Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The Tennysons at Farringford (c.1862)

  That spring, with the organist Edward Francis Rimbault helping him with the arrangements, Lear published five more Tennyson songs. When the Tennysons received them – on a day when Charles Dodgson was visiting them – they both agreed that ‘The time draws near’ and ‘Come not when I am dead’, were ‘the best & wonderfully beautiful’. The following year his settings from Idylls of the King appeared, including Elaine’s heartsick song for Lancelot:

  Sweet is true love though given in vain, in vain;

  And sweet is death who puts an end to pain:

  I know not which is sweeter, no, not I.

  In June 1860 Lear went to Farringford again. But this time Frank Lushington was coming too, a troubling reminder of having loved in vain. From the moment that he boarded the train at Waterloo with Frank and ‘a party of Prinseps’, coming down to see Julia Margaret Cameron, he felt overwhelmed. Julia and Sara, the latter married to Henry Thoby Prinsep, an East India Company director and Persian expert, were two of the seven famous Pattle sisters, born in Calcutta to an Anglo-Indian merchant and his aristocratic French wife. Sara Princep ran her own literary salon at Little Holland House, where the artist G. F. Watts, whom they had taken in when he was ill, stayed for many years. Among the other sisters were Virginia, Lady Somers, whom Thackeray thought too beautiful even to imagine falling in love with, and whose husband was one of Lear’s patrons; Maria, grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell; and Sophia, ‘the improper Monte Carlo Great Aunt’. (Virginia Woolf imagined them all wafting by, ‘robed in splendid Venetian draperies … talking with foreign emphatic gestures’.)

  The tempestuously generous Julia – who had not yet been given the camera that would make her famous – had been very taken by the Isle of Wight when she visited the Tennysons and promptly bought a house nearby as a retreat for herself, her husband and their six children, naming it Dimbola Lodge after her husband’s tea plantation in Ceylon. For Lear, it was a daunting gathering. Mrs Cameron, ‘rushing al solito’, met them at the harbour and whisked him off in a fly to Farringford. With Alfred and Emily, Frank and the boys, the evening would have been a happy one, he thought, ‘only at 10, Mrs. C. & her train came & odious incense palaver & fuss succeeded to quiet home moments’.

  Lear and Frank walked on the downs again with Tennyson, but this time they heard no booming poetry. Tennyson, instantly recognisable in his flowing cloak and broad-brimmed hat, was weary of admirers rushing up to him on walks or craning over his garden fence. Today he was at his ‘most disagreeably querulous & irritating’, and as soon as he saw people coming he wanted to go home. ‘But F.L. would not go back, & led zigzag-wise towards the sea – A.T. snubby & cross always. After a time he would not go on – but led us back by muddy paths (over our shoes,) a short-cut home – hardly, even at last, avoiding his horror, – the villagers coming from church.’ Next day Tennyson and Frank walked alone, and later Lear sang to much applause at Mrs Cameron’s. Soon after they returned, Emily noted:

  I hear a trampling on the drive when I am resting before dinner and think it is Americans coming as seven did the other day to ask for admittance but find it is Mrs Cameron’s Grand Piano which she has most kindly sent for Mr Lear. It is pleasant to see the surprise of each one coming in & seeing it. The Camerons in the evening. Mr Lear sings a long time.

  Everyone complained that the Tennysons’ own piano was out of tune, and a couple of years later Lear suggested they should buy Mrs Cameron’s grand to replace their ‘ancient & polykettlejarring instrument’. But although his singing went well, after the awkward walk on the downs he had already decided that this was probably his last visit. In his diary he wrote, ‘We come no more to the golden shore, where we danced in days of old.’

  Lear’s sketch of Farringford, 1864

  A few months later, Lear met Tennyson in London in one of his more affable moods, and was relieved that he had not been swallowed up in ‘Pattledom’. Though now wary of the man, he still admired the poetry and kept to his plan for the illustrations. But once, when he wrote out his quotes he made a telling slip: instead of the lines from ‘Ulysses’,

  But all experience is an arch wherethro’

  Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades

  For ever and forever as I move …

  Lear wrote, ‘But all remembrance is an arch wherethro’’. The misquotation could have been his own motto. Sympathising with Fortescue’s feeling of being in a vacuum, he had said that he too felt this intensely:

  there is nothing of which I have so distinct a recollection as the fearful gnawing sensation which chills & destroys one, on leaving scenes & persons, for which & whom there are no substitutes till their memory is a bit worn down. I say, there is nothing I so distinctly remember, because these feelings are with me already taking the form of past matters, never again to recur, like cutting one’s teeth, measles &c.

  The childhood images of teeth and measles gave him away. His memory was constantly jolted, as if tripping over a branch in a path, by a place, news of a death, a change in the weather. When he met people or arrived somewhere, he would count the years since a first meeting or visit – twenty, thirty, now even forty. Life seemed fleeting, ungraspable. He recognised Sir James Reid’s feeling after leaving his post as Chief Justice of Corfu ‘that his twenty-one years seemed already like a dream’. But if the past was a dream, ‘Where then are the realities? & why seek for any?’

  Writing his diaries late at night Lear included backward looks like a haunting refrain:

  7 June. Samuel Clowes comes round: & as it hardly rained, we walked to the Z. Gardens. The Balœniceps was the most curious brute there. – The few – 4 I think – older keepers, sadly strangely recall those early days of Z. drawing: – so narrow does the ruin of life gradually seem to become.

  22 June 1860. [Visiting Frank Lushington’s new lodging in the Temple] His rooms, – wh. I had never been in – strangely recalled past years: – the same objects & similarly placed.

  2 July. [Reading the paper] I saw in the paper — died – … Somerville, formerly Inspector of Hospitals, & later, chief Physician at Chelsea Hospital, at Florence, in his 93rd year. Whereon the Garden at the Nemi, & the walk at Genzano rise to sight.

  14 November. [Painting an oil of Philates, on the coast opposite Corfu] – & how completely the carrying out the sketch brings the life of those days of August 1856 back again – strangely dreamy! – when lame & ill, I lay on the rugs over the door of Jaffier Pashas palace, & watched the Albanian Evening life.

  Lear validated his sadness by clothing it in Romantic diction, as if he was mourning the beauty and innocence of the universe itself. It was like Tennyson’s repeated ‘no more’. And even the person remembering was the same but not the same.

  He saw, too, that throwing off this sadness would mean losing the intensities of feeling that made him what he was. His dark moments were also part of him. He looked back at moments of apprehension from childhood on. Ten years hence, after walking though the pinewoods near Cannes, he would write: ‘it is not easy to say why that scene of pines & far hills is so lovely now …’

  What a mingling of sadness & admiration of landscape botheringly will persist in existing! All the unsought morbid feelings – (certainly unsought – for I knew not what even the meaning of morbid was in those days,) of past years crop up at once – such as the Hornsey fields & Highgate archway, & the sad large Thorn tree at Holloway about 1819 or 1820 … the Mill at Arundel, or Peppering in 1824 & 5 – the heights above Plymouth in 1836–7 – the Godesberg – 1837 – Civitella 1839 & Nemi – all were with me at once. How far is it right or wise to get rid of or crush the morbids altogether? – I can’t tell. Yet I have tried & do try to do so – tho’ I crush a good deal else with them – because I have a feeling that to encourage ‘morbids’ is wrong.

  Lear had had enough of grinding away at his easel. In early July he sent Fortescue another verse letter,
a parody of Arthur Clough’s mock-Byronic verse novel in letters, Amours de Voyage, with its failures and misunderstanding and pungent picture of Rome. Pinching Clough’s conversational tone and long hexameter, he wrote with deliberate bathos not of lost grandeur but of a borrowed handkerchief, of brushing his beard, breakfasting and reaching the station, ruefully thinking of Tennyson’s pension of £200 a year and going back to the rant of ‘Locksley Hall’:

  Bother all painting! I wish I’d 200 per annum!

  – Wouldn’t I sell all my colours and brushes and damnable messes!

  Over the world I would rove, North South East and West I would –

  Marrying a black girl at last, and slowly preparing to walk into Paradise!

  He signed off, ‘Yours with a lot of affection – the globular foolish Topographer.’ He was worrying about the future: money, loneliness, travel, his career as an artist. He had a long list of commissions for watercolours and oils: three Bassaes, two Campagnas, one each of Civitella, Interlaken, Zagori, Philae, Bethlehem, Beirut and Damascus, and many more. He had done rather well in the big exhibitions, and this year his large oil of Bassae was bought for the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge by a subscription raised among his patrons.

  Now he wanted to aim higher, to do a truly grand painting. At the time he was concerned about the civil war in the Lebanon, following the suppression of Maronite Christian rebels. Early July saw massacres in Damascus, and after reading about these in The Times, then waking from an afternoon sleep, Lear wrote, ‘Worked suddenly at a sketch for the cedars of Lebanon.’ Behind his tranquil scene of trees in high mountains lay rivers of blood.

  Lear read Colonel Charles Churchill’s account of his ten years in the Lebanon: ‘I am wretched about all those places,’ he sighed. Now he set about hunting for good cedars to paint on all his visits to friends. There were beautiful trees at Weybridge in Surrey, and Lear stayed nearby at Ockham Park with Frank’s elderly relation Dr Stephen Lushington, ‘a wonderfully fine cheerful good learned fine old man’. This was a very different household to Park House: Stephen Lushington, now in his late seventies, had been a passionate anti-slavery advocate and a lawyer, then judge in the ecclesiastical court – he had acted for Lady Byron in her separation from Byron, and had been counsel to Queen Caroline in her dispute with George IV. His twin sons, Vernon and Godfrey, were both fervent advocates of positivism (Vernon was also close to the Pre-Raphaelites: he introduced Rossetti to Edward Burne-Jones, and his daughters knew Holman Hunt as ‘Uncle Hunt’). Lear enjoyed being with this lively family, especially as they walked across to Painshill where they found ‘Great & fine Cedars’, coming back ‘with much fun – pun – laughter & talk of all kinds’.

  The Temple of Apollo at Bassae (c.1854–5)

  Eventually Lear found his trees in the grounds of the Oatlands Park Hotel near Weybridge. Oatlands was originally a royal palace built by Henry VIII, and Charles I, it was said, had planted the cedars in 1640. His room was light and airy, and he was woken by the songs of birds, which he fed from his window. He felt so well that one day, he said, ‘I was seized with incapacity to work, – & foolishness of high spirits. – So off I walked – all along to Hersham, & to Esher – (how beautiful is the home on a hill with hanging woods close to the village!)’ Occasionally he went up to London or friends came down to see him, but most of the time he worked on the Cedars and Masada. Both were huge: the canvas for Cedars was nine feet long and that for Masada was seven.

  He was at Oatlands in the bitter January of 1861, when the snow fell and the Thames froze. He met working men in tears, begging on the road, and walked with them to Chertsey to buy loaves of bread for their families, returning to feel guiltily lucky in his warm room. Then came a thaw, the sudden bursting of the cistern and the deluge of the ‘arm-broad torrents of water’. His own room was unscathed but the sawing and knocking of repair work drove him back to town. In February his huge Masada was exhibited at the British Institution, and a review in The Times called it the most noticeable painting there, ‘for truth and conscientious work’. Other reviews were not so kind, but Lear was pleased. Determined to get up to date with London life he marched off to the Royal Society to sit, at first patiently, to hear the ‘diabolical Professor Tindall rave on gases, figures & the deuce knows what. At the end of an hour I felt I was growing actually mad, – & flew the brutal torture. Meanwhile, I had seen AT come in & sit afar far off! –’ Next day he met Tennyson at dinner. As a change from the Oatlands quiet he enjoyed the smart London dinners, meeting Gladstone and other luminaries.

  *

  Things were going well. The MP Sir Francis Goldsmid, the first Jew to be called to the English bar, bought his painting of Civitella for 150 guineas, and people came in droves to his studio at Stratford Place. He sold two paintings straight away: ‘so I shall pay all my debts,’ he told Emily Tennyson, and ‘if there is any overplus, buy a pleasing tabby cat, or a guitar, or some currant jelly: – but I don’t think there will be anything over.’

  A nagging worry remained: Ann’s health. She was seventy in January and her eyes and the nerves in her face had been bad for some time: ‘– poor dear – her face is very sad: – & so is her loneliness at the dark end of life,’ Lear had written in 1858; ‘I soon made her laugh by talking of her not studying the Bible properly – yet it seems to me more sad this year than in any yet.’ Their sister Harriett died in Scotland in July 1859, and Ellen’s husband William Newsom in December. Lear had liked William, and sent constant messages via Ann: ‘My kind love to Ellen, & tell her to look sharp after you, for you are always full of mischief.’ One consolation was that Sarah planned to come back from New Zealand to send her granddaughter Emily to school, and to try to persuade her husband Charles to go back out with her. ‘She will bounce into your quiet room one day,’ he promised Ann, ‘clad in a New Zealand flax garment & otherwise wholly amazing!’ So she did, and Lear often found her in the house that Ann shared with two old friends in Stonefield Street, Islington.

  Whenever Lear was in London he took the bus to see her, or she came to his studio and chatted while he worked. One snowy day in mid-December 1860 she walked all the way, not trusting carriages on the slippery roads, and told him curious stories of life in Pentonville in 1800, before the family moved to Bowman’s Lodge – one basis for his claim that he knew everything that had happened before he was born. A few weeks later, on 1 February 1861, they spent another evening with Sarah:

  Ann – dear Ann so old! —

  & Sarah – quieter.

  This evening was passed really pleasantly. The talk of N. Zealand – & my nephew &c. &c. &c. all very straight & true & right.

  He was still lured by the thought of the South Pacific. At Oatlands he read the new edition of Herman Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, where savages are noble and Europeans are not. But Ann’s increasing weakness cancelled all thought of travel.

  In early March a painful swelling appeared on the back of Ann’s neck and she began vomiting. Within a week Lear was consulting the doctor daily. She was always pleased to see him: ‘what a blessing you are here! – not among the Arabs! … bless you my dear Edward! What a comfort you have been to [me] all your life!’ On 8 March he took her flowers: ‘her pain is dreadful. But she never swerves in the least iota from cheerfulness, affection – patience … O! O! O! O! O! O!’ Two days later she was still full of concern for them, sending Ellen to bed, asking the nurse if she had had supper, and ‘Edward my precious – take care you do not hurt your head against the bed iron.’

  Next day, 11 March, she slid into a coma. Lear went home, came back, walked the night streets, went up to the Nevills in Highbury, came back again. Unable to face seeing her die he paced the pavement outside. At noon he saw the blinds pulled across the windows. Ann died in her sleep, without pain.

  In his letters and diary Lear painted her end as a classic Victorian deathbed scene, selfless and sustained by faith. She had talked of dying, he said, ‘as a change to bring about s
uch great delight’ that she had to check herself from thinking about it: ‘She has always been indeed as near Heaven as it was possible to be.’ Sorting her possessions he found that she had kept his drawings since the age of five, and all his letters and the presents he had bought in Rome, in Sicilian markets, in the souks of Constantinople and Cairo. A week after her death, he told Fortescue: ‘I am all at sea & do not know my way an hour ahead. I shall be so terribly alone. Wandering about a little may do me some good perhaps.’ Emily invited him down, but he found the house full, with Tennyson’s brother Horatio and his family, and left upset. He drifted between friends – to Bath, Torquay, Cheltenham. Perhaps after all, he wrote, ‘the less one stays in places one likes the better – & so one escapes some pain. Therefore wander.’

  He did wander, always looking back. At Woolwich in mid-May, he remembered the Hornbys’ son, Phipps, killed in Montreal in 1848. ‘There, on as bright a day as in years gone, I crossed the Artillery ground. There Phipps was alive, Lina & Susan & all: & dear Lady Hornby. All things seemed gay & bustling as then: yet how much of the “then” exists no longer – in myself as elsewhere?’ At the end of the month, when Holman Hunt was going to Denmark, Lear gave him a letter of introduction to his beloved friend from the early days in Italy, Wilhelm Marstrand, asking him to write some day: ‘Mandate mi un lettera un giorno.’ Adding a cartoon of his overweight self, he ended, ‘Vostro affezionato sempre, Oduardo Lear’.