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, com-
municating, 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 be-
came 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.
EMMA, LADY HAMILTON 145
down the gauntlet in earnest. The roth of Septem-
ber, 1793, brought Nelson's first entry both into Naples and into the Ambassador's house.
He had been despatched by Lord Hood on a spe-
cial 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 aim-lessly 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.
146 EMMA, LADY HAMILTON
leaving the service. After a short interval, Miss An-
drews 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 accomplish-
ments, . . . 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 un-
imaginative 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 dis-
illusionment 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-
EMMA, LADY HAMILTON 147
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 in-
tellect ; the other creates and enkindles its fuel by idealism. The former in England is signally illustrated in
differing spheres by Walpole and Wellington; the lat-
ter 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 situa-
tions in a flash, and, from first to last, his courage took 148 EMMA, LADY HAMILTON
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 Hamil-
ton 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 him-
self go; he delighted in fun and playful sallies. He
EMMA, LADY HAMILTON 149
formed a band of firm believers, and he believed in
them with enthusiasm an enthusiasm which accentu-
ated his bitterness whenever it was damped or disap-
pointed. 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 repug-
nant 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 ap-
proach 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 com-
plete 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.
150 EMMA, LADY HAMILTON
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 cun-
ning, 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 let-
ters she is always the same receptive creature of sin-
cere 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 hyp-
notise 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 at-
tracted her, and in her greatest dependence she had
never been a parasite. It was talent and kindness that
EMMA, LADY HAMILTON 151
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 false-
hood, 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 wel-
come 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 arrange-
ments, 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 " Ad-
miral," 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-
152 EMMA, LADY HAMILTON
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 con-
ceived 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 gen-
eral besides; one, too, who, although a stern discipli-
narian, 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 cor-
respondence 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 hand-
somely rewarded." And her first letter of our new
series in 1798, written hurriedly on June I7th while
Full text of Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; Page 17