Читать книгу Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey - Richard Holmes - Страница 9

In a newspaper article of 1811, discussing the new Romantic interest in celebrity and biography, Coleridge described these years of the English Regency as ‘emphatically, the Age of Personality’. So it was not surprising that a figure like Nelson, who seemed so much larger-than-life, was bound to exercise a fascination on people by the very vividness of his character as much as by the heroism of his actions. He had been asked to write his own autobiography as early as October, 1799, and did indeed dash off a Sketch of his life for John M’Arthur, a naval journalist working as joint-editor of The Naval Chronicle.

The result was a curious mixture of modesty and melodrama. Nelson mentions in passing the loss of eye and arm, his childless marriage, his failure to achieve spectacular prize-money (from captured ships), and his strictly local success in ‘placing the King of Naples back on his throne’. But his conclusion is like one of his battle signals hoist to the topgallant mast-head. ‘Without having any inheritance, or having been fortunate in prize money, I have received all the honours of my profession, been created a peer of Great Britain, and I may say to the reader: GO THOU AND DO LIKEWISE.’

After his death, a mass of brief memoirs were hastily published, especially dealing with disputed events at the battles of Aboukir Bay and Copenhagen, and the controversy over Nelson’s actions–and inactions–at Naples. Encouraged by Lady Hamilton, an inaccurate and highly partisan study was published by James Harrison in 1806. The following year 1807 William Beatty published his Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson.

Then the journalist John M’Arthur joined forces with a navy chaplain and historian James Clarke, to produce a massive semiofficial assemblage of papers, The Life and Services of Horatio Viscount Nelson from his Lordships own Mss published in two enormous volumes in 1809. It drew widely on Nelson’s letters and despatches, and commissioned or republished eyewitness accounts. These volumes had the support of Lady Nelson, and were notable for the fact that they did not mention Lady Hamilton at all. They also carried, as their frontispiece to set the tone, an engraving of Benjamin West’s heroic painting.

In the following year 1810, the newly founded Quarterly Review asked one of its fiercest reviewers to make a general assessment of the state of Nelson biography. It was five years after Trafalgar, the Napoleonic war was still at its height, and a patriotic encomium might have been expected. But the reviewer chosen was unusual: the poet and one-time pro-Jacobin rebel, Robert Southey. He was given the Harrison volume, the Clarke and M’Arthur, the Beatty memoir, and several lesser studies. In a forty-two page essay published in Quarterly Review No. 5, February, 1810, Southey was highly critical of all the volumes except Beatty’s precise and moving eye-witness account. He observed that Harrison was totally unreliable, and that Clarke and M’Arthur were almost literally unreadable, as their volumes ran to thousands of pages, were five inches thick, and weighed in at almost twenty-seven pounds. The Life lacked all narrative skill and selection, did not give a convincing picture of Nelson’s character, and did not address the question of Lady Hamilton, about whom Southey appended a long and waspish footnote.

Southey concluded by making an elegant précis of Nelson’s career, and observing that none of the writers before him understood the art of biography. True biography required above all three things: ‘industry, judgement, and genius: the patience to investigate, the determination to select, the power to infer and enliven.’

Southey’s shrewd publisher John Murray (already Byron’s publisher) immediately challenged Southey to write such a biography himself. Could not Southey easily turn the 10,000-word review into short and popular portrait of Nelson, to suit the taste of wartime readers, and to inspire young sailors? If he pitched it right, Murray could print ‘a large impression’ and also count on it ‘going off as a midshipman’s manual’. He had paid a hundred guineas for the review, and he now offered a further hundred guineas for the biography, which he reckoned Southey could complete within six months.

Southey enthusiastically accepted; but almost the moment he began serious research, was assailed by doubts. What could a literary man, living in deep rural retirement with his family in the Lake District, know of naval warfare, sailing terminology, the drama of the high seas and the intricacies of maritime diplomacy? Moreover, what could a poet understand of a warrior’s temperament like Nelson’s? He wrote to his brother Tom Southey, who was the sailor in his family: ‘I am such a sad lubber that I feel half ashamed of myself for being persuaded even to review the Life of Nelson, much more to write one…I walk among sea terms as a cat does in a china pantry, in bodily fear of doing myself mischief, and betraying myself.’ It was a properly domestic and unseamanlike analogy, and one that Southey would often repeat in self-deprecation.

In fact Southey was rather better qualified than he pretended. As a young man he had indeed made his name as a Jacobin writer, and a poet of long, lurid verse romances, like Thalaba, the Destroyer (1801), and The Curse of Kehema (1810). Their length and their absurd titles suggest why Lord Byron–among others – made fun of them. The verse was execrable, and yet the story-telling was strangely compelling. Southey realised that this suggested that his prose–which his private letters already show as crisp, vivid, and wonderfully engaging–might be a stronger suit than his poetry.

So now, a family man in his mid-thirties, he had deliberately set out to re-establish himself as an historian, and had done so with great success. Murray had just published the first volume of his massive History of Brazil, which was very well-received and Southey would dedicate a further nine years to completing it in three volumes (1810-1819). It was on the basis of this work, not his poetry, that he had originally been sent the Nelson books for review and why Murray now had such confidence in him.

In fact Southey had a natural genius for shaping narrative and bold story-telling. (His children’s tale of ‘The Three Bears’ is still a favourite, partly because of its perfect construction, a masterly accumulation of comic suspense.) He also revealed an outstanding ability to research and organize complex sources, and yet still retain a poet’s feel for the vivid turn of phrase or memorable image. In this unusual combination of the scholarly and the imaginative, Southey had all the makings of a fine biographer, whatever his subject might be.

He had not renounced poetry, and would continue to publish works, now increasingly patriotic, like The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (1816). But he saw history and biography as the new direction to his mature career, even though he pretended to lament it. In 1810 he wrote to his friend Walter Savage Landor: ‘I have an ominous feeling that there are poets enough in the world without me, and my best chance of being remembered will be as an historian.’ Later he would add simply: ‘by nature I am a poet, by deliberate choice an historian.’

Like all good biographers, Southey was soon drawn deeply into his subject, finding Nelson’s life both more inspiring and more enigmatic than he had at first expected. In the event the six month project took over two years to complete, and Southey was still writing in spring 1813. He combed minutely through Clarke and M’Arthur, carefully re-assembling the narrative of Nelson’s career, but boldly reconstructing it in a series of superbly visualised scenes. From the original chaos of these materials, an overwhelming sense of Nelson’s destiny emerged with almost hypnotic power, a destiny that had seized him even in childhood.

Southey sticks remarkably close to the original sources in official despatches and eyewitness accounts. There is not a single quoted phrase of Nelson’s, or exchange of dialogue, that does not have an authentic written source, and often several. Unlike modern scholars’ convention, Southey only occasionally chooses to acknowledge these–notably in the case of Beatty–but prefers to present unbroken historical narrative. Yet such is the crisp, factual style of the narration, that the reader never feels he is straying into fiction. Instead Southey selects and dramatises–or ‘infers and enlivens’-with enormous success, achieving a genuine sense of modern epic, especially in his four great battle set-pieces–Cape St Vincent, Aboukir Bay, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar.

Besides Clarke and M’Arthur, Southey also characteristically undertook a wide sweep of research and enquiry, especially in controversial areas. He read with exacting attention the independently published accounts of Boswell on Corsica; Captain Edward Berry at Aboukir Bay; of Captain Edward Foote at Naples (together with a civilian eyewitness to the atrocities, Helen Maria Williams); of Colonel William Stewart, a military liaison officer at Copenhagen; of Dr Beatty and Nelson’s chaplain, Alexander Scott, at Trafalgar.

He gave full consideration to the materials that Lady Hamilton had supplied to Harrison and others, even when he did not approve of them, or even fully trust them. He made contact with John Wilson Croker, a formidable Tory figure then Secretary to the Admiralty, who after initial suspicions, whole-heartedly backed the book and provided Southey with charts, maps, strategic plans, and the full co-operation of the Admiralty’s cartographic department. The biography was eventually dedicated, with nice diplomacy, to Croker.