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.

4

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.

5

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 he talked little of art as such, and affected to belittle his own inspiration, his artistry was more than technique and it is a criticism of criticism that his drawings, 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”.’

6

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.