Word: lear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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BOOKS Best Reading EDWARD LEAR, THE LIFE OF A WANDERER, by Vivien Noakes. In this excellent biography, the Victorian painter, poet, fantasist, and author of A Book of Nonsense is seen as a kindly, gifted man who courageously tried to stay cheerful despite an astonishing array of diseases and afflictions...
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...
...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...
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...