Mysterious Wisdom

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  Palmer would relish such experiences all his life and would happily recount tales of mystic canary birds or haunted toy horses. He was delighted, some fifty years after leaving Shoreham, to find an article in the Spectator by someone who, while ridiculing rustic credulity, thought a terror of ghosts a far more reasonable response to tradition than mere dismissal of what one cannot at once explain. As Palmer himself rather pompously declared, having returned in 1870 to Margate where he had spent ‘among the most interesting evenings of my life’ in a haunted house, his impression was ‘that, making all allowance for imposture and mistake, there was a residuum of evidence which no candid mind could resist’.38

  The Ancients, however, only indulged in their eccentric nocturnal jaunts from time to time. In autumn, as the fragrant smoke of the homeward-plodding labourers’ pipes drifted along the lanes, their own thoughts would also turn to the hearth. In the cold of the winter they preferred to remain by the fire. Frequently they would stay up into the small hours, working by candlelight as a little ink sketch of Richmond done by Palmer attests. Huddled up in his warm dressing gown, a long, tasselled night cap pulled over his head, he scratches away diligently at his engraving. It is his Shepherd, a note by Palmer informs us: an elegant but unfinished pastoral composition that had been inspired by the engravings of Blake.

  Later, as an elderly hypochondriac nervously alert to potential causes of ill health, Palmer would repent these prolonged late-night stints. ‘Sir Walter Scott got all his day’s work done before breakfast,’ he informed a pupil. ‘I fell early into the opposite habits which I deeply regret.’39 But at the time those long winter evenings, pulled like warm coats around them, felt delightfully homely, especially after Palmer moved from the incommodious Rat Abbey into the far more comfortable Waterhouse. He loved the ‘never-cloying luxury’ of long ‘quiet intellectual evenings to those who are fagged out by the day’.40 Gathered round the fire, the Ancients would listen to the music of the river as it rushed down to the millrace, to Palmer playing his fiddle or picking out tunes on the piano, while Finch sang along choosing the sort of ‘sweet pathetick’41 melodies that his friends most loved.

  Long after the last amber glow of the neighbours’ candlelit lattices had faded, the young men would be sitting there, indulging in their agreeable ceremonies of pipe-smoking and snuff-taking, puffing and tamping and pinching and blowing as they sipped at their bowls of ‘dear precious green tea’.42 Palmer and Richmond (whose mother sent him parcels of tea and sugar from London) had a particular passion for this drink and a letter passes between them in which Palmer minutely instructs his friend on how to discriminate Hyson (which should be ‘of a full-sized grain, of a blooming appearance, very dry, and crisp’) from its superior Gunpowder (which ‘should have a beautiful bloom upon it, which will not bear the breath’, be of ‘greenish hue’ and ‘a fragrant pungent taste’).43 But green tea – or terre verte as they called it, after the artist’s pigment – was their particular favourite and even years later a bowl of it would stir nostalgic memories for Palmer of quiet Shoreham evenings and ‘nice long old-fashioned talks’44 by the fire.

  These conversations were made up of an ‘entertaining medley’45 of poetry and art, religion and politics, though they could easily descend into acrimonious theological bickerings, not least when Palmer’s father was entertaining Primitive Baptists or Linnell had invested in the latest proselytising tract. Palmer relished a tough quarrel and revelled in long-running intellectual tussles. But more even than talking, the Ancients loved to read. ‘Blessed books – any one of which is worth all the toggery we ever put on our backs,’46 said Palmer. With ‘opodeldoc [a powerfully aromatic liniment, supposedly invented by Paracelsus, made of soap dissolved in alcohol, to which camphor and herbal essences, most notably wormwood, had been added] rubbed into the forehead to wake the brain up’ and ‘a Great Gorge of old poetry to get up the dreaming’,47 he was happy. When the wind howled bitterly round the chimney pots and the rain beat in gusts against panes, he and his fellow Ancients would place the steaming teapot by the fire and, reaching down the tall folios from the bookshelves, tuck themselves peacefully into their tomes. These precious interludes, passed ‘recreating myself with good books’,48 were times which Palmer was always to look back on and treasure. ‘I am really glad I had a dose and glut of reading at Shoreham,’ he would write many years later, for some savour of it always remained, he said, ‘like the relish of wine in an empty cask’.49

  Eventually it would be time to retire. Palmer would go up to his bed, with its mattress of local sheep’s wool (‘a feather bed costs 14 guineas and is not my lot’50) with a hop sack coverlet thrown over it if he needed extra warmth, and lie there listening to the calls of the owls as they swept through the trees, the creaking of the floorboards and the bark of the foxes. And maybe, beyond that, so constant that he barely even caught it, the deep background hum of a profound sense of peace. ‘We less enjoy life than listen to the sound of its machinery,’51 Palmer later wrote. He would always look back to his time in Shoreham as a moment of blessed tranquillity; as a time of stillness which for the rest of his life he would seek.

  William Blake died within a year of Palmer moving to Shoreham. Richmond gave Palmer the news. ‘He died on Sunday night at 6 o’clock in most glorious manner,’ he told him. ‘He said He was going to that country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and He burst out in Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.’52 It was Richmond who finally closed Blake’s eyelids and kissed him as he lay in his work room in Fountain Court. John Linnell, with characteristic efficiency, helped to arrange the burial and five days later the Ancients followed Blake’s humble elm coffin to the dissenters’ burial ground in Bunhill Fields in north London where both his parents had already been buried and where their brilliant son was now laid, at a cost of nineteen shillings, in a common grave. Palmer wasn’t there. It was a loss he must have felt keenly, despite his conviction that they would meet again in heaven one day. For the rest of his life he kept among his most treasured mementos a message card designed for Cumberland, the last work Blake had completed, and his pair of big, round, steel-rimmed glasses, their lenses bleared by many years of use. The memory of Blake bound the circle of Ancients even more closely together. They were to become his most impassioned defenders. ‘He was one of the few to be met with in our passage through life, who are not in some way or other, “double-minded” and inconsistent with themselves; one of the very few who cannot be depressed by neglect, and to whose name rank and station could add no lustre,’53 Palmer would say.

  It was Linnell, however, who was most immediately affected by his death. He had been much involved in his affairs during his last feeble months and had lent Blake’s widow, Catherine, the money to pay for the ceremony, moving her afterwards into his Cirencester Place studio ostensibly as a housekeeper, but in fact to take care of her. He had lost a friend whom he had profoundly respected and his health began to break down shortly afterwards. One day, queuing at the bank, he found himself too weak to wait any longer and had to return home. Soon, all other restorative measures having failed, he was compulsively inhaling twelve bottles of oxygen a day.

  In 1828, finding the constant back-and-forth journey too taxing, he moved his family back from Hampstead to a rented house in Bayswater. But he still kept up a punishing work schedule: rising early in the morning to work at his painting, continuing his teaching (he was by then much in demand as a tutor), educating his children, making bread (he would often leave his sitters for a few moments to knead the dough), brewing beer and, as if all this wasn’t sufficient, hatching a scheme to build a new house. Having consulted with the architect Tatham, undergone all his usual pecuniary calculations and negotiated a complex web of barter arrangements by which he would trade paintings for building work, he embarked on the project. By the autumn of 1829, foundations had
been laid in Porchester Terrace and, within the stipulated year, the new home was finished, by which time Linnell, having taken a hand in everything from the drawing up of the first plans to the digging of the cesspool, was installing a bread oven and a cast-iron kitchen range.

  Beside all this determined industry, the un-timetabled hours that he passed in Shoreham must have felt even more beguiling and back in London, after a visit, he began dreaming of pastoral Kentish scenes. Palmer, manifestly delighted, did everything he could to encourage his return. A succession of letters passed back and forth between them, discussing potential accommodation, organising help from a farmer’s daughter (down to the specific details of her responsibilities: her father would not like her to wash dishes or be under the cook doing scullery work), negotiating prices, giving the times of the coaches and making arrangements to meet them. Palmer would happily walk up to the toll road at the top of the hill at Shoreham on the off-chance that Linnell might be on a certain coach. He worried about whether his mentor could bear the uncushioned jolting of a cart without springs and on one occasion, when Linnell was feeling particularly weak, the Ancients procured a wheelbarrow in which to push him about.

  The Palmers did everything they could to make their guests welcome at Waterhouse. There was always a bowl of apples left out on the table and a kettle of tea left brewing on the hob. When Calvert and his wife came to visit they were given the best room because they were married and, when one of their sons fell dangerously ill, the Palmers looked after him in Shoreham while he convalesced. ‘In all probability it saved his life,’54 the boy’s grandmother thanked them. If there were not enough rooms, Palmer would move out to lodgings above the village bakery and, if walkers from London arrived in the middle of the night, his father would not only get up to greet them but give them his own bed so that they could enjoy a well-earned sleep.

  Palmer made as few visits as possible to ‘the great national dusthole’.55 ‘I purpose never again to see London by daylight,’ he declared in 1834. Between 1831 and 1835 he bought four more properties in Shoreham which he let out to locals, planning to live off the meagre rental income until his career gathered pace. He would own these cottages for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, his fellow Ancients ran his errands in the capital – visiting framers, looking out books, delivering messages or purchasing materials that ranged from the sheets of thick Bristol board, which he most liked to draw on, to a mussel shell of powdered gold for a miniature that he planned to paint. Palmer, in return, dispatched potatoes to Tatham at two shillings a bushel, sacks of hops to Linnell and to Richmond flagons of cider for his bowels.

  Alone in Shoreham, however, Palmer greatly missed his friends – he laments not being present for a cricket match in Linnell’s garden – and constantly chivvied his fellow Ancients to visit: the harvest is coming; the days are glorious; the hopping season has begun, the weather is fine, they must hurry before it breaks. ‘Why do Walter and Mr Calvert fancy Shoreham a hundred miles off?’ he complained in 1828. ‘Let them get on the road by chance and walk a bit and ride a bit and they will soon look down on the valley.’56 The winter months when the roads were not conducive to travelling, when the weather was ‘fogg’d and cloudy’ and the ‘landscape a sickly white or grey’,57 often left him solitary and in the summer, when sudden rains turned the roads into mires, sending torrents rushing down the hillsides and leaving the fruit carts stranded up to their axles in three foot of water, he would feel the inconvenience of his isolation acutely.

  The Ancients kept in touch by writing long letters to each other in which they discussed their activities, ideas and discoveries. ‘Punctually devote half an hour every evening to setting down the prominent circumstances of your day; particularly anything pictorial or intellectual,’58 Palmer instructed Richmond as he set off to Italy in 1828. ‘Pray write me a more minute account than the last of what you get up to “from morn to dewy eve”.’59 He fretted about the parlous state of the postal service with its delays and misdirections. ‘I want so much to be talking to you that you see I cannot wait to be coming to town,’ he told Richmond in a letter which ‘dribbled out’ as he walked in the neighbouring Lullingstone Park, as he sat in the peace of a local farmer’s garden or scribbled at a table after supper at home.60 These periodically updated missives took the place of a conversation; a pen, the place of an arm tucked companionably into his own.

  Palmer in many ways found writing a more natural form of expression than painting. ‘It is very much easier to give vent to the romantic by speech than to get it all the way down from the brain to the fingers’ ends, and then squeeze it out upon the canvas,’61 he told Calvert in 1837. To consult the archives of the Victoria & Albert or the Fitzwilliam Museums, to read through page upon close-packed page of his sloping sepia-inked scripts, is to gain a vivid sense of his life and character. A barrister who had once met Blake over dinner, described him as having delivered an unmethodical rhapsody on art, poetry and religion throughout the meal. Palmer’s letters have something of the same rambling flow. They encompass anything from the most solemn disquisition on artistic beliefs, to a boyish discussion of bowel movements; from a profound profession of faith, to a fussy itemisation of costs. They have a delightful freshness. The reader is introduced to a character unfurling in all its many aspects, from the heights of its idealism to the depths of its disappointments. A picture is offered of Palmer in his many moods: passionate, punctilious, pious, fun-poking, pompous, provocative, self-pitying, appeasing. One hears him haranguing or assuaging, whining or exulting; finds him madly excited or gloomily melancholy, ridiculously grandiloquent or just downright silly. Sometimes, Palmer pours out his thoughts in a stream of consciousness (‘autobabblery’62 as he describes it), sometimes he flits from idea to idea as when he moves in a trice from discussing the ‘perpetual miracle of life’63 to the price that he should pay a Mr Steggle for a picture frame. Sometimes, he writes with premeditated gravity in a neat legible script with barely a crossing out; sometimes his letters are ornamented with drawings in the margins, packed with afterthoughts and cross-scorings and strings of postscripted points.

  Palmer tried to draw the brotherhood more tightly together through his letters, passing on news, offering words of encouragement or conveying frequent remembrances from one to the other. The Ancients would also use drawing in this way. Like the Nazarenes before them, they would sketch each other, studying the lineaments of each other’s faces, becoming familiar with expressions and moods. Such likenesses could affirm a sense of shared purpose. When Richmond exhibited his 1829 miniature of Palmer under the title of Portrait of an Artist, it was an assertion of his faith in the future of his friend’s profession.

  More often, however, their sketches were less serious. The Ancients were little more than boys – and were even mistaken for schoolchildren as a tale, which Finch liked to tell, shows. One day, out for ramble, they had stripped to the waist to wash in a village well only to find themselves suddenly surrounded by locals who, thinking them truants, wanted to call the constable. It was only when a man ran a finger across one of their cheeks that, feeling the bristles, he realised: ‘No, these ain’t schoolboys. This is an old file!’64

  The young men revelled in boyish teasing, in practical jokes and self-mockery. A caricature of Richmond catches him ‘in the full swing of his glory’, his tail coat flapping as he twirls upon a pair of horizontal bars. And in a little self-portrait, Richmond presents himself as a dunce, smoking a pipe and wearing a fool’s cap. There are pictures of Palmer in big round glasses and ridiculous hat, or singing with his mouth wide-agape as a frog’s, or shambling absent-mindedly, his umbrella clutched upside down. ‘Sambo Palmer’, Richmond inscribed this sketch. The Ancients liked nicknames. They called Blake ‘the Interpreter’, Michelangelo ‘Mike’, Linnell’s children ‘the little Leonardos’, and Richmond’s newborn baby ‘the Chevalier’, short for ‘Chevalier-New-Come’.

  Beyond the solemn purpose and the religious piety of the brotherhoo
d, lay the simple enjoyment of a gang of young men who loved laughter and jokes and bawdiness, ridiculous puns (‘I would rather have queer notions than queer motions’65 Palmer declares as he returns yet again to the subject of costiveness) and ludicrous rhyming ditties. ‘I am in one of my fits, again,’ Richmond wrote. Palmer would often be reduced to rolling incapable on the floor: ‘a kind of delightful hysterics’, as he described it, when he would ‘yell and roar’ like a wild beast.66 They all relished teasing except the solemn Calvert who as a result became the butt of their jokes. A high-spirited Palmer once affronted him by singing The British Grenadiers at the top of his voice when he had been told not to. Calvert’s consequent anger lasted for more than thirty-six hours. They were the only three days that they ever hated each other, an affectionate Palmer was later to recall.

  12

  At Work in the Valley of Vision

  Nature . . . transmitted into the pure gold of art

  from The Letters of Samuel Palmer

  To look at the pictures which Palmer painted in Shoreham is to see rural England through newly enraptured eyes. As he wandered the fields of the fertile Kentish valleys, along wooded ridges and down sloping pastures, among orchards and hop gardens, by hayricks and cattle sheds, he beheld a landscape transfigured as if by some miracle of divine grace. It was as if the whole world, ‘passed thro’ the intense purifying separating transmuting heat of the soul’s infabulous alchymy’,1 had been transubstantiated. ‘I really did not think there were those splendours in visible creation,’2 he said.

  Linnell, however, was keen that his protégé should return to academic basics and learn to master the figure and, for a while, Palmer knuckled down to anatomical studies. In 1824 he wrote dutifully to his mentor to assure him that had been working diligently on a drawing of a head. ‘Have I not been a good boy?’ he asked. ‘I may safely boast that I have not entertain’d a single imaginative thought these six weeks.’3 For many years he persisted, fitfully, in his attempts to represent properly the human form, even, every now and then, managing to make his newfound skills pay: in 1829, he complained of having ‘a bothering little job of a likeness’4 to finish. And yet, for all that he still dreamt of conjuring grand biblical tableaux, the only works that survive to bear witness to such high-flown ambitions owe far more to the landscapes of Shoreham than to studies in the life room. His The Rest on the Flight to Egypt (c.1824) shows the Holy Family huddling among the valley’s wooded hills.