Sad enchanter
Peter Levi
when Patrick Leigh Fermor picked Edward Lear's Cretan Journal as the best book of the year in the Spectator, I was thrilled to hear of its existence. It his reached very few British bookshops, being published in an obscure corner of Athens and distributed here, not without hic- coughs, by the Golganooza Press. This is a pity, because I can think of dozens and dozens of people who would be delighted by it. The illustrations, a number of which are colour plates of sparkling quality, include some of Edward Lear's best water- colours, and the text, which is a genuine travel journal, bears the same relation to his published books as the watercolours do to his finished oil paintings. No writer in the 19th century is fresher or more inti- mate. Few watercolour painters can offer such a wonderland of transformations, and no one else as good ever painted Greece until modern times.
He was not quite as eccentric, or as isolated, a painter as one might think. The Pre-Raphaelite revolution in the Royal Academy schools had him in thrall;and his lilac-coloured mountains turn up in the background of Holman Hunt's 'Scapegoat'. But Lear is better. He is so crisp and fresh. His conception is so lyrical and so swift. His mountains at Palaiokas- tro, which are reproduced here, turn out to have been sketched in flying colours, very fast indeed and in some depression. This picture used to belong to George Seferis; it is one of my favourite paintings in the world. The mountains have a misty solid- ity. One wrongly imagines the painter working in a transport of happiness. But then one would never guess from most of Lear's work at the depth of his sadness or the clinical nature of his despair. Perhaps that is what makes his work so vigorous and so enchanting. It needed to be.
Crete in 1864 was very unlike what anyone now remembers. The 'vast flox of goats on the sand' sound everlasting, though they are not so vast nowadays. But the painted tombstones of the Turks have gone, and the blacks, the Libyan Arabs and the drunken Turkish soldiers have gone with them. One no longer meets a crowd of lepers outside the town walls. And small things have altered. In Turkish Crete someone might steal a baggage rope. Petty theft evaporated with the Turkish occupation. Lear was in a difficult position in Crete. He was made to take a Turkish guard to spy on him, and the Greeks seem to have viewed him with mistrust for that reason. But he did have his Greek servant, with whom he was more or less in love, and in spite of numerous grumbles and dis- appointments, he did have moments of paradise that only Crete can provide.
The grumbles are sometimes humorous — 'a bell sounded, and a dog accompanist' — and sometimes extraordinary. He gets frantic about the lack of pots de chambre in Greek monasteries, someone takes his flea-powder as snuff, he sleeps in a loft full of looms, and 'washed in a cheese-plate'. In one of his cross moments he writes: 'I perceive the nature of the Sphakian moun- tians would preclude much possibility of picturesqueness.' And one discovers him treasuring a very old piece of Stilton cheese that has maggots in it on an island that has some of the best native cheese in the world — nowadays, at least. He does enjoy the wine, which he thinks is the best he has ever tasted. Again and again it amazes him. That has not altered anyway.
In 1864, Edward Lear left his lodgings in Corfu, a noisy block of flats on the waterfront which is still standing; the Brit- ish were handing over the Ionian Islands to the Greeks, and the Jews and stray Eng- lishmen like Lear were getting out before it happened. Lear was not finding it so easy to make a living. People who once bought a drawing for a souvenir were beginning to prefer a photograph. It is an odd thought that he was more or less put out of business by the postcard. He was 51, and desperate for new material. 'Whether I go to Albania or Syria or [illegible] or Crete or Asia Minor is dark.' He chose Crete because he wanted another look at Athens, where he thought of settling. In fact, he painted the acropolis from a spot not a hundred yards from the address where this book is pub- lished. The bare, hot hillside of his fore- ground became an artist's quarter and a red light district in the 1900s. In his day, it was a stony wilderness with the ruins of a windmill. Windmills naturally command exciting views, but this one is spectacular. Lear's ideas of a proper view were based on Claude and, apparently, Raphael, whom he mentions in Crete. He framed his landscapes in a 'monocular glass' which , recalls the curious periscope type of machine Gray used in the Lakes and the little viewing lenses still used by film directors. Gell, an earlier Greek typo- graphical painter, used a camera lucida, which flung a reflected image on to paper, which the artist merely traced. But Lear paints with utter freedom and purity, so that one hardly notices his 18th-century composition. He interestingly remarks that 'Greenery is the nature of Crete', and think the river scenes of Crete are its best claim to beauty for paintings'. He was not young or bold enough to meet Crete face to face; it alarmed him because it fitted no existing category of art. And yet, in the few minutes it took him to paint, he captured the essential, fleeting scenery as no one else has done. When Crete receded into the past, he remembered it with real feeling for the rest of his life. His comic drawings, particularly those of the Cretan wild goat normally called Kri-Kri, are enchanting.
He was charmingly awkward, though he loved domesticity. He had become, with his wide experience of travel, a little hard to please, but his enthusiasm never really. died. 'Rose at 5.30 and wrote out journal, up to the 15th, till noon or later, making ten more drawings for the little girl also. Just as I was "changing myself', Hay brought in Dendrino to visit me . . . Slept and read till six, when I walked in the garden and also gave the monkey some onions. Then, with Mr and Mrs Hay, walked out to the Arab huts and beyond. The sea air was delicious, but I have never seen any sunset here warmer in colour than those of Hastings: a sort of pearly silver mist involves all the isle . . . At eight, tea-supper, and afterwards sang them six- teen Tennyson songs.' In some of his drawings, and certainly in finished paint- ings, the longing for warm colours is apparent, but Crete in bad weather refused to indulge him.
This is a fine edition of a fascinating book. When will we get a modern edition of Edward Lear's brilliant letters?
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