Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (13 page)

For the first time in two years, Shelley had enough time and money to write for sustained periods. In the autumn of 1815, he embarked on his most ambitious poetic project since
Queen Mab
, completed some three years previously. This was
Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude
, a poem which demonstrated a new level of intellectual maturity in its writer.
Alastor
is a less angry poem than
Queen Mab
, but it presents its complicated arguments with a virtuosic subtlety absent from the earlier work. It tells the story of a poet who leaves his home to wander the world. His visionary meanderings end in his death – a death mourned by nature, and by the poetic voice who relates his fate.

In the Preface, also written that autumn, Shelley described how
Alastor
‘represent[ed] a youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventurous genius led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic.’
⁴⁰
But, he continued, ‘the picture is not barren of instruction to actual men.  The Poet’s self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin.’
Alastor
was thus, at one level, an indictment of selfish solitude: ‘those who love not their fellow-beings, live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.’ But Shelley’s announcement of the centrality of human sympathy is complicated by a simultaneous acknowledgement that the ‘power which strikes the luminaries of the world with a sudden darkness and extinction’ also  awakens them ‘to too exquisite a perception of its influences.’ Thus, although it involves the abnegation of community, those who seek truth are endowed with both knowledge and a powerful intensity of perception.  Even though the poet-wanderer of
Alastor
has rejected all human contact, his death is still mourned, both by the narrator and by nature itself:

It is a woe too ‘deep for tears’, when all

Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,

Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves

Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans,

The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;

But pale despair and cold tranquillity,

Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things,

Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.

Alastor
reflected a dilemma which was beginning to formulate itself in Shelley’s mind, and which would preoccupy him, in one form or another, from this point onwards. This was a dilemma of solitude and sociability, about whether the poet needed companionship or isolation in order to produce great work. In
Alastor
Shelley was influenced by Wordsworth (whose
Ode on Intimations of Immortality
provided the source for too ‘deep for tears’), and his Lake poet contemporaries. He was reacting to the disappointments of both post-Waterloo Europe, and to the inability of the first generation of Romantic poets to respond to the final failure of the French Revolution represented by the Bourbon restoration. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey had betrayed their youthful radicalism and had retreated into solitude and political apostasy, only to re-emerge as puppets of a corrupt administration. Shelley parodied their solitary solipsism through the figure of the self-absorbed poet-wanderer, while demonstrating the importance of poetic influence, in his self-conscious indebtedness to Wordsworth’s early poetry.
Alastor
showed too the influence of Peacock – who suggested its title – and Mary, with whom Shelley discussed Wordsworth’s failures. It was Mary who recorded the scathing reading note on Wordsworth’s
Excursion
in her diary: ‘much disappointed – He is a slave.’
⁴¹
And the circumstances of the poem’s composition supported its argument: Shelley was able to write again when he was settled among close friends and intellectual kindred spirits. And yet – could a poet really achieve greatness supported by others? Didn’t the development of powers of intense perception ultimately
involve a rejection of society? Wasn’t the search for knowledge in the end a solitary one?
Alastor
asked all these questions, and refused to answer any of them.

By the end of 1815,
Alastor
was complete. The autumn had been highly productive and for the first time, Shelley had succeeded in gathering a harmonious community of kindred spirits about him. The Bishopsgate version of this community was less avowedly political than the ideal communities of his imagination, but it provided him with an opportunity to think seriously about how poetry might provide a more subtle and philosophically ambitious vehicle for reforming the world than campaigning political prose. Buoyed by the support of his friends, in January 1816 he sent
Alastor
to John Murray, and asked him to become his publisher. His request met with instant rejection: Murray was quite uninterested in publishing
Alastor
, the work of a young man who had previously produced only the scandalous
Queen Mab
.

Leigh Hunt, who also sent work to Murray in January 1816, had more success, and a reluctant Murray was persuaded by Byron to publish
The Story of Rimini
. The difference in the fortunes of Hunt and Shelley was the direct result of Byron’s patronage, since Murray would never have agreed to publish Hunt’s work without Byron’s persuasion. Byron’s friendship provided Hunt with powerful literary support, something notable by its absence from Shelley’s life. But this balance of power, and the role played by Byron in the lives of Shelley and Hunt, was about to change dramatically. The catalyst for this change would be Claire.

3

Sisters

Claire put on a brave face about her expulsion to Devon, maintaining in her letters that she lived in a state of ‘constant tranquillity’.
¹
Lynmouth was a ‘dear little spot’ and Claire was ‘enraptured’ by her escape from the ‘turmoil of passion and hatred’ created by Shelley and Mary’s elopement. ‘I am perfectly happy’, she boasted to Fanny. She lived in a cottage covered in jasmine and honeysuckle, the countryside was full of delightful walks, and the town’s gentleman landowners were absent from their homes – and so, Claire’s letters suggested, could not disturb her peace by falling in love with her. Poor Fanny, still trapped in Skinner Street, could have been forgiven if Claire’s enthusiastic descriptions of her peaceful life made her envious. It seemed as if Claire had once again fallen on her feet when she abandoned Shelley and Mary’s cramped lodgings in favour of a charmed existence by the sea.

This was certainly the reaction Claire hoped for from her sisters, but the reality of her situation was rather different. Perched on the coast, cut off inland by the high ground of Exmoor, Lynmouth was little more than a fishing village, and Claire was a stranger to the area. Shelley and Harriet had lived in Lynmouth for a few months in 1812, and it is likely that Shelley arranged bed and board for Claire with the landlady who previously housed him. But he did no more than attend to her basic needs and, once she arrived, Claire was left to fend for herself. She had little to do except sew and read, and letters took weeks to arrive. It is not surprising that, in spite of the honeysuckle covered cottage, in later life she burned with resentment at the way she had been treated. ‘Hatred and persecution let loose their destroying hounds upon me in the very dawn of life’, she told Mary in 1835. ‘But a mere child I was driven from all I loved into a solitary spot . . . day after day I sat companionless upon that unfrequented sea-shore, mentally exclaiming, a life of sixteen years is already too much to bear.’
²
Long days alone by the sea gave Claire plenty of time to contemplate the events of the previous year, and the predicament in which she now found herself.  She envied Mary her relationship with Shelley and the life she had with him; but she had no wish to share Shelley with her stepsister. The emotional peril of attaching herself too closely to Mary and Shelley was all too evident. As a result, Claire seems to have decided that once she left Devon, she would arrange matters very differently.

Claire’s movements in the second half of 1815 are something of a mystery, with the exception of a brief period in October when she travelled to Ireland with her brother Charles. At the beginning of 1816, however, she was finally permitted to rejoin Shelley and Mary in order to assist at the birth of Mary’s baby – a healthy little boy, named William, after his grandfather. But shortly after William’s birth she left the Shelleys and appears to have established herself in separate lodgings in London.  She had learnt the hard way that a dependent sister was all too likely to be used, had no control over her own destiny and no way of forging an independent existence. She was determined not to put herself in such a position again.

Had she known Claire, Bess Kent might have sympathised with her predicament. In January 1816, Bess too was living with her sister and a brother-in-law to whom she was uncomfortably close. In 1816, Hampstead, the location of the Hunts’ new home, was surrounded by fields and open countryside. Socially it bore little resemblance to the millionaires’ village it is now, although the arrival of Hunt and his friends marked the beginning of its gentrification. The Hunts’ cottage was in a small hamlet a short distance from the centre of the village. Known as the Vale of Health, the hamlet consisted in 1815 of fewer than fifteen cottages. Walking through the Vale today, it is noticeable how enclosed it is, cut off from the rest of Hampstead by a narrow, tree-lined lane, and surrounded by the steeply rising banks of the heath on three of its four sides. It is therefore ideal for someone with agoraphobic tendencies, and it is little wonder that Hunt came to identify so strongly with the area. Helped by a new sense of physical security, and by expeditions on to Hampstead Heath itself, he slowly began to reintegrate himself into the world from which he had retreated, making trips to the theatre and to
The
Examiner
offices.

Although the move to Hampstead eased Hunt’s agoraphobia, it did not diminish its impact on his life and work. During his incarceration in Surrey Gaol and his self-imposed confinement in the lily room in Maida Vale, the idea of ‘home’ took on a new significance for Hunt. Domestic pleasures had saved him from the bleakness of prison life, and had comforted him in the frightening weeks following his release.  Now he increasingly came to view domesticity itself as a crucial source of inspiration.  Accordingly he set about transforming the cottage’s parlour into yet another bower – another room which would be the physical and emotional heart of the place. The busts, books, and piano were installed, alongside portraits and the customary flowers.  The green and white furniture was moved up from Maida Vale, and Hunt was surrounded once more by the objects and colours he loved. The room was tiny – just big enough to seat two people – but this suited Hunt perfectly. The Hampstead version of his prison rooms soon allowed him to retreat not just from the world, but from the emotional dramas of his own household.

These dramas started early in 1816, with the publication of
The Story of Rimini
, which
tells the tale of Dante’s Francesca, who is trapped in a passionless marriage, and finds solace in the arms of her brother-in-law, Paulo.
Hunt was unapologetic in his depiction of the sensual pleasures of a forbidden relationship: ‘Paulo turned, scarce knowing what he did,/ Only he felt he could no more dissemble,/ And kissed her, mouth to mouth, all in a tremble . . ./ The world was all forgot, the struggle o’er,/ Desperate the joy. – That day they read no more.’
³
 Such descriptions won much praise from his friends. Hazlitt thought the poem full of ‘beautiful and affecting passages’, and told Hunt, rather slyly, ‘you are very metaphysical in character and passion, but we will not say a word of this to the ladies.’
⁴
Haydon reported that after reading it ‘every nerve about me seized with trembles’,
⁵
and Charles Lamb that it had given both him and his sister Mary ‘great delight’. They agreed, he continued, ‘in thinking it superior to your former poems.’
⁶