The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear. Edward Lear
that wilfulness which ever kept him a child in a world that was already in its second childhood.
He was born at Highgate on the 12th May 1812, and died in 1888 at San Remo, on the Italian Riviera where he had lived for eighteen years with his Albanian servant, Georgio Kokali, who had served him for nearly thirty years, and his famous cat, Foss, who had pre-deceased him by a few months at the advanced age of seventeen years.
Lear was the youngest of a family of twenty-one children, most of whom he outlived. Of the twenty-one, thirteen were girls and Edward was brought up by Ann, the eldest, who continued to mother him until her death when he was nearly fifty. His father was a stockbroker of Danish descent who speculated his way from affluence on Highgate Hill to poverty and the King’s Bench Prison. His mother came from Durham, and was presumably English. Edward also attributed a liking for Irish character to the influence of a ‘Gt.Gt.Gt.Gt.-Gt. Gt. grandfather’ of Irish blood. So, remembering Hans Andersen, who was a Dane, and the supposed humour of Ireland, one may argue that Danish and Irish blood is a good mixture for the production of that kind of humorous fantasy which he called nonsense. But whatever his descent, Edward Lear possessed many of the characteristics of the more eccentric of wandering Englishmen, and neither he nor his peculiar brand of humour could have been produced anywhere but in England, the birthplace of the Ingoldsby Legends, the Bab Ballads, and Alice in Wonderland.
He never married; there is no evidence that he was attracted to women except as friends, and his works, literary and graphic, are as sexless as the artistic efforts of a child. He occasionally puzzles over the problem of marriage as he puzzles over so many things which are not quite obvious, but when he is in his forty-first year he rebukes any impulse to that end by reflecting that if he married he would ‘paint less and less well’, and further, this most determined and illustrious entertainer of children puts it on record that the thought of ‘annual infants’ of his own drives him ‘wild’. In the same letter he argues as many bachelors, scared at the idea of a lonely old age, have done before him: ‘If I attain to 65, and have an “establishment” with lots of spoons, etc., to offer—I may chain myself:—but surely not before. And alas! and seriously—when I look around my acquaintances—and few men have more, or know more intimately, do I see a majority of happy pairs? No, I don’t. Single—I may have few pleasures—but married—many risks and miseries are semi-certainly in waiting—nor till the plot is played out can it be said that evils are not at hand.’ Fear of matrimony is evidently a recurring whimsy, whose continued presence is revealed ten years later when he is living in Corfu, where he is attracted by a native girl and wishes, playfully, he were ‘married to a clever good nice fat little Greek girl—and had 25 olive trees, some goats and a house’. ‘But’, he adds, ‘the above girl, happily for herself, likes somebody else,’ and there the matter ended and Edward Lear makes the pilgrimage of life alone, though not without friends, and the friendship of faithful servants, and the seventeen year long companionship of ‘Old Foss’, the cat, amusingly immortalised in so many of his drawings.
Although his education, according to modern standards, was inadequate, and he was earning a living as a commercial artist at fifteen, he managed to accumulate considerable culture. He could read or talk in at least half-a-dozen languages, including Greek both ancient and modern; and in addition to his skill as a painter of landscapes and his technical exactitude as an illustrator of birds, he composed and sang songs, wrote light verses, kept long diaries, wrote innumerable letters, and gave a new idiom to numorous drawing. He must also have had a gift for communicating his skill for at one time he was the art-master of Queen Victoria.
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Those nonsense drawings and their attendant verse and prose reveal an invincible boyishness. On one side Lear was as old as the rocks he painted, on another as young as the children he loved or the child he awoke in the adults who loved him. This plump, bewhiskered man with high-domed brow, small, spectacled eyes and loose-fitting clothes was ineradicably childlike, although he must have looked what he would have called an ‘old cove’ nearly all his life. But in spite of that there was something of him that would not grow up: his peterpantheism was no pose. There was an unusual physical expression of this fortunate anomaly of prolonged adolescence. At the age of forty-one, the year, it will be recalled, in which the idea of marriage began to puzzle him, he ‘cut two new teeth’, and, after the attendant discomforts of this event, at first thought to be mumps, there was a renewal of health and spirits which he attributed to the belated infantile phenomenon.
Attempts at portraiture are fortunately unnecessary, for Lear loved self-dramatisation and has left several personal glimpses, both literary and graphic, the best of all that full-length self-portrait in verse which introduces this collection of his nonsense.
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His varied gifts and dual character were encouraged by the manner of his upbringing, and although we have no cause for complaint, Edward Lear was always conscious of some masculine inadequacy. ‘Brought up by women—and badly besides—and ill always,’ he had no chance of ‘manly improvements or exercise’. Yet, he says, ‘I am always thanking God that I was never educated, for it seems to me that 999 of those who are so, expensively and laboriously, have lost all before they arrive at my age (47)—and remain like Swift’s Strulbruggs—cut and dry for life,’ whereas he seemed always to be on ‘the threshold of knowledge’. Much as he loved quietness, inwardly and outwardly, he could not be still. He never lost the restlessness of childhood, and as he could not achieve the inward calm he craved, he denied its existence: ‘As for content that is a loathesome slimy humbug —fit only for potatoes, very fat hogs—and fools generally. Let us pray fervently that we may never become such asses as to be contented.’
One of the most surprising things about him is that he managed to combine roving habits and impecuniosity with a considerable social status. It surprises even Lear himself. He cannot understand how ‘such an asinine beetle’ could have made so many friends. ‘The immense variety of class and caste which I daily came in contact with in those days, would be a curious fact even in the life of a fool.’ Many of his friends were patricians or ‘swells’, as he called them, and if he had wished he could have spent much more time than he did in the houses of the great and affluent, but being social rather than gregarious, he hated the ‘bustle and lights and fuss of society’ and soon tired of being a flâneur. Yet, pursued as he was by the demon of boredom, he must have friends as well as work, and contriving to enjoy both he went his grumbling, but, on the whole, cheerful way always rather surprised that ‘such a queer beast’ should have so many friends, and whimsically resentful at the drudgery which temperament and circumstances imposed upon him.
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No more diligent artist ever lived. He had the concentration of a beaver and never liked parting with a job once he had started to gnaw it. During fifty years of his busy life, for instance, he made 200 illustrations for Tennyson’s poems, but did not live to see any of them published.1 Sometimes he suspected this laboriousness although he looked upon a ‘totally unbroken application to poetical-topographical painting and drawing’ as the ‘universal panacea for the ills of life’.
The number of drawings he turned out on a sketching tour was astounding. In one year alone (1865) his ‘outdoor work’ comprised, ‘200 sketches in Crete, 145 in “the Corniche”, and 125 at Nice, Antibes and Cannes.’ He goes to India and in six months despatches to England ‘no less than 560 drawings, large and small besides 9 small sketch books and 4 journals’. He was then sixty-two and described himself, with some justice, as ‘a very energetic and frisky old cove’. When not travelling in search of the picturesque or working up his sketches) he is holding exhibitions of drawings and paintings from the sale of which he lived, or writing to his friends and patrons about work in progress and the attendant economic problems which were never entirely absent, and any spare time was devoted to the diaries which he kept for years, and those travel books2 which he illustrated with some of his best drawings.
He lived to draw and paint and drew and painted to live, pretending to hate the necessity of having to go on day after day ‘grinding’ his ‘nose off’. But although