by Jenny Uglow
He consulted Lady W. and Fortescue, who thought he should only marry if she brought him a solid £300 a year. Amid the late June thunderstorms he developed a tingling skin irritation and although Gussie sent a soothing letter, he was wretched. He visited Fortescue in the Gothic fantasy of Strawberry Hill, where he was trying to recreate the library of its builder, Horace Walpole. But among the crowd here Lear decided that he was not keen on English summer life, ‘& do greatly incline to shut up Stratford Place, & take my chances of wandering for some years’.
When Gussie visited his studio in September it was a pain rather than a pleasure to them both: ‘For the gulf is not to be passed. Unhappiness only could follow if it were otherwise. Yet it seems hard too, & were I 10 years younger I would act differently.’ From now on, he was ‘not at home’ to her sister Emma, dreading reopening of the subject. Just as the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò would flee from his rejection by Lady Jingly Jones, so Lear bolted back to the travelling life:
Down the slippery slopes of Myrtle,
Where the early pumpkins blow,
To the calm and silent sea
Fled the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
There, beyond the Bay of Gurtle,
Lay a large and lively Turtle: –
‘You’re the Cove,’ he said, ‘for me;
On your back beyond the sea,
Turtle, you shall carry me!’
In December 1866 Lear was on his way to Egypt. He could not follow Bates up the Amazon, but he could follow Speke and Mansfield Parkyns up the Nile. This was what he could not give up, the liberty to travel, to paint, to drift in the ‘sunlight dozy Lotos land’. In these years of indecision he wrote ‘The Duck and the Kangaroo’. Problems were easier to solve in terms of animals and birds, even different in species, mismatched in size and uncertain in gender. The little duck longs to bound round the world escaping its dull life – ‘a bore in this stagnant pond’ – and easily deals with the Kangaroo’s main objection, its unpleasantly cold, wet feet.
Said the Duck, ‘As I sate on the rocks,
I have thought over that completely,
And I bought four pairs of worsted socks
Which fit my web-feet neatly.
And to keep out the cold I’ve bought a cloak,
And every day a cigar I’ll smoke,
All to follow my own dear true
Love of a Kangaroo.
Said the Kangaroo, ‘I’m ready!
All in the moonlight pale;
But to balance me well, dear Duck, sit steady!
And quite at the end of my tail!’
So away they went with a hop and a bound,
And they hopped the whole world three times round;
And who so happy, – O who,
As the Duck and the Kangaroo.
The person Lear was actually hopping round the world with was Giorgio Kokali. Giorgio was no duck (though he did wear a cloak and smoke cigars). If questioned, Lear simply said that Giorgio was ‘a faithful serving man’. He was proud of him, fascinated by his Suliot past and intrigued by his large and often errant family. In some ways he treated Giorgio like a child, teaching him to read and write, putting up with his sulks, worrying if he was ill. He recorded his odd sayings and retailed them to friends: the way he asked in Santa Maura, ‘“if that Lady” – meaning Sappho – meant to drown herself, why did she take the trouble to go quite to the end of the promontory, when there were so many points nearer – unless indeed she came in a boat to the point?’ Or in Crete, when a Turkish girl asked Giorgio why he didn’t draw too: ‘Don’t you see, I am too short?’ Giorgio took up Lear’s interests, bug-hunting and collecting plants, and commenting on views and artists, and like Lear he was someone that children felt safe with: ‘totally patient and good; all the children going to him in swarms by instinct’.
Yet Lear himself seemed often like a child. Giorgio cooked for him, cared for him, rushed to bring a cloak if it was cold, called him at four in the morning, scoured houses they were staying in for a good chamberpot. When they were apart, Lear looked anxiously for his letters. Life with Giorgio did not assuage the marriage fantasy, but it was a comfort, and a partial consolation.
30: ‘GRADUALLY EXTINGUIFIED’
There was an Old Man of Boulak,
Who sate on a Crocodile’s back;
But they said, ‘Tow’rds the night, he may probably bite,
Which might vex you, Old Man of Boulak!’
In the autumn of 1866, turning his back on Gussie, Lear felt impatient with Britain as a whole: people, politics, religion. ‘Seriously, it does seem to me’, he wrote to Henry Bruce, ‘that those who have voices should use them now & then … tho’ it is very likely that I am wrong & talking nonsense: those conditions not unfrequently occur to painters & poets & parrots, as well as priests.’ The list of those who speak ‘nonsense’ was suggestive – painters, poets, parrots and priests. An old lithographer friend, Thomas McLean, who had printed Lear’s Views in Rome and Illustrated Excursions, and his books of nonsense, now had a gallery in the Haymarket and offered to exhibit his new Tyrants. He rushed to finish them, slashed the prices of his big pictures and persuaded Edgar Drummond to buy his Beirut. Then, without even saying goodbye to his closest friends, he took the boat to Boulogne, making a note in his diary of the bottles left behind: ‘Claret 8, Marsala 7, Sherry 4’. From Marseilles he explained to Fortescue that he had left abruptly because he was fed up with the smoke and noise and cold. England was fine for the wealthy, but ‘an accursed place for those who have known liberty and have seen God’s daylight daily in other countries’. Some day, he thought, he would quit the country altogether, ‘even if I turn Mussulman & settle in Timbuctoo’.
He did not reach Timbuctoo. After a short stay in Marseilles, eyeing his companions at the table d’hôte – ‘violent lively American damsel on the right’ – Lear took the boat to Alexandria. On the way the boat stopped briefly in Malta, where he looked up friends and dined with John Peel, who had been Storks’s Assistant Military Secretary. Peel told his younger brother about their boozy evening. Lear, he said, ‘was as usual somewhat melancholy, and foretold the death of his remaining relatives, several in number and his own total blindness and impecuniosity like Micawber; however he brightened up, and concealed a good deal of liquor about his person, he is now up the Nile, and I owe him a letter’.
Giorgio – always ready to make such long-distance treks to join Lear – met him in Cairo. As his planned trip was alarmingly expensive, Lear borrowed from friends, a rash request, perilous to friendship, but the money came in. Once again the country entranced him: ‘O sugar canes! O camels! O Egypt!’ – but the whole trip was to fill him with visions of past glory lost, greatness extinguished. There were personal losses too: in Cairo, Lear heard of the death of Holman Hunt’s wife Fanny, and wept for his friend, then shook off this sadness and joined the Nile boat on 31 December. Their journey up river was swift: Lear rose at dawn and stayed on deck, sketching the life on the river and the banks, where modern agriculture competed with temples and palms, ‘a steam working engine, which grunts & whistles as it might do at King’s Cross’. To his joy there were numberless birds, storks and pelicans, ducks and herons, ibis and pigeons – ‘The myriads of pigeons! & when they fly, their shadows on the ground!’ But all the time he felt the weight of the long-extinct civilisations, the great temples empty of all except swarms of wild bees, ‘& where one peeps into those dark death-silent halls of columns – a terror pervades the heart & head’.
Lear in Egypt, seated in the centre
He had promised his Montreal cousin Caroline Jones to meet up with her son Archie, who was touring the Mediterranean and planned to join the boat at Luxor. Lear wrote doubtfully before he set out: ‘I hope to goodness he hasn’t got a wooden leg, or stammer, or squints – I have never seen him, only out of affection for his mother I must stick to him.’ When he arrived, Archie seemed amiable but his charm soon grew thin: he preferred shopping in the bazaars to exploring templ
es, which he said smelt awful; he whistled, drummed his fingers, scratched his name on temple walls. Then he fell ill and was moodily homesick. Having looked forward to the company, Lear thought, really, it was better to travel alone.
Archie was not the only transatlantic tourist. ‘You can’t imagine the extent of the American element in travel here!’ Lear exclaimed to Lady W. Americans to English were twenty-five to one, and they went about in ‘dozens and scores’: one party refused to visit a temple on a Sunday because it was a ‘heathen church’, yet went without a murmur to see poor women, clad in nothing but necklaces and nose-rings, who were only made to dance by threats and large bribes. The English could unnerve him too, like the eccentric Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, who had settled in Luxor five years before, who gossiped of the Prinseps family and G. F. Watts and took him round the English cemetery. He was impressed, but her habit of calling attention to the ‘“lovely rounded muscles and velvet skin” of naked men nearby – & absolutely naked cox and all’, were, he decided, ‘not what I like to admire in an Englishwoman’. There was a violence, as well as superiority, in the American and European gaze.
The river itself was peaceful, beyond corruption. The chief glory was the colour, changing from dawn to dusk.
Near Gau el Kebir, 6 p.m., 9 January 1867
At Luxor, when the sun set, the colours were ‘perfectly astonishing … absolute Cadmium & Lemon light, with purple shades on the water’s edge’. Lear felt this intensely at Philae (where Archie stunned him by saying he had seen it all in three hours): ‘I have not made enough of the dark gray & black-sooted granite rox in the water – always too red & yellow in my drawing … & one feels acutely how little one has done to represent such beauty.’ He never forgot the rocks and colours and birds of the Nile, the black storks poised on one leg, the lovely ibis, the watchful herons, and the pelicans, ‘careless, foolish’, and he celebrated them all in the opening to his later song, ‘The Pelican Chorus’:
We live on the Nile. The Nile we love.
By night we sleep on the cliffs above;
By day we fish, and at eve we stand
On long bare islands of yellow sand.
And when the sun sinks slowly down
And the great rock walls grow dark and brown,
When the purple river rolls fast and dim
And the Ivory Ibis starlike skim,
Wing to wing we dance around, –
Stamping our feet with a flumpy sound, –
Opening our mouths as Pelicans ought,
And this is the song we nightly snort: –
Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee!
We think no Birds so happy as we!
Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill!
We think so then, and we thought so still.
On the Nile, time and tenses turned upside down. In idle moments Lear read Herodotus; if the dinners were poor he read Darwin to console himself. Ancient history and natural history, extinction and evolution, ran side by side. Every day brought a welter of contrasts and surprises. Near Ibreem, at ten in the morning on 2 February 1867, one of the sailors close by was playing a violin ‘to the utmost perfection’:
no one could tell it was not a fiddle being tuned by a good performer – sliding into half scales & the resemblance is so absurd I am constantly grinning. How quiet is this river scene! One boat has been seen today, & that on the shore. 11. Reach Ibreem which on all sides is really fine, & I hope to get a good drawing of it: a sort of River Masada. But interest is divided between this & the Crocodile sandspit, where are some of these beasts – Castle – Crocodile – Crocodile – Castle – one don’t know which way to look. Ibreem is past – & at 11.30 – lo! A vast Crocodile, at which G. fires & I fancy the second ball hit the brute, who walloped into the Nile. But then his head came up, tho he was a long time in getting to the sand again.
Their furthest point, Wadi Halfa, seemed to Lear the essence of Nubian scenery. The desert awed him with its utter loneliness and vast expanse of sand: a ‘sad, stern, uncompromising landscape – dark ashy purple lines of hills, – piles of granite rocks – fringes of palm – & ever and anon astonishing ruins of oldest Temples: above all wonderful Abu Simbel, which took my breath away’. When he turned a corner at Abu Simbel and suddenly saw the Rameses heads, he was so moved that he could not draw at all; his sketch of the heads is marked ‘partly memory’. Overawed by the solitude and the weight of history he walked over the ‘deep sinking gold apricot sand’, and ventured inside the great temple, creeping on all fours down the slope between the columns into the darkness.
Abu Simbel, 9 February 1867
Lear and Giorgio were back in Cairo in early March, having dropped Archie at Luxor. He had planned to go on a second journey, to Gaza and Jerusalem and on to Tyre and Sidon, but by the time they reached Jerusalem, swamped by Easter pilgrims, he was so tired that he turned round, returned to Alexandria and waited for a boat to Europe.
It was too early for Lear to go back for his English summer, so he and Giorgio landed at Brindisi and spent a month meandering up the Italian coast to Ravenna and Rimini, and north-west to the Italian lakes. At Lake Garda, Lear was thrown back in time: flicking through an earlier visitors’ book he saw that in 1833 J. D. Harding had praised the white wine, and a year later Dan Fowler and Robert Leake Gale (who had both emigrated to Amherst Island in Nova Scotia in 1843) had recommended the Hotel del Galline in Milan. ‘I knew Dan’s writing at once & poor Rob’s,’ wrote Lear. Remembering thirty years ago, when he had read Dan’s letters from Italy with the Gale sisters, he added, ‘Lucy and Elizabeth were happy then: now Lucy Francillon is a widow with 3 children, & poor Bessie an unhappy wife with 6!’
In England he avoided the Bethells and his own fantasy of marriage and children. Then, in October, a letter arrived from Gussie, ‘wh puts me all nowhere again. & shortly after came Emma Parkyns: – go to Hinton it seems Somerset’. He was filled with odd thoughts: ‘Gussie: – dreamland: – but it is a blessing – come of it what may’. Asked to stay in Hinton as long as he liked, he packed two trunks and wrote nervously,
It is absurd to think that at 54 years old I am within a point of doing what will fix the rest of my life – be it short or long – in one groove – good or bad. I do not say I am decided to take this leap in the dark, but I say that I am nearer to doing so than I ever was before.
Yet within a day of his arrival Emma took him aside and said that she did not think Gussie and he could live happily. It was a shock, given Emma’s positive views of a year before, and ‘broke up a dream rudely & sadly’. Gussie’s own feelings remain a mystery. That afternoon he walked with Lord Westbury: ‘He says of G – she will never marry.’ That was enough. On 7 November 1867, he left.
*
In the past few years of travelling and fretting about Gussie, Lear had often looked back to his early interest in natural history, which was revived by the recent flurry of debates about natural selection and evolution. In 1858, at the Royal Institution, T. H. Huxley had shocked his audience by comparing the skeletons and musculature of baboons, gorillas and humans, arguing that in structure man was no further from the gorilla than the gorilla from the baboon: the great difference was not physique, but the gift of speech. When Lear walked up to the zoo, he was fascinated by the orang utan, ‘a very great brute’. (Queen Victoria had thought the same twenty years before, ‘too wonderful … He is frightfully, and painfully, and disagreeably human.’ In fact the one she saw was a female, called Jenny). Now The Origin of Species had led everyone to look at apes with some alarm. ‘Is man an ape or an angel?’ Disraeli asked at the Diocesan Society in Oxford in November 1864: ‘My lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new-fangled theories.’
Lear read Darwin happily on the Nile in 1867, but the ideas could be disturbing. Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who developed similar theories at the same time, argued that all creatures passed certain variations on from one generation to the next: in the
long struggle to preserve the species, the more advantageous variants would dominate, and the others would either be modified beyond recognition or die out completely. At this point, Lear was brooding on marriage and heredity, anxious not only about his epilepsy but about the threat of madness that he felt came with it. This fear had reached a peak on 30 April 1865 when his old friend, the banker Mr Prescott, cut his throat in the bathroom of his house at Roehampton, driven to despair by senile dementia. Lear was aghast and heartbroken for his family. He had become close to the Prescotts after meeting them in Rome in 1859 and discovering that Prescott had been his father’s banker. (Their daughter Isabella had married Colonel Richard Decie of the Corfu garrison, and now they had a little boy and a baby, Ruth, to whom Lear gave an alphabet and sent sweet nonsense letters.) He felt the shock acutely because Sarah’s husband Charles Street, now in his eighties, was suffering ‘the same sad delusions as Mr Prescott’. It was the third recent case he had heard of. ‘I have come to the conclusion’, he told Emily Tennyson, trying to joke, ‘that nobody ought to marry at all, & that no more people ought ever to be born, – & so we should be gradually extinguified, & the world would be left to triumphant chimpanzees, gorillas, cockroaches & crocodiles.’
*
In the mid-1860s, Lear began to write stories and poems that focused on animals, almost as parables of human dilemmas. In Nice in February 1865, he wote nonsense letters of this kind for Anna Duncan and her mother, Lady Duncan, whom he had known since his time in Rome. Playing on the nickname for the French, he told of being escorted home ‘by two large and amiable Frogs’, who took him by the arms and led him down the lane.