Edward Lear

On 12 May Google celebrated the bicentenary of the birth of Edward Lear.

Google Lear

Edward Lear

'Phos ye cat'

Edward Lear and Foss

‘I am become like a periwinkle in the wilderness, with an owl for his dessert. It ain’t pleasant at 63 … I shall have recourse to the society of my Cat, & walk up & down the terrace.’

Knowledge shall set you free

What can be at once more gratifying and more frustrating than viewing a book online?

There on your screen is some book from a distant library that for reasons of remoteness, rarity and cost one would probably never be able to hold as a physical copy. The pages turn, floating across your screen, in an unreal, cinematic fashion, remote, efficient. There is an electronic equivalent for flipping through the pages and the finger stuck in page twenty-seven. Now this page, now that; never quite convenient.

The screen is both a window on vast possibilities and a cruel restriction: always a window, never a door. There is somewhere, unseen, ungraspable, a logical step-by-step equivalent of the tottering pile of books on your desk.

We have recreated our own - far superior - version of the medieval chained library.

Hereford Cathedral library

An afflictive phenomenon

It was in this year also that the Hogarth Club was started - 'that afflictive phenomenon' as Carlyle called it: 'a club not small enough to be friendly and not large enough to be important, a room to which nobody sends things and Friday night meetings to which nobody cares to go. Funerals are performed in the shop below through which one passes.

Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet 1812-1888 by Angus Davidson, 1938

Friends

Staying at Combe Florey, Jack and I went one afternoon for a walk and Jack, wanting a stick, rather stupidly chose a light cane. This he broke, and on our return went shame-facedly to Evelyn to apologise. Evelyn was really upset and angry - he loved this small, rather dashing cane - and Jack felt an ass. When we got home he wrote to Evelyn asking him to send it to Briggs to be mended but Evelyn replied 'Tonkin has been spliced locally', and Jack forgot the incident.

Some weeks later I said to him, not thinking much about it:

'Annie has a letter from Evelyn in which he said: "The Donaldsons came to stay. He broke my cane.".'

'Oh no,' Jack cried. 'How beastly of him.'

Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of a Country Neighbour, Frances Donaldson (1967)

Their first halting-place was Yenidje, and Lear, armed as usual with letters of introduction, was staying with the postmaster. As they were drinking coffee in the evening an incident occurred which, though unfortunate in itself, provided an example of Oriental good manners which filled him with delight. In his awkward, shortsighted way (in a room where there was neither table nor chair) he stepped heavily on his host's handsome pipe-bowl. He apologised profusely through his interpreter, to which the postmaster, bowing as he sat cross-legged on the floor, replied: 'The breaking such a pipe-bowl would indeed, under ordinary circumstances, be disagreeable; but in a friend every action has its charms....'

Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet 1812-1888, Angus Davidson (1938)

Both Waugh and Lear travelled, sometimes alone (though I think Lear was the more intrepid) in remote parts of Europe and adjoining continents. Both were men for whom humour (of utterly different kinds) was essential in their relationship to the world.

This is the bicentenary of Edward Lear's birth - see A Blog of Bosh

Forests lost

Once upon a time Corsica was entirely covered by forest. Storey by storey, it grew for thousands of years in rivalry with itself, up to heights of fifty metres and more, and who knows, perhaps perhaps larger and larger species would have evolved, trees reaching the sky, it the first settlers had not appeared and if, with the typical fear felt by their own kind for its place of origin, they had not steadily forced the forest back again.

The degradation of the most highly developed plant species is a process known to have begum near what we call the cradle of civilization. Most of the high forests that once grew all the way to the Dalmatian, Iberian and North African coasts had already been cut down by the beginning of the present era. Only in the interior of Corsica did a few forests of trees towering far taller than those of today remain, and they were still being described with awe by nineteenth-century travellers, although now they have almost entirely disappeared. Of the silver firs that were among the dominant tree species of Corsica in the Middle Ages, standing everywhere in the mists clinging to the mountains, on overshadowed slopes and in the ravines, only a few relicts are now left in the Marmano valley and the Foret de Puntiello, and on a walk there a remembered image came into my mind of a forest in the Innerfern through which I had once gone as a child with my grandfather.

A history of the forest of France by Etienne de la Tour, published during the Second Empire, speaks of individual fir trees growing to a height of almost sixty metres during their lives of over a thousand years, and they, so de la Tour writes, are the last trees to convey some idea of the former grandeur of the European forests. He laments the destruction of the Corsican forests 'par des exploitations mal conduites' ('by mismanaged exploitation'), which was already becoming a clear menace in his time. the stands of trees spared longest were those in the most inaccessible regions, fro instance the great forest of Bavella, which covered the Corsican Dolomites between Sartene and Solenzara and was largely untouched until towards the end of the nineteenth century.

The English language painter and writer Edward Lear, who travelled in Corsica in the summer of 1876, wrote of the immense forests that then rose high from the blue twilight of the Solenzara valley and clambered up the steepest slopes, all the way to the vertical cliffs and precipices with their overhangs, cornices and upper terraces where smaller groups of trees stood like plumes on a helmet. On the more level surfaces at the head of the pass, the soft grounds on which you walked was densely overgrown with all kinds of different bushes and herbs. Arbutus grew here, a great many ferns, heathers and juniper bushes, grasses asphodels and dwarf cyclamen, and from all these low-growing plants rose the grey trunks of Laricio pines, their green parasols seeming to float free far, far above in the crystal-clear air.

'At three the top of the pass ... is reached,' says Lear, 'and here the real forest of Bavella commences, lying in a deep cup-like hollow between this and the opposite ridge, the north and south side of the valley being formed by the tremendous columns and peaks of granite ... which stood up like two gigantic portions of a vast amphitheatre', with the sea beyond them, and the Italian coast like a brush-stroke drawn on paper. these crags, he writes, 'are doubly awful and magnificent now that one is close to them, and excepting the

heights of Serbal and Sinai, they exceed in grandeur anything of the kind I have ever seen'. But Lear also comments on the timber carts drawn by fourteen or sixteen mules which even then were making their way along the sharply winding road, transporting single trunks a hundred to a hundred and twenty feet long and up to six feet in diameter, an observation that I found confirmed in 1879 by the Dictionnaire de Geographie edited by Vivien de Saint Martin, in which the Dutch traveller and topographer Melchior van de Velde writes that he has never seen a finer forest than the forest of Bavella, not even in Switzerland, Lebanon or on the islands of Indochina.

W.G. Sebald, 'The Alps in the Sea' collected in Campo Santo, trs. Anthea Bell