Word: lear
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...queer," Edward Lear once wrote to a friend, "that I am the man as is making some three or four thousand people laugh in England all at one time. . . ." But to staid and sensible Victorians, who seemed to have a safety-valve passion for nonsense, there was nothing queer about it. Edward Lear's volumes of limericks, his world of Jumblies, scroobious snakes, runcible spoons and Dongs with Luminous Noses, set English gentlemen roaring into their port and schoolkids giggling into their bedtime hot milk...
...pleasant to know Mr. Lear!" he once wrote in an autobiographical verse, and most eminent Victorians would have agreed. Critic John Ruskin put him "first of my hundred authors." Solemn statesmen referred to his Books of Nonsense in Parliament. "Sich," sighed Lear to his Learishly spelled diary, "is phame...
...sort of phame that Edward Lear was after. A shy, pear-shaped six-footer with a bulging nose and "a beard that resembles a wig," he was a melancholy bachelor who could "blubber bottlesful" over Tennyson's poems. The son of a bankrupt, he began painting for his living at 15. It was as a painter, and not as a writer of "bosh," that he wished to be known...
Nose-Grinding. Through all his grumbles and rising gorges, Edward Lear painted furiously. He rose before dawn, trudged about all day until he found a landscape that pleased him. Then, after myopically surveying the scene over his spectacles, he began his hasty sketches on odd-shaped scraps of paper from his notebook. His watercolor sketches were meant mostly to be notes for his fastidious and stilted oils, over which he labored long and hard ("I hate the act of painting. . . . It is like grinding my nose off!"). A few of the oils rode into the Royal Academy on the coattails...
Baudelaire explained what he meant in an essay written in 1863, when Delacroix died, and now published for the first time in English (Delacroix; Lear, Crown; $5). To the world, Bachelor Delacroix was the urbane, self-confident son of a prosperous lawyer-obviously gifted, and smooth as silk in company. To his friends, he was "like the crater of a volcano artistically hidden by bouquets of flowers." Wrote the author of Flowers of Evil...