Blake liked to visit on Sundays and often, passing Palmer’s Broad Street home, he would pick him up on the way. They always went on foot – the alternative, a bumpy cabriolet ride, being considered by Blake ‘a rumble I fear I could not go through’.15 Not that Palmer would have minded. Walking with Blake, he said, was like walking with the prophet Isaiah. He kindled the imagination, transforming even London’s ‘charter’d streets’16 into a bejewelled City of God.
The conversation of these walking companions might be guessed at. Perhaps Blake told Palmer about the 1780 Gordon Riots when, after Parliament had drafted a bill lifting restrictions from Roman Catholics, cries of ‘No Popery!’ had rung through the capital. A pitched battle between mob and militia had taken place in Broad Street where Palmer now lived. Blake, as a young man strolling home, had been swept up by the rabble, borne on its tide towards Newgate where rioters with sledgehammers and torches had set the prison on fire. He never forgot the flickering leap of the flames and the shrieks of trapped felons; the images of conflagration and chaos that pervade his poetry may in part, Ackroyd has suggested, spring from this harrowing memory.
The two would have doubtless spent much time discussing artistic matters. They might well have talked about Cowper, whose works they both loved: Palmer because they reminded him of his dead mother; Blake because Cowper who, suffering from manic religious fits had spent months in an asylum, seemed to him the very type of the mad poet most to be pitied and celebrated. They would have dwelt on Milton, for Blake recognised in this stubborn rebel an artistic forerunner who shared not just a sacred vision but a poetic mission to arouse England from spiritual slumber and return it to the state of ancient grace which it had enjoyed in the times when (as Milton put it) the ‘Druids created the cathedral of philosophy’.17 And maybe Blake described to Palmer the hallucinatory visits he had received from this long-deceased English poet who had appeared to him both in the guise of a youth and an old, grey-bearded man.
Following the meandering course of the River Fleet, the pair left London behind for the fresh air of the open fields. To walk with Blake in the country was ‘to perceive the soul of beauty through the forms of matter’,18 Palmer wrote. They would pause to rest on their way up Haverstock Hill, the dome of St Paul’s behind them and, on clear days, the towers of Westminster Abbey also visible beyond. Blake may have told Palmer, whose reverence for England’s ecclesiastical architecture he shared, how this abbey had been the home of ‘his earliest and most sacred recollections’.19 Blake had been sent there by Basire to make drawings of its tombs and had spent many solitary hours alone among its bright splendours, amid the coloured waxworks and painted funeral effigies, the marbles and mosaics, the stained glass and gilded decorations from which his rich sense of colour may have first arisen. Memories of the old cathedral enchanted him all his life and he would often recall the wondrous moment when he saw the spirits which dwelt amid its Gothic vaults; when its ‘aisles and galleries . . . suddenly filled with a great procession of monks and priests, choristers and censer-bearers, and his entranced ear heard the chant of plain-song and chorale, while the vaulted room trembled to the sound of organ music’.20 Blake often talked of his visions: when he said ‘my visions’, the journalist Henry Crabb Robinson recalled, ‘it was in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of trivial matters that everyone understands’.21
The Linnell children would watch for their father’s two friends as they crested the brow of the hill, their coat tails flapping, their pockets stuffed to bulging with pencils and scraps of paper and volumes of poetry, and sometimes also a book brought along as a present for Mrs Linnell. At a wave of greeting from Blake, the lively troupe would come rushing: Hannah at the fore, her gold ringlets flying, her plump cheeks flushed pink. Children loved Blake, Palmer recalled, for he had not ‘the least taint of affectation about him’,22 and Blake in his turn loved them back. He liked to listen to them playing in the courtyard below his flat, their laughter echoing round the brick. One visitor remembered once being led to the window and Blake, leaning out, pointing at the little ones beneath. ‘That is heaven,’ he had said. ‘He thought that no one could be truly great who had not humbled himself “even as a little child”,’ Palmer recalled.23
The Linnell children remembered Blake as ‘a grave and sedate gentleman, with white hair, a lofty brow, large lambent eyes [and] . . . a kind and gentle manner’,24 whose gaze would fill with tears when their mother, Mary, sat at the pianoforte to play one of his favourite Scottish songs. Blake was easily moved to tears and Palmer recalled the time when, dwelling upon the beauty of the parable of the prodigal son, he had begun to read it but at the words ‘when he was yet a great way off his father saw him’ had found himself unable to go further. Blake also liked to sing and would choose his own poems or some simple popular melody while Palmer with his rich tenor and the high-piping children would join in.
Sometimes Hannah would bring her pet cat in a big furry armful. Blake shared Palmer’s opinion of these creatures: ‘so much more quiet in her expressions of attachment than a dog’.25 Once Blake showed them a book of pictures he had done as a boy of fourteen, including a drawing of a grasshopper that they had all particularly liked. Occasionally he would take out his pencils to sketch. Three delicate drawings of a baby survive. Blake would tell the children stories. He could make his listeners laugh with such tales as that of the time that he had been sent a flask of walnut oil to try out as a solvent for his paints. Blake had tasted it and then gone on tasting it until the whole lot had been drunk. The artistic experiment had never taken place.
Constable may also have visited. He had lodgings just across the heath and knew the Linnells, although the only conversation recorded between him and Blake was that which took place as the old visionary leafed through one of his sketchbooks. ‘Why, this is not a drawing, but inspiration,’ he had said as he had admired a picture of Hampstead trees; whereupon Constable had replied: ‘I never knew it before; I meant it for a drawing.’26
As the evenings drew in, Blake liked to stand at the door, enjoying the mild summer air. He would gaze out in tranquil reverie at the hills or, sitting peacefully in the arbour at the end of the garden, would ruminate with the cows that chewed the cud on the far side of the fence. Sometimes Varley would arrive along with Mulready or other guests and they would sit down to dinners that lasted late into the night, starting with intense artistic discussions and ending with arguments and laughter and jokes. Linnell shared Mulready’s knack for mimicry and could imitate their foul-mouthed professor, Fuseli, so well that it may have been one of his impersonations that led the Academician to remark: ‘It is very good; it is better than I could have done myself.’ A sketch by Linnell shows Varley and Blake conversing after dinner. Varley, caught in the middle of animated conversation, is probably trying to convince Blake of the truth of his astrological theories. He was riveted by horoscopes and, upon meeting a new person, would immediately ask them their date of birth, whereupon he would start unstuffing his huge sail pockets of their cargo of almanacs. He believed firmly in his forecasts. One day, calculating that Uranus was about to exert a malign influence on his life which would reach its peak at midday, he took the precaution of remaining in bed. As the clock struck twelve there came a cry of ‘Fire!’ and Varley, rushing out, discovered that his house was in flames. He was so delighted to have predicted the disaster that the damage to his home didn’t bother him at all. Varley believed in Blake’s spiritual visitants as ardently as Blake himself and, in 1819, they had held a series of seances during which, between nine in the evening and three in the morning, Blake would keep open studio to any heavenly caller. Herod, Socrates, Mahomet, Owen Glendower and Voltaire were among the more notable figures that dropped in and Blake, sitting with his sketchpad, took all their portraits.
Darkness would long since have fallen when Mary Linnell bundled Blake warmly up in a shawl and sent a servant with a lantern to guide him and Palmer back across the heath. From there, t
he two would walk slowly homewards under the stars. The mythological stories of the glittering constellations felt far more real to Blake than the scientific discoveries of his day and Palmer was always to remember him, roused irritably from his silence, when talk at a friend’s house had turned to the vastness of space: ‘It is false!’ he had declared. ‘I walked the other evening to the end of the earth, and touched the sky with my finger.’27
8
The Oxford Sepias
A mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul
from The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer
Palmer was in awe of Blake. Leafing through his portfolios, he would marvel at their vitality, at the ‘spectral pigmies, rolling, flying, leaping among the letters; the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and bursts of flame’. The pages seemed almost to tremble under his touch. ‘As a picture has been said to be something between a thing and a thought, so in some of the type books over which Blake had long brooded, with his brooding of fire, the very paper seems to come to life,’ Palmer said. When he had finished, he would lay the portfolio as tenderly back down on the table as if he ‘had been handling something which was alive’.1
Blake flung open the windows of Palmer’s youthful imagination; through them he could see further than he had ever seen before. He began to work in new ways. Already in his 1824 sketchbook he had begun dashing down his drawings with an impulsive energy. By the autumn of 1825 he had written to a Mr Bennett who had commissioned him just a few months previously, to warn him that he might be surprised by his new style. At first, he promised to take back any which displeased their new owner and listen to suggestions as to how they might then be improved, but a few weeks later he thought better of this offer. ‘I will no more, by God’s grace, seek to moderate for the sake of pleasing men,’ he wrote. ‘The artist who knows propriety will not cringe or apologise when the eye of judgement is fixed upon his work.’2
Palmer took his cue from the uncompromising Blake whose ideas from this point on pervaded his development – from his loftiest ambitions to some technical aide-memoire: remember ‘that most excellent remark of Mr B’s . . . how a tint equivalent to a shadow is made by the outlines of many little forms in one mass’.3 If Palmer did not completely lose his own trajectory it was in large part because he never really understood his new mentor.
Palmer’s approach to nature was quintessentially Romantic. The philosophers of the Enlightenment era had, broadly speaking, regarded the human and the natural as two opposing poles; but in the latter half of the eighteenth century ideas had started to undergo an important shift in their course. Where the Age of Reason had argued, along with Thomas Hobbes, that man in a ‘state of nature’ has no notion of goodness and is vicious because he knows nothing of virtue, in the Romantic era Jean-Jacques Rousseau posited that, on the contrary, ‘uncorrupted morals’ prevail in natural man. Though his belief in the ‘noble savage’ (an oxymoron that was, in fact, first introduced not by him but by the British poet John Dryden in his 1672 play The Conquest of Granada) has been greatly exaggerated by subsequent history – Rousseau never actually suggested that human beings in a state of nature behave morally – he did argue that morality was not essentially a construct of society. Rather, he considered it to be ‘natural’ in the sense that it was innate in so far as it was a product of man’s instinctive reluctance to bear witness to suffering; whereas civilisation, as Rousseau saw it, was essentially artificial and bred inequality, envy, and unnatural desires.
By the time Rousseau’s final book, his 1782 Reveries of a Solitary Walker, was published, Europe had become a far safer place to travel. Its citizens felt freer to journey for the purpose of pleasure alone. The heights of the mountains, the depths of the woods, the dramas of the thunderstorm were no longer merely hazards to be overcome, but awesome experiences to be enjoyed and pondered, to be appreciated almost as aesthetic performances. Nature had come to be seen as a source of the sensations that would arouse the emotions that provoked imaginative visions which, opening man’s perceptions to divine powers, could act as a morally improving force.
Blake’s work, however, for all that it is full of references to animal and plant life, did not stem from naturalistic observation. His creatures played a purely symbolic role. His lamb or his tiger, his stately raven or sinister worm, were emblems. They embodied the states of the human soul: the good and the evil, the innocence or experience. Nature, in all its profusion and variety, was just so much obfuscating material as far as he was concerned. It was ‘the work of the devil’, he even once said.4
The young Palmer would have been confused. He saw spiritual meanings shining forth from material beauties and was becoming, if anything, more attentive to the natural world. He particularly admired Blake’s landscapes, delightedly perusing his Virgil woodcuts. They were ‘visions of little dells and nooks, and corners of Paradise’, he said: ‘models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry’.5 Several drawings in Palmer’s 1824 sketchbook show similar views, sweeping valleys and looping rivers, peaceful shepherds and floating clouds, but it was not so much the scenery as the mood which pervaded it that captivated Palmer. He was entranced by the ‘sentiment’ which Blake, through his contrast of solemn depth and vivid brilliancy, managed to conjure; by a quality quite ‘unlike the gaudy daylight of this world’, which seemed to him to offer a precious glimpse of that which ‘all the most holy, studious saints and sages’ have enjoyed: that ‘rest which remaineth to the people of God’. It was this numinous atmosphere that he too wanted to capture: ‘a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul’.6 Before he met Blake, Palmer had been planning a landscape in which the hills of David and the hills of Dulwich would be as one, but now it would no longer be enough merely to ‘unite scattered recollections’ into ‘a Dulwich-looking whole’. He must evoke that diaphanous half-light which speaks of divine presence; which would make these same hills promise that ‘the country beyond them is Paradise’.7
A set of six sepia drawings survive from this period. Palmer was proud of them: they are all signed; all but one has been dated ‘1825’. He kept them among his possessions almost until the end of his life. Now in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, and known as the Oxford Sepias, they present a series of peaceful rural scenes: a smocked ploughman harnessing his curly-polled bullock, a hare loping its solitary way through the woods, a recumbent man reading amid a ripening cornfield, a pipe-playing shepherd with his gathered flock. Three of the drawings describe the delicate clarity of daybreak, three the gentle closing in of the dusk. Palmer captures the glimmering magic of these transitional moments to perfection. He sees the first paling of the sky in the earliest morning; notices the long shadows cast by a just risen sun; observes the way that the darkness is drawn into the folds of a landscape; delights in the sprinkled brightness of a crescent moon.
Palmer used a sepia ink, extracted from cuttlefish, and applied it in washes so that some parts of the picture surface were left unpainted (the moon shines with the white of the underlying paper); others were built upon layer by layer, lines fattened and thickened by a viscous pigment made, as Blake would have taught him, by mixing the sepia with gum arabic. Slowly he would assemble the images in obsessive detail, from the tiniest figure perched on the furthest horizon, to the little horned molluscs that probe a foreground. As he elaborated, observing the courtship of a pair of song thrushes, the translucent fungi that sprout in the damp, the individual shape of every different tree leaf, the characteristic texture of every trunk, he moved towards an oddly magnified view of the world in which every detail assumes a significance, becomes part of a patchwork of myriad patterns which draws their many elements into a harmonious whole.
The varnish was also made of gum, again applied layer by layer, each coat given time to dry between applications and in a very uneven manner so that where there was more pigment it became an impasto – a layer so thick it is textured – and where there was no pai
nt it formed an all-but-transparent veil. Palmer would have known that the black sepia would fade with time to rich brown and the gum slowly darken to an amber tone. He would have foreseen the golden glow that these works now possess. And it was this luminosity that he most wanted to capture. His landscapes are consecrated by a beneficent light.
9
The Primitive
A pure quaint crinkle-crankle goth
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
Blake was obsessed with the idea of a lapsed spiritual age. All his life he would look for what he called ‘lost originals’,1 peering back through the layers of successive civilisations, through the veils of history and the confusions of belief, to discover the purified lineaments of some fundamental truth. It was in Westminster Abbey that he had first glimpsed it, he told Palmer. It was there that, with ‘his mind simplified by Gothic forms & his Fancy imbued with the livid twilight of past days’, he had found what he knew to be ‘a true Art’.2 The abbey’s Gothic memorials had revealed a ‘simple and plain road to a style . . . unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice’. They had taught him how, by working within native traditions, he could recapture the unsullied virtues of the artists he most admired: the sanctified purity of Fra Angelico’s frescos, the linear chastity of Mantegna’s designs, the innocent perfection of Raphael’s paintings, the hieratic clarity of Dürer’s woodcuts. ‘Everything connected with Gothic art and churches, and their builders, was a passion to him,’3 Palmer recalled.
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