Fuseli knew eight languages and derived much of his inspiration as an artist from classical mythology and from literature; he painted numbers of scenes from Shakespeare and Milton, and many of his drawings sought to catch histrionic moments of despair, horror or sublime emotion, expressed in faces with staring eyes, in slumped bodies, the flared nostrils of a woman or the tensed thigh muscles of a man. Some of the portrait heads of women are simple and beautiful, but his female figures are more often grotesque. He never drew Mary.3 Like Blake, he imagined human figures floating and moving in the air as fish move in water; the two men admired one another's work and respected one another's character, though they had not much in common beyond their fantasies of human flight. Blake's tribute to Fuseli is probably the best-known thing about him:
The only man that e'er I knew
Who did not make me almost spew
Was Fuseli: he was both Turk and Jew -
And so, dear Christian friends, how do you do?
If he had the crafty, miserly and savage streak Blake attributed to him, it did not stand in the way of their friendship or prevent Fuseli from persuading Johnson to commission Blake as an illustrator.
Fuseli's concern for Blake in his poverty must have been one of the things that impressed Mary; but his whole personality and reputation were made to appeal to her: the legends of his fiery temperament, the learning which would have been pedantic had it not been leavened with jokes, the long years of struggle before success. The vehemence of his manner did not frighten her so much as excite her, and she felt herself quite capable of holding her own; even when she was low-spirited she was not timid.
They must have met not long after she had settled in George Street; both were constant callers at Johnson's and early contributors to the Analytical. What she saw was a small-boned and graceful middle-aged dandy, a few inches above five feet tall, wearing his own straight, unpowdered hair; the same illness that had whitened it had afflicted his hands with a perpetual trembling. His eyes were set far apart; at times his face took on the look of a cat, and his movements were catlike and quick, his glance bright and piercing. Like Mary, he needed glasses; like her, he was too vain to be seen wearing them.
What Fuseli observed was ‘a philosophical sloven, with lank hair, black stockings and a beaver hat’, but piquant enough to capture his attention.
According to the account given by the Scots writer Allan Cunningham, who wrote about Fuseli in his Lives of the Painters at a date when there were still living witnesses of his behaviour, Mary fell in love with him the first time she ever set eyes on him,
and he, instead of repelling, as they deserved, those ridiculous advances, forthwith, it seems, imagined himself possest with the pure spirit of Platonic love – assumed artificial raptures and revived in imagination the fading fires of his youth.
Fuseli was forty-seven, an age when fires are not always entirely extinct, and Mary twenty-nine; Cunningham however could not resist adding his opinion that ‘the coquetting of a married man of fifty with a tender female philosopher of thirty-one can never be an agreeable subject of contemplation’. And unfortunately for Mary, Fuseli was indeed married; or rather, he was in the process of getting married at the very time they met. His bride was an uneducated woman from Somerset called Sophia Rawlins, who had been earning her living as an artists' model, and was very likely endowed with the mixture of prettiness, shrewdness and determined respectability that often goes with successful modelling. (After Fuseli's death she piously gathered up all the pornographic drawings that were still in the house and burned them.) Perhaps he married her for domestic comfort and to put his life on a regular footing: se ranger, the French term for this sort of marriage, expresses it perfectly. He maintained a clear demarcation between home and his social round, from which Sophia was as often as not excluded; evidently she was not chosen for her qualities as an intellectual companion.
A man who marries for the first time at forty-seven may experience a panic resentment at the moment of committing himself, and if he meets just then a woman in almost every respect the opposite of the one he has just tied himself to, she may take on twice the appeal she would otherwise have had. Something of this sort seems to have occurred with Fuseli; by flirting with Mary he simultaneously reassured himself and teased Sophia. It was by no means the first time in his life he had set out to shock his friends and indulge a perverse streak in his own nature.
He was born neither Turk nor Jew but a respectable Swiss protestant from Zürich. His father was a painter who had determined that the elder of his two boys should become a minister of the church; Fuseli said he was flogged into learning and had to draw in secret to satisfy his longing for art. At the age of eleven, inspired with a passion for English poetry by a teacher, he attempted to translate Macbeth into German. The protestant sect to which the family belonged was that of Zwingli, a little less rigorous than Calvinism; Fuseli was ordained when he was twenty and spent a year preaching in Zürich. His best friend was Johann Lavater, ordained at the same time and also destined to become famous for inventing a pseudo-science that became the craze all over Europe: the earliest form of phrenology, which he called physiognomical studies. The young Fuseli's feelings for Lavater were intense: even allowing for the vocabulary of German romanticism, there appear to have been unequivocal declarations of erotic passion and reproaches addressed to Lavater's timidity.
In 1763 the two young men, joined by a third friend, Hess, launched a political attack on a corrupt city judge, and as a result were asked to leave Zürich. They went north to Germany, and for six months lived a life of idyllic happiness in a cottage in Prussia, writing poetry. Then Lavater and Hess decided to return to Zürich, trusting rightly that things would have blown over. But Fuseli was now set on a different course and did not want to go tamely home; instead he went on to Berlin, where under the guidance and patronage of the English ambassador he translated Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters into German. While he was busy with this first attempt to come to terms with an English bluestocking, he addressed a series of letters to Lavater, in which he described himself as ‘a soul in love, but not ignobly in love’:
You ask for my ‘Complaints’ [his collection of poems] – I may not send them, for they are only for the Lavater with whom I slept, and I fear they might fall into the hands of him who wrote the two letters I am now answering. What does your sedateness want with words that burn?… But my brain catches fire, I grow too excited, I must stop here – O you who sleep alone now dream of me - that my soul might meet with yours, as through the lattice the hand of the Shulamite met with her dew-drenched beloved.4
When Lavater announced his marriage a few years later, Fuseli could not resist sending messages to his bride urging her to bring Lavater back from the land of disembodied spirits, and suggesting that his own spirit would hang about their lips when they kissed. Later he sent the bridegroom himself a poem expressing his own readiness to give up all the pleasure provided by women for ‘your embrace’. Fuseli's attitude to women remained ambivalent.
Once the Wortley Montagu letters were published he set off for London, in March 1764. He managed the feat of translating Winckelmann into English during his first year of residence; he met Johnson and they took to one another at once: ‘My first and best friend’ Fuseli called him. He had still not touched a paintbrush and regarded himself as a writer, and soon he found the traditional employment of the penniless man of letters, as tutor to a young aristocrat. In December 1765 he set off with Lord Chewton, son of the Earl of Waldegrave, for the Grand Tour. Fuseli put his opportunities to good use and managed to meet Rousseau in Paris, but Lord Chewton's education demanded that they travel to Lyons. Here the tutor became so enraged with his charge that he brought his engagement to an abrupt end by boxing his ears.
A brief stay in France followed, then London and journalism. He managed to review his own book on Rousseau; he lived with Johnson. Still later came the decision to become a painter, and the departure for Rome
; he spent seven years in Italy. Typically, he boasted that the many weeks lying flat on his back on trestles under the roof of the Sistine chapel gave him his only respite from the libertine pleasures of the city.
Returning to England by way of his native town, he formed the second passionate attachment of his life, this time for Lavater's niece. Her name was Anna; he called her Nanna and addressed several insipid poems to her. He was still penniless; she came from a solid bourgeois family and did not even care for him very much, so that he had no hope at all of winning her hand; but he managed to pose as the distraught and determined lover. At the same time he found consolation of sorts with at least two other young women: Martha Hess, who was dying of consumption, and her married sister Madeleine Schweitzer, who was to become Mary's friend much later. All three girls were nicely brought up and inaccessible for anything more than a flirtation: Martha ill, Anna on the point of accepting another suitor, Maddy the bride of one of Fuseli's friends. This last proved the smallest impediment of the three, and Herr Schweitzer had reason to be annoyed.
On leaving Zürich Fuseli launched into a new series of melodramatic and erotic letters. One was addressed to a married woman friend of Anna's:
Each earthly night since I left her, I have lain in her bed – when she perceived me, a voice from her bed always asked me, ‘How is Fr—Schw—?’ O how I would answer that dainty-demure languishing of yours, if once you were in my arms! And for your sake, you slanting eye of love, you creature of roses, lilies and violets, you womanly virginity, you precious coaxer of tears, you who make me wring my hands so desperately – for your sake Italy and my native land are become foreign countries for me and the spring sunshine darkens. But go and take another – for I have belonged to another, and perhaps I still do.5
In June he wrote to Lavater from London, reaching a fortissimo of passionate utterance:
Is she in Zurich now? Last night I had her in bed with me – tossed my bedclothes hugger-mugger – wound my hot and tight-clasped hands about her – fused my body and her soul together with my own – poured into her my spirit, breath and strength. Anyone who touches her now commits adultery and incest! She is mine, and I am hers. And have her I will – I will toil and sweat for her, and lie alone, until I have won her. And woe to him, who dares to desire her; church and altar are but stone and wood –6
and so on; it was a ‘state of phrenzy’, but for whose benefit it is hard to say. In any case, Fuseli soon calmed down. In August he wrote to Lavater asking coolly for news of the Swiss girls: ‘Lots about Nanna and Maddy, and so you will save me from Polly and Nancy and Peggy’ (i.e., London prostitutes). He ended the letter characteristically with the word Basciami – not sending a kiss, but asking for one.
The next ten years of Fuseli's life were the ones that turned him into something approximating to a respectable English painter, licensed to show eccentricities but not overstepping the bounds into anything too openly scandalous. Mary was his last indiscretion. No doubt she saw herself as an Héloïse; her curiosity about the world she had scarcely seen, the grandiose emotions she had scarcely experienced, the art she had not sufficiently studied or appreciated – all could be satisfied by him. He had only to talk, and she to listen and worship. The prospect was irresistible to them both. Their meetings multiplied, at Johnson's, at George Street where Fuseli took to dropping in, then at his studio where he invited her. She made Sophia's acquaintance too, writing her off mentally, no doubt with Fuseli's encouragement, as a nothing. Presently Mary wrote a review of Rousseau's Confessions in the Analytical in which she excused the writer's adulteries and abandonment of his children on the grounds of Thérèe's ‘negative’ character. There must have been some smiles.
Sophia bore no children, and as far as we know Fuseli fathered none. What his sexual eccentricities amounted to must be left to guesswork. Mary told Godwin specifically that there was nothing improper in her relationship with Fuseli; she enjoyed ‘the endearments of personal intercourse and a reciprocation of kindness, without departing in the smallest degree from the rules she prescribed to herself’.7 But Fuseli enjoyed talking and writing about sex; he liked drawing it; whatever was solemn and serious about Mary he probably took pleasure in shocking, whatever was ardent he inflamed further. He lived at the very opposite pole of experience from the idealistic and rather childlike Dissenters. From him Mary learnt much about the seamy side of life – who else would have told her about the unnatural vices of the Romans and the Portuguese? – as well as about the painful and driving force of obsessive love. Obviously there was a time when they were in love with one another, and playing with fire; the increase of Mary's love to the point where it became torture to her is hard to explain if it remained at all times entirely platonic. (The subsequent destruction of her letters by her grandson suggests that he thought them incriminating.)
Whatever happened or did not happen between them, Fuseli certainly continued the process started by the Kingsboroughs, of arousing her erotic imagination. But then, tormentingly, she found she could progress nowhere. It may be that Johnson warned either or both of them. There was no question of a public scandal; things had to remain static. For Fuseli, it was flattering to be known as the object of Mary's passion, to be seen about with her and give rise to discreet conjecture and gossip; and there was always Sophia at home. There is a story of his behaviour at a Covent Garden masquerade, to which he escorted Sophia, Mary and Lavater's son who was visiting London, which suggests just how quickly he could retreat when he felt threatened. A man dressed as the devil (Fuseli's familiar of course) hung about and annoyed his party, at which Fuseli suggested, in his jocular, offensive way, that he should go to hell:
... but the dull devil, instead of answering in character, ‘Then I will drag you down with me,’ or making some bitter retort, put himself into a real passion, and began to abuse me roundly. So I, to avoid him, retired from the place, and left the others of the party to battle it out.8
As time went by Mary, like the devil, grew more intense and demanding; she said there was nothing ‘criminal’ in her love, but still it proved too much for Fuseli to cope with. He had taught her his scorn of convention, he was teaching her willy-nilly to be more honest with herself about what she really wanted; he himself was learning the skill of retreat. As she became increasingly frantic in her feelings and dissatisfied with their relationship, he slipped quietly back into the protection afforded by his marriage. Convention had its uses after all.
In August 1790, Mary was given the opportunity of meeting another domesticated wife, when Henry Gabell, her flirt from the Irish packetboat, invited her to stay with him and his bride in their home near Salisbury. Mary reported to Everina that the household was efficiently run, and Ann herself ‘a Doric pillar for proportion without beauty. I am never disgusted by their frequent bodily displays of fondness’ she continued, likening them to Adam and Eve and making an arch reference to Darwin's Loves of the Plants for good measure. A week later she had grown less kind:
Whenever I read Milton's description of Paradise – the happiness which he so poetically describes, fills me with benevolent satisfaction - yet, I cannot help viewing them, I mean the first pair, as if they were my inferiors - inferior because they could find happiness in a world like this a feeling of the same kind frequently intrudes on me here.
and
I think I could form an idea of more elegant felicity – where mind chastens sensation, and rational converse gave a little dignity to fondness.9
It was impossible for Mary to admit that she was jealous; such an acknowledgement cost too much in humiliation, cut across what she believed about her own independence and self-sufficiency, and might even seem to threaten the status of her platonic attachment to Fuseli. But the spectacle of women who were her inferiors achieving marriage and, in Ann Gabell's case, winning love even from a sensible, educated man, simply because she was pretty, aroused in Mary a pain and rage she could not overcome.
[8]
The
Amazon
THE Fuseli affair dragged on, less and less satisfactorily for all concerned. Sophia seems to have adopted the classic tactic of the ignorant and amiable wife, though she may have bitten her lip on occasion. He, confident that she adored him, knew how to keep her in order if she ever appeared on the point of complaining: ‘Why don't you swear, my dear? You have no idea how much it would ease your mind.’ With Mary, who was perfectly capable of criticizing and wrangling even where she loved, that tone could not be used.
Politics became a saving distraction for her. Long before the Bastille was stormed in July 1789, her Dissenting friends were keenly following the preliminary rumbles of revolution in France, and when the explosion came they were beside themselves with joy. ‘Hurrah! Liberty, Reason, brotherly love for ever! Down with kingcraft and priestcraft! The majesty of the people for ever!’ ‘shouted young Harry Priestley, waving his hat in the air as he brought the news to his father.1 Few of the English expressed their pleasure in quite these terms, but there was general admiration for the way in which France, held to be a nation of servile, superstitious and cowardly creatures, had thrown off ‘the iron yoke of slavery… Ill betide the degenerate English heart that does not wish her prosperity’ wrote Anna Seward to Thomas Christie as he dashed across to Paris to inspect the situation.2
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft Page 11
