Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  He worked punishingly hard, doing sketches for the smaller Tyrants through the storms and rain before Christmas and in the sunlit days afterwards: ‘Paradise weather. Long as I have seen these mountains – yet their beauty today was so wonderful that I could fancy it new.’ It was an odd kind of work, calling up all his memories, yet with no aspirations to high art. The Tyrants progressed painfully slowly. He went over the pencil outlines in grey watercolour, then rubbed out the pencil. Then to paint them, he took a single colour and moved from one to another, adding first a pale blue wash all along the line, then red, then yellow, then grey details, before gradually building up the picture with stronger colours, emphasising the distance and then highlighting the foreground. This was the way that he had watched the colourists work at Hullmandel’s worshop, thirty years before.

  Having finished his first thirty Tyrants, he began the second batch. The work became a ‘terribly wearying incubus’, but having begun, he had to finish. On 10 February he did, working out that the whole set had taken him sixty-three days: ‘A singular spotch of energy’. Working in this way became a practice he returned to for years, whenever he needed money. Near the end of his life, Henry Strachey, the young brother-in-law of Lady Waldegrave’s niece Constance, watched him in his studio:

  He was then at work on a series of water-colours, and his method seemed to be to dip a brush into a large wide-necked bottle of water-colour, and when he had made one or two touches on the drawing, to carry it to the end of the room and put it on the floor, the performance being repeated until quite a row was arranged across the room.

  Once he had finished his sixty watercolours, Lear sent out notes to all he knew, hoping to sell them for a very modest price, then framed and hung them round his gallery walls, knocking in the nails himself. ‘There’s a proof that an old cove of 50 has some energy still!’

  He had doubts about the success of his gallery, feeling that photography was now a rival to topographical prints, something that had dawned on him rather slowly. Six years ago he had bought a ‘photographic machine’ himself, but thought of photographs only as an aide-memoire. ‘If I can come to use this mode of working,’ he had explained to Ann, ‘it will be of great service to me in copying plants, & in many things which distance, limited time, heat etc. would prevent.’ Photography had developed rapidly in the last twenty years and many amateurs were now keen: Lewis Carroll bought his first camera in the same spring as Lear, becoming a master of the new medium, processing as well as taking his pictures. Lear’s many friends now often pored over photographs, as well as prints, after dinner. But Lear was never happy with his experiments: two years after his first purchase he tried again, buying a new camera but selling it after a few months for £15 to Major Shakespear, who took many views of the island.

  *

  Despite opposition from his brother Lord Clermont, in which he sought Lear’s help as an intermediary, Fortescue married Lady Waldegrave on 20 January 1863. He wrote to ‘my dear Lear’ at midnight before his wedding day: ‘Today I am going to be married! I will not try to tell you what I feel tonight. How could I if I did try? I wonder that the world goes on as usual. I am almost overwhelmed.’ The thought of this wedding made Lear feel more alone, but he had new friends like the de Veres, for whose daughter Mary he drew a set of coloured birds, and he became fond of Giorgio’s family, paying for his sons’ schooling, worrying about scarlet fever and giving the boys their medicine. He was thrilled, too, when the Shelleys arrived in their yacht and Percy Shelley copied his setting of ‘O world! O life! O time!’

  On the last day of February 1863 the Tyrants were finished. That day a letter came telling him that Frank and Kate Lushington had a daughter, Gertrude, and asking Lear to be her godfather. He looked back with some amazement at the misery of his time on the island with Frank, more than five years ago. By contrast the current year, with its string of cloudless days, had been calm, despite, or perhaps because of his hard work. He had not felt so serene for many years, he thought, putting this down to better climate, better health, getting over Ann’s death and less anxiety about money, ‘but I believe most of all to the better state of the “demon”– or rather to his greater absence’. Even his rooms were perfect: ‘This home is a sort of Paradise this year: now & then the children below make a noise, but the most beautiful playing on the Piano of the Consul’s wife is indeed a blessing. The only drawback is that she plays so little, & that the Instrument is below my bed room.’ He had to give up his own piano as it was too expensive. This was a loss, but still, what could he do? He could not remember a happier winter.

  His big pictures on display in Stratford Place had still found no takers. The Tyrants, however, did the trick: he sold them for ten or twelve guineas and when he did his accounts in March he reckoned he was owed precisely £289 8s. He wrote tactful letters to those who had not paid. Then, wondering how else he could make money, he decided to write another book, on the Ionian islands.

  27: ‘FROM ISLAND UNTO ISLAND’

  At the end of March 1863 Lear packed a wooden crate with paintings, drawings and photographs. The crate went on the boat to England, but Lear did not. At the end of March he sold three more drawings, and worked out that he had ‘enough tin to pay rent and shut up house for 8 weeks or thereabouts’. Then he set out round the Ionian islands.

  He wanted to take this trip and make sketches for future paintings because the seven islands in British possession – Corfu, Paxos, Santa Maura, Cephalonia, Ithaca, Zante and Cerigo – were on the verge of being handed back to Greece. The islanders had asked for this for thirty years, in constant tension with the British establishment. ‘They hold us in utter contempt’, Frances McLellen had written on visiting Corfu in the 1830s, ‘and we look on them as removed but one degree from donkeys.’ Gladstone’s visit to hear their grievances in 1858 had changed little. In 1862, inspired by Garibaldi’s march to Rome and the founding of the Kingdom of Italy, the Greek military led a revolution and King Otto (the son of Ludwig of Bavaria) was deposed after thirty years’ rule. But Greece still seemed destined to be ruled by foreigners. When a plebiscite was held to choose the next king nearly thirty names appeared on the ballot paper, including Garibaldi and ‘an Orthodox king’, but the vote was overwhelmingly for Prince Alfred, Victoria’s second son, later Duke of Edinburgh.

  This was not to be, however, as a protocol of 1832 – the year Otto was crowned – had decreed that no prince of Britain, France or Russia could take the throne. Then it was offered to Edward Stanley, later fifteenth Earl of Derby, but he too turned it down, so Palmerston manoeuvred the choice towards the sixteen-year-old Prince William of Denmark. Adding a jovial P.S. to a letter to Edgar Drummond about money, Lear wrote, ‘You may not have heard (it is not generally known), that I refused the throne of Greece – King Lear the first – on account of the conduct of Goneril & Regan my daughters, wh. has disturbed me too much to allow of my attention to governing.’ It was a joke, but a bitter one, as Lear the impoverished artist set out on his travels:

  O reason not the need! Our basest beggars

  Are in the poorest thing superfluous.

  Allow not nature more than nature needs,

  Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.

  In Corfu a new row broke out when Storks, at Gladstone’s order, removed two long-serving Ionian judges from the Supreme Council, a step that provoked Frank Lushington to publish a furious pamphlet in their support. Lear saw the island world he knew disintegrating around him. He packed for his trip, not forgetting the vital flea-powder, scribbling a quick limerick before heading for the quiet limestone island of Paxos:

  There was an old person of Páxo,

  Which complained when the fleas bit his back so;

  But they gave him a chair

  And impelled him to swear,

  Which relieved that old person of Páxo.

  He sailed on the night of 4 April, looking back at Corfu under a bright full moon. Giorgio joined him in Paxos and for the next eight
weeks they travelled the islands.

  In each island Lear contacted the British Resident ministers, taking advantage of clean rooms, good meals and talk and books. He was welcomed everywhere and sketched every day, even Sundays, although the kindly Scottish Baron d’Everton on Santa Maura ‘was awfully Sabbatical, & don’t quite approve my sketching tomorrow evidently’.

  He had strong opinions on what he found. Paxos was quiet and provincial. Santa Maura, despite the sea of olives spreading out like a morning view by Claude or Turner, was ‘hideously dry’, inland ‘withered wrinkled, chasmy, rocky valley – gullies’. Initially Lear thought this island beautiful, but in the blazing heat he took against it, fearing fever around its lagoons and salt-pans. The next island, Ithaca, was grand and full of poetic resonance. Cerigo – the ancient Cythera – was gold with ripening corn; Zante was dazzling and elegant, but its people too violent; Cephalonia was beautiful but sombre, dominated by its Black Mountain. Everywhere he went he hunted for views to sketch, walking through shrublands of myrtle, arbutus and holm-oak, jotting reminders in his diary: ‘Great naked slabs of rock. Twisted olives. Asphodels & lambs.’ Once, when someone suggested going with him, Giorgio explained: ‘My master is like one hunting dog – he looks there & here, & does not go straight, – he is always looking about as he goes, & cannot attend to anything: – so you would only be like one log of wood – & bother would be good for nothing.’

  On Santa Maura he strode out to the rocky Cape Ducato, where Sappho leapt to her death, inspired by the dark grey cliffs, edged with foam, with vultures on a ridge and shards of pottery scattered round the ruined temples. At Metaxata, on Cephalonia, he searched for traces of a modern, not an ancient, poet:

  Lord Byron’s house was easily found – the small children knowing it. Every one I met said – ‘Yes – we know it, ἀλλὰ θέλεις ἀγωράσει Μέρλαις;’ [But would you like to buy some laces?] – to G.’s amusement. And at the house itself, (I was there in 1848 –) was nil save the white barrel earthen broken-handled jug – still there as then. —

  Cape Lefkada (Cape Ducato), from Views in the Seven Ionian Islands (1863)

  Poetry was mixed with politics, as it had been in Byron’s life, and Lear was very conscious of the imminent end of British rule. He saw the civil power in action when Storks sailed in to hear a case, accompanied by Evelyn Baring, ‘talkative & cheery’, and he saw the remnants of military power in the soldiers who wined and dined him: ‘good rough cheer, much beer & laughter’. As time went on he began to weary of the ‘smoke, noise, cards, wine, bother’ of the mess dinners that left him with terrible hangovers. Yet at fifty-one he felt fitter than he had for a long time. He walked all day, drinking at stone cisterns and eating picnics of bread, sausage, eggs, walnuts and almonds, stopping to sketch or write his journal by a path, on a rock or under a shady tree. For the past year he had been slowly reading though the Iliad in Greek and on Ithaca on 27 May 1863 he climbed high up to Korax, the crag of the raven, overlooking the spring of Arethusa, said to be where Odysseus met Eumaeus the swineherd when he returned to his island home:

  Drew till 10, & we are now sitting at the fountain below the ‘great rock;’ a most exquisite cool spot – (‘here are cool mosses deep,’) popple popple ever, with green moss & maidenhair fern. All around are gray savage rocks, clad with Prickly Oak – Ilex – Phyllorea, Πρινάρι [Kermes oak], & every sort of shrub & flower. The Squill leaves are grand, – the white & pink cistus lovely – salvia, mullein – what not. Blackbirds sing, pigeons flit, swallows shimmer, & as we came, a flock of goats was abundantly pretty. Κωραξ [Korax] is indeed a remarkable spot for beauty. The vast height & shut-in loneliness of the spot are very impressive, & as I drew from above opposite, the flight of wild pigeons to the little fountain, their wings shining in the morning sun, made the hollow gloom still grander.

  Whether this island was Homer’s Ithaca was disputed, but Lear was content to link the rock to the Odyssey and the cool mosses to Tennyson’s ‘Lotos Eaters’. His own drifting was a kind of lotus-eating, and sometimes he longed to live this way forever. In his diary he wrote,

  It seems to me that I have to choose between 2 extremes of affection for nature – towards outward nature – i.e. — English, or Southern. – The former, oak, ash, beech, – downs & cliffs, – old associations, – friends near at hand, & many comforts not to be got elsewhere. The latter – olive – vine – flowers – the ancient life of Greece, warmth & light, better health – greater novelty – & less expense in life. On the other side are, in England, cold, damp & dullness, – constant hurry & hustle, – cessation from all varied Topographical interest, extreme expenses: – & at the South are —— (cetera desunt).

  Cetera desunt, ‘the rest is missing’, no disadvantages at all …

  On 3 June he sailed back to Corfu through the islands ‘now so well-known’. The familiar life opened up to receive him – letters, an invitation from the palace, a gathering at the de Veres’, Evelyn Baring playing the piano. But the weather was ominous and a storm made the harbour a rolling sheet of foam. All the talk was of the end of their era: ‘The acceptance of the Gk. Throne seems fixed – & one’s impression is that the Islands will be ceded immediately: – & our occupation end by the end of the year.’

  *

  Two days later Lear took the boat to Italy. In Ancona, after struggling to undo the straps on all his luggage for a customs inspection in the blazing midday heat, he got sunstroke. He struggled north, but collapsed in Turin for ten days and arrived back in England giddy and low, worried that he had no news of Giorgio. People called to see him:

  But nothing removes my sadness. It is dreadful: & this life is impossible – staying – hard-working all day – awaiting for comers – never going out – hearing the dim roar of the distant streets – only seeing those who come for a few minutes, no freedom, no air, – no light, – no friendliness. Better remain abroad wholly. Worst of all is the mortal folly of supposing Giorgio ill or dead: – it has often happened so before, but still weighs senselessly on me – without a shadow of foundation.

  This penning out – & journals! The task seems too long.

  It was a classic collapse. Yet within a few days he was dining out – ‘very pleasant’, ‘utterly pleasant’ and, at Thomas Baring’s, ‘very very pleasant’ – and setting off to weekend house parties in country mansions. Eventually he retreated to Hastings to work. He had planned to write up his Ionian journal as he had for Albania, but this was too much and instead he decided to publish a large, elegant volume of twenty views with short introductions, like the second volume of his Illustrated Excursions in Italy. This, ‘being well done, if at all, would keep up my prestige as a draftsman of Mediterranean scenery’, he explained to Fortescue, ‘and would, moreover, hold up or pave a way to my more general smaller sized Topography of Greece, to be one day printed with my Journals’.

  To avoid the chore of lithography, Lear hoped to use photographs of black-and-white drawings, but although he tried drawing in pencil and charcoal and chalk, all the photographs were useless. He had to set about lithographs after all, complaining that he couldn’t even go out to see the mountains, as he had when he slaved over Tyrants in Corfu. During these weeks he visited Ann’s grave and went round Bowman’s Lodge: ‘As I stood in various parts of the large empty rooms, I could absolutely hear and see voices and persons, and could – (had I had a pen and ink and paper at the time,) have written out months and years of life nearly 50 years ago, exactly and positively.’ Feeling distinctly odd at this annihilation of time he went home to finish another lithograph.

  His twenty plates were dominated by Corfu, including the vista from Ascension; boats on the straits, their sails pale against the sea; the orange groves; the curving bay of Palaiokastritsa.

  Palaiokastritsa, Corfu, from Views in the Seven Ionian Islands (1863)

  For the other islands he chose views that summed up his most powerful memories: the precipices of Assos in Cephalonia;
the ‘gay white houses and tall and elegant campanili’ of Zante; the ‘cheerful calm’ of Gaio in Paxos. But he could never quite banish the absurd. Of Zante’s ‘plain of currant vines’, he noted:

  The old nursery rhyme –

  ‘If all the world were apple pie,

  And all the trees were bread and cheese’ –

  supposes a sort of Food-landscape hardly more remarkable than that presented by this vast green plain, which may be, in truth, called one unbroken continuance of future currant-dumplings and plum-puddings.

  Even the flower-stems of the aloes were ‘like asparagus-stalks on a gigantic scale’. The people amused him too. After the dark costumes of the northerly isles he warmed to the bright colours of Cerigo, where the women carried long sacks, slung from their shoulders, made of gorgeously coloured carpets. These sacks, open at one end, he explained, ‘are universally used as cradles by the peasant-mothers of Cerigo during their outdoor labour; and in each of them is a baby Cerigot – if not quiet, at least as closely swathed and imprisoned as any chrysalis’.

  By late October the book was finished, but then he had to write seeking subscriptions, another mighty labour: he never wanted to hold a pen again. Finally, Views in the Seven Ionian Islands appeared on 1 December, dedicated to Sir Henry Storks, the last High Commissioner. In a letter to Mrs Prescott, Lear drew himself as the ‘old man with a Book’, telling her he had left a copy for her at Waterloo station. All his friends liked it. ‘What a beautiful book!’ wrote Emily Tennyson on Christmas Eve. ‘We are so glad – One can see the violet shadows on the Olive groves and the hot mist from the waters.’