Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (18 page)

In the autumn of 1816, Haydon’s feelings about Hunt became deeply contradictory. In September he was writing of his gratitude for Hunt’s friendship, proclaiming that ‘the Hunts have been to me such friends that nothing but Death shall ever disjoin us’, but by October they were arguing about religion, with Hunt claiming that poetry was always in advance of religious thinking, and Haydon accusing Hunt of denying the sublime beauty of Christian doctrine because of a cowardly fear of ‘being roasted or pitchforked or punished’. Hunt, he decided, was a remarkable man: intellectually alert and capable of immense sympathy, and he admired his capacity for affection. But he criticised his tendency to encourage ‘inferior people about him to listen, too fond of shining at any expense in society, too apt when another is beginning to divide attention by exhibiting more knowledge to stop it by a joke which is irresistible – a love of approbation from the darling sex bordering on weakness.’ In November, an analysis which began as an attempt to understand Hunt’s weaknesses sharpened into stringent criticism. ‘Such is the morbid sensibility of his temperament that the supposition he can be guilty of Sin gives gloomy pain & he must be kept in a continual excitement of pleasure & voluptuousness by amorous poems & bodily sensations to keep himself in a state of ordinary every day comfort.’
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This shift, from approbation to criticism, was attributable to several things.  Haydon’s perplexed grappling with Hunt’s oddness and with the qualities which made him simultaneously loveable and infuriating was not unique: other friends and acquaintances were equally puzzled by Hunt. But Haydon’s obsessive accounts of Hunt’s relationship with women, of his amorousness and need for physical affection, were particular to him, and were symptomatic of his preoccupation with the women in Hunt’s life, by whom he was alternately attracted and repelled. These women – and Bess in particular – played a key role in the souring of Hunt and Haydon’s friendship. This culminated in Haydon dispatching a furious missive to Hunt railing against the treatment meted out to him by Marianne, who had suggested that he would make a suitable husband for her sister:

For these seven years that I have been honoured by the sneers of Mrs Hunt, every body has told me of them, from your oldest friends to your newest acquaintances, and have asked me the reason! I never gave one, tho’ perfectly aware they proceeded from my having resisted an attempt of your wife and her mother to entrap me into a marriage with Miss Kent . . . It was always irksome to me to visit your family after that transaction, and I have ever endeavoured by every minor attention to soften the anger I saw but ill concealed, whenever I was present.
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Here as elsewhere Haydon protests too much. He was obsessed by Bess, and by her relationship with Hunt, which he considered at length in private diary entries: ‘he likes & is satisfied to corrupt the girl’s mind without seducing her person, to dawdle over her bosom, to inhale her breath, to lean against her thigh & play with her petticoats, and rather than go to the effort of relieving his mind by furious gratification, shuts his eyes, to tickle the edge of her stockings that his feelings may be kept tingling by imagining the rest.’
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This particular diary entry was written after an evening in which Hunt made Haydon furious by being rude about Christianity, and it presents a vivid picture of the continuing closeness between Hunt and Bess. But his agitated cataloguing of the ‘sickly pukings’ of Hunt’s ‘lechery’ reveals as much about Haydon’s own fascination with Bess’s bosom, thighs, stockings and petticoats as it does about her relationship with her brother-in-law.

In addition, the suggestion that Haydon was poorly treated by the Hunts is not supported by the many references during the previous ‘seven years’ to his love and affection for both Hunt and Marianne. His reaction to a ham-fisted attempt at matchmaking was overblown and his references to Bess’s ‘power’ and her ‘ill concealed’ anger towards him are vindictive enough to suggest the extent of his preoccupation with her. The passing of time did little to subdue Haydon’s morbid fascination with Hunt’s household.  Over a decade later he would work himself up into another fury about the Hunt women and write an article for
Blackwood’s
in which he lampooned Marianne and Bess as drunken nose-pickers. He subsequently withdrew the article in a fit of remorse, but not before the proprietors of
Blackwood’s
derived much malicious enjoyment from his anguished spite.
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And in marginal annotations to a biography of Byron, written at some point after 1824, he returned once more to the subject of Hunt, Bess, and his relationship with them. He maintained that Bess ‘pretended to be dying for me’, and that she was made ‘hysterical’ by his rejection. He conflated his memories of the Surrey Gaol years with the period following Hunt’s release from prison to argue that Hunt became interested in Bess as he comforted her following Haydon’s refusal of her advances: ‘Hunt, in trying to console her, got interested himself – and as I was positively a witness once to the grossest conduct, while she played on the Piano forte before him – I fear as they were alone for weeks in Prison – they went further – I think nothing but such an act, could have so completely altered Hunt.’ He proceeded to suggest that only such immorality could account for
The Story of Rimini
, ‘& all its feelings’, apparently forgetting his own admiration for the poem at the time of its publication.
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At the point that he wrote these comments, Haydon had convinced himself that Hunt, Byron, Shelley and Godwin were co-conspirators in a plot to bring revolution to Britain, and that they were only thwarted because they ‘shocked the Country by their opinions on sexual intercourse’. But at the time it was in fact the arrival of Keats, rather than Hunt’s sexual immorality, which really changed the relationship between Hunt and Haydon. Haydon was among the first of Hunt’s circle to extend friendship to Keats and he quickly became a devoted admirer of the young newcomer. Keats was flattered by the attention, and before long the two men were breakfasting and spending evenings together, often in the company of John Reynolds, who rapidly attached himself to Keats. Hunt was not invited to join them. Keats wrote sonnets in praise of Haydon, and Haydon responded by suggesting Keats’s poetry should be shown to Wordsworth. Inspired by this example, Reynolds, once one of Hunt’s most ardent followers, was moved to write his own sonnet in praise of Haydon, because, he informed him, ‘I really
feel
your Genius.’
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Writing sonnets in praise of one’s friends was an activity pioneered by Hunt, and it was now being used as a way to assert allegiance and strengthen the ties of a coterie from which he was partially excluded. Haydon was able to move away from Hunt because Keats provided him with an alternative focus. And in this new circle it was Haydon who was the centre of attention, and who positioned himself, as Hunt had done before him, as the older, wiser artist basking in the admiration of a group of clever young men.

On 1 December 1816,
The Examiner
published an article entitled ‘Young Poets’. Buried amongst a discussion of Bonaparte’s residence on St Helena and a diatribe against
The Times
(‘this paper is a nuisance which ought to be abated’), the article, by Hunt himself, drew the attention of the newspaper’s readership to the work of ‘three young writers, who appear to us to promise a considerable addition of strength to the new school’. This ‘new school of poetry’, Hunt proclaimed, ‘began with something excessive, like most revolutions, but this gradually wore away; and an evident aspiration after real nature and original fancy remained, which called to mind the finer times of the English Muse.’  The ‘old school’ of French, artificial, neo-classical poetry (exemplified by Alexander Pope) had been a target of Hunt’s criticism since his
Feast of the Poets
. His three young writers would build a new English poetry and would demolish the flimsy efforts of the eighteenth-century poets to resurrect the grandeur of Milton and Spenser. These three poets were Keats, Reynolds – and Shelley.

Throughout the tumultuous events of 1814–1816, Shelley had retained his respect for Hunt. The same admiration which caused him to boil with indignation when the proprietors of
The Examiner
were sent to prison prompted him to write to Hunt in 1816, when his own literary fortunes were at a low ebb. The summer with Byron convinced Shelley of the importance of publicity, and made him realise that his work could never reform the world if it did not reach an audience. Over the course of the summer Byron talked of Hunt’s generosity with much enthusiasm, and when Shelley returned to England it was to find that
The Examiner
’s literary column was growing ever more influential. Encouraged by Byron’s example and conversation, and frustrated by his own failure to achieve public recognition, Shelley sent Hunt his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. It was a bold step, which was to have important personal and professional ramifications for both men. But, at first, it seemed as if Shelley’s attempt to thrust his work forward had failed. Hunt promptly lost the manuscript of ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and, to Shelley’s disappointment, the poem remained unpublished.

However, Hunt did at least read ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ before he mislaid it in the piles of paper in his study. He was impressed by what he saw and, in his ‘Young Poets’ article, he praised Shelley as a ‘striking and original thinker’. He commended Reynolds too, although he censured him for being too ready to imitate Wordsworth and for poetic details ‘too overwrought and indiscriminate’. But, Hunt concluded, Reynolds was still young, and only in want of ‘still closer attention to things as opposed to the seduction of words, to realise all that he promises.’ Keats, the youngest of them all, had ‘not yet published anything except in a newspaper; but a set of his manuscripts was handed us the other day, and fairly surprised us with the truth of their ambition, and ardent grappling with Nature.’ Hunt concluded by insisting that his praise for all three poets was justified: ‘we really are not in the habit of lavishing praises and announcements . . . [but] we have no fear of any pettier vanity on the part of young men, who promise to understand human nature so well.’
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Hunt’s ‘Young Poets’ article is remembered now as the first piece of writing to anticipate the canonisation of Shelley and Keats. It also had room for brief praise of Byron (who, in the third canto of
Childe Harold
, had ‘taken his place where we always said he would be found, – among the poets . . . who go directly to Nature for inspiration’), so it is often read as an early proclamation of the powers of a new generation of Romantic poets. But when the article is resituated among the complex, shifting dynamics of the Hunt circle in the autumn of 1816 ‘Young Poets’ appears primarily as an assertion of power.  Hunt used the article to reposition himself at the centre of the circle of writers and sympathetic thinkers who gathered around him after his release from prison. In praising Keats and Reynolds in
The Examiner
Hunt was reclaiming them as his:
his
protégés,
his
discoveries. In the short term, it worked. Keats was delighted by the article, by public recognition of his talents and his place in a new poetic canon.  Along with his burgeoning friendships with literary men ‘Young Poets’ gave him the confidence, at the end of 1816, to give up his medical training for good and to devote himself to poetry.

In Bath, Shelley was equally delighted by Hunt’s article, which more than made up for his failure to publish ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. The unexpected public praise boosted his confidence, in a bright moment in a dark and difficult autumn. While Shelley shuttled back and forth between Bath and Peacock’s house in Marlow, from where he was looking for a more permanent residence, Mary and Claire lived quietly, reading, attending lectures, writing letters and walking through Bath’s Georgian crescents. Mary worked on the first draft of
Frankenstein
, building on the ideas and conversations of the summer, and both she and Claire took drawing lessons. In September Claire was left in charge of William while Mary joined Shelley and Peacock in Marlow. From Bath, Claire attempted to assert her presence in the group through a series of instructions: ‘tell Peacock from me to make his Book “funny”’; ‘Don’t over walk Shelley & pray
make
him get a great coat’; ‘pray write & say when you will be home’.
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Mary was still in Marlow four days after receiving this last command, so she evidently felt no urgent need to hurry back to her stepsister.