Читать книгу The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear - Edward Lear - Страница 9

Those nonsense drawings and their attendant verse and prose reveal an invincible boyishness. On one side Lear was as old as the rocks he painted, on another as young as the children he loved or the child he awoke in the adults who loved him. This plump, bewhiskered man with high-domed brow, small, spectacled eyes and loose-fitting clothes was ineradicably childlike, although he must have looked what he would have called an ‘old cove’ nearly all his life. But in spite of that there was something of him that would not grow up: his peterpantheism was no pose. There was an unusual physical expression of this fortunate anomaly of prolonged adolescence. At the age of forty-one, the year, it will be recalled, in which the idea of marriage began to puzzle him, he ‘cut two new teeth’, and, after the attendant discomforts of this event, at first thought to be mumps, there was a renewal of health and spirits which he attributed to the belated infantile phenomenon.

Attempts at portraiture are fortunately unnecessary, for Lear loved self-dramatisation and has left several personal glimpses, both literary and graphic, the best of all that full-length self-portrait in verse which introduces this collection of his nonsense.