LADY HAMILTON

PATRON SAINT OF DIME-NOVEL HEROINES

She was the mother of Gertrude the Governess, the granddam of Bertha the Beautiful Sewing-machine Girl, the earliest ancestorette of Ione, the Pride of the Mill; she was the impossibility that made possible the brain daughters of Laura Jean. She was the patron saint of all the dime-novel heroines; she was the model, consciously or otherwise--probably otherwise--of all their authors. Because, at a period when such things were undreamed of, even in fiction, she rose from nursemaid to t.i.tle.

Even in the books and plays of that age, the born serving wench did not marry the heir. In the highest literary flights, Bridget's crowning reward was to wed Luke, the gamekeeper, and become landlady of The Bibulous Goat or The Doodlethorpe Arms. Goldsmith was eyed askance for even making the heroine of "She Stoops to Conquer" pose momentarily as a lady's maid.

Having thus tried to show how impossible was the happening, let me work up by degrees to the happening itself.

She was a Lancashire la.s.s, Emma Lyon by name. In mature years she dropped the "Lyon" and called herself "Emma Harte." No one knows why.

Lyon was not her name; neither was Harte, for that matter. In fact, she had no name; her careless parents having failed to supply her with the legal right to one.

Her father was a rural farm hand. He died while Emma was a baby. Her mother, an inn servant, moved later to Hawarden; and there a Mrs.

Thomas hired Emma as nursemaid. This was in 1777. Emma was thirteen.

She had already learned to read--a rare accomplishment in those days for the nameless brat of an inn drudge. And, as nursemaid, she greedily picked up stray morsels of her little charges' education, as well as the manners and language of her employers. She learned as quickly as a Chinaman.

There is a hiatus in the records, after Emma had served a year or so in the Thomas family. One biographer bridges the gap with a line of asterisks. Asterisks, in biographies as well as in s.e.x-problem fiction, may indicate either a lapse of time or a lapse of morals.

Emma reappeared from the asterisk cloud in London, where she was nursemaid in the house of a Doctor Budd, one of the physicians at St.

Bartholomew's Hospital. Doctor Budd's housemaid at that time, by the way, later became a Drury Lane star, under the name of "Mrs. Powell."

And in that bright afterday she and the even more apotheosized Emma renewed their below-stairs friendship.

For some reason Emma left Doctor Budd's service rather suddenly and found a job as helper in the shop of a St. James' Market mercer. She was sixteen, and she was gloriously beautiful. Her figure was superb.

Already she had a subtle charm of her own which drew to her feet crowds of footmen, s...o...b..ys, apprentices, and such small deer. There is no record that they one and all were sent away disconsolate.

During her brief career as helper to the St. James' Market mercer, Emma chanced to attract the notice of a woman of quality who one day entered the shop. And forthwith she was hired as lady's maid. The girl had picked up a smattering of education. She had sc.r.a.ped from her pink tongue the rough Lancashire bur-r-r. She had learned to speak correctly, to ape the behavior of the solid folk whose servant she had been. Now, from her new employer, she was to learn at firsthand how people in the world of fashion comported themselves. And, chameleonlike, she took on the color of her gay surroundings.

Soon she could lisp such choice and fashionable expletives as "Sc.r.a.pe me raw!" and "Oh, lay me bleeding!" and could talk and walk and posture as did her mistress. Trashy novels by the dozen fell into her hands from her mistress' table. Emma devoured them, gluttonously and absorbed their precepts as the human system absorbs alcohol fumes.

Please don't for one moment get the idea that there was anything profitable to a young girl in the novels of the latter eighteenth century. Perhaps you have in mind such dreary sterling works as "Pamela," "Clarissa Harlow," "Sir Charles Grandison," and others that were crammed into your miserably protesting brain in the Literature Courses. Those were the rare--the very rare--exceptions to a large and lurid list, which included such choice cla.s.sics as "Moll Flanders,"

"Roxana"--both of them by the same Defoe who wrote "Robinson Crusoe,"

and whose other novels would send a present-day publisher to States prison--"Peregrine Pickle," "f.a.n.n.y Hill," "The Delicate Distress,"

"Roderick Random," and the rest of a rank-flavored mult.i.tude.

Emma reveled in the joys of the local "circulating library," too; one of those places that loaned books of a sort to cause even the kindly Sheridan to thunder his famous dictum:

"A circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. It blossoms through the year. And, depend on't, they who are so fond of handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last."

Much reading filled Emma with wonderful new ideas of life.

Incidentally, it made her neglect her work, and she was discharged.

Her next step was to become barmaid in a tavern. While she was there, a young admirer of hers was seized by the navy press gang. Emma went to the captain of the ship to beg for her swain's release. The captain was John Willett Payn, afterward a rear admiral. Payne granted the lovely girl's plea. He not only gave her what she asked, but his own admiration as well. Her story as a heart winner had begun.

In fiction, the gallant captain would soon have tired of his lively sweetheart and cast her aside. But Emma was not a lowly sweetheart.

She was a super-woman. She showed how much stranger than fiction truth may be by deserting Payne for a richer man. First, however, she had wheedled the captain into hiring tutors and music masters for her, and she profited vastly by their teachings.

Her new flame was a sporting baronet, Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, of Up Park, Suss.e.x. Sir Harry was an all-round athlete and a reckless horseman. He taught Emma to ride--"a beggar on horseback?"--and she became the most daring equestrienne of the century. He taught her to spend money, too. And so splendidly did she learn her lesson that inside of a year Sir Harry was bankrupt.

Perhaps ~all~ rats do not leave a sinking ship; but, for very good reasons, one never hears anything further of the rats that don't. The rat that wishes to continue his career wastes no time in joining the exodus. And Emma Lyon did not disdain to take example from the humble rodent.

There seemed no good reason for remaining longer at the side of the bankrupt baronet, to add to his cares and expenses. So, with womanly consideration, she left him.

She was alone in the world once more, without a shilling or a friend; equipped with education, accomplishments, wondrous beauty, and charm, but with no immediate market for those commodities. It was the black hour that comes least once into the life of every adventuress.

And, in this time of need, she fell in with a beauty-culture quack, Graham by name.

Graham had devised a rejuvenation medicine--from Doctor Faustus down, the world has feverishly, piteously seized on every nostrum advertised as a means of exchanging age for youth--and he vowed that it would make its users not only young again, but maddeningly beautiful. As an example of "after using," Graham exhibited Emma Lyon, who, he said, had once been old and ugly, and who, by a course of his elixir, had become youthful and glorious. He called his medicine "Megalanthropogenesis."

Women who heard his lecture took one look at Emma and then bought out Graham's ready supply of the stuff. The charlatan was an artist in gaining his effects, as witness a report of the exhibition in which Emma posed:

He had contrived a "Bed of Apollo," or "Celestial Bed," on which, in a delicately colored light, this exquisitely beautiful woman, nearly naked, was gradually unveiled, to soft, soft music, as Hygeia, G.o.ddess of health.

Presumably no effort was made by any eighteenth-century Comstock to suppress this show, and all London flocked and thronged and jostled to behold it. Apart from the normal crowd of idlers, came painters and sculptors to gaze in delight on the perfect face and form revealed through the shimmer of rose-colored light.

And foremost of these artists was a freakish genius toward whom was slowly creeping the insanity that a few years later was to claim him, and whose stealthy approach he was even then watching with horror. He was George Romney, who, with Sir Joshua Reynolds, divided the homage of England's art world. Romney had come to stare at Emma. He remained to worship. He engaged her as his model, and, soon or late, painted no less than thirty-nine pictures of her.

"I call her 'The Divine Lady,'" he once wrote. "For I think she is superior to all womankind."

The black hour was past. Emma Lyon's fortune and fame were secure.

Thanks to Romney, she was the best-advertised beauty on earth.

Conquests came thick and fast, not treading on one another's heels, but racing abreast.

Soon, out of the ruck and forging far ahead, appeared Charles Francis Greville, wit, art connoisseur, and nephew and heir of the famed antiquary diplomat, Sir William Hamilton. Greville cut out all rivals, Romney among the rest, and won Emma for his own.

Theirs was an odd love affair. For here, too, Emma gave full rein to her craving for education. And she showed for the first time just why she was so eager to be highly educated. It was not for mere learning's sake, but to enhance the charm that gave her a hold over men. She cared nothing for any but the showy accomplishments. She already had a fair groundwork in English and ordinary school studies. She made Greville get her the best teachers in singing, in dancing, in acting.

Perhaps she looked forward to a stage triumph, but more likely to outshining the colorless bread-and-b.u.t.ter women of her day.

Never did pupil better repay the pains of her teachers. Her voice presently rivaled that of many a prima donna. Her dancing was a delight. It was she who conceived the celebrated "shawl dance" that was the rage throughout Europe for years thereafter, and that still is used, in very slightly modified form, by ~premieres danseuses~.

But acting was Emma's forte. Says a contemporary writer:

With a common piece of stuff she could so arrange and clothe herself as to offer the most appropriate representations of a Jewess, a Roman matron, a Helen, Penelope, or Aspasia. No character seemed foreign to her, and the grace she was in the habit of displaying under such representations excited the admiration of all who were fortunate enough to be present on such occasions.

Siddons could not surpa.s.s the grandeur of her style or O'Neil be more melting in the utterance of deep pathos.

In this heyday of her prosperity, Emma hunted up her aged and disreputable mother, bestowed on her the name "Mrs. Cadogan," and settled a rich pension on her. At about the same time, too, Emma bade a cheery farewell to the serviceable name of Lyon and took to calling herself Emma Harte.

Then Greville went broke.

In his new-found poverty, he hit on a plan of life foreign to all his old ideas.

He decided to ask his rich old uncle, Sir William Hamilton, to pay his debts and settle a little annuity on him. With this sum as a means of livelihood, he intended to marry Emma, and, with her and their three children, settle down in some cheap suburb.

How this appealed to Emma history forgets to say. Judging by both past and future, it is not unjust to suppose that she may have been making ready once more to emulate the ship-deserting rat. But this time she did not need to. The ship was about to desert her--for a consideration.

Greville, full of his new hopes, went to Sir William Hamilton and laid the plan before him. His nephew's derelictions from the straight and narrow path had long distressed the virtuous old diplomat. And in Greville's financial troubles Sir William thought he saw a fine chance to break off his nephew's discreditable affair with Emma.

He offered to set Greville on his feet again if that luckless youth would drop Emma's acquaintance. The enamored Greville refused. Sir William insisted, raising his offer of financial aid, and pointing out, with tearful eloquence, the family disgrace that a marriage to a woman of Emma's desolute character must cause. It was all quite like a scene from a modern problem play. But Fate, her tongue in her cheek, was preparing to put a twist on the end of the scene worthy of the most cynical French vaudeville writer.

Greville resented his uncle's rash judgment of his adored Emma, and begged him to come and see her for himself, hoping that Emma's wonder charm might soften the old man's virtue-incrusted heart. Reluctantly, Sir William consented to one brief interview with the wicked siren.