Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

Ajoskyboskybayso.

  No more my pen: no more my ink

  No more my rhyme is clear,

  So I shall leave off here I think. –

  Yours ever,

  Edward Lear

  In the last week of November he set off to wander south. Borrowing £50 from Bernard Husey Hunt, he went to Margate to see Ann and then crossed the Channel with Samuel Clowes, an old Knowsley friend with whom he had once planned to go to Palestine. After a day of Paris tourism they took the night train to the Midi, a journey of impatience and amusement:

  A very ugly woman, & a roaring baby & nurse, & a militaire our companions. At first, along of the child’s screams, we anticipated a night of terror, but the enfant did us great good, as after frightening all people away – was itself silent: so we slept. – After midnight 2 people rushingly invaded us – one, a lady – drew a crinoline all ‘athwart’ the carriage, – but finding it intractable, left us.

  2 Americans were our next lot, the baby waking up at intervals & conducting herself with great propriety.

  After sailing from Hyères they finally reached Rome in a mighty thunderstorm, and Lear collapsed at his hotel with a large glass of brandy. Next morning he opened his shutters to find he was right opposite Penry Williams’s studio, as if stepping back in time. Williams was delighted to see him, and all his old friends, like the sculptor John Gibson, James Uwins and the Knight family, were equally affectionate: ‘& it does seem most wondrous to me that all are so to me!’

  Rome had been peaceful since French troops reinstated Pius IX in the summer of 1849 and the English had returned in droves. At first, in the bright sunshine and surrounded by friends, Lear felt huge joy and resurrection of spirits, as he put it. But after the high came the low. His days were ragged, with epileptic turns coming suddenly at night and in the afternoons. Clowes fell off his horse, broke his collar-bone and retired to bed, and letters from Ann and Fortescue made Lear cry like a child. ‘A deep black bitter melancholy destroys me,’ he wrote in his diary. Stoically he took a three-year lease on a suite in a large palazzo on the Via Condotti off the Spanish Steps. On Christmas Eve Giorgio, who had been summoned from Corfu, suddenly turned up at his door: ‘Indeed, indeed, this is a great blessing.’

  With Giorgio there, Lear cheered up. He always enjoyed furnishing his rooms, as if he were going to stay for years, not flit in and out. In Corfu he had bought rugs and put up prints, and now, while Giorgio sewed dish-cloths in the kitchen, he summoned workmen to hang grey cotton over the ghastly wallpaper in the drawing room, which became his studio. He had a dining room-cum-library, a small room where he could display his pictures, a kitchen and a room for Giorgio. In a great bustle the rooms were carpeted, the blinds put up, and they rushed out and bought coffee pots and plates: to begin with they lived in a very ‘hoky poky’ style, with Giorgio bringing in salt on a piece of paper and saying, ‘We are in the desert Sir.’ But a companionable routine resumed: at seven (‘dreadful late hour’) Giorgio opened the shutters and shouted at Lear in Greek to get up, ‘So I do; & when I am up, I find the study fire quite lit, & I write or shuffle about there, or polyponder till 8.30.’ Then came breakfast, the answering of notes and invitations, and work until noon. Each Wednesday and Saturday at noon, the door-bell rang:

  From 20 to 30 people rush up the stairs. Giorgio lets them into my show-room, where a fire is lit, & there are chairs set before my folio stand, & he comes & says with a grave grin ‘the Arabs are come’. (One day there were ‘4 male & 6 female Arabs’ and another time ‘one old Arab on 4 legs’ – an old man on crutches.)

  Lear saw new people too, and finally met Browning, who came to see his pictures in late January 1859. For the last few years the Brownings had spent the winters in Rome to escape the chill winds of Florence, although Elizabeth Barrett Browning often wearied of the sociable city: ‘a great roaring watering place … Cheltenham or Baden Baden – How the Caesars can sleep through it is hard to fancy. But I can’t work through it.’ Lear also met the Brownings’ American friend, the sculptor William Wetmore Story, who had finished his famous marble statue of Cleopatra the previous year and lived with his family in the Palazzo Barberini. This brought introductions, in Story’s words, to ‘the harem (scarem) I call it – and the emancipated females who dwell there in heavenly unity’, including the actress Charlotte Cushman and her current lover, the sculptor Harriet ‘Hatty’ Hosmer. (Lear was astounded when the Prince of Wales commissioned one of her giant sculptures: ‘& one from Hosmer!!!!!!!!!!!’) He hugely enjoyed Cushman’s dinners, and revelled in her company and her singing: ‘The Cushman sings savage ballads in a hoarse, manny voice’, wrote Story, ‘and requests people recitatively to forget her not. I’m sure I shall not.’

  These Americans had lived in Rome on and off since the start of the decade (this is the world of Hawthorne’s Marble Fawn, and Henry James’s Roderick Hudson), but they still saw Italy as a place of romance and glorious light, of rambles over the Campagna with thunderstorms looming, of trips to Frascati and the Alban hills. When Elizabeth Gaskell stayed with the Storys, escaping the fuss over her Life of Charlotte Brontë, she was ecstatic. ‘Oh I so long for Italy and Albano that it makes me ill,’ she wrote on her return. ‘I think Rome grows almost more vivid as the time recedes.’ She remembered her time there with ‘an ache of yearning’. Lear knew that ache of yearning. Sometimes as he walked the streets he was suffused with memories, full of the longing Henry James would attribute to ‘the lover of Italy, the survivor of changes, extinctions, young intensities, the spirit haunted by the sweeter, softer, easier, idler Rome, of greater and stranger differences’.

  On crisp January days Lear rode into the Campagna, the light shining on silver snow, and walked on the Pincian hill, empty of tourists and bitterly cold. In contrast to the weather, having lugged his canvases up the stairs, he was painting the sunlight in Palermo and the baking heat of the Dead Sea, Masada and Jerusalem. He kept up his twice-weekly viewings, showing his Palestine drawings and talking for an hour or so, after which, he said, everyone shook his hand and went away. In fact his pictures sold well, supporting him through the winter. His visitors included lords and ladies, Russian princesses and eventually the seventeen-year-old Prince of Wales, whose visit to Rome thrilled the British community: a prepossessing youth, Lear thought, ‘& very much like his mother, God help her’. Having said he didn’t care ‘a millionth of a button’ whether the prince came or not, Lear was clearly pleased when he turned up in late March after an enquiry from his tutor, Colonel Bruce. Giorgio, dressed in his best, opened the door and Lear met him on the landing: ‘I shewed him the Greek pictures, & all the Palestine also – & the whole of the sketches, & when I said, “please tell me to stop, Sir, if you are tired by so many” – he said – “O DEAR, NO!” in the naturallest way.’

  If British royalty was entertaining, the government’s policies with regard to Italy were disturbing. Piedmontese troops had supported the allies in the Crimean war and ever since, Victor Emanuel, the king of Piedmont-Sardinia, and his prime minister, the Count of Cavour, had argued for British support for unification. This winter Cavour turned instead to France, signing a secret treaty with Louis Napoleon to drive the Austrians from Venetia and Lombardy. ‘To tell truth, we are getting a bit fidgetty from day to day,’ Lear admitted. ‘If war really breaks out, there will be no living here, and I can’t see any chance of its not breaking out.’ In April 1859, border skirmishes deliberately provoked an Austrian ultimatum and a declaration of war. In May the French crossed the border. ‘All public news are most disastrous,’ Lear wrote in his diary, ‘– The Emperor landing at Genoa – “hostilities” commenced, – part of the army marching to Ancona.’ Garibaldi was back too, siding with Cavour and leading his three thousand volunteers, the Cacciatori di Alpi, against the Austrians in the Alps.

  Angry supporters of the Risorgimento believed clearly that the British, deaf to their appeals, were siding with the Austrians. The English fled Rome. Civita Vecchia was packed w
ith people fighting to get on the boats and although he despised the panic, Lear saw that there was no point staying with no one left to buy his pictures. Giorgio took up the carpets and Lear started packing. He had three full ‘lots’ to take home, stuffing in clothes and socks between painting materials:

  LOT 1. 4 cases of drawings – (one contains 5 book folios & 2 flannel waistcoats.)

  LOT 2. 1. case – 2 pictures, framed & glazed.

  4. Folios

  4 Arab dresses. 1 cloak. 2 pr. trousers. 2 waistcoats.

  Carton of Corfu – in 3 pieces. 3 rolls of Gk. paper.

  Petra, & 16 small books

  LOT 3. 1 large wood case – (6 canvasses.)

  2. case – 6 small canvasses – 3 books. 3 Rulers

  5 book folios. 3 Nos. of Roberts.

  6 pairs of drawers. 3 paper cutters.

  3. case 3 folios – 2 prs of drawers.

  8 prs socks – 1. sketching stool.

  4. case – 2 pictures

  5. Knapsack, couches, 2 diaries (1855–1858) &c. &c.

  6. Boxes of paintbrushes.

  7. a cloak

  8. a capote.

  On 15 May he was on the steamer north, and Giorgio was on his way to Corfu, waving his hat from the boat.

  *

  Lear left many things undone. In London this summer he wrote up the journals of Athos, and of Palestine and Lebanon – neither would ever be published. ‘At present I am doing little, but dimly walking on along the dusky twilight lanes of incomprehensible life,’ he wrote mock-humorously to Fortescue. ‘I wish you were married. I wish I were an egg and was going to be hatched.’

  He stayed with friends, including the Tennysons, and looked for rooms in London, declining Fortescue’s offer of a loan, ‘for my whole life from 14 years has been independentissimo’. In July he went to St Leonards in Sussex, where he could breathe, feel calmer and work peacefully. When tired he read Sophocles or composed songs, and in the evenings he would potter to the post ‘or puddle along the shingly beach’ in the dusk. That shingly beach would return in Mr Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’s lament:

  I am tired of living singly, –

  On this coast so wild and shingly, –

  In July, with both sides in the Italian conflict weakened after the bloody battle of Solferino (the Swiss tourist Henry Dunant’s experiences there led to the founding of the Red Cross), the French and Austrians signed the Peace of Villafranca, leaving Cavour enraged. Furious at British indifference, Elizabeth Barrett Browning cried against this ‘peace’:

  There is no peace, and shall be none.

  Our very dead would cry ‘Absurd!’

  And clamour that they died in vain,

  And whine to come back to the sun.

  In a proclamation, Tuscany refused to countenance Austrian rule. When he heard of this Lear fretted, ‘Tuscany is at present a beautiful, but lonely beacon of hope – alas! Who knows if fated to burn or die out?’

  Although the tension remained, by the end of the year Lear felt that Rome was peaceful enough for him to return, away from the cold. London was encased in ice: on 18 December he walked across Hyde Park to the Serpentine, where thousands were skating. In the snowy days before Christmas he crossed the Channel. On board the ferry he met Thackeray, who gave him an early copy of the first issue of The Cornhill Magazine, which he was editing, to take to his friend Story. (Five years before Thackeray had supported the Storys when their son died, and had composed ‘The Rose and the Ring’ to entertain their ill daughter Edith.) The train to Marseilles was followed by a stormy voyage, rocking every atom of Lear’s body:

  Bowels, stomach, toes, mind, liver, – all mixed together, it does not seem to me that actual death can be more horrible! – All became dark & terrific alas! – as I counted those dreadful moments hour after hour till the light went out. – The shrieks & hysterics & vomitings all round were most fearful, as the wind increased & the sea was fearful.

  But then the wind ceased and he went on deck: ‘– & then came the golden sunset, calm, & with one long purple, orange lighted cloud above, & many a golden flecked streak at the water edge – the sun going down one full orb of sublimity –: above the delicate new moon, & one star’.

  *

  In Rome he left romantic sublimity behind. French troops filled the streets and there were fewer English residents to buy his work. Looking at the Roman nobles and middle classes stuck in ‘stagnation of pride & ignorance & superstition’, Lear despaired: ‘I believe, if God Almighty were to come down Himself, they wouldn’t have a single benefit from him if He were not a “Roman”.’ ‘I deeply hate this place,’ he wrote in February. He was already thinking of taking Giorgio to England for the summer. Once there, he would paint a large Cedars of Lebanon for the Manchester exhibition, and perhaps a Baalbek for Liverpool – then off to Palestine.

  Then came an unexpected shock. ‘Have I ever lied to you in the four years I have been with you?’ Giorgio asked one evening, before announcing that he had been married for nine years, and had three children, a boy of eight and two girls of six and three (later two more sons were born). All this was news to Lear. Yet once the astonishment passed, he was glad, he realised, that Giorgio had a family, and as he was clearly homesick Lear decided to send him to Corfu soon. His ideas grew more drastic: he would let Giorgio go altogether and head far away – to India, or America, or Australia. Better never to have been born, he wrote in his diary, quoting Sophocles in Greek: but the next best, if he was to be alone, was to be alone. Then in March, a letter came from Giorgio’s brother Spiro – Giorgio’s daughter, six-year-old Elisabetta, was dead. Lear had to break the news and when he saw his intense grief, ‘actual as a wall or a house’, he took him away to the Alban hills to distract him, feeling more and more concerned at the sacrifices Giorgio had made to be with him.

  Lear often dined alone, cooked for by Giorgio, but sometimes he had meals sent up from Spillmans, the restaurant below, or ate at his favourite cafe, Falcone’s. It rained constantly and he had colds and asthma, but he still saw his friends, visiting Isabella Knight, housebound by illness, and trying to help the landscape painter Charles Coleman, who was seriously ill. More happily, he saw a great deal of the older artists, especially Penry Williams, and the American set (although he ducked out of meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe). At a small dinner at Charlotte Cushman’s, the other guests were her new partner the sculptor Emma Stebbins, the diplomat Odo Russell, ‘so kindly without shame, & clear without sharpness’, the archaeologist Sir Charles Newton – who had just excavated the mausoleum at Halicarnassus and was briefly consul in Rome, before becoming Keeper of the Antiquities at the British Museum – and Robert Browning. Browning was ‘all fun’:

  foaming with spirit; – his anecdote of Carlyle – (wh. he hesitated ere giving,) – how he & C. went to Boulogne, C. for the first time abroad: – when, on seeing the first Crucifix – C. calmly & feelingly said – – – – ‘Ah! poor fellow! – I thought we had done with him!’ Great mirth & roaring. Dinner especially good – oysters & peaches from America. Champagne & all things very excellent, but all in perfect taste. Miss C. with her plain broad kindly heartedness & good strong common sense, cultivated & refined taste, is assuredly a very No 1 woman.

  Altogether ‘the evening was splendidophoropherostiphongious’. He was less thrilled by his visit to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had collapsed after the Treaty of Villafranca in July, and was still frail, surrounded by admirers and hangers on. ‘What good does one get of anyone’s society’, he asked Emily Tennyson, ‘when it is merely like a beautiful small rose tree planted in the midst of 43 sunflowers, 182 marigolds, 96 dahlias and 756 china-asters?’

  Although supportive, Lear was sometimes unnerved by the rising nationalist fervour. On Garibaldi’s birthday on 19 March crowds took to the streets, fighting with the police. Afterwards Lear told Giorgio that when he went out he should take a basket to put his head in, in case it was cut off: ‘On which he said, “No sir, I take soup tureen – hold him
better.”’Soon the papers were censored and no news came through. Lear began to pack again. Troops were everywhere, including a thousand Irish who came on a mission to help the Papal States. On 11 May 1860 Garibaldi landed in Sicily with his ‘Thousand Men’ and took Palermo. A week later Lear and Giorgio sailed up the coast to Livorno and spent a few days exploring the Carrara mountains and the Gulf of Spezia, stopping at Lerici to pay tribute to Shelley and Byron. Before he left for England, Lear saw Giorgio on to the boat for Corfu. He watched him through his telescope until he disappeared from view, standing at the bowsprit, ‘calmly enough & perobbably smoking’.

  24: NO MORE

  There was an Old Man of Lodore,

  Who heard the loud waterfall roar;

  But in going to look, he fell into a brook,

  And he never was heard of no more.

  Part of the reason that Lear enjoyed exploring the Bay of Spezia with Giorgio was that everything was new, not burdened with memories. In his middle forties he was suffering more and more from a feeling of transience, mourning a lost past.

  Even his friendship with the Tennysons seemed to be slipping into this misty realm. He stayed with them at Farringford in Freshwater in the summer of 1859, a glorious June week. He read ‘Guinevere’, which he thought the loveliest of the new poems in the first tranche of the Idylls of the King, and walked on the downs with Tennyson: ‘who read out the Lady of Astolât, – another version of Lady of Shalott: – most wonderfully beautiful & affecting – so that I cried like beans. The gulls on the cliff laughed.’ He loved the boys, and Emily noted that as he left, Lionel, now aged five, ‘looking out of the window says “How I like him” & one echoes the words in one’s heart.’ But Lear found it hard to get on with the poet, and thought Emily seemed pale and tired, underrated by Alfred: ‘I should think computing moderately, that 15 angels, several hundreds of ordinary women, many philosophers, a heap of truly wise and kind mothers, 3 or 4 minor prophets, and a lot of doctors and school-mistresses might all be boiled down, and yet their combined essence fall short of what Emily Tennyson really is.’