Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  Sometimes Lear leaves us with no judgement or consequence at all, simply an exclamation that is hard to decipher:

  There was an Old Person of Tartary,

  Who divided his jugular artery;

  But he screeched to his wife, and she said, ‘Oh, my life!

  Your death will be felt by all Tartary!’

  What does she mean? He husband may screech, but he looks calm – and he still has his pince-nez on. And will all Tartary be sad, shocked, or pleased – as she appears to be? In Lear’s violent verses, horror is often offset by the smiles, the satisfaction, on the faces of those involved. Here we are left puzzled. Metaphors and morals are absent. Whatever Lear’s struggles with faith there is no God here, no deus ex machina, no abstract justice. Yet many of the verses are metaphors in themselves, images of fleeting states of mind: anger, curiosity, ingenuity, foolishness and pride. Where there is a ‘judgement’ – and this is often elusive – it resides with the telling adjectives. These can be positive – amusing, courageous, ingenious – but just as often devastatingly negative: capricious, surprising, deluded, horrid, wayward, distressing, doubtful, bewildered, angry, mendacious, whimsical, vague. All our weaknesses are here.

  Within the nonsense world, of course, we shouldn’t take those judgements too seriously.

  There was an Old Person of Rhodes,

  Who strongly objected to toads;

  He paid several cousins, to catch them by dozens,

  That futile Old Person of Rhodes.

  Is he futile simply because there will always be more toads? Or, as the picture suggests, because the marching female cousins with their froggy burdens fill him with even more fear?

  The mood of Lear’s final lines is always unpredictable:

  There was a Young Lady of Wales,

  Who caught a large fish without scales;

  When she lifted her hook, she exclaimed, ‘Only look!’

  That extatic young lady of Wales.

  She could have been horrified – but Lear lets her rejoice. Far from an unthinking, easy return to a first line, his endings cleverly cast a mood back on the whole.

  The flat tone makes the implausible sound ‘sensible’, and this fracture of reason makes the world dangerous, unsettling, even frightening.

  There was an Old Man of Nepaul,

  From his horse had a terrible fall;

  But, though quite split in two, by some very strong glue,

  They mended that Man of Nepaul.

  The glue of the rhyme sticks the pieces together – but in the drawing the man’s two halves are still wide apart. As Derry down Derry, Lear promised ‘fun’. But it was fun of a very odd kind, full of melancholy, murder, panic, self-harm and suicide. What is the ‘fun’ in the Old Man of Cape Horn, who wishes he had never been born? Where is the laughter in the lonely Old Man of New York? (Yet in the drawing, rather different to the published version, a small figure goes ‘tee-hee!’ at the side.)

  There was an old man of New York,

  Who murdered himself with a fork;

  But nobody cried – tho’ he very soon died, –

  That unlucky old man of New York.

  14: ‘SOMETHING IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN’

  There was an Old Person of Gretna,

  Who rushed down the crater of Etna;

  When they said, ‘Is it hot?’ he replied, ‘No, it’s not!’

  That mendacious Old Person of Gretna.

  For Lear 1846 had been a year of work and publication. And before he left in December yet another book appeared, the lavish two-volume Gleanings from the Menagerie and Aviary at Knowsley Hall. The first volume contained lithographs of Lear’s paintings of birds and small mammals, the second of ungulates, hoofed mammals, by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Lord Derby had wanted a permanent record, and John Edward Gray of the British Museum, who wrote the text, was so impressed by the liveliness, grace and accuracy of Lear’s work that he had argued for separate volumes, lest Lear’s illustrations make Hawkins’s look weak. So in this single year Lear appeared in print in all his dimensions: naturalist, lithographer, landscape artist, travel writer and creator of nonsense.

  He was particularly pleased by the acclaim for Illustrated Excursions in Italy in the Quarterly Review the following year, where the anonymous critic (actually Richard Ford) reviewed it alongside Fanny Kemble’s account of her Italian travels. Ford had, he said, begun by looking at the engravings expecting ‘the annual experience of the stereotyped stuff’. Then a sentence or two caught his eye, and ‘We found ourselves tempted on – and so on, until we read the entire letter-press – to be well repaid by much new observation, nice marking of manners, genuine relish for nature and quiet dramatic humour.’ Lear was welcomed as a writer at last, and as an artist who ‘has enrolled his name high in art – in that city where art is most appreciated’. ‘The review seems written by someone of great kindness and cleverness,’ he told Ann, ‘but who is not quite right about me – as you will acknowledge when I tell you he talks about my “unruffled temper”!!!!!!!!!! – I hope we shall not happen to travel together if I am to keep his good opinion; I fear he would alter his decree.’

  *

  At the end of 1846 Lear travelled back to Rome the modern way, by train and steamboat, only to be held up by engine trouble and gales – ‘I am crawling on like an old snail,’ he moaned from Florence on Christmas Day. But at 5 a.m. on 29 December he was safe in the Via Felice. His friends cheered his return and he grew fat on the parties, but he already planned to get away, hoping to travel in May. He worried about how much work he could fit in before then, about the strain on his eyesight, and most of all about money. He might make £120 this year, he reckoned, to add to the £100 from his books, and could not save much.

  In the long dark winter and early spring, when the rain poured, the snow came and the streets were a river of ice and mud, he wrote to Ann, sounding slightly homesick, asking for news of family and friends and fretting about her health – she had trouble with the nerves of her face and problems with her eyesight. He pressed her to get her portrait painted, teased her about thinking there were wolves in the Apennines, followed her charitable work with the blind and with coal and blankets for the poor, and told her of the Rome collection for the Irish famine. In March he wrote whimsically, that ‘please God’, five or six years ahead, he might live comfortably in London: ‘when I trust you will live with me. We shall be very cosy & antique. I shall be 40 – or 41 – you – 60 or 61. We must have an old cat, & some china: – & so we shall go on smoothly. My dear Ann, this is all nonsense – but you must see I’m half asleep – so there’s my apology.’ They would never live together again. Ann drifted from place to place, blown here and there ‘like thistledown’, she said, often staying with friends, but nothing stopped her writing to her dear Edward.

  Lear was gentle about Ann’s faith, describing his own church-going and warding off her religious tracts. He could do without Griffith’s Spiritual Life, he wrote; ‘To tell you the truth, as I know you would wish me to do, I find the prayer book with all the lessons my most useful companion, & next to that, Abercromby’s Essays.’ And he warned her, lightly, against too many Mrs Jellyby-like ventures. Distressed cottagers were fine, but ‘With regard to the Madagascar peoples, I am afraid I do not take much interest in them; you know they are quite black & I do not think they are quite respectable enough to be distressed about’:

  Seriously, there are so many poor & forlorn, & unenlightened, close beneath our eyes, that it seems to me one is looking through a telescope & yet blindfolding ones eyes to all round us, when one takes so long sight. This however, does not ever apply to you who always find someone to be of use to where ever you are. Tell me what cottages you find to visit, for, to one’s shame, one requires, or thinks one requires, to feel an interest however little, in people before one gives them anything.

  He was always curious about individuals, the way they worked, treated their families, talked, dressed, ate and played. In his travel
journals, as in his limericks, he homed in on detail, like the Reggio official ‘who had perched himself at the top of a totally dark and crooked staircase, the ascent of which was disputed step by step by an animated poodle’, or the old French gentleman whom he found ‘playing at whist, double dummy’.

  Delight in the particular and avoidance of the general was one reason that Lear, warm-hearted as he was, turned his back on politics. He also hated confrontation and wanted anxiously to be accepted by all, whatever their stance or creed. His dissenting background placed him in a line that had always been outside the establishment, barred from political office and from taking degrees at Oxford and Cambridge. But Lear liked moderation: at the end of his life he declared himself ‘an outsider and by nature and habit a Liberal’, who felt that both ‘gross and violent Radicals’ and ‘virulent Tories’ should be kept from governing. Yet if he had managed to sweep aside rows over Ireland and Corn Law campaigns when he was in England, it was impossible to ignore the tension in Italy in 1847. He was glad that Ann had not come, he said, not only because of the cold: ‘Many other causes, more serious, but of which I do not choose to write, confirm me in this view of things.’ Much of the country was ablaze with nationalism, and the last two years had seen several failed uprisings. In July 1844, when Lear was heading back to the Abruzzi, two young Venetians, the Bandiera brothers, had led a doomed raid to free political prisoners in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. A month after their death by firing squad he wrote to Ann that ‘although no war will probably break out as yet – two or more years will possibly upset everything’.

  In 1847 matters were indeed upset. ‘Italy’ was a patchwork of separate regional states and small kingdoms, and the drive for unification had been gathering force since the end of the Napoleonic wars, given new force by the European revolutions of 1830. A first aim was to expel the Austrians in the north and the Bourbon rulers in Naples and Sicily, but the ultimate goal was to create a complete nation. Radical leaders like Mazzini and Garibaldi dreamed of a single federal republic; others envisaged a conferacy of separate states, led by Piedmont. Under pressure, in Rome, the new Pope, Pius IX, elected in July 1846, gave an amnesty to political prisoners, introduced more liberal press laws and set up a power-sharing Council of State. Leading exiles were full of hope: from London Mazzini supported the reforms and Garibaldi wrote from South America offering to provide the Pope with his legion to fight for unification. British interest was intense. Many Catholics, including Cardinal Manning (who came out to Rome that spring, and whose sermons Lear heard), were anxious to restore the old Roman Catholic hierarchy in England, while the British government hoped the Pope might use his influence to calm discontent in Ireland. There were rumours of establishing new diplomatic relations – from Pisa, Robert Browning offered to be secretary of the new embassy and once settled in Florence the Brownings flung themselves into the cause of Italian liberty. All this Lear ignored. Instead he sent Ann engravings of the Pope to show her friends, writing only of his popularity, piety and person, ‘large and portly (at least he looks so in his white and scarlet robe, as one meets him walking), and of the most cheerful and benevolent countenance possible. He very frequently walks about the roads just outside the Gates with his attendants and carriages – no guards.’

  In the troubled city, Lear’s spirits rose when spring came, turning the Campagna purple and gold: ‘Thus – climate & beauty of atmosphere regain their hold on the mind – pen – & pencil.’ He was ready to be off. ‘I shall write before I go to Calabria, if I do go there at all.’ But before Calabria, which he hoped to explore with Chichester Fortescue, he planned to revisit Sicily, travelling with the twenty-four-year-old John Proby. Proby (heir to the Earl of Carysfoot, as Lear later discovered) was another young Irishman who had aimed to become an MP, like Fortescue: when he failed to win a seat in 1846 he came to Rome to study painting and after spending the winter ill with ‘Roman fever’, a vicious strain of malaria affecting Rome and the Campagna, he rashly thought a trip would do him good. Lear met Proby in Palermo in late April, supplied with letters ‘to half the grandees & merchants & bankers of Sicily & Naples & what not’. Over the next few weeks they walked and rode from dawn to dusk, seeing cornfields inland and temples on the coast.

  Lear was horrified by Sicilian poverty but entranced by the ruins and the flora: the enormous prickly pears, the wildflowers carpeting the ground at the temple of Segesta, the oleanders and myrtles, figs and acanthus making ‘such hedgerows as cannot be looked at without wonder’. Even the ancient quarries of Syracuse, where the Athenian prisoners had suffered, were now gardens. In the late 1850s, working with Holman Hunt, he would base one of his finest oil paintings on his sketches and watercolour studies of these quarries.

  Syracuse quarries, 12 June 1847

  The climax of the trip was their climbing of Etna. Starting at mid-night they reached the snow-line at dawn, where Lear found it hard to keep his footing on the frozen snow. ‘Sometimes I rolled back as far as 20 minutes had taken me up,’ he wrote. As they struggled higher, now plunging up to their knees in ash, the thin air stopped his breath, but the view was worth it – from the summit Sicily lay below them like a pink map surrounded by blue sea and purple mountain shadows. Although the heat was intense and the sulphur burned their clothes,

  Yet one was too glad to bury one’s hands in it – one’s body & head being wrapped up in cloaks & plaids through all which one shivered in the icy wind which blew like knives from the North (Etna you know, is nearly as high as Mt Blanc). We came down ridiculously fast: you stick your heels in the ashy cone, & slide down almost without stopping to the bottom, – & with a spiked stick you shoot down the icy hill we had taken so long to surmount – in 10 minutes.

  His exaggerated account of the descent was like the slipping, sliding, tumbling of his nonsense figures. The exhilaration mixed with fear at the heat and cold, the heights and depths, the gasping and falling, suggests his own fluctuating moods – as well as the turbulence of Italy erupting into violence around him, and the flames, house fires, burning ovens of his limericks.

  The travelling was hard, the food atrocious, the fleas and mosquitoes intolerable, and Proby fell ill. In their final week in Palermo, where the city was ‘crammed full, full, full’ due to the presence of the king and queen and the French fleet, their tempers frayed. But by the end they were friends again, and when they reached Naples and Lear realised that Chichester Fortescue could not come to Calabria, as he would have to stay in Britain for the coming election, he and Proby set off together, to the toe of Italy. Among the orange groves of Reggio, they collected more introductions and hired a guide, Ciccio – short for Francesco – who replied to all their plans with a single short sentence:

  ending with – ‘Dogo; dighi, doghi, daghi, da’ – a collection of sounds of frequent recurrence in Calabrese lingo, and the only definite portion of that speech we could ever perfectly master. What the ‘Dogo’ was we never knew, though it was an object of our keenest search throughout the tour to ascertain if it were animal, mineral, or vegetable.

  With his nonsense-speak, Ciccio was a success. He chivvied them on, found the best routes, solved problems, grimaced at things he disliked and was quick to laugh. When they parted at the end of the trip, he wept.

  This region, even more than the Abruzzi, was largely unknown to British travellers and readers, but Lear did not publish his journal immediately. Instead he waited until 1852, when the political storms were past. He called it Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria and the Kingdom of Naples, and in his Preface he wrote, ‘Wishing to confine these journals strictly to the consideration of landscape, I have said as little as possible of events which occurred in 1848, and their sequel.’ He wanted readers to travel with him not as a political commentator but as a painter, following his hunt for a good view, his dashes to sketch before sunset, his penning-out of drawings at night. His judgements were painterly, often referring back to his favourite artists, Claude Lorrain,
Salvator Rosa and Poussin. He expresses his frustration at lack of a ‘Claudian foreground’, his delight at Bruzzano, ‘placed as if arranged by G. Poussin for a picture, on the edge of a great rock arising out of the plain’, his joy at the woods in the morning light:

  None of your dense carpet-forests – your monotonies of verdure, but made up of separate combinations of pictorial effect, such as one can hardly fancy – Claude and Salvator Rosa at every step. All the morning we drew in this beautiful place, and little enough could our utmost efforts make of what would occupy a regiment of landscape painters for years, if every one of them had as many arms and hands as Vishnoo.

  Palizzi, from Journals of a Landscape Painter in Calabria

  The journal was alight with colour, flashes of blossom against dark rocks, women in deep blue dresses with orange and pink borders. All the senses were here: the feel of cactus prickles and burning heat; the perfume of amaryllis, the earthy scent of animals, the poisonous stench of soaking hemp; the taste of macaroni, figs and ricotta; the sound of waterfalls, crying children, squeaking pigs, barking dogs, and cicadas, ‘who buzzed and fizzed, and shivered and shuddered, and ground knives on every branch above and around’. Lear’s metaphors made grandeur intimate: a village ‘crushed and squeezed into a nest of crags’; the great rock of Palizzi ‘like a king of nine-pins, set edgeways against the sky’.

  The sensuous, hurrying text reflected their journey. Lear and Proby were always on the move. They never knew what the day would bring or where they would stay – a palazzo on a precipice, a barn or a taverna outhouse, ‘loaded with rolls of linen, guns, gourds, pears, hats, glasses, tumblers, puppies, jugs, sieves &c.’ They speculated with amusement on the next set of hosts and whether they could stay awake long enough to be civil. Some stops were an ordeal, like ‘Silkworm Hall’, where every room was festooned and the stink of caterpillars was overwhelming: ‘Supper and silkworms once again; screaming children and howling dogs; the fat lady shouted and scolded, and anathematised the daddy-long-legs who flew into the candles.’ But they made many friends and met characters who remained in Lear’s mind, like the garrulous baron who ‘bustled about like an armadillo in a cage’. And Lear made careful studies of the people he met, drawing aprons and caps and children shyly proud of their best dress.