Mysterious Wisdom

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  In his painting, In a Shoreham Garden, the blossoms of an apple tree break like a wave frothing over the picture. Blob upon huge blob, Palmer builds up the masses, an impasto exploding upon the surface of the board. He revels in the soft profusion of the pink-and-white petalled foam. The Magic Apple Tree glows like a great autumn bonfire. Palmer exults in the harvest’s rich gifts. Colour becomes a pure sensual pleasure. These are paintings to glut the appetite. And yet their meanings remain elusive. Their subjects cannot be explained. Reality is transfigured as Palmer embodies his giddiest, his boldest, his most extravagant perceptions in paintings now hailed as the pinnacle of his Shoreham achievement. And yet, even as he captured the most exalted form of his vision, in the eyes of the world he was seen to have failed.

  13

  The Pastoral and the Political

  I love our fine British peasantry

  from The Letters of Samuel Palmer

  The visitor to Tate Britain in London might easily wander past Palmer’s Coming from Evening Church without so much as pausing. Barely the size of a piece of A4 paper, it seems hardly designed to draw the stranger up short. And yet, this is probably Palmer’s most significant picture: it captures the essence of his Shoreham beliefs.

  Palmer paints a procession of villagers winding their way homewards from the ivy-clad church that stands at the heart of their rural way of life. A line of domed hills forms the furthest horizon, encircling and protecting the pastor’s congregation just as, on the far slopes, woven hurdles protect the shepherd’s huddled flock. Framing tree trunks curve upwards, boughs interlacing to form a Gothic archway; cottage windows glow warmly from amid scrambling leaves and, as the church spire elevates its shining cross to the heavens, the light of a full moon falls like a benediction from above.

  The natural and the spiritual merge in this landscape. Man lives in harmony with his community, with his rural surroundings and with his God. Palmer presents a vision of rural life as it may be shaped and protected by the traditions of the Anglican Church – and, in so doing, it turns out, he is making a direct political point. Clearly visible at the bottom of the painting is the inscription: ‘Painted 1830 at Shoreham Kent S. Palmer’. Since this is one of very few works of this period to be signed and dated, it seems probable that Palmer chose to do so deliberately: a decision that makes sense in the light of upcoming events for, even as he was painting this beneficent fiction, a far harsher reality was beginning to take shape. The year 1830 saw the first rural unrest in Shoreham. It was the beginning of the upheavals that would lead to parliamentary reform.

  Palmer’s life spanned a period of great change. The traditional agrarian way of life was vanishing; the Enlightenment’s rationalist certainties were fading and soon pretty much everything was being thrown into question: the nature of society, the basis of civil government, the doctrine of individual rights, the notion of political justice and the roles and the relationships of the sexes all found themselves coming under scrutiny as Britain moved towards the new values of a modern industrial world. However, even as swift currents were sweeping society onwards, tradition was dragging like a powerful undertow. To those who yearned for the safety of familiar shores, culture could create a protective haven. The visual arts – and most particularly landscape painting – had a patriotic role to play.

  The mid-eighteenth century had seen the start of the widespread enclosure of Britain. As act after parliamentary act was passed (some 4,000 were to come into effect before the General Enclosure Act of 1845 enabled appointed commissioners to enclose land without applying to Parliament), the strip plots that dated back to a medieval feudal system were turned into larger fields which were then separated off from each other by hedges. The look of the British countryside was radically changing. At the same time, Romanticism was encouraging people to take pride in their native beauties. Why turn to the Roman campagna of Enlightenment tastes when Britain could boast noble views of its own? As piecemeal plots merged to create single holdings, the estate was presented as an alternative idyll: the cheerful peasants, nurtured and protected by landowners, working happily to produce the crops that would bring ease and prosperity to their nation. This was the contemporary version of the pastoral vision which Virgil had presented in his Georgics, a book that every educated schoolboy would have been expected to know. Its philosophies, adapted to Romantic sensibilities, had found full expression in Wordsworth’s 1814 The Excursion, a poem which, exploring the political and economic pressures exerted upon the rural community, had suggested that the essence of English country life lay in a mystical connection between man, nature and God: a traditional order upheld by the local pastor and symbolised by the church spire which bonds earth and sky. This is the vision which Constable alludes to in his images of Salisbury Cathedral from the meadows. It is the picture which Samuel Palmer paints in his Coming from Evening Church.

  The great estate, however, was not quite the private Elysium of the wishful imagination. With enclosure, the peasants were being evicted from their lands, driven into the cities of a burgeoning industrial revolution. England’s supposedly idyllic rural communities were being drained. Traditions tend to feel most charming when they are finally vanishing. Palmer, in moving to Shoreham, was moving into a land of dreams that were crumbling just as he set out to capture them in paint.

  The first census of Shoreham taken in 1841 (about five years after Palmer had left) records about a thousand people living in some two hundred households, the majority in the village itself, the rest scattered in outlying hamlets and farms. There were seven blacksmiths, nine carpenters and wheelwrights, a harness maker, a shoemaker and two keepers of shops; but for the most part the Shoreham folk would have worked on the land either as tenant farmers or their more humble labourers. Palmer painted them in his pictures: up at sunrise to yoke their burly brown oxen, shearing the sheep through the long afternoon, gleaning the fields by the last glow of the daylight or bringing in the sheaves under a shining moon. His work is full of rustic vignettes. He shows the felled tree trunk hauled slowly homewards, the farm wagon heaped high with newly mown hay, the reapers embracing their harvested corn bundles, the women balan­cing baskets of woven willow on their heads, the cattle quenching their thirst in the river’s cool shallows, the crows as they circle the ploughman’s fresh furrows, the sheepdog curled sleeping in its patch of warm sun.

  Palmer knew several of his neighbouring landowners: Farmer Tooth with whose family he had first lodged and whose daughter Clarissa – or Clary, as Palmer knew her – was to be employed as a child minder by the visiting Linnell; Mr Groombridge the apple grower whose cottage the Palmers could see from their Waterhouse windows and in whose pleasant gardens Palmer often liked to sit; Mr Love, a hop grower whom he thought a fine farmer, and Mr Waring of Chelsfield who made the best cider. He enjoyed cordial relationships with several of the inhabitants of Shoreham’s timber and thatch cottages, with Mr Brewer the tailor, Mr Gregory the baker and Mr Yates who lived on the terrace road. He would pass the time of day with Mr Barham, an old labourer with a bright and busy wife and two daughters, or wave to the Wilmot family of Goddington Mill or bid good morning to Mr Bailey, the carrier, who told him one day that he was as happy as a lamb with two mothers. When Bailey’s young wife fell pregnant, Palmer described her as having a belly as large ‘as if she had got the dome of St Paul’s under her apron’, and yet she still bustled about like a girl, he said; when the day comes, he told Richmond, ‘she’ll drop her kitten into the basket without any . . . parade and in a day or two be just as well as ever again’.1

  These were all decent people running their modest households on cautiously metered budgets, as their numerous arrangements to let lodgings to Palmer’s friends suggest. A Mrs Mills, for example, had a spare room but no bedstead to go in it and was not prepared to invest in one unless her prospective lodger would commit himself to staying for the whole of the summer. The Ancients enjoyed the lively gossip of locals. They laughed at the story of the local baker
, a meek and grievously henpecked man whose wife, a jealous scold, would watchfully track him when he was out on his rounds. He had a pet jackdaw which had learnt to mimic this harridan. ‘Ah, Thomas V . . . Thomas V . . . You hadn’t a shirt to your back when I married you Thomas V . . .’2 it would croak, until one day the baker, driven beyond the bounds of endurance, leapt up and wrung the bird’s neck.

  Richmond described in amused detail the clerk of a nearby chapel: an aged war veteran who, having lost a leg, had had it replaced with a wooden one. The clerk would sit under the pulpit till the hymn before the sermon was given out, whereupon, there being no choir, he would assume the role of chief songster. As the first bars of the musical prelude were played, his grandson, a young ploughman, would march from the west end of the church to his grandfather’s seat where, bending over as if about to play leapfrog, he would mount the old man upon his back. Out would ring the first words of the hymn: the clerk, from his new elevation, would deliver alone the first two lines. Then the youth with the old man on his back would march solemnly down the nave, the clerk singing lustily all the way from his strange vantage point. Up the spiral staircase the youth would steadily mount, the voice gradually diminishing before rising once more to an abrupt crescendo as an upper door opened, eventually to conclude with a stentorian finale as the youth deposited his cargo in the musician’s gallery.

  The Ancients would always stop to talk to the idling village simpleton who, in sunny weather, liked to bask away the hours upon the bridge. Richard Lipscombe, the jovial ostler from Otford whom Palmer knew as Dick, was another favourite with the young men. With his broad Kentish dialect, his simple piety and his talent for rhyme, he was like a character from Pilgrim’s Progress, Richmond thought, or the ‘inglorious Milton’ of Gray’s churchyard Elegy, and he would lend him edifying books on the pages of which he would pen his customary ditties: ‘To turn down the leaves is a very bad plan/ So I always puts paper wherever I can.’ Lipscombe was particularly fond of Palmer’s father whom he knew as his preacher and described him in one of his impromptu poems:

  Palmer is a man of God

  He is a sound divine,

  For when he doth expound the word,

  His face doth always shine.

  Years later, when the ostler had been laid in his grave, John Giles returned to put up a tombstone in his memory. It still stands in the shadow of the old yew in the Otford churchyard, a simple red sandstone monument with a deep-cut cross.

  Frederick Tatham visited a sick cottager, day after day for months on end, washing and dressing his sores, and Palmer put himself to considerable effort in his attempts to find a position for a local farrier who had lost his job. One of the principal purposes of Christian teaching, he wrote in a letter to Richmond, was to divert attention away from ‘vile all-absorbing self’ to the plight of the impoverished.3 There is no doubt that there was a good relationship between the Ancients and the people whom they lived among. ‘In time they . . . came to know us and we to love them,’4 Richmond said. And yet, there was a fundamental difference between the simple Shoreham dwellers and the privileged urbanites who had decided to live among them. The stout barriers of class and convention had not really been overcome, as an episode involving a village woman, employed by Palmer’s father, suggests. One day, while she was waiting at table it was pointed out to her that a plate was dirty. She picked it up, spat on it, wiped it with her apron and replaced it in front of the diner. ‘Never let me see you do that filthy trick again,’ her outraged employer had scolded, but the woman had just stared, astonished by this outburst; she had no idea of what she had done wrong.5 The story of a cottager who had cooked up rat pudding was among the Ancients’ repertoire of oft-recounted Shoreham tales; but it seems to have been told as a joke, none of the young men even pausing to consider quite how hungry a family must have been to have resorted to this unsavoury recipe.

  ‘The jocose talk of hay-makers is best at a distance,’ George Eliot wrote in Adam Bede, a novel which explores village life at precisely Palmer’s period. ‘Like those clumsy bells round the cows’ necks, it has rather a coarse sound when it comes close, and may even grate on your ears painfully; but heard from far off, it mingles very prettily with the other joyous sounds of nature.’6 Palmer, indulging his dreams of a pastoral idyll, did not see the realities of rural life. He did not consider the rheumatic damp that would have seeped into the watching shepherd’s bones; the backbreaking ache of the bent reaper’s pose; the terrible weariness of the labourer at the end of a day which, beginning even before the first scrawny cockerel had scrambled onto its dung heap, closed in an often fireless darkness with shivering families huddled on beds of flea-ridden straw. Palmer painted cottage windows glowing with a welcoming light. His more socially attuned contemporary, Eliot, spoke instead of ‘little dingy windows telling, like thick filmed eyes, of nothing but the darkness within’.7

  The inhabitants of Palmer’s paintings are not real people. They are characters from a pastoral fantasy: denizens of flowered dells and fruitful landscapes fed by burgeoning nature with berries and nuts, dozing to the piping melodies of flutes while the mellow sun warms their plump cheeks. This is the world that he described in The Shepherd’s Home, one of only a few of his poems to survive, in which he wrote of ‘a little village, safe, and still,/ Where pain and vice, full seldom come’; where ‘Clear, shallow, pebbled streams are found,/ Where many a fish doth skim and bound’; where ‘trim cottage gardens’ are ‘intricate with fruit-bent boughs’ and ‘sweet young maidens . . . fairer than the milky lilies do appear’.8 Palmer wanted to believe in a nurturing land which would provide for its people as the mother ewe in one of his images lets down her milk to a nuzzling lamb. He loved ‘the jovial time of hop picking’ when the whole village made ‘sunshine holiday’, when ‘age and youth and childhood, merrily singing as they worked, garnered in the fragrant crop without the help of strangers’.9 He relished the ‘pretty picture’ of harvest home when, the very last wagon loaded up, the children would ride home atop ‘singing and shouting for joy’ before retiring to the old farmhouse where, as Palmer looking back wistfully described it, ‘all the poor people who have been reaping for so many days in the hot sun till they are as brown as hazel nuts – all these merry reapers have a good supper together with music and song and dances’. ‘They worked hard for their master, and now he makes them happy,’10 Palmer concluded, equating the feudal relationship of landowner and peasant with that of Christ and his Christian flock.

  The reality was rather different from this rose-tinted idyll. The bucolic character, wrote the clear-sighted Eliot, was not always ‘of that entirely genial, merry, broad-grinning sort, apparently observed in most districts visited by artists’.11 An observer, ‘under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes hardships picturesque’, she wrote in Middlemarch, would find a village homestead delightful with its ivy-choked chimneys, its large porch ‘blocked up with bundles of sticks and half the windows closed with grey worm-eaten shutters about which the jasmine boughs grew in wild luxuriance’. The mouldering garden wall with hollyhocks peeping over it, the mossy thatch of the cowshed, the broken barn doors: ‘all these objects’, when painted ‘under the quiet light of a sky marbled with high clouds would have made a sort of picture which we have all paused over as a “charming bit”’.12 As this fiercely moral and profoundly compassionate woman well knew, a grim reality blighted the pastoral whimsy and this was a particularly brutal period in the rural history of Britain.

  Many of the poorest field workers were only able to survive because they could graze a cow, raise a flock of geese, collect firewood or grow a few vegetables on the common, a shared piece of land to which they had a traditional right by virtue of renting a cottage within a village. When this common land was enclosed they were deprived of their independence. Forced to sell the livestock which had helped to ward off penury, they had only their wages to rely on. Gradually, an underclass of agricultural labourers emerged. Many would no
t have been the sort of ‘civil cleanly moral peaceable and industrious’13 folk whom Palmer met in the farmsteads of Shoreham for, by the end of the 1820s, more than a third of the population of the Kentish weald was unemployed.

  The Corn Laws, which had filled the coffers of Nathanial Palmer on whose annual allowance Palmer’s father now lived, had spread hunger and distress through the very communities within which he preached. Many could no longer afford to pay for the grain from which they ground their bread. This state of affairs was exacerbated by the prolonged agricultural recession which followed the end of the Napoleonic wars. The poor rates – a tax on property levied by the parish to provide relief for those in need – should have helped but instead they further added to the problem as farmers, hoping that they could leave it up to the parish to make good any deficiencies, offered only the barest subsistence wage to their labourers; a sum which did not increase upon marriage or the birth of children. A family man could no longer take pride in being a hard-working provider; he was forced to depend on the handouts of charitable relief. And even when a farmer did pay a decent living wage, he still had to contribute to the poor rate and so ended up subsidising his less humanitarian neighbour.

  After the war, when returning soldiers flooded the labour markets, the cost of parish relief soared. Farmers cut back even further on wages, often by laying off workers. This decision was made easier by the arrival of threshing machines, one of which it was reckoned in 1830 could replace ten labourers.14 This deprived men of the threshing work that they had come to rely on to tide them over the bleak winter months. Life grew ever harder, as a wry Kentish rhyme records.