Allegorizings by Jan Morris

Author:Jan Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Hero

Thank God Nelson died at Trafalgar. Can’t you imagine the bathos of the hero in his old age, absurdly vain, increasingly testy and hypochondriac, drinking too much, plastered all over with decorations, forever trying to avoid poor Lucy Nelson and recalling old victories in the arms of his grotesquely obese and fulsome mistress Emma Hamilton?

But then again, thank God for Emma! If there were more Emmas, as the admiral said himself, there would be more Nelsons, and certainly without her the most operatic of England’s national romances (at a Verdian rather than a Wagnerian level) would hardly be a romance at all – just the career of a fighting admiral whose principal merit, so Lord St Vincent thought, was mere animal courage, and whose love-life followed a familiar naval pattern of humdrum wedlock punctuated by distant and transient infatuations.

Without Emma’s husband Sir William, too, the tale would lose much of its charm. What a thoroughly agreeable old cuckold he was, and what an artistically important part he played in the ménage à trois. He was more than just a foil, but a dramatic mirror to the passions of the spectacle, for he loved Emma almost as besottedly as Nelson did, and made the perfect Dr Watson to Nelson’s Sherlock – or, one might perversely say, a Horatio to his Hamlet.

And what would the grand opera be without its chorus? Behind the virtuoso stood his Band of Brothers, worthy understudies one and all, steady bald Hardy, impetuous Berry (‘Here comes that damned fool Berry! Now we shall have a battle!’), Foley always in the van, Beatty the gentlest of surgeons, ‘good dear little Parker’ – and behind them again the rough, bluff, cosmopolitan company of seamen, half of them distinctly reluctant recruits to the Royal Navy, who threw themselves into Nelson’s service with a devotion worthy of football crowds or rock fans, and ‘cried like wenches’ when he died.

The real allure of the scenario lies in its theatrical antithesis between life at sea and life ashore. What a perfect ass the Saviour of Europe could be, when he was away from his ships! How preposterously he swaggered around with his stars and his medals and his sashes and his scarlet pelisse and the chelengk on his cocked hat, given him by the Sultan of Turkey, whose diamond centre revolved when you wound it up! And what kind of a hero was it who, receiving a letter from the loving wife he had so shamelessly deserted, sent it back to her with the despicable inscription ‘Opened in error. Returned unread’? Surely, one wonders, no amount of animal courage, no number of annihilations, could make up for Nelson’s failings?

But the glorious denouement of the performance does it. The Duke of Wellington, at his only meeting with Horatio, thought at first what a coxcomb and charlatan he was, only to discover that after a time his conversation became of matchless interest. Never had he known, recalled the Duke, such a complete metamorphosis; and

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