Memoirs of Emma, lady Hamilton, the friend of Lord Nelson and the court of Naples; (10 page)

CHAPTER IV

APPRENTICESHIP AND MARRIAGE 1787-1791

WHAT was the new prospect on which Emma's eyes first rested in March, 1786? Goethe has described it. A fruitful land, a free, blue sea, the scented islands, and the smoking mountain. A population of vegetarian craftsmen busy to enjoy with hand-to-mouth labour. A people holding their teeming soil under a lease on sufferance from earthquake and volcano. An inflammable mob, whose king lost six thousand subjects annually by assassination, and whose brawls and battles of vendetta would last three hours at a time. An upper class of feudal barons proud and ignorant. A lower class of half-beggars, at once lazy, brave, and insolent, who, if they misliked the face of a foreign inquirer, would stare in silence and turn away. A middle class of literati despising those above and below them. A race of tillers and of fishermen alternating between pious superstition and reckless revel, midway, as it were, between God and Satan. The bakers celebrating their patron, Saint Joseph; the priests their childlike "saint-humorous," San Filippo Neri; high and low alike, their civic patrons, Saints Anthony and Janu-arius, whose liquefying blood each January propitiated Vesuvius. Preaching Friars, dreaming Friars; singing, sceptical, enjoying Abbes. A country luxuriant

Si

not only with southern growths, but garlanded even in February by "banks of wild violets and tangles of wild heliotrope and sweet-peas. A spirit of Nature, turning dread to beauty, and beauty into dread.

She sits, her head leaned against her hand, and gazes through the open casement on a scene bathed in southern sun and crystal air—the pure air, the large glow, the light soil that made Neapolis the pride of Magna Grsecia. Her room—it is Goethe himself who describes it—" furnished in the English taste," is " most delightful "; the " outlook from its corner window, unique." Below, the bay; in full view, Capri; on the right, Posilippo; nearer the highroad, Villa Reale, the royal palace; on the left an ancient Jesuit cloister, which the queen had dedicated to learning; hard by on either side, the twin strongholds of Uovo and Nuovo, and the busy, noisy Molo, overhung by the fortress of San Elmo on the frowning crag; further on, the curving coast from Sorrento to Cape Minerva. And all this varied vista, from the centre of a densely thronged and clattering city.

The whirlwind of passion sank, and gradually yielded to calm, as Greville had predicted. " Every woman," commented this astute observer, resenting the mention of his name at Naples, " either feels or acts a part"; and change of dramatis personcc was necessary, he added, " to make Emma happy" and himself " free." But his careful prescription of the immaculate " Mrs. Wells" only partially succeeded. True, the elderly friend was soon to become the attached lover, and the prudential lover a forgiven friend; but he ceased henceforward to be " guide " or " philosopher," and gradually faded into a minor actor in the drama, though never into a supernumerary. She felt, as she told Sir .William, forlorn; her trust had

been betrayed and rudely shaken. What she longed for was a friend, and she could never simulate what she did not feel. 1 His gentle respect, his chivalry, contrasting with Greville's cynical taskmastership, his persuasive endearments, eventually won the day; and by the close of the year 'Emma's heart assented to his suit. Her eyes had been opened. To him she " owed everything." He was to her " every kind name in one." " I believe," she told him early in 1787, " it is right I shou'd be seperated from you sometimes, to make me know myself, for I don't know till you are absent, how dear you are to me "; she implores one little line just that she " may kiss " his " name." Sir William at fifty-six retained that art of pleasing which he never lost; and she was always pleased to be petted and shielded. Already by the opening of 1788 she had come to master the language and the society of Naples. Disobedient to his nephew, and his niece Mrs. Dickinson, who remonstrated naturally but in vain, Sir William insisted on her doing the honours, which she astonished him by managing, as he thought, to perfection. Every moment spared from visits abroad or her hospitalities in the Palazzo Sessa was filled by strenuous study at home, or in the adjoining Convent of Santa Romita. Her captivating charm, her quick tact, her impulsive friendliness, her entertaining humour, her natural taste for art, which, together with her " kindness and intelligence," had already been acknowledged by Romney as a source of inspiration; her unique " Attitudes," her voice which, under Galluci's tuition, she was now beginning " to command," even her free and easy manners when contrasted with those of the

J Cf. her very striking letter to Hamilton, Morrison MS. 163: "... Do you call me your dear friend ? . . . Oh, if I cou'd express myself! If I had words to thank you, that I may not thus be choked with meanings, for which I can find no utterance !"

Neapolitan noblesse, all seemed miracles, broke down the easy barriers of susceptible southerners, and gained her hosts of " sensible admirers." So early as February, 1787, Sir William reported to his nephew: •". . . Our dear Em. goes on now quite as I cou'd .wish, and is universally beloved "—a phrase which Emma herself repeated ten months later to her first mentor, with the proud consciousness of shining at a distance before him. " She is wonderful," added Hamilton, " considering her youth and beauty, and I flatter myself that E. and her Mother are happy to be with me, so that I see my every wish fulfilled." By the August of this year, when she first wrote Italian, she saw " good company," she delighted the whole diplomatic circle; Sir William was indissociable; she used the familiar " we "— " our house at Caserta is fitted up," while Sir William followed suit. The very servants styled her " Eccellenza." Her attached Ambassador " is distractedly in love "; " he deserves it, and indeed I love him dearly." There was not a grain in her of inconstancy. " He is so kind, so good and tender to me," she wrote as Emma Hart, in an unpublished letter, " that I love him so much that I have not a warm look left for the Neapolitans." His evenings, he wrote, were sweet with song and admiring guests, while her own society rendered them a " comfort." Inclination went on steadily ripening, until it settled within three years into deep mutual fondness. He fitted up for her a new boudoir in the Naples house with its round mirrors, as Miss Knight has recorded, covering the entire side of the wall opposite the semicircular window, and reflecting the moonlit bay with its glimmering boats, the glass tanks with their marine treasures of " sea-oranges " and the like. Within a year Hamilton tells Greville that she asks him " Do you love me, aye, but as much as your new apartment ? "—

both here and at Caserta. He did his best to " form " her, and in the course of time she was able to share his botanical studies, which they pursued not as " pedan-tical prigs " to air learning, but with zeal and pleasure in the early mornings and fresh air of the " English " gardens. Her aptitude and adaptiveness worked wonders. Within a year she could take an intelligent interest in the virtuoso's new volume, if we may judge from Sir J. Banks, who some years later again bade his old crony tell her that he hoped she admired Penelope in his work on Urns. She aided his volcanic observations; Sir William laughed, and said she would rival him with the mountain now. Both had already stayed with, and she had enchanted, the Duke and Duchess of St. Maitre at Sorrento, the musical Countess of Mahoney at Ischia; cries of " Una donna rara," " bellissima creatura," were on every mouth. The Duke of Gloucester begged Hamilton to favour him with her acquaintance. The Olympian Goethe himself beheld and marvelled. Her unpretending naivete won her adherents at every step. " All the female nobility, with the queen at their head," were " distantly civil " to her already; none rude to Emma were allowed within the precincts. Meddlers or censors were sent roundly to the right-about, and informed that she was the sweetest, the best, the cleverest creature in the world. When he returned from his periodical royal wild-boar chases, it was Emma again who brewed his punch and petted him. Now and again there peeps out also that half voluptuous tinge in her wifeliness which never wholly deserted her. She had been Greville's devoted slave; Sir \Villiam was already hers. Her monitor had repulsed her free sacrifice and urged it for his own advantage towards his uncle; but her worshipper had now fanned not so much the flame, perhaps, as the incense of her un-

feigned* attachment. The English dined with her while Sir William was away shooting with the king. She trilled Handel and Paisiello, learned French, Italian, music, dancing, design, and history. Hamilton, himself musical, used later on to accompany her voice—of which he was a good judge—on the viola. She laughed at the foibles and follies of the court; she retailed to him the gossip of the hour. She entered into his routine and protected his interests; she prevented him from being pestered or plundered. Only a few years, and she was dictating etiquette even to an English nobleman.

It was a triumphal progress which took the town by storm; her beauty swept men off their feet. The transformations of these eighteen months, which lifted her out of her cramped nook at Paddington into a wide arena, read like a dream, or one of those Arabian fairy-tales where peasants turn princes in an hour. Nor is the least surprise, .among many, the thought that these dissolving views present themselves as adventures of admired virtue, and not as unsanctioned escapades. At Naples the worst of her past seemed buried, and she could be born again. Her accent, her vulgarisms mattered little; she spoke to new friends in a new language. The " lovely woman " who had " stooped to folly, and learned too late that men betray," seems rather to have " stooped to conquer " by the approved methods of the same Goldsmith's heroine.

The scene of her debut is that of Opera, all moonlight, flutter, music, and masquerade. Escaping in

*Cf. Morrison MS. 164,1787 (Emma to Sir William): "... 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. . . . My heart and eyes fill. ... I owe everything to you, and shall ever with gratitude remember it. . . ." And cf. ibid, 172, 1788 ;"...! love Sir William, for he renounces all for me."

the cool of the evening from her chambers, thronged by artists, wax-modellers, and intaglio-cutters, she attends Sir William's evening saunter in the royal gardens at the fashionable hour. Her, complexion so much resembles apple-blossom, that beholders question it, although she neither paints nor powders. Dapper Prince Dietrichstein from Vienna (" Draydrixton" in her parlance as in Acton's) attends her as " cavaliere servente," whispering to her in broken English that she is a " diamond of the first water." Two more princes and " two or three nobles " follow at her heels. She wears a loose muslin gown, the sleeves tied in folds with blue ribbon and trimmed with lace, a blue sash and the big blue hat which Greville has sent her as peace-offering. Beyond them stand the king, the queen, the minister Acton, and a brilliant retinue. That queen, careworn but beautiful, who already " likes her much," has begged the Austrian beau to walk near her that she may get a glimpse of his fair companion, the English girl, who is a " modern antique." " But Greville," writes Emma, " the king [h]as eyes, he [h]as a heart, and I have made an impression on it. But I told the prince, Hamilton is my friend, and she belongs to his nephew, for all our friends know it." * Only last Sunday that " Roi d'Yvetot " had dined at Posilippo, mooring his boat by the casements of Hamilton's country casino for a nearer view. This garden-house is already named the " Villa Emma," and there for Emma a new " music-room " is building. Emma and the Ambassador had been entertaining a " diplomatick party." They issue forth beneath the moon to their private boat. At once the monarch places his " boat of musick " next to theirs. His band of " French Horns " strikes up a serenade for the queen of hearts. The king re-1 Morrison MS. 152, July 22, 1786.

moves his hat, sits with it on his knees, and " when going to land," bows and says, " it was a sin he could not speak English." She has him in her train every evening at San Carlo, villa, or promenade; she is the cynosure of each day, and the toast of every night.

Or, again, she entertains informally at Sorrento, all orange-blossom in February, after an afternoon of rambling donkey-rides near flaming Vesuvius, and visits to grandees in villeggiatura. In one room sits Sir William's orchestra; in the other she receives their guests. At last her turn comes round to sing; she chooses " Luce Bella," in which the Banti makes such a furore at San Carlo, that famous Bant? who had already marvelled at the tone and compass of her voice, when in fear and trembling she had been induced to follow her. As she ceases, there is a ten minutes' round of applause, a hubbub of " Bravas" and " Ancoras." And then she performs in " buffo " i—" that one " (and Greville knew it) " with a Tam-bourin, in the character of a young girl with a raire-shew [raree-show], the pretiest thing you ever heard." He must concede her triumph, the hard, unruffled man! She turns the heads of the Sorrentines; she leaves " some dying, some crying, and some in despair. Mind you, this was all nobility, as proud as the devil"; but —and here brags the people's daughter— " we humbled them "; " but what astonished them was that I shou'd speak such good Italian. For I paid them, I spared non[e] of them, tho' I was civil and oblidging. 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 have brought him with me,' pointing to Sir William." Hart, the English musician, wept to hear her sing an air by Handel, pronouncing that in her the tragic and comic

Muses were so happily blended that Garrick would have been enraptured. These were the very qualities that even thus early distinguished her self-taught " Attitudes," by common consent of all beholders a marvel of artistic expression and refinement. Goethe, at this moment in Naples, and certainly no biassed critic, was an eye-witness. He had been introduced by his friends, the German artists, 1 to the Maecenas Ambassador and " his Emma." He thus records his impressions :—

". . . The Chevalier Hamilton, 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. 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. . . . We have already rejoiced in the spectacle

1 Tischbein, Hackert, and Andreas, who, with others, were at this time painting in Naples.

two evenings. Early to-morrow Tischbein paints her." x

There are less familiar references also in the Italian Journey. On Goethe's return from Sicily in May, the author of Werther, occupied with the art, the peasant life, and the geology of the neighbourhood, renewed his acquaintance with the pair and acknowledges their kindnesses. He dined with them again. Sir William favoured him with a view of his excavated treasures in the odd " vault," where statues and sarcophagi, bronze candelabra and busts, lay disarranged and jumbled. Among them Goethe noticed an upright, open chest " rimmed exquisitely with gold, and large enough to contain a life-size figure in its dark, inner background." Sir William explained how Emma, attired in bright Pompeiian costume, had stood motionless inside it with an effect in the half-light even more striking than her grace as " moving statue." Goethe, ever curious, was now keenly interested in studying the superstitions of the Neapolitan peasantry, including the realistic shows of manger and Magi with which they celebrated Christmas-tide. In these, living images were intermixed with coloured casts of clay. And he hazards the remark—while deprecating it from the lips of a contented guest—that perhaps " Miss Harte " was at root not more than such a living image —a tableau vivant. Perchance, he muses, the main lack of his " fair hostess " is "geist" or soulfulness of mind. Her dumb shows, he adds, were naturally unvoiced, and voice alone expresses spirit. Even her admired singing he then thought deficient in " fulness." Had Goethe, however, known her whole nature, he would have owned that if she were " geistlos" in the highest sense, she was never dull, and was to prove the reverse of soulless; while he, of all men, 1 Goethe, Italienische Reise, March 16, 1787.

would have admired not only her enthusiasm but her more practical qualities. Did he, perhaps, in after years recall this mute and lovely vision when her name, for good or ill, had entered history? At any rate, though neither Hamilton nor Emma has noticed him in existing letters, they both endure on Goethe's pages; and to have impressed Goethe was even then no easy task. That the creator of Iphigcnia and Tasso was deeply impressed is proved by another and better known passage, where after praising Hamilton as " a man of universal taste, who has roamed through all the realms of creation," and has " made a beautiful existence which he enjoys in the evening of life," he adds that Emma is " a masterpiece of the Arch-Artist."

To resume our dissolving views: a priest begs her picture on a box, which he clasps to his bosom. A countess weeps when she departs. The Russian empress hears her fame, and orders her portrait. Commodore Melville gives a dinner to thirty on board his Dutch frigate in her honour, and seats her at the head as " mistress of the feast." She is robed " all in virgin white," her hair " in ringlets reaching almost to her heels," so long, that Sir William says she " look't and moved amongst it." She has soon learned by rote the little ways of the big world, and whispers to him that it is gala night at San Carlo, and de rigucur to reach their box before the royal party entered their neighbouring one. The guns salute; the pinnace starts amid laughter, song, and roses, while off she speeds to semi-royal triumphs—" as tho' I was a queen." Serena's wholesome lesson is being half forgotten.

Once more, Vesuvius " looks beautiful," with its lava-streams descending far as Portici. She climbs the peak of fire at midnight — five miles of flame; the

peasants deem the mountain " burst." The climbers seek the shelter of the Hermit's cabin—that strange Hermit who had thus retired to solitude and exile for love of a princess. 1 Has she not spirit ? Let Greville mark: " For me, I was enraptured. I could have staid all night there, and I have never been in charity with the moon since, for it looked so pale and sickly. And the red-hot lava served to light up the moon, for the light of the moon was nothing to the lava." Ascending, she meets the Prince-Royal. • His " foolish tuters," fearful of their charge's safety and their own, escort him only halfway, and allow him but three minutes for the sight. She asks him how he likes it. " Bella, ma poca roba," replies the lad. Five hundred yards higher he could have watched " the noblest, sublimest sight in the world." But the " poor frightened creatures" beat "a scared" retreat: "O, I shall kill myself with laughing! " And is not the plebeian girl schooling herself to be a match for crass blue blood? " Their [h]as been a prince paying us a visit. He is sixty years of age, one of the first families, and fh]as allways lived at Naples; and when I told him I had been at Caprea, he asked me if I went there by land. Only think what ignorance! I staired at him, and asked him who was his tutor," coolly remarks the femme savante who writes of " as " and " stair."

She cannot tear her eyes away from the volcano's awful pageant. She takes one of her maids—" a great biggot "—up to her house-top and shows her the conflagration. The contadina drops on her knees, calling on the city's patron saints: " O Janaro mio, 0 Antonio mio!" Ejnma falls down on hers, exclaiming, " 0 Santa Loola mia, Loola mia! " Teresa rises, and with open eyes inquires whether " her Excellency"

*Alexandre Sauveur, who dared to love the Princess Ferdinand, whose tutor he was.