Читать книгу Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey - Richard Holmes - Страница 11

In the light of modern research, Southey’s biography does have many technical shortcomings. He is too close to the war against Napoleon to set it in any larger European context. He has nothing like the modern scholar’s access to the Nelson and Admiralty archives. He frequently over-simplifies the manoeuvrings and chaos of a large naval battle and, despite his conversations with Tom Southey, he often underestimates the stunning, brutal violence of naval warfare for officers and seamen alike. Clipped phrases like ‘he was almost cut in half, lose all meaning. Alexander Scott, the chaplain aboard the Victory at Trafalgar, described it as finding himself suddenly plunged into ‘a butcher’s shambles’ of human body parts. He refused to write any detailed memoirs, and was traumatised for years afterwards.

But the portrait of Nelson is admirable in its depth, and contrasting lights. What is most striking is its mixture of flamboyant patriotism and grim psychological realism. It is not a flat portrait, or hagiographic study. It presents an immensely powerful and seductive figure, who is also restless, self-deluding and vain. There are many penetrating glimpses of Nelson’s inner doubts and turmoil. Southey emphasises his weakness as a child, the disastrous loss of his mother at the age nine, and writes a moving passage about Nelson’s boyhood homesickness, which in a sense continues until he meets Emma Hamilton. He isolates the episode of young Nelson’s despair, on the voyage back from India, and suggests a moment of intensely Romantic selfdedication to the idea of ‘heroism’ itself. He describes the depressions, professional frustrations and bitterness of Nelson’s middle period; his anger with the Admiralty; his disillusion with many superior officers; and hints at the physical disappointments of his marriage with Frances Nisbet, later Lady Nelson.