Nelson's Lady Hamilton (8 page)

C/3 U

W 2 G a

lightly flatter her vanity. With a somewhat laughable air of prudence, she writes: " We keep the good-will of the other party mentioned abbove [the Queen], and never give him any encouragement."

In a difficult position and a dangerous society she really deserved the credit of acting with a sweetness that charmed all, and a prudence which repelled the unworthy. When at Sorrento, she had a slight encounter with one of the moth-like men who hovered round this particularly charming candle. "One asked me if I left a love at Naples, that I left them so soon. I pulled my lip at him, to say, ' I pray, do you take me for an Italian ? . . . Look, sir, I am English. I have one Cavaliere servente, and I have brought him with me/ pointing to Sir William."

Sir William Hamilton's devotion knew no bounds — save marriage. Everything that a woman who was content to forego the name Df wife could wish, was hers. And all was given .vith such kindness, such genuine admiration and lelight, such freedom from the lecturing and •eproving tone to which Greville had accustomed icr, that it is no matter for wonder if Emma's .usceptible heart and really affectionate nature >egan to sway the girl who had declared she ould not live without Greville into making Sir Villiam the genial sun of her hemisphere. In ime, he too was to pale into a minor luminary;

70 NELSON'S LADY HAMILTON

but up to the year after the Nile, Emma revolved round him with grace and enthusiasm.

Her enthusiasm, her tremendous store of vitality, was one of the causes of her success, as it was also one of the reasons of her lack of ordinary moral standards. After such an experience as Greville's cold and cruel abandonment, most women would have been too broken to go on again. Not so Emma: she grieved, she implored, she wept, and there is no doubt that a certain child-like simplicity—which had survived the treatment of Captain Willet-Payne and Sir Harry Fetherstonehaugh—died in her at this time. But in less than a year she was clinging to Sir William Hamilton with affectionate attachment, and declaring there was no one like him in the world. Then, when she had become Lady Hamilton—for the first time in her life holding an assured position, and with every inducement not to marr what she had won by years of waiting—she met Nelson, and flung herself upon him with undiminished ardour and all the raptures of a girl in love for the first time. It is a spectacle at which the chronicler can only marvel, feeling that it is not reasonable to judge such a woman by the usual standards, and feeling, above all, that in her extraordinary vitality may be found some explanation, some condonation of her conduct. Emma Hamilton was never jaded—after the most devastating

experiences she arose with a head unbowed and optimist eyes fronting the yet unshattered future. It is courage distinctly, and moral courage, too, though lacking in the finer spiritual qualities. But in judging her career and character, this courage and this marvellous power of recovery must not be forgotten.

She never could resist the enticing voice that called to her in the tone of kindness and affection : she responded with fatal quickness and no forethought. In the words of an American poet, who would have fully appreciated her vitality, she might have said, and thus summed up all her blunders and mistakes—

" Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I

shall follow,

As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps anywhere around the globe."

After parting from Greville, and until the te when she met Nelson, Emma regarded Sir r illiam Hamilton with real affection and devo-ion. In one of her letters she says, " He is so :ind, so good and tender to me that I love him much that I have not a warm look left for the eapolitans." When he tore himself away to shooting with the king at Persano, Emma rrote to him in the same agitated and warm-learted manner she had used to Greville so short time before— " I have just received your dear sweet letter,"

72 NELSON'S LADY HAMILTON

she tells him. "It has charmed me. I don't know what to say to you to thank you in words kind enough. Oh, how kind! Do you call me your dear friend ? Oh, what a happy creature is your Emma !—me that had no friend, no protector, no body that I could trust, and now to be the friend, the Emma, of Sir William Hamilton! If I had words to thank you, that I may not thus be choaked with meanings, for which I can find no utterance! Think only, my dear Sir William, what I would say to you, if I could express myself, only to thank you a thousand times."

Temporarily separated from him on a later occasion, she writes, within a few hours of the parting—

" I can't be happy till I have wrote to you, my dearest Sir William, tho* it is so lattely I saw you. But what of that to a person that loves as I do. One hour's absence is a year, and I shall count the hours and moments till Saturday, when I shall find myself once more in your dear kind arms, my dear Sir William, my friend, my All, my earthly Good, my Kind home in one, you are to me eating, drinking and cloathing, my comforter in distress. Then why shall I not love you ? Endead, I must and ought, whilst life is left in me, or reason to think on you. I believe it is right I should be sepe-rated from you sometimes, to make me know

s

O i

P i

r-i «

H

myself, for I don't know till you are absent how dear you are to me; and I won't tell you how many tears I shed for you this morning, and even now I can't stop them, for in thinking on you, my heart and eyes fill. ... I have had a long lesson, and am going now to have another, for musick quiets my mind, so that I shall study much tell I see you. I can't finish this subject tell I have thank'd you, my dearest Sir William, for having given me the means of at least amusing myself a little, if in your absence I can be amused. I owe everything to you, and shall for ever with gratitude remember it. Pray, one little line, if you have time, just that I may kiss your name. . . . Take care of your dear self."

In an earlier letter, written to Sir William while he was absent on one of his sporting expeditions, there is a touch of feminine pity for the victims of the sportsmen that shows how little hardened her heart was to suffering, though later a base calumny was to accuse her of exulting in the execution of Caracciolo. " I am glad you had some good sport," she writes, evidently using a conventional phrase, without considering its meaning, " I should like to see that that is 200 weight, for it must be a fine one; but the other 2, that got of wounded, they must be somewere in great pain."

But even for the pleasure of killing his dumb fellow-creatures Sir William Hamilton did not

74 NELSON'S LADY HAMILTON

leave his fair Emma often. She was so sweet and gay, such a joy to watch and to educate, that he could not tear himself away from her. She had masters of all sorts, to teach her Italian, to teach her singing; while the Palazzo Sessa was thronged with painters and sculptors, all occupied—by Sir William's orders—in perpetuating her beauty on canvas, in marble, in cameos. Inexhaustible good temper, as well as a considerable share of vanity, must have been necessary to enable her to endure the strain. In one of her letters of this period she says—

" The house is ful of painters painting me. He [Sir William] as now got nine pictures of me, and 2 a painting. Marchant is cutting my head in stone, that is in camea for a ring. There is another man modeling me in wax, and another in clay. All the artists is come from Rome to study from me, that Sir William as fitted up a room, that is calld the painting-room. Sir William is never a moment from me. He goes no where without me. He as no diners but what I can be of the party. No body comes without the[y] are civil to me. We have allways good company. . . . My old apartments is made the musick-rooms, where I have my lessons in the morning. Our house at Caserta is fitting up eleganter this year, a room making for my musick, and a room fitting up for my master, as he goes with ous. Sir William says he loves nothing but me, likes no

«

person to sing but me, and takes delight in all I do, and all I say, to see me happy. ... It is a most extraordinary thing that my voice is totally altered. It is the finest soprano, you ever heard, so that Sir William shuts his eyes and thinks one of the Castratos is singing; and, what is most extraordinary that my shake, or tril, what you call it, is so very good in every note, my master says that, if he did not feil and see and no that I am a substance, he would think I was an angel/'

In another and earlier letter she had carefully detailed for the benefit of the admiring Sir William some of the compliments on her music that she received during his absence :—

"Mr. Hart went awhay yesterday with his head turned; I sung so well Handell's 3 songs , . that you never saw a man so delighted. He said it was the most extraordinary thing he ever knew. But what struck him was holding on the notes and going from the high to the low notes so very neat. He says I shall turn the heads of the English. . . . Galucci played solo some of my solfegos and you whold have thought he would have gone mad. He says he had heard a great deal of me. But he never saw or heard of such a whoman before. He says when he first came in, I frightened him with a Majesty and Juno look that I receved him with. Then he says that whent of on being more acquainted, and I enchanted him by my politeness and the