How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear

EDWARD LEAR, THE LIFE OF A WANDERER by Vivien Noakes. 359 pages. Houghton Miffllin. $8.95.

Among the small wonders of the great age of Queen Victoria is the fact that the Queen herself once had a drawing master who wrote The Owl and the Pussy-Cat. Subsidized as they were with honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five-pound note, the owl and the pussycat went on to achieve that monumental Victorian ideal, a happy marriage. Their creator, Edward Lear, however, never wed, though he sometimes used to talk sentimentally about marriage as "making a nest in the olive trees." It is not recorded whether the little Queen gave so much as a fiver to her instructor.

Calais to Coromandel. A painter, poet and fantasist, Lear--as Vivien Noakes' biography makes clear--was a kindly, gifted man in many ways as mocked by madness and petty affliction as Shakespeare's eponymous king. The later Lear, however, played his own gentle fool; his tragedy was wistful farce. When he died in 1888, he left a jumble sale of assorted scribblings, some illustrated travel books rarely looked at any more and A Book of Nonsense, containing verses that will be heard as long as a rattle sounds in the cradle.

Like numerous Victorians, Lear was superficially normal and enviable. He kept a wonderful cat whom he immortalized under the preposterous name of Foss, as magical a literary companion in its way as Dr. Johnson's Hodge or Christopher Smart's Jeoffrey. He had enduring friends, including Tennyson and a man called Chichester Fortescue, a real name that sounds like a Lear invention. Lear's peregrinations over 30 years ranged from Calais to the coast of Coromandel, a course which enabled him to work at his art--essentially the trade of providing souvenirs of the Grand Tour to a pre-Leica age.

He never really prospered. In Lear's day, Royal Academy openings were occasions for a grand turnout of the Establishment in sables and broadcloth. Being an impresario for oneself was intrinsic to the success of the Victorian artist. Lear was always a little below the salt. He had his studio at-homes, but those who came to scoff his scones did not remain to pay for his pictures. Briefly he joined the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. But how could his neat landscapes compete with the bogus medievalism of Burne-Jones' Sir Galahad or the religiosity of Holman Hunt's The Light of the World, in which a mournful schoolmaster wearing a mortarboard of thorns drew devout thousands to the doors of British and U.S. museums?

Fighting the Morbids. There was a deep vein of inconsolable melancholia in many of Lear's contemporaries, though the age is still notorious for its fatuous, unquestioning optimism. It was Lear's friend Tennyson who wrote

"Tears, idle tears . . . tears from the depth of some divine despair." Characteristically trying to keep cheerful, Lear referred to his own numbing bouts of depression as "the morbids." His versifier's reaction to such metaphysical miseries would never win him the laureateship, but they essayed an heroic humor outside Tennyson's reach:

When awful darkness and silence reign

Over the great Gromboolian plain . . .

In truth, Lear was beset by specific afflictions that would have excused bitterness, something he never showed. He was an epileptic subject to almost daily seizures, a syphilitic and a homosexual. The Victorian world provided no palliative drugs to mitigate his diseases. Homosexuality had not yet achieved the modern status as a Third Sex International. It was still the love that dared not speak its name. A succession of handsome, brilliant boys haunted his imagination and became recipients of the best of his wonderfully funny letters; those who stirred his hopeless love were unaware of the nature of his affection (only crossed-out but still intelligible passages in his private diaries betrayed the truth).

Because of all Lear's hang-ups, he could be called a truly modern figure for his sense of the precarious and tragic in human life. His nonsense verses, always catchy, should acquire renewed relevance today. They were the obverse of the solid moral copper coins given to good little Victorian children by the avuncular Establishment. His characters, like the "Old Person of Cadiz" or "Young Lady of Clare," are rarely righteous, and when they do practice virtue, it often goes refreshingly unrewarded. One thing this age will never really understand about Lear: his penchant for the nonporno limerick.

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