Читать книгу The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear - Edward Lear - Страница 14

This restlessness was no doubt due to a nervous defect, for although Lear lived for well over seventy years, he always, and with reason, looked upon himself as an invalid and could not understand why he continued to survive after he was fifty. There was reason for these fears, whimsically as he often stated them, for he was an epileptic, and suffered also from chronic asthma and bronchitis, from which he ultimately died. But in spite of these defects, he had varying spells of comfortable health, and his ailments did not interfere with his love of wandering in strange lands, and of working continuously, and, on the whole, happily, at high pressure. At one time he is advised ‘to take things easy’ as he has ‘the same complaint of the heart that my father died of’, but there is no evidence that he took the advice. Asthma and bronchitis would have driven him to warmer and drier climates even if he had not been otherwise predisposed to travel. Some of his irascibility may be attributed to physical and nervous defects, but much of it is a normal if exaggerated love of grumbling, to which he invariably gave the characteristic Lear touch of nonsense. He is, however (after the manner of men who explode over trifles), inclined, like Walter Savage Landor, to congratulate himself on his composure. An instance occurs after a sunstroke in Italy: ‘I often thank God’, he said, ‘that although he has given me a nature easily worried by small matters, yet in such cases as this I go on day after day quite calmly, only thankful that I do not suffer more.’