Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  The garden of the Villa Tennyson

  After about a week Fortescue caught a chill from sitting outside watching the sunset and collapsed into bed. Lear went to see him daily in snowy December days, feeling pretty weak himself: ‘very feeble lunch – chiefly bread & butter & Parmeggiano cheese; also a whole bottle of Marsala!!!!!!!! … Sate with Carlingford till nearly 6. He is much better – but dreadfully weak. Coming back, I fell over Foss in the dining room & hurt my nose a good deal. Luigi set me up again.’ Soon Fortescue was up but Lear was down. On Christmas Day he staggered over to dine at the hotel, ‘saying he would not have come for anyone else, “except Frank Lushington”’. He cheered up over dinner but next day he was in bed with bronchitis; now it was Fortescue’s turn to sit by his sick friend. They talked and talked, of James Stuart Mill, irreligion and Calvinism, of the queen and John Brown, of the horrors of Bulgarian massacres, but ‘all political talk is better avoided,’ Lear decided, ‘for official partisans can only see with the eyes of their party’.

  As he slowly recovered, Lear thought of the lines from Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’:

  Some pious drops the closing eye requires;

  Even from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,

  Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.

  After Fortescue left, he turned back to a poem of his own that he had tinkered with for years, ‘Some Incidents in the Life of my Uncle Arly’. He had begun it long ago for Emma Baring, Northbrook’s daughter, and had scribbled verses from time to time – on the flyleaf of Walpole’s letters, which he read when he was ill in 1873, and in letters to friends.

  All the drafts mentioned the cricket landing on his nose. Now, in February 1886, on a day of fierce east wind: ‘I did not rise at all, but kept still, & with a good fire cough less, & feeling better generally, thank God – at 2–3 – broth, boiled mutton & tacoli – sort of peas – very good sort of food. Also jelly – but no wine. Kept always in bed & read – (also writing “my aged Uncle Arly”).’ A week later, he told Ruskin that he was writing the poem, adding, ‘I esteem it a thing to be thankful for that I remain as great a fool as ever I was.’

  The title contained his name, ‘Uncle Arly’. But it also hinted at a willed obliqueness: it was unclear: ‘Un-cleArly’. If ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear’ had been a teasing self-portrait, this was his whole life: his youthful love of natural history, his teaching and medical drawings, his forty-three years of wandering, from Bowman’s Lodge to the Villa Emily. Always his cricket had chirruped in his ear, poetry’s lasting power, the call that ‘never – nevermore’ would leave him. Lear’s poem defied time, with its upside-down sunset and sunrise. It described age and childhood, mocking ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ – as Lewis Carroll had done. It combined lyrical melody and down-to-earth chat. It was true to himself.

  O my agèd Uncle Arly! –

  Sitting on a heap of Barley

  All the silent hours of night, –

  Close beside a leafy thicket: –

  On his nose there was a Cricket, –

  In his hat a Railway-Ticket; –

  (But his shoes were far too tight.)

  Long ago, in youth, he squander’d

  All his goods away, and wander’d

  To the Timskoop Hills afar.

  There, on golden sunsets blazing

  Every morning found him gazing, –

  Singing – ‘Orb! you’re quite amazing!

  How I wonder what you are!’

  Like the ancient Medes and Persians,

  Always by his own exertions

  He subsisted on those hills; –

  Whiles, – by teaching children spelling, –

  Or at times by merely yelling, –

  Or at intervals by selling

  ‘Propter’s Nicodemus Pills’.

  Later, in his morning rambles

  He perceived the moving brambles

  Something square and white disclose; –

  ’Twas a First-class Railway-Ticket;

  But, on stooping down to pick it

  Off the ground, – a pea-green Cricket

  Settled on my uncle’s Nose.

  Never – never more, – oh! never,

  Did that Cricket leave him ever, –

  Dawn or evening, day or night; –

  Clinging as a constant treasure, –

  Chirping with a cheerious measure, –

  Wholly to my uncle’s pleasure, –

  (Though his shoes were far too tight.)

  So for three-and-forty winters,

  Till his shoes were worn to splinters,

  All those hills he wander’d o’er, –

  Sometimes silent; – sometimes yelling; –

  Till he came to Borly-Melling,

  Near his old ancestral dwelling; –

  (But his shoes were far too tight.)

  On a little heap of Barley

  Died my agèd uncle Arly,

  And they buried him one night; –

  Close beside the leafy thicket; –

  There, – his hat and Railway-Ticket; –

  There, – his ever-faithful Cricket; –

  (But his shoes were far too tight.)

  He was pleased with his poem and sent it to several friends, often quoting Gray’s ‘Elegy’ in his letters, ‘even in our ashes live their wonted fires’. It was, he said, ‘the last nonsense poem I shall ever write’.

  42: PAX VOBISCUM

  A few months after finishing ‘Uncle Arly’, on the endpapers of his new copy of Gordon Cummings’s At Home in Fiji – his wanderlust now confined to books – Lear wrote:

  Quacks vobiscum Uncle Arly

  Sitting on your heap of Barley

  Quacks vobiscum – every Duck

  Quacks vobiscum – two by two

  Quacks vobiscum – as they flew

  Through the morning sky so blue

  Quacks vobiscum – what a lark!

  The birds were back, quacking in Latin the final blessing of the Mass, ‘Pax vobiscum’ – peace be with you. ‘Pax vobiscum, serve fidem’ – keep the faith.

  Death did not frighten Lear, but he wanted to get things in order. When he sold the Villa Emily he had made a will leaving £1500 to Sarah’s granddaughter Emily, and small sums to Hubert and Arny Congreve and his godchildren Percy Coombe, Allan Nevill and Lizzie Senior; five thousand drawings would go to Northbrook and his letters and diaries to Fortescue. When Northbrook came to stay in April 1886, he gave him several hundred drawings and watercolour sketches. (Northbrook later had these beautifully mounted in seven large volumes, alongside the journals of the Abruzzi and Calabria, a tribute to his deep affection.) But that April Lear also asked him to witness a new will. This time, as well as more drawings that would go to Northbrook in their specially designed cabinets, he left the house to Sarah’s granddaughter Emily in New Zealand, his painting materials to Frank Underhill and small legacies to Lambi and Dmitri. All his other papers and drawings would go to Frank Lushington. Emily’s daughter Sophie remembered visiting Frank’s house when she was a girl: ‘He opened drawer after drawer of exquisite sketches, and now he would say, “Where will you go now, Egypt, Palestine, India, Italy, Greece”; and many other lovely places.’ (Much later, in 1929, the bulk of these were sold.) Frank gave drawings to friends and patrons, including the Earl of Derby, and returned many letters to the writers or their families. But while Constance Strachey edited his correspondence with Chichester Fortescue, the letters to Frank himself disappeared and so did Lear’s diaries of their time in Corfu. Perhaps Frank burned them, or Kate did after he died in 1901. Or are they still in some trunk, waiting to be discovered?

  In February 1886 he was immensely pleased by a tribute from Ruskin in the February Pall Mall Gazette: ‘I really do not know any author to whom I am half so grateful for my idle self, as Edward Lear. I shall put him first of my hundred authors.’ His nonsense would live on, exerting a largely unrecognised influence on Modernist and later writers in
Britain and America – on Eliot, Joyce, Auden and Stevie Smith, on Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and John Ashbery, and many other poets, comedians, songwriters and illustrators. In a poll in 2012 a whole nation put ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ at the top of their list: it was Britain’s favourite poem. It took more time for Lear to be recognised as an artist: after Lady Ashburton’s death, the great Kinchenjunga sold for £5 and as late as the 1950s his sketches and drawings could be picked up for peanuts. It is only in the last fifty years that his landscapes have been valued for their skill and their wistful, luminous beauty.

  In the 1880s, when he thought of posterity, Lear thought of his paintings and, more and more, of his Tennyson drawings. He still worked on these, and on his paintings, but his health was a problem. In his garden in June 1886, ‘the big magnolia flowers, also the nightingales and robins’ were ‘a satisfaction – but his boots were far too tight, i.e. my chest oppression and cough are a sad set off’. In the summer he went to Brianza, breathing better and cheerfully going back to his Marsala and Barolo, but the heat was tremendous, driving him into the mountains, to Mendrisio. In early September he took a trip to Lucerne, seeing the lakes and Alps that had inspired him when he first saw them fifty years ago, but here he fell seriously ill, and briefly his San Remo doctor, Dr Hassall, feared for his life. Within a month, he could shuffle across the room in his slippers, but when Frank saw him in November he was shocked. He told Hallam that ‘my dear old Lear’ was better, but ‘sadly aged and feeble, very crippled at times with the rheumatism – totters about within the house – hardly ever goes out at all even on his terrace just outside the windows’. Luigi dressed and undressed him, putting him to bed at six. He was so disabled by rheumatism, he told Emily Tennyson, that often he was not up to writing at all. He managed a letter full of jokes to Fortescue, but ended, ‘He only said, I’m very weary. The rheumatiz he said. He said, it’s awful dull and dreary. I think I’ll go to bed.’

  Photographs filled the wall above Lear’s fireplace, among them Emily Tennyson, Thomas and Evelyn Baring, Chichester Fortescue, Arthur Stanley, Charles Church, the doctor’s wife Mrs Hassall, Gertrude Lushington and Gussie. ‘There!’ he wrote to Hallam, telling him of these. ‘It ain’t everybody as has such friends!’ But while Lear treasured his old friends he withdrew more and more from San Remo society, confessing cheerfully to Wilkie Collins that ‘of what is called the Colony here I know – I am happy to say – nothing. Neither perpetual church services (high & low – candlestix or cursing) are to my taste, nor are balls & Lawn Tennis among my weaknesses.’ One day Constance and Eddie Strachey caught sight of him from the train going through San Remo. It was Sunday and he was walking dreamily away from the station, ‘out of earshot of our calls. The sad, bent, loosely-clad figure with hands clasped behind him, we did not know was walking away from us then and for ever, for we never saw him again.’

  He was far from well over the coming winter. Sometimes his handwriting became wild. Once he fell out of bed in the dark, could not get up and lay there until day broke: ‘Hardlines!’ he wrote, but felt lucky that he was not badly hurt. He was pleased when friends called in, and by March 1887, when Northbrook and his daughter Emma Baring came to stay in San Remo, he could walk to the lower terrace and back and have lunch with them in style: their visit was ‘a very great blessing, and I wish them back hourly’. Back they came a month later, walking in suddenly when he was already in bed, ‘And sate knitting & talking till 10.30. A very great pleasure. We had great fits of laughter about the Welsh Epitaphs, making lots of others for fun.’ These included one for Agnes Pears:

  Below the high Cathedral Stairs

  Lie the remains of Agnes Pears:

  Her name was Wiggs it was not Pears,

  But Pears was put to rhyme with stairs.

  Foss kept him company, ‘Foss always here’. Foss was supposed to be there in April when Lear had his photograph taken, sitting in a chair in his bedroom. He reported this exchange to Fortescue:

  Manipulator (From the depths of the curtain and the black box): Mr Lear!

  Mr Lear: How do you know my name?

  Manipulator: I used to see you 35 years ago at Hullmandels, the lithographers.

  I was the boy. You ain’t altered.

  In the photograph Lear’s arm is bent because he was holding Foss, who jumped down at the last minute. He wanted a photograph to give to his friends, including Gussie, to whom he had written when he was ill: she came out to see him, turning up without warning, ‘more nice and charming than ever’. In an absurd repetition, he thought again whether he might, finally, ask her to marry him, and again did not. While she was there she read Wordsworth to him to pass the time, and on her return sent him a volume of the poems and a paper cutter, to cut the pages. In time she married again: when Lear died Frank sent the Wordsworth volume back to her and Gussie later gave it to her husband’s young nephew, the artist Paul Nash, who proudly inscribed his name.

  Lear in 1887

  The days lengthened, the sun shone, and the passion flower and purple clematis were full of flowers. Lear passed his seventy-fifth birthday on 12 May 1887, and went back to Tennyson. The £500 that Ellen had left him had almost all gone on his experiments in reproducing the pictures, but he thought the proofs of the lithographs and autotype were always a failure: he had ordered the autotype company to send all his drawings back and now he was thinking of even more expensive processes, such as chromolithography and the new ‘platinotype’. To cheer him, Hallam sent a young American publisher, Dana Estes, who was planning a Tennyson edition, to look at his drawings. Lear perked up but Estes, clearly taken aback, told Hallam tactfully that ‘some portions are unfinished in detail, and would require very artistic treatment at the hands of an engraver or etcher’. He could see, he said, that publication was ‘the dearest wish of the old gentleman’s heart’, and that Lear almost despaired this would happen. Lear was right. The only book, published two years after his death, was a private edition of one hundred copies using a selection of the drawings for ‘The Daisy’, ‘The Palace of Art’ and ‘To E.L. on his Travels in Greece’. Tennyson signed all the copies, he said, for the sake of his old friend, Edward Lear.

  *

  Lear’s last months were not sad. Luigi left ‘in a vast tantrum’, complaining of too much work, and Giuseppe Orsini arrived. Lear disliked him at first – he thought he smelled and looked like the hefty Irish ‘Liberator’ Daniel O’Connell – but Giuseppe turned out to be gentle, slow and devoted. Lear also had a young cook, Cesare, who raised pigeons, and he took great pleasure watching the ten birds ‘& their punctual ways – 2 hours exactly on their eggs – & 2 hours liberty’. (Giuseppe thought they had little watches under their wings that they wound up at night.) The birds’ fluttering beauty among the full-blown roses pleased him: every day he looked from his window on ‘the same goldengreen of the new terrace, the sparkle of pigeons’ wings, the pulled blue of the sea breaking beyond. What continuance of heavenly weather!!’ He lay, and read, and watched the birds.

  In July he managed the jolting journey up to Andorno on the way to the Valle d’Aosta in the mountains north of Turin and even here, in the hot summer months with ‘rumbly bumbly thunderstorms’ and annoying clouds of flies, he worked on the Tennyson drawings. Often, though, his eyesight failed. He still wrote his letters. As Frank Lushington said, they kept up ‘the affectionate regular correspondence we had maintained for many years, but by degrees his letters became shorter & showed failure of memory’. Gradually he gave up writing his diary. When he came home Foss was staggering around, stiff on one side. He died in early September, and was buried ‘deep below the Figtree at the end of the Orange walk’. Foss was seventeen, a grand age for a cat, but Lear thought he was thirty, they had been together so long.

  Lear grieved for Foss. He wrote letters, saw friends, and planned another two hundred Tennyson drawings in a larger size. ‘Very absurd probably,’ he admitted. Then he had a fall. It was not this, th
ough, that caused the pains in his side, his doctor said, but too much champagne, ‘a great and ridiculous bore, inasmuch as Frank Lushington has just sent me 30 Bottles as a present’. The champagne would have helped him celebrate: he was delighted this autumn when an article in the Spectator praised his nonsense books and picked out his drawings as ‘enabling him to quadruple the laughable effect of his text by an inexhaustible profusion of the quaintest designs’. The review called him ‘the parent of modern nonsense-writers’. ‘Very nice indeed,’ said Lear.

  When the cold days came he sometimes walked on the terrace but often he just lay on the sofa, reading Trollope. He finished his household accounts, jotting down payments up to the end of November. Underneath these, a final entry read, ‘Wrote to Frank Lushington, 6. January 1888’. Then he took to his bed. All the time he lay there, Giuseppe said, he talked of his friends. He became weaker, tender to all around him, Dr Hassall said, ‘as by way of a leavetaking’, and even when spoken to in English he generally answered in Italian. On 29 January 1888, just after midnight, he asked Giuseppe to take down a final message. Giuseppe sent this to Frank Lushington, writing a touch too eloquently, perhaps, to be really faithful, but claiming that ‘with the greatest grief I act as interpreter of his last words – they are these precise and holy words’. ‘Mio caro Giuseppe …’

  I feel that I am dying. You will render me a sacred service in telling my friends and relations that my last thought was for them, especially the Judge and Lord Northbrook and Lord Carlingford. I cannot find words sufficient to thank my good friends for the good they have always done me. I did not answer their letters because I could not write, as no sooner did I take a pen in my hand than I felt as if I were dying.