Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  On this trip, he particularly wanted to go to the monasteries of Mount Athos. Then, to his dismay, he found that cholera had broken out in Salonica: the monks had barred the peninsula and Church was trapped in the south beyond a cordon sanitaire of closed villages. In the city Lear met ominous silence, sultry, oppressive heat, and biers passing with corpses in the street. He longed to leave, and as his only way out was to the northwest he thought he might travel across country to Yannina (Ioannina), where he could meet Church. Or – and it was a formidable ‘or’ – should he travel on, to Elbasan and the wilds of Albania? ‘Make, I thought to myself no definite arrangement beyond that of escape from Salonica; put yourself, as a predestinarian might say, calmly into the dice-box of small events, and be shaken out whenever circumstances may ordain: only go, and as soon as you can.’ He made a rough plan. After Elbasan he would head north to Tirana and Skodra (modern Shkoder, or Scutari, the border-town in the Albanian Alps). Then he would trek south, before heading east across Greece, back to Mount Olympus.

  It was Lear’s first solo journey outside Italy, and he faced a landscape more hostile than any he had known. Autumn was coming, with rain and cold. He did not know the language, and was unfamiliar with the customs – he found it agony to sit cross-legged like a Turk to eat, and ended lying sideways on the ground. (Although the Turks were so polite, he thought, that they would show no amazement even if you took your tea suspended from the ceiling.) For a man recovering from fever this was a foolhardy choice. But Lear rested if he felt symptoms returning, and he had good support in his servant, a man from Smyrna who spoke ten languages and was his ‘dragoman, cook, valet, interpreter and guide’.

  The post-boy, the soorudji, in his jacket with blue embroideries, led the baggage horse heading their small procession. The omens were good, for Lear rode into a world of birds: ‘Countless kestrels hovering in the air or rocking on tall thistles: hoopoes, rollers, myriads of jackdaws, great broad-winged falcons soaring above, and beautiful grey-headed ones sitting composedly close to the roadside as we passed.’ There were vultures, too, and ‘now and then a graceful milk-white egret, slowly stalking in searchful meditation’. The flight of birds was an avian commentary on human struggles below: coots circling and diving at a falcon, desperate to drive off the predator; eagles soaring above an abyss, then suddenly swooping to snatch a screaming chicken from the market place.

  In the bazaars of Monastir, a barrack town on the border with Montenegro, Lear found ‘an endless kaleidoscope of pictures’, but a taste of difficulties ahead came with the crowds who mobbed him as he drew: one man wrenched his book away, saying, ‘Yok, Yok!’ – No, no! Would this grow worse as he rode further into Albania? It was a Muslim country, and the Prophet had decreed that those who made images of living creatures – people, animals or birds – would be punished for imitating the creation of Allah. He soon forgot his fears, or set them aside. Reaching the fortress of Akhridha (modern Ohrid), its lake shimmering under stormy skies, he was astonished and delighted, he said, at every step: at the beech trees clothing the heights, at Lake Peupli clouded with flocks of birds; at the men in their fur-trimmed overcoats, purple, crimson or scarlet. But his own dress did not suit. His white hat offended the orthodox and bystanders pelted him with stones and lumps of mud. And, said his guide, ‘unless you take to a fez, Vossignoria will have no peace and probably lose an eye in a day or two.’ Lear bought a fez, unhappy that it did not shade his eyes or protect him from the rain like his old wide-awake hat.

  Monastir, 17–18 September 1848

  They travelled on, across precipices and chasms into the country of the Gheghes people. ‘At length, thought I, these are fairly the wilds of Albania.’ But to the inhabitants, it was Lear who seemed dangerous. At Elbasan a shepherd, seeing the sketch of the castle, shrieked, ‘Shaitan!’ and fled ‘as from a profane magician’, and when people saw Lear coming they rushed screaming into their houses, ‘drawing bolts and banging doors with the most emphatic resolve’. As he drew, boys whistled through their fingers like ‘the butcher-boys in England’. The vision of himself sketching while a great crowd whistled at him with all their might struck him so forcibly, he wrote,

  that, come what might of it, I could not resist going off into convulsions of laughter, an impulse the Gheghes seemed to sympathise with, as one and all shrieked with delight, and the ramparts resounded with hilarious merriment. Alas! This was of no long duration, for one of those tiresome Dervishes – in whom, with their green turbans, Elbasan is rich – soon came up, and yelled ‘Shaitan scroo! – Shaitan!’ in my ears with all his force; seizing my book also, with an awful frown, and pointing to the sky, as intimating that heaven would not allow such impiety.

  A shower of stones drove Lear to a quieter spot. But still he drew.

  Although this was a nuisance, verging on frightening, Lear was intrigued: the stone-throwing mob were like the ‘they’ of his limericks, the god-fearing majority offended by the deviant, whom they genuinely want to smash. It was odd to be in this position. But he was also moved by the idea that an artist was not ‘drawing’ in an innocuous Western sense, but writing – ‘scroo’ – recording a place, a way of life, and in so doing he had an almost magical power. The hostility was not only religious. ‘We will not be written down,’ people insisted – perhaps Lear was a Russian spy, sent to take notes so that the sultan could sell them to the Russian Emperor? The Gheghes were suffering in the aftermath of a rebellion against Turkish rule in north-western Albania that had been ferociously suppressed. Many of the beys, their local leaders, had been exiled and their men killed, or condemned to the galleys or drafted into the sultan’s armies. Those who survived were taxed beyond endurance and forbidden to carry arms. Under the straw matting roofs of Elbasan’s dark bazaars, Lear noticed especially the lanes of the tanners and butchers, ‘dogs, blood, and carcasses filling up the whole street and sickening one’s very heart’.

  He was conscious of danger, of blood, yet he preferred to travel rough. He had a letter from the sultan and could have stayed with local beys, but their ceremonious meals and endless pipe-smoking left him no time to sketch. For a landscape painter, he concluded, travel in Albania offered ‘luxury and inconvenience on the one hand, liberty, hard-living, and filth on the other; and of the two I chose the latter, as the most professionally useful, though not the most agreeable’. One exception moved him, the eighteen-year-old Bey of Kroia in his galleried palace under the crags, who made Lear describe steamships and trains, and imitate their noises, over and over again, ‘“Tik-tok, tik-tok, tik-tock, tokka, tokka, tokka, tokka, tokka – tok (crescendo)”, and “Squish-squash, squish-squash, squish-squash, thump-bump” for the land and sea engines respectively.’

  He preferred to stay in the khans, roadside inns where horses were stabled and travellers slept in a gallery above. These were often ramshackle and filthy, but he described even the worst with a relish that reached its height in a long passage with the refrain ‘O khan of Tyrana’, where his long, despairing sentences moved towards music.

  O khan of Tyrana! Rats, mice, cockroaches and all lesser vermin were there. Huge flimsy cobwebs, hanging in festoons above my head; big frizzly moths, bustling into my eyes and face, for the holes representing windows I could close but imperfectly with sacks and baggage: yet here I prepared to sleep, thankful that a clean mat was a partial preventive to some of this list of woes, and finding some consolation in the low crooning singing of the Gheghes above me, who, with that capacity for melody which those Northern Albanians seem to possess so essentially, were murmuring their wild airs in choral harmony.

  As in a scene from a dark Arabian Nights, he watched through a chink in the wall as an elderly dervish hummed and whirred and whirled and danced alone.

  Everywhere Lear was surrounded by noise, the clucking of hens, the snort of pigs, the barking of dogs. Even the music seemed strange and dissonant. One night, trying to sleep, he was kept awake by Albanians in the room next door: ‘Four begin to form
a sort of chorus; one makes a deep drone or bass; two more lead the air; and the remainder indulge in strange squeaking falsettos, like the whinings of uneasy sucking pigs.’ At dawn, the muezzin often woke him, ‘the wildest of singular melodies’. But other sounds roused him too, like the rain drumming on the roof: ‘It is half past four A.M. and torrents of rain are falling.’

  At Skodra, the northernmost point of his tour, the skies darkened, the thunder roared and the river swelled beneath the bridge, whose painted arches reminded Lear of a Gothic cathedral. He found friends here, including a grumbling Capuchin friar whom he knew from Rome, and the British vice consul, the Corfu-born Signor Bonatti, whose wife and ten children moaned of their exile among the mountains. Poor Signora Bonatti and her daughters, Lear thought – isolated as Greeks and as Christians and unable to show their faces (in some places both Christian and Muslim women were veiled). Staying with the Bonattis Lear painted a Gheghe chief in traditional finery and one of the daughters modelled a local wedding dress for him. He was fascinated by the glamour that the local women hid beneath their veils, ‘a magnificence of costume almost beyond belief’.

  Much lay beneath the surfaces. The mood of Skodra was black, he was told – ‘vendette, nasconderie, sospetti, incendie’ – intrigue, suspicions, incendiaries. It held ‘the extremes of revolutionary and despotic, Turk against Christian, Latin opposed to Greek – no place seems more fully fraught with the evils of life’. But was this so very different from ‘civilised’ states? When Lear finally got some German newspapers on the coast in Avlona, he devoured news ‘of the most extraordinary events occurring throughout all Europe’. Returning three weeks later he found his German hosts full of Emperor Ferdinand’s flight from Vienna (in December he would abdicate in favour of his son Franz). As they thumped the table, ‘predicting with sinister glee all sorts of bloodshed and downfall of tyrants’ and launching into tirades against England, Lear abandoned his role of passive listener and demanded ‘that we might henceforth talk about pelicans, or red mullet, or whatever they pleased, so that we eschewed politics’. (The shy pelicans feeding on the salt-marsh pools near the sea were his special joy: he had thought them white stones when he first saw them, and then, like a magical metamorphosis, he later told Lord Derby, ‘I rode up to them, when lo! They were all pelicans! & away they flew … I never was more amused in my life than at seeing so many thousand Pelicans all together.’)

  Between his two stays in Avlona, Lear left his guide behind and hired an elderly local man, Anastasio – who turned out to be related to almost everyone they met – to steer him over the crags of Acroceraunia, opposite Corfu. Beyond these moutains, in Khimara, lay the most unexplored and romantic place of his wanderings, the hidden gulf of Dukhades: ‘Shut out as it stood by iron walls of mountain, surrounded by sternest features of savage scenery, rock and chasm, precipice and torrent, a more fearful prospect and more chilling to the blood I never beheld – gloomy and severe – so unredeemed by any beauty and cheerfulness.’

  Khimara, 25 October 1848

  That night, in the khan, Anastasio arranged for gipsies to play and sing. In the flickering light of wood torches, people crowded in, and the music rose to a climax, a capo d’opera,

  till at the conclusion of the last verse, when the unearthly idol-gipsy snatched off and waved his cap in the air – his shining head was closely shaved, except one glossy raven tress at least three feet in length – the very rafters rang again to the frantic harmony: Bo, bo-bo –bo, bo-bo-bo, bobobo, BO! – the last ‘Bo’ uttered like a pistol-shot and followed by a unanimous yell.

  Next morning Lear woke before daylight to a piercing scream, ‘repeated with a force and sharpness not to be recalled without pain’, the wild wail for the dead, echoing from the rocks around.

  In this obscure region Lear was jolted by domestic as well as political oppression. He watched women carrying heavy burdens up the mountains, while their men walked: ‘“Heavens” said I, surprised out of my wonted philosophy of travel, which ought not to exclaim at anything. “How can you make your women such slaves?”’ The explanation was simple: there were no mules in Khimara and ‘though far inferior to mules, women were really far better than asses or horses’. Even Anastasio, whom he liked greatly, treated women like this. Lear was also dismayed at the arranged marriages that condemned a girl to live with an old man she hated, and at the punishment for infidelity: death for the woman, but not for her lover.

  Everywhere Lear found degrees of slavery, scales of violence. The Khimariots and the Suliots, whose region Lear visited next, had never recovered from the ravages of Ali Pasha, the ‘Lion of Yannina’. In the 1780s, the sultan had made the brigand Ali a local governor, a pasha, in order to enlist him in the fight against the Austrians, but then Ali rampaged through southern and western Albania, carving out his own coastal kingdom. Stories of Ali’s atrocities multiplied until finally the Ottomans attacked and in 1822 they sent his head to the sultan on a silver platter. Visiting his rock fortress of Tepelene, Lear found a ‘a dreary, blank scene of desolation, where once, and so recently, was all the pomp of Oriental despotism’. The twenty-four-year-old Byron had met Ali Pasha here in 1809, admiring his splendour while knowing him to be barbarous and cruel:

  In marble-paved pavilion, where a spring

  Of living water from the centre rose,

  Whose bubbling did a genial freshness fling,

  And soft voluptuous couches breathed repose,

  ALI reclined, a man of war and woes:

  Yet in his lineaments ye cannot trace,

  While Gentleness her milder radiance throws

  Along that aged venerable face,

  The deeds that lurk beneath, and stain him with disgrace.

  Byron’s visit was the stuff of myth: one of the few portraits that he allowed to be engraved was of himself in Albanian or Suliot dress, haughty in his loose turban and robes of red and gold. But the teasing flirtation between Byron and the powerful pasha was all in the past: ‘The poet is no more; the host is beheaded, and his family nearly extinct; the palace is burned to the ground.’ The abandoned palace was the most telling place, he said, of anywhere he had been.

  Through the cold November rain Lear trekked back to Yannina, and then quickly down to the coast to take a boat to Malta – his post had brought yet another invitation, to visit Cairo, Mount Sinai and Palestine.

  Suli, 5–6 May 1849

  The following spring he returned, crossing the Pindus mountains in torrential rain to see the rocks of Meteora, with their crumbling monasteries perched on top like storks’ nests, and to journey through the Vale of Tempe to Mount Olympus. On this second trip too, he followed a trail of blood. Ali Pasha had defeated the Orthodox Christians of Suli in 1803, and Lear passed the rock where desperate Suliot women had flung their children to the crags below, then joined hands and sang as they danced to the edge of the cliff, throwing themselves one by one to their deaths. But still, as he travelled, music followed him and the birds and animals woke him. One night, he listened to the ‘wild octave singing of the Albanians below, till the arrival of midnight, silence and sleep’, but the room was so dark that it was ‘only by the sudden and simultaneous clattering of storks, twittering of swallows, bleating of goats, and jingling of mules’ bells, that a man is advised of the coming day’.

  Such details of life and landscape and history were thrilling to readers. Lear’s Journal of a Landscape Painter in Greece & Albania was written with a new, passionate confidence. Lear had learnt how to mould his experiences into a narrative full of suspense, presenting himself both as artist and as ‘innocent’ recorder of people, places and culture. The innocence was artful. He knew now how to prune the detail that crammed his long letters to Ann. He made his journey immediate and vivid, beginning and ending each day in the present tense, so the reader would wake and sleep with him. He could command different registers, comic, reflective, moving or ‘sublime’, and enliven his vocabulary with Muslim and Albanian terms. He described
Albania’s soaring ranges, crashing waters and busy towns, its people, costumes and song, but he wrote also of its sufferings and defiance of tyranny. In this year of revolutions Lear showed how the violence of despots –the cruel Ali Pasha, the repressive Sublime Porte – could damage the spirit of a people. At the Suliots’ final mountain stronghold, he wrote, ‘I gazed on the strange, noiseless figures about me, bright in the moonlight, which tipped with silver the solemn lofty mountains around. For years those hills had rarely ceased to echo the cries of animosity, despair and agony; now all is silent as the actors in that dreadful drama.’

  16: ‘ALL THAT AMBER’

  John Cross, a friend from Knowsley days, a fervent Christian who wanted to explore the lands of the Bible, had invited Lear to meet him in Malta and travel over the winter of 1848 from Cairo through the Holy Land to Syria and the Lebanon. Lear, the experienced traveller, seemed the ideal companion, and Cross was happy to pay his expenses, although ‘The matter is a secret’, Lear told Ann, ‘& I am supposed to be spending from my own purse.’ He dashed away from Albania in November, only to be held back by nine days of quarantine on the island of Santa Maura (ancient Leucadia, now Lefkas) and then by ‘high winds and hurricanes’.

  When he arrived in Malta the Jerusalem party had already left. He stayed a week, meeting friends from Rome and dithering about whether to go back to Corfu or even to England. The island was full of talk about the upheavals in Europe and changes in Malta itself, with promise of constitutional reform. The chief secretary to the government was Henry Lushington, appointed in 1847 – Lear had met some of the family that May among the English visitors in Naples. Full of interest in the French Republic, the Italian Risorgimento and Hungarian nationalism (and alarm at the number of exiles arriving in Malta), Lushington was proposing a new code of laws, arguing for religious equality and educational reforms. He was helped in the Villa Giuseppe, among the pines on the cliffs outside Valletta, by his sisters Emily and Maria, and then, when Maria went home ill, by Louisa. His younger brother Franklin spent long holidays there, sailing and enjoying the heat.