Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  Over the next few years Lear drew more cartoon misadventures. In Italy in July 1842, planning a trip with his friend Charles Knight to the hills of the Abruzzi, he realised he must learn to ride. In over thirty scratchy drawings, he recorded his trials when Knight gave him riding lessons, from ‘L contemplates a ferocious horse with feelings of distrust’, through gallops and falls, immersion in quagmires and encounters with bushes, until he reaches an unsteady, but manageable pace. Lear was clumsy, prone to falling – off horses, down stairs, over branches: long ago he had described himself as having crooked knees, a long neck, ‘a most elephantine nose, and a disposition to tumble here and there owing to being half blind’. This clumsiness, like his nose, became a comic feature.

  From time to time, he drew more of these happy travel sketches. In 1847, touring Sicily with John Proby, he drew them fleeing beggars, dodging mosquitoes and, stepping into fantasy, nursing a troglodyte infant and peering at a ‘hen trinacria’ (the three-legged symbol of Sicily) sitting on her eggs. The cartoon journeys were presents for friends. In these drawings, so different from the formal lithographs, Lear created the hapless wanderer who would appear in poems, letters and journals. Holman Hunt described Lear staying in Sussex in 1852, where he told stories of his travels, Hunt said,

  and surprised me by showing that he was uncombative as a tender girl, while at the same time the most indomitable being in encountering danger and hardship. Nothing daunted him, and yet no one could be more fearful than he of certain difficulties he had to face … He would rather be killed than fire a pistol or gun; horses he regarded as savage griffins; revolutionists, who were plentiful just then, he looked upon as demons, and Custom officers were of the army of Beelzebub. On the other hand, he had the most unquenchable love of the humorous wherever it was found. Recognition of what was ridiculous made him a declared enemy to cant and pretension.

  Laughter crossed boundaries. In Albania in 1848 Lear stopped at the village of Episkopí, ‘close to a little stream full of capital watercresses which I began to gather and eat with some bread and cheese’. This provoked the bystanders ‘to extatic laughter and curiosity’:

  Every portion I put into my mouth, delighted them as a most charming exhibition of foreign whim; and the more juvenile spectators instantly commenced bringing me all sorts of funny objects, with an earnest request that the Frank would amuse them by feeding thereupon forthwith. One brought a thistle, a second a collection of sticks and wood, a third some grass; a fourth presented me with a fat grasshopper – the whole scene was acted amid shouts of laughter, in which I joined as loudly as any. We parted amazingly good friends, and the wits of Episkopí will long remember the Frank who fed on weeds out of the water.

  If Lear was an artist of promise, a talented, published lithographer, he was also, in the third person, already the ‘Mr Lear’ that children, friends and strangers would love: comical, accident-prone, and nonsensically pleasant to know.

  12: EXCURSIONS

  Lear saw how Ann and his friends enjoyed his accounts of Italy. (In one early letter he included a sketch of Ann devouring his letters, munching the pages.) This gave him a new ambition: Lear as travel writer, parallel to Lear as landscape artist. His time in Italy was for learning, and making money from paintings and lithographs, but he also liked travel for its own sake – it gave him freedom, excitement, variety, and a way of assuaging loneliness. He wrote later to his friend Chichester Fortescue: ‘if you are absolutely alone in the world, & likely to be so, then move about continually & never stand still. I therefore think I shall be compulsed & more especially by things on the horizon.’

  Compulsed, he went to Sicily in the spring after his return to Italy – the trip was supposed to last only a month, but ‘delays & ill fortunes’ stretched it to ten weeks. He went with Peter Leopold Acland – the son of a Devon MP – who had stayed in Tivoli with him and Uwins in 1838. The Moorish tone of Sicilian life fascinated Lear and so did the waves of invasion and layers of history, from legendary Cyclops and cave-dwellers to Greeks and Romans, Normans, Spanish and French. He loved the wild beauty of the northern coast and the temples of Selinunte and Agrigento in the south, and was astonished by the ravines on the slopes of Etna, a volcano that smoked and growled but was quiet compared to Vesuvius. And he found the absurd here too:

  Just above Taormina on a perpendicular rock of vast height is a town called Molia – where we had heard that all the babies were tethered to door posts by strings round their waists – for fear of falling down the precipice: – so we made an excursion there, to seek for all or any such babies – but – after diligent search – none were to be found: only – just as we were giving up the scrutiny – Lo! – one solitary piggywiggy – tied by its body – & fallen just 3 feet over the end of the rock – being the full length of its cord!

  A tethered pig apart, he found little in the zoological way, he told Derby, but was thrilled by ‘that brilliant bird the Roller – which flew like glittering jewels in the morning sun – round & round the old temples: – I suppose they build there.’ There were eagles in lonely places too, and herons, and birds he could not identify.

  Back in Rome, as he listened to the owls hooting, and watched the bats flitting round the houses in the evening, he thought of eagles soaring in the Apennines and of flights of birds crossing the Campagna to their winter feeding grounds on the vast Lake Fucino. He did not need to fly far to find a wilder Italy. In July 1843, after his riding lessons, Charles Knight lent him his Arab horse, Gridiron, and they set off together to explore the three provinces of the Abruzzi, south-east of Rome. This was then part of Neapolitan territory, reaching from the Apennines to the Adriatic coast, and much planning was required, as they needed permission from the Neapolitan minister in Rome to take their horses across the border from the Papal States. Nationalist feeling was rising and with it came fear of spies. At one point the police detained them for two nights before they could travel on, and later Lear could only obtain his pass to move from one province to another by facing an entire room of townsfolk:

  These people cannot imagine one’s motives for travelling to be simply the love of seeing new places, &c; and the more one strives to convince them that it is so, the more certain are they that one has other designs. ‘Where are you going!’ they scream out, if one goes but a foot’s length out of the highway to seek a point for drawing.

  But difficult borders were part of the attraction – this was a relatively unknown territory to British visitors and thus a good subject for Lear. This time, he thought, he would revise his journals as a travel book with his lithographs and call it Illustrated Excursions in Italy.

  Travel books were popular in Britain and if Lear could not offer adventures with tigers, or voyages through deserts and jungles, he could at least reveal an Italy that lay off the beaten track and people to whom ‘an Englishman’ was a strange being. He knew that his readers would expect descriptions of landscape and local life, mingled with history. This he could easily give them, describing the mountain passes, the great valley with its wine and corn, olives and melons, and the streets of Sulmona, birthplace of Ovid. He did his research carefully, acknowledging Sir Richard Colt Hoare and Richard Keppel Craven who had written on the Abruzzi before him, and including extracts from authorities and footnotes acknowledging a wide range of sources, many in Italian. But if he was not the first to describe the region, he was a pioneer as an artist: his illustrations, he could claim, ‘are, I believe, the first hitherto given of a part of central Italy as romantic as it is unfrequented’.

  Lear’s response to the region was unusually personal and lively. At Lake Fucino the recorder of history gave way to the naturalist, the artist and the dreamer. As he sat in the sunshine gazing on the still water and the peaks beyond, ‘brilliant with the splendour of an Italian morning’, he brooded on the contrast between the lake’s glory as the site of Roman holidays and festivals and its air of solitude today. He felt a spell of enchantment, heightened by the presence of the
animals and birds:

  A herd of white goats blinking and sneezing lazily in the morning sun: their goatherd piping on a little reed; two or three large falcons soaring above the Lake; the watchful cormorant sitting motionless on its shining surface; and a host of merry flies sporting in the fragrant air, – these were the only signs of life in the very spot where the thrones of Claudius and his Empress were placed on the crowd-blackened hill: a few distant fishing boats dotted the Lake where, eighteen centuries ago the cries of combat rent the air, and the glitter of contending galleys delighted the Roman multitude.

  This lake, illustrated in his book, has since vanished. In Roman times Claudius had tried to control its constant flooding by digging a tunnel, and almost two millennia later, a quarter of a century after Lear’s visit, the whole lake was drained to create a fertile plain.

  Lago di Fucino, from Illustrated Excursions in Italy (1846)

  As they travelled on, Lear described the rugged landscape like a lyrical geologist, but also like a painter, noting detailed foregrounds giving way to the interest of the middle plane and then to distant horizons. Among the bare, rugged peaks surrounding the mountain of the Gran Sasso, ‘the monarch of the Abruzzi’, they looked out, he wrote, over ‘a wild chaos of mountain tops, ridge above ridge, peak above peak … a dark purple world, still and solemn, outlined with the utmost delicacy against the clear sky, where the daylight yet lingered along an horizon of golden red’.

  Travel books needed the drama of obstacles and Lear provided these: rocky passes and dense woods, fierce storms and summer heat. But readers also wanted to see the life of the people, so he wrote of the peasants in their colourful dress and painted brilliant word-pictures of feasts and processions, like his memory of the first time he saw the annual feast at La Mentorella, near Subiaco, when men and women chanting litanies and prayers carried huge stones from the summit to a pile below the town. The chapel on its rock, backed by the sombre mountains, ‘was crowded with peasants, kneeling or sleeping under its dark arches; forming altogether so wild a scene that, unable to tear myself away, I remained wandering from fire to fire, among the groups of people, nearly the whole night through.’

  He wrote too of eccentric aristocratic hosts, echoing inns and heavy meals. He was delighted when the constant macaroni and ‘Pomi’d’oro’ was unexpectedly replaced by ‘a positive plain English-looking roast leg of mutton’ with boiled potatoes, served by Prince Giardinelli, whose cook, like the prince himself, had been in England. He was delighted too by odd culinary suggestions. In the shady valley of Antrodoco, ‘I was sauntering by the brawling river, when a little boy passed me carrying a dead fox. “It is delightful food (cibo esquisito)”, said he, “either boiled or roast”. Said I, “I wish you joy”.’ He took joy, too, in the animals, like the torrent of black pigs rushing into Avezzano to be fed: ‘How we did laugh, to the diversion of half the rabble of the town, who had come to gaze on us, as the immense current of grunters burst from the long street into the market-place, with a wonderful hubbub, and ran shrieking through all the lanes of the place.’

  As they crossed the borders, Knight became ill and returned to Rome, taking Gridiron with him. Riding a solid grey mare, Lear wandered on through the mountains, enduring earthquakes and answering everlasting questions about Brunel’s Thames tunnel, which had just opened in 1843. He was touched by the hospitality of the people, although some hosts were disconcerting, like Don Constantino in the hill village of Abadessa, where the looks of the inhabitants, Lear thought, betrayed its past as a Greek colony. The stay was a catalogue of oddities: first, Don Constantino hit his five beautiful daughters if they spoke Albanese rather than Italian; next a young blind man came in ‘to see the Englishman’ and sang twenty interminable verses of a Greek song about the battle of Navarino; and finally, when the family went to bed, ‘Don Constantino and a very old hideous female domestic followed me into my chamber, the latter of whom proffered her services to “undress me”, which offer I respectfully declined, though she again entered to tuck all the sheets round the bed, an operation I could not prevent as the doors of all the rooms were open …’ Often, as here, picturesque artist, hapless traveller and nonsense writer came together. Could it really be that on one night cats ran in and out perpetually and the doves called without cease: ‘two turtles remained stationary on the top of the bed, moaning dismally’?

  *

  The following year Lear was ‘over head and ears in painting’, affectionately treated by the established Rome artists – Richard James Wyatt gave him a four-volume set of the Arabian Nights in 1843, which he kept all his life. He travelled down to sketch again on the Amalfi coast and came back to stay with the artists in the mountains:

  out before sunrise, watching the sun catch peak by peak … the little village of Civitella di Licenza, perched on its peaked hill, which rises out of a long line of folds so blue. Olive gardens still sleeping in shade … paths, with crisp brown & green fern, hanging over the gardens below from the mossy old bits of stone. Not a sound, but the cry of the Jay, of the woodpecker, & the gay yellow oriole.

  But then in September, news came of his mother’s death – for which he showed no grief, apart from wearing a mourning suit – and once he had got over the flurry of Ann’s potential visit, he wanted to travel again. ‘Now you are not coming,’ he wrote to her, with scarcely hidden relief, ‘I think I shall run into the Abruzzi to see some places I did not go to last year.’

  Almost as soon as he wrote he was off. From this second trip, he included the story of his border crossing at Civita Ducale, when he was stopped by a carabiniere convinced that he was Palmerston, whose name, as Foreign Secretary, was written on Lear’s passport in large letters, and who was known to support the insurrectionary movement. Lear argued and cajoled to no avail. ‘You great fool! I thought: but I made two bows, and said placidly, “take me to to the Sott’ Intendente, my dear sir, as he knows me very well”.’ Triumphantly, the carabiniere paraded him through the town, Lear feeling a great fool himself: ‘Some have greatness thrust upon them. In spite of all expostulations Viscount Palmerston it was settled I should be.’ Soon, however, all was sorted: ‘So I reached Rieti by dark, instead of going to prison.’

  San Vittorino (2 May 1845). Notes: ‘very bright’, ‘bright far’, ‘blue!!!!!’ … ‘field’, ‘olive wood deep shadow’, ‘red rox’, ‘olives’, ‘light trees’, ‘roofs yellow red – houses gray & ochre’, ‘O! path!’ …

  That winter Lear thought briefly that he might illustrate the seventh book of Virgil’s Aeneid, where the landing of the Trojans gives rise to vivid descriptions of central Italy. In the spring, thinking of this, he toured the Volscian mountains but then he went back to the Abruzzi, collecting still more hidden places, like the hamlet of San Vittorino, on the site of the ancient Roman city of Amiternum. Only a few of these, however, would find a place in his Illustrated Excursions, the project uppermost in his mind.

  In England, in the summer of 1845, he went to work on his drawings at Knowsley. He had hoped for quiet, but Knowsley, like the rest of the country, was abuzz with politics. Lord Derby’s son Edward, Lord Stanley, had been Colonial Secretary in Peel’s government but had resigned after arguments over Ireland and the Corn Laws: soon he would lead the Protectionist party, which included the young Disraeli. Not far away the Lancashire mill towns were afire. Three years before, when the Chartist petition was rejected, soldiers had opened fire on a crowd in Preston and now poor harvests sparked more agitation. Knowsley rang with arguments and in the autumn Lear came down to London to find quiet, staying at Robert Hornby’s house, 27 Duke Street in St James’s.

  He still had work to do on the text and plates, and on the vignettes that would appear as wood engravings. Side by side with these, as a relaxation, Lear gathered together the nonsense rhymes that he had written from time to time since his first experiments at Knowsley, ten years before: urged by friends, he had decided to publish them, just for fun. But the serious work was always the
Excursions, and when he came to publish this he added an unusual addition, an Appendix of music (he thanked unidentified ‘Ladies’ for writing out the arrangements). He was a pioneer, as the collecting of folk music was only just getting underway in Britain, and the tunes he published were a tribute to his memories of evenings of song in the Abruzzi: a song to a swallow, the ‘bella Rondinella’; a dance tune; a chanting song of women carrying cloth to a shrine. His first setting was one of the tunes played by the pifferari, the pipers Lear had heard in Rome who came down from the mountains during Advent to play novenas in pairs, one playing a wooden flute or piffero, a kind of oboe, the other bagpipes made of goatskin. The bagpipe drone had often been associated with the pastoral; Handel had used the ‘pifa’ to introduce the shepherds in the Messiah, and the tunes of the pifferi also inspired Berlioz and Mendelssohn. Lear liked their primitive, rural, ancient tone: in his own nonsense there is often something Orphic about music, as if it could soothe the animal in all of us, scaring away the serpents of lust and fear.

  Since Lear was planning a luxurious production for Illustrated Excursions in Italy, costing four guineas, he wrote to his long list of connections, asking for subscriptions. When their numbers were known, Hullmandel printed the plates and Bentley the text and finally, in April 1846, Thomas McLean published his book. Lear dedicated it ‘most respectfully and gratefully’ to Lord Derby, his patron and friend. The text was full of unusual, entertaining detail, and the thirty plates conjured up views of high mountain ranges, villages clinging to the hillsides, lonely churches and narrow passes between great rocks, as well as groups of peasants, men tending goats and women in elaborate headdresses carrying loads on their heads. He felt he was among a new generation of artist-writers.