by Jenny Uglow
There was an Old Man of Dunblane,
Who greatly resembled a Crane;
But they said, – ‘Is it wrong, since your legs are so long,
To request you won’t stay in Dunblane?’
In ‘The Pelican Chorus’, the Crane King dons human garb, far grander than that of Mr and Mrs Spikky Sparrow: ‘Such a lovely tail! Its feathers float / Between the ends of his blue dress-coat’. Proudly, tenderly, without a ripple of wonder at the coupling between a tall elegant crane and a frumpy bird of another species, the Pelicans tell how the King won Dell’s heart with gifts and tarts:
As soon as he saw our Daughter Dell,
In violent love that Crane King fell, –
On seeing her waddling form so fair,
With a wreath of shrimps in her short white hair.
And before the end of the next long day,
Our Dell had given her heart away;
For the King of the Cranes had won that heart,
With a Crocodile’s egg and a large fish-tart.
She vowed to marry the King of the Cranes,
Leaving the Nile for stranger plains;
And away they flew in a gathering crowd
Of endless birds in a lengthening cloud.
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!
The lovers disappear with the cloud of birds, streaming away to Lear’s own ‘stranger plains’. But if there is loss, the King and Queen Pelican feel no abandonment. They miss Dell, and mourn her, but are happy for her too, as they sit under the moon on their islands and rocks, where the present is past, and the past is here. Their ‘never’ is qualified by ‘probably’ – there is a chance, just a chance, that they will meet again.
And far away in the twilight sky,
We heard them singing a lessening cry, –
Farther and farther till out of sight,
And we stood alone in the silent night!
Often since, in the nights of June,
We sit on the sand and watch the moon; –
She has gone to the great Gromboolian plain,
And we probably never shall meet again!
Oft, in the long still nights of June,
We sit on the rocks and watch the moon; –
– She dwells by the streams of the Chankly Bore,
And we probably never shall see her more.
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!
That ‘probably’ is lacking altogether in the poem that Lear finished two months later. On 24 August 1876 he worked on drawings of Hyderabad, ‘After which I quite concluded “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” – & so also ends the new Christmas book.’ Lear walked on his terrace in the evening cool, and, as he put it, ‘mooned about’. ‘The Dong’ felt like a final word:
Wrote to F. Lushington enclosing the Dong, for Gertrude, also to R. J. Bush, with the Dong, his portrait, the music for Lady J Jones, & the Pelicans, & a list of Books to be sent, 55 in number. After wh – lunch on bread & cheese with Foss, & am now mostly mooning about … Later a walk on the Terrace, moonlight.
The year before, Lear had been astonished to learn that Edward Trelawny – the explorer of Albania, fighter for Greek independence, ‘who with Byron burnt Shelley’s remains’ – was still alive: he had just missed him at the Wyatts’ but would see him several times in the years ahead. The Dong, like Trelawny, is a Romantic relic roaming high Victorian terrain. The poem has the diction and rhythm of Tennyson, the doomed mood of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ or the darker Matthew Arnold. But it mixes these with earlier Romantic language, looking back to the lofty towers of Shelley and the bleak shore of Thomas Moore’s ‘The Beach’ and to ‘The Lake of the Dismal Swamp’, where the ‘meteor bright’ is the firefly lamp of the lost girl, perhaps her ghost, paddling her white canoe. But if he heard these as he wrote, Lear’s song is different. Its Gothic darkness is as wide as the world. Slowly it narrows in, pulling us with its wrenched syntax through the vast and gloomy dark to a pinpoint of flickering light:
When awful darkness and silence reign
Over the great Gromboolian plain,
Through the long, long wintry nights: –
When the angry breakers roar
As they beat on the rocky shore; –
When storm-clouds brood on the towering heights
Of the Hills of the Chankly Bore: –
Then, through the vast and gloomy dark,
There moves what seems a fiery spark,
A lonely spark with silvery rays
Piercing the coal-black night, –
A Meteor strange and bright: –
Hither and thither the vision strays,
A single lurid light.
Slowly it wanders, – pauses – creeps, –
Anon it sparkles, – flashes and leaps;
And ever as onward it gleaming goes
A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws.
The Dong, we learn, fell in love with a Jumbly Girl with her sky-blue hands and her sea-green-hair when the cheerful Jumblies landed and danced to his pipe all night. But then they sailed on:
And the Dong was left on the cruel shore
Gazing, – gazing for evermore, –
Ever keeping his weary eyes on
That pea-green sail on the far horizon.
The rhyme makes him funny. He knows he is a fool, a nonsense man, as he flatly admits: ‘What little sense I once possessed/ Has quite gone out of my head!’ He is driven beyond sense by refusal to abandon a dream. Ever since, he has looked for his Jumbly girl, even though he knows she has sailed. To guide him at night he weaves a huge nose from the bark of the Twangum tree, painted red, with a hollow space for a lamp, tied round his head with a bandage – like the Pobble’s nose – ‘To prevent the wind from blowing it out’.
And now each night, and all night long,
Over those plains still roams the Dong;
And above the wail of the Chimp and Snipe
You may hear the squeak of his plaintive pipe
While ever he seeks, but seeks in vain
To meet with his Jumbly Girl again;
Lonely and wild – all night he goes, –
The Dong with a Luminous Nose.
And all who watch at that midnight hour,
From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower,
Cry, as they trace the Meteor bright,
Moving along through the dreary night, –
‘This is the hour when forth he goes,
The Dong with a luminous Nose!
Yonder – over the plain he goes;
He goes!
He goes;
The Dong with a luminous Nose!’
It would be simple to say that the noses that stretched and pointed and poked throughout Lear’s work had finally fused into a single flaming organ. Yet the luminous nose is poetry itself, glimmering in the landscape of a sombre life. The great Gromboolian plain is not an empty, lonely land. It has halls and towers, full of people. But while ‘they’ live indoors by the fire, the Dong is an outsider, in all senses, lonely and wild. His folly is noble. He is a hero, driven by desire. He wanders hopefully, without hope, in a desperate refusal to despair.
VII. SWOOPING
39: SHOCKS
There was an old person whose tears
Fell fast for a series of years;
He sat on a rug, and wept into a jug
Which he very soon filled full of tears.
Lear was often unwell in his mid-sixties. He had shingles, asthma, giddiness, rheumatism, trouble with his bowels. His right eye, which he had damaged in the fall long ago, had never recovered and he worried that he would lose his sight. His epileptic fits were less frequent but more intense: ‘Demo
n with violent indigestion but the fit tho’ violent was short’; ‘went out on the Terrace, where the cold gave me a chill, & went up to sleep then X5 super suddenly’. At one point his heart palpitations returned and he crawled into bed, ‘perilously near a semi-paralysed state’. He felt mortal, and when Ellen told him that their brother Henry had died, aged eighty, he was badly upset – ‘strangely as it may seem’ – and decided to get to England as fast as he could.
England in 1877 both cheered and exhausted him. One day he walked past the house in Upper North Place, ‘where Ann & I began our “Art Life” in 1828–9’. Another day, crossing Regent Street, he bumped into Hallam and Lionel Tennyson, now twenty-five and twenty-three: ‘O days of Farringford! Giorni passate – perche no retorni!’ Later he took them to drinks at the Criterion, and arranged to go down to Aldworth, where he found Tennyson in a genial, if growling, mood and Emily looking ‘younger, & handsomer, & diviner than ever’.
That summer, after the shock of Hubert’s decision to study at King’s, Lear steadied himself. But he was badly shaken again when he heard that Giorgio was very ill in Corfu. He packed furiously and set off for Greece, steaming into Corfu harbour past the lilac coast and the islands where he and Frank used to sail. He found Giorgio sick and thin, and set about finding the family better rooms, leaving after a few days, happier in the thought that they could now live in comfort. But Giorgio was not well enough to come back until midsummer the following year, and then when Lear met him off the boat at Genoa he seemed a mere skeleton, hardly able to walk. He took him to convalesce in Mendrisio, across the Swiss border at the foot of Monte Generoso between lakes Lugano and Como, where they stayed in a hotel that was also a clinic, run by a Dr Pasta. Lear clambered up the mountain to sketch the ranges rippling to the Alps and the hazy views south across the plains, ‘a vast scene, and one that might be made something of’.
Monte Rosa from Monte Generoso, 8 am, 6 July 1878
In October, back in San Remo, with Lambi to help, the old patterns resumed and Lear was sanguine. His garden was glorious, he told Fortescue, ‘so that altogether I should be rather surprised if I am happier in Paradise than I am now’. Yet he ended on a different note, showing his anxiety by a plunge into nonsense:
A huge Hotel is to be built just below my garden. If it is on the left side it will shut out all my sea view: a calamity as afflicts me.
(The Akond of Swat would have left me all his ppproppprty, but he thought I was dead: so didn’t. The mistake arose from someone officiously pointing out to him that King Lear died seven centuries ago, and that the poem referred to one of the Akhond’s predecessors.)
King Lear had come to mind when he left Corfu – would he be dispossessed again? Would hotel shadows darken his garden and block out the sea, misty in the mornings and blue-black at night, with the silver track of the moon? Ever since he moved in Lear had talked to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth and Thomas Hanbury, first hoping to buy the land and then hoping to ensure that nothing high would be built on it. But now men were cutting down the olive trees and clearing the plot. The land had been sold to a German, Herr Wolfen, whom Lady Kay-Shuttleworth’s daughter Jenny had introduced to Hanbury, and who planned to build a huge hotel. This made things worse: when German families fled across the border from France at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war Lear had seethed with an immigrant’s resentment at a new wave of settlers. (Later, Henry Strachey remembered with amusement, Lear was pleased with his ploy of answering the door himself when he was supposed to be at home to show his pictures so that he could send away people he didn’t like, ‘and also keep out Germans. He seemed to have a great horror and fear that a German might be let in by accident.’)
For the moment he planned to hide the eyesore with a wall, or to plant eucalyptus. Trying to forget the threat, Lear bustled back and forth, visiting Vice-Consul William Bevan and sitting with old-maidish kindness with the evangelical chaplain, Mr Fenton, whose sermons he had mocked but whose family he loved. There were new English arrivals in San Remo, including Hugh Montgomery and his wife, who became stalwart friends, and in Bordighera, where the writer George Macdonald and the unconventional botanist Clarence Bicknell both settled. Lear followed the gossip and flung himself into trivial pleasures like buying plants or chocolate, biscuits and bottles of Bass, and eating good meals with pears and quinces and champagne. He had money in the bank, his health was better and his depression lifted. There was no mention of tears or heartache, loneliness or the lost past. On New Year’s Eve he wrote firmly, ‘So ends 1878, which I ought to call a year of thanks, so much unexpected good has happened.’
There was an Old Person of Sheen,
Whose expression was calm and serene;
He sate in the water, and drank bottled porter,
That placid Old Person of Sheen.
It could not last. At the start of 1879 the blasting of rocks and rattling of carts on the land below were driving him mad: ‘horribly out of humour with the Great Bee Stanbury and the Jenny Shuttlecock Hotel’. The worry came out in a quick rhyme:
O dear! How disgusting is life!
To improve it O what can we do?
Most disgusting is hustle & strife,
& of all things an ill fitting shoe –
Shoe,
O bother an ill fitting shoe!
The ‘Devil’s Hotel’ rose, day by day, with scaffolding poles, gaping windows and hanging canvas. With the rashness that sometimes drove him, Lear immediately looked at new plots of land, working out what they would cost, examining his bank balance and listing people he could borrow from, making an offer for the Villa Berigo, higher up the hill, and then immediately withdrawing it. Ruefully, he pulled himself together and one April evening, with Bevan’s eldest daughter, he composed a poetic self-portrait in response to a remark made by one of her friends.
‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.
His mind is concrete and fastidious; –
His nose is remarkably big; –
His visage is more or less hideous; –
His beard it resembles a wig.
He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers, –
(Leastways if you reckon two thumbs;)
Long ago he was one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumms.
He sits in a beautiful parlour,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of Marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.
He has many friends, laymen and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical; –
He weareth a runcible hat.
When he walks in a waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, – ‘He’s come out in his nightgown,
that crazy old Englishman, – O!’
He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger-beer. –
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish, –
How pleasant to know Mr Lear!
It was to be sung, he said, ‘to the air “How cheerful along the gay mead”’. This was at once ironic and oddly appropriate, the tune being ‘The Song of Eve’ from Arne’s mid-eighteenth-century opera Abel, celebrating the bursting life that never failed to thrill Lear, the flowers, the flocks, the trees and fruits, the ‘myrtle that springs from the clod’. At the same time, Arne’s song declared that this bounty was a fragile gift, which its creator could ‘destroy with a nod’.
‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear’. Drawing in Lear’s letter to William Bevan, 14 January 1879
Lear sent
his poem to several friends. It showed that he would never, really, be ‘one of the dumms’. Everything was there: his work, his books, his friends, his Marsala, Foss and the rushing children, the nonsense ‘runcible’ and chocolate shrimps. And the tears. A fortnight after he wrote the poem he called round to the Bevans at teatime and finding a dozen children there, he sang ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, ‘but broke down in the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’: ‘I was sorry I could do no more to help the swarry.’ He wept as the hotel’s whitewashed walls glared into his studio.
*
On his way to Monte Generoso in July, Lear learned that Lady Waldegrave had died, suddenly, from a heart attack. Knowing that Fortescue would be distraught he wrote at once to ask him to stay. It would not happen this year: ‘I am crushed to the earth,’ Fortescue wrote, ‘and have no energy to travel – and above all, I will not run away from my awful misery and suffering.’
Lear’s suffering seemed small by comparison. In Mendrisio he tried to put the hotel, ‘The Enemy,’ out of his mind and on the whole he succeeded. Toward the end of his stay, Marianne North came to Como. She was on her way back to England from India, and they went on an excursion to Monte Civita near Monza to see a new hotel, talking endlessly and enjoying the views across the plain. ‘There are few women to be compared with Marian North’, Lear wrote, ‘& the day with her has been a wonderful light up.’ He tried to keep this up when she visited him in San Remo a month later, plying her with little luxuries, showing her his Indian sketches and letting her know, as she left, how good he had been not to mention ‘The Enemy’ all day.