Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  Three years later, when Ann went to see Hunt’s The Scapegoat at the Academy, Lear agreed with her ‘in not liking the subject’. But, he wrote loyally, it was a wonderful picture and ‘Where the skill & genius which Hunt possesses is so immeasurably in advance of that of the mass of painters, we must take what we can get.’ Lear would always be wary of Hunt’s biblical subjects, but he continued to think himself Hunt’s junior as a painter. In this respect, as he told Fortescue, he was a child. From an early stage he began to address Hunt as ‘dear Daddy’, and Millais and Woolner as his ‘Uncles’. As a painter in oils, Lear was transformed by his time with Hunt. In the end he found the Pre-Raphaelite palette too bright and the technique too arduous and fussy, yet under this influence his painting became more powerful, less conventional, utterly his own.

  18: MEETING THE POET

  ‘Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls …’ In Sussex in the autumn of 1852 Lear was painting a fig tree in the overgrown garden of the Hastings MP Frederick North, lodging in the gardener’s cottage. The fig was perfect for the Syracuse canvas, but as he also wanted a group of ravens he wired a stuffed bird on the apple tree opposite his window – hardly strict painting from nature. While there he met North’s two daughters: Marianne, later famous for her paintings of flora, from California and Brazil to the East Indies and New Zealand, and Catherine, who would become a friend of Lear’s later years. Marianne remembered how he would drift into their sitting-room at dusk:

  and sit down to the piano and sing Tennyson’s songs for hours, composing as he went on, and picking out the accompaniments by ear, putting the greatest expression and passion into the most sentimental words. He often set me laughing; then he would say I was not worthy of them, and would continue the intense pathos of expression and gravity of face, while he substituted Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle, or some other nonsensical words to the same air.

  Lear had admired Tennyson’s poetry since he read the two-volume Poems of 1843. One volume contained unpublished works from the past decade such as ‘Ulysses’, ‘Locksley Hall’ and ‘Break, break, break’, and the second held a selection from Tennyson’s earlier collections of 1830 and 1833, including ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Mariana’, ‘The Palace of Art’ and ‘The Lotos Eaters’. Tennyson returned constantly to his earlier work, and all these poems had been heavily revised for the new edition: ‘You will see and groan!’ Browning wrote to a friend. ‘The alterations are insane. Whatever is touched is spoiled.’ But to Lear they were all wonderful. Seduced by the glorious excess, the echoing assonance and swooping cadences, he fell under the spell of Tennyson’s melodic gift. He saw the sonorous phrases as summoning up the mood of scenes, like the gleaming river of ‘The Lotos Eaters’, ‘rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below’. The sounds did the work, almost regardless of meaning. Tennyson himself implied this when he remembered the lines he composed as a boy of eight, that he thought ‘grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott. I rolled it out, it was this “With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood” … great nonsense of course, but I thought it fine.’

  Charles Church had remembered Lear setting half of the lengthy ‘Locksley Hall’ to music, an intriguing choice, especially on a guitar. (Lear was fond of ‘spreading chords’ on the piano, so he may have done the same with the guitar, more reciting than singing.) Though widely popular, the poem was controversial, with its bitter narrator, unhinged by loss and sexual jealousy, railing about fleeing to India where he was born.

  Or to burst all links of habit – there to wander far away,

  On from island unto island through the gateways of the day.

  Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,

  Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise …

  There the passions cramp’d no longer shall have scope and breathing space;

  I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.

  Tennyson showed a man full of self-loathing, his imperialist tirade coming from the brink of madness. Yet Lear understood the drive to self-exile and the rejection of Victorian England and the mechanical ‘march of mind’ of steamship and railway. He was sensitive to Tennyson’s swerving attitude to progress, at once welcomed for the general good yet regretted for the loss of the old. He felt, too, the underlying melancholy and the curious stasis, the waiting and the lingering, the way that heroic narrators like Ulysses might remain on the shore as if paralysed.

  Tennyson’s childhood outstripped Lear’s for misery – his father was a violent alcoholic and his family was haunted by feuds and madness – but both men were nostalgic for a childhood that they had never really had. ‘Tears, idle tears’ touched Lear’s sense of happiness snatched away but alive in memory – the acrobats of childhood, the days at Peppering, the summers at Civitella:

  Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

  Tears, from the depth of some divine despair

  Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

  In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

  And thinking of the days that are no more.

  Although Lear hugely enjoyed life, and vividly described this enjoyment, he really did believe, as he once told Emily Tennyson, ‘that I enjoy hardly any one thing on earth while it is present: – always looking back, or frettingly peering into the dim beyond’. This would always be a feature of his emotional life: in 1881 he wrote to Chichester Fortescue, ‘I am always fancying, and fancying in vain, that something different to the life of the moment would be more endurable.’

  *

  For Tennyson 1850 was a miraculous year. In May he published In Memoriam, seventeen years in the writing; in June he finally married Emily Sellwood, whom he had loved for almost as long; in November he succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate.

  Lear knew that the Lushingtons had played a crucial role in these triumphs. Over the years, Edmund, Tennyson’s fellow Apostle, had read the poems prompted by the death of Arthur Hallam that would become In Memoriam: Tennyson celebrated their friendship, ‘the imperfect gift’ of a grieving man, and Edmund’s marriage to Cecilia gave the poem its closing note of hope. The family, so fond of serious discussion, had also influenced The Princess in 1847. In the same year, Edmund and Cecilia brought Tennyson and Emily briefly together at Park House, the start of their rapprochement seven years after their early engagement had ended.

  Lear met the Tennysons in the stormy late summer of 1850, when he and Frank Lushington called in on them at Tent Lodge, on the Marshalls’ estate at Coniston in the Lake District. Lear was shy and eager, knowing that Tennyson, ‘fiery Son of Gloom’, as Thomas Carlyle called him, could be unpredictable: charismatic and affable or sardonic and critical. He looked alarming too, a towering figure, dishevelled and unkempt. While Lear and Tennyson got on amicably, they never really understood each other. By contrast, Emily was easy to like. Carlyle reported to his wife Jane that marriage had made Tennyson far more cheerful and ‘Mrs T also pleased me: a freckly, round-faced woman, rather tallish and without shape, a slight lisp too.’ There was something ‘kleinstadtisch’ – provincial – and unpromising about her at first, he thought, ‘but she lights up bright glittering blue eyes when you speak, has wit, has sense’.

  In the early spring of 1851, Emily had a still-born son and to help her recover the Tennysons went to northern Italy (avoiding Rome because of unrest and Venice because of fever), and stayed with the Lushingtons at Park House on their return while they looked for a house. Knowing of their Italian trip – though ‘it seems rather late in the day to beg you & Tennyson to accept a small “wedding present”’ – in December Lear sent Emily his Illustrated Excursions in Italy, and told her that long ago he had meant to do some landscapes to illustrate Tennyson’s poems. He had set this aside – ‘A thousand things have stepped in between me & my wishes,’ he wrote – but ‘There have been but few weeks or days within the last 8 years, that I have not been more or less in the habit of remembering or reading T
ennyson’s poetry, & the amount of pleasure derived by me from them has been quite beyond reckoning.’ He hoped to call on them in Twickenham, but in the cold and fogs of a London winter he had resorted to ‘a kind of hybernating tortoise-ship’.

  Emily immediately asked him to stay for the weekend, ‘and we will try to get Frank Lushington to come too that you may have the more agreeable recollections of Twickenham and be tempted to come again and again’. She soon became a confidante. That winter, working alone in Sussex, he confessed all his self-doubts to her: ‘It is a sad evil with me that I think I can do so much more than I ever can do: & that I have so little faith in my power of improvement. Whether I shall ever see myself in a fair groove of improvement is very doubtful now.’ (‘Groove’ is such a Tennysonian word.)

  Emily, then, was a woman he could talk to, but he also hoped that she might act as a bridge between him and Tennyson. Even on his first reading of the Poems, he explained later, ‘I thought that if I tried to illustrate portions of the Tennyson Poetry by combining Poetical treatment with Topographical accuracy, I might eventually produce an original & beautiful work.’ That idea drew on a popular format of the 1830s, often involving several illustrators, such as Rogers’s Italy, Charles Tilt’s Landscape Illustrations of Scott’s Waverley novels, and William and Edward Finden’s Landscape and Portrait Illustrations of the Life and Works of Byron. (This included several subjects by Turner, who went on to illustrate the many volumes of Scott’s Poetical Works and Prose Works.) But by the time he met Tennyson, Lear’s project had evolved into a different form.

  In the autumn of 1852, when he was staying with Holman Hunt – also an avid Tennyson fan – he outlined his idea to Emily. He had arranged many subjects for illustration, he said, and recently he had:

  extracted & placed in a sort of order all the lines which convey to me in the most decided manner his genius for the perception of the beautiful in Landscape, & I have divided them into ‘suggestive’ and ‘Positive’: & altogether there are 124 subjects in the 2 volumes. (I have not included the Princess or In Memoriam). By ‘suggestive’ I mean such lines as

  ‘vast images in glittering dawn’ —

  ‘Hateful is the dark blue sky —

  &c&c&c – which are adaptable to any country or a wide scope of scenery.

  By ‘positive’ – such as —

  — ‘The lonely moated grange —

  — ‘They cut away my tallest pines —

  — ‘A huge crag platform …

  ‘The balmy moon of blessed Israel —

  &c &c – which indicate perforce certain limits of landscape.

  He was more qualified than most to illustrate these, he thought, as he already had many sketches from nature, from many countries.

  Lear’s odd idea of taking single lines and painting landscapes that matched them was curiously in tune with the way Tennyson himself thought. Later in life, Tennyson told his son Hallam that in a kind of reverse process, he had once jotted down responses to landscape as inspiration for poems. Passages were not suggested to him by Wordsworth or Shelley or another poet, he insisted:

  There was a period in my life when, as an artist, Turner for instance, takes rough sketches of landskip, etc., in order to work them into some great picture, so I was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike me as picturesque in Nature. I never put these down, and many and many a line has gone away on the north wind, but some remain: e.g.

  A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight.

  Suggestion.

  The sea one night at Torquay … The sky was covered with thin vapour,

  and the moon behind it.

  A great black cloud

  Drags inward from the deep.

  Suggestion.

  A coming storm seen from the top of Snowdon.

  By contrast, Lear looked at his own sketches for scenes that ‘suggested’ the lines to him as a reader. Offering to send Emily a list, he said that he had begun three or four subjects and hoped for Tennyson’s permission to continue. She responded at once, and kindly. A week later, Lear invited them down to spend Sunday at Clive Vale, telling Tennyson that there was a cliff ‘on purpose to smoke on – & nobody near’. That November, when they took a house not far away at Seaford, escaping London once Tennyson finished his ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’, his first work as Poet Laureate, Lear dashed over to see them. He had missed Hallam’s christening in October, and now brought what Emily called a ‘Roman Catholic doll’ for him, that ‘A. said perverted our Hallam from the pure protestant worship of morning light on the bedpost.’ Lear was in a happy mood, illustrated by one of his flying drawings: ‘I shall come all crookedwise a wandering about the hills … How windy it will be on those downs.’

  Their first meetings were warm but they hardly felt momentous. At one point in the rush of laying out his grand scheme, Lear drew breath: ‘But of that there is time enough to think.’ Time there was – this would be a lifetime’s work. Other illustrators, including Lear’s Pre-Raphaelite friends, focused on Tennyson’s characters: in 1850 Hunt drew the Lady of Shalott caught in her web, recoiling from the curse, her story told in roundels encircling the broken mirror. A few years later, in 1857, the Brotherhood drew many illustrations for the woodcuts in Edward Moxon’s illustrated edition, and Hunt contributed six, with a new Lady of Shalott laden with Christian and magical symbolism. (Tennyson was baffled: ‘I must now ask you’, he pressed Hunt, ‘why did you make the Lady of Shalott, in the illustration, with her hair wildly tossed about as if by a tornado?’ and ‘Why did you make the web wind round and round her like the threads of a cocoon?’)

  Lear’s interest was not in character but in Tennyson’s mood pictures in sound. He chose lines with echoing vowels, evoking sea and shore, mountain and cliff, dusk and twilight: ‘A cedar spread his dark green layers of shade’, ‘A light upon the shining sea’, ‘Rosy blossom in hot ravine’, ‘of shadowy granite in a gleaming pass’. In particular, over time, he illustrated a lyrical poem addressed to himself – ‘To E.L. on His Travels in Greece’, which Tennyson wrote after reading his Journal of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania, in 1852.

  Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls

  Of water, sheets of summer glass,

  The long divine Peneian pass,

  The vast Akrokeraunian walls,

  Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair,

  With such a pencil, such a pen,

  You shadow forth to distant men,

  I read and felt that I was there:

  This is almost self-mockingly ‘Tennysonian’ but it is also a nod to Lear’s own love of onomatopoeic diction, like the craggy, rocky ‘Akrokeraunian’ range hiding the gulf of Dukhades.

  With the pivotal line, ‘I read and felt that I was there’, Tennyson moved from writer to reader, from record to feeling. His reading of Lear was partial and personal, as his title suggested with its casual relocation of Albanian places to ‘Greece’, and the inclusion of Athos, which, of course, Lear had not reached. Tracking Lear, Tennyson stepped towards his own ‘classic ground’, a sensuous, unspecific pastoral:

  And trust me while I turn’d the page,

  And track’d you still on classic ground,

  I grew in gladness till I found

  My spirits in the golden age.

  For me the torrent ever pour’d

  And glisten’d – here and there alone

  The broad-limb’d gods at random thrown

  By fountain urns; – and Naiads oar’d

  A glimmering shoulder under gloom

  Of cavern pillars; on the swell

  The silver lily heaved and fell;

  And many a slope was rich in bloom

  From him that on the mountain lea

  By dancing rivulets fed his flocks,

  To him who sat upon the rocks,

  And fluted to the morning sea.

  The land is both timeless and full of motion – torrents pouring, Naiads row
ing, lilies heaving, streams dancing – and at the end, perhaps, we meet Lear again, the man who played his flute or guitar by the sea and marked the ‘rox’ so carefully in his sketches.

  The exchange turned each man’s gaze back on himself, but though flattered, Tennyson was always a little remote from Lear’s passionate project. Lear ‘has painted one very fine picture “Morn broaden’d on the borders of the dark”, from a landscape near Rome,’ he told Emily in 1864, apparently forgetting he had seen a version almost ten years before. The line, from ‘A Dream of Fair Women’, Lear said, seemed to describe exactly ‘what I had so often watched in other days, that Darkness, edged with broadening light, which I had seen through so many summer and autumn months during years of Italian wanderings, and most of all from the neighbourhood of Civitella’. This became one of the key drawings of his Tennyson series.

  Over the coming year, as he struggled with Pre-Raphaelite dictates about painting outdoors, and with his own longing to recreate the closeness to Frank Lushington that had made him so happy in Greece four years before, he began to long to leave rainy, stressful England. He started to look for escapes. In October 1853, he told Hunt that Charles Church had asked him to go up the Blue Nile – but he was also dreaming of Athens, Spain or Malta.