The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear. Edward Lear
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instance occurs after a sunstroke in Italy: ‘I often thank God’, he said, ‘that although he has given me a nature easily worried by small matters, yet in such cases as this I go on day after day quite calmly, only thankful that I do not suffer more.’
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He has also numerous aversions, such as noises, crowds, hustle, gaiety, fools and bores, which are doubtless valetudinarian. Once he confesses that ‘barring a few exceptionals’, all human beings seem to be ‘awful idiots’. Yet he is neither prig nor curmudgeon, and inclined to gently scan his brother man, but he enjoys company rather than ‘society’. He is a worker but not a team-worker. ‘Always accustomed from a boy to go my own way uncontrolled, I cannot help fearing that I should run rusty and sulky by reason of retinues and routines.’ He repudiates the term Bohemian, but has ‘just so much of that nature as it is perhaps impossible the artistic and poetic beast can be born without’.
Noise is the annoyance which comes in for the full blast of his whimsical invective, and it is the misplaced sounds of children, cats, poultry and music which annoy him most. He humours this sensitiveness all over Europe. In Paris: ‘all the Devils in or out of Hell! four hundred and seventy-three cats at least are all at once making an infernal row in the garden close to my window. Therefore, being mentally decomposed, I shall write no more.’ At a Swiss hotel the greatest drawback is the noise of children: ‘the row of forty little ill-conducted beasts is simply frightful.’ At Rome: all manner of things irritate him; among them the conversion of so many to the Roman Catholic faith and Manning preaching ‘most atrocious sermons . . . to which nevertheless, all heaps of fools go’. But of all objectionable noises unwanted music inspires the fullness of his powers of vituperation. In Rome ‘a vile beastly rottenheaded foolbegotten pernicious priggish screaming, tearing, roaring, perplexing, splitmecrackle, crachimecriggle insane ass of a woman is practising howling below-stairs with a brute of a singing master so horribly, that my head is nearly off’. And some few years later at Corfu he is ‘much distressed by next door people who had twins babies and played the violin: but one of the twins died, and the other has eaten the fiddle—so all is peace’. As usual he compensates himself for these worries with a dose of nonsense, as, for example, the thought of ultimate calm among choice friends ‘under a lotus tree a eating of ice creams and pelican pie, with our feet in a hazure coloured stream with the birds and beasts of Paradise a sporting around us’.
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These irascibilities which play so large and so amusing a part in his letters, are mere whimsies when compared with his pecuniary anxieties. Money, always in ‘short supply’, is a stock subject of his letters, and at times, and much against the grain, he is forced to become a borrower. He is inclined to be thrifty but does not succeed in saving more than £300 until he is past fifty, and rejoices in the thought that henceforward he will be ‘entitled annually to £9’. The labour of ‘hopelessly endeavouring to get in subscriptions’ for one of his books, is so great that ‘I abhor the sight of a pen, and if I were an angel I would immediately moult all my quills for fear of their being used in calligraphy’. He dislikes the financial aspect of his work, but in spite of a large circle of friends and acquaintances and growing reputation both as artist and humorist, the task of earning a living remains a problem and a cause of anxiety. He has long been an artistic lion, one of the ‘sights’ of Cannes, Valetta, Corfu—or where-ever he may have pitched his studio, but his numerous visitors seem more inclined to sponge on his personal charm than to buy his pictures, and he dislikes being lionised at any time. At Malta he was ‘dubbed a mystery and a savage’ because he fled from the crowd of visitors who would have thronged his rooms without dreaming of spending £5 on a drawing. In a whole season he ‘only got £30 from the rich Cannes public’. He had a bad winter in 1878 at San Remo, having sold but one drawing for £7, and would have ‘come to grief’ had it not been for two friends who bought some of his smaller oil paintings. In addition to these fluctuations in turnover, he suffers from the failure of his publisher, and his troubles are increased when the tenants of his villa at San Remo abscond owing him nearly £100.
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He broods less upon these material worries than upon the evanescence of life and of all those things, friendship and the beauty of the earth, which are his real attachments. He is capable of consoling himself for the shortage of material possessions with a quip, but his acute sense of the shortage of time is not so easily assuaged. He attempts to soothe his temporal anxieties by resort to those apologetics which are common to all who are sensitive to evanescence. ‘The fact is,’ he argues, ‘time is all nonsense,’ and he inclines to leave it at that, resolving the incomprehensible by invincible pursuit of his chosen craft. His pictures give permanence to memories and impression and thus create a desirable illusion of timelessness. Yet the possession of a keen sense of fact will not permit him to be more than temporarily soothed by such arguments. He cannot bluff himself. He knows he is walking in the ‘dusty twilight of the incomprehensible’ and instinctively seeks to escape through the door of nonsense. ‘I wish I were an egg and going to be hatched,’ he sighs, summing up his desire for Nirvana.
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Lear’s nonsense is no mere tissue of quips and jokes. It is a thing in itself in a world of its own, with its own physiography and natural history; a world in which the nature of things has been changed, whilst retaining its own logical and consistent idiom. He expresses a nonsensical condition which is peculiar to himself and necessary to his serenity, and it may be that this fantastic world gratifies for him a desire which we all share to some extent, probably more than we are willing to admit, and which he seems to share, by anticipation, with the surrealists of our own time.
The authentic brand of nonsense is rarely absent from his letters, if no more than the fantastic spelling of a word. The art perfected in the Nonsense Books is here seen in the rough. It is not surprising, for instance, that the far-fetched hope of selling his Tennyson illustrations for the large sum of £18,000 should set him off. In that unlikely event, he will buy a ‘chocolate coloured carriage speckled with gold, driven by a coachman in green vestments and silver spectacles wherein sitting on a lofty cushion composed of muffins and volumes of the Apocrypha’, he will ‘disport himself all about the London parks to the general satisfaction of all pious people, and the particular joy of Chichester, Lord Carlingford and his affectionate friend Edward Lear’. Here we have nonsense combined with humour, and there are many similar passages in the letters. In one of them he threatens to go to Darjeeling or Para and ‘silently subsist on Parrot Pudding and Lizard Lozenges in chubbly contentment’. Lear is not a good sailor and once he writes from Folkestone that if the sea is rough he will hire, somewhat inconsistently, ‘a pussilanimouse porpoise, and cross on his bak’. He records that one of his frequent coughs shakes off one of his toes, ‘2 teeth and 3 whiskers,’ and he is so irritated by the doctor’s concern that he orders ‘a baked Barometer for dinner and 2 Thermometers stewed in treacle for supper’.
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Lear is an adept at the game of monkeying with words. Like Rabelais and Swift and Joyce he has a genius for fantastic verbal adventures, but often they do little more than play tricks with established spelling. The more familiar the words the more he is tempted to tamper with them. The habit is ingrained, the result not alone of a natural love of the whimsical and an indomitable sense of fun, but it is also, as he himself is aware, an instinctive effort to bridge a gap between idea and expression. ‘Proper and exact “epithets” always were impossible to me,’ he says, ‘as my thoughts are ever in advance of my words.’ And here also we may discover a key to his nonsense, or ‘nonsenses’, as he calls them, which are perhaps ahead of rather than behind his senses.
In the first of his published letters to Fortescue, whom he likes to address as ‘40scue’, he recounts the names of the distinguished foreigners at Rome, in 1848, as: ‘Madame Pul-itz-neck-off and Count Bigenouf—Baron Polysuky, and Mons. Pig.’ He is afraid to stand near the door, lest the announced names should make him grin. In his letters as well as his books he rattles off strings of queer examples with familiar gusto. A projected journey