Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  Are God and Nature then at strife,

  That Nature lends such evil dreams?

  So careful of the type she seems,

  So careless of the single life.

  On 22 November 1859 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection sold out overnight. For Darwin’s supporters, the words ‘natural behaviour’ no longer had a fixed meaning, defined by a Creator. The book created rifts between those who accepted the complex, stumbling ‘progress’ of nature, with its leaps and dead ends, and those who clung to the belief that the world was ordained by God, in general and in detail. In June 1860 at the British Association of Science meeting, a ferocious argument took place between Darwin stalwarts, led by T. H. Huxley, and the believers in divine design, headed by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (‘Soapy Sam’): the ‘Darwinists’ triumphed but the row was far from over.

  In the 1860s, however, church circles were riven by different schisms, with the Anglican establishment gathering their skirts against critics. The Darwin furore was almost pushed aside by the row the following year over the mildly titled Essays and Reviews, whose authors, dubbed by opponents ‘The Seven against Christ’ (six were clergyman and one a lawyer and Egyptologist), spoke out roundly against belief in miracles and for a critical reading of the Bible. Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, argued that the scriptures should be read as a book like any other, taking account of context and the author’s intention. The Essays went through ten editions in two years, selling in equal numbers to the Origin of Species, and provoking equally furious attacks: a letter to The Times signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and twenty-five bishops threatened to pursue the authors through the ecclesiastical courts. The paper war raged for five years in around four hundred books and pamphlets.

  Lear was fascinated. ‘Apropos of the Essays & Reviews’, he noted in his diary the horror that Lord Stanley of Alderley had expressed to Fortescue:

  ‘What is to become of us if you do away with miracles?’ – said Lord S. of A. to C.F. – there is no faith – no nothing. ‘And how rash of Jowett! He might have been Bp.!’ – Poor fool Lord S. of A! How little you can understand the love of truth, which don’t dwell in such meagre buzzims as your’n.

  He disliked the extreme advocates on both sides, the High Churchmen and the Calvinists, and supported the liberal intellectual line taken by Jowett and his old friend Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, now a professor at Oxford and soon to be Dean of Westminster. When the Bishop of Salisbury prosecuted the vicar Rowland Williams (who had promoted the new German biblical criticism in the Essays) Lear wrote, ‘Should Williams be condemned, I think you will not be surprised by my openly becoming a Unitarian some day.’ In 1863, he was equally concerned about the attacks on the theologian John Colenso, who had been the first Anglican Bishop of Natal and had refused to accept that unbaptised Africans would go to hell: when the South African bishops tried to remove him from his post, he took the matter to the civil courts, and won the backing of the Privy Council. Colenso also wrote scrupulous, controversial studies of the Old Testament Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, arguing that they could not be taken as literal truth, and commenting that massacres presented as ‘works of God’ were as terrible as the Indian Mutiny: the excesses and inconsistencies threw doubts on the historical truth of the whole Bible.

  The Colenso affair enraged Lear: ‘A broader creed, – a better form of worship – the cessation of nonsense and curses – and the recognition of a new state of matters brought about by centuries, science, destiny or what not, – will assuredly be demanded and come to pass whether Bishops and priests welcome the changes or resist them.’ He was tired of the stupidity: ‘I begin to be vastly weary of hearing people talk nonsense, – unanswered – not because they are unanswerable but because they talk in pulpits,’ he wrote. Nonsense could only be answered by nonsense. Bishops should forbid people to come to church unless they answered two questions in the affirmative:

  1st. Do you believe in Balaam’s ass, Jonah’s whale, Elisha’s bears, and Lot’s wife?

  2nd. Do you believe that all mankind who do not believe in these creatures will be burned in everlasting fire, wholly without respect to their wisdom, charity or any other quality?

  In the early 1860s he was appalled by the ‘rage & horror’ of religious factions that he met in polite Hastings. At the time he was reading Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus, which argued that Christ’s life should be subject to historical and textual criticism and was amused that Renan’s title gave his fellow lodgers an impression of his piety, ‘little conceiving the opposition of that volume to their views & their topics of faith’. He stuck to his views. Ten years later, he felt he had been knocking his head against a wall with regard to Holman Hunt, as he told Thomas Woolner. Thinking that Hunt possessed ‘advanced or liberal principles’ in religious matters:

  I had spoken about the increase of rationalistic & antimiraculous thought, & hoped his future pictures would point or express such progress. Whereas I find I never made a greater mistake, & that on the contrary, he is becoming a literalist about all biblical lore, & has a horror of Darwin, Deutsch, & I suppose of Jowett & A Stanley … meantime, if he should paint Balaam’s Ass or Gideon’s Fleece it will not surprise me.

  He was alarmed, too, by the vogue for animal magnetism and spiritualism, and horrified when Fortescue and other intelligent people, including Dickens, Thackeray and Tennyson, flocked to the séances of the American medium Charles Forster, who claimed he was in touch with Virgil and Cervantes. In Lear’s limericks judgement is social and human. It may be erring and arbitrary but it is certainly far from divine.

  Lear protested almost too vehemently. The miracles he cited most – Balaam’s ass, Jonah’s whale, Elisha’s bears and Lot’s wife – touched his own fears, and his fascination with metamorphosis and change, speaking animals and vengeful justice. In particular Lear, who so feared drowning, recoiled at the horror of the whale carrying Jonah down into the depths: ‘The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.’

  But if his nonsense now feels full of undercurrents and psychic terrors, in the 1860s it just made children laugh, and carried adults back to the silliness of their youth. For a while, because of Lear, limericks were all the rage. Poets of Lear’s generation and the next had a go: Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, later Kipling, and even, allegedly, Tennyson. Making up a limerick seemed so easy, old or young, drunk or sober, and it proved a perfect form for pornographic jollity in clubs and mess rooms across the empire.

  A Book of Nonsense sold four thousand copies within six months but Routledge failed to pay and the Dalziels began to ask Lear to settle his account. In November 1862 he sold all the rights to Routledge for £200. He crowed with pleasure and relief all the way to the bank but George Routledge had the last laugh: the book sailed through twenty-four editions in Lear’s lifetime. In different forms, it has never been out of print.

  26: ‘MR LEAR THE ARTIST’

  When Frank Lushington’s friend Granville Bradley left his card at Farringford, Tennyson invited him over ‘to meet Lear, not the king but the artist’. This was what he wanted above all, not to be loved for his nonsense but to be taken seriously as ‘Mr Lear the artist’.

  The sketches he made on his travels – free, bold, alive – were not for sale; they were just the reference store, the library of his art. When he made them he was drawing only for himself, not to please others; his hand was sure and fast and the colour washes flowed over the lines like light itself, or the blue loom of storm. From these sketches Lear worked up his more finished studio watercolours and these specially commissioned versions of chosen scenes are often glowing, memorable works. His chief concern in the 1860s, however, was his oil painting. His oils – unlike his quick, spontaneous sketches – took an immense amount of time. He worked slowly, squaring up the original sketch so that it was easier to copy and drawing the design on his canvas in charcoal. Then he applied broad hal
f-tone washes, especially where the picture would be shaded, and began to work. He could do the sky in one session but the main picture and especially the foreground required detailed work, tiny strokes, obsessive finishing.

  Lear’s great hope now was for the two canvases he worked at so painfully at Oatlands, Cedars of Lebanon and Masada, the latter of which was exhibited at the British Institution in February 1861. He was planning a gallery of his own at Stratford Place but was not sure exactly where his work fitted in the current schools. He still moved in Pre-Raphaelite circles, but was not comfortable with all its stars, deciding that Millais was ‘all outside & froth’, vastly inferior to Hunt, ‘like a crafty aged French dancing-master, – & has neither depth nor softness in his character’. He disliked Effie Millais even more, ‘her catching at Aristocratic names, – her pity of bachelors – “it’s just so melancholy!” (as if one half of her 2 matrimonial ventures in life had turned out so happily!) – & her drawling stoniness’. If Millais could charge 450 guineas for Apple Blossoms, Lear thought, then Cedars, which he finished in May, should be worth half as much again. He would put it on sale for £735 or more, and not care if no one bought it. The painting has vanished today, but a copy painted for the MP Charles Roundell gives some idea of what this vast canvas was like.

  Cedars of Lebanon (1862)

  So Cedars was finished, but Lear worked on. By now he was tiring, resenting being tied to his easel: ‘No life is more shocking to me than the sitting motionless like a petrified gorilla as to my body & limbs hour after hour – my hand meanwhile peck peck pecking at billions of damnable little dots & lines, while my mind is fretting & fuming through every moment of the weary day’s work.’ Yet despite his comic rage, oil painting engrossed him: he liked the smell of the paint and linseed oil, the crumpled rags, the feel of the palette and brushes. (In Corfu that winter he was holding his palette at the window when his friend Colonel Bruce saluted as he marched by: returning the salute Lear got paint all over his hair and whiskers, ‘which I must now wash in Turpentine or shave off’.) He was rethinking his views on the painters he admired, astonished that he could once have liked Poussin and Salvator Rosa, when he now liked Titian and Holbein more. But this had little impact on his own style, which remained recognisably the same. He felt he was on the right course – when Cedars was shown in Liverpool in late summer it was ‘praised to the skies’, he told Fortescue, ‘the concluding paragraph being – “Mr. Lear has in this great picture not only achieved a professional success, but he has also conferred an obligation of the highest order on the whole Christian world” (!!!!!! – After that take care how you write to me.)’.

  Lear found few autumn delights in London, except the sensation of ‘a new spadmodic poet, by name Swinburne who seems to amaze small circles’. Then, to his surprise, at the end of his stay a Canadian relative by marriage arrived, Caroline Jones, the widow of his cousin Henry Chesmer, famous for her ‘wonderful eyes’ and now married to a Quebec politician. Lear liked her, and took her down to see Ellen in Leatherhead: ‘a sweetly kind creature is my cousin Caroline’. He was intrigued, too, by her lively, good-looking daughter Jessie, and her husband Major Foy, ‘a chubby magnified cherub looking pudgy man –but a gentleman, & kindly & hospitable’. All in all, he enjoyed this surprise family meeting. And the next week he was off. He planned to spend the winter of 1861–2 in Corfu, without Frank, who became engaged this autumn to Kate Morgan, an old friend whom Lear had met in Eastbourne with the family and who had supported them at the time of Henry’s death as ‘a help & a pleasant sight to every body’. Lear made no comment. They would be married that December.

  In Corfu, Lear thought of Emily Tennyson in an England full of ‘snow, peasoups rain hail coalfires plumpudding and childblains’, telling her that here, in glorious weather, ‘oranges are a halfpenny a piece … Owls are Plentiful. Flights of grey gregarious gaggling grisogonous geese adorn the silver shining surface of the softly sounding sea.’ He missed old friends like the Reids, Cortazzis and Edwards, not to mention Frank, and brooded over his struggles: ‘Yet looking back – even as far as 6 years old – (at the clown & circus at Highgate,) & then to all since – how can it be otherwise? The wonder is, things are as well as they are through constant fighting.’ But he liked the new governor, Sir Henry Storks, and found a lasting friend in his aide Evelyn Baring, Thomas Baring’s young cousin. Even better, in December Julia Goldsmid took rooms in Corfu and stayed for three months: Lear saw her often, dined with her alone when he could, and grieved when she left. But he made no mention of marriage.

  With all these distractions he was relatively calm when the post brought letters about Frank’s wedding, which he hoped would let some light into ‘the too close boskiness of Park House’. And another wedding was on the cards: Lady Waldegrave’s husband Mr Harcourt died, leaving her free to marry Fortescue – if she would have him. After months of suspense, during which she seemed to lean towards Fortescue’s boss at the Colonial Office, the Duke of Newcastle, she finally accepted his offer, making him feel ‘the luckiest dog in the world’.

  *

  On Easter Sunday 1862 Lear sat on the cliffs at Palaiokastritsa, where he had sailed with Frank in Midge, in perfect quiet ‘excepting only a dim hum of myriad ripples 500 feet below me, all round the giant rocks which rise perpendicularly from the sea: – which sea, perfectly calm and blue, stretches right out westward unbrokenly to the sky, cloudless that, save a streak of lilac cloud on the horizon’. He was fifty that May, and this island seemed the best place to be.

  He came back to London in early June to a round of invitations and heavy eating and drinking (‘o dear dear these dinners! – More amendments & resolves’). The diversions were constant, from gossip that Ruskin was going mad to demands that he fill in his tax forms, from concerts with the Fairbairns to weekend trips to the country. One that he particularly enjoyed was his stay with Stephen Lushington at Ockham, where he met Mrs Gaskell and two of her daughters and spent a merry evening singing. He was not, however, so happy about his paintings. He had arranged for Cedars of Lebanon to be sent to the exhibition in South Kensington in May and was distressed to find that his pictures were hung too high, blaming this on the prejudice of the Royal Academicians against painters outside their group. Then he read a lukewarm review in The Times by Frank Lushington’s friend and fellow Apostle, the powerful critic Tom Taylor, damning naturalistic painters influenced by ‘Pre-Raffaelites’, like John Brett, who merely mirrored the external scene, and adding: ‘Mr Lear must be on his guard against descending to the same merely reflective function, though at the height at which his large landscape of “Corfu” (381) and the “Cedars of Lebanon” (382) are hung it is impossible to say if the remarks that we have applied to Mr Brett be applicable to him.’ And that was all.

  This summer and autumn, feeling bleak, Lear painted two oils linked to Tennyson’s poem ‘You ask me, why’. Commissioned by one of Fortescue’s close friends, Henry Grenfell, MP for Stoke on Trent, the pair were complete contrasts, one being of Philae, already associated in his mind with the ‘palms and temples of the South’, and the other of Beachy Head, for the line ‘Between the steep cliff and the coming wave’ from ‘Guinevere’. (Originally Lear had thought, appropriately, that he would illustrate ‘my spirits falter in the mist’.) Sketching there in October, he groaned to Chichester Fortescue of the painful five-mile walk to get the ‘vastly fine view he wanted’. The result, a study in black and white and silver, with the cliffs looming up like icebergs and only a streak of green on the mirror-like sea, had a chilly power, turning the Sussex coast into an Arctic drama.

  As Lear sketched, he was not thinking of the poem’s celebration of Britain’s freedom of speech and good governance, but of the opening lines:

  Beachy Head (1862)

  You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease,

  Within this region I subsist,

  Whose spirits falter in the mist,

  And languish for the purple seas.

  Hi
s own spirits were faltering while he sketched these cliffs, the suicide’s leap. He worried about the condemnation of Cedars, first by the Academicians who hung it so high and secondly in Taylor’s ‘coldblooded criticism’: ‘What to do with the Cedars I do not know,’ he wrote drily. ‘Probably make a great coat of them.’ Lear’s hopes of a grand sale had faded: he couldn’t even think how to pay for his frames, his colours and his rent. Perhaps he should slash his prices by half? He was almost broke, but within weeks the sale of his rights in the Nonsense to Routledge saved him, at least briefly. And once he had funds, he sailed off again to Corfu.

  If he couldn’t sell large pictures why not try small ones to pay the bills? Three days after he arrived in Corfu he ‘began to draw outlines of drawings “to be made –” – to the amount of 30!!!!!!!’ Taking sixty sketches from his many travels, he made thirty small mounts and thirty larger. He stuck his paper onto these and for the next two days made thirty outlines a day, giving each one a number: within a fortnight he was calling these his ‘Tyrants’, writing to Winsor & Newton and ordering sixty frames from Foord’s.