by Jenny Uglow
His nonsense speech was uncomfortably, excessively intense in its alliterative insults. Did Lear recognised something of himself in the monks, something that he would rather not see? A few months later he joked that Fortescue should get Parliament to send out all the distressed needlewomen in Britain. They must be landed at once, ‘4000 at least’, and make a rush for the nearest monastery.
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Lear came back from Mount Athos with fifty images of this hidden world: later he would paint several watercolours and at least ten oils of the Athos peninsula. This was the strangest, most unsettling of his trips. Images of death and staggering beauty jostled in his mind.
I never saw any more striking scenes than those forest screens & terrible crags, all lonely lonely lonely: paths thro’ them leading to hermitages where these dead men abide, – or to the immense monasteries where many hundred of these living corpses chant prayers nightly & daily: the blue sea dash dash against the hard iron rocks below – & the oak fringed or chesnut covered height above, with always the great peak of Athos towering over all things, & beyond all the island edged horizon of wide ocean.
He was horrified to think how ‘many many thousand monks live on through a long long life of mere formal blank. God’s world maimed & turned upside down’. ‘Blank’ was one of Lear’s darkest negatives, used when he was at his lowest. In this sacred mountain, a place where he had looked for spiritual qualities, he had found only horror. Would his own life be a ‘mere formal blank’, a hermit’s dead existence? His counter to ‘blank’ was not ‘happy’ or ‘full’ but ‘wondrous’, a vision of beauty beyond sense – and he found that in Athos too.
The Monastery of Zografu, Athos
Writing to Emily during the long quarantine off Corfu, imposed due to new fears of cholera, he told her about his frustration with Frank, who would always assume he knew all the family news – like the illness of Eddy, who would die that October – yet neglected to tell him what was going on. There were rows:
The impetuosity of my nature cannot however always be controlled & we have had one or two sad antagonisms – tho we are perhaps better friends afterwards: but our natures are so different, & he is so changed since I first knew him, while I have remained so absurdly the same – (I mean, he has become 70 – & I have stuck at 20 or any boy-age all through my life –) that I feel convinced we are best when not with each other.
Yet even as he wrote, a letter arrived from ‘Franky’ full of the news that Lear thought he was holding back. Then Frank himself sailed over, bringing books, wine, meat and fruit. ‘I am a beast and ought to be squashed,’ Lear wrote remorsefully.
When an earthquake shook his rooms he jumped at the chance of moving to the smart Condi Terrace on the ramparts, next door to Frank and near to the Cortazzis. He had a huge airy room with a lovely north-eastern light to paint by. He liked all his neighbours. The flat upstairs was taken by Major John Shakespear, who had fought at Alma, Inkerman and Balaclava, and had now been posted to the Corfu garrison, and his wife Louisa, whom Lear thought one of the nicest women there, if not the nicest. He spent Christmas Day with the Cortazzis and Shakespears and the latter’s new baby Ida, for whom he asked Ann to send a coral rattle with silver bells and a handle: ‘Major Shakespear has been so good natured in helping me with my easel, that I want to make them some return, & as their little girl is my “Alarum” in the morning, I fixed on this little present-trifle.’
Franklin Lushington Edward Lear Revd Sydney Clark Major Shakespear Sir James Reid Mrs Shakespear Jemmy Mary and Helen Reid Lady Reid
In a brief spell of calm in early January 1857 Lear crossed to Albania with Frank: it rained but on the whole, Lear thought, ‘this queer Albanian trip did me a deal of good’. At least it was a change: in Corfu he was bored of palace gaiety, ‘dancing & rushing about pauselessly & continually. I suspect Lady Young would not be happy in heaven if she did not get up an immense ball & land & water picnics, among the angels.’ In mid-April he went again to Albania, sailing with Frank in Midge and sketching with James ‘Jemmy’ Edwards, godson of an old Knowsley friend.
But Lear still felt unsatisfied, woeful about Frank. He told Fortescue that he would come home for the summer to make lithographs of his Corfu and Athos sketches, and to see his sisters, as Ellen too was now going to New Zealand. The chief reason, however, was his own half-life: ‘Why are you coming say you –? – Because I can’t stay here any longer – without seeing friends & having some communion of heart & spirit – with one who should have been this to me – I have none. And I can’t bear it.’ This, perhaps, was his most self-revealing moment.
Frank was going home for the summer break, and they left together on 19 May 1857, steaming through calm seas to Trieste, which seemed huge, busy and modern after ‘poor, mean, dirty, uncomfortable, quoggly, boggly, old Corfu’. Then they went to Venice, which, to everyone’s surprise, including his own, Lear disliked – no trees, no green, no colourful costumes. From there, Lear took the train back to England, bringing with him a large bag of presents and, in a red Albanian box, a small Corfu tortoise.
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By 1857 he had decided that he would come back to England every summer, to make sure he was included in the exhibitions in Manchester and Liverpool and London and to show his sketches and paintings. This would, he hoped, make enough in sales and commissions to fund life abroad in the winter, avoiding ‘the whitening of the ground & blackening of the sky: – the starving & deaths of birds; – the columns of deaths in the Newspapers: the railway & skating accidents “through the seasonable weather”’.
Although he always made room to go away and paint in peace, he spent most of his English summers scurrying between visits. He ricocheted round the country, north, east, west and south: he was always on trains, with the wrong ticket and smuts in his eyes, jolting his back when his train shunted backwards into a goods train. These journeys and visits allowed him to see friends and patrons across the country. When he was away he assiduously stayed in touch, noting letters received and sent. In Corfu he watched the Trieste steamer coming in with a leap of excitement, wondering if it brought post, and in quarantine in October 1856, he wrote to everyone he could think of. ‘Why has Fanny Coombe not written to me?’ he asked, and was relieved when a long letter came full of news. Apart from a couple of people, he told Ann, ‘I have now letters, from all my old friends I think, I do not know what I should do without letters.’ But letters were nothing in comparison to staying with them, talking to them, singing and showing them his pictures. He made his living through this wide net of friendship, and the circles grew.
He made sure to see the grand folk, although ‘Very possibly’, he confided to Fortescue, ‘the small dinners of highly intelligent or scientific middle class friends are about the really best society going, though you might not think so, as Diamonds & Marchionesses hardly ever enter into these more vulgar Kingdoms of Heaven, nor are Duchesses or Princes frequent.’ He was happy in London when the Season was over, feeling that ‘of all things to be remarked, this is a fact: – the middle classes – professional & otherwise, are by far the best fun for pleasure & knowledge as to converse. The big folk are in most cases a norful bore.’ But the ‘big folk’ bought his pictures – and Lear did enjoy his weekends in beautiful country houses. He liked sinking into the leather chairs in well-stocked libraries, he appreciated the smooth routines, the quiet hours when everyone retreated to their rooms and the maids plumped up the cushions in the drawing room, and was amused by the chatter and the music in the evenings. Most of all, his spirit expanded as he walked through the great parklands with their spreading lawns, a landscape he evoked in a painting of Nuneham for Lady Waldegrave, with sheep in early morning light, a scatter of birds over billowing trees, and the flow of the clouds above.
Nuneham (1860)
Many of his purchasers were diplomats or MPs, or sat in the House of Lords – all his Baring friends eventually became lords, as did Henry Bruce from south Wales, and Fortescue himself. Th
e fourteenth Earl Derby had been in and out as prime minister, leading a minority government with Disraeli as his right-hand man: in 1855 he had declined to take office again, and when the elderly Palmerston took over, Fortescue became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. But the whirligig went on. Derby and Disraeli were back in 1858 – and Palmerston was back the year after that.
Lear’s visits of 1857, however, were dominated not by domestic politics but by events in India. From May onwards, when sepoys in the East India Company army mutinied, The Times and other papers demonised the mutineers and published graphic accounts of massacres. Many of Lear’s friends had relatives caught up in the Indian Mutiny. Fortescue’s nephew John Hamilton was an engineer in Benares; Lady Reid’s stepson Captain James Dalzell would be killed at Lucknow. The Lushington family had long connections in India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Frank’s brother Tom worked in the colonial service. Home on leave after seven years, with his wife and five children, Tom was recalled in a hurry in December.
Lear felt guilty at enjoying life while others suffered. But enjoy himself he did, and for once, he had the promise of money. The MP T. William Evans bought his hastily finished Corfu from the Village of Ascension, Evening for five hundred guineas, a coup Lear trumpeted to Ann in capital letters, ending, ‘HURRAH!’ He set aside plans for his Athos lithographs and journal in a rush of visits. He spent three weeks in Ireland with Fortescue at Ardee, enjoying the wit of Fortescue’s elderly aunt, Mrs Ruxton. ‘He talked a good deal about F.L.’, noted Fortescue, ‘with whom he has had a misunderstanding from the entire diversity of their characters.’ One afternoon, they had their portraits done by a travelling Glasgow photographer: ‘Aunt much amused,’ wrote Fortescue. (A few years later, when Lear had another portrait done, Frank said it looked like ‘a mixture of Socrates, Sir John Falstaff & Sancho Panza’.)
Lear and Fortescue at Ardee, September 1857
From Ireland Lear crossed to Liverpool, stopped at Knowsley and saw his Quarries of Syracuse in the crowd-pulling Manchester Art Treasures exhibition, organised by Thomas Fairbairn, another good friend and purchaser. He went to south Wales to see Henry Bruce, later Lord Aberdare, and to Somerset to stay with Charles Church, now a canon of Wells Cathedral. He sank back and relaxed with his oldest friends, like William Nevill, now a widower: Lear took his godson Allan out and gave him the tiny Corfu tortoise. Another haven was Bern Husey Hunt’s home near Lewes, where he walked on the downs, ate good dinners and read by the fire. ‘The H’s are always the same,’ he wrote contentedly. But late summer brought sadness too: George Coombe died, after years of illness, and Lear called on Fanny, now living in the grand but still unfinished Trafalgar Square, while the next month saw the death of old Robert Hornby, who had helped send him to Rome twenty years ago.
1857 was the year of Moxon’s illustrated edition of Tennyson, and in November Lear dined at the Tennysons’ with Woolner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Hunt. ‘All pleased with Mr Lear’s singing,’ noted Emily. ‘A. reads “Morte d’Arthur” & “Break, Break, Break” after he has sent me to bed.’ That was one of Lear’s last London outings. By now, as well as settling into this pattern of winters abroad, he had become an experienced traveller, keen on modern comforts. On his way across Europe he sent Ann an account of continental trains. He was in Vienna, having changed at Frankfurt before another ‘16 hours rattle’:
These railway matters are so different to ours! A half hour before starting time everybody meets in a large room – each class separately; this room is full of couches – tables – chairs – & mirrors – & is like a drawingroom, & everybody sits or walks about with their bags & cloaks etc allowed in the train. Then a bell rings – ¼ hour before the time – & the doors are opened which lead on to the platform, when everybody rushes to the carriages & gets settled as best he or she may. Very few travel first class & in this instance I had a whole carriage to myself – so spread out my rugs & cloaks (did I not tell you that W. Nevill kindly gave me such a magnificent soft wool railway rug! Immensely large – black outside, & with a beautiful leopard woven inside –) & got my bag of books, & so became quite comfortable. I read away at the life of Charlotte Bronte – a most interesting biography – & I was so pleased with it …
He was back on Corfu at the end of November, finding that nothing had changed: ‘The ludicrous sentiment of standstill & stagnation was truly wonderful.’ Even when he tried to read he hopped from book to book: ‘Some Greek of St John – some of Robinson’s Palestine, some Jane Eyre, – some Burton’s Mecca, – some Friends in Council, some Shakespeare, some Vingt ans après, – some Leake’s Topography – some Rabelais – some Tennyson – some Gardner Wilkinson, – some Grote, some Ruskin – & all in half an hour.’ To begin with he found the slow pace of life frustrating but he worked on his pictures and joined friends at dinners, lamenting that he talked, ate, drank and smoked too much. Yet as he settled back into the Corfu rhythm, he rather enjoyed the gossipy palace dinners. The island was like a jotting in the margins of empire and he liked to hear the stories of the eagle-sharp Lord Canning, his host in Constantinople a decade ago, and of Lady Headfort, widow of William Hay Macnaghten who had been assassinated during the Afghan War of 1842. Lady McN., as Lear called her, was always smothered in jewels, allegedly smuggled out in the retreat.
The only disappointment was that Frank became increasingly taciturn, ground down by petty island politics and pushed around by the domineering Bowen (‘a man of rhinoceros-like insensibility’). It was Frank’s thirty-fifth birthday on 4 January 1858, a cold day, threatening snow. ‘Somehow I did nothing this day,’ Lear noted. ‘Wrote Greek: fidgetted for letters – had bookshelves put up: – prepared to paint. At 2½ Lushington called – but anything sadder or more unsatisfactory than his visit could not be.’ Although they went walking together, these days, Lear wrote bitterly, ‘it is a weary silent work, & now that he has got a dog, one cannot help feeling how far more agreeable it is to him to walk with that domestic object, to whom he has not the bore of being obliged to speak’. He winced at Frank’s ‘millennial, corpse-like stiltiness’. He knew that the only remedy was to move away, to move on.
21: BIBLE LANDS
Lear had wanted to go to Palestine for years, talking it over with Holman Hunt, who drew a fine portrait of him this year. He asked Hunt if he could provide any introductions in Jerusalem: ‘Tell them you introduce a most irregular & uncomfortable fool – partly swell – partly painter, who will never do any good – to himself or anybody else: & advise them parenthetically to stop his unpleasant rumblings by instantly emptying a large bucket of water on his noddle.’
Lear’s frivolousness and restlessness irked Frank, who planned his days in a straight line, without deviation. He realised that Lear’s huge picture of Corfu from Ascension would lie unfinished if the Jerusalem trip came off, ‘but I suppose that to make artists work straight on end at one thing like ordinary people till they have finished is a work beyond the reach of art’.
In the winter of 1857–8 Lear read as much as he could about Jerusalem and the Holy Land, from the fourth-century text of the ‘Pilgrim of Bordeaux’ and the medieval extravaganzas of John Mandeville to recent books like William Lynch’s account of Jordan and the Dead Sea, the travels of the American clergyman Edward Robinson, and Félicien de Saulcy’s tour to the ‘Bible Lands’. He thought it could be a profitable venture, as the work of David Roberts in this region in the 1840s had proved immensely popular, particularly his dramatic prints of Petra. At dinner at the palace he eyed Lady Hertford’s ‘turquoises & emeralds & bangles & spangles & chains’, fantasising about turning them into cash for his trip.
By the end of February 1858 he had worked out his route, reassuring Ann that he was taking an enormous box of medicines. Reports of attacks on travellers in Palestine warned him that the trip might be dangerous, so he made his will, with Lushington and Husey Hunt as executors. Frank also insisted that he learn to shoot. ‘O! here is a bit of queerness in my life. Brought u
p by women – & badly besides – & ill always, I never had any chance of manly improvement & exercise, etc – and never touched firearms in all my days.’ Now he was packing a five-barrelled revolver. He set off alone. The omens were not good: ‘Weather frightful, pouring rain & wind … O wind! Wind! Wind!’ On the evening of Sunday 13 March he walked down through the quiet Jewish quarter to meet his servant Giorgio and his brother Spiro: ‘Row over to harbour, & alongside steamer, to Bombay. Nearly fell into the water, & so did Spiro – I not seeing the steps … So begins my Syrian tour.’
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A bundle of motives lay behind his trip: an escape from Corfu and getting away from Frank, a new set of subjects and most of all the longing to see new places – perhaps write another journal. But what did it mean to him to be in the ‘Holy Land’? What did he believe? He had rejected his evangelical childhood, although his elder sisters were still devout chapel-goers. ‘I hope you have the pleasure of hearing some good Ministers,’ Ellen wrote to Fred’s family in America. ‘It must be a comfort to you if you have public worship regularly – but if outward means fail, I trust you may enjoy that inward peace, a deep sense of the love of God, that cannot be destroyed by the changes & trials of this present life.’ Lear never wrote like this. After going to church with the Nevills at Stoke Newington he exploded about the complacent congregation of ‘monstrous old men & gorgon-like elderly women’, the endless hymns and the long sermon on the Athanasian Creed, damning non-believers. He railed against narrow-minded sectarian disputes, obsession with rituals, and smug protestations of ‘love thy neighbour’ that smacked of the hypocrisy of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (a frequent term of abuse).