"Grand Peripatetic Ass"
Edward Lear's Indian Journal: Watercolours and Extracts, 1873-1875. Edited by Ray Murphy. (Jarrolds. 42s.) THE truth is that plain, unvarnished diaries, even when they record the doings of a genius, make restless, uncomfortable reading. Here is a typical short day's entry from this book:
"Jan. 1st 1874. Carry drive to ghat; and boat, after a while not very odious. Botanical. gardens flat and nowise beautiful, except for the many good trees. Immense banyan tree. Drew vast bamboo till II, having had tea and bread and butter first. Breakfast• 11.30, particularly nice and pleasant. Afterwards, more inspection; passiflonte orchids, etc. Drew two coco palms. Then to the boat and across Hooghly; lovely day and evening. Sketching stool come."
Those who know India and can fill out this kind of shorthand with their own visual memories will make more of this diary than those who do not, but neither will find it particularly easy going. Nor, it should be said at once, is there much nonsense to be enjoyed: The Cummerbund and The Akond of Swat are the only two major nonsense compositions which appear. (I had hoped we were going to be introduced to the latter in person, but not so.) "Grand Peripatetic Ass and Bosh-producing Luminary" was the title Lear once invented for himself, and it is much more in the first capacity than in the second that he presents himself here.
He first set foot in India in November, 1873, at the age of sixty-two, lucky in being able to count -the Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, as a personal friend, whose patronage was able to smooth his journey at important moments. And what a journey it was—one which no modern tourist would feel like undertaking. For fourteen months without a break, disregarding monsoons, hot weather, cold weather, insects, diarrhoea, lost luggage and all the other notorious incon- veniences of India, this single-minded, facetious old gentleman moves resolutely to and fro across the country from the Himalayas to Ceylon, inclusive. The longer stages are done by train, the shorter sitting on an air-cushion in a wide variety of horse- or man-drawn vehicles. Enormous meals are eaten, bad and good alike being recorded in the diary; gallons of sherry-and-soda are drunk. His Albanian servant Giorgio knows nothing of the language, and is thus less useful than he might be, sulks often, and in the end succumbs to dysentery at Kandy, where Lear has to nurse him. On one occasion at Monghyr he is so maddened by the crowds of people following him that he turns suddenly and spits at them, "whereat they ran away like mad." Small wonder that after a month or so we read: "How I hate all Indian ways and Indian life!" and that-this sentiment, so far as the mechanics of the journey are concerned; is repeated at intervals for the rest of the trip.
So far as the beauty of the Indian scene is concerned, however, it is an entirely different matter. "I never saw anything half so lovely and cannot think how I shall go away." "A truly fine Indian landscape, tawny and yellow and lilac and pale as is all its colouring." It was Lear's passion for painting that kept him going, and that sometimes, but too rarely, breaks out from the pages of his diary in descriptive passages of the finest sensibility. _Such was his devotion to his art that he brought away nearly a thousand coloured roughs from the trip, pencilled over with notes, for finishing later either in water-colour or as one of those stagy, qverworked oil paintings which -found so much more favour in their creator's eyes than they have done since. Nine of these delicately tinted roughs are reproduced by colour lithography as the principal glory of this book, twelve more in black-and-white; but alas they all "bleed off" the page in the manner now fashionable, so that their edges, often including some of the artist's handwriting, have been trimmed off in the binding—a tiresome fault.
An affectionate biographical introduction by Ray Murphy tells us that Lear did finish his oil and water-colour paintings of India before his death in 1888. So few European painters have ever done justice to the Indian scene that it would be a pleasure to see a full-
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