Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  They left early in a morning mist, with Tennyson and Emily watching their boat through their telescope. A week later Emily wrote to Lear, ‘I am afraid you are in some mischief as we do not hear from you, gnawing your own heart or doing some other cannibal thing of the kind.’ It was true, he agreed, he had been ‘jarry & out of tune’. Yet, he reassured her, he remembered every detail of their visit: the mushrooms at breakfast; the boy dashing in; ‘You, Alfred & Frank begin to talk like Gods together careless of mankind.’

  I even complain sometimes that such rare flashes of light as such visits are to me, make the path darker after they are over: – a bright blue & green landscape with purple hills, & winding rivers, & unexplored forests, and airy downs, & trees & birds, & all sorts of calm repose – exchanged for a dull dark plain, horizonless, pathless, & covered with clouds above, while beneath are brambles & weariness.

  The pathless plain was a rural version of Tennyson’s image of loss: ‘On the bald street breaks the blank day’. As consolation for the lost mirage, Lear spun a brief fantasy about the future, imagining the Tennysons settling near Park House, and himself in his old age, going ‘cripply cripply’ across the hills to see their grandchildren and Frank’s grandchildren ‘& so slide pleasantly out of life’.

  After Henry’s death, a major question was whether Frank should return to Corfu. Lear thought he should go, before he was warped by life at Park House, but his sisters wanted him to stay. After terrible tension, Frank decided to go. For a time it seemed that his sister Ellen could go out to look after him, but rumours of cholera scotched this. Instead Lear would travel with him: the prospect was exactly what he dreamed of – sunshine, Greece, and Frank. Before they left he read a last letter from Emily: ‘You are not alone, Mr Lear,’ she wrote, ‘you cannot be while you can be so much to those so very dear to you, to those to whom so few are anything but the mere outside world. But one would be all and in that one cannot be, here is the loneliness … God bless you, dear Mr Lear,’ she ended, ‘and prosper you in your labour of love.’

  20: HALF A LIFE: CORFU AND ATHOS

  On 21 November 1855 Lear sailed from Dover with Frank Lushington, carrying in his pocket a conker that little Hallam Tennyson had given him. After a long train journey they reached Prague in blinding snow, before circling round to Vienna and south to Trieste. ‘Was there ever such luck as mine in sailing!’ wrote Lear, as they steamed down the Adriatic. ‘The sea was perfectly smooth, so that one ate & drank, & read & wrote & slept just as if in a house.’ But Corfu, which he had looked forward to so eagerly, was full of troops on their way to the Crimea, and George Bowen, now chief secretary to the government of the Ionian islands, only had room to put up Lushington. On their first night Lear struggled to find a bed. Then it was tricky to rent good rooms. Officers and their families had taken houses, prices had risen and those remaining were ‘some too high up – some too low down – some with wrong lights – some too dear’. When Lear finally found rooms overlooking the harbour, the rain fell, lightning flashed and winds blew.

  Beneath the surface Corfu was tense. The war was on everyone’s mind. The islanders supported the Russians, their fellow Christians, and were horrified by British support of their old enemies the Muslim Turks. The British stuck closely together, ignoring the islanders. At the palace the ease and friendliness Lear remembered from 1848 had given way to ‘great etiquette and gaiety’, and he missed the bustle of London, the twice-daily post, the newspapers, the casual calling in and flow of invitations. With Frank caught up in official business – ‘Poor boy, such loads of work’ – he was so lonely that he begged Ann to write once a week, even a single line.

  It seems that Lear had hoped that in Corfu he and Frank would become closer, perhaps becoming a couple, at least reaching the ‘philosophical’ love of the Apostles’ circle, the love of Tennyson for Arthur Hallam, of George Stovin Venables for Henry Lushington, of Frank himself for Henry Hallam – whose friendship, he wrote, had been ‘a necessity of existence’. But to Frank Lear was a different kind of friend, an older, kindly, amusing mentor. Frank’s reserve also held him back: he could never match Lear’s craving for affection, his desire to be needed. He was moody, insecure, over-serious. ‘I suppose there is such an immense “fonds” of discontent at the bottom of my character’, he confided to Emily Tennyson, ‘that no possible combination of present and future will satisfy me.’ No diaries for these years or letters between them have been found, and many papers were destroyed. Only Lear’s account survives.

  When Lear saw that the intimacy he longed for was impossible, his spirit crumbled. He paced his rooms weeping, lay and stared at the ceiling, unable to paint, and brooded on going home or back to Rome. He would always look back on this winter as the darkest time of his life. Slowly, he pulled himself back by focusing on his art and on Corfu itself: ‘I certainly should like to do one or 2 large paintings of Corfu – for no place in all the world is so lovely, I think.’ He looked across to the mountains of Albania, covered in snow, ‘& though there were still storms about, every part of this beautiful island was like purple & blue & gold & crimson velvet as the sun went down’. Walking up to the village of Ascension (Análipsis), he decided that this was the best view of the town and the bay, and made sketches that would be the basis of many paintings over the years.

  On the steep hill to Ascension, Lear rediscovered his love of oddity and detail:

  On the way up, I saw 2 gentlemen digging in a bank, & found they were looking for the Trap spiders so common here; these make a long nest, & shut it with a door, out of which they bound, upon flies & beetles, – but if you try to open it they stick their claws into little holes & prevent you. I shall try to get one, to send poor little Eddie Lushington.

  Corfu from Ascension (1862)

  Slowly his bounce came back. He got to know his landlord, Demetrius Kourkoumeli, and his family, especially his tall, dark-eyed daughter Effrosini, ‘Foffy’, a good friend for many years. He painted, braced himself to make calls, congratulated Bowen on his engagement to Contessa Diamantina di Roma, daughter of the Senate president. At the weekly palace receptions people asked him to dinner and parties and he grew to like the army officers and the civil officials, particularly the Chief Justice, Sir James Reid, and his wife: ‘They are very nice, plain, kind people and asked me to come often.’ Best of all, he saw more of Frank: they took long walks, dined together and went to the opera, and Lear sympathised with his anxieties. The weather cheered up and he drew outside in the sun among trees full of tiny green frogs which filled the air with duck-like quacking. On a cloudless Christmas Day Frank gave him a gold watch with a silver chain, valuable in itself but more so to Lear, because it had been Frank’s own, and the watch chain had belonged to Harry: it seemed that he was, after all, being drawn into the family.

  When the New Year came anemones and violets began to appear. Lear watched the boats bringing cattle, horses, pigs and sheep from Albania, tipped into the sea to swim ashore: ‘Just now’, he wrote at the end of January 1856, ‘all the harbour is full of black pigs – swimming away like a shoal of porpoises!’ He began to sell small views and these, plus his larger pictures of Philae and Parnassus, more than paid his rent. He felt more hopeful about his art, and when he was offered the post of director at a School of Art in the university, with a house and a salary of £100 a year, he turned it down, feeling sure that his ‘progress as a painter would be wholly knocked up’. (A pity, as the Ionian Academy was a colourful place, established by the Philhellene Frederick North, Earl of Guilford, a convert to the Greek Orthodox Church: the poet Andreas Kalvo taught there and its pupils ‘bound their hair like Hermes’ and wore tunics and cloaks, and knee-high, red-leather buskins.)

  Lear was fascinated again by the local people, the women in their colourful costumes, the bearded, black-robed priests and the kilted Albanian shepherds. His sketches showed that he could, when he wanted, draw people extremely well. With the sunshine the anxious letters to Ann dropped back to every
two weeks, and then three. ‘All the Court (as I call it) came to my rooms in a body on Thursday,’ he reported. Lady Young, wife of the High Commissioner, was particularly keen: her husband Sir John told Fortescue that they found Lear ‘a great addition to our society, and we all like him very much – especially Lady Young, who has taken to sketching with great ardour’. A couple of months later the big room at the palace was ‘all over Lear’, since she not only hung her own purchases but borrowed other people’s to copy. But there were drawbacks:

  the Court has taken a whim of coming to see me sketch, which disturbs and annoys me. That is to say Lady Young & her suite – galloping furiously on 12 or 16 horses, come rushing through my quiet olive groves, & quite destroy the repose of the landscape. However they are soon off again for Her Ladyship (our gracious sovereign) seldom remains long in one place.

  Ann was not to report this in case it circled back: ‘this is such a place for gossip!’ ‘We Corfiotes’, he wrote once, ‘seize a bit of local news with great avidity, & I think of ruminating cattle when I find the same atom of speculation coming up over & over again 10 times a day.’

  Lear quite liked being a big fish in this small pond. In April Frank told Emily,

  Lear having for the first month he was here asserted that he hated music more than any thing in the world, has now become the most admired musician in Corfu – a very much more natural position for him to occupy than that of a music-hater. He has done a good deal for the spreading of Alfred’s reputation in these benighted shores.

  By this point, when the countryside was a mass of wild flowers, he seemed thoroughly settled: ‘all the fields have ceased to be green & are sheets of pink & lilac & yellow & blue. I never beheld anything so amazing.’ He even went sailing – a proof of devotion from a man who hated boats – in Midge, Henry’s old yacht that Frank had brought over from Malta. Midge was supposed to be comfortable, but Lear could not sleep for the ‘screwy & squashy & fidgety noises’; he disliked the wind, and the dead calm even more: ‘roll, roll, pitch, pitch, creaking, flapping and bumping till I could have thrown myself overboard’. When they landed in his favourite bay of Palaiokastritsa with its little monastery high on the cliff above, he uncurled gratefully after a week of knocking his head in a cramped cabin.

  More enjoyably, they walked in the hills, exploring distant parts of the island. By now they had actually talked about sharing a house, and the difficulties that prevented it. And although Lear agreed it would not be wise to live together, as they were both nervous and fidgety and emotions could run high, they often behaved like a couple – without the sex – constantly bickering and making up. On dull days Lear wrote letters and read all the books at hand, old and new: the novels of Trollope and Bulwer Lytton, the poetry of Matthew Arnold and Clough and, of course, Tennyson. Frank, determined to educate him more seriously, said, ‘I have set Lear upon Carlyle’s Past and Present, as the easiest dose I could give him – and on his expression of a wish for more gave him the Sartor Resartus to try but I am afraid that has rather choked him off, to use the vulgar phrase.’

  Lear studied Greek, took new rooms and hired a servant. ‘Yorhi’, soon ‘Giorgio’, Kokali had been born in Corfu after his Suliot family fled there during the civil war, and spoke Albanian, Greek and some Italian. He would work for Lear for the rest of his life.

  In early summer Lear left for the hills to paint, following his old Civitella regime: rising early to sketch, reading, writing letters and practising his Greek, sleeping in the heat of the day, then sketching again until sunset, supper and bed. After a few weeks he moved on, to other remote hamlets, and finally back to Ascension. At the village fete he watched the women dancing in slow circles, in gorgeously coloured dresses, loaded with gold necklaces and heavy rings. It was a magical time: ‘Last night the mountains at sunset were of the purest vermilion rose I ever saw! – & all the sea like glass or oil, was amber colour, reflecting the sky.’

  Old friends appeared, including Charles Church, and, to his amazement, James Uwins, sporting a great grey beard: ‘It seems but the other day – though really 19 years ago exactly that I walked from Rome to Naples with him.’ But Lear also made new friends, like the Cortazzis, who lived in town in Condi Terrace but had a summer villa in Ascension. John Cortazzi was the British consul in Corfu: his wife Marianne was a Hornby and his sister had also married into the Hornby family, so for Lear the connections were close. He often called in to see them, ‘though I am beginning to call the house “Castle Dangerous”’, he said, ‘because of the 2 young ladies, – & of the difficulty of getting away when one has gone there. If I were not such an ancient owl, I believe I should fall victim to the eldest, – but I am resolved to run if I find myself growing silly.’ The younger sister, Madeleine, was prettier, but the older, Helena, intrigued Lear more, though she was ‘not thought half as much of as that large Miss A.Z. who can only talk English and dance polkas’. Helena translated Tennyson into Italian, set his poems to music and knew every word of In Memoriam, or so Lear told Emily, who was, of course, delighted. He told Holman Hunt too about the girls:

  so full of poetry & good taste, & grace & all the nettings whereby men are netted – I begin to think I must either run for it or rush into extremes – & as neither they nor I have money, am I not a fool for thinking about it? Yet sometimes at 43 I cannot help believing that life as half life will get too wearisome to bear ere long. The elder is my alarm – but the younger is prettier – o papa! What a blasted old ass your son is.

  Lear chewed over this dilemma, mulling over the declaration in The Princess,

  Either sex alone

  Is half itself, and in true marriage lies

  Nor equal, nor unequal …

  Helena was twenty years his junior and the idea of union, of Tennyson’s perfect ‘two-celled animal’, was hard to envisage. His interest was genuine but the impulse to run was stronger. He had once told Fortescue in a sour mood that if married he would paint less well ‘and the thought of annual infants would drive me wild. If I attain to 65, and have an “establismt” with lots of spoons &c to offer – I may chain myself: – but surely not before.’ And, seriously, he asked, when he looked around at the married couples they knew, ‘do I see a majority of happy pairs? No, I don’t.’ Yet he did not brush off Helena’s spell straight away. Two years later, after Mrs Cortazzi’s death, the family went to Odessa, but when they returned to England Lear tried to track them down in Manchester and Brighton: ‘A world of thought about H.C.’ he wrote.

  *

  Lear encountered another disturbing half-life in late summer. Frank was planning to cross to Albania and Lear decided to go with him and then to travel on to Yannina and, if possible, ‘the long desired Mount Athos’, the Holy Mountain. This mountainous, densely wooded peninsula on the northern Greek coast had been a monastic enclave since the eighth century, blessed, according to legend, when the Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist were blown off course on a voyage to Cyprus. It was the Virgin’s sacred garden, and no other female, human or animal, was allowed to enter there.

  To make his way across country, Lear obtained papers from the British consuls who had been sent to Albanian towns during the Crimean war in an effort to keep the country neutral. Then he and Giorgio set off. They began by staying with Jaffier Pasha in Philates (modern Filiates, opposite Corfu). In his old Turkish courtyard house, its high walls black with jackdaws and towers white with storks, Lear fell down a flight of stone stairs and sprained his back, but he knew, he said, that the best thing was to go on – and so they did, crossing the mainland to Katerina on the Aegean coast, where they lingered hungrily waiting for a boat to Salonica. From there he could write letters to worried friends. He had been away for a month, Frank reported to Emily:

  verifying Alfred’s’s poem about his travels – i.e. at last visiting Mount Athos. I heard from him a few days ago from Salonica – I was very glad to hear from him as he was not at all in condition for hard travelling when he started through a
very rough & not always safe country … he began unluckily with a fall and after a fortnight still had to be lifted on & off his horse for fear of re-straining the muscles.

  Still, Frank admitted fondly, ‘He is one of the people pre-eminently gifted with a genius for travelling – and Athos is what he has always wanted to see.’

  After a fifty-mile walk, Lear could at last glimpse Mount Athos, ‘a high peak on a bluer sea – seen above the most wondrous forest of beech I ever beheld’. The Holy Synod that controlled the peninsula made them welcome, but the constant prayer and chanting and the ‘atmosphere of falsehood and ignorance’ irritated Lear beyond bounds. He became ‘positive that living alone – banishing all women whom God has made to be our equals & companions’, utterly reversed God’s will. Then Giorgio fell dangerously ill with fever, and Lear succumbed too, but in the end they managed to visit all the western monasteries. These were ‘wondrous’ and the scenery was stupendous, he wrote, but he would not go again to the Holy Mountain ‘for any money, so gloomy, so shockingly unnatural, so lonely, so lying, so unatonably odious seems to me all the atmosphere of such monkery’. A Turk with six wives or a Jew working to feed his family would be more pleasing to God ‘than these muttering, miserable, mutton-hating, man-avoiding, misogynic, morose, & merriment-marring, monotoning, many-mule-making, mocking, mournful, minced fish & marmalade masticating Monx. Poor old pigs! Yet one or two were kind enough in their way – dirty as they were: but it is not them, it is their system I rail at.’