Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (17 page)

" I study very hard, . . . and I have had all my

songs set for the viola, so that Sir William may accompany me, which as pleased him very much, so that we study together. The English garden is going on very fast. The King and Queen go there every day. Sir William and me are there every morning at seven a clock, sometimes dine there and allways drink tea there. In short it is Sir William's favourite child, and booth him and me are now studying botany, but not to make ourselves pedantical prigs and shew our learning like some of our travelling neighbours, but for our own pleasure. Greffer* is as happy as a prince. Poor Flint, the messenger, was killed going from hence. I am very sorry. He was lodged in our house and I had a great love for him. I sent him to see Pompea, Portici, and all our delightful environs, and sent all his daughters presents. Poor man, the Queen as expressed great sorrow. Pray let me know if his family are provided for as I may get something for them perhaps. . . . Pray don't fail to send the inclosed."

But more than such surface-life was now animating Emma. A peasant's daughter, at length in the ascendant over an Empress's, was receiving, communicating, intensifying wider impressions. When her Queen denounced, she abominated the Jacobins; her tears were mingled with Maria's over the family catastrophes. She preached up to her the English as the avengers of her wrongs. She rejoiced with her over the Anglo-Sicilian alliance concluded in July. She longed for some deliverer who might justify her flights of eloquence.

England had at last joined the allies and thrown

'Grafer—a trusted agent of Hamilton's. He afterwards became the manager of Nelson's Bronte estates. His wife was a scheming woman who, in later years, gave much trouble both to Nelson and Lady Hamilton.

down the gauntlet in earnest. The roth of September, 1793, brought Nelson's first entry both into Naples and into the Ambassador's house.

He had been despatched by Lord Hood on a special mission to procure ten thousand troops from Turin and Naples after that wonderful surrender of starved-out Toulon:—" The strongest in Europe, and twenty-two sail of the line . . . without firing a shot." 1

The previous year had called forth two ruling strains in his nature: the one of irritable embitterment at his unrecognised solicitations for a command; the other of patriotic exultation when Chatham and Hood suddenly " smiled " upon him, thanks, it would seem, to the importunity of his early admirer and lifelong friend, the Duke of Clarence. For five years he had been eating out his heart on half-pay in a Norfolk village; and even when the long-delayed command had come, crass officialism assigned him only a " sixty-four" and the fate of drifting aimlessly off Guernsey with no enemy in sight. If proof be wanted of Nelson's inherent idealism, it js found in the fact that in these long days of stillness and obscurity he was brooding over the future of his country, and devising the mearjs of combating un-arisen combinations against her.

He was now almost thirty-five, and had been married six years and a half; his wife was five years younger than himself.

From his earliest years, at once restrained and sensitive, companionable and lonely, athirst for glory rather than for fame, simple as a child yet brave as a lion, he had experienced at intervals several passionate friendships for women. As a stripling in Canada he conceived so vehement an affection for Miss Molly Simpson that he was with difficulty withheld from 1 Nelson to his wife, nth September.

leaving the service. After a short interval, Miss Andrews in France had rekindled the flame. His in-tensest feeling in the Leeward Islands had been for Mrs. Moutray, his " dear, sweet friend." His engagement to her associate, Frances Nisbet, had been sudden—some suspected from pique. The young widow of the Nevis doctor attracted him less by her heart than what he called her " mental accomplishments, . . . superior to most people's of either sex." These were rather of a second-rate boarding-school order. Nelson's unskilled, uncritical mind and his frank generosity always exaggerated such qualities in women, and not least in Emma, more self-taught than himself. His wife's virtues were sterling, but her power of appreciation very limited. She was perhaps more dutiful than gentle, less loving than jealous; her self-complacent coldness was absolutely unfitted to understand or hearten or companion genius. She entirely lacked intuition. Her outlook was cramped—that of the plain common-sense and unimaginative prejudice which so often distinguishes her class. She was a nagger, and she nagged her son. She was quite satisfied with her little shell and, ailing as she was, perpetually grumbled at everything outside it. But directly success attended her husband, she at once gave herself those social airs for which that class is also distinguished when it rises. She became ridiculously pretentious. This it was that seems to have disgusted Nelson's sisters in later years, though they were certainly prejudiced against her. Some disillusionment succeeded as time familiarised him with the lady of his impulsive choice. She nursed him dutifully in 1797; but, for her, duties were tasks. At Bath, a short time before his eventful voyage of 1798, he was to express his delight at the charms of the reigning toasts; but in steeling himself against tempta-

tion, he got no further than the avowal of having " everything that was valuable in a wife."

There are two sorts of genius, or supreme will: the cold and the warm. The one commands its material from sheer fibre of inflexible character and hard intellect ; the other creates and enkindles its fuel by idealism. The former in England is signally illustrated in differing spheres by Walpole and Wellington; the latter by Chatham and Nelson. Both of these shared that keen faculty of vision, really, if we reflect, a form of spiritual force, and allied to faith which, in volume, whether for individuals or nations, is irresistible. This sword of the spirit is far more powerful than ethical force without it; still more so than merely conventional morality, which, indeed, for good or for ill, and in many partings of the ways, it has often by turns made or marred. Both, too, were histrionic— a word frequently misused. The world is a stage, and of all nature there is a scenic aspect. The dramatic should never be confused with the theatrical, nor attitude with affectation. And the visionary with a purpose is always dramatic. He lives on dreams of forecast, and his forecast visualises combinations, scenes of development, characters, climaxes. When he is nothing but a lonely muser, or, again, an orator destined to bring other hands to execute his ideas, his audience is the future—the " choir invisible." But when he himself acts the chief part in the dramas which he has composed, he needs the audience that he creates and holds. He depends on a sympathy that can interpret his best possibilities to himself.

In Nelson's soul resided from boyhood the central idea of England's greatness. His intuitive force, his genius, incarnated that idea, and what Chatham dreamed and voiced, Nelson did. He realised situations in a flash, and, from first to last, his courage took

the risk not only of action, but of prophecy. Indeed, his own motto may be said to have been that fine phrase of the other which he quoted to Lady Hamilton in the first letter which counselled the flight of the royal family in 1798— " The Boldest measures are the Safest." George Meredith's badge of true patriotism fits Nelson beyond all men: " To him the honour of England was as a babe in his arms; he hugged it like a mother."

Nelson, again, was eminently spontaneous. There was nothing set or petty about him. He never posed as " Sir Oracle." He dared to disobey the formalists. He despised and offended insignificance in high places; the prigs and pedants, the big-wigs of Downing Street, the small and self-important purveyors of dead letter, the jealous Tritons of minnow-like cliques. Above all, he abhorred from the bottom of his honest heart the f ' candid friend "—" willing to wound and yet afraid to strike "; but he honoured—to return from Pope's line to Canning's—" the erect, the manly foe." Clerical by .association, the son of a most pious, the brother of a most worldly clergyman, his bent was genuinely religious, as all his letters with their trust in God and their sincere " amens" abundantly testify. To clergymen he still remains the great but erring Nelson. But his God was the God of truth, and justice, and battles—the tutelary God that watches over England; and he himself owns emphatically in one of his letters that he could never turn his cheek to the smiter. He liked to consecrate his ambitions, but ambition, even in childhood, had been his impulse. *' Nelson will always be first " had been ever a ruling motive.

And, man of iron as he was in action, out of it he was unconstrained and sportive. He loved to let himself go; he delighted in fun and playful sallies. He

formed a band of firm believers, and he believed in them with enthusiasm—an enthusiasm which accentuated his bitterness whenever it was damped or disappointed. A daredevil himself, he loved daredevilry in others. In Emma as he idealised her, he hailed a nature that could respond, encourage, brace, and even inspire, for she was to be transfigured into the creature of his own imaginings. She was his Egeria. It was a double play of enthusiastic zeal and idealisation. She fired him to achieve more than ever she could have imagined. He stirred her to appear worthier in his eyes. She wreathed him with laurel; he crowned her image with myrtle. Many to whom the fact is repugnant refuse to see that this idealised image of Emma in Nelson's eyes, however often and lamentably she fell short of it, was an influence as real and potent as if she had been its counterpart. Her nearest approach to it may be viewed in her letters of 1798.

It is idle to brand her as destitute of any moral standard; her inward standards were no lower than those of the veneered " respectables " around her. Her outward conduct, as Sir William's partner, had been above suspicion; the sin of her girlhood had been long buried. And in many respects her fibre was stronger than that of a society which broadened its hypocrisies some .thirty years later, when Byron sang

"You are not a moral people, and you know it, Without the aid of too sincere a poet."

The radical defect in her grain was rather the complete lack of anything like spiritual aspiration. Hers, too, were the vanity that springs from pride, and the want of dignity bred of lawlessness. She had been a wild flower treated as a weed, and then transplanted to a hothouse; she was a spoiled child without being in the least childlike; she was self-conscious to the core.

But if she was ambitious for herself, she was fully as ambitious for those that she loved, and she admired all who admired them.

It is idle to dwell on the " vulgarity " of an adventuress. Adventure was the breath of Nelson's nostrils, and Emma's unrefined clay was animated by a spirit of reality which he loved. It is idle, again, to talk of his " infatuation," for that word covers every deep and lasting passion in idealising natures. It seems equally idle, even in the face of some uncertainty, to say that Nelson was a " dupe " in any portion of his claims for her " services " which lay within his own experience. With regard to these he was absolutely aware of what had actually transpired, and if it had not transpired he himself was a liar, which none have had the temerity to assert. The only sense in which Nelson could ever be styled the " dupe "of Emma would be that he was utterly cheated in his estimate of her. If she merely practised upon his simplicity, if there was nothing genuine about her, and all her effusiveness was a tinsel mask of hideous dissimulation; if she was a tissue of craft and cunning, then she was the worst of women, and he the most unfortunate of men. Wholly artless she was not; designedly artful, she never was. She was an unconscious blend of Art and Nature. In all her letters she is always the same receptive creature of sincere volitions and attitudes; and these letters, when they describe actions, are most strikingly confirmed by independent accounts. They are genuine. Her spirit went out to his magnetically; each was to hypnotise the other. Had she ever been artful she would have feathered her nest. Throughout her career it was never common wealth or prodigal youth that attracted her, and in her greatest dependence she had never been a parasite. It was talent and kindness that

she prized, and towards genius she gravitated. It is not from the bias either of praise or blame that her character must be judged. It is as a human document that she should be read. The real harm in the future to be worked by her on Nelson was that of the falsehood, repugnant to them both, which, eight years later, the birth of Horatia entailed—an evil aggravated by reaction in the nature of a puritan turned cavalier, and anxious to twist the irregularities of a " Nell Gwynne defender-of-the-faith " into consonance with the forms of his upbringing.

At Naples, Nelson and his men found a royal welcome in every sense of the word. The King sailed out to greet him, called on and invited him thrice within four days. He was hailed as the " Saviour of Italy," and while he was feted, his crew, who from the home Government had obtained nothing but " honour and salt beef," were provisioned and petted. A gala at San Carlo was given in their honour; six thousand troops were offered without hesitation; a squadron was despatched. The atmosphere of despairing indecision was dispersed by his unresting alertness, his lightning insight, his faith in Great Britain and himself, and the heroic glow with which he invested duty.

The phlegmatic Acton was impressed. His only fear was lest England's co-operation with Naples should provoke the interference of the allies, and be impeded by it. He superintended all the arrangements, for he was eminently a man of detail; he brought Captain Sutton (who stayed throughout the autumn) to see the King. Nelson he mis-styled " Admiral," and there for the moment his respect ended. But the hospitable Hamilton, under the sway of Emma's enthusiasm, was enraptured. He brought him to lodge at the Embassy in the room just pre-

pared for Prince Augustus, who was returning from Rome. He caught a spark of the young Captain's own electricity, he mentioned him in despatches, and conceived friendship at first sight. Here was a real man at last, a central and centralising genius. His wife shared and redoubled his astonishment. Here was a being who, like herself, "loved to surprise people." Here was one who, indefatigable in detail, and almost sleepless in energy, took large views, was a statesman as well as a sailor, and showed the qualities of a general besides; one, too, who, although a stern disciplinarian, could romp and sing with his midshipmen, one who made their health and his country's glory his chief concern. Moreover, his appearance, small, slight, wiry in frame, and rugged of exterior, was nevertheless prepossessing and imposing. When he spoke, his face lit up with his soul; nor had he yet lost an eye and an arm. And his contempt for Jacks-in-office, which seldom failed to show itself, chimed with her own—with that of a plebeian who in after years constantly used that Irish phrase, adopted by Nelson, " I would not give sixpence to call the King my uncle." Here was one who might rescue her Queen and shed lustre on Britain; who might prove the giant-killer of the Jacobin ogres. What Emma thought of her guest may be gathered from two facts, one of which is new. Though they were not to meet again until 1798, Nelson and Sir W. Hamilton were in constant and most sympathetic correspondence for the next five years. In 1796 Sir William recommended him to the Government as " that brave officer, Captain Nelson "; " if you don't deserve the epithet," he told him, " I know not who does. . . . Lady Hamilton and I admire your constancy, and hope the severe service you have undergone will be handsomely rewarded." And her first letter of our new series in 1798, written hurriedly on June I7th while