The relationship which Sam and his father now forged set a pattern for the strong male friendships that Palmer was always to foster. The pair must have presented a companionable picture, walking side by side along country lanes, the elder striding along in a flapping overcoat, the younger bobbing beside him in short jacket and cap making periodic forays into hedgerows and fields to fetch birds’ nests or flint stones, mushrooms or beech nuts. There were treasures to be hoarded and Sam, having emerged in one bound ‘from short petticoats . . . into trousers and . . . O rapture! – into pockets’,12 had found just the place. Amid the lucky-dip of delights – ‘gingerbread nuts, story books, toffy, squirts and pop guns’13 – which his bulging pockets harboured, he would always keep his most prized gift of a knife. One day he had asked his father to file its blade even sharper and it had had to be explained to him that if an edge was too finely honed it would do nothing but shave because, if put to any other purpose, it would turn. Palmer would discover in this advice a metaphorical lesson: the human mind, also, could become too acute. ‘Whatever sharpens narrows,’14 as the philosopher Francis Bacon, whom he would frequently cite, had once said.
Palmer’s own education was broad. Considered too fragile for school, the foundations of his learning were laid at home. The Bible was a bedrock. Sam was made to learn a passage from it daily. But his father, on very rare occasions with the aid of a rod, also taught him good Latin and the rudiments of Greek. He was allowed to graze freely in the pastures of literature with only the vaguest of programmes to guide him. Volumes discovered in solitude were to become matchless companions. ‘There is nothing like books,’ as he would later say: ‘of all things sold incomparably the cheapest, of all pleasures the least palling, they take up little room, keep quiet when they are not wanted and, when taken up, bring us face to face with the choicest men who ever lived, at their choicest moments.’15 The lessons of these men were to form the weft of his life. He would never forget, for example, his first reading of Pope’s Essay on Criticism, a didactic composition which pursues a discussion as to whether poetry should be ‘natural’ or written according to set classical rules. Pope resolves the problem by arguing that classical rules are natural. It was an idea that Palmer was later to explore in his painting. Joseph Glanville’s Sadducimus Triumphatus, which decried scepticism about witchcraft, was, with its lurid illustrations and its tales of drumming spirits, a particularly favoured volume according with his boyish tastes but also, in its more serious aspects – its reconciliation of the rise of science with supernatural powers – serving to validate his faith in metaphysical possibilities, preparing him for his meeting with Blake, who believed ardently in magic.
Palmer’s father added to his knowledge on their rambles through the country, talking and reciting and reading to him as they walked from one of the little vellum-bound notebooks which he always kept tucked into a waistcoat pocket. These books were stuffed with a haphazard assortment of observations, quotations and facts which had been harvested randomly from whatever he happened to be reading. Ranging from the scribbled solution to an algebraic problem, through a few lines of poetry to the religious pronouncements of some admired divine, their ideas would, one by one, be slipped into the formative mind of young Sam.
Palmer’s father, in many ways, was not a good role model. An unworldly dreamer, he could be carefully methodical in small things; but when it came to matters of more serious import – not least, financial provision for his family – he was prepared to act upon improvident whim. Even when it became obvious that he was misguided, he would continue stubbornly on. Once, finding the gate to a bridge over a river locked, he had without hesitation waded straight out into the flow. And yet, he was as lenient as he could be obstinate and Palmer was always to remember the day when, due for a birching, he had pleaded with his parent to turn his mind to other more pleasant matters and so been let off.
Many years later, Palmer would look back with gratitude on the upbringing that an affectionate and enthusiastic father, a man who had ‘loved knowledge for its own sake’,16 had offered him. He would always value the kindness and, even more importantly, ‘the liberality’17 with which he had been allowed to pursue his interests when a more worldly parent, eager to be rid of financial encumbrance, would have pushed his son into trade.
Around 1814 the Palmer family left Surrey Square, moving to Houndsditch on the eastern border of the City of London. This road is now a steep gulley of glass, all but deserted outside business hours, but then it was part of a labyrinth of narrow, crowded streets, overlooked by ramshackle houses and blocked by horse-drawn-traffic jams. The move was probably made for financial reasons. Two young sons were not cheap to support and the bookselling business, it was hoped, would be brisker in this part of the capital where a stallholder, setting out his wares on the pavement, could attract the custom of walkers returning from work in the City to the residential West End. To the country-loving Sam, however, the change would have felt bleak. Houndsditch was rough, surrounded by the notorious rookeries of the Jewish Quarter and famous for its rag fair: a ‘mass of old clothes, grease, patches, tatters and remnants of decayed prosperity and splendour’.18 It was said that a silk handkerchief could be bought back here within hours of its having being stolen. It was certainly not a salubrious area and Palmer would later recall with disgust the sight of a dead man’s brains lying in the middle of Ludgate Hill with only a little hastily scattered sawdust to cover them.
Worse was to come. In May 1817, Sam was sent away to school. Merchant Taylors’ was chosen: an institution founded in 1561 by the City livery company of that name. Now located outside London, in Palmer’s day it was established in some bare old buildings in Suffolk Lane in the shadow of St Paul’s. The school motto, Concordia Parvae Res Crescunt – ‘small things grow in harmony’ – could almost have served as a professional maxim for the painter that Palmer was to become, but it far from reflected his experiences at the time. A cosseted child with a tendency to shed ‘delicious tears at performances on the organ’19 did not cope well with the coarse rough and tumble of school life.
The diminutive twelve-year-old with his thick russet hair, his pale complexion and his asthmatic’s cough, gazed with misgiving at the boisterous creatures around him. ‘I . . . thought they resembled baboons,’ he later wrote. He was always to disdain the public school system in which ‘the fag crawls to be kicked, and, in his turn, kicks the fag who crawls to him’, even as he sardonically acknowledged that the system ‘perfectly represents and so admirably prepares for the requirements of public life’ for ‘what is statesmanship but successful crawling and kicking?’20
The timid young Palmer sought, as ever, a safe haven in books and it may well have been around this time that his particular affection for the work of William Cowper was nurtured. Cowper, then, was one of the nation’s most popular poets. His homely vision was deeply to move Palmer. He saw his mother as the living counterpart of the domestic paragons of Cowper’s verse and ‘Tirocinium’ – a poem in which Cowper urges a clerical friend not to send his sons off to boarding school but to opt for private tuition instead – contained painful resonances for the unhappy little boy.
Why hire a lodging in a house unknown
For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own?
This second weaning, needless as it is,
How does it lacerate both your heart and his!
Maybe Palmer followed the same pleading tack. By the time autumn came, his parents had brought him home. The Merchant Taylors’ experiment had lasted barely six months.
Palmer was delighted to be back in familiar surroundings from which, like the protagonist of Cowper’s most famous work, ‘The Task’, he could peep at the world through ‘the loop holes of retreat’; watch ‘the stir/ of the Great Babel’, but not ‘feel the crowd’. Seclusion was always to suit him and most of all when it was shared with a small companionable group. ‘SNUG’, he was later to write: ‘how much lies in that little word . . .
Did you never put up your feet on the fender and . . . wish you could roll yourself up like a dormouse? . . . a cosy corner is the thing to sit down in.’21
His nurse, Mary Ward, was a cherished member of his homely circle. More than just a hired help, she became a much-loved part of the family with which she would remain for the rest of her life. She was clearly an unusual woman for, at a time when most servants would have been illiterate, she had read deeply from her two most treasured volumes: the Bible and a popular copy of Milton’s verse. It was to Mary, Palmer said, that he owed his first true poetic experience, one that would shape his vision for the rest of his life.
Palmer had not yet turned four at the time and had still been living in Surrey Square where, tucked up in bed on a winter night, he remembered lying wakefully, watching the moon rising through the bare elm branches, floating away into a deep violet dusk. Its silvery light flooded into his room. Palmer gazed at the shadows that were cast by the trees, at their shapes fiddling and tangling upon painted walls. But it was Mary, he said, who gave meaning to these ephemeral patterns, fixing a picture of them forever in his head. ‘Well do I remember,’ he recalled many years later, ‘while the long shadows of moonlight were stealing over an ancient room, her repeating from Dr Young: “Fond man, the vision of a moment made,/ Dream of a dream, and shadow of a shade!”’22 This couplet – Edward Young’s poetic echo of the philosophical allegory in which Plato imagines that mankind is imprisoned in a cave, perceiving reality only in the form of its shadows as they are cast by a fire upon surrounding walls – entranced the youthful Palmer. Shadows for him accrued a soulful new resonance from then on, conjuring not just an awareness of life’s fragile mysteries but also a wistful yearning for a greater reality beyond. Again and again, as an artist, he would paint crepuscular scenes. ‘Of all creatures the owls and I love twilight best,’23 he would say.
Mary Ward also instilled a deep reverence for the poetry of Milton. She would have known the great poet’s work from her youth when it had been very much part of popular culture, its epic dramas inspiring the era’s leading artists or conjured up for the masses in the Eidophusikon, an entertainment palace in London’s Leicester Square in which, by means of complicated systems of mirrors and pulleys, huge theatrical paintings of Miltonic scenes were made to appear to move. Mary had a Tonson’s pocket Milton, an illustrated collection of his poems which, first published by Jacob Tonson in 1688, was to run into more than sixty editions between 1770 and 1825. This was the volume, seldom far from her side, from which Mary would recite to Sam as a child and which she would bequeath him upon her death. It was a legacy he would always treasure, along with her pair of simple, roughly worked spectacles and the tin ear-trumpet which she used in old age. Binding the book with brass corners, he would carry it in his pocket for more than twenty years. He came to know most of it by heart. Its images stocked his artistic imagination; its sonorous rhythms stirred the depths of his soul. ‘I am never in a “lull” about Milton,’ he would write more than fifty years later; ‘. . . nor can tell how many times I have read his poems . . . He never tires.’24 ‘I do believe his stanzas will be read in heaven.’25
Mary Ward became almost a second mother to Palmer. She had to be for, on 18 January 1818, his real mother suddenly died. She was not yet forty. Sam was almost thirteen and was visiting his grandfather when an uncle arrived to break the tragic news. ‘It was like a sharp sword sent through the length of me,’26 he wrote.
Portrait of Sam Palmer 1819 by Henry Walter.
This is likeness of Palmer taken by his childhood
friend presents a solemn fourteen year old at
the very beginning of his artistic career.
3
The Beginnings of an Artist
Oh that I had had the human bones broken about my stupid head
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
The death of a devoted mother would fall heavily on any young boy, but for the home-loving Sam it was particularly painful. He struggled to cope with a confusion of feelings and even many years later the wounds had not healed. He would sit and weep softly over Cowper’s On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture, a work which, recalling the poet’s own bereavement, would always move Palmer to tears.
My mother! when I learn’d that thou wast dead,
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed?
Hover’d thy spirit o’er thy sorrowing son,
Wretch even then, life’s journey just begun?
Perhaps thou gav’st me, though unseen, a kiss;
Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss . . .
It was, he thought, the most affecting poem in the English language.
The more practical consequence of the loss, however, was to set people thinking about the direction which thirteen-year-old Sam’s life should take. An artistic path, it was decided, would suit his proclivities. Attitudes to painters had altered greatly over the course of the previous fifty years. Where formerly they had been considered mere craftsman, by the end of the eighteenth century they had acquired professional respect. Immanuel Kant had effected what he had himself claimed to be the equivalent of a Copernican revolution in philosophy: where Enlightenment thinkers had sought to describe a strictly objective world, he had argued that reality could only be interpreted from the unique viewpoint of each individual and in so doing he had paved the way for Romanticism. He had set the creative spirit free to soar up to imaginative pinnacles, to a place where the dreamer could commune with a higher reality and the visionary discover truths in the solitude of his soul.
Palmer, as a boy, had dreamt of becoming an author like his grandfather. He had attempted verse from early youth, but as a poet he was never to advance beyond an ornately self-conscious style:
Methinks the lingring, dying ray
Of twilight time, doth seem more fair,
And lights the soul up more than day,
When wide-spread, sultry sunshines are.
Yet all is right and all most fair,
For Thou, dear God, hast formed all;
Thou deckest ev’ry little flower
Thou guidest ev’ry planet ball
And mark’st when sparrows fall.1
In prose, however, Palmer was to discover a more authentic voice. His letters reveal a descriptive verve, a stylistic flair and freshness of perception that suggest that, had he shed a lecturing tone of long-winded and sometimes pious pomposity, he might have made something of the writer’s calling. He speaks of ‘our earthly hopes’ being ‘shed like shirt buttons’;2 he describes a damaged etching plate as being ‘bent up like an earwig disturbed in an egg-plum’;3 he explains that ‘to stuff the mind with a legion of little facts makes it stupid and heavy as a bed is made heavy by its fullness of light feathers’;4 he describes the tortured flourishes of modern operas as running ‘up and down, backwards and forward, and round and round, like a squirrel in his cage’.5
‘Attention [is] the daughter of Curiosity who seldom can be prevailed upon to go anywhere without her mother,’6 Palmer wrote; or ‘in the North when there happens to be a dull summer – nothing but grey grey grey – the poor mind begins to feel as if it were going to bed with cold feet’.7 His images are resonant and his relish for language can almost be tasted on the tongue when he describes a cup of cocoa with its ‘oleaginous globosities bobbing about as you stir it like porpoises of the deep’8 or discusses the ‘sapid hotch potch’ of Southey, in which he has been ‘routing like a hungry hog’,9 or rails against ‘all this gaseous rhodomontade about the Ideal’.10
However for all the vigour of the copious letters that Palmer would write throughout the course of his life, his literary ambitions, remained those of the ‘true bookworm’. ‘Some place their bliss in action,’ he wrote to his boyhood friend Walter Williams in 1839, effortlessly slipping in a line from Pope, but on ‘a dull, pattering, gusty December day, which forbids our wishes to rove beyond the tops of the chimney-pots’, what he would most want would be ‘a good r
egister stove; a sofa strewed with books; a reading friend, and above all, a locked door forbidding impertinent intrusions’. A day like this, he wrote, punctuated by ‘a light dinner about one o’clock’, ‘a little prosy chat (not too argumentative), just to help digestion; then books again, till blessed green-tea-time winds us up for Macbeth or Hamlet’,11 was his idea of ecstasy.
As far as a profession was concerned, however, it was decided that Palmer should apply himself to the visual arts. Looking back, he considered the choice misguided. ‘It is too commonly the case,’ he observed, that when a young man ‘prefers scribbling over paper to his Latin and Greek, he is supposed to have a “taste for painting”’.12 He had liked music and architecture more, he said. His earliest known picture – a tiny watercolour done when he was seven of a windmill, with a man fishing in the pond in front of it – though dated and proudly preserved by his mother (and then kept by him for his ‘dear Mother’s’13 sake), reveals no especial talent although its small size and rural subject matter might be considered prescient.
It is possible that his family had pushed him towards painting because they felt they were pursuing a deceased mother’s wish. Martha had always encouraged her son’s creative efforts. In an 1814 letter from Margate she told her husband that Sam had been sketching the local church for a cousin and that now this same relative wanted a picture of a mackerel too. This letter, however, also hinted at the source of the misunderstanding regarding his choice of career. His earliest artistic forays, he much later explained, stemmed not from an inborn attraction to painting but from a ‘passionate love’ – and the expression was not too strong, he assured his correspondent – ‘for the traditions and monuments of the Church; its cloistered abbeys, cathedrals and minsters’, which he was always imagining and trying to draw; ‘spoiling much paper with pencils, crayons and watercolours’.14
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