Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  Malta was a stopping point for Mediterranean journeys and when Lear decided to sail on to Egypt he left his books and clothes in Valletta to pick up on his return. After landing in Alexandria he joined a crowded steamer to Cairo. Egypt was one of the places Lear had dreamed of before he left Italy: ‘I am quite crazy about Memphis & On & Isis & crocodiles & opthalmia & Nubians, – & simooms & sorcerers, & sphingidae’, he wrote flippantly to Fortescue, and now Cairo amazed him. ‘I shall never be surprised at anything after the streets of Cairo’:

  If you think one picture of a costume curious – what must the scene be which is composed of thousands of thousands of the most magnificent & strange varieties? The Arabs, blacks, Copts, Greeks & Dervishes etc etc!!!! – the astonishingly narrow streets full of galleries & beautiful stone work – the mosques, the shops – in a word every possible hue & form of novelty.

  He loved the Sphinx and the pyramids, but was wary of the snarling camels. Riding a camel, he told Ann, was like riding a rocking chair. Perched up high on a kind of table ‘made up of pillows, & coats, & carpets & saddlebags: – we sit crosslegged – or opposite each other, or we turn round – just as we please, & we lunch or read as quietly as if we were in a room. Nothing can be more charming.’

  Cross had organised things well. When they set off across the desert they slept in tents, cared for by Arab guides and servants. These included Ibrahim the dragoman, an eclectic cook who conjured up Irish stews, pancakes and macaroni amid the sands, and a baggage train that carried food, beds, carpets and other luxuries, ‘so I fear there will be no romance of hardships in the desert’. Lear felt that he cut rather a dashing figure, with a hat lined with green, and a green gauze veil and a cloak. The aim was to follow the path of the Israelites fleeing Egypt: ‘You must begin at the 14th Chapter of Exodus to know our route.’ They rode across gravelly plains to green oases, through brilliant sun and sudden rain, between bare, shimmering, blue mountains.

  Outside the Walls of Suez, 8:30 a.m., 17 January 1849

  The climax was Sinai itself, a place of ‘excessive & wonderful grandeur’. In his watercolour sketches, Lear caught the atmosphere while never sacrificing accuracy. He never took any credit for this particular achievement, thought Franklin Lushington, looking back. Lear called himself a topographical artist, ‘and the phrase was neither an affectation of false modesty nor in any sense untrue’:

  Near Wadi el-Sheikh, 8 a.m., 30 January 1849. Notes: ‘dark brown’, ‘sky pale blue’, ‘brown’, ‘rox’, ‘sand pale shining, mountains dark purple’.

  Nothing could have induced him to give to his landscapes any effect of form, colour, light, shade, or other detail which did not actually belong to the scenery of the particular region. The lines of hill and mountain, the depths of valley, the breadth of plain, the character of foreground, were reproduced with stern exactness in his vigorous and delicate drawing.

  Lushington noted that the geologist Sir Roderick Murchison used to say that Lear’s sketches always accurately revealed a region’s geology: ‘Yet his sketches were not mere photographs. They were full of the intuitively true imagination of an artist who had studied the features of the land till he knew them by heart.’

  Lear immersed himself in the lines, textures, shadows and light. But although the plan was to cross to Gaza, travel to Jerusalem and then work slowly north through Palestine to Beirut, in early February Lear suddenly cut his trip short. His excuse was a severe cold. He wrote airily about abandoning Cross, ‘I decided it would be more kind to leave him than to accompany him.’ This did not altogether ring true. Before he had even reached Egypt Lear thought that he might skip Mount Sinai, try to see Mount Athos in the spring, and ‘wind up all my Thessaly, Albanian and Greek tour before I come home in the summer’. By early March he was writing from Patras, ‘Here I am you see in Greece again.’

  *

  Greece was where he wanted to be, and this time his fellow traveller was ‘Mr F. Lushington – the government secretary’s brother at Malta – a very amiable and talented man – to travel with whom is a great advantage to me, as well as pleasure’.

  The pleasure was obvious; this was the kind of young man he took to his heart. Lear was now thirty-six and Frank Lushington was twenty-six, good-looking in a similar way to Fortescue, tall and dark-haired. Although he lacked Fortescue’s Irish warmth, in Greece he was on holiday, light of heart and full of fervour for the classical world. Lear was always concerned about his lack of education, and prepared for his trips meticulously. Before visiting any country, Lushington wrote later,

  he studied every book he could lay hands on that would give him the best information as to its physical characteristics and its history; and he appreciated instinctively the truth and accuracy of travellers’ descriptions. His habit of accumulating a store of knowledge before setting out made him a valuable and delightful fellow-traveller to those whose tastes and objects were to any degree in unison with his own. He knew what he wanted, and followed it up with energetic determination.

  The short reading list that Lear sent Ann in January this year, so that she had some idea of what he was up to, revealed the work he put in: ‘Doctor Holland’s narrative of a Tour in Albania – Urquhart’s Spirit of the East – Walsh’s residence in Constantinople (excellent) – also his journey thence. Lanes’s Customs & Manners of the Modern Egyptians, Lord Lyndsay’s Holy Land – Robertson’s Palestine is the best of all, but is voluminous.’ But this reading was no substitute for the deep knowledge of the classical Greek world that Charles Church and the Lushington brothers had imbibed since childhood: ‘One of the most delightful recollections of one particular holiday of my very young days’, Frank Lushington remembered, was ‘hearing Edmund and Harry translate the Odyssey for the benefit of Maria and Emily and us little ones’. Travelling with Frank, Lear could breathe in a bit of this knowledge like the sunlit air itself.

  Frank Lushington, c.1840

  The two eldest Lushington brothers, Edmund, now Professor of Greek at Glasgow, and Henry (‘Harry’ or ‘Hal’), Lear’s exact contemporary, were brilliant classical scholars. The much younger Frank had followed in their footsteps at Trinity College, Cambridge, coming first in the Classical tripos, winning the Chancellor’s Medal and quickly being elected a Fellow. At Cambridge all three brothers were members of the Apostles as their father had been. Membership of this exclusive club of twelve was a stamp of brilliance: in 1851, when the critic William Bodham Donne had to speak at the annual dinner, he confessed, ‘I had rather address a Norwich mob than the “Apostles”, not that I mean to compare them, but they are so formidable.’ The Lushingtons were doubly appealing to Lear, as Edmund and Harry were extremely close to their fellow Apostles Arthur Hallam and Alfred Tennyson, Lear’s favourite poet. Their home, Park House near Maidstone, was a stone’s throw from Boxley Hall where the Tennyson family lived after they left Lincolnshire, and in 1842, Edmund had married Tennyson’s younger sister, Cecilia, a wedding celebrated at the end of In Memoriam, the sequence born of Hallam’s early death.

  O true and tried, so well and long,

  Demand not thou a marriage lay;

  In that it is thy marriage day

  Is music more than any song.

  When Frank reviewed In Memoriam in Tait’s Magazine in 1850, he called it ‘one of the most touching and exquisite monuments ever raised to a departed friend’. His own beloved friend was Hallam’s younger brother Henry. Friendship (as well as high-minded duty) was central to the Apostles: they discussed the form it had taken in the past and its meaning today and saw nothing as more important. This was something that Lear could understand.

  Frank was running to keep up with his brothers’ standards: his father had died when he was fourteen, his mother four years later, and Edmund had been the head of the family ever since. But on holiday Frank shrugged off the sober ethos of the Lushingtons. The weather was glorious, and since he wanted to sketch as much as Lear, there was no awkwardness. Lear drew swiftly and confidently, noting
the place, date and often the time of day, numbering his drawings, then penning in outlines and applying colour washes. ‘I do not know when I have enjoyed myself so much,’ Lear wrote; ‘we only complain that the days are too short.’ After landing at Patras and visiting the convent of Megaspelion, ‘a wondrous place containing 200 or 300 monks – in a large cave’, they headed south into the Morea, the heart of the Peloponnese, the ancient Arcady, home of Pan. ‘The beauty of this part of Greece can hardly be imagined, as all the exquisite plains of the coast are seen through the magnificent forests of ilex and oak,’ Lear wrote. ‘At Bassae on the 18th – we went to the temple of Apollo – perhaps the finest Greek ruin after the Parthenon. I never saw such a beautiful landscape.’ Their dragoman, though elderly, fat and unsteady, knew every winding path. From Bassae, where a sudden snowstorm stopped Lear sketching, he guided them to Sparta and the plains of Argos, ‘where you know Agamemnon & all those people lived’, Lear reminded Ann casually.

  If Albania was a country of birds, Greece was a land of flowers. After a rare day of rain ‘The ground has been literally covered with flowers; I wish you could see them; – sometimes it is quite pink with Hepaticas – scarlet & blue, – Anemones – Yellow Euphorbias – Cistus – & several hundred kinds of flowers.’ The whole earth was like a garden, or a rich Turkish carpet: ‘As for Lushington & I, equally fond of flowers, we gather them all day like children, & when we have stuck our hats & coats & horses all over with them – it is time to throw them away, & get a new set.’ And nonsense rode with them too. ‘I remember one night in Greece’, Lushington wrote many years later,

  when, after scrambling for fifteen hours on horseback over the roughest mountain paths, we had dismounted and were waiting in black darkness for our guide to find among a few huts a tolerably weather-tight shelter for us to sleep in, Lear, who was thoroughly tired, sat down upon what he supposed to be a bank; but an instant grunt and heave convinced him of error as a dark bovine quadruped suddenly rose up under him and tilted him into the mud. As Lear regained his feet he cheerily burst into song:

  There was an old man who said, ‘Now

  I’ll sit down on the horns of that cow!’

  Frank could not remember if this was published, but the moment lay behind a verse in Lear’s next nonsense book:

  There was an Old Man who said, ‘How, –

  Shall I flee from this horrible Cow?

  I will sit on this stile, and continue to smile,

  Which may soften the heart of that Cow.’

  Circling back, flowers in their hats, they saw the ruins of Mycenae and crossed the Gulf of Corinth to Athens. Then they headed west to Thebes and Mount Parnassus, the home of the Muses, sacred to Dionysus, where Apollo gave Orpheus his golden lyre, and on to Delphi, the seat of the oracle. At the end of April Lushington left for Malta from Patras, and next day Lear took the steamer north.

  The tour in Greece was a rare time of true happiness: ‘I really never remember having had so delightful a trip.’ Nothing had happened, yet everything had happened. Lear had fallen in love with this younger man, and it would shape his life. The Delphic oracle uttered no warning of what lay ahead.

  *

  Lear now went back to finish his journey through Albania. In the journal of this second tour a new name crept in, condensed to initials: ‘F.L., my Greek companion, is obliged to return to Malta, so I set out alone.’ Lear wrote of the circling dance of peasant women that they had seen near Parnassus, and described a dangerous pass where the baggage horse stumbled and all the plates and dishes ‘which F.L. had bequeathed to me at Patras’ tumbled into the abyss. The trip had a melancholy air from the beginning. ‘Late at night’, he wrote in his journal for 6 May,

  I strolled on to the bright sands, and enjoyed the strange scene: air seems peopled with fireflies, earth with frogs, which roar and croak from the wide Acherusian marsh; low-walled huts cluster around; Albanians are stretched on mats along the shore; huge watchdogs lie in a circle round the village; the calm sea ripples, and the faint outline of the hills of desolate Suli is traced against the clear and spangled sky.

  When he crossed northern Greece to Mount Olympus, the gods were hidden in cloud. He could make only one sketch of ‘dark Olympus’ before a thunderstorm and a deluge drove him in. He wrote of the rain and the woes of Thessaly, and the loneliness he felt brought the familiar fear of happiness found and lost. It had been a year of friends, he noted:

  Any one – it is certain – more quiet and good and full of all sorts of intelligences and knowledges than Lushington a man could not travel with. Charles M. Church, John E. Cross and F. Lushington are the companions within 12 months such as few could fall in with. How this fly got into all that amber, I can’t understand.

  It was time to go home. Lear collected his belongings in Malta and took back to England his Albanian studies of minarets and markets, his sketches in browns and greys, misty and mysterious, of mountains, rivers and towns. From Egypt he took his drawings of sulky camels and his glowing watercolours. He packed his views of the Acropolis and the heat-shimmering Greek plains. From these he would paint beautifully finished studio watercolours. But would this vision, too, pass away? It would be difficult, he thought, to recall the clarity of the Greek landscape and to transfer it to paper or canvas. ‘What scenery is this Greece!’ he sighed. ‘Shall I remember these lovelinesses, these pure grey-blue seas, these clear skies, cut chiselled hills, and bright white sails, and glittering costumes, and deep shadows, when I am far away from them?’ Could he keep these safe from the lapse of time, preserved in the amber of his art?

  IV. TUMBLING

  17: THE BROTHERHOOD

  Lear arrived in England in the late spring of 1849 determined to make plans for his future career. He needed to work up his watercolours, revise his journals and make lithographs for his planned books on southern Italy and Albania, but what he wanted most was to gain some training and to become a respected, exhibited artist. The previous summer, lying ill in Athens, he had written:

  What to do, my Dear Fortescue, when I return to England!!???–¿!! (expressive of indelible doubt, wonder, & ignorance.) London must be the place, & then comes the choice of two lines; society, & half days work, pretty pictures, petit-maître praise boundless, frequented studio &c. &c, wound up with vexation of spirit as age comes on that talents have been thrown away: – or hard study beginning at the root of the matter, the human figure, which to master alone would enable me to carry out the views & feelings of landscape I know to exist within me. Alas! If real art is a student, I know no more than a child, an infant, a foetus.

  He had no real home here. He was not the only one of the Lears to flee England: all his three brothers were now abroad. The eldest, Henry, had sailed to the West Indies in the early 1830s, and lived for ten years in Cuba before moving to New York with his wife Jemima and children. They were now in Brooklyn. Ten years hence Henry and his eldest son were described as painters, while the second son was a lithographer and the third a brass finisher: later Henry became a distinguished map- and globe-maker. Fred, who had been an exuberant elder brother when Lear was small, was also in America, engaged in ventures as a mining engineer, most of them disastrous, and now living near St Louis with his wife Rosa and their children, and Rosa’s sister Fanny. Charles, the closest in age to Lear, went as a medical missionary to Sierra Leone. (According to family stories, he was sent home with malaria, but as the captain would not take him without a nurse, the local girl who had looked after him, Adjouah, came forward. Charles immediately married her for ‘propriety’ and brought her to his sister Ellen, who sent her to school: Adjouah then became a missionary herself.)

  Lear was rarely in touch with his brothers. As for his sisters, he was devoted to Ann, but could not live with her, and he never thought of staying with the pious Ellen and Mary. When Ellen and her husband William Newsom searched for a house, ‘There was an objection of some sort to all they saw; if the situation suited, there was no Chapel in the place: if
there was a Chapel, there was no Garden, or the situation would not suit.’ Eventually they settled on Leatherhead. (‘What a funny dear old couple of larky birds are those two!’ Lear wrote fondly.) Mary and Richard Boswell were in Margate and Harriett in Lanarkshire. Sarah, always the jolliest sister, was living near Ellen now that Charles Street had retired from the Arundel bank. A proud grandmother, Sarah kept up her music and drawing and loved her cottage with its apples and plums. ‘Gardening’, she told Fred, asking him to shake a few American seeds into his next letter, ‘is my never failing pleasure.’

  Sarah also passed on news of Lear’s travels: ‘He has arrived last from a visit to Egypt – Cairo – Mount Sinai – the Wilderness – Constantinople – and the Grecian Isles – and now intends to settle in England. The day before yesterday he surprised the Newsoms with an early visit, to breakfast, having walked over from Ashtead, where he was staying at the seat of Lady Howard.’ A rapid visit was clearly enough. The family would scatter further when Sarah emigrated to the South Island of New Zealand with her son Charles and his wife Sophie, leaving her ill husband behind. Lear was fascinated by her farm near Otago and for once he sounded envious. ‘The more I read travels, the more I want to move,’ he told Chichester Fortescue. ‘Such heaps of N. Zealand as I have read of late! I know every corner of the place.’ He read too about Borneo, Australia and Tasmania. Three years later when Lord and Lady Somers were planning to go to India and asked Lear to come too, he thought seriously about it: ‘I might see Sarah perhaps,’ he mused to Ann, ‘for from India to New Holland is now only a run. But there is time enough to think of this.’ Some years later Ellen and William Newsom and Mary and her husband would follow Sarah to New Zealand, but the Newsoms stayed only briefly, returning with relief to civilised Leatherhead.