Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  As he wrote, the country was heading towards war. Russian determination to break the Ottoman Empire had become ever clearer, and Turkish ships in the Black Sea were now under attack. The British government, worried about the threat to trade routes through the Mediterranean, had already sent a fleet to the Dardanelles. Lear joked about fighting the Russians – or going to Australia – when he told Emily that he longed to earn a living that would let him get away:

  But stay here I won’t, to be demoralised by years of mud & fog & gnats and rheumatism & small beer & stupid boors and coalfires and choleramorbusses and income taxes and Calvinists and steel forks and midnight atmospheres all the year round – I have had enough of it, & forthwith I am growing moustaches in sign of going elsewhere.

  It would be a wrench to leave, he admitted to Hunt, but ‘nevertheless I have not shaved my upper lip for a fortnight’. (He grew moustaches and a beard on his travels, but always shaved them off when he got back.)

  At the end of October his lungs and throat were worse and he insisted to Emily that he was off at once, ‘to see “the Palms and Temples of the South”’. The allusion was to Tennyson’s ‘You ask me, why’. England was a land of progress, the poem insisted, of ‘sober-suited freedom’, of liberty of speech, of empire building,

  Yet waft me from the harbour-mouth,

  Wild wind! I seek a warmer sky,

  And I will see before I die

  The palms and temples of the South.

  Lear took the train to Southampton, to sail to Alexandria. Before he left he worked on his settings of four Tennyson songs. ‘I have left a set of songs with Frank Lushington, for your acceptance,’ he told Emily. He had been working on these all summer. They were to be published as a volume, ‘inscribed to Mrs Alfred Tennyson’, but also sold separately as sheet music for two shillings each. When he sent them to the printers he begged for ‘Tears, idle tears’ to be done first.

  19: AN OWL IN THE DESERT

  There was an Old Person of Philae,

  Whose conduct was scroobious and wily;

  He rushed up a Palm, when the weather was calm,

  And observed all the ruins of Philae.

  The next two years were ones of travel and work, and, in Lear’s emotional life, of a deepening closeness to Chichester Fortescue and Emily Tennyson, as well as a frustration that he could not regain his intimacy with Frank. Travel came first, escape from the cold. In January 1854 Lear was sketching in the sun on the small island of Philae on the the Nile, with ‘enough to occupy an artist for months’. His party left their boats and took everything they needed to sleep and cook, sweeping out rooms in the great temple. English visitors arrived all the time, he told Ann:

  so we have dinner parties, & music every evening nearly. As for me I have been at work every day throughout the whole daylight hours, & so charming is the place & the climate that I shall be very sorry to leave it. It is impossible to describe the place to you, any further than by saying it is more like a real fairy island than anything else I can compare it to. It is very small, & was formerly all covered with temples, of which the ruins of 5 or 6 now only remain.

  As he wrote he was sitting on the terrace of the Temple of Isis, watching the Nile flow round the rocky islets, with the desert and the hills of Aswan beyond: ‘at morning & evening the scene is lovely beyond imagination’. On the oil painting of Philae that he made on his return, he wrote his Tennyson line: ‘Philae – “I will see before I die/The Palms & Temples of the South”’. He gave up trying to paint in oils as the colours dried too fast in the heat, the tubes stuck and the sand got into them. Watercolours were difficult too but he made many drawings, happy to return to his old ways. He was entranced by the colours, particularly the lingering light after the sun set, leaving the sky ‘all in broad stripes of lilac, green, rose, & amber’.

  His journey out had been surprisingly smooth, indeed ‘perfectly wonderful’. A Hornby nephew and niece and Chichester Fortescue’s nephew were on board, ‘so we make up a very pleasant party of our own’. The Biscay storms held off, the meals were good and there was ‘a piano and all sorts of games’. As he walked on deck his anxieties fell away. In Cairo, he met up with the painter Thomas Seddon and over Christmas they waited for Hunt to join them. In the meantime Lear painted, tried to learn Arabic, and met the mysterious Sir Richard Burton, who had left his job with the East India Company to go on the Hajj to Mecca, disguised as a pilgrim. Seddon sketched him, and Lear painted two watercolour sketches of him in Arab dress, vividly sombre.

  Impatient at Hunt’s delay while he finished The Light of the World, Lear joined a flotilla of English tourists sailing up the Nile to Aswan. ‘Don’t laugh!’ he told Ann, but they would start ‘4 boats together, & 3 more go before, & 5 or 6 follow after!!’ Heading slowly up the great wide river they slept in villages under a brilliant moon and woke to drink fresh buffalo milk for breakfast. Lear wore a flat leghorn hat covered with white calico for the shade: seeing him, a small boy said ‘“oh thou! Who wearest a turban resembling a dinner table” – so I am called “the father of the dinner tables” ever since!’ He walked on the banks through green corn and broad-bean fields in bloom, but the most beautiful feature, he thought, was ‘the number of boats, which look like giant moths’. Around and above him were birds, milk-white herons, pelicans and cranes, eagles and hawks: ‘Turtle doves, Kingfishers & Hoopoes are like flies in number, & Pigeons in vast flights of hundreds. But today I heard a universal quacking, & looking up, saw one of those astonishing flights of geese so remarkable here. All the sky was covered with a web.’

  On their way back they stopped at Luxor, the ancient Thebes, and at the ruins of Karnak, ‘a great forest of columns grown out of the ground’. In Cairo Lear overlapped with Hunt, who was finally on his way to Palestine. Lear dithered, but decided not to go with him: instead he would go home.

  *

  Lear was back in London in late April 1854, fitter and fatter, with a huge bushy beard and a portfolio stuffed with sketches. But he was still restless and impatient, and by midsummer he was abroad again, walking in the Bernese Alps with Bernard Husey Hunt (‘Bern’, formerly Bernard Senior), trekking up to the Reichenbach Falls that Turner had painted, and past the Rhône glacier, ‘like a ladies “goffrée” frill or ruffle – all of ice – 20 miles long!’ After Bern went home, Lear walked on alone to Interlaken, always hoping that Frank would come and join him, an idea mooted before he left. Earlier they had planned to go to the Pyrenees together, but instead Frank and his sister Ellen had gone to Malta to bring back their ill sister Louisa: she died in Frank’s arms in Avignon on their way home, and now he was plunged in grief.

  With his nonsense rhymes Lear often drew a figure in a tree, on a wall, up a ladder – somewhere up high, looking down, surveying the scene in calm weather. But in his Philae limerick his ‘scroobious and wily’ old man looks apprehensive: when you are high up, you can fall. In the autumn after Lear returned from the Alps England seemed a land of fogs and icy winds and sadness. Emily invited him affectionately to come for Christmas but as the cold set in and his asthma grew worse, he holed himself up until spring came. Over time, he saw that his depressions were often linked to winter darkness: ‘I have been wondering if on the whole,’ he wrote a few years later, ‘the being influenced to an extreme by everything in natural or physical life, i.e. atmosphere, light, shadow, and all the variety of day and night, – is a blessing or the contrary – and the end of my speculation has been that “things must be as they may”, and the best is to make the best of what happens.’

  It was hard to make the best of things, and lack of sun was not the only cause of gloom. The whole country was preoccupied by the conflict with Russia. In the spring French and British troops had been sent to Gallipoli to counter the threat to the Balkans and the Danube, while a naval force confronted the Russian navy in the Baltic. Many debated the wisdom of this involvement, and Lear found it hard to discuss. He could not share the wholehearted enthusiasm for war express
ed by Frank and Henry Lushington. When the first troops went out, Frank wrote two patriotic poems, one on the Baltic fleet and the other on ‘The Muster of the Guards’, coloured, perhaps, by a sedentary lawyer’s envy for a life of action:

  Cheer boys, cheer! Till you crack a thousand throats,

  The cannons are God’s preachers, when the time is ripe for War.

  There was little movement over the summer but in September British troops landed in the Crimea, aiming to take the vital port of Sebastopol. Great battles followed: Alma in September; Balaclava in October; Inkerman in November. In response, the brothers wrote more poems, Henry on Inkerman and Frank on Alma, with bloodthirsty gusto:

  Charge! Up to the belching muzzles – charge! Drive the bayonet home:

  Oh God, do we live or die? What’s Death, what Life, in the cry

  As we reel to the gory summit, all fire with the murderous climb.

  Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, on the remaining battle, Balaclava, was published in The Examiner in December. When the War Office circulated copies to the troops it became widely known as ‘Someone had blundered’.

  This was the first time that war correspondents in the field sent news humming across telegraph wires to London and the accounts of the battles and the year-long siege of Sebastopol shocked the public. As people learned of the freezing cold, the casualties, and the dysentery, malaria and cholera that left over fourteen thousand British troops in the camp hospitals, feelings ran high against the war. But Henry and Frank still argued loudly for British aggression. The Preface to their poems, collected as Two Battle Pieces, was a bold rallying cry: ‘We are united as a people: that is, we are at war, and we all wish to win. Traitors in England there are none, except Indifference.’ This was no time for agonised reflection: ‘For a moment, dearly as we love him, let Hamlet stand aside … we want Fortinbras just now.’

  *

  Turning his back on war and politics, over the winter of 1854–5 Lear stayed in his studio, painting watercolours and warming himself with memories of the Nile and the sun. Many people had commissioned paintings based on his sketches, including Harriet, Lady Ashburton, who wanted an oil of Philae: Lear painted The Approach to Philae for her, the landscape of a dream, its temples moored like a great boat among the rocks.

  Philae (1863)

  But although he worked hard and visitors called constantly, he felt marooned and lonely, and when he went out he was on edge. Once, after Fortescue invited him to a dinner with Lady Waldegrave, he realised that he might have offended her by refusing to sing when asked. Mortified, he pleaded that he was ill from the bitter east winds, ‘& so completely uncertain whether I had any voice or not, that I thought it better not to sing, than to go to the piano & be obliged to quit it. I felt like a cow who has swallowed a glass bottle – or a boiled weasel – & should probably have made a noise like a dyspeptic mouse in a fit.’

  The whimsy was telling: when he was low Lear always felt closer to the animals than to the smart people around him. It was hardly surprising that he quailed at being driven to the piano as his hostess, the blonde, flamboyant Frances, Lady Waldegrave, was the daughter of the famous tenor John Braham, and her brother Charles was an opera singer. In her early thirties Frances was already on her third husband. Her first, John Waldegrave, illegitimate son of the sixth Earl Waldegrave, had died in 1839 within a year of their marriage, and then she swiftly married his half-brother George, the seventh earl. He too died, in 1846 from cirrhosis of the liver, leaving her all the family estates, including Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. The next year, she married the widower George Harcourt MP, thirty-six years her senior, son of a former Archbishop of York and a sober contrast to the wild Waldegraves. At Nuneham in Oxfordshire and at Strawberry Hill, which she restored in great style, she became a dazzling hostess, and made their London house in Carlton Gardens a leading salon for the Liberal leaders. Fortescue had fallen in love with her in 1850 when he saw her bowling down Piccadilly in her carriage with her back to the wind. (Trollope allegedly used her as the model for Madame Max Goesler in his Palliser novels, and Fortescue for Phineas Finn.) Ever since, he had followed her with devotion, included in all her parties but kept at arm’s length. Lear was a sympathetic confidant to his apparently hopeless passion, suggesting a remedy that he had tried for himself – work. ‘By the bye’, Fortescue wrote, ‘I admire the excellence of your advice to me touching occupation. I am putting it in practice and so fighting against indescribable feelings which sometimes assault me.’

  Lear was rather pleased that Fortescue whisked him into the Waldegrave world, so much brighter and livelier than that of the Lushingtons. In the Park House atmosphere Frank seemed withdrawn and lacking direction. He was now thirty-three and in the spring of 1855, encouraged by Lear, who sought Fortescue’s influence as an MP, he applied for the post of judge to the Supreme Court of Justice in the Ionian islands, based in Corfu. Yet when the post was offered he hesitated, until it seemed it might go to someone else, when he finally accepted. He sailed in May, and Lear joined the goodbye parties to see him off from Dover. In the weeks after Frank sailed, Lear tried to shore up his place as a family friend by looking after Cecilia and Edmund’s ailing son Eddy, giving Cecilia an album of drawings, making a nonsense alphabet for their daughter Zilly’s tenth birthday. In London, he met up with the Lushingtons and Tennysons among the groups going to see the Crystal Palace on its new site on Sydenham Hill. And at Frank’s suggestion he invited Edmund, Tennyson and friends to come and see his Nile drawings. ‘I of course would be happy to make friends with the Nile,’ replied Tennyson, fitting this in with a trip to the dentist and then realising next day that he had promised to see Carlyle: ‘Don’t bore yourself to give a dinner. I love you all, as well undined.’

  Lear was trying to be sociable and cheery, as all his friends expected him to be. In June Wilkie Collins gave a party for Millais, who was off to Scotland to marry Effie Ruskin, and Lear went along. But he was a lot older than this starry, laddish gang of young artists and writers, and confessed in a letter to Tennyson that he felt out of it, on the fringes, ‘woundily like a spectator … very little an actor. David’s particular Pelican in the Wilderness was a fool to what I have been all my days, whether in a crowd or not.’ The reference, which he used more than once, was to the most desolate of psalms:

  Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee.

  Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble; incline thine ear unto me: in the day when I call answer me speedily.

  For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth.

  My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread.

  By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin.

  I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.

  I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

  In the same letter, he wondered if there was a farmhouse or an inn near the Tennysons (‘a Pharmouse or a Nin’ – his nonsense a sign of nerves) where he could stay and paint. The Tennysons’ summer was fraught, troubled by attacks on the newly published Maud, but Lear did visit them briefly at Farringford, the cliff-top house that they were renting at Freshwater in the Isle of Wight, which they bought the following year.

  Then came a blow. In July the Lushington family heard that Henry had fallen ill in Malta. He was trying to make his way home but when his close friend George Stovin Venables met him in Arles, he found him weak and gaunt, and by the time he reached Paris he was clearly dying. While Edmund and his sister Emily rushed over to Paris, Lear hurried down and joined the family in their summer home at Eastbourne. It was awkward, and he felt hurt and rebuffed, as if his presence was a nuisance. He asked Emily Tennyson miserably if he should go or stay. He was right to stay, she insisted: ‘As Frank’s friend you could not, I am sure, be in any place where you would so much wish to be.’ It was true that he was useful: ‘Mr L
ear is very good and kind to us all,’ Cecilia told Edmund. Frank himself hurried back from Corfu, but Henry died in Paris on 11 August, the day before he arrived. When the brothers brought the body home the atmosphere was increasingly dark and Lear worried that he should leave. Once again Emily Tennyson cheered him: ‘Frank will make it all easy for you and you will find you are a comfort and blessing,’ she wrote, the day after Henry’s funeral: ‘You must be good and not morbid and be with him as much as you can. I feel one, or at least I myself, often errs grievously through what in worldly parlance one calls shyness, what in higher and sterner language is want of faith in God and Man.’ She was sure the Lushingtons were ‘at heart grateful and sympathising, though the gift of utterance is except upon rare occasions denied them’.

  Frozen by the silence, Lear dashed up to see Fortescue, who was staying at one of Lady Waldegrave’s mansions, Dudbrook Hall in Essex. Lear was in low spirits, Fortescue noted, and revealed ‘more of himself, his secret feelings, than he has ever done, showed me a good deal of his great and self-tormenting sensitiveness’.

  Trying to salve Frank’s deep distress, and to cheer Lear up, Emily invited them both to Farringford, warning Lear briskly that he had hard work ahead. ‘Not only are you to be sofa to my shyness and Frank’s silence, but you are to be yourself wellest and freshest and happiest.’ They put the visit off until mid-October, and by then both men had relaxed. It was a happy time: Frank walked the grounds with Tennyson and his neighbour Sir John Simeon, and Emily arranged a dinner, only to be overwhelmed that she had overlooked Simeon’s Roman Catholicism and forgotten ‘Friday and fish’. Luckily, ‘Mr Lear’s singing made us forget this, whatever else it brought to mind. He sang for two or three hours.’ (What did she mean by ‘whatever else it brought to mind’?) Many listeners admired Lear’s settings of Tennyson – including Tennyson himself, who said they were the only arrangements he liked – but some of the more musical ones winced. Millais thought he hummed rather than sang, and Charlotte Schreiber dismissed the songs briskly: ‘They are mostly pretty things but he has no voice, and, on the whole, it is rather painful to listen to him.’ But on this visit, Lear’s music made one guest, Miss Cotton, the daughter of a local landowner, so transported that she spent a sleepless night. Reporting Lear’s success as ‘a hero of romance’, Emily was, perhaps, trying to make a match. Frank, amused, encouraged the idea, but Lear shrugged it hastily off, slipping into an image that implied, almost openly, that his appearance might deceive: ‘Alack! For Miss Cotton! And all admirers. But we all know about the beautiful glass jar which was only a white one after all, only there was blue water inside it.’