The problem of finance was a constant irritant, and his wish to stabilise his income, though couched in the Learian nonsense idiom, was none the less a reality. But although he was chronically short of cash, he was never actually destitute or even poor. It was the lack of regular income rather than poverty which gave him a permanent feeling of insecurity. He was thus forced by circumstances to think unduly about money. Such a condition might have made him thrifty, which is often the first step to miserliness; but he was as generous as he was poor and continually helped the still poorer members of his family and others less closely related. ‘I only wish for money to give it away,’ is no idle boast, as we know from the records of many generous acts. His books contribute little to his variable income and it is to his landscapes that he turns for subsistence. He becomes a travelling showman of his own works, for at Corfu or Valetta or San Remo, he holds exhibitions, and in his later years there was a small permanent show of his pictures at Foord’s Gallery in Wardour Street. But customers are shy and they do not always pay promptly. The position would have been still worse but for the support of regular patrons. His old friends are ever ready to help and to enlist the help of their friends, but even then there are lean periods, for, alas, ‘private patronage must end in the natural course of things, but eating and drinking and clothing go on disagreeably continually.’ Like William Blake he began his career as an illustrator of the works of others, and it was as a delineator of birds for the ornithologist John Gould that he attracted the attention of Edward Stanley, thirteenth Earl of Derby, the Whig statesman and scholar, known to literature as Bulwer Lytton’s ‘Rupert of debate’. Lord Derby engaged him to illustrate a book on the menagerie which was then a show-piece of the Stanley demesne at Knowsley near Liverpool. This commission was momentous, for it earned him the lifelong patronage of the noble family which has done many more serviceable things than lend its name to the most famous horse race in the world, not least the befriending of the quaint ‘cove’ whose work has already outlived the fame of his first kindly and illustrious patron. Edward Lear worked for no less than four successive Earls of Derby—but, more important still, he worked or rather played for the children in the household of his first patron, and by so doing achieved immortality. The first Book of Nonsense was composed to amuse the grandchildren, nephews and nieces of the thirteenth earl, to whose ‘great-grandchildren, grand-nephews and grand-nieces’, it is dedicated.
7
If ever a gifted man worked for a living it was Edward Lear, and, although he joked about his journeys, they were not jaunts but professional expeditions in search of the picturesque, with the object of turning it into marketable landscapes. He is in fact a pictorial merchant: a later Dr. Syntax—in search of a living. Scenery is the raw material of his trade. When trekking across Albania he is glad to leave the district of Peupli for Akhrida, where he hopes the scenery will be ‘more valuable’. He is, as he declares in his Corsican Journal, a ‘wandering painter—whose life’s occupation is travelling for pictorial and topographic purposes’. But although he always makes a virtue of necessity, work is life to him. He fears idleness because it exposes him to boredom, and if he is capable of enduring the prophylactic of drudgery, he has no liking for the sedentary side of painting: ‘No life is more shocking to me than sitting motionless like a petrified gorilla as to my body and limbs hour after hour—my hand meanwhile, peck peck pecking at billions of little dots and lines, while my mind is fretting and fuming through every moment of the weary day’s work.’
He craves for movement as though his curiously active mind needed the companionship of an active body, for ‘after all one isn’t a potato’, so perhaps it is better ‘to run about continually like an ant’. It was nothing for him even when past his prime to walk fifteen and twenty miles a day, and to do an amount of sketching as well. The trade of landscape-painter was perhaps, after all, only the excuse for those laborious journeys in Albania, Greece, Corsica, Malta, Crete, Egypt, Corfu, Switzerland, Calabria and other parts of Italy, the French Riviera, and India. There are indications that he relished travel for its own sake and was always planning jaunts to ever more distant lands. It is probable, also, that he found in travel a means of relief from that mental stress which, as we shall see, was an underlying cause of his jocularity. The craving for movement is like a chronic desire to run away from himself. ‘The more I read travels the more I want to move,’ and he playfully invited his friend Fortescue to go with him to ‘New Zealand, Tasmania and Lake Tchad’. As he grew older he believed that a sedentary life, after moving about as he had done for more than half a century, would ‘infallibly finish’ him ‘off suddenly’. And although, he reflected, he might ‘with equal suddenness be finished off if he moved about’, he believed that ‘a thorough change’ would affect him ‘far better rather than far worse. Whereby’, he concludes, ‘I shall go either to Sardinia, or India, or Jumsibobjiggle-quack this next winter as ever is.’
8
This restlessness was no doubt due to a nervous defect, for although Lear lived for well over seventy years, he always, and with reason, looked upon himself as an invalid and could not understand why he continued to survive after he was fifty. There was reason for these fears, whimsically as he often stated them, for he was an epileptic, and suffered also from chronic asthma and bronchitis, from which he ultimately died. But in spite of these defects, he had varying spells of comfortable health, and his ailments did not interfere with his love of wandering in strange lands, and of working continuously, and, on the whole, happily, at high pressure. At one time he is advised ‘to take things easy’ as he has ‘the same complaint of the heart that my father died of’, but there is no evidence that he took the advice. Asthma and bronchitis would have driven him to warmer and drier climates even if he had not been otherwise predisposed to travel. Some of his irascibility may be attributed to physical and nervous defects, but much of it is a normal if exaggerated love of grumbling, to which he invariably gave the characteristic Lear touch of nonsense. He is, however (after the manner of men who explode over trifles), inclined, like Walter Savage Landor, to congratulate himself on his composure. An instance occurs after a sunstroke in Italy: ‘I often thank God’, he said, ‘that although he has given me a nature easily worried by small matters, yet in such cases as this I go on day after day quite calmly, only thankful that I do not suffer more.’
9
He has also numerous aversions, such as noises, crowds, hustle, gaiety, fools and bores, which are doubtless valetudinarian. Once he confesses that ‘barring a few exceptionals’, all human beings seem to be ‘awful idiots’. Yet he is neither prig nor curmudgeon, and inclined to gently scan his brother man, but he enjoys company rather than ‘society’. He is a worker but not a team-worker. ‘Always accustomed from a boy to go my own way uncontrolled, I cannot help fearing that I should run rusty and sulky by reason of retinues and routines.’ He repudiates the term Bohemian, but has ‘just so much of that nature as it is perhaps impossible the artistic and poetic beast can be born without’.
Noise is the annoyance which comes in for the full blast of his whimsical invective, and it is the misplaced sounds of children, cats, poultry and music which annoy him most. He humours this sensitiveness all over Europe. In Paris: ‘all the Devils in or out of Hell! four hundred and seventy-three cats at least are all at once making an infernal row in the garden close to my window. Therefore, being mentally decomposed, I shall write no more.’ At a Swiss hotel the greatest drawback is the noise of children: ‘the row of forty little ill-conducted beasts is simply frightful.’ At Rome: all manner of things irritate him; among them the conversion of so many to the Roman Catholic faith and Manning preaching ‘most atrocious sermons . . . to which nevertheless, all heaps of fools go’. But of all objectionable noises unwanted music inspires the fullness of his powers of vituperation. In Rome ‘a vile beastly rottenheaded foolbegotten pernicious priggish screaming, tearing, roaring, perplexing, splitmecrackle, crachimecriggle insa
ne ass of a woman is practising howling below-stairs with a brute of a singing master so horribly, that my head is nearly off’. And some few years later at Corfu he is ‘much distressed by next door people who had twins babies and played the violin: but one of the twins died, and the other has eaten the fiddle—so all is peace’. As usual he compensates himself for these worries with a dose of nonsense, as, for example, the thought of ultimate calm among choice friends ‘under a lotus tree a eating of ice creams and pelican pie, with our feet in a hazure coloured stream with the birds and beasts of Paradise a sporting around us’.
10
These irascibilities which play so large and so amusing a part in his letters, are mere whimsies when compared with his pecuniary anxieties. Money, always in ‘short supply’, is a stock subject of his letters, and at times, and much against the grain, he is forced to become a borrower. He is inclined to be thrifty but does not succeed in saving more than £300 until he is past fifty, and rejoices in the thought that henceforward he will be ‘entitled annually to £9’. The labour of ‘hopelessly endeavouring to get in subscriptions’ for one of his books, is so great that ‘I abhor the sight of a pen, and if I were an angel I would immediately moult all my quills for fear of their being used in calligraphy’. He dislikes the financial aspect of his work, but in spite of a large circle of friends and acquaintances and growing reputation both as artist and humorist, the task of earning a living remains a problem and a cause of anxiety. He has long been an artistic lion, one of the ‘sights’ of Cannes, Valetta, Corfu—or where-ever he may have pitched his studio, but his numerous visitors seem more inclined to sponge on his personal charm than to buy his pictures, and he dislikes being lionised at any time. At Malta he was ‘dubbed a mystery and a savage’ because he fled from the crowd of visitors who would have thronged his rooms without dreaming of spending £5 on a drawing. In a whole season he ‘only got £30 from the rich Cannes public’. He had a bad winter in 1878 at San Remo, having sold but one drawing for £7, and would have ‘come to grief’ had it not been for two friends who bought some of his smaller oil paintings. In addition to these fluctuations in turnover, he suffers from the failure of his publisher, and his troubles are increased when the tenants of his villa at San Remo abscond owing him nearly £100.
11
He broods less upon these material worries than upon the evanescence of life and of all those things, friendship and the beauty of the earth, which are his real attachments. He is capable of consoling himself for the shortage of material possessions with a quip, but his acute sense of the shortage of time is not so easily assuaged. He attempts to soothe his temporal anxieties by resort to those apologetics which are common to all who are sensitive to evanescence. ‘The fact is,’ he argues, ‘time is all nonsense,’ and he inclines to leave it at that, resolving the incomprehensible by invincible pursuit of his chosen craft. His pictures give permanence to memories and impression and thus create a desirable illusion of timelessness. Yet the possession of a keen sense of fact will not permit him to be more than temporarily soothed by such arguments. He cannot bluff himself. He knows he is walking in the ‘dusty twilight of the incomprehensible’ and instinctively seeks to escape through the door of nonsense. ‘I wish I were an egg and going to be hatched,’ he sighs, summing up his desire for Nirvana.
12
Lear’s nonsense is no mere tissue of quips and jokes. It is a thing in itself in a world of its own, with its own physiography and natural history; a world in which the nature of things has been changed, whilst retaining its own logical and consistent idiom. He expresses a nonsensical condition which is peculiar to himself and necessary to his serenity, and it may be that this fantastic world gratifies for him a desire which we all share to some extent, probably more than we are willing to admit, and which he seems to share, by anticipation, with the surrealists of our own time.
The authentic brand of nonsense is rarely absent from his letters, if no more than the fantastic spelling of a word. The art perfected in the Nonsense Books is here seen in the rough. It is not surprising, for instance, that the far-fetched hope of selling his Tennyson illustrations for the large sum of £18,000 should set him off. In that unlikely event, he will buy a ‘chocolate coloured carriage speckled with gold, driven by a coachman in green vestments and silver spectacles wherein sitting on a lofty cushion composed of muffins and volumes of the Apocrypha’, he will ‘disport himself all about the London parks to the general satisfaction of all pious people, and the particular joy of Chichester, Lord Carlingford and his affectionate friend Edward Lear’. Here we have nonsense combined with humour, and there are many similar passages in the letters. In one of them he threatens to go to Darjeeling or Para and ‘silently subsist on Parrot Pudding and Lizard Lozenges in chubbly contentment’. Lear is not a good sailor and once he writes from Folkestone that if the sea is rough he will hire, somewhat inconsistently, ‘a pussilanimouse porpoise, and cross on his bak’. He records that one of his frequent coughs shakes off one of his toes, ‘2 teeth and 3 whiskers,’ and he is so irritated by the doctor’s concern that he orders ‘a baked Barometer for dinner and 2 Thermometers stewed in treacle for supper’.
15
Lear is an adept at the game of monkeying with words. Like Rabelais and Swift and Joyce he has a genius for fantastic verbal adventures, but often they do little more than play tricks with established spelling. The more familiar the words the more he is tempted to tamper with them. The habit is ingrained, the result not alone of a natural love of the whimsical and an indomitable sense of fun, but it is also, as he himself is aware, an instinctive effort to bridge a gap between idea and expression. ‘Proper and exact “epithets” always were impossible to me,’ he says, ‘as my thoughts are ever in advance of my words.’ And here also we may discover a key to his nonsense, or ‘nonsenses’, as he calls them, which are perhaps ahead of rather than behind his senses.
In the first of his published letters to Fortescue, whom he likes to address as ‘40scue’, he recounts the names of the distinguished foreigners at Rome, in 1848, as: ‘Madame Pul-itz-neck-off and Count Bigenouf—Baron Polysuky, and Mons. Pig.’ He is afraid to stand near the door, lest the announced names should make him grin. In his letters as well as his books he rattles off strings of queer examples with familiar gusto. A projected journey to Egypt makes him ‘quite crazy about Memphis and On and Isis and crocodiles and ophthalmia and nubians and simoons and sorcerers and sphingidos’.
It is natural that Lear should have fallen, as we should now believe, into the then widespread vogue of punning. But he is no slavish imitator of Lamb and Hood. Even his puns have a style of their own which often trips over the boundaries of humour into his own rightful realm of nonsense. Here is an example from a letter of 1865:
‘This place (Nice) is so wonderfully dry that nothing can be kept moist. I never was in so dry a place in all my life. When the little children cry, they cry dust and not tears. There is some water in the sea, but not much:—all the wet nurses cease to be so immediately on arriving:—Dryden is the only book read—the neighbourhood abounds with Dryads and Hammer-dryads: and weterinary surgeons are quite unknown.’
A trip to the Ionian Islands induced a punning declension of archipelago: ‘v.a. Archipelago, P. Archipelament, P.P. Archipelagore.’ In the same manner he has ‘German, Gerwomen and Gerchildren’, and such constructions as ‘geraffino’ for a young Giraffe, and ‘hippo-potamice’ as an improved plural for hippopotamus.
Elsewhere he performs a different trick with an undertone of Learian irony:
‘I went into the city to-day; to put the £125 I got for the ‘Book of Nonsense’ into the funds. It is doubtless a very unusual thing for an artist to put by money, for the whole way from Temple Bar to the Bank was crowded with carriages and people—so immense a sensation did this occurrence make. And all the way back it was the same, which was very gratifying.’
14
But as he is not content with being a punster, he quickly enter
s into the fun of any verbal trick new or old, and when Charles Dickens popularises Wellerisms, Lear becomes an easy convert to that once fashionable kind of humour: ‘On the whole, as the morbid and mucilaginous monkey said when he climbed up to the top of the Palm-tree and found no fruit there, one can’t depend upon dates.’ The vocabulary of Sam Weller is also exploited in ‘viddy’ for ‘widow’, and ‘wurbl’ for ‘verbal’, and among other Cockneyisms such mispronunciations as ‘chimbly’ (chimney) and ‘suddingly’, recall Mrs. Gamp.
Phonetic spelling plays a considerable part in many of his nonsense words, and often a complete effect is obtained by this process as in ‘yott’ (yacht), ‘rox’ (rocks), ‘korn’ (corn), and ‘toppix’ (topics). He is better, however, in distortions like ‘buzzim’ (bosom), ‘omejutly’ (immediately), ‘pollygise’ (apologise), ‘spongetaneous (spontaneous), ‘mewtshool’ (mutual), ‘gnoat’ (note), ‘fizzicle’ (physical), ‘fizziognomy’ (physiognomy), and ‘phibs’ (fibs).
The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear Page 2