The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear. Edward Lear
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particularly those in black and white and water-colours, should have been sidetracked rather than assessed. His habit of under-statement, as in the case of Anthony Trollope, is responsible for some of the posthumous neglect of his graphic work. His trick of looking upon himself as a recorder and ‘topographer’ rather than a creator, has been taken too literally. Self-depreciation was not a pose. Lear was as puzzled about his gifts as he was about marriage, or, indeed, about life. Conscious of ‘being influenced to an extreme by everything in natural and physical life, i.e. atmosphere, light, shadow, and all the varieties of day and night’, he wondered whether it was ‘a blessing or the contrary’, but decided, wisely enough, that ‘things must be as they may, and the best is to make the best of what happens’. Like Pangloss he concludes that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds and he certainly makes the best of this sensitiveness before the picturesque, grumbling much but demanding little beyond ‘quiet and repose’ so that he could get on with his work.
His idea of heaven is a place of charming landscapes without noise or fuss. ‘When I go to heaven, if indeed I go—and am surrounded by thousands of polite angels—I shall say courteously “please leave me alone:—you are doubtless all delightful, but I do not wish to become acquainted with you;—let me have a park and a beautiful view of sea and hill, mountain and river, valley and plain, with no end of tropical foliage:—a few well-behaved cherubs to cook and keep the place clean —and—after I am quite established—say for a million or two years—an angel of a wife. Above all let there be no hens! No, not one! I give up eggs and roast chickens for ever”.’
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Uncertainty of income (for even the patronage of rich friends does not stabilise his finances) predisposes him to wish for a sinecure, and when, in 1863, Greece took to herself a king, Lear requests his friend Fortescue (afterwards Lord Carlingford) to ‘write to Lord Palmerston to ask him to ask the Queen to ask the King of Greece to give’ him a ‘place’ specially created, the title to be ‘Lord High Bosh and Nonsense Producer . . . with permission to wear a fool’s cap (or mitre)—three pounds of butter yearly and a little pig,—and a small donkey to ride on’. Before that, rumour having raised Mr. Gladstone to the Hellenic throne, Lear had threatened to ‘write to Mr. G. for the appointment of Painter Laureate, and Grand Peripatetic Ass and Boshproducing Luminary’ to the Greek Court.
The problem of finance was a constant irritant, and his wish to stabilise his income, though couched in the Learian nonsense idiom, was none the less a reality. But although he was chronically short of cash, he was never actually destitute or even poor. It was the lack of regular income rather than poverty which gave him a permanent feeling of insecurity. He was thus forced by circumstances to think unduly about money. Such a condition might have made him thrifty, which is often the first step to miserliness; but he was as generous as he was poor and continually helped the still poorer members of his family and others less closely related. ‘I only wish for money to give it away,’ is no idle boast, as we know from the records of many generous acts. His books contribute little to his variable income and it is to his landscapes that he turns for subsistence. He becomes a travelling showman of his own works, for at Corfu or Valetta or San Remo, he holds exhibitions, and in his later years there was a small permanent show of his pictures at Foord’s Gallery in Wardour Street. But customers are shy and they do not always pay promptly. The position would have been still worse but for the support of regular patrons. His old friends are ever ready to help and to enlist the help of their friends, but even then there are lean periods, for, alas, ‘private patronage must end in the natural course of things, but eating and drinking and clothing go on disagreeably continually.’ Like William Blake he began his career as an illustrator of the works of others, and it was as a delineator of birds for the ornithologist John Gould that he attracted the attention of Edward Stanley, thirteenth Earl of Derby, the Whig statesman and scholar, known to literature as Bulwer Lytton’s ‘Rupert of debate’. Lord Derby engaged him to illustrate a book on the menagerie which was then a show-piece of the Stanley demesne at Knowsley near Liverpool. This commission was momentous, for it earned him the lifelong patronage of the noble family which has done many more serviceable things than lend its name to the most famous horse race in the world, not least the befriending of the quaint ‘cove’ whose work has already outlived the fame of his first kindly and illustrious patron. Edward Lear worked for no less than four successive Earls of Derby—but, more important still, he worked or rather played for the children in the household of his first patron, and by so doing achieved immortality. The first Book of Nonsense was composed to amuse the grandchildren, nephews and nieces of the thirteenth earl, to whose ‘great-grandchildren, grand-nephews and grand-nieces’, it is dedicated.
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If ever a gifted man worked for a living it was Edward Lear, and, although he joked about his journeys, they were not jaunts but professional expeditions in search of the picturesque, with the object of turning it into marketable landscapes. He is in fact a pictorial merchant: a later Dr. Syntax—in search of a living. Scenery is the raw material of his trade. When trekking across Albania he is glad to leave the district of Peupli for Akhrida, where he hopes the scenery will be ‘more valuable’. He is, as he declares in his Corsican Journal, a ‘wandering painter—whose life’s occupation is travelling for pictorial and topographic purposes’. But although he always makes a virtue of necessity, work is life to him. He fears idleness because it exposes him to boredom, and if he is capable of enduring the prophylactic of drudgery, he has no liking for the sedentary side of painting: ‘No life is more shocking to me than sitting motionless like a petrified gorilla as to my body and limbs hour after hour—my hand meanwhile, peck peck pecking at billions of little dots and lines, while my mind is fretting and fuming through every moment of the weary day’s work.’
He craves for movement as though his curiously active mind needed the companionship of an active body, for ‘after all one isn’t a potato’, so perhaps it is better ‘to run about continually like an ant’. It was nothing for him even when past his prime to walk fifteen and twenty miles a day, and to do an amount of sketching as well. The trade of landscape-painter was perhaps, after all, only the excuse for those laborious journeys in Albania, Greece, Corsica, Malta, Crete, Egypt, Corfu, Switzerland, Calabria and other parts of Italy, the French Riviera, and India. There are indications that he relished travel for its own sake and was always planning jaunts to ever more distant lands. It is probable, also, that he found in travel a means of relief from that mental stress which, as we shall see, was an underlying cause of his jocularity. The craving for movement is like a chronic desire to run away from himself. ‘The more I read travels the more I want to move,’ and he playfully invited his friend Fortescue to go with him to ‘New Zealand, Tasmania and Lake Tchad’. As he grew older he believed that a sedentary life, after moving about as he had done for more than half a century, would ‘infallibly finish’ him ‘off suddenly’. And although, he reflected, he might ‘with equal suddenness be finished off if he moved about’, he believed that ‘a thorough change’ would affect him ‘far better rather than far worse. Whereby’, he concludes, ‘I shall go either to Sardinia, or India, or Jumsibobjiggle-quack this next winter as ever is.’
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This restlessness was no doubt due to a nervous defect, for although Lear lived for well over seventy years, he always, and with reason, looked upon himself as an invalid and could not understand why he continued to survive after he was fifty. There was reason for these fears, whimsically as he often stated them, for he was an epileptic, and suffered also from chronic asthma and bronchitis, from which he ultimately died. But in spite of these defects, he had varying spells of comfortable health, and his ailments did not interfere with his love of wandering in strange lands, and of working continuously, and, on the whole, happily, at high pressure. At one time he is advised ‘to take things easy’ as he has ‘the same complaint of the heart that my father died of’, but there is no evidence that he took the advice. Asthma and bronchitis would have driven him to warmer and drier climates even if he had not been otherwise predisposed to travel. Some of his irascibility may be attributed to physical and nervous defects, but much of it is a normal if exaggerated love of grumbling, to which he invariably gave the characteristic Lear