Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (5 page)

will do all I can towards it, and I am sure you will not desire more. I think if the time would come over again, I would be differant. But it does not matter. There is nothing like bying expearance. I may be happyer for it hereafter, and I will think of the time coming and not of the past, except to make compar-rasons, to shew you what alterations there is for the best. . . . O Greville! think on me with kindness! Think on how many happy days weeks and years—I hope—we may yett pass. . . . And endead, did you but know how much I love you, you wou'd freely forgive me any passed quarrels. For I now suffer from them, and one line from you wou'd make me happy. . . . But how am I to make you amends? ... I will try, I will do my utmost; and I can only regrett that fortune will not put it in my power to make a return for all the kindness and goodness you have showed me."

Conscious of growing gifts, she had chafed by fits and starts at the seclusion of her home—for home it was to her, in her own words, " though never so homely." On one occasion (noted by Pettigrew and John Romney too substantially to admit of its being fiction) Greville took her to Ranelagh, and was annoyed by her bursting into song before an applauding crowd. His displeasure so affected her that on her return she doffed her finery, donned the plainest attire, and, weeping, entreated him to retain her thus or be quit of her. This episode may well have been the source of Romney's picture " The Seamstress."

The accounts omit any mention of amusements, and it must have been Greville alone who (rarely) treated her. She may have seen " Coxe's Museum," and the " balloonists " Lunardi and Sheldon, the Italian at the Pantheon, the Briton in Foley Gardens. She may

have been present, too, when in the new " Marylebone Gardens " Signer Torre gave one of his firework displays of Mount Etna in eruption. If so, how odd must she afterwards have thought it, that her husband was to be the leading authority on Italian and Sicilian volcanoes! But what at once amazed Greville —the paragon of nil admirari —was the transformation that she seriously set herself to achieve. " She does not," observed this economist of ease three years later, " wish for much society, but to retain two or three creditable acquaintances in the neighbourhood she has avoided every appearance of giddiness, and prides herself on the neatness of her person and the good order of her house; these are habits," he comments, " both comfortable and convenient to me. She has vanity and likes admiration; but she connects it so much with her desire of appearing prudent, that she is more pleas'd zvith accidental admiration than that of crowds ^vhich now distress her. In short, this habit, of three or four years' acquiring, is not a caprice, but is easily to be continued. . . ." " She never has wished for an improper acquaintance," he adds a month later. " She has dropt everyone she thought I could except against, and those of her own choice have been in a line of prudence and plainness which, tho' I might have wished for, I could not have proposed to confine her [to]."

Their visitors seem to have included his brother and future executor, Colonel the Honourable Robert Fulke-Greville, with perhaps, too, his kinsmen the Cathcarts; afterwards, the sedate Banks, a Mr. Tollemache, the Honourable Heneage Legge, whom we shall find meeting her just before her marriage, and oftener the artist Gavin Hamilton, Sir William's namesake and kinsman. He at once put Emma on his " list of favorites," reminding him, as she did, of a Roman beauty that he

had once known, but superior to her, he said, in the lines of her beautiful and uncommon mouth. Her main recreation, besides her study to educate herself, were those continual visits to Romney, which indeed assisted it. His Diaries contain almost three hundred records of " Mrs. Hart's " sittings during these four years, most of them at an early hour, for Emma, except in illness, was never a late riser. One portrait of her, unmentioned in our previous list, represents her reading the Gazette with a startled expression. I have been informed (though at first I thought otherwise) that this is really a likeness of her in the character of Serena reading scandal about herself in the pages of a journal. " While," remarks the sententious John Romney, " she lived under Greville's protection, her conduct was in every way correct, except only in the unfortunate situation in which she happened to be placed by the concurrence of peculiar circumstances such as might perhaps in a certain degree be admitted as an extenuation. . . . Here is a young female of an artless and playful character, of extraordinary Elegance and symmetry of form, of a most beautiful countenance glowing with health and animation, turned upon the wide world. ... In all Mr. Romney's intercourse with her she was treated with the utmost respect, and her demeanour fully entitled her to it." He adds that she " sat" for the " face " merely and " a slight sketch of the attitude," and that in the " Bacchante " he painted her countenance alone; while Hay-ley, in his Life of the painter, speaks of " the high and constant admiration" with which Romney contemplated not only the " personal " but the " mental endowments of this lady, and the gratitude he felt for many proofs of her friendship," as expressed in his letters. " The talents," he continues, " which nature bestowed on the fair Emma, led her to delight in the

two kindred arts of music and painting; in the first she acquired great practical ability; for the second she had exquisite taste, and such expressive powers as could furnish to an historical painter an inspiring model for the various characters either delicate or sublime. . . . Her features, like the language of Shakespeare, could exhibit all the gradations of every passion with a most fascinating truth and felicity of expression. Romney delighted in observing the wonderful command she possessed over her eloquent features." He called her his " inspirer." To Romney, as we have already seen, she " first opened her heart." At Romney's she met those literary and artistic lights that urged her native intelligence into imitation. A sketch by Romney of his studio displays her seated as his model for the " Spinstress " by her spinning-wheel. A figure entering and smiling is Greville; of two others seated at a table, the one appealing to her would seem to be Hayley, to whom she always gratefully confessed her obligations.

William Hayley, the "Hermit" of Eartham, the close ally both of Romney and Cowper, must have been far more interesting in his conversation than his books, though his Triumphs of Temper created a sensation now difficult to understand. He was a clever, egotistical eccentric, who successively parted from two wives with whom he yet continued to correspond in affectionate friendship. Curiously enough, Hayley's rhymed satirical comedies x are much the best of his otherwise stilted verses. He must have remembered Hamilton and Greville when, in one of them, he makes " Mr. Beril " account for his ownership of a lovely Greek statue:

1 The Happy Prescription (1784) and The Two Connoisseurs are brilliant vers de societe. For Horace Walpole's poor opinion of his authorship, cf. Letters, vol. viii. pp. 235, 236, 251.

" I owe it to chance, to acknowledge the truth, And a princely and brave Neapolitan youth, Whom I luckily saved in a villainous strife From the dagger of jealousy aimed at his life:"

and when his " Bijou " ironically observes to " Varnish ":

" I protest your remark is ingenious and new, You have gusto in morals as well as virtu:"

His unfamiliar sonnet on Romney's " Cassandra" may be here cited, since it may have suggested to Greville his estimate of Emma—" piece of modern virtu ":

"Ye fond idolaters of ancient art,

Who near Parthenope with curious toil, Forcing the rude sulphureous rocks to part,

Draw from the greedy earth her buried spoil Of antique entablature; and from the toil

Of time restoring some fair form, acquire A fancied jewel, know 'tis but a foil

To this superior gem of richer fire. In Romney's tints behold the Trojan maid,

See beauty blazing in prophetic ire. From palaces engulphed could earth retire,

And show thy works, Apelles, undecay'd, E'en thy Campaspe would not dare to vie With the wild splendour of Cassandra's eye."

In a late letter to Lady Hamilton the poet assures her that an unpublished ode was wholly inspired by her, and there are traces of her influence even in his poor tragedies. But since " Serena " influenced her often, it may be of interest to single out a few lines from the Triumphs of Temper (composed some years before its author first met her) as likelier to have arrested her attention than his triter commonplaces about " spleen " and " cheerfulness " :

" Free from ambitious pride and envious care, To love and to be loved was all her prayer."

" Th' imperishable wealth of sterling love."

" . . . She's everything by starts and nothing long, But in the space of one revolving hour Flies thro all states of poverty and power, All forms on whom her veering mind can pitch, Sultana, Gipsy, Goddess, nymph, and witch. At length, her soul with Shakespeare's magic fraught, The wand of Ariel fixed her roving thought."

And

" But mild Serena scorn'd the prudish play To wound warm love with frivolous delay; Nature's chaste child, not Affection's slave, The heart she meant to give, she frankly gave."

The August of 1782 brought about an event decisive for Emma's future—the death of the first Lady Hamilton, the Ambassador's marriage with whom in 1757 had been mainly one of convenience, though it had proved one also of comfort and esteem. She was a sweet, tranquil soul of rapt holiness, what the Germans call " Eine schone Seele," and she worshipped the very earth that her light-hearted husband, far nearer to it than she was, trod on. He had set out as a young captain of foot, who, in his own words, had " known the pinch of poverty "; but during the whole twenty-five years of their union she had never once reproached him, and had dedicated to him all " that long disease " she called " her life." So far, though intimate with the young Sicilian King and friendly with the Queen, Hamilton had weighed little in diplomacy. In a sprightly letter to the Earl of Dartmouth some six years earlier, he observes: " It is singular but certainly true that I am become more a ministre de farnille at this court than ever were the ministers of France, Spain, and Vienna. Whenever there is a good shooting-party H.S. Majesty is pleased to send for me, and for some months past I have had the honour of dining

with him twice or three times a week, nay sometimes I have breakfasted, dined, and supped ... in their private party without any other minister." He next descants on his exceptional opportunities of helping the English in Naples. He hits off a certain Lady Boyd among them as " Like Mr. Wilkes, but she has [such] a way of pushing forward that face of hers and filling every muscle of it with good humour, that her homeliness is forgot in a moment "; and he concludes with the usual complaint that—unlike his predecessor, Sir William Lynch—he has not yet been made " Privy Councillor." So dissatisfied was he that in 1774 he had tried hard on one of his periodical home visits to exchange his ambassadorship at Naples for one at Madrid; and hitherto science, music, pictures, archaeology, sport, and gallantry had occupied his constant leisure—indeed he was more of a Consul than of an Ambassador. General Acton's advent, however, as Minister of War and Marine in 1779 proved a passing stimulus to his dormant energy. If a dawdler, he was never a trifler; and he was uniformly courteous and kind-hearted. His frank geniality recommended him as bear-leader to the many English visitors who flocked annually to Naples, often stumbled lightly into scrapes that caused him infinite trouble, and prompted his humorous regret that Magna Charta contained no clause forbidding Britons to emigrate. It was not till Emma dawned on his horizon that he woke up in earnest to the duties of his office. His wife made every effort, so far as her feeble health admitted, to grace his hospitalities. She shared his own taste for music, and sang to the harpsichord before the Court of Vienna. The sole regret of her unselfish piety was that he remained a worldling. She studied to spare him every vexation and intrusion; and while he pursued his long rambles, sporting, artistic, or sentimental,

she sat at home praying for her elderly Pierrot's eternal welfare. Her example dispensed with precepts, and hoped to win- her wanderer back imperceptibly. How little she deserved the caricature of her as merely " a raw-boned Scotchwoman " may be gleaned from some of the last jottings in her diary and her last letters to her husband:—

" How tedious are the hours I pass in the absence of the beloved of my heart, and how tiresome is every scene to me. There is the chair in which he used to sit, I find him not there, and my heart feels a pang, and my foolish eyes overflow with tears. The number of years we have been married, instead of diminishing my love have increased it to that degree and wound it up with my existence in such a manner that it cannot alter. How strong are the efforts I have made to conquer my feelings, but in vain. . . . No one but those who have felt it can know the miserable anxiety of an undivided love. When he is present, every object has a different appearance; when he is absent, how lonely, how isolated I feel. ... I return home, and there the very dog stares me in the face and seems to ask for its beloved master. . . . Oh ! blessed Lord God and Saviour, be Thou mercifully pleas'd to guard and protect him in all dangers and in all situations. Have mercy upon us both, oh Lord, and turn our hearts to Thee."

" A few days, nay a few hours . . . may render me incapable of writing to you. . . . But how shall I express my love and tenderness to you, dearest of earthly blessings. My only attachment to this world has been my love to you, and you are my only regret in leaving it. My heart has followed your footsteps where ever you went, and you have been the source of all my joys. I would have preferred beggary with you to kingdoms without you, but all this must have

an end—forget and forgive my faults and remember me with kindness. I entreat you not to suffer me to be shut up after I am dead till it is absolutely necessary. Remember the promise you have made me that your bones should lie by mine when God shall please to call you, and leave directions in your will about it."