Nelson's Lady Hamilton (7 page)

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ever do for me but going home to you. If that is not to be, I will except of nothing. I will go to London, their go into every excess of vice till I dye, a miserable, broken-hearted wretch, and leave my fate as a warning to young whomen never to be two good ; for now you have made me love you, you made me good, you have abbandoned me; and some violent end shall finish our connexion, if it is to finish. But oh! Greville, you cannot, you must not give me up. You have not the heart to do it. You love me I am sure; and I am willing to do everything in my power, and what will you have more ? And I only say this is the last time I will either beg or pray, do as you like."

Again she tells him, " I always knew, I had a foreboding since first I began to love you, that I was not destined to be happy; for their is not a King or Prince on hearth that cou'd make me happy without you."

She would have saved herself much grief and humiliation of spirit if she had remembered and acted upon a saying of Greville's in one of his very earliest letters to her. " I have never seen a woman," he told her, " clever enough to keep a man who was tired of her." Not only was Greville somewhat tired of her—in spite of his protestations to the contrary—but she also interfered with his material interests, which were always paramount with him. Therefore her most pathetic

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letters, her tears, her reproaches, were all in vain, they made no impression upon the hard, clear surface of his self-love and self-satisfaction. He believed himself incapable of making a blunder in taste or good breeding—and taste and good breeding represented all his outlook, while they were a very small matter in Emma's.

Greville was capable of writing to Sir William Hamilton a few months after his cruel break with the girl who loved him, yet with quite sincere conviction—

" I so long foresaw that a moment of separation must arrive, that I never kept the connexion, but on a footing of perfect liberty to her. Its commencement was not of my seeking, and hitherto it has contributed to her happiness. She knows and reflects often on the circumstances which she cannot forget, and in her heart she cannot reproach me of having acted otherwise than a kind and attentive friend. But you have now rendered it possible for her to be respected and comfortable, and if she has not talked herself out of the true view of her situation she will retain the protection and affection of us both. . . . Knowing all this, infinite have been my pains to make her respect herself, and act fairly, and I had always proposed to continue her friend, altho' the connexion ceased."

So far the virtuous and upright Greville.

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lie was incapable of seeing his conduct in the light in which it appeared to more generous souls. He told himself that he had done well for Emma, as for himself. Her worldly circumstances were improved, her material prosperity was assured, so long as she continued to please Sir William Hamilton. Hard and unspiritual in his own nature, in spite of his culture and refinement, he recked little of the blow he had dealt Emma by shattering her faith and trust in him. By his treatment he did more than any other man who came into her life to destroy the child in her—the simple uncritical belief in goodness which she had strongly, in spite of her own stray ings from the path of virtue. Flung back upon herself as she had been by his abandonment of her, it was no wonder, it was only human, that she at last turned to bay and wrote to him: " It is not to your intrest to disoblidge me, for you don't know the power I have hear. ... If you affront me, I will make him marry me."

By writing that threat Emma showed herself a subtly changed creature. She had learned her lesson: in future she would be less the victim of men's passions and more the moulder of her own fortunes. "Love, in its unselfishness," says Captain Mahan, "passed out of her life with Greville. Other men might find her pliant, pleasing, seductive; he alone knew her

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as disinterested." This judgment is somewhat sweeping, but substantially just. Ambition and the love of power were dawning upon the horizon of the country girl, who hitherto had been content to give everything and receive little.

CHAPTER V

NAPLES

IT would have been impossible to find a place or a society more entirely fitted to expand Emma's characteristic gifts and graces than Naples from the year 1786 to the year of the Battle of the Nile. She had naturally a southern temperament: joyous, responsive, thinking little of the morrow, fully alive to all visible beauty— to all beauty, that is, which could be touched and seen, but insensitive to the austere and spiritual charm of things unseen—" the visionary gleam, the glory and the dream/ 1 Her native tendency towards the theatrical side of life was enhanced by the atmosphere of Naples, where the priests, the Lazzaroni, the royalties, gave to everything she saw the air of a gorgeous opera, played in a sunshine so brilliant as to have some of the dazzling qualities of limelight, and backed by the unsurpassable stage-setting of the Bay of Naples and the smoking crater of Vesuvius.

For the first few years of her life there it was all gaiety and flowers, balls, receptions,

" Attitudes," compliments, a king in the train of her admirers. Such was the opening scene. Then the stage darkened, and the Muse of History came stalking across the boards, arrayed in all the pomp and panoply of war. It was—

" A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene !"

Storms, revolutions, bloodshed followed, while warships — the battered victors of the Nile — rode at anchor on the blue waters of the Bay of Naples, and the fortresses of Uovo and Nuovo, on which Emma had looked out many years, became the centres of anarchy and rebellion. Emma's spirit rose to these great events. Her courage, her resource, her readiness were undoubted ; she played her part well when the time came, and there can be little question that she saw herself and the Queen of Naples as the twin heroines of a drama which was being acted before the eyes of Europe.

But in the late summer of 1786 wars and revolutions were yet dim upon the horizon, the only disturbances were thunder, lightning, an eruption of Vesuvius. In one of her letters, Emma writes: "We have dreadful thunder and lightning. It fell at the Maltese minister's just by our house and burnt [h]is beds and wires, etc. I have now persuaded Sir William to put up a conductor to his house. The lava runs a

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little, but the mountain is very full and we expect an irruption every day."

By the end of the year Emma and her mother had left their own apartment, and moved into the Palazzo Sessa, the British Embassy at that time. Nothing which money, imagination, and taste could suggest for her comfort and pleasure had been left undone by Sir William Hamilton, Goethe, during his Italian journey, saw and admired her boudoir, which, " furnished in the English taste," he considered "most delightful," while the " outlook from its corner window" was " unique." He admired the apartment, and, somewhat against his will, he was also compelled to admire and marvel at its mistress.

"The Chevalier Hamilton," he writes, "so long resident here as English Ambassador, so long, too, connoisseur and student of Art and Nature, has found their counterpart and acme with exquisite delight in a lovely girl—English, and some twenty years of age. She is exceedingly beautiful and finely built. She wears a Greek garb becoming her to perfection. She then merely loosens her locks, takes a pair of shawls, and effects changes of postures, moods, gestures, mien, and appearance that make one really feel as if one were in some dream. Here is visible complete, and bodied forth in movements of surprising variety, all that so many artists have sought in vain to fix and render.

MEDALLION PORTRAIT FROM LIFE

FREDERICK REHI5ERG

Successively standing, kneeling, seated, reclining, grave, sad, sportive, teasing, abandoned, penitent, alluring, threatening, agonised. One follows the other, and grows out of it. She knows how to choose and shift the simple folds of her single kerchief for every expression, and to adjust it into a hundred kinds of headgear. Her elderly knight holds the torches for her performance, and is absorbed in his soul's desire. In her he finds the charm of all antiques, the fair profiles on Sicilian coins, the Apollo Belvedere himself. . . ."

That is one of the earliest appreciations and descriptions of the famous " Attitudes " in which Emma expressed with plastic grace the dreams of artists, and proved herself " the heroine of a thousand things." All who ever saw those " Attitudes " were enchanted with them, however unfavourably they might regard Emma herself, and in later years, when her beauty had degenerated and her fame was somewhat too loudly noised abroad, she had many critics, especially of her own sex.

But these, her early triumphant years at Naples, were unmarred by criticism or calumny. Her position in Sir William Hamilton's house was apparent to all, but the easy Neapolitans were not concerned to trouble themselves about it, while many of the English visitors to Naples who did not wish to deny themselves the pleasure of visiting the Palazzo Sessa and there beholding

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the most famous beauty of the time and place, affected to believe that she was secretly married to the British Ambassador. Almost the only distinction which marked her position from that of a wife was that the Queen of Naples did not receive her at Court, though she admired her looks, and showed her "every distant civility." The King was frankly enchanted, followed her about, expressing a sort of dumb and animal-like amazement at her loveliness. "The king," wrote Emma in one of her letters, with not unnatural exultation (accompanied by a lamentable lack of h's) "as eyes, he as a heart, and I have made an impression on it." Neither the eyes nor the heart of Ferdinand were of much value, but Emma could not be expected to know this, and she may be forgiven if she was a little dazzled by the first royal smiles that had come her way. On one occasion she describes how on Sundays the King dines at " Paysilipo " (as she spells it), " and he allways come every Sunday before the casina in his boat to look at me. We had a small deplomatic party, and we was sailing in our boat, the K. directly came up, put his boat of musick next us, and made all the French horns and the wholl band play. He took of his hat, and sett with his hatt on his knees all the wile, and when we was going to land he made his bow, and said it was a sin he could not speak English." But the King's attentions did no more than