Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  That mysterious Old Person of Deal.

  Neither can fully understand each other, and perhaps they never will.

  As ‘they’ fade, so the Persons grow bolder.The Old Person of Minety hurls apples and pears, and the Old Person of Stroud slaughters the crowd (as Lear often wished to do) when they push against her too thickly:

  There was an Old Person of Stroud,

  Who was horribly jammed in a crowd;

  Some she slew with a kick, some she scrunched with a stick,

  That impulsive Old Person of Stroud.

  At last the Persons have power, of a kind. But the balance will always lie with ‘they’. The fearsome old woman still hides under her hat. Yet while Lear’s limericks can express defiance, onslaught, anger, despair, the urge to hide, even to die, they can also offer an exhilarating freedom, a rare joy. The nonsense man can fling open his window, spread his arms and let us in with ‘Fil-jomble, fil-jumble’. He can play his fiddle, wreathed in smiles. He can let the birds nest in his beard. With one foot off the ground, his wide hat raised, he can become a male version of the Madonna della Misericordia who shelters the weak under her cloak.

  There was an Old Man of Dee-side,

  Whose hat was exceedingly wide;

  But he said, ‘Do not fail, if it happened to hail,

  To come under my hat at Dee-side!’

  Sometimes, too, hidden away, the men and women of the limericks can spin their dreams in peace. In the sunset, with her pen poised, this smartly dressed, smiling Young Person, like a female muse, can write her own version of the past.

  There was a Young Person whose history

  Was always considered a mystery;

  She sate in a ditch, although no one knew which,

  And composed a small treatise on history.

  Between the publication of Nonsense Songs and the limericks of More Nonsense, Lear wrote two poems that hid the writer, not in a ditch, but in thickets of words and images. One was the mysterious ‘The Scroobious Pip’, whose illustrations, like a mixed-up medieval bestiary, suggest a shifting creature of stray man-beast parts – any metamorphosis seems possible.

  The Pip, as in Lear’s nesting fantasies, lives on the tallest tree, high above the world. Around him all the beasts and birds, fish and insects cry out in bemused frustration, trying to pin down this multiform creature:

  ‘Tell us all about yourself we pray! –

  For to know from yourself is our only wish –

  Are you Beast or Insect, Bird or Fish?’

  The Scroobious Pip looked softly round

  And sang these words with a liquid sound –

  ‘Plifatty flip – Pliffity flip –

  My only name is the Scroobious Pip.’

  The Pip hides himself, as Lear hid his inner being, his desires, his epilepsy, his loneliness. He looks on knowingly, replacing the demand for identification only with his name, ‘the Scroobious Pip’, a name that recalls the seed at the heart of a fruit and also, perhaps, the power of drawing itself, the ‘Scroo! Scroo!’ of the Albanian dervish. He is at home in any element. (In Lear’s limericks many people are poised between earth and water, earth and air: indeed perhaps this suspension is the only way Lear finds to be ‘at home’.) Surrounded by the call of birds and the splashing of fish, the Pip is an observer, a still centre. Lear does not dramatise the Pip himself, but the creatures he draws towards him, whirling as in a centrifuge, calling out in their quest to understand. The Pip, like the poet, is both part of, and apart from, the community of the world:

  And all the birds in the world came there,

  Flying in crowds all through the air.

  The Vulture and Eagle – the Cock and the Hen,

  The Ostrich, the Turkey, the Snipe and Wren,

  The Parrot chattered, the Blackbird sung,

  And the Owl looked wise but held his tongue,

  And when the Peacock began to scream

  The hullabaloo was quite extreme.

  And every bird he fluttered the tip

  Of his wing as he stared at the Scroobious Pip.

  ‘The Scroobious Pip’ was not published in Lear’s lifetime. Nor was the second unfinished poem, ‘Cold are the crabs’. This is a puzzle of ‘utter nonsense’, a poem about poetry itself, a palimpsest of remembered reading, a nonsense dance:

  Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hill,

  Colder the cucumbers that grow beneath

  And colder still the brazen chops that wreath

  The tedious gloom of philosophic pills!

  Lear clearly delighted in the ‘spot the poet’ puzzle. The first line looks back to the second canto of Byron’s Childe Harold, ‘Cold as the crags upon his native coast’, but one can also spy Pope, and Tennyson, and all through the poem, readers have found other voices – Wordsworth, Keats, Burns, Arnold, Shakespeare, Gray.

  In this playful tribute with its solemn metre, even the cucumbers attain a dignity. Lear had fun with alliteration and carefully modulated assonance. His mismatched words generate energy, as they did in ‘Ribands and pigs’, as crabs, cucumbers and chops bump against archaic adjectives and the nonsense abstraction of tedious ‘philosophic pills’. Then, suddenly, small living things disrupt the Romantic rhetoric.

  For when the tardy film of nectar fills

  The ample bowls of demons and of men,

  There lurks the feeble mouse, the homely hen,

  And there the Porcupine with all her quills.

  Yet much remains; – to weave a solemn strain

  That lingering sadly – slowly dies away,

  Daily departing with departing day.

  That double ‘departing’ sounds like an ending, but in the final lines a warm-blooded, noisy, nonsense life rushes out again:

  Such such is life –

  Where early buffaloes in congress meet

  Than salt more salt, than sugar still more sweet,

  And pearly centipedes adjust their feet

  Where buffaloes bewail the loss of soap

  Where frantic walruses in clouds elope,

  And early Pipkins bid adiew to hope.

  Such is life, salt and sweet. Even in the poem’s half-made state the hidden poet, like the Scroobius Pip, is present in every line – like a child putting his hands across his eyes and pretending he isn’t there. This was Lear’s true way out of the morbids. In his drawings and limericks and songs he launched himself on stormy seas, sailing like the Jumblies to a realm beyond sense.

  35: RESTLESS IN SAN REMO

  In the year between Nonsense Songs and More Nonsense, Lear was busy with his house. His furniture, prints and books were shipped out from London duty free, thanks to Frank Lushington who was now ‘the Judge’, the London Police Magistrate, and wangled Lear a certificate of London residence. Another load arrived from Cannes by train and at the end of March 1871 Lear and Giorgio unpacked the crates and began arranging rooms. It was almost a year since he had bought the plot. The long, low house gleamed white against the slope. It had good rooms for friends to stay and, best of all, at last he had the perfect studio:

  I never before had such a painting room – 32 feet by 20 – with a light I can work by at all hours, and a clear view south over the sea. Below it is a room of the same size, which I now use as a gallery, and am ‘at home’ once a week – Wednesday: though as Enoch Arden said in the troppicle Zone ‘Still no sail, no sail’.

  Lear told Holman Hunt about his new scheme for life: ‘Neither too much in, nor altogether out of the world – my plan may ultimately succeed, if I can only work hard enough to send to every kind of exhibition in England, for that tack I am now (perforce) going to try.’ He could settle down and be an artist again.

  This proved harder than he hoped. Not only were sales slow, but he failed to get elected to the Old Water Colour Society, and his two large Corsica pictures lingered unsold at Foord’s, although he lowered the price to £50 each, without frames, instead of the £200 he thought they were worth. The summer before, t
o mark the move to the new house, he had offered to paint an oil for Lord Derby, his old patron’s grandson, who had become the fifteenth earl on his father’s death in 1869. The new earl, who had been one of the children that Lear wrote his first nonsense for in the nursery at Knowsley, sent a friendly letter declining a large painting – he had too many already – but asked for a smaller picture, or watercolours, for £100. After more correspondence he chose one of Corfu. Privately, the young earl noted that it was hard to refuse as Lear was always in want of money, ‘and his request is quite as much an appeal for help as an offer to supply what he thinks may be wanted’. In Lear’s view, however, this was a virtuous circle: the first painting in the house of his old age would have the same Knowsley patronage that had started his career. Luckily, when the Corfu picture arrived Derby noted, ‘It pleases me much, and the cost (£100) does not seem expensive.’ He became one of Lear’s most loyal patrons in the coming years.

  Villa Emily in the 1870s

  Lear sent small oil paintings to be sold by Foord’s, found other commissions to keep him going and, to his relief and delight, when he was really strapped for money, Sir Francis Goldsmid bought one of the two large Corsica paintings for £100. Lear’s chief aim now was to return to his idea, first mooted almost twenty years ago, of illustrating Tennyson’s poems. In the coming year he worked on five large oils, including paintings of Mount Athos and Mount Timohorit. Tennyson stayed in his mind, and among the many letters that made him feel surrounded by friends, the most precious were from Emily, ‘singularly good & kind – that woman is 10,000 angels boiled down – an essence of goodness’.

  What delighted him most was the utter quiet: only birdsong broke the silence, as he sat in his library, writing his letters. He paid calls on Lady Janet Kay-Shuttleworth next door and her daughter Janet Elizabeth (‘Jenny’ to friends, ‘Puss’ to her family), who was in her late twenties. Both were ‘very kind and friendly’. Lear knew Janet Kay-Shuttleworth through his friendship with her stepfather, Frederick North: she was half-sister to Catherine Symonds and Marianne North (‘Pop’ to the family), and had known Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, authors Lear greatly admired. When her marriage to the social reformer Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth collapsed in 1851, she had moved to San Remo with Jenny and her younger sons Lionel and Stewart and their Polish governess Miss Poplawska (whom Charlotte Brontë reckoned the most interesting person in the house, but the family thought dangerous). Lear liked her son Ughtred, who was now MP for Hastings, as his grandfather had been, and who visited with his new wife Blanche and took Lear’s drawings back to England for him. He was also extremely fond of Marianne North, now travelling worldwide as a botanical painter, sending her a comic picture letter when he found he had refused to pay for a letter insufficiently stamped.

  Yet despite Lady Kay-Shuttleworth’s connections Lear disliked her aura of ‘trouble’ and illness, as well as her non-stop talking. He never felt at home in her Villa Ponente. By contrast, he became ever closer to Walter Congreve and his sons. Congreve had taught at Rugby under Archibald Campbell Tait (who had since become Archbishop of Canterbury), and had been appointed Second Master at Marlborough when his first wife and their eldest son fell ill. Told to find a warmer climate, he took them to the Riviera, but they both died soon after they arrived. Walter stayed on, taking pupils, acting as a wine merchant, and building and renting villas. He remarried and had two more sons, but when Lear met the family the second Mrs Congreve was gravely ill. She died of cancer in October 1870, leaving Walter with two small boys, Hubert, who was twelve, and Arnold (‘Arny’), aged eight. Walter was helped by their nanny, Ellen Walters, and only a couple of months after his wife’s death, Lear noted waspishly that ‘by the eye of proffisy I fancy I can see who may be a 3d Mrs C. – namely E – (but I may be wrong)’. Lady Kay-Shuttleworth worked this out too, coolly changing the subject when Congreve’s name came up.

  Mr Lear stamps and dances for joy on securing Miss North’s letter

  Hubert remembered running down the path to meet his father and finding him accompanied by ‘a tall, heavily built gentleman, with a large curly beard and wearing well-made but unusually loose-fitting clothes, and what at the time struck me most of all, very large round spectacles’. He was disconcerted when Lear introduced himself with his long nonsense name, but Lear put his hand on his shoulder, saying, ‘“I am also Derry Down Derry, who loves to make little folks merry, and I hope we shall be good friends.” This was said with a wonderful charm of manner and voice, accompanied by such a genial, yet quizzical smile, as to put me at my ease at once.’ He became an adopted uncle, giving the boys drawing lessons and reading his poems and stories: ‘gt laughter thereat’. At lunchtime, he dropped in for a glass of Marsala, talking about travels, birds, botany and music, his conversation scattered with puns, and in the evenings he strolled over and stayed late, singing his Tennyson settings and comic songs, including their favourite, ‘The Cork Leg’. One morning in June he sketched the boys by the well in their garden, with Arny holding his much-loved cat.

  Congreve’s house was often full of visitors, including his brother Richard, a passionate republican and devotee of Auguste Comte: he was ‘the (Unorthodox) Apostle of Positivism’ as opposed to Congreve’s other brother, ‘the (Orthodox) Vicar of Tooting’. That winter a bevy of clerics were there, including Archbishop Tait. Lear went to church and groaned, and at Christmas he lent the archbishop Nonsense Songs ‘as a pious and instructive work fitted for the season’.

  The spring passed happily. He arranged for four pictures to be exhibited in the Academy show. Then he sat back to enjoy his Riviera garden, planting shrubs and flowers and seeds that friends sent from England and Sarah from New Zealand.

  Lear’s gardening was mostly pottering and planning – tying of creepers and picking up caterpillars, as he put it. He hired workmen to prune his thirty olive trees and a gardener to do the heavy work of digging, grubbing up huge aloes, making a pergola and planting tomatoes, peas, beans and vines. Making grander plans, he thought of buying another patch of land between his house and the Hôtel de Londres, but the owner decided not to sell. He enquired, too, about the empty plot below, which Thomas Hanbury had rented to the Kay-Shuttleworths, but Hanbury was in China and nothing could be done, and he wasn’t worried, ‘for even if Mr Hanbury builds, I look over the highest possible house’.

  Giorgio, who had been with Lear now for sixteen years, did the indoor work and walked the half-mile to town to do the shopping. When he went to Corfu in the summer of 1871 Lear could not face rattling around on his own so he planned an Italian trip. For six weeks he toured old haunts, taking the train past the small Corniche towns he had walked through with Giorgio, with their towers and bridges, mulberries, olive groves and figs and golden sea, and then going south, crossing the Campagna to the capital: ‘Rome 1837 – 1859 – & now 1871! But it is walking on graves.’ He met old friends like Penry Williams, sweating in the heat as he toured his old neighbourhoods, then he set out for Frascati to see Margaret Knight, Duchess of Sermoneta – her invalid sister, Isabella, had died the previous year, another broken thread. From the cool Alban hills he crossed to Ancona and Rimini and the forests where Byron walked, before working his way north through Padua to Belluno and the Italian Tyrol, back to Milan and Turin and the beautiful, if fly-plagued, Certosa.

  Frank Lushington came to stay in October, and after he left and the cold winds came, Lear took solace in nonsense, writing of the Scroobious Pip, the Discobbolos pair and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò. The latter, set to music, was a great success locally and he thought of asking Bush if he might bring out single ballads, ‘or two or three at a time’: ‘It is queer (and you would say so if you saw me) that I am the man as is making some three or four thousand people laugh in England all at one time, – to say the least, for I hear 2,000 of the new Nonsense are sold.’

  San Remo suited him, ‘for we are all humdrum middle class coves and covesses, and no swells’, and he was constantly droppi
ng in on people, having guests for lunch and going out to dinner. ‘Life is pretty easy as things go,’ he wrote. ‘My elth is tolerable’, he told Fortescue and Lady W. on Christmas Day 1871, ‘but I am 60 next May, & feel I am growing old. Going up & down stairs worries me, & I think of marrying some domestic henbird & then of building a nest in one of my many olive trees, whence I should only descend at remote intervals during the rest of my life.’

  Instead of a wife, he acquired a cat. The first wandered off and when the second, Potiphar, ‘Potta’, disappeared in Corfu, where Giorgio took him the following summer, Miss Poplawska brought over his twin brother, with his cut-off tail. They called him Foss, short for ‘Adelphos’, Greek for ‘brother’.

  *

  Lear’s calm was shaken in the autumn of 1871 when his old friend Thomas Baring (Lord Northbrook since his father’s death in 1866) reluctantly accepted the post of Viceroy of India and asked him if he would like to come out, at his expense, to live there for six months. India had long been a dream. Could he ‘give up once more the chance of seeing Agra, Delhi and Darjiling? – I cannot decide at once’. He met Northbrook in Cannes the following March 1872, and enjoyed a jovial reunion with Evelyn Baring: ‘Vastly good dinner, “too” much champagne perhaps. Long sitting & smoking & stories. Later no end of stories & recollections of Corfu days.’

  ‘This offer has greatly unsettled me,’ he admitted to Fortescue a couple of months later. He felt there was something in him inherently antagonistic to travelling as part of a viceregal suite: