Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  A couple of years from now he would stop going to church in England altogether. Staying with Bernard Husey Hunt in Sussex, he wrote, ‘Sleep and deadly Anglo-Sunday God hating idolatrous puritan Pharisee silence and sermonreading. At 6 dinner, & better fun. But I weary of English Sundays & must break off from lying conventionally.’ He did, however, go to Anglican services while abroad. In 1861 he had dinner with the Revd Woodward, the chaplain in Rome:

  After dinner a most sad dispute occurred: a real annoyance. Nor can I well remember what was its first origin except that Presbyterians & Dissenters coming to church was spoken of, & I vindicated their doing so on the grounds of there being but one Church in Rome. – All 4 flew at me & pointed out the Prussian, & the American services – I said, if you think it is inconvenient for dissenters to go to our church, it would be better that it were generally known that you disliked their coming. ‘What do you mean by it being better that it were generally known –’ said Mrs. W. – angrily? – ‘In order that they might be more consistent, said I. Mrs. W. said then things about Quakers & Presbyterians – ‘they may be called Xtians’ – &c. &c. of so shocking a nature that I was really perfectly disgusted & distressed. The poor fool evidently supposes no one but ‘Anglicans’ can be saved – & W. said – ‘the Q. of E. has no more right to go to a Scotch kirk than to a mosque.’ ‘Church? said Mrs. W. – it is not a church at all – it is a kirk.’ – I scarcely spoke again all the evening, – tho’ a Mr & Mrs Meynall came: – & I believe I shall never go to see them again – since the company of bigots & fools is not good for anyone who can avoid it.

  Lear turned his back on intolerant bigots, just as he had shuddered at the misogynistic monks on Athos. He was, however, interested in spiritual matters. He had a sense of a transcendent being, or at least of a power suffused in the universe; he accepted Christ as a teacher, and he clung to the hope of an afterlife. But he had no time for doctrines of original sin, judgement and hell. He cringed at the Athanasian Creed, which decreed that the conditions of being ‘saved’ were belief in the Trinity, the incarnation of Christ and the Second Coming, when ‘All men will rise again with their bodies; And shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil, into everlasting fire.’ To Lear this showed that priests were guilty of blasphemy and lying, ‘or they would not say that the Almighty damns the greater part of his creatures’. He joined many in his generation who rigorously questioned the ‘truth’ of the Bible. The Mosaic account of the Creation and the Deluge had long been overturned by geology and the fossil trail, and in biblical studies, certainties were shaken by works like David Friedrich Strauss’s three-volume Life of Jesus of the mid-1830s, which applied historical method to the Gospels and set aside the supernatural elements as mythology, and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, published in 1841, which stressed love and sympathy rather than vengeful justice. (Both were translated by Lear’s contemporary, Mary Anne Evans, later George Eliot, in 1846 and 1854.)

  Years later, Lear reminded his sister Eleanor that Ann used to say to him, ‘A man’s life proves his religion.’ Lear disagreed. ‘I think this is a mistake. There may be excellent moral conduct, without any heartfelt spiritual knowledge of the Truth.’ His historicist, humanist approach led to differences with the profoundly religious Holman Hunt, who believed in sacrifice and redemption, miracles and grace. Lear agreed with Hunt on many points, he said, but he needed ‘to express my own preference for such subjects in the life of Christ as are universal & of daily interest & other than those more occult & dogma-breeding points which do not suit all minds’:

  Nor do I for one cling to the miraculous & supernatural, thinking that I observe from all history the torrents of blood & the cries of torture which have arisen from disputable ‘idols’ of belief. Christ pardoning the woman taken in adultery, Christ blessing the children & hundreds of ministries of exquisite goodness & wisdom appear to me as being incapable of failing in attracting all suffrage. Nobody doubts mercy, or affection, being good, but the world will never – as it has never agreed – agree on much that has been written on abstruser subjects, such subjects being (selon moi) of far less importance than the facts & rules Christ lived to order & exemplify.

  He did not, then, set off for the Bible lands as a spiritual pilgrim, but he had been learning Greek assiduously and the fact that he could now read both the Old and New Testament in Greek spurred his desire to see the places mentioned in the Bible, and the sites in Josephus’ History of the Jews (a staple on Victorian bookshelves). He did this in the same spirit in which he tracked the places mentioned in Greek myths, or in the Odyssey, or in Byron’s poems. And by the time he left, his Greek studies had taken him in a new direction. He was reading Plato’s arguments for the afterlife of the soul, reading his Phaedo all through the night and marvelling at the death of Socrates. ‘How is it’, he asked Fortescue, ‘that the thoughts of this wonderful man are kept darkly away from the youths of the age? (except they go to the universities, & then only as matters of language or scarcely more) because Socrates was a “Pagan”?’

  *

  When Lear landed at Alexandria and discovered that the boat for Jaffa would not arrive for a week, he went to Cairo. On the slow train journey he burst with enthusiasm, vivid with joy in the birds and animals:

  Renewal of Egyptian impressions, the immense green plains! The birds – Zikzacs & white egrets, hawks, herded crows, gulls, plovers, ducks! – Camels, in those long streams – asses, sheep in black masses, – spotted goats – horses, oxen, – buffali –: those endlessly varied costumes & figures! – the mud villages – pigeon houses, palm trees, Forts & Sycamores, & canals – dogs – &c., &c – the great moving panorama, delighted me. I am thankful today, just as in 1848.

  After a week of tourism and sketching he boarded the little steamer, packed not only with ‘English & Americans – Prussians & Austrians etc – but actually 20 different languages all going to Easter in the Holy City’. Luckily the sea was calm and after the scramble in the port at Jaffa, his party rode out onto the great coastal plains, an unbroken sea of bright green corn. Heading for Jerusalem, they climbed the stony hills on their mules and on the afternoon of the second day, 27 March 1858, Lear wrote, ‘I saw all the places I at once recognised as portions of the scene I so long have desired to paint, – & when we were opposite the west side of the city – I at once found it far more beautiful than I had expected.’

  It was Palm Sunday and when Lear went to the English church for once he was intrigued by the sermon, ‘of a kind I had not looked for – & one which gave me great pleasure’. The text, from Luke’s Gospel, was Christ’s answer to Martha’s complaints: ‘Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things. But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.’ This was a text that was often preached on, Lear knew, ‘But I do not remember to have heard it treated before, as teaching that “the one thing” should be looked on as real practical life-religion; & that the spiritual mind may be cumbered by what it thinks spiritual “many things” to wit, party religion – forms – theologies – & all the Pharisaecalities Christ so pointedly condemned.’

  Lear’s ‘life-religion’ was practical in this sense, a matter of ethics and loving-kindness. But it was also full of poetry. Keen to see places he had heard of since childhood, he went twice to the Mount of Olives to find the spot where Christ must have been when he saw the city on coming from Bethany. To his friend Thomas Seddon, such a view was a religious experience; ‘One cannot help feeling that one is treading upon holy ground; and it is impossible to tread the same soil which Our Lord trod … and follow the very road that he went from Gethsemane to the cross, without seriously feeling that it is a solemn reality, and no dream.’ To Lear, who so often turned back from sacred sites – from Jerusalem, Mount Athos, Mount Olympus – the views were endowed with a different kind of sublimity, that of nature itself. At t
he top of the Mount, turning round, he exclaimed: ‘– lo! The Dead Sea! – clear pale milky far blue, with farther off all rosy mountains – fretted & carved in lovely shadow forms – their long long simple line melting into air towards the desert’. The next day, after dining with his new English acquaintances, he wrote: ‘Afterwards – as I came up the stairs, how glorious was the full moon of blessed Israel – & how beautiful the dim pale film of Moab! – the round domes of the city & a thousand other glorious quietudes recalling older days.’

  To escape the Easter crowds he hired a local dragoman, Abdel, and set off for Bethlehem and Hebron. Here Abdel made an arrangement with the Sheikh of the Jehaleen – who had been the guide to Edward Robinson in 1838 and to de Saulcy – to take Lear to the ancient Nabatean capital of Petra, then on to the Dead Sea and Masada: he would need an escort of fifteen men, the sheikh announced, for a cost of £30, to include the camels. It was expensive and Lear was not sure he trusted him but he accepted and after a night broken by the cries of jackals his small procession rode out into the hills of Moab, ‘pure and beautiful in colour and simple in form’. Their six camels were impressive, if not biblical. His own was handsome and young; Giorgio’s looked shaved, and ‘a great white Hubblebubble’ carried difficult goods, but refused the hens that gave Lear eggs for breakfast, ‘as an uncamellike & undignified burden. Altogether the din of snarling, growling, screaming, and guggling was considerable.’

  On they went, over carpets of hepatica and pale asphodel and out into an open plain where a thousand camels grazed. At night they camped in hollows in the sandy hills: ‘The fires are lit, dinner & pipes discussed, firearms discharged to warn possible robbers. Starlight; and the vast desert silence.’ The silence was broken only by the whirring of grasshoppers among the shrubs, reminding Lear of summer nights in Calabria. Riding up the rocky limestone tracks of the Edom mountains, watching his camels creeping like flies through the narrow defiles below, Lear was astonished by the colours, the forms, the views:

  But what a scene of stoniness & craggyness, – points & chasms, – black grimness, exquisite colours, & strange, wild forms! What strata of giant boulders and rock-forms below! What tawny vastness of lion-coated ridges above! all lit up with the golden light of the afternoon sun, – a splendour of wonder, – a bewildering, dream-like, unfinished world, – bare, terrible, stupendous, strange, & beautiful!

  During five days’ hard travel, made worse by worry about water, feuds among the Arabs and rushes for guns when strangers were seen, he often wondered if the journey was worth the expense. These doubts vanished as they wound through the narrow entry of the Siq and saw before them the rose-coloured facades of Petra.

  As he looked at the rainbow-hued cliffs and the dark mouths of the rock-hewn tombs, Lear sensed a terrible loneliness in these scenes of vanished glory with their scattered pillars and capitals and ruined temples. He had found a new world, he wrote in his journal, yet one that he could never fully convey: ‘Who could reproduce the dead silence & strange feeling of solitude … What art could give the star-bright flitting of the wild dove & the rock-partridge through the oleander gloom, or the sound of the clear river rushing among the ruins of the fallen city.’

  He sketched in the valley, full of flowering shrubs, and then higher up by an ancient temple, until the sun went down and the great eastern cliff became a wall of fiery-red stone. The purple shadows lengthened and the cliffs grew darker and darker, ‘silent & ghostly-terrible’. As Lear kept on drawing in the creeping dusk Abdel pointed up to a rock terrace, and he saw ten black figures squatting in a line above their tents: ‘“Who are they Abdel, & what do they want?” said I. “He is of the Arab, & is asking for the money.”’ Local Bedouin were demanding a tax for crossing their land. Lear had already paid the Sheikh of Haweitat but these men were from different hill-villages and wanted a separate payment: if Lear did not pay they would be back with fifty men. He refused, saying the sheikh must divide the money with them. Then he went to bed. At midnight the fifty men appeared with loud shouts, settling round the fires to wait until morning. More and more men drifted in, cheerfully asking for sugar, coffee, bread, and at four in the morning Lear packed his saddle-bags. Then twenty retainers of the Sheikh of Haweitat arrived and briefly it seemed all would be solved. Leaving Giorgio to watch the tent, Lear went off to draw, fearing that it might be his last chance, climbing the cliffs to the highest temple, the monument of the Deir.

  The theatre, Petra, 14 April 1858

  On his return he found the camp flooded with two hundred violently quarrelling men, the sheikh in the middle, riding a white horse and dressed in scarlet robes. Quickly, he ordered the tents to be struck, then went off to sketch again, scrambling up to the top of the theatre: at the ‘Kasne’ – the so-called treasury, or Khazneh – he wrote his name on the wall so that if the worst happened it would be clear that he had got this far. When Giorgio and Abdel came to rescue him with the camels, men rushed past them, pushing Lear and pulling at his clothes: yet still he could see the absurd: ‘One struck me in the face with one of my own hens, adding insult to injury.’ Even the intense rage on the faces of his attackers would have been a study for a painter ‘had the circumstances permitted’. As the arguments raged he was hustled and dragged and grabbed until men, ‘holding my arms and unbuttoning all my clothing, extracted in a twinkling everything from all my many pockets, from dollars and penknives to handkerchiefs and hard-boiled eggs, excepting only my pistols and watch’. Finally the sheikh said he could help no more: Lear must pay their assailants twenty dollars. He paid, and the Bedouin wheeled and left. Within a quarter of an hour his party was on the move, pursued from time to time by more men demanding money. He paid them all.

  Lear wrote about this with warmth and wit, but he was shaken and short of funds and set off quickly back to Jerusalem. He stopped on the way to sketch at Masada, the last stronghold of the Jews in AD 72–3, who chose mass suicide rather than surrender in their struggle against Rome. He would develop one Masada sketch into a fiery scene for Lady Waldegrave, who had commissioned two paintings from this trip.

  Masada (1858)

  Lady Waldegrave’s second request was for a painting of Jerusalem, and Lear was soon back there, stopping briefly by the Dead Sea – the taste of the waters, he told Ann, ‘you may imitate if you like by putting a little bark mustard, & cayenne, with Epsom salts’. Lear could explore Jerusalem properly now that the Easter crowds had left. He found it beautiful, but recoiled from the squalor and despaired at the squabbling of the Christian churches – Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox and Protestant. Even more absurd was the mission to convert the Jews: with their rich heritage, why should they take up with ‘a religion professing to be one of love & yet bringing forth bitter hatred & persecution’? Yet he found every corner of Jerusalem moving, ‘forcing you to think on a vastly dim receding past – or a time of Roman War & splendour – (for Aelia Capitolium was a fine city –) or a smash of Moslem & Crusader years – & the long long dull winter of deep decay through centuries of misrule’.

  From here he planned a northern trip. He got as far as Jericho, but after an encounter with yet another group of Arabs demanding money, he turned back again without seeing the Sea of Galilee and Nazareth. Instead, he took a steamer up the coast from Jaffa to the Lebanon. On 13 May, his forty-sixth birthday, he was in Beirut, wandering past dusty lemon groves and mulberry gardens. From the heights in the evenings, ‘the Lebanon is white & pink & receded – & you see all the multitude of wrinkles & villages in the nearer hills – All the foreground is gray & cadmium, & dark Cologne earth.’ At every stage, Lear thought as a painter, his ‘Cologne’ being a rich deep brown, and in the Lebanon he found a supreme subject, fusing natural grandeur with Biblical echoes: the great cedars. He sketched these among bare, snow-topped peaks, forming an amphitheatre above the dark grove, silent except for the birdsong, and his drawings would form the basis for his most ambitious painting. But the move from torrid cities to icy crags, so cold that
he could not hold his pencil, made him ill. He travelled on to the temples of Baalbec (too florid, he thought, and not a patch on Egyptian temples), and by the time he reached Damascus, where it was too hot even to draw outside, he was exhausted. Beautiful though the city was with its gardens and glittering river, it was time to leave.

  22: A WAS AN ASS

  A was an Ass,

  Who fed upon grass

  And sometimes on Hay

  Which caused him to bray.

  A!

  What a good Ass

  In June 1858, with Palestine and the Lebanon behind him, Lear sailed back across the eastern Mediterranean, through the Cyclades and round to Corfu. Within hours of landing he was dining with Sir James Reid as if he had never been away. Island politics were now so bad that Frank Lushington had resigned: in August they would travel home. As the heat rose, Lear packed, made his last calls and sold his piano.