her sister had been no more to him than sparks of her mother's fire. She knew her mother and he still met, an ageing goddess and her acolyte, and she did not say a word of reproach to either of them.

But the worm had entered the bud. During the next five years, while his fame as an artist and a lover spread, and queens and princes were seduced by him, and still he wore his sweet-sad smile, she started to wither away until her own muse fled - “I sing but little now to what I did once”. She had lived only to give joy to those she loved, and she had no joy left. She had reached the limits of feeling. She lived, but it was the posthumous existence of despair. Every asthma attack was like a drowning, in which to die would be easier than the struggle for breath. She yielded to invalidism as if it was a lover. 

She never lost faith in her mother, she would always be the chief priestess of the Tragic Muse, ensuring nothing distracted the goddess, knowing that the slightest shift of wind might upset the sacred artifice of her art, causing the goddess to misjudge her timing or overreach her power to represent emotion from feeling too much, performing worst when she most ardently wished to do better than ever.[1]

Her breath got shorter and shorter. Even when she knew she was dying, the eldest daughter did not want to cause her mother trouble. There was never any question that the goddess must continue working while her daughter was ill, often travelling far away, giving spiritual sustenance to her worshippers on other islands to pay for medicine, food, clothing and lodgings for her family.  All her life the girl had suffered in her mother's absence which created a vacancy in her heart that nothing else could fill [2] but she and her father, a mere mortal player, not a god, who relied on his wife's earnings to maintain their household, kept the worst news to themselves.

Drawing of Sarah Siddons, artist and date unknown  © Victoria and Albert Museum 

 

At last there came a day when an attendant dared tell the Tragic Muse that her daughter was dying. "Will you believe I must play tonight!" [3] exclaimed the distraught mother. She had always known that she was not immortal, as people wanted her to be, but rather an heroic victim of her own powers of arousing emotion. She broke her contract so she could rush home, but her journey across the sea was delayed by great storms, which neither her dramatic arts nor maternal appeals could appease, and when she arrived, her lovely child, her sweet Sally, was already dead.

Claude-Joseph Vernet, Nocturnal Seastorm 1752
Oil on canvas. Private collection. Image source WGA

[1] Paraphrasing Sarah Siddons' much quoted piece of self-criticism that holds true for all actors, from her letter to Rev. Whalley, 16 July, 1781, published in The Kembles, Percy Fitzgerald, 1871: "Sorry am I to say, that I have often observed I have performed worst when I have most ardently wished to do better than ever"[2] Paraphrasing Letter from Sally Siddons to Miss Bird, 15 September, 1798, quoted by F.M.W. Parsons, The Incomparable Siddons, 1909, p.199.
[3] Paraphrasing Letter from Mrs Siddons to Mrs Fitzhugh, quoted by Parsons, p.204

Romantic fictions and casualties

PART TWO: The temple of delight

 

Fragonard, The Fountain of Love 1785. Oil on canvas, Wallace Collection, London.

Image source: WGA. In this painting, the purveyor of insouciance and erotica for the ancien regime breaks into the psychological dreamworld of the Neoclassicists and Romantics.
"I fly with HORROR from such a passion" Sally Siddons

The Tragic Muse's eldest daughter had loved the artist steadfastly even after he had forsaken her for her younger sister, a pretty, airheaded girl of sixteen he decided, on an impulse, to marry. 

During this gaping wound in time, her two years of "mortification, grief, agony", a new kindling began inside her. Under layers of suffering, she heard more clearly the music of her calling. 

Passion reverberated in her, enriching her voice with sweetness, her melodies with mortal yearning: “I never should have sung as I do had I never seen you; I never should have composed at all. . . You then liv'd in my heart, in my head, in every idea…”. 

She had turned a fallible man into her muse, and given birth to her own art.

Romantic fictions and casualties

“I never should have sung as I do had I never seen you; I never should have composed at all. . . You then liv'd in my heart, in my head, in every idea…” 

 

The Art of Loving or The Pleasant Lesson, furnishing fabric,

Favre Petitpierre et Cie (possibly, maker), ca.1785-1790, detail © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

PART ONE

One autumn long ago, while Britain was at war with revolutionary France, whose armies under Napoleon had conquered most of mainland Europe, and the people at home were rejoicing at Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile that saved the Middle East, while Irish rebels were fighting their English oppressors with the help of the French; while Jenner's findings on vaccination against the mass killer small-pox were being published; while a new kind of poetry was being read for the first time in Coleridge and Wordsworth's collection of Lyrical Ballads, while quietly in a village in Hampshire Jane Austen was writing Northanger Abbey, and a new kind of woman appeared in a novel called Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft; while the external world was spinning and bleeding and crying and laughing, the eldest daughter of the Tragic Muse renounced forever the man she loved. 

He was a charming young artist who painted everyone as if he was in love with them. His pencil, chalk and brush had the power of Cupid's arrows to pierce men and women with the flushed, breathless heat of desire. When he looked at someone, however dull they had felt the moment before, they saw the reflection of beauty in his eyes. 

François-André Vincent, Zeuxis Choosing his Models for the Image of Helen from among the Girls of Croton 1789. 

Oil on canvas. Private collection. Image source: WGA

He was....