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.’

8

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 touch of nonsense. He is, however (after the manner of men who explode over trifles), inclined, like Walter Savage Landor, to congratulate himself on his composure. An 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.’

9

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 .