by Jenny Uglow
A host of emotions, open and unacknowledged, clouded Lear’s feelings for Hubert: in complex ways, he loved him. On his part, Hubert was fond of Lear and looked to him for advice. Much later he remembered Lear’s drawing lessons, accompanied by running commentaries on art, nature, scenery and travels, as some of ‘the most delightful experiences of my young days’. Sometimes they had lessons in the studio but often they went on sketching expeditions, with ‘Lear plodding slowly along, old George following behind, laden with lunch, and drawing materials’. When they found a good subject, Lear would sit down, push up his spectacles and peer at the scene through his ‘monocular glass’, then draw mountain ranges, villages and foregrounds so fast and accurately that Hubert was left awe-struck.
More uncomfortably, Lear tried to act as a bridge between father and son. Walter was depressed, tired of being a property agent, anxious about his mistress Ellen Walters who was now working elsewhere. For a while he planned to go to Tasmania, although one day Hubert, flicking nervously through Lear’s drawings, said that personally ‘he had rather not go for 3 years as he could help his Father better as a man; also that he thought his father would never marry again – being 51!’ In December, Walter told Lear that he would marry Ellen or no one, ‘“but shall not bring her here”!!’ Over the New Year the tension grew, and impetuously, at the start of February 1877, Lear decided that Hubert should know the truth. Congreve agreed. It was a painful exchange. Hubert sobbed that he was sure Ellen was to blame: ‘How can a fellow bear the sight of a woman who has caused the ruin of a whole family?’ But when Lear begged forgiveness for causing him pain by telling him, he turned and kissed him, saying, ‘It is not your fault.’ In fact Hubert soon shook off the shock, Walter was grateful and Tasmania was forgotten.
That month, Giorgio, ill and agitated, demanded to return to his other children in Corfu. Lear agreed and decided to go with him, taking eighteen-year-old Hubert as a kind of treasurer to relieve him of worries about money and tickets. Lambi came too, and the odd quartet travelled down to Brindisi in icy weather, arriving in gales and snow. The gales strengthened, and seeing Lear become ill and anxious, Hubert persuaded him to let Giorgio and Lambi sail by themselves. Next day he and Lear went back across to Naples, where ‘Lear at once began to revive’. Or appeared to. Privately, he was brooding on Giorgio’s passionate farewell speech – that Lear had been good to him now for twenty-two years, that he felt he would never see him again – and his request that he might kiss him, ‘per la prima e l’ultima volta’. That first night in Naples Lear was not revived but distraught: ‘Bed. Ill & tears – Mind & heart broken & distracted.’
Sharing Naples and Pompeii with Hubert worked a healing magic, and then on the train north they passed the valley of Frascati, with Lear’s old haunt, Civitella, hidden in cloud and rain. Their week in Rome, in Hubert’s rosy recollection, ‘was one of the fullest and happiest we spent together. No one knew his Rome better than Lear, and in a week he had shown me more of the wonders and beauties of the old city and its surroundings than most people see in three months.’ At their hotel, Lear sang Tennyson songs, bringing tears to an old lady’s eyes when she realised that one setting she loved was Lear’s own. But once Lear realised that lots of people were listening, he stood up abruptly, said good night and left: ‘A sudden change of feeling and manner to casual acquaintances was one of his characteristics,’ noted Hubert perceptively. On his last Roman evening he sang ‘Lady Jingly Jones’. But there was no turtle to carry him away, and when he reached San Remo loneliness overwhelmed him. He had been playing at families, but they were not his own. He was left by his little heap of stones.
Another wrench came in July, when Lear was in England and Hubert wrote to say that he had decided to become a civil engineer. Soon he learned from the Congreve aunts that Hubert would study at King’s College, London: his rooms were already arranged, ‘& not a word written to me about this!’ Distraught at losing the person who made his San Remo days bright, Lear resolved ‘and re-resolved’ to overcome this:
Pain contracts & convulses me. But I am gradually getting to see that the past must be the past, & buried: yet I can by no means think of anything to put forward as the future. Meanwhile the present is a fearful blank – cutting off heartstrings the only serious order of the day … In vain I work for an hour – tears blind me. In vain I play on the Piano, – I get convulsed: – in vain I pace the large room – or try to sleep. True, all these symptoms happened also in 1855 – but then there was not the finality there is now – & then – there were unreal glimpses of light –; now – back returns the dark, ‘with no more hope of light’. God help me. I was never nearer to utter & total madness than now. Yet I don’t mean to give way, & shall stave off worse things if I can.
Hubert had been a son, a companion, but also an embodiment of the handsome young men that he had loved ever since his time in Italy with Wilhelm Marstrand. But if he thought wretchedly of Frank in 1855, he also wrote ‘back returns the dark’ – the words he used when he gave up Gussie. Yet even in this self-dramatising misery, far from breaking down, Lear walked out, made calls, stayed to lunch, strolled through the park, slept in the afternoon and went to friends in Onslow Square in the evening: ‘Contrary to my fears – a very pleasant dinner & song.’
Hubert wrote and Lear was comforted – slightly – but his spirit was sore. A fortnight later, staying with Bern Husey Hunt, walking, reading odd things that were lying around, thinking of time passing, he copied into his diary a verse from a poem, ‘To a Beautiful Child’, that had appeared in the Eton College Magazine in 1832:
May he that gave so beautiful a form
Protect and bless thee: May thy gentle heart
Be still as pure, as guileless, & as warm
As nobly worthy of thine outward part.
May’st thou be ever blest as now thou art.
Such are my prayers – nought else can I bestow;
May these suffice to blunt misfortune’s dart,
And smooth thy passage through the world below –
And ne’er may I repent, that I have lov’d thee so.
Once Hubert began his studies, he wrote to Lear often and they spent time together in San Remo and in London: in 1880 Lear was almost dizzy with pride when he watched Hubert receiving prizes at King’s. The day after the prizegiving was thundery and wet, dull until Hubert came in, ‘all joyful at his College success, but as childlike & modest as ever’. They went out for supper to the zoo:
& ordering dinner, saw one side of the ‘Society’, & then dined very well – soup, salmon, cutlets, cold beef salad – omelette, cheese & a bottle of hock, for 12/-. Afterwards we saw all the other ‘beasts’ & walked back to 33 Norfolk Square by 8.30 – when, after tea, the Boy, H C left. Doubtless, a fine fellow & no mistake.
Hubert’s recollections were even warmer, and in his memory there were no menus and no thunderstorms. ‘You are just beginning the battle of life’, Lear said, ‘and we will spend the evening where I began it’:
It was a beautiful evening in July and we dined in the open and sat under the trees till the gardens closed, he telling me all the story of his boyhood and early struggles, and of the meeting with Lord Derby in those gardens, and the outcome of that meeting – the now famous book, The Knowsley Menagerie. I never spent a more enjoyable evening with him, and Lear, when at his best, was the most inspiriting and delightful of companions. He was then absolutely natural and we were like youths together, despite the forty and more years that lay between us.
38: LAUGHABLE LYRICS
Lear liked showing off his house, and his longing for visitors – ‘very few people come this way’ – could be felt in the lovely ‘Quangle Wangle’s Hat’, which he wrote soon after he moved in. Folk of the nonsense world, like the Fimble Fowl with a Corkscrew leg, as well as the birds, snails, bees and frogs, all make their way to the Crumpetty Tree:
And the Golden Grouse came there,
And the Pobble who has no toes, –
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And the small Olympian bear, –
And the Dong with a luminous nose,
And the Blue Baboon, who played the flute, –
And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute, –
And the Attery Squash, and the Bisky Bat, –
All came and built on the lovely Hat
Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.
And the Quangle Wangle said
To himself on the Crumpetty Tree, –
‘When all these creatures move
What a wonderful noise there’ll be!’
And at night by the light of the Mulberry moon
They danced to the Flute of the Blue Baboon,
On the broad green leaves of the Crumpetty Tree,
And all were as happy as happy could be,
With the Quangle Wangle Quee.
The names are alive – the Bisky, dusky Bat; the Attery Squash – will he squash the hat? They join in the treetop dance to the flute of the Blue Baboon. In 1876, a week after he wrote the poem out for his new book, Lear tried playing the flute, as he had done as a boy, ‘– but I can make little of it now a days’. Next day he played again, several times. His nonsense creatures, both less and more than ‘characters’, twirled in his head. They entered each other’s poems, crept into alphabets, and became familiars, internal touchstones. When he took a shine to a visitor, Miss Poynter, he sighed, ‘Too late – oh far too late, Mr Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’; when he thought that the Tasmanian bush might actually suit Hubert Congreve, he added, ‘but his aunt (Jobiska) thinks not’; when he brooded on the cost of furniture and new curtains he groaned,
When all these people come to be paid
What a horrible bore t’will be –
Said the Quangle Wangle Quee.
At Christmas 1876, Fortescue spotted ‘a pile of smart red and green books’ in Bush’s shop, ‘and behold it was a new Nonsense Book’ – Laughable Lyrics: Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, Music &c. He bought several for Christmas presents and was glad, he told Lear, ‘to meet again in full dress my old friend the Akond of Swat, whom I had learnt to know in the undress of MS’. ‘I am very glad you like my new fooly-book,’ Lear replied. All his poems of the last few years were there, Mr and Mrs Discobbolos, the Quangle-Wangle, the Pobble and the Pelicans, the Indian Akond and Cummerbund, as well as ‘The New Vestments’ and the latest ballad of all, ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’. The Two Old Bachelors were on the cover, bashed by the Sage (who looks scarily like Lear in an angry mood). The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò was on the title-page, riding his turtle. The cover said ‘Fresh’, the title-page ‘Fourth’: both were true.
In ‘The Two Old Bachelors’ Lear was in his lightest mode, turning linguistic muddle into narrative. When the hungry bachelors catch a muffin and a mouse, they think they could cook the latter, ‘if we only had some Stuffin’!/ If we had but sage and onion we could do extremely well’. Lured by unhelpful directions, they embark on a mock-romantic quest, high among the rocks, where they find an ancient Sage ‘areading of a most enormous book’. It is another of Lear’s dramas of ascension and precipitous fall, of wisdom found at a price:
‘You earnest Sage!’ aloud they cried, ‘your book you’ve read enough in! –
We wish to chop you into bits to make you into Stuffin’!’ –
But that old Sage looked calmly up, and with his awful book
At those two Bachelors’ bald heads a certain aim he took; –
And over crag and precipice they rolled promiscuous down, –
At once they rolled, and never stopped in lane or field or town, –
And when they reached their house, they found (beside their want of Stuffin’)
The Mouse had fled; – and previously, had eaten up the Muffin.
They left their home in silence by the once convivial door.
And from that hour the Bachelors were never heard of more.
The poem ripples with tongue-rolling words, jokes and allusions: the ‘once convivial door’ echoes Mariana’s ‘unlifted was the clinking latch’; the teasing ‘promiscuous’ might at that date simply mean mixed, but already possessed a sexual edge. It gave Lear a thundering Miltonic line (like the slaughter of the Piedmontese Protestants): ‘As over crag and precipice they rolled promiscuous down’, with the rocky ‘cr’ and ‘pr’ tumbling to land on the chord of the final round vowels.
The Bachelors are limerick men doubled, like the word they seek, sage/sage. Their silliness dooms them to fail and fall. In ‘The New Vestments’, another limerick-style figure gets a longer run on the page – and an extra foot in the line.
There lived an old man in the Kingdom of Tess,
Who invented a purely original dress;
And when it was perfectly made and complete,
He opened the door, and walked into the street.
How clever he is, the old man, what care he has taken – and how brave to walk into the street. Eccentric, original, obsessive, as Lear’s old persons are, he steps into the world clothed in things that loomed large in Lear’s life – food and animals – or their specimen ‘skins’. He is both a mad preacher, as the word ‘vestments’ suggests, and a nursery-rhyme man, like Aikin Drum, whose hat was made of good cream cheese and his coat of good roast beef. But his garments are oddly sinister, corpses and meats and sweets combined.
His Shirt was made up of no end of dead Mice,
The warmth of whose skins was quite fluffy and nice; –
His Drawers were of Rabbit-skins; – so were his Shoes; –
His Stockings were skins, – but it is not known whose; –
His Waistcoat and Trowsers were made of Pork Chops; –
His Buttons were Jujubes and Chocolate Drops –
The straightforward sentences, very different to the baroque comedy of ‘The Two Old Bachelors’, sprinkled with conversational phrases – ‘no end of’, ‘fluffy and nice’, come to seem increasingly creepy. As Lear dresses his hero, garment by garment, line by line, he becomes a folklore figure, a predator, a sweet-toothed murderer. But then, in a trice, the poem shrinks him into a victim. ‘They’ turn upon him, not the bourgeois crowd, but the creatures Lear loved, ‘Beasticles, Birdlings, and Boys’. Cows, monkeys, goats, dogs, children, pigs and cats rush from dark alleys, snatching and gobbling, stripping him down to his animal self:
They swallowed the last of his Shirt with a squall, –
Whereon he ran home with no clothes on at all.
And he said to himself as he bolted the door,
‘I will not wear a similar dress any more,
Any more, any more, any more, never more!’
In 1875 Lear was reading the translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fictionalised autobiography The Improvisatore, pleased to discover that Andersen had lived in the same corner house that Fortescue had stayed in when they first met in Rome. His own version of Andersen’s story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ is like a bad dream. It feels as if the affable Lear, clothed in his art, his Tennyson songs, his knowledge of natural history and faraway lands, was stripped of these clothes, leaving him bare, a figure of fun. It recalls his sense of being fat and hideous, his thick glasses and big nose, his baggy trousers, his buying of new clothes for Knowsley, his anxious packing of trunks for Hinton and packing again when his dream of Gussie was stripped away. These poems expose the old man of Tess and the two old bachelors as frauds as well as fools, ignorant of language, hopeless cooks, ridiculous tailors. Brutally, Lear pulls their self-esteem from under their feet, driving them to self-banishment. In both poems, the word ‘never’ sounds like a bell: ‘And from that hour the Bachelors were never heard of more’; ‘I will not wear a similar dress any more/Any more, any more, any more, never more!’ They hide away, like the limerick person who lies with his head in a sack.
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‘The Two Old Bachelors’ and ‘The New Vestments’ were boundingly dramatic. ‘Lyric’ was not the right word – but then nor was ‘Laughable’. The violence was still th
ere, in the bashing and stripping and crunching. It was there too in the whisking away of the Pobble’s toes. Yet the Pobble’s tale was genuinely lyrical in its mysterious, mournful tone, and so were ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’ and ‘The Pelican Chorus’ – both of which he set to music.
‘The Pelican Jee’, as Lear called it, is different to Lear’s other poems of longing and love. Not only are the lovers happy, but their relationship is seen from the outside, from the point of view of the parents – their love and loss lie at its heart. It is full, too, of a different love, for the glory of birds. At the feast for the Pelicans’ daughter Dell, they flock to honour her:
Herons and Gulls, and Cormorants black,
Cranes, and Flamingoes with scarlet back,
Plovers and Storks, and Geese in clouds,
Swans and Dilberry Ducks in crowds.
Thousands of Birds in wondrous flight!
The pelicans took Lear back to the Nile, to the gathering of birds on the sandbanks like a military court, ‘serene geese & dux – & sentinel plovers – all without Heron guards’. As Lear watched, the herons reappeared and ‘perhaps the funniest community came thro’ the air, just then – 2 immense pelicans – & 20 cranes. These alighted near 2 other Pelicans who put up their heads (present arms) & then slept.’ The poem’s romantic suitor, the King of the Cranes, looks even further back, to Lord Derby’s great cranes and to the Old Man of Dunblane: