Nelson's departure from England on this occasion closes the first of the two periods into which his career naturally divides. From his youth until now, wherever situated, the development has been consecutive and homogeneous, external influences and internal characteristics have worked harmoniously together, nature and ambition have responded gladly to opportunity, and the course upon which they have combined to urge him has conformed to his inherited and acquired standards of right and wrong. Doubt, uncertainty, inward friction, double motives, have been unknown to him; he has moved freely in accordance with the laws of his being, and, despite the anxieties of his profession and the frailty of his health, there is no mistaking the tone of happiness and contentment which sounds without a jarring note throughout his correspondence. A change was now at hand. As the sails of the "Vanguard" dip below the horizon of England, a brief interlude begins, and when the curtain rises again, the scene is shifted,—surroundings have changed. We see again the same man, but standing at the opening of a new career, whose greatness exceeds by far even the high anticipations that had been formed for him. Before leaving England he is a man of distinction only; prominent, possibly, among the many distinguished men of his own profession, but the steady upward course has as yet been gradual, the shining of the light, if it has latterly shot forth flashes suggestive of hidden fires, is still characterized by sustained growth in intensity rather than by rapid increase. No present sign so far foretells the sudden ascent to fame, the burst of meridian splendor with which the sun of his renown was soon to rise upon men's eyes, and in which it ran its course to the cloudless finish of his day.
Not that there is in that course—in its achievements—any disproportion with the previous promise. The magnitude of the development we are about to witness is due, not to a change in him, but to the increased greatness of the opportunities. A man of like record in the past, but less gifted, might, it is true, have failed to fill the new sphere which the future was to present. Nelson proved fully equal to it, because he possessed genius for war, intellectual faculties, which, though not unsuspected, had not hitherto been allowed scope for their full exercise. Before him was now about to open a field of possibilities hitherto unexampled in naval warfare; and for the appreciation of them was needed just those perceptions, intuitive in origin, yet resting firmly on well-ordered rational processes, which, on the intellectual side, distinguished him above all other British seamen. He had already, in casual comment upon the military conditions surrounding the former Mediterranean campaigns, given indications of these perceptions, which it has been the aim of previous chapters to elicit from his correspondence, and to marshal in such order as may illustrate his mental characteristics. But, for success in war, the indispensable complement of intellectual grasp and insight is a moral power, which enables a man to trust the inner light,—to have faith,—a power which dominates hesitation, and sustains action, in the most tremendous emergencies, and which, from the formidable character of the difficulties it is called to confront, is in no men so conspicuously prominent as in those who are entitled to rank among great captains. The two elements—mental and moral power—are often found separately, rarely in due combination. In Nelson they met, and their coincidence with the exceptional opportunities afforded him constituted his good fortune and his greatness.
The intellectual endowment of genius was Nelson's from the first; but from the circumstances of his life it was denied the privilege of early manifestation, such as was permitted to Napoleon. It is, consequently, not so much this as the constant exhibition of moral power, force of character, which gives continuity to his professional career, and brings the successive stages of his advance, in achievement and reputation, from first to last, into the close relation of steady development, subject to no variation save that of healthy and vigorous growth, till he stood unique—above all competition. This it was—not, doubtless, to the exclusion of that reputation for having a head, upon which he justly prided himself—which had already fixed the eyes of his superiors upon him as the one officer, not yet indeed fully tested, most likely to cope with the difficulties of any emergency. In the display of this, in its many self-revelations,—in concentration of purpose, untiring energy, fearlessness of responsibility, judgment sound and instant, boundless audacity, promptness, intrepidity, and endurance beyond all proof,—the restricted field of Corsica and the Riviera, the subordinate position at Cape St. Vincent, the failure of Teneriffe, had in their measure been as fruitful as the Nile was soon to be, and fell naught behind the bloody harvests of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. Men have been disposed, therefore, to reckon this moral energy—call it courage, dash, resolution, what you will—as Nelson's one and only great quality. It was the greatest, as it is in all successful men of action; but to ignore that this mighty motive force was guided by singularly clear and accurate perceptions, upon which also it consciously rested with a firmness of faith that constituted much of its power, is to rob him of a great part of his due renown.
But it was not only in the greatness of the opportunities offered to Nelson that external conditions now changed. The glory of the hero brought a temptation which wrecked the happiness of the man. The loss of serenity, the dark evidences of inward conflict, of yielding against conviction, of consequent dissatisfaction with self and gradual deterioration, make between his past and future a break as clear, and far sharper than, the startling increase of radiancy that attends the Battle of the Nile, and thenceforth shines with undiminished intensity to the end. The lustre of his well-deserved and world-wide renown, the consistency and ever-rising merit of his professional conduct, contrast painfully with the shadows of reprobation, the swerving, and the declension, which begin to attend a life heretofore conformed, in the general, to healthy normal standards of right and wrong, but now allowed to violate, not merely ideal Christian rectitude, but the simple, natural dictates of upright dealing between man and man. It had been the proud boast of early years: "There is no action in my whole life but what is honourable." The attainment of glory exceeding even his own great aspirations coincides with dereliction from the plain rules of honor between friends, and with public humiliation to his wife, which he allowed himself to inflict, notwithstanding that he admitted her claims to his deferential consideration to be unbroken. In this contrast, of the exaltation of the hero and the patriot with the degradation of the man, lie the tragedy and the misery of Nelson's story. And this, too, was incurred on behalf of a woman whose reputation and conduct were such that no shred of dignity could attach to an infatuation as doting as it was blamable. The pitiful inadequacy of the temptation to the ruin it caused invests with a kind of prophecy the words he had written to his betrothed in the heyday of courtship: "These I trust will ever be my sentiments; if they are not, I do verily believe it will be my folly that occasions it."
The inward struggle, though severe, was short and decisive. Once determined on his course, he choked down scruples and hesitations, and cast them from him with the same single-minded resolution that distinguished his public acts. "Fixed as fate," were the remorseless words with which he characterized his firm purpose to trample conscience under foot, and to reject his wife in favor of his mistress. But although ease may be obtained by silencing self-reproach, safety scarcely can. One cannot get the salt out of his life, and not be the worse for it. Much that made Nelson so lovable remained to the end; but into his heart, as betrayed by his correspondence, and into his life, from the occasional glimpses afforded by letters or journals of associates, there thenceforth entered much that is unlovely, and which to no appreciable extent was seen before. The simple bonhomie, the absence of conventional reticence, the superficial lack of polish, noted by his early biographers, and which he had had no opportunity to acquire, the childlike vanity that transpires so innocently in his confidential home letters, and was only the weak side of his noble longing for heroic action, degenerated rapidly into loss of dignity of life, into an unseemly susceptibility to extravagant adulation, as he succumbed to surroundings, the corruptness of which none at first realized more clearly, and where one woman was the sole detaining fascination. And withal, as the poison worked, discontent with self bred discontent with others, and with his own conditions. Petulance and querulousness too often supplanted the mental elasticity, which had counted for naught the roughnesses on the road to fame. The mind not worthily occupied, and therefore ill at ease, became embittered, prone to censure and to resent, suspicious at times and harsh in judgment, gradually tending towards alienation, not from his wife only, but from his best and earliest friends.
During the short stay of seven months in England, which ended with the sailing of the "Vanguard," the record of his correspondence is necessarily very imperfect, both from the loss of his arm, and from the fact of his being with his family. Such indications as there are point to unbroken relations of tenderness with his wife. "I found my domestic happiness perfect," he wrote to Lord St. Vincent, shortly after his arrival home; and some months later, in a letter from Bath to a friend, he says jestingly: "Tell—that I possess his place in Mr. Palmer's box; but he did not tell me all its charms, that generally some of the handsomest ladies in Bath are partakers in the box, and was I a bachelor I would not answer for being tempted; but as I am possessed of everything which is valuable in a wife, I have no occasion to think beyond a pretty face." Lady Nelson attended personally to the dressing of his arm; she accompanied him in his journeys between Bath and London, and they separated only when he left town to hoist his flag at Portsmouth. The letters of Lady Saumarez, the wife of one of his brother captains then serving with Lord St. Vincent, mention frequent meetings with the two together in the streets of Bath; and upon the 1st of May, the day before leaving the fleet off Cadiz for the Mediterranean, on the expedition which was to result in the Nile, and all the consequences so fatal to the happiness of both, he concludes his letter, "with every kind wish that a fond heart can frame, believe me, as ever, your most affectionate husband."
On the 2d of May the "Vanguard" quitted the fleet for Gibraltar, where she arrived on the 4th. On the 7th Nelson issued orders to Sir James Saumarez, commanding the "Orion," and to Captain Alexander Ball, commanding the "Alexander," both seventy-fours, to place themselves under his command; and the following day the "Vanguard" sailed, in company with these ships and five smaller vessels, to begin the memorable campaign, of which the Battle of the Nile was the most conspicuous incident.
FOOTNOTES:
[59] The British admiral in command of the fleet which fought at Camperdown.