Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  At this low point he took up Wilkie Collins’s suggestion that he should finish the story of Mr and Mrs Discobbolos. In the new, second part, when the ever-expanding family have lived on their wall for twenty years, ‘By all admired, and by some respected’ – a nicely sly aside – Mrs Discobbolos wails for her children: ‘Surely they should not pass their lives/ Without any chance of husbands or wives!’ But her husband calls her a fiddledum head, a goose, an octopod: applied to their domestic life on the wall, Lear’s ‘runcible’, usually affectionate, becomes a swear word, a term of abuse.

  Suddenly Mr Discobbolos

  Slid from the top of the wall;

  And beneath it he dug a dreadful trench, –

  And filled it with Dynamite gunpowder gench, –

  And aloud began to call, –

  ‘Let the wild bee sing and the blue bird hum!

  For the end of our lives has certainly come!’

  And Mrs Discobbolos said,

  ‘O! W! X! Y! Z!

  We shall presently all be dead

  On this ancient runcible wall, –

  Terrible Mr Discobbolos!’

  Pensively, Mr Discobbolos

  Sate with his back to the wall; –

  He lighted a match, and fired the train, –

  And the mortified mountains echoed again

  To the sounds of an awful fall!

  And all the Discobbolos family flew

  In thousands of bits to the sky so blue,

  And no one was left to have said,

  ‘O! W! X! Y! Z!

  Has it come into anyone’s head

  That the end has happened to all

  Of the whole of the Clan Discobbolos?’

  ‘Pensively’, Lear was blowing up the hotel, but the explosion, collapse and the awful fall contain all the crashes that had blighted his life, right back to his father’s Stock Exchange collapse, which had scattered the Lear clan, after their twenty settled years in Bowman’s Lodge.

  In October Lear sent this terrible sequel to his American publisher James Fields. He told Fields about the hotel, and laughingly mentioned that someone had advised him to travel the world giving readings of nonsense to raise money to build another house: ‘So look out for me and my cat some fine day – by a Boston steamer, on my way to San Francisco.’ Then, at the end of his letter, he added a ‘Statement’ to the effect that the life of the celebrated Mr Lear, artist and writer of nonsense and travel, had been ruined, despite a written promise, by the construction of an immense hotel that condemned him to sunlessness in winter and destroyed his studio’s light. He was preparing to move to New Zealand, and ‘all the Sanremisi were not at all reticent in their remarks on the parties who are about to cause it’. If he was trying to blow himself up, he was succeeding. When Wilkie Collins leaked the statement to the press, the accused ‘parties’ were easily identifiable as Hanbury and the Kay-Shuttleworths: there were threats of libel actions and the Kay-Shuttleworth clan turned their backs. His friendship with Johnny and Catherine Symonds cooled drastically, and he lost touch with Marianne North, whom he loved. Corresponding with her friend Amelia Edwards he always asked, longingly, what had become of Marianne.

  ‘Altogether I was never in a greater fix in all my life, & as it is so near the end of it, it is all the more disagreeable,’ he groaned, a week after he sent his Statement to James Fields. But by the end of the month his friends were hatching a plan to solve his fix by building a new house. Northbrook offered a loan of £2000, and the young Earl of Derby commissioned yet more drawings. Other friends chipped in to swell the building fund and Lear planned to sell the Villa Emily, for a good price he thought, and send drawings to London to be sold. Chichester Fortescue was with Lear when he decided on the plot he would buy. For months Fortescue had been holed up in Lady Waldegrave’s family home at Chewton, visiting her grave daily, weeping, kissing the clothes flung over the chair in her dressing room. His grief was compounded by recriminations that if he had only watched her, and seen how serious her illness was, he could have saved her. In December 1879 he forced himself to travel to Cannes for the wedding of Constance Braham, Lady Waldegrave’s niece, to young Eddie Strachey, Johnny Symonds’s nephew. Afterwards he made his way over to San Remo and stayed for two months at the Hôtel de Londres, next door to Lear, gradually regaining his cheerfulness. During his long visit they talked often of Tennyson. In his grief, Fortescue said, In Memoriam was constantly in his hands, ‘soothing and strengthening both by its varied experience and expressions of sorrow and loss, and by the deep inward trust in God and a future life which is worked out’. Lear was warmly sympathetic, despite his own troubles.

  Towards the end of Fortescue’s stay, Lear sorted through boxes of sketches to sell; he took out 581 of them and decided to send four hundred to London: ‘I seem by doing this to be cutting out parts of my own flesh, for I can never see them again.’ At this point, Northbrook and Baring arrived. Appalled at the prospect of this loss, Northbrook offered to buy fifty drawings for £500. Although Lear would take no more money from him, he did agree to leave the drawings behind and sell more finished pictures instead. He could show them at 33 Norfolk Square, where Frank Lushington had asked him to stay for some months while Kate and the children were in the country for the summer.

  London was a whirl: bewildering, noisy, confusing. He was bilious and tried to cure his bad stomach with neat whisky. He felt harassed and unsure. In June, Robert Bush went bankrupt, and it turned out that he had lost the plates for all the nonsense books he had published. ‘Here’s a shindy!’ Lear wrote. It was even more vital to sell his paintings, and Lear sent letters to everyone he knew, posting four hundred cards: friends and patrons duly turned up, taking drawings away with them.

  ‘I bought two, cost me £26,’ said Lord Derby, rather tersely. There were lighter moments, like Hubert’s prize-giving and the dinner at the zoo, and stays with good friends. He bought toys for the children, and drew alphabets and birds. They perched and swung and flew, glanced sideways and flaunted their feathers: green, brown, brilliant yellow and coy pink, and rather cross-looking in stripes.

  Lear enjoyed his time with Frank and his evenings with Northbrook and with Fortescue. But once again he looked back to roads not taken. Watching Gussie he thought, ‘What would not life have been with that woman!! But it was not to be.’ Staying with her in Wimbledon, early one morning he looked out of his window and drew a small sketch, ‘of a Chicken looking at the eggshell he had come from’. This prompted ‘O Brother Chicken! Sister Chick!’, with its wry acceptance of doubt:

  Can no one tell? Can no one solve, this mystery of Eggs?

  Or why we chirp and flap our wings, – or why we’ve all two legs?

  And since we cannot understand, –

  May it not seem to me,

  That we were merely born by chance,

  Egg-nostics for to be?

  Lear did not look for answers. In his Paris hotel on his way home, he felt grateful, listing places where he had seen friends this summer:

  So far I ought to be very thankful, – but – but – but – the past & the future often will outweigh the present – Leatherhead, Stratton, Aldworth, Compton, Dudbrook, Guy’s Cliffe, Oxford, & Templehurst – for the past; – Sanremo the future.

  Trust & go on hoping.

  Bed at 11.

  On the train he read Tennyson. Three days later he was home.

  40: THE VILLA TENNYSON

  The new villa was lower down the slope, just to the east. Its design copied that of the the Villa Emily almost exactly, to make it easier, Lear said, for Foss to find his way around, but the rooms were in reverse order, to fit the ground. In late February 1880 he could write: ‘The walls of the Villa Oduardo was really begun yesterday: certainly I am making a leap in a kind of darkness.’ It had ‘only the road & the Railway between it and the sea’, he told Emily, so it was safe, ‘unless the Fishes begin to build, or Noah’s Ark comes to an Anchor below the site’. Fears sapped his confiden
ce, old nightmares of Jonah and unfathomable depths.

  Slowly the house rose, and in September he decided on a name – Villa Tennyson. The following spring, when he sent Lord Derby the last four drawings in repayment of his advance, he was packing paintings, books and furniture. When he moved, he said, ‘thenceforward I hope to work harder & hardest at my 300 Topographical Poetical Illustrations of A Tennyson’s poems – many of which are far advanced, – but all have had to be shunted along of the abominable Shuttleworth Hanbury Hotel’. He moved in in June 1881. ‘We send our affectionate God bless you and the New House,’ wrote Emily. The whole Tennyson family, with Alfred at the head, signed the letter wishing him well.

  *

  From time to time over the past thirty years Lear had returned to his ‘Poetical Illustrations’ of lines from Tennyson, first projected in 1852. In this strange, intensely personal – even eccentric – project, Lear looked back through his innumerable sketches to find scenes of real places that were suggested to him by lines of Tennyson’s poetry, or that offered a visual equivalent to the mood and image. Then he drew these again to form a lengthy sequence. He had taken up the idea anew ten years ago, when he moved into the Villa Emily in 1871. At that point he had searched for his original list, writing it out again and beginning three oil paintings, of Philae for ‘Moonlight on still waters’, Kasr es Saàd for ‘The crag that fronts the Even’, and the Albanian mountains for ‘Akrokeraunian Walls’. He had also made outline drawings on prepared wood: ‘the small initiative preliminary pestilential pseudo perry derry pumpkinious beginnings for the Tennyson work’.

  Lear’s plan was to show the large paintings in his gallery and use the drawings to create a book, on the lines of Claude’s Liber Veritatis, which he had pored over in Northbrook’s library, and Turner’s Liber Studiorum of 1807–9. He had a copy of the Turner with the seventy engravings in etching and mezzotint, as well as the new autotype edition, and the young lithographer Frank Underhill had made copies of five plates for him. He knew that Turner had returned to these early works towards the end of his life, painting some of the subjects afresh, including the shimmering Norham Castle, Sunrise. There was nothing wrong in reviving an earlier vision. It was a kind of return, an ending.

  In the 1870s Lear had worked on five large oils related to particular Tennyson lines, telling his friends, and spoofing the quotations for fun. The effect was surreal – no. 5 could be a quotation from T. S. Eliot – but it was the kind of parody-puzzle Lear enjoyed, knowing that Tennyson fans could easily find the originals:

  1. Tom Moorey

  2. The Nasty crockery tott’ring falls

  3. Like the wag that jumps at evening, – all along the sanded floor

  4. To catch the whistling cripples on the beach

  With Topsy Turvy signs of screaming pay.

  5. Spoonmeat with Bill Porter, in the hall

  With green pomegranates, & a shower of Bass.

  This is frightful – but what can you expect from the Author of the Book of Nonsense?

  The first two were ‘Timohorit’ and ‘The vast Akrokeraunian walls’ from ‘To E.L. on his travels in Greece’; the third, ‘And the crag that fronts the Even,/All along the shadowing shore’, came from ‘Eleanore’, and the final two from ‘The Lotos Eaters’: ‘To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,/and tender curving lines of creamy spray’, and ‘moonlight on still waters between walls/Of gleaming granite, in a shadowy pass’.

  Lear heard Tennyson’s music tumbling in his head like the sea in a shell pressed to the ear. Parody was irresistible. Evelyn Baring, insisting on Lear’s kindly, lovable self (‘He was too warm-hearted to be satirical’), remembered him sobbing while he played ‘Tears, idle tears’, yet sending round a sketch the next morning with a verse that was clearly Tennyson, though clearly not:

  Nluv, fluv bluv, ffluv biours,

  Faith nunfaith kneer beekwl powers

  Unfaith naught zwant a faith in all.

  If read aloud, especially in the mournful, sonorous tones in which Tennyson declaimed his work, this reproduces the original:

  If Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours

  Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers:

  Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.

  Casting Lancelot’s song from the Idylls into phonetic nonsense diction looks like mockery, but it let Lear spell – or unspell – his deepest beliefs, his need for love, his hope of faith. When he wrote to Fortescue in 1873 telling him about the five paintings, he padded out his letter with another parody. Here was Tennyson praising Lear’s book on his travels in Albania and Greece:

  Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls

  Of water, sheets of summer glass,

  The long divine Peneian pass,

  The vast Akrokeraunian walls,

  Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair,

  With such a pencil, such a pen,

  You shadow forth to distant men,

  I read and felt that I was there …

  And here were Lear’s ‘mysterious and beautiful verses’, catching Tennyson’s cadences and harmonies in a bathetic, concrete nonsense that was, paradoxically, more faithful to the actual Albanian trip: the dangerous dogs, stubborn mule and crashing plates.

  Tom-Moory Pathos; – all things bare, –

  With such a turkey! such a hen!

  And scrambling forms of distant men,

  O! – ain’t you glad you were not there!

  Delirious Bulldogs; – echoing, calls

  My daughter, – green as summer grass: –

  The long supine Plebeian ass,

  The nasty crockery boring falls; –

  The effect was both to make the original seem ridiculously overstated and to mock the tribute to himself. But in his drawings, Lear portrayed the ‘Illyrian woodlands’ with great seriousness, looking past the trees of Akhrida in Albania to the bays beyond.

  Twenty-five years ago he had explained to Emily that he wanted to show that Tennyson’s poetry,

  (with regard to scenes) is as real and exquisite as it is relatively to higher and deeper matters: that his descriptions of certain spots are as positively true as if drawn from the places themselves, & that his words have the power of calling up images as distinct & correct as if they were written from those images, instead of giving rise to them.

  ‘As if drawn from the places themselves’, as if ‘written from those images’: it was Lear who had seen the places, not the poet. As he read and reread Tennyson’s poems he found his own ‘distinct & correct’ images to illustrate them. In the process he compiled a pictorial autobiography, from the Sussex of his youth to his travels in Italy, Greece, Egypt, the Levant and India. By now he had drawn and painted watercolours and oils from his sketches many times. The Tennyson drawings were a way of seeing himself and his past through the ‘subtle-thoughted, myriad-minded’ power of recall that Tennyson himself had called on in his ‘Ode to Memory’:

  Thou who stealest fire,

  From the fountains of the past,

  To glorify the present; oh, haste,

  Visit my low desire!

  Strengthen me, enlighten me!

  I faint in this obscurity,

  Thou dewy dawn of memory.

  In August 1876, as he opened packing cases and rifled through a clutter of belts and spades and garden scissors, he came upon the ‘Tennyson’ scenes of Civitella and Philae that his old friend Bill Nevill had bought years ago, now returned to him after Bill’s death: ‘Bottini’s man came, & opened 2 cases. “Morn broadens”, painted at Stretton (1853 I think) & “Palms & Temples” – at Eastbourne in 1855 – are now here: queer change – after their glory at Woodgreen & their happy obscurity – yet always beloved. At Langhams! They are very dirty though.’

  In 1855 he had told Emily Tennyson proudly how these paintings hung each side of the drawing-room door in the Nevills’ house in Stoke Newington. ‘Morn Broadens’ was the first large Tennyson landscape sold, and although it went cheaply he was gl
ad, he said, ‘that it belongs to people who will always enjoy it’.

  Letter from Lear to Emily Tennyson, 11 November 1855

  Bill’s sons had also sent Lear a packet of his letters: ‘some are as far back as 1835 – from Knowsley!’ That autumn, planning new Tyrants, he went through his sketches:

  Worked all day long in looking over sketches – more than three cabinets full, so that today & yesterday I seem to have lived again every year of my life from 1824 – Sussex – Lancashire, the Rhine – Rome – Naples – Campagna, Abruzzi – Sicily, Calabria – Sicily again – Apulia – Corfu – Greece, Constantinople, Albania, Greece & Thessaly – Sinai, Egypt – Ionian Isles, Athos, Palestine, Malta, Cornice, Venice, the Lakes, Dalmatia, Crete, Corsica, India.

  Long ago he had decided that ‘in converting memories into tangible facts – recollections & past time as it were into pictures, – lies the chief use & charm of a painter’s life’. The Tennyson work became a shifting lens focused on his own wanderings. When he drew sunlit plains and ruins glimpsed through a dark Roman arch – an eye of memory – he wrote beneath it the lines from ‘Ulysses’,

  For all experience is an Arch wherethro’

  Gleams the untravelled world, whose margin fades,

  For ever and for ever when I move.

  And then, with a flourish, ‘Campagna di Roma, Italy’.

  Thinking about the paintings he had made throughout his travelling life brought not shocks exactly, but tremors from some fault-line deep beneath. He felt slightly behind the times: in London in 1876 he had gone to a show at the Watercolour Society; ‘It interests me much – but principally in the various modes of execution – so much more liquid than my own. Glennie’s distances are beautiful, but his foregrounds are wanting in much.’ Arthur Glennie, one of Lear’s many correspondents, had been known since the 1840s for his hazy, Italianate watercolours and Lear’s work, too, seemed now to belong to that earlier era. In London Whistler was painting his Nocturnes in black and gold. Across the Channel, the exhibitions of the ‘Impressionists’, as the critic Louis Leroy called them sneeringly, were causing as much fuss as the Pre-Raphaelites had done a quarter of a century ago; Monet’s painting of Palm Trees at Bordighera could not have been more different to Lear’s.