Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  In this child’s song, the two friends, Mr Daddy Long-legs and Mr Floppy Fly, play in the chilly wind among the pebbles, on a beach not unlike Southwold, at a child’s game reversed, ‘battlecock and shuttledore’. The fly shimmers in blue and gold, the daddy long-legs is famed for his silvery sound. But the fly cannot go to court ‘because my legs/Are so extremely short’, while the daddy long-legs no longer sings even the smallest song, ‘And this the dreadful reason is,/ My legs are grown too long!’

  Gertrude Lushington, 1870

  So Mr Daddy Long-legs

  And Mr Floppy Fly,

  Sat down in silence by the sea,

  And gazed upon the sky.

  They said, ‘This is a dreadful thing!

  The world has all gone wrong,

  Since one has legs too short by half

  The other much too long!

  There was no dancing and no moon for Gertrude, but Lear did have an answer – first you find friends, and then you sail away.

  Then Mr Daddy Long-legs

  And Mr Floppy Fly

  Rushed downwards to the foamy sea

  With one sponge-taneous cry;

  And there they found a little boat,

  Whose sails were pink and gray;

  And off they sailed among the waves,

  Far, and far away.

  They sailed across the silent main,

  And reached the great Gromboolian plain;

  And there they play for evermore

  At battlecock and shuttledore.

  ‘Much fun about my poem,’ Lear wrote after a dinner party a month later. But despite the escape to a magic land, in the dying rhythm of this poem, with its silent sea and perpetual reversed game, there was something bleak even in an eternity of play.

  32: ‘THREE GROANS FOR CORSICA!’

  There was a Young Lady of Corsica,

  Who purchased a little brown saucy-cur

  Which she fed upon ham, and hot raspberry jam,

  That expensive Young Lady of Corsica.

  In Cannes, in the spring sunshine of 1868, Lear penned out sketches and wrote up his journals of Crete and Egypt, hoping to publish all three. ‘By degrees,’ he told Lady W., ‘I want to topographize & topographize all the journeyings of my life, so that I shall have been of some use after all to my fellow critters.’ As soon as he sold some pictures and had some money, his restlessness returned. He moved to a different house, with a view west across the bay to the low, jagged Esterel hills. At times he thought of Cannes as a permanent winter home, at others he wondered if he should have gone to New Zealand instead (too far while the elderly Ellen was still living). He was bursting to move, getting into disputes, letting his tongue run away: ‘I never can apply to remembering how hours of sedentary life make me boil over when I get away – a steam force which is let off by walking, but bursts out in rage & violence if it has no natural outlet.’ It was not enough to walk by the sea, or in the pine woods counting caterpillars.

  Thinking of his plan to ‘topographise’ his travelling life, Lear wanted to complete his unfinished journey to Nazareth and Galilee, but he was also tempted by Corsica, which was cheaper, and nearer: on clear days he could see the Corsican mountains floating on the horizon. He had become friends with the writer Prosper Mérimée, now in his mid-sixties and very frail, who spent the winters in Cannes, and when Lear read Mérimée’s novella Colomba, about a Corsican vendetta, he was filled with curiosity. Mérimée gave him notes and introductions, and Symonds suggested they go together. On 7 April 1868 they took the steamer from Nice.

  Corsica was a promising subject, easy for British tourists to reach yet still relatively unknown. In his first week in Ajaccio he went sketching with Catherine Symonds and planned his route with help from a new friend, Thomasina Campbell, ‘a vast & manlike maiden’ who had lived here for some years, collecting plants in the mountains and studying the fish around the coast. Now she was living at the Hôtel de France, finishing her Notes on the Island of Corsica in 1868. Dedicated to those in search of Health and Enjoyment. Lear became fond of her and drew a frontispiece of the forest of Valdoniello for her book. He was happy and optimistic. As for the people, he felt they were more dour than Italians, but intelligent and shrewd, like the Scots. ‘The children are grave & thinking little animals,’ he wrote, ‘& one can understand the Napoleon or any other Bonaparte cropping out of such ground.’ Lear saw Napoleon’s birthplace, read his letters and felt his life to be at one, in many places, with the island’s history.

  When he came to write his journal he was full of tips for artists who might follow, warning them about the climate – hot in the valleys, freezing on the peaks – and advising that as well as their drawing materials they should take ‘an indian-rubber bath; above all, a small folding camp orient bed … in which I am sure of sleep anywhere’. A good servant was a bonus, and Lear paid tribute to his own:

  George Kokali, a Suliot, speaking several languages, sober, honest, and active, saves me all trouble and gives none; now carrying a weight of cloaks and folios and daily bread for a twenty-mile walk or more, anon keeping off dogs and bystanders when I am drawing, or cooking and acting as house-servant when stationary; a man of few words, and constant work.

  To cover the island quickly Lear hired a two-horse carriage and an objectionable-looking coachman called Peter. Miss Campbell saw them off, calling ‘from the window cheerfully, “You should have taken my man Jean! All your luggage will fall off! Your horses will tumble! Everything will go wrong!”’ Shrugging this off, Lear and Giorgio drove south into the mountains, range on range, their bare granite tops rising above dense woods, full, in Lear’s view, of a lonely sadness.

  They stayed in country inns, invariably run by widows, gazing ‘into wide distances of Claude Lorraine landscape’. At every step, Lear wrote, ‘there are studies for pictures, if only in the hedges, which are in some places literally blue with a beautiful climbing vetch’. Such details absorbed him, like the granite mottled with tints, ‘green, white, yellow, orange and black lichen, tufts of a red kind of stonecrop, moss and ivy … enough work for months of artist-life’. He thought the forest of Bavella, where pines grew in ranks between great rock walls, ‘one of the most wonderfully beautiful sights nature can produce’. The trees beat all he ever saw or dreamed of, he told Fanny Coombe:

  The trees are many of them 150 feet high they say. The flowers would rather astonish you: sometimes you see a mile or so of pink – it is all rose cistus: the anemones, broom, crocus, lavender, vetch, cyclamen – all wild, along the sea side. The nightingales are by millions – ditto the blackbirds which inhabit the thick covering of myrtle, arbutus, that covers nearly all the island.

  Sheltering from a thunderstorm Lear watched a shaft of sun touch the crags of Bavella, creating a golden haze above the vast gloom below where the dark pines stood out ‘in deepest shadow against the pale granite cliffs dazzling in the sunlight’. ‘No frenzy of the wildest dreams of a landscape painter’, he wrote, ‘could shape out ideal scenes of more magnificence and wonder.’ Writing to Emily Tennyson he fantasised about building a house in one of these mighty pines. He drew a sketch of this up the side of his letter, lifting himself even higher than the Old Man of Philae in his palm tree.

  The Forest of Bavella, 4 p.m., 29 April 1868. Notes: ‘all/darkish/brown/green/light/seen/through/blu’

  There were disturbing scenes too. One day, walking up a mountain track, they saw Peter ahead, cursing and beating the horses, and watched in horror as they backed towards the precipice, sending the carriage careering into the ravine. ‘A ghastly sight I can’t get rid of. One horse killed, the other horribly injured: the little beast of a driver not so badly hurt as he ought to have been.’ Miss Campbell’s prophecy had come true: all their luggage had tumbled far down among the rocks and ferns. Back in Ajaccio Peter was replaced by the youthful Domenico ‘of Napoleonic and grave aspect’, bringing with him a small spotty dog, Flora, ‘of amiable and watchful deportment’. Lear was happy, te
lling Fanny, ‘I eat trout no end, and drink no end of wine. Ajaccio is beautiful, dull & dirty, but there are some nice people here, & a house in a garden would be Paradise: if I hadn’t settled at Cannes I would come here.’ Then off they set again to the north, to the forest of Valdoniello, enclosed by snowy mountains like wings. Their third, final tour was to the eastern plain and the ports of Bastia and Calvi (where, to Lear’s delight, in the eighteenth century the people had driven off Genoa’s German mercenaries by hurling bee-hives at their heads).

  At the Hôtel de Londres, Lear dismissed Domenico and Flora fondly. Soon he was back in Cannes, gazing at the familiar Esterels, delicately perfect and lovely. He had made over three hundred sketches and in mid-June 1868 he headed for London to see about his book. Symonds gave him an introduction to the publisher George Smith, of Smith, Elder & Co.: he was interested but only if the costs were low, and suggested a single volume instead of two, with wood engravings instead of lithographs. Reluctantly, Lear agreed and set to work on revising his journal while travelling round his circle of friends. Tired though he was, he could still enjoy himself. At the Goldsmids in November he walked around the churchyard with a charming young woman: ‘quoted Epitaphs – talked of Italy – religion, Philosophy – beetles – Via Reggio – toads – woodpeckers – & the immortality of the Soul – David, ladies trains, – Tennyson, mulberries, Calvinism, puns, landscapes, Tunny fish, Leghorn, Laurels & Lozenges’.

  He felt alive, confident. He stayed on through the summer and autumn until all the woodcuts and drawings were ready. Then came a blow: ‘Smithanelder, I saw at once, would have nothing to do with my book – his verdict was thus: “Thus expensively illustrated – your book cannot pay. Less expensively illustrated it won’t be an ‘illustrated book’, & won’t pay as a literary speculation.”’ Macmillan turned it down too, and gloomily he realised that he must publish it himself. The printer Robert Bush of Charing Cross agreed to do it, but with cheaper cuts. Lear had already spent £130 on the woodcuts, and now they would have to be done again.

  The only option was to return to Cannes and find engravers in France. Back in the sunshine his mood lifted. He missed the Symonds, but met new people, like young Edmund Langton, ‘– fancy! Langton is nephew of DARWIN!!!!!!!!!’ On Sunday evenings he asked Giorgio to stay and talk of his family and have a smoke and a drink, ‘though he will not have more than a teaspoon of Marsala … I think this is right, that a man so far from home should feel that his employer has some interest in his life.’

  As the weeks passed he started a new set of Corsican ‘Tyrants’, and transcribed his journal, striking a line through each page as he passed it. In the early months of 1869, when the mistral roared and the windows rattled, his epilepsy returned badly: one violent fit left him almost cataleptic for an hour. But as the sun warmed he took days off, wandering up into the hills with Giorgio and drawing as he loved to do: ‘It was a real pleasure to me.’ He went to Paris to see wood engravers although he knew that his drawings were too subtle and delicate for the hard line of woodcuts. Staying in his usual refuge, the Hôtel du Louvre, he looked caustically at the English people opposite him at dinner, who ‘might have made a good Dickens chapter, but one can’t record the nonsense … O this Corsica! 3 groans for Corsica!’ Yet the engravings were underway, and if the style was heavier than usual, the scenes were still dramatically alive.

  Ajaccio, from Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica (1870)

  In late June Lear found rooms in Duchess Street in Marylebone and set out on his visits, including the fortnight with the Lushingtons at Southwold. Wherever he stayed, he worked, translating his French sources and writing ‘Additional Notes’ on Corsican geology, climate, people and history. In his Preface he explained that he had been led to the island by the wandering painter’s need ‘to find new places, and add fresh ideas of landscape to both mind and portfolio’, quoting ‘Ulysses’ again, on ‘the untravell’d world’.

  Tennyson’s poetry was still his guide, but he found it harder to get on with the poet himself. The previous year, when Tennyson had called on him in London, Lear thought that to hear him talk, ‘one would fancy him a mere child and a foolish one too’ – except on money matters – ‘Verily o Poet! You are a wonder!’ In Tennyson’s view, however it was Lear who was childish with his riddles and puns and songs.

  At the end of September 1869, Lear went to stay with Alfred and Emily in their newly built house, Aldworth, high on the Surrey downs. The year before he had been enraptured by the view stretching forty miles across the Weald to the Channel. Now driving up to ‘Palazzo Tennyson’ in a pony cart, he marvelled again. He walked cheerily with Tennyson through the woods, but next morning they had a row. Tennyson had chosen two colour sketches of Corsica, but then changed his mind, first wanting to exchange them for cheaper pencil drawings, then muttering that it would be better to spend the money on the house: after all, he said, it was Emily who wanted the pictures, not him. Lear fumed: ‘I said he was given to worry & everyone knew it – & he said I was irritable & what not – & so we all exploded & went. Then I packed my things.’ When he came downstairs Emily handed him a cheque for £10 for ‘Morn broaden’d’, patted and soothed him and sent him off for a walk. But although Lear apologised, Tennyson was still scalded by his ‘Everyone knows it’. Early next morning Lear left, with the great plain below covered in mist.

  To cheer himself up, in a fit of extravagance he moved down the road to the new Langham’s Hotel in Portland Place, fabulously modern, with bathrooms and hydraulic lifts. He corrected the proofs of his book, with Frank’s help, and slowly the subscriptions came in. Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica, priced modestly at £1 and dedicated to Frank Lushington, would appear for the last Christmas of this fraught decade.

  33: DEGLI INGLESI

  There was an Old Man in a tree,

  Whose whiskers were lovely to see;

  But the birds of the air pluck’d them perfectly bare,

  To make themselves nests in that tree.

  On 10 December 1869, his Corsica book out at last, Lear was on the train, taking ‘just 20 hours’ from Folkestone. Arriving in Cannes he wrote in large letters, ‘Of course, George was there.’ Everything was in order, ‘& such a dinner of mutton broth & roast lamb & cheese & olives! … I confess things seem like a dream, so very exact & good!’ It was time for a new project. Two months earlier, when the American publisher James Fields asked to publish ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, ‘The Duck and the Kangaroo’, and ‘Mr Floppy Fly’ in his children’s magazine Our Young Folks (they appeared in February, March and April the following year), Lear had written firmly, ‘You will I know kindly print my name in full “Edward Lear” – wh. will, when I get the Magazine, delight my feeble mind, & console me for remaining in this cold foggy place. After all, small as it may be, one does some good by contributing to the laughter of little children, if it is a harmless laughter.’ Now he planned new laughter. On New Year’s Day 1870 he told Fortescue: ‘I shall look out and heap together all the nonsense I can for my new book which is to be entitled – Learical Lyrics and Puffles of Prose &c., &c.’ Over the year, the whimsical title vanished and the one book became two, Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets and More Nonsense. And while these books grew, Lear found a new home, in Italy.

  He had joked to Emily Tennyson about his nest in the pine tree but he was serious about building a house. This had been on his mind for some time. He had put money into government bonds for his old age but the interest was going on rent and London storage for his paintings – surely it could be better spent? First, he toyed with the idea of an English home. In 1868, when he heard that land near the Tennysons at Aldworth was £100 an acre, he wrote, ‘My last mania is to buy some ten or so & build a house!’ The following September, before their row, he saw one field there that would be ‘absolutely delightful’ to build on, but added, ‘it by no means follows I could live “happily” – even if I built a house here’. Then he brooded over a
house in Southwold, and, at Frank’s suggestion, land near Bournemouth. But he knew it would not do. He looked around Nice and Cannes too, but in early 1870 the rumblings of the tension that would lead to the Franco-Prussian war made him wonder if France was a sensible place after all. At the end of February he crossed the border to San Remo in Italy, where his friends the Wyatts were considering settling. Here he met an English resident, Walter Congreve, who showed him land overlooking the sea. He heard of a house in Corfu; he thought of Ajaccio. But should he settle at all? Should he give up painting and travel? ‘Good Gracious! What a bother about a place for a “comfortable life”.’

  In the clear March days when the air was like crystal and snow lay on the Esterels, Lear sent off two paintings to be entered for the Academy, Valdoniello and Kasr es Saàd, the first time he had done this for years. Then he went back to San Remo. Over a single weekend, everything happened in a flash. On 25 March, he looked at land above Walter Congreve’s house, with a view out over the sea. Next morning he decided to buy, and later in the day met an architect, Anselmi. Within a couple of days he had sorted out terms and signed the contract. The land cost £400, and the house would be £1200, leaving him money to spare from his savings. First he was exhilarated: ‘Very cold all day. Did little but write letters, & make plans of the House’. Then he panicked. Then he calmed again. A few weeks later, on May Day, he wrote to Thomas Woolner: