Sunday, February 25, 2018

“Young Romantics” by Daisy Hay

Hay makes the case that the second generation of Romantic poets, particularly Shelley, Keats, and Byron, coalesced around Leigh Hunt, an editor and publisher of the political newspaper, The Examiner, who also wrote his own, if more ephemeral, poetry. Hunt was a radical whose own editorials earned him two years in Surrey Gaol on a charge of libel to the Crown. The Examiner’s motto was “Party is the Madness of the Many for the Gain of a Few.” From 1813 to 1815, Hunt and his brother John, The Examiner’s printer, who was also incarcerated on the same libel charge, were able to keep the paper running every week from prison. In fact, the fame and repute of the paper only grew and Leigh Hunt attracted many famous visitors to his prison cell, amongst them Lord Byron. Soon after their first meeting, Byron would write in his journal of Hunt that he is a soul “not exactly of the present age [and] he is, perhaps, a little opinionated, as are all men who are the centre of circles, wide and narrow.” To contemporary friends and foes, Hunt was the man to whom the fashionably avant-garde painters, sculptors, journalists, and poets of the day gravitated. Hunt would establish ‘sociability’ as an ideological principle in its own right.

This book is a joint biography of the group Hay labels as the “young romantics.” It skips along between the travails of the Hunt family, both pecuniary and political, the affair and marriage of Percy Shelley to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and the brief romance, the ensuing pregnancy, and the much longer feud between Lord George Byron and Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont. To a lesser degree, John Keats’ relationship with Hunt and Shelley floats in and out of Hay’s story. Throughout her book, lesser known family, friends, and artists such as William Godwin, Thomas Peacock, Thomas Hogg, Vincent Novello, Benjamin Haydon, Joseph Severn, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Edward Williams, and Edward Trelawny add color to the lives of the protagonists.

Percy Shelley, despite being married to a wife enduring her first pregnancy, upon his first meeting with his idol, William Godwin, ended up falling head over heels in love with his sixteen year old daughter, Mary. Shelley would write to a friend of her, “how deeply did I not feel my inferiority, how willingly I confess myself far surpassed in originality, in genuine elevation & magnificence of the intellectual nature until she consented to share her capabilities with me.” This affair of “free love” would shape the lives of Percy, Mary and Claire, the latter of whom would accompany the previous two on their escape from the unreceptive Godwins across the Continent and back to England. Shelley was part aristocrat, part radical, and part reformer, whose first major poem Queen Mab would be decried by the establishment for its atheism, republicanism, and materialism, particularly the Tory press. Hay writes, “it was the poem of a man who could never be dull: cool and reasoned maybe, but also susceptible to fits of hyperactive over-excitement and to dreams and hallucinations.” After all, Shelley was the type of man who, on their escape through war-torn France, “one day…. decided to adopt a beautiful little girl he saw on the road, and was surprised and put out when her father informed him she was not available.” The most practical of men he was not. Shelley’s friend Peacock would agree “that a man who lived so totally out of the ordinary world and in a world of ideas, needed such an ever-present sympathy [of a woman like Mary] more than the general run of men.” Shelley’s second major poem, Alastor, would be a meditation on the virtues of isolation versus companionship for the artist. Was the search for knowledge a solitary one? Was isolation necessary to produce a great work? In Alastor, Shelley would disagree, “those who love not their fellow-beings, live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.” Shelley had a specific teleological idea of poetry at its best. He wrote, “poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”

To many of her contemporaries Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was no more than the sum of her components. Her father, William Godwin, was a radical anarchist, whose political writings were among the most influential of his day. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a feminist and philosopher, whose thoughts on marriage and childrearing were among the most well-known, if radically subversive to mainstream morality, of her times. Her lover and future husband, Percy Shelley, was an up and coming poet of the new school, whose political verse was already causing a rage amongst the conservative press. However, Mary Shelley came into her own with the publication of her novel, Frankenstein. She published the work when she was twenty-one, having started it on a challenge by Byron to write a ghost story. Hay writes that “Frankenstein condemns…. isolation, self-indulgence, and an abnegation of social responsibility…. It champions a method of endeavour in which ideas reach fruition through ‘many a walk, many a drive, many a conversation.’” Mary Shelley’s novel combined her father’s ideas of historical perfectibility, her mother’s thoughts on parental responsibility, and her husband’s materialism in her own way, while throwing in her own ideas on the importance of community for the impetus of creation. Frankenstein was a social critique, as well as a manifesto of social duty. It’s nuanced prose led to a reading of layered meanings with multiple interpretations. Some of Mary Shelley’s later works would play on darker themes. Isolation and regret would seep to the fore. Later in life, Mary, having lived through much tragedy, including the deaths of three of her children, would admit that “the living were not fit companions for me, and I was ever meditating by what means I might shake them all off, and never be heard of again.”

Lord George Byron would tell Hunt immediately following his engagement to Annabella Milbanke, in what would be a disastrously loveless marriage, that he was “in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.” At this time Byron was already engaged in semi-secret sexual relations with his half-sister, Augusta, perhaps fathering her child. Byron was the embodiment of the aristocrat. He would wake up after noon, chat, read, ride, and shoot pistols through the day, dine with friends late into the night, and finish another bottle of wine while writing verse, before going to bed around four or five in the morning. He seduced women, young and old, married and virginal, with abandon. Byron was a man on contradictions. He lived a life of solipsism and decadence, but also with his own particular code of honor and virtue. He could alternate between being miserly with his fortune and secretly helping an acquaintance in desperate need. His poems, particularly Don Juan, were regarded by his peers as the pinnacle of the day’s verse. His contemporaries only wished that he lived a little bit less and wrote a little bit more. Towards the end of his life, Mary Shelley would note that “she had seen him be kind to children and servants- to the weak and defenceless- [and] that it was only to his equals that he was cruel.” 

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