This Dover edition, first published in 1951, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the work originally published by Faber and Faber Ltd. in 1947.
International Standard Book Number
9780486119465
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 51-14566
Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
20167829
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DEDICATED TO
DAVID, JOHN
MICHAEL, PETER
AND JOSEPHINE
CARNEGIE
BY THE EDITOR
SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE LAUREATE OF NONSENSE
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.
His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.
He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;
Long ago he was one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.
He sits in a beautiful parlour,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of Marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.
He has many friends, laymen and clerical;
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.
When he walks in a waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, ‘He’s come out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!’
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads but he cannot speak Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger-beer:
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
EDWARD LEAR
INTRODUCTION
EDWARD LEAR: LAUREATE OF NONSENSE
BY HOLBROOK JACKSON
1
Just over a hundred years ago the children of England (and also many older folk) were surprised into entertainment by the appearance ‘out of the blue’ of an oblong book of hilarious rhymes and still more hilarious pictures by an author hitherto unknown to the general public. This fantastic collection of rhymes-without-reason was an instantaneous success, and Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense had given a local habitation and a name to one of the oldest and most persistent of human faculties. Its author, like an earlier poet, awoke to find himself famous—but in an entirely different branch of art from that by which he sought to earn a living, and he remains its unchallenged laureate. The literature of nonsense has grown in quality as well as quantity during the past century but the whole-hearted abandonment of sense, as formalised by Edward Lear, is still the classical example of this curious and amusing art.
There are several ways of approaching the fine arts and particularly that of an artist so peculiar as Edward Lear, for although the entertainment value of the Book of Nonsense and its pendants is obvious, the personality and motives behind that work will repay examination. Such an examination is tempting because Lear was no ordinary writer turning out humorous books for a living, nor were those books his only productions; on the contrary his nonsense began as the sideline of a professional life devoted to the illustration of books, mainly ornithological, and the pursuit of the picturesque for those landscapes which were latterly his main source of revenue. At the same time nonsense was not merely an occasional, still less an idle occupation. What appeared to begin and end in the casual amusement of children was actually a method of amusing, or, better, diverting himself. His excursions into the realm of nonsense were certainly occasional but the occasions were so frequent as to pervade the whole of his life, ultimately becoming a continuous as well as a formal medium of expression. Nonsense was the safety-valve of his consciousness responding to most of his approaches to himself and his environment. It became ultimately a world in itself specially created by him as a refuge from the trials and irritations of life: ill-health, lack of means, and, above all, an over-strung sensibility. Nonsense was thus Lear’s Ivory Tower and it was far more accessible than most retreats of the kind and its peace could be enjoyed without fuss or ceremony in most emergencies. It was as though he lived a double life, one in the realm of sense and the other in that of nonsense; and he had the power of transmuting himself from one to the other at will, a gift which he exercised almost continuously as his familiar letters prove. Most of those who know the Book of Nonsense and even one or more of the sequels think of Lear solely as writer and illustrator of amusing limericks; but that was only one form of his nonsense. In addition and equally important are his nonsense alphabets and vocabularies, poems and pictures, which comprise nonsense geography, natural history, botany, and anthropology. He depended largely upon his own subconscious promptings for the flora and fauna of this funny cosmogony, but was not averse from annexing birds and animals from nature which happened to approximate to his own nonsensical conceptions. Thus pelicans and parrots, seals and rhinoceroses and other queer creatures associated appropriately with his Dongs and Pobbles and Quangle-Wangles:
Herons and Gulls and Cormorants black
Cranes and Flamingoes with scarlet back,
Plovers and Storks, and Geese in clouds,
Swans and Dilberry Ducks in crowds.
He even nonsensified himself and his cat in verse, and in those humorous drawings which are a characteristic and happy feature of a large number of his letters to intimate friends.
2
There was something preposterous about Edward Lear, amiably preposterous. He might have stepped out of one of his own nonsense books, and he seemed to know it and to make the most of it. He pokes fun at himself even when he is serious, and his letters dance with caricatures of his own plump figure, high-domed brow, and bushy whiskers. By profession he was a painter of birds and landscapes, by habit a wanderer, a humorist and a grumbler. He was, in fact, an artist, and if he had not been forced to fritter away his life in earning a living, he might have been a greater artist in his chosen profession of topographical illustrator. Instead of that he became famous for his side-lines—the sketches in water-colour incidental to his finished paintings, as well as to the nonsense rhymes and pictures which were his quaint lines of communication with his friends and their children, but which were themselves developed from an involuntary need for whimsical expression. Some inner conflict, aggravated by indifferent health and insufficient wealth drove him to cut capers with words and images and ideas. And so, by accident he becomes the laureate of nonsense, objectivising for his own relief and, as it happens, for our delight, that wilfulness which ever kept him a child in a world that was already in its second childhood.
He was born at Highgate on the 12th May 1812, and died in 1888 at San Remo, on the Italian Riviera where he had lived for eighteen years with his Albanian servant, Georgio Kokali, who had served him for nearly thirty years, and his famous cat, Foss, who had pre-deceased him by a few months at the advanced age of seventeen years.
Lear was the youngest of a family of twenty-one children, most of whom he outlived. Of the twenty-one, thirteen were girls and Edward was brought up by Ann, the eldest, who continued to mother him until her death
when he was nearly fifty. His father was a stockbroker of Danish descent who speculated his way from affluence on Highgate Hill to poverty and the King’s Bench Prison. His mother came from Durham, and was presumably English. Edward also attributed a liking for Irish character to the influence of a ‘Gt.Gt.Gt.Gt.-Gt. Gt. grandfather’ of Irish blood. So, remembering Hans Andersen, who was a Dane, and the supposed humour of Ireland, one may argue that Danish and Irish blood is a good mixture for the production of that kind of humorous fantasy which he called nonsense. But whatever his descent, Edward Lear possessed many of the characteristics of the more eccentric of wandering Englishmen, and neither he nor his peculiar brand of humour could have been produced anywhere but in England, the birthplace of the Ingoldsby Legends, the Bab Ballads, and Alice in Wonderland.
He never married; there is no evidence that he was attracted to women except as friends, and his works, literary and graphic, are as sexless as the artistic efforts of a child. He occasionally puzzles over the problem of marriage as he puzzles over so many things which are not quite obvious, but when he is in his forty-first year he rebukes any impulse to that end by reflecting that if he married he would ‘paint less and less well’, and further, this most determined and illustrious entertainer of children puts it on record that the thought of ‘annual infants’ of his own drives him ‘wild’. In the same letter he argues as many bachelors, scared at the idea of a lonely old age, have done before him: ‘If I attain to 65, and have an “establishment” with lots of spoons, etc., to offer—I may chain myself:—but surely not before. And alas! and seriously—when I look around my acquaintances—and few men have more, or know more intimately, do I see a majority of happy pairs? No, I don’t. Single—I may have few pleasures—but married—many risks and miseries are semi-certainly in waiting—nor till the plot is played out can it be said that evils are not at hand.’ Fear of matrimony is evidently a recurring whimsy, whose continued presence is revealed ten years later when he is living in Corfu, where he is attracted by a native girl and wishes, playfully, he were ‘married to a clever good nice fat little Greek girl—and had 25 olive trees, some goats and a house’. ‘But’, he adds, ‘the above girl, happily for herself, likes somebody else,’ and there the matter ended and Edward Lear makes the pilgrimage of life alone, though not without friends, and the friendship of faithful servants, and the seventeen year long companionship of ‘Old Foss’, the cat, amusingly immortalised in so many of his drawings.
Although his education, according to modern standards, was inadequate, and he was earning a living as a commercial artist at fifteen, he managed to accumulate considerable culture. He could read or talk in at least half-a-dozen languages, including Greek both ancient and modern; and in addition to his skill as a painter of landscapes and his technical exactitude as an illustrator of birds, he composed and sang songs, wrote light verses, kept long diaries, wrote innumerable letters, and gave a new idiom to numorous drawing. He must also have had a gift for communicating his skill for at one time he was the art-master of Queen Victoria.
3
Those nonsense drawings and their attendant verse and prose reveal an invincible boyishness. On one side Lear was as old as the rocks he painted, on another as young as the children he loved or the child he awoke in the adults who loved him. This plump, bewhiskered man with high-domed brow, small, spectacled eyes and loose-fitting clothes was ineradicably childlike, although he must have looked what he would have called an ‘old cove’ nearly all his life. But in spite of that there was something of him that would not grow up: his peterpantheism was no pose. There was an unusual physical expression of this fortunate anomaly of prolonged adolescence. At the age of forty-one, the year, it will be recalled, in which the idea of marriage began to puzzle him, he ‘cut two new teeth’, and, after the attendant discomforts of this event, at first thought to be mumps, there was a renewal of health and spirits which he attributed to the belated infantile phenomenon.
Attempts at portraiture are fortunately unnecessary, for Lear loved self-dramatisation and has left several personal glimpses, both literary and graphic, the best of all that full-length self-portrait in verse which introduces this collection of his nonsense.
4
His varied gifts and dual character were encouraged by the manner of his upbringing, and although we have no cause for complaint, Edward Lear was always conscious of some masculine inadequacy. ‘Brought up by women—and badly besides—and ill always,’ he had no chance of ‘manly improvements or exercise’. Yet, he says, ‘I am always thanking God that I was never educated, for it seems to me that 999 of those who are so, expensively and laboriously, have lost all before they arrive at my age (47)—and remain like Swift’s Strulbruggs—cut and dry for life,’ whereas he seemed always to be on ‘the threshold of knowledge’. Much as he loved quietness, inwardly and outwardly, he could not be still. He never lost the restlessness of childhood, and as he could not achieve the inward calm he craved, he denied its existence: ‘As for content that is a loathesome slimy humbug —fit only for potatoes, very fat hogs—and fools generally. Let us pray fervently that we may never become such asses as to be contented.’
One of the most surprising things about him is that he managed to combine roving habits and impecuniosity with a considerable social status. It surprises even Lear himself. He cannot understand how ‘such an asinine beetle’ could have made so many friends. ‘The immense variety of class and caste which I daily came in contact with in those days, would be a curious fact even in the life of a fool.’ Many of his friends were patricians or ‘swells’, as he called them, and if he had wished he could have spent much more time than he did in the houses of the great and affluent, but being social rather than gregarious, he hated the ‘bustle and lights and fuss of society’ and soon tired of being a flâneur. Yet, pursued as he was by the demon of boredom, he must have friends as well as work, and contriving to enjoy both he went his grumbling, but, on the whole, cheerful way always rather surprised that ‘such a queer beast’ should have so many friends, and whimsically resentful at the drudgery which temperament and circumstances imposed upon him.
5
No more diligent artist ever lived. He had the concentration of a beaver and never liked parting with a job once he had started to gnaw it. During fifty years of his busy life, for instance, he made 200 illustrations for Tennyson’s poems, but did not live to see any of them published.1 Sometimes he suspected this laboriousness although he looked upon a ‘totally unbroken application to poetical-topographical painting and drawing’ as the ‘universal panacea for the ills of life’.
The number of drawings he turned out on a sketching tour was astounding. In one year alone (1865) his ‘outdoor work’ comprised, ‘200 sketches in Crete, 145 in “the Corniche”, and 125 at Nice, Antibes and Cannes.’ He goes to India and in six months despatches to England ‘no less than 560 drawings, large and small besides 9 small sketch books and 4 journals’. He was then sixty-two and described himself, with some justice, as ‘a very energetic and frisky old cove’. When not travelling in search of the picturesque or working up his sketches) he is holding exhibitions of drawings and paintings from the sale of which he lived, or writing to his friends and patrons about work in progress and the attendant economic problems which were never entirely absent, and any spare time was devoted to the diaries which he kept for years, and those travel books2 which he illustrated with some of his best drawings.
He lived to draw and paint and drew and painted to live, pretending to hate the necessity of having to go on day after day ‘grinding’ his ‘nose off’. But although he talked little of art as such, and affected to belittle his own inspiration, his artistry was more than technique and it is a criticism of criticism that his drawings, particularly those in black and white and water-colours, should have been sidetracked rather than assessed. His habit of under-statement, as in the case of Anthony Trollope, is responsible for some of the posthumous neglect of his graphic work. His trick of looking up
on himself as a recorder and ‘topographer’ rather than a creator, has been taken too literally. Self-depreciation was not a pose. Lear was as puzzled about his gifts as he was about marriage, or, indeed, about life. Conscious of ‘being influenced to an extreme by everything in natural and physical life, i.e. atmosphere, light, shadow, and all the varieties of day and night’, he wondered whether it was ‘a blessing or the contrary’, but decided, wisely enough, that ‘things must be as they may, and the best is to make the best of what happens’. Like Pangloss he concludes that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds and he certainly makes the best of this sensitiveness before the picturesque, grumbling much but demanding little beyond ‘quiet and repose’ so that he could get on with his work.
His idea of heaven is a place of charming landscapes without noise or fuss. ‘When I go to heaven, if indeed I go—and am surrounded by thousands of polite angels—I shall say courteously “please leave me alone:—you are doubtless all delightful, but I do not wish to become acquainted with you;—let me have a park and a beautiful view of sea and hill, mountain and river, valley and plain, with no end of tropical foliage:—a few well-behaved cherubs to cook and keep the place clean —and—after I am quite established—say for a million or two years—an angel of a wife. Above all let there be no hens! No, not one! I give up eggs and roast chickens for ever”.’
6
Uncertainty of income (for even the patronage of rich friends does not stabilise his finances) predisposes him to wish for a sinecure, and when, in 1863, Greece took to herself a king, Lear requests his friend Fortescue (afterwards Lord Carlingford) to ‘write to Lord Palmerston to ask him to ask the Queen to ask the King of Greece to give’ him a ‘place’ specially created, the title to be ‘Lord High Bosh and Nonsense Producer . . . with permission to wear a fool’s cap (or mitre)—three pounds of butter yearly and a little pig,—and a small donkey to ride on’. Before that, rumour having raised Mr. Gladstone to the Hellenic throne, Lear had threatened to ‘write to Mr. G. for the appointment of Painter Laureate, and Grand Peripatetic Ass and Boshproducing Luminary’ to the Greek Court.
The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear Page 1