by Jenny Uglow
Lear knew that his readers would have preconceptions: ‘Calabria! – No sooner is the word uttered than a new world arises before the mind’s eye, – torrents, fastnesses, all the prodigality of mountain scenery, – caves, brigands, and pointed hats, – Mrs Radcliffe and Salvator Rosa – costumes and character, – horrors and magnificence without end.’ He was not, however, setting out to find this southern Gothic. When he finally came across some ‘real, positive, pointed hats’, they did not belong to Calabrians at all, but to goatherds from Catanzaro, while a mysterious midnight noise, like an echo of Mrs Radcliffe’s horrors, turned out to be a tame sheep huffing and sobbing under the bed.
As a sop to Gothic tastes, Lear includes a couple of tales of mad aristocrats, murdered lovers and crumbling castles – and he did visit the castle of Malfi, home of Webster’s doomed duchess, soon to be utterly swept away in the terrible earthquake of 1851, just before Lear published his book. But his real interest was in the mundane life of the region. And he soon came to realise that it was he and Proby who were the oddities; to the local people, England, not Calabria, was an exotic place, a land of mystery. Did they have no rocks in England, that they must come here to draw them? How could there be a country that did not grow rice, or make wine? At the mountain convent of Polsi the Father Superior explained to his monks that England was very small, about a third the size of Rome, and the people were a sort of Christians ‘though not exactly so’, as their priests married – a ridiculous and shocking practice. And here too, as in the Abruzzi, tales circulated of Brunel’s great achievement: ‘The whole place is divided into two equal parts by an arm of the sea, under which there is a great tunnel,’ the priest explained. At Rocella, fruit growers informed them that England had no fruit, only potatoes, and laughed off Lear’s accounts of gooseberries and greengages: ‘So we ate our supper in quiet, convinced almost that we had been telling lies; that gooseberries were unreal and fictitious; greengages a dream.’
Some enquiries were more disquieting. From the start, mystified by the idea of an artistic tour, people fired questions at them: ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’ as if the only reason they had come was to spy. As they turned back towards the western coast, the unease grew. A spherical baron at first refused to welcome them and pursued them with a breathless interrogation: ‘Perche?’ ‘Why, what for?’ Their passports were examined, their steps were followed, they were badgered about news from Reggio. By now even Lear, firm ‘in the habit of studiously remaining as far as I could in ignorance of all political acts or expressions’, felt increasingly that ‘something is about to happen’. After a trip across the straits to Messina, where Proby stayed behind, Lear returned to the mainland to find his host and family agitated. Guns were heard, a messenger arrived: ‘E gia principiata la revoluzione!’ – the revolution has already begun. In the published journal, moving to the present tense, Lear evoked the drama and his predicament: ‘As for me, revolution or no revolution, here I am in the toe of Italy all alone, and I must find my way out of it as best I may.’
In Reggio armed men roamed the streets with banners declaring ‘Viva Pio IX’ or ‘Viva la Costituzione’. The concierge at the hotel where Lear had left his luggage refused to give him his key: ‘Non ci sono più chiavi,’ screamed the excited cameriere; ‘non ci sono più passaporti, non ci sono più Ré – piu legge – più giudici – più niente – non x’è altro che l’amore, la libertà – l’amicizia e la costituzione – eccovi le chiavi – ai! o-o-o-o-o-orra birra bà!!’ – no more keys, passports, kings, laws, judges … nothing but love, liberty, friendship and the constitution. The Bourbon government was suspended and the friends and officials who had given Lear and Proby introductions were perplexed and distressed. Hearing that Messina, too, was in revolt, with considerable courage Lear persuaded a boatman to row him across to find Proby, and they eventually boarded a steamer to Naples, leaving sad scenes behind: ‘Gloom, gloom, overshadows the memory of a tour so agreeably begun … The bright morning route of the traveller overcast with cloud and storm before mid-day.’
The tour was not altogether finished. Proby had another month to pass before heading north, so from Naples they decided to tour Basilicata for three weeks. But the scenery was not so grand, the clouds came down, and despite lovely mountain towns and kindly hosts their mood was shaken. They returned to Rome in mid-October.
Lear reassured Ann that he would leave if trouble threatened: ‘Most people who intended to winter here have turned back; there is I believe no real alarm, but families do not like to take risks. Rely upon it, whenever it is necessary, I shall move in time.’ In November he packed a huge box of books to send home, cheered by the arrival of Ann’s miniature: ‘it is exactly like looking at you through a diminishing glass.’
Ann Lear, by Mrs Arundale (1847)
Proudly keeping his long Calabrian moustaches, on Wednesdays he opened his studio to visitors, making enough to send small sums back to his sisters for Christmas. Although many people had left, he was still out to supper four or five times a week and his letters were sprinkled with names. Younger visitors in particular sought him out, men in their twenties, who looked up to him, as Proby had done, for his art, his ease, his knowledge of the language and his energetic travelling. Some would remain friends for life, like Lord Eastnor, later Lord Somers, and Fortescue’s Oxford crony, the fair-haired, handsome Thomas Baring, ‘an extremely luminous & amiable brick’, Lear decided, ‘& I like him very much’.
Although he was busy, he felt increasingly unsettled, unsure what to do or where to go. The previous autumn George Bowen, President of the Ionian Academy, the University of Corfu, whom he had met in Rome, had invited him to stay on the island. The idea was tempting, as he wanted to see Greece, but he was also fascinated by the idea of Egypt, and by Syria and Asia Minor: ‘You see therefore in how noxious a state of knownothingatallaboutwhatoneisgoingtodo-ness I am in!’ When Lear wrote this in February 1848, one of his new friends, twenty-five-year-old Charles Church, was leaving Rome for Athens. Charles’s uncle was the extraordinary Sir Richard Church, a Quaker who had defied his family to fight in the Napoleonic wars and had organised the Suliot defence of the Ionian islands in 1809. Later the Greeks asked him back to lead them against the Turks. Charles Church encouraged Lear to go to Greece. ‘I am very sorry to leave Rome and many friends there, especially Edward Lear,’ he wrote:
I spent my last evening in his studio, Lear diligently penning out his sketches, full of quaint and ludicrous stories of people who came to his studio; I and another man looking through portfolios, had coffee, smoked and chatted, Lear telling, among other things, about Ruskin and Tennyson, quoting piece after piece of Tennyson’s early poems, and finally taking down his guitar, he sang off half of ‘Locksley Hall’, with voice pathetic and plaintive but not melodious. He is doubtful about coming to Greece, but has not given it up.
While Lear mulled over his next move, Italy became still more unsettled. The riots that he and Proby had seen in Reggio and Messina had been suppressed by the military but they were a harbinger of things to come: an uprising in Palermo in early January 1848 spread fast over Sicily, prompting riots on the mainland. King Ferdinand granted a new constitution in the Kingdom of Naples and the English rushed north to Rome. ‘What do you think of the Sicilians?’ Lear asked Fortescue. ‘Brave fellows are they not?’ Trouble was not confined to Italy. On 22 February, Parisian crowds poured onto the streets. Barricades were erected and soldiers fired on the crowd, then the troops mutinied and Prime Minister Guizot resigned. Next day Louis Philippe abdicated and fled to England and the monarchy was replaced by the Second Republic. In London that week Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto, commissioned by ‘The League of the Just’. London was full of rumours of approaching Chartist mobs and the army was on the alert. In fact the Chartist demonstration on 10 April was peaceful and the British panic faded, but in this ‘Year of the People’ insurrections flared across Europe – in Austria, Germany, Denmark, Hun
gary, Poland, Belgium. In Italy revolts in the north led to months of fighting against the Austrians. To begin with Pius IX supported the nationalist struggle, but in May he withdrew his troops, nervous of losing the war. His support in Rome collapsed after this apparent betrayal and in November he was forced to leave: the following February Mazzini and Garibaldi would set up the short-lived Roman Republic.
By the time of the Pope’s flight, Lear was long gone. Finally, he decided to accept Bowen’s invitation to Corfu. In late March 1848 he sold his furniture and sent his books and drawings and paintings home, apart from a couple of canvases that he thought he might return to Rome to finish. Since the steamers from Trieste had been stopped by the Austrian war, he set off for Naples to sail from there via Malta. ‘It would be quite impossible’, he told Ann after taking the boat south,
to make you understand how a few short months have changed all persons & things in Italy for indeed I hardly believe what passes before my own eyes. Restraint & espionage have given universal place to open speaking & triumphant liberal opinion. One of my fellow passengers was a Neapolitan noble, exiled for 17 years – when he saw Vesuvius first, he sobbed so that I thought he would break his heart.
Lear’s sympathies were with the reformers, but when he sailed for Malta, on 7 April 1848, he was glad to leave the land he had come to love. This was not from fear of danger, he said, but because ‘the whole tone of the place is worry, worry, worry – & I am sick of it, having lived in it so long in quieter times’.
15: ‘CALMLY, INTO THE DICE-BOX’
‘Daybreak and wailing; wailing at night, wailing at morn. Shrieks and Khimara will ever be united in my memory.’ The lament for the dead, taken up by wives, daughters, sisters and the women around, echoed for days in the Albanian mountains. Lear felt it in his bones, yet the more he was surrounded by danger and death, the more alive he felt.
Leaving Italy, caught in the undertow of the great wave of revolutions, Lear found himself travelling through lands of earlier struggles and battles for independence. After a brief stay in Malta – too white, too bright, too treeless to attract him – he crossed the Ionian Sea in a storm, before sailing through the islands in a moonlit calm. He passed Missolonghi, where Byron died, and sailed on to Ithaca, ‘Ulysses island, – & later to Leucadia whence Sappho leaped into the sea’. Early on the morning of 19 April 1848 his boat anchored in the beautiful bay of Corfu. But within days he was off again, sailing south to find his host George Bowen, who was visiting other islands, and then wandering on through Cephalonia and Ithaca.
Britain had gained six Ionian islands in 1810 during the Napoleonic wars, adding Corfu on Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, and although they were technically independent, not colonies but British protectorates with their own senate and constitution, real power lay with the British High Commissioner. Lear found that while Corfu buzzed with a large expatriate community, this was only the latest layer in the island’s culture. The architecture of the port, with its citadel, colonnaded streets, markets and squares, bore witness to the centuries of Venetian control up to 1797; many of the island’s aristocrats, intellectuals and poets still spoke and wrote in Italian. A third of the population was Greek and another third Jewish, living in an area like the Venetian Ghetto, called the Hebraica. The rest were a galaxy of Mediterranean peoples from Albania, Malta, Dalmatia and Italy. The British were a mere crust floating on top of this rich mix, insular and snobbish, keeping to themselves, like the community Lear had known so well in Rome.
It was high spring, and Lear basked in the sun, the wild flowers and white villages. Gazing at the mountains across the straits, he saw the country that Byron had hymned in Canto II of Childe Harold, published in 1812, when Lear was born:
Land of Albania! let me bend mine eyes
On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men!
The cross descends, thy minarets arise,
And the pale crescent sparkles in the glen,
Through many a cypress grove within each city’s ken.
‘If I go to Albania I shall send you a daily journal,’ he promised Ann. But then he accepted an invitation from the ambassador to Turkey, Sir Stratford Canning and his wife, old friends from Rome, now staying in Corfu, to go with them to Constantinople, spending a week in Athens on the way. And off he went again.
The Acropolis left Lear astounded: ‘Poor old Rome sinks into nothing by the side of such beautiful magnificence.’ In the sunset many owls, the bird of Minerva, came and sat near him as he drew.
With his usual precipitous enthusiasm Lear was now in love with Greece. Determined to explore at least some of it before he went to Turkey, he decided after all that he would travel with Charles Church, who could speak modern Greek and was full of the classical education Lear had never had. The trip began inauspiciously, with Lear crashing from his horse and spraining his shoulder, then being bitten by a centipede so that his leg swelled up. But with a guide, who found horses, cooked meals and arranged lodgings in village houses, they carried on. They passed Marathon, where the Greeks defeated the Persians. They rode past towns destroyed after the modern fight against the Turks. But Lear was happy, careering through ‘fields of pink hollyhocks, yellow and lilac thistles, clover and convolvulus, and rejoicing in the storks of Lamia, that nested on every house and minaret, clattering with their beaks so that it seemed the whole town was playing backgammon’.
Athens, 23 July 1848
At Thermopylae, Church read his pocket Herodotus while Lear sketched. In the burning midsummer Lear was busy, Church remembered, ‘from 3 in the morning, only resting during the midheat – among the crowds in the market-place, among the soldiers – only intent upon his work, with infinite patience and unflagging good humour and patience’. This took its toll. Another insect bite brought fever, probably malaria. By early July Lear was delirious and had to be carried back to Athens, ‘brought here’, he told Fortescue cheerfully later, ‘by 4 horses on an Indiarubber bed’. There he recovered slowly under the care of Lady Canning, supported by ‘books, jelly, porter & visits continual’ from English residents. By mid-July he felt better, so hungry, he said, that he could eat an ox.
Soon he was strong enough to sail to Constantinople, but at the embassy at Therapia on the Bosphorus he collapsed again. It was not until late August that he explored the city and could watch the sultan’s procession to Santa Sophia, a display of power with horses caparisoned in velvet and gold, and pashas and officials in diamond-studded turbans. At the climax, there was a long, silent pause, and then ‘surrounded by scarlet & gold dressed guards, with halberts or pikes, carrying most wondrous crescent-like plumes of green & white feathers’, in rode the Grand Seigneur, ‘as if he were in a grove of beautiful birds’. Seeing the ranks hurl themselves on the ground before the young sultan, Lear told Ann, ‘gave one a wonderful idea of the Barbaric despot sort of thing one has read of as a child’.
Excited, he spent a week sketching and buying presents for his sisters: printed muslin with gold and blue flowers, silks for a dress, scented pastilles and bracelets, and a little Persian writing box, ‘good for knitting needles’. By the time he described these on 9 September, Lear had already left. Well-off friends had sent money for him to travel, and he was on the Austrian steamer Ferdinando on his way to Salonica. The steerage was crammed with Turks, Jews, Greeks and Bulgarians, like herrings in a barrel, but Lear shared the first-class deck with the Austrian consul’s family and a Turkish harem, ‘who entirely cover the floor with a diversity of robes, pink, blue, chocolate and amber, pea, sea, olive, bottle, pale and dark green’. When the women rose, they moved like a bed of tulips in a breeze. He watched the towers of Constantinople fade into the distance: ‘first pale and distinct in the light of the rising moon, and then glittering and lessening on the calm horizon, till they, and the memory that I have been among them for seven weeks, seem alike part of the world of dreams’.
When he came to write up his travels, Lear felt experienced enough to hand out advice. Travellers i
n this region should abandon firearms and gifts to the natives (including portraits of the queen). They should hire a good dragoman and take ‘cooking utensils, tin plates, knives and forks’ as well as a light mattress, sheets and blankets, capotes and plaids, ‘two or three books; some rice, curry powder and cayenne; ‘a world of drawing materials – if you be a hard sketcher’. Take as few clothes as possible, he added, but put something in for meeting beys and dignitaries. Most vital was ‘some quinine made into pills (rather leave all behind than this)’. Cramming all this into heavy leather bags, Lear planned to meet Church in Salonica, to visit Mount Athos with him and then travel round Greece, continuing the explorations of the spring. He had been reading the many volumes of Colonel William Leake’s travels in northern Greece and the Morea, published in the 1830s, and though he admired these books, he felt the lack of pictures. Greece, he thought had been only ‘imperfectly illustrated … The vast yet beautifully simple sweeping lines of the hills have hardly been represented I fancy’, he mused to Fortescue, ‘nor the primitive dry foregrounds of Elgin marble peasants &c. What do you think of a huge work (if I can do all Greece)?’ He clung to this idea for some years, sending sketches to Byron’s publisher John Murray, who was depressingly cool, feeling Greece had been well covered already.