Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  Venice, 3.30 p.m., 18 November 1865

  Lear owed his stay to Lady W. and he wrote to her exuberantly when he saw in The Times that Fortescue was now Chief Secretary for Ireland, appointed by Lord John Russell, Prime Minister after Palmerston’s sudden death:

  being of an undiplomatic & demonstrative nature in matters that give me pleasure, I threw the paper up into the air & jumped aloft myself – ending by taking a small fried whiting out of the plate before me & waving it round my foolish head triumphantly till the tail came off & the body and head flew bounce over to the other side of the table d’hôte room. Then only did I perceive that I was not alone, but that a party was at Bkft in a recess. Happily for me they were not English, & when I made an apology saying I had suddenly seen some good news of a friend of mine – these amiable Italians said – ‘Bravissimo Signore! Ci rallegriamo anche noi! – se avessimo anche noi piccoli pesce li butteremo di quâ e la per la camera in simpatico con voi! – So we ended by all screaming with laughter.

  It was a joyful dismemberment – the Italian family, equally delighted, wishing they too had little fish to throw across the room. But Lear did worry about Fortescue taking the position when Fenian attacks were on the rise. ‘Read papers: Irish news looks really bad,’ he noted in January 1866.

  *

  When he read the reports of Ireland Lear was in Malta. He had gone there largely to see Evelyn Baring and Sir Henry Storks, who had been governor there since 1864, and was furious to find that they had left two days earlier, to work on the commission on an uprising in Jamaica. ‘No greater bore could have occurred,’ he wrote in large scrawls with lines of exclamation marks. Resigned to the loss of ‘Sir Storky’, he took a room in a house across the bay from Valletta. He had toothache, his epilepsy was bad and the weather turned wild: ‘Wonderfully shrilly-howly is the winds tonight, & how booming the sea!!!!!! … what a howling!!!!!!!’

  Lear had always felt ambivalent about Malta. Stopping there briefly nearly twenty years before he had told Ann that he could never live there: ‘there is hardly a bit of green in the whole island – a hot sandstone, wall, & bright white houses are all you can see from the highest places … the street scenery – so white, so bright, so clean, so balconied, is really beautiful, but there the charm ends.’ Now, In January 1866 he complained that it was hard to capture the ‘sparklingness’ of the towns and the bareness of the landscape. But he made superb sketches, pure in line against a tawny wash. The highlight of his stay was his visit to Gozo, where the scenery, he told Lady W., ‘may truly be called pomskizillious and gromphibberous, being as no words can describe its magnificence’. This was the legendary home of Calypso, who had detained Odysseus for years, and Lear played with her name in a single-sentence poem he sent to Henry Luard, the grandson of his early mentor Prideaux John Selby. ‘Gozo my child’, it began, ‘is the isle of Calypso’, the nymph who:

  … every morn in the sea did dip so

  Whereon Ulysses seeing her strip so

  And all her beautiful ringlets drip so

  From her beautiful head to her beautiful hipso

  Because her curls she never would clip so

  – Took to staying away from his ship so …

  It seemed doubtful that any Calypso-like nymph would ever hold Lear in thrall. One evening, after writing letters and paying calls, he watched the full moon rise and scribbled a sketch in his diary with lines from Tennyson’s ‘The Palace of Art’, slightly misquoted as usual:

  One seemed all dark and red – a tract of sand

  With someone pacing there alone

  Who pac’d for ever in a glimm’ring land

  Lit by a large low moon.

  ‘It was most beautiful,’ he wrote, ‘the brilliance of the night, & its silence.’

  29: ‘THE “MARRIAGE” PHANTASY’

  There was an Old Person of Harrow,

  Who bought a mahogany barrow;

  For he said to his wife, ‘You’re the love of my life!

  And I’ll wheel you all day in this barrow!’

  Lear knew that there was an alternative to his wandering – to settle down, marry, have a family. His obsession with this idea, and his endless dithering, ruled his life in the mid-1860s, as his longing for Frank had dominated it ten years before. He felt out of step. Even in paintings he was faced with idealised visions of family life: Holman Hunt was now working laboriously, cursing the while, on The Children’s Holiday for Thomas Fairbairn, literally moving the chair, table, damask table-cloth, dog, silver tea-urn and five plump children into the woods of their Sussex estate, and painting a surprised-looking Allison Fairbairn in a silver crinoline pouring the tea.

  Lushington and Fortescue had both married and at the end of this year Hunt married Fanny Waugh (Thomas Woolner had proposed to her the year before, and when she turned him down he married her sister Alice). ‘Every marriage of people I care about rather seems to leave one on the bleak shore alone,’ Lear confessed to Fortescue. As if in response, he had concocted his own dream of married life. The person he fixed on was Augusta Bethell, daughter of the Lord Chancellor, Richard Bethell, Lord Westbury.

  Lear had known the family since the 1830s. He dined with them often in London and stayed at Hackwood, their estate near Basingstoke. But the friendship was not always congenial. As Lord Chancellor, Westbury was a ruthless reformer, favouring statute over the old common law. He led the Privy Council decision against the bishops’ sacking of Rowland Williams, which pleased Lear – but he was sarcastic, boastful and self-centred, took a mistress openly and made his wife Ellinor ill and unhappy, as she lamented dolefully when he was out of earshot. Long ago, in 1858, Lear had suffered an intolerable evening showing them his Palestine sketches:

  Tittering & laughing & bore – and Sir R talking Cicero & D Roberts – but no lifelike care for Palestine itself, tho’ they asked to see views of it … At 11 I came away – I confess – very angry: but when I think of the life of poor Lady B. & the force she has to put on herself, – I do not wonder at her talking nonsense “Do you carry that large box always with you –” – &c

  The Bethells set him on edge. A year later a real row had developed at dinner over Tennyson’s ‘Two Voices’, in which one voice urges the other to suicide:

  A still small voice spake unto me,

  ‘Thou are so full of misery,

  Were it not better not to be?’

  This provoked ‘a frightful discussion … wherein I lost my temper horridly’, wrote Lear. And when the topic moved to religion, Sir Richard lost his temper too: ‘he became vastly angry & blew me up – “Lear, if you grow so testy – no one will converse with you Lear! –” “You are quite a breed” on which he was perfectly right – only on the argument he was wholly wrong. Frightful indignation & irritation.’

  They were worlds apart, and Westbury had no sympathy with Lear’s humour:

  He – Speaking of ‘undique sequences’ – ‘sequax,’ – and saying ‘let us remember the line and go and look for a translation,’ quoth the landscape painter in a fit of absurdity, ‘My Lord, I can remember it quite easily by thinking of wild ducks.’

  ‘How of wild ducks, Lear?’ said the Lord C. –

  ‘Because they are sea-quacks,’ said I.

  ‘Lear,’ said his Lordship, ‘I abominate the forcible introduction of ridiculous images calculated to distract the mind from what it is contemplating.’

  At the time Lear found this funny. But if his relationship with her father was so difficult, why did Lear fix on Gussie? He had known her since her childhood, and had watched the other children grow up; the boys Slingsby, Richard and Walter, and Emma, Gussie’s older sister. Emma was now married to Mansfield Parkyns, famous for his book on travels in Nubia and Abyssinia in the 1840s, and a good amateur artist; eventually they had eight daughters. By contrast, Gussie was the invaluable daughter at home. She was round and sweet-faced, and easy to talk to, an echo of Emily Tennyson. Lear felt sorry for her, bullied as she was by her squabbling, �
��disjointed’ family. When she was in her late teens he thought of her as ‘a dear good true little girl, – almost faultless’.

  In fact Gussie was independent and clever, and by the early 1860s she had already published collections of folk tales, translations of works from Spain and Norway, and several stories ‘for young people’. These were sentimental and moral, in good mid-Victorian vein, but the dialogue was lively and feeling intense, sometimes violent. In Maud Latimer, 1863, the heroine is a disobedient tomboy, given to storms and passions of tears, who accidentally blinds her sweet, golden-haired sister by pushing her near the fire so that her dress goes up in flames. Maud runs away to London and although she is saved by the kindness of strangers (and her sister, of course recovers), her wilfulness remains appealing – gripping reading for young girls.

  So Gussie was no ‘angel in the house’, as Lear began to see her, after Coventry Patmore’s popular poem. Yet as he listened to her play the piano, worried about her health and eyesight and walked with her under the trees in Hackwood’s park, he saw himself as a knight errant who could rescue her from her miserable home, as he had hoped to save Frank from Park House. On the other hand there was plenty against such a marriage. In 1862, Lear was fifty and Gussie twenty-four. He was not well off and knew his questionable status as a ‘dirty landscape painter’. His epilepsy made him worry about living closely with someone, and he feared it might be passed on to children. And he dreaded giving up his work and travel. Most of all, he had never really got over Frank. When he and Frank walked home together after a jolly, ‘anarchic’ dinner in 1861 with the elderly Stephen Lushington Lear felt he was boring Frank and so ‘cut away’. However, he wrote, ‘it is best as it is. For a fanatical-frantic caring overmuch for those who care little for us, is a miserable folly. And after all ordinary natural pride revolts at selfish coldness.’ He was on the rebound. It was the idea of marriage, not the woman, that he was in love with.

  Augusta Bethell

  In Lear’s imagination and childhood memories marriage held as many threats as joys. In his limericks and poems, terror swirls around it. Judging by the grin on this wife’s face, can ‘mistake’ be the right word?

  There was an Old Man of Peru,

  Who watched his wife making a stew;

  But once by mistake, in a stove she did bake,

  That unfortunate Man of Peru.

  The diminutive, smiling husband is unfortunate indeed. But both husband and wife can suffer, and sometimes in Lear’s verse the institution of marriage itself appears as a monster of nature, a walking, stalking, devouring, gnawing mistake.

  There was an Old Person of Hyde,

  Who walked by the shore with his bride,

  Till a crab who came near fill’d their bosoms with fear,

  And they said, ‘Would we’d never left Hyde!’

  In 1861, lonely after Ann’s death, Lear had wondered, ‘Would one have been as happy as one fancies if one had been married & had had children?’ The past conditionals suggest a dream already abandoned, but marriage was still on his mind when he went down to Hackwood in June the following year and walked with ‘dear little Gussie’ in the woods. The family clearly knew something was up: every day they placed him next to Gussie at dinner and her father was determinedly agreeable, asking Lear to sing, walking with him and gossiping about the Cabinet and Corfu. The sun shone, the woods were green, the talk was good: there were tours round the old kitchen garden with the family, with Gussie’s brother Wally pushing the now frail Lady Westbury in her bath chair. ‘As pleasant a day as passed for many years,’ Lear wrote on the last evening of his visit. But nothing was said.

  The year passed. He returned to Corfu, sailed around the Ionian isles and spent his London summer working on his Views. But in the autumn of 1863 the dithering dance with Gussie was performed again, with the same tentative approach and recoil. Lady Westbury had died in March and Gussie was still grieving, hardly able to talk through her tears. Lear was as amenable as he could be, playing with Emma’s six children, walking with Gussie’s father and brothers in the woods, ‘perhaps as lovely & grand a specimen of English lofty home scenery as can exist’, singing after dinner and exchanging risqué stories with the men in the smoking room. But the issue went no further. ‘A pleasant, but very sad visit. What will be the end of this odious matter?’

  In early July 1864 he was at Hackwood once again, steeling himself to come to the point. Then, as always, he retreated: after a walk with Emma, who stressed the desolation of Gussie’s life, he was on the point of fleeing. ‘This visit will I fear be my last here. Poor Gussie! And how to decide? If her life is sad, – united to mine would it be less so? Or rather – would it not be more?’ Next morning he was still in a whirl: ‘The risk of trying the marriage – the marriage itself so gt. a risk of making 2 people more unhappy than before?’ His reasoning now was that it was his duty to retreat to save Gussie from misery. This was a genuine fear as well as an excuse and a self-deception. He knew that she would be happy to be married, smiling like the woman wheeled in the barrow. This was a stock figure of old rhymes. But the earliest of such images from medieval manuscripts show the barrow full of souls being carted to Hell. Would he be wheeling a smiling Gussie into torment, or boxing into a life-in-death state from which there was no escape?

  There was an Old Man on some rocks,

  Who shut his wife up in a box;

  When she said, ‘Let me out,’ he exclaimed, ‘Without doubt,

  You will pass all your life in that box.’

  Lear seemed to welcome an excuse to stand back. In October, when Gussie’s brother postponed a family dinner because Emma Parkyns was ill, he wrote to say he could not dine with them at all. ‘Best so’, he wrote in his diary, ‘for, even at this late hour of life, the ridiculous flames of nature burn: best put out at once – hard as it is – over & over again, to welcome darkness.’ Yet he could not quite put out the flames. He was back at Hackwood a year later, but it was a bad time to visit. That summer Gussie’s father Lord Westbury had been embroiled in scandal after scandal. First he misled a House of Lords Committee about the dismissal of a fraudulent clerk, giving the vacant position to his own son Slingsby. Then there was a long court case in which he was held to have used undue influence on behalf of another son, Richard, an undischarged bankrupt. Westbury faced a vote of censure and in the week that Lear arrived, he was forced to give up the seals of office as Lord Chancellor. He was furious and humiliated, talking bombastically, hinting of further hidden scandals, boasting of his Italian mistress, Tizzy, and the estates he would gain in Italy. ‘What a conversation!’ thought Lear:

  Was there ever such a man as this! … Alas! – I now see truly that all said of him is only too lenient –: the study of law – making black white – seems to have left him no knowledge of right or wrong. If not for Gussie’s sake – this is the last walk I will ever take with him.

  The family’s affairs were awful ‘& all seem in a trap – a snare – ruin’. In September he found things just as bad and clung to his self-deceiving belief that he must make a noble sacrifice. When Gussie played the piano: ‘for a moment one’s heart returned. But no. It would not do. Better suffer alone, than cause suffering in others.’

  ‘And so ends Hackwood for ever’, Lear wrote as he left. Not so. Six months later, in April 1866, he stopped at Corfu on his way back from Malta. Stunned afresh by the glory of the island, he walked up to Ascension and lay on a leafy platform under the olives, surrounded by wild flowers, looking down on the sea, ‘one blue calm sheet of light’. It was, he said, ‘A regular intoxication of beauty! … Can I give no idea of this Paradise island to others? Would Gussie like to live here?’

  Two days later he sent her a long letter, ‘but much beside the mark; also to Emily Tennyson – much more besider: but it is not possible to write as one would’. What Gussie herself felt remains a mystery.

  On his first day back in London, he hung up his drawings, went to see Frank Lushington, who was
out, and then headed straight to the Bethells at Lancaster Gate. Within a week he was there again, ‘& passed a pleasant evening. Pleasant did I say? This – the last dream – to burst in a bubble or flourish into reality – is indeed a strange matter.’ At dinner he sat next to Gussie, but later, beneath his diagram of the seating plan he wrote some lines from Maud:

  Like a sudden spark

  Struck vainly in the night

  And back returns the dark –

  With no more hope of light.

  Alas. The building seems to fade away & the dream to flit.

  Next day, he wrote,

  the ‘marriage’ phantasy ‘will not let me be’ – yet seems an intangible myth. To think of it no more, is to resolve on all the rest of life being passed thus – alone – & year by year getting more weary: – to envisage it, is to pursue a thread leading to doubt & perhaps more positive misery, & ‘Meanwhile’ – the ‘ignoble toil’ of these worrying drawings goes on – (as does the necessity of £200 a year rent).