Mysterious Wisdom

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  Palmer must greatly have missed the company of Blake, a man who, like Socrates, he said, had declined the common objects of ambition. His old mentor was much in his mind at this time because, in 1855, Palmer was approached by Alexander Gilchrist, a young writer and art critic who, embarking upon a biography of Blake, was looking for people who had known him personally. Palmer responded enthusiastically and he and Hannah spent many evenings reminiscing while Gilchrist took notes. On one occasion they became so absorbed in looking at portfolios of drawings that they lost track of time. Dawn had broken by the time that the party disbanded. The Palmers’ servants had got into a terrible state, fearing that their employers had both been murdered and their bodies disposed of in a roadside ditch. Palmer, however, must have treasured this opportunity to talk. It gave him, albeit temporarily, a renewed sense of relevance, especially when Linnell, who had expected also to contribute, had had his offer turned down. He had wanted to take control of the project but Gilchrist had not been prepared to hand over his editorial independence.

  Work had always provided a refuge for Palmer in times of trouble and in the 1850s he discovered a new outlet for his talents. He turned to etching for the first time. It is surprising, perhaps, that he had never tried it before. Small-scale monochromes were suited to his way of working; but, until he first took up the etcher’s needle as a middle-aged man, he had not suspected quite how perfectly this scrupulous discipline would suit the proclivities of his mind, body and soul. It rekindled not just his enthusiasm but the visionary spirit of his art.

  In February 1850, Palmer became a member of the Old Etching Club, a small association of professional artists (many of them Academicians) that had been founded twelve years previously with the aim of promoting a practice that, until then, had been seen principally as a means of reproduction rather than as a way to do original work. Members met regularly to share expertise, exchange criticisms and opinions, and occasionally to quarrel – not least about the division of the money that accrued when, having pooled their resources as they did periodically to publish a small collection of etchings, they found themselves in possession of a modest profit.

  Palmer’s probationary plate was a picture of a willow bending over a river. He had already painted a watercolour of the same tree, bringing to it the vivid sensibilities of someone who has lain down and dreamt under those very leafy branches, followed the sweep and the twist of their pliable limbs, listened to the wind as it twisted through the silvery foliage, the water as it slipped beneath a shadowing trunk. This is the mood that he captured in his etching plate. On the strength of it, Palmer was unanimously elected to the Society.

  In the etcher’s studio, inhaling the smell of nut oil and varnish, beeswax and lamp black; surrounded by iron pots for boiling, flat pans for warming and tallow candles for blackening; by racks of needles and burins and scrapers and burnishers; by stacks of translucent paper and copper etching plates; by old rags for wiping, pumice for polishing, silk for spreading, feathers for smoothing and muslin for drawing up the ink, he found a milieu in which he felt at home.

  Etching is a laboriously complicated and painstaking process that demands precision and patience. An extract from William Faithorne’s 1702 The Art of Graving gives an idea of quite how arduous it can be. ‘Use water and a grinding stone for polishing your plate, then go over it with a pumice stone, then again with a fine smooth stone and some water. Then go over it with charcoal, and remove any small strokes or scratching with a steel burnisher. Then clean it with stale bread or chalk. Smooth the varnish over the plate. Take a great tallow candle with a short snuff, then apply the flame to the varnish with the snuff of the candle,’ instructs Faithorne; and all that before the art of designing has even begun. His advice continues: ‘Dry the plates on a fire, place your needle in firm wood of six inches or less; whet the needle with an oilstone and prepare for the graving. You must place the knob or ball of the handle of your graver in the hollow of your hand and, having extended your forefinger towards the point of your graver, laying it opposite to the edge that should cut the copper, place your other fingers on the side of your handle, and your thumb on the other side of the graver flat and parallel with the plate.’72 Palmer, pursuing the all but interminable stages of this discipline, was set on an often perplexing, frequently frustrating and occasionally heartbreaking path. But learning by a process of trial and error that error and accident themselves could be turned to account, he gradually progressed in his art.

  His early attempts he described as ‘a scramble of uncertainties from beginning to end’.73 Working on his second etching, an 1850 copy of his Skylark, he passed ‘a whole day in nearly burnishing out a sky that was overbitten’ for ‘the perverse acid would bite skies and nothing else’ and ‘the delicate upward flush of early dawn over thin vaporous cloud’ was achieved only at a painstaking second attempt in which he went ‘half through the copper’.74 His Christmas or Folding the Last Sheep, done in the same year, in which a homecoming shepherd fastens the hurdle that encloses his huddled flock, makes skilled play with the contrasts between the softness of the moonlight and the window’s welcoming glow. It is a fine piece of work. But many years were still to pass before Palmer had truly mastered the practice. Even a decade later he was still tackling obstreperous technical difficulties, recording how he had just spent several tedious days working ‘in a ghastly frame of mind’ trying to prove a plate that he had etched on some detestable old second-hand Club copper from which a previous image had already been scraped. ‘I gave myself up for lost on Saturday at 5.30,’ he noted, ‘but, by a desperate perseverance, had singed the last neck of the hydra by 6.15.’75 Palmer was prepared to labour on and, with the example of Blake a guiding beacon, with the shadowy mazes of Rembrandt and Dürer to inspire him and the advice and encouragement of his fellow Club members, his great skills as a printmaker slowly became manifest.

  Palmer had the right temperament for an etcher: success in the medium, he wrote, ‘depends on delight in solitude and locked doors, a contemplative mood and intense concentration’.76 Alone in his studio, images dropping gently into his imagination, sinking down gradually through layer upon layer of thought until they came finally to rest in the sediments of his mind, he would work slowly and patiently for hour upon hour. Years could be passed developing a single copperplate. His Weary Ploughman, begun in 1858, was worked on until 1865, by which time it had gone through eight states. At that point the copper was finally abandoned (though only destroyed ten years later when his son discovered a publisher on the verge of reissuing it without his father’s consent and destroyed it as Palmer had requested). Occasionally the changes he made would alter an image fundamentally: an etching begun in 1861 as a picture of Hercules chasing the cattle-rustler Cacus was transformed over time into an image of a kneeling peasant girl and a boy washing sheep. More often, however, Palmer’s alterations involved the minute tuning of tones, the tiniest adjustments of balances of dark and light as, penning endless minutely complicated annotations for printers, he tried to coax out the subtlest poetic effects.

  Palmer had fallen under the spell of the ‘teasing, temper-trying, yet fascinating copper’.77 Its difficulties, he wrote, ‘are not such as excite the mind to “restless ecstasy”, but are an elegant mixture of the manual, chemical and calculative, so that its very mishaps and blunders . . . are a constant amusement’, and although ‘the tickling’, sometimes amounted to torture, on the whole the practice kept ‘a speculative curiosity’78 alive: very like gambling, he said, except without the guilt or the ruin. Etching spared Palmer the ‘death grapple with colour which makes every earnest artist’s liver a pathological curiosity’,79 he told Philip Gilbert Hamerton, the author of Etching and Etchers, a popularising book on the subject which would eventually help lead to a renaissance of this much neglected form.

  Palmer – to whom a whole chapter of this seminal volume was devoted – became one of the keenest proponents of this so-called ‘etching revival’. If he cou
ld have made the practice remunerative, he said, he would have been happy to do nothing else. But he couldn’t. He had to restrict the practice to intense periods squeezed in between the demands of his watercolour painting, his teaching and his family life. He was only ever to finish thirteen plates in his life.

  In 1856, Palmer showed two large watercolours, both inspired by Milton’s Comus, at the Old Watercolour Society. ‘Works of high imagination and extraordinary power,’ declared a critic in the Guardian.80 ‘Compositions of this imaginative kind are rare among our watercolour artists, and make an agreeable contrast to the general realism which prevails,’ declared a writer in the Critic.81 Such praise inflamed Palmer’s hopes. He pored excitedly over the copy of the newspaper that Julia Richmond had sent him via one of his pupils. But the pictures never found a buyer.

  Such moments of optimism were inevitably followed by disappointments and glooms. ‘One day he finishes a castle in the air – the next he mourns over its ruins,’82 his son Herbert said. ‘My whole life . . . has been little more than one continued punishment – flogging upon flogging – each before the last “raw” was healed,’83 Palmer groaned. He was only half in jest. Sometimes he felt as if his work was ‘a yoke and a burden’: ‘I feel as if I were repeating myself and have very little impulse or enjoyment in it,’84 he told Hannah. And although, periodically, he would make a concerted attempt to pull himself together, getting up thirty minutes earlier so that he could have breakfast over and done with by half past seven and, vowing to continue this reform, bringing his whole schedule forward by yet another half hour, none of his efforts would better his plight.

  As a painter he was passed over – and most pointedly by his father-in-law who in 1852 sought out the Pre-Raphaelites one varnishing day at the Royal Academy and invited them over to Redstone for lunch. William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais both accepted and many years later the former was to describe the visit to Linnell’s first biographer. ‘The house was new; the fare was simple but most liberal, and the host was reigning in patriarchal state. After the midday dinner taken in a large hall with the door open to the breezy hills, some choice wine was brought up from the cellar, and over this he assured us of his admiration of particular works which we had done.’85 Palmer, in contrast, was not encouraged either to come often or stay long at Redstone. Indeed, Linnell seems seldom to have passed over an opportunity to ridicule or humiliate his son-in-law. When Palmer told him excitedly of how, by chance, he had just met Calvert in the street – ‘It was so delightful to roll along arm in arm at the old pace. How truly learned he is on Art!’86 reported Palmer – the acerbic Linnell copied out the passage and illustrated it with a sketch showing two stout figures, one leaning upon the other, staggering from a doorway upon which he had printed in large letters the sign ‘Pure Gin’. A pawnbroker’s shop is depicted nearby. And when a drip of snuff dropped from Palmer’s nose, staining his letter paper, Linnell burnt it fastidiously before penning a mocking note of complaint. Palmer received the criticism good-naturedly, countermanding accusations in farcical legalese, but Linnell’s reply, scorning the vicious habit of stuffing noses with the nasty weed, transformed a trivial matter into a spiteful attack.

  Herbert thought his father would have been better if he had remained unmarried. ‘Imagine the results if, unhampered [by] a Kensington villa, two servants and an idol,’ he wrote – the idol being Thomas More – ‘he had been able to depart each spring, carefree and happy, and practically rich to new beauty and old associations.’87 Palmer would probably have concurred, albeit for very different reasons. Parental anxiety, which began, he wrote, ‘when a child begins to walk, for beginning to walk is beginning to tumble’,88 turned a screw on the heart. When, at the end of 1859, the family was struck down by scarlet fever, he grew almost demented with worry. The ‘pain suffered for sick children, of anxiety terror and sometimes inconsolable grief – are a very very abundant offset to the desolateness of celibacy,’ he told Richmond. ‘We should by no means persuade those to marry who are content to be single.’89

  ‘O! this grinding world there is no Leisure for anything,’90 Palmer, in 1843, had cried out to his wife. Now, fifteen years later, he felt completely crushed. He began commending mournfully sentimental poems about death to Hannah. ‘I could go quietly,’ he told her, ‘like a poor sheep under the first hedge and lie down and die.’91 To Richmond, he described himself as ‘a squashed worm’.92 ‘I seem doomed never to see again that first flush of summer splendour which entranced me at Shoreham,’93 he lamented. He was in his mid-fifties. His dreams were all past. He had become nothing but ‘a living flour mill which has to grind corn for others’,94 he wrote.

  19

  A Bitter Blow

  The Catastrophe of My Life

  from The Letters of Samuel Palmer

  Even as Palmer’s dreams were being ground down to dust, his hopes for his son mounted higher and higher. Hardly a letter passed between them which was not burdened with educational, moral or religious advice – and usually all three at once. Little wonder that More often yearned to escape. For a while, he dreamt of going to sea. The life of a mariner must have felt far more enticing than the career of a clergyman which his father had in store but, discouraged from the other side by a disapproving mother, nothing ever came of his nautical plans.

  More did make one spirited bid for freedom. At the age of fourteen, he and Richmond’s son, Willie, ran away from the homes where they were ‘nurtured like cucumbers’,1 and, with four pence between them, set off to seek their fortunes alone. Many years afterwards, Willie (by then Sir William Richmond Blake) described what happened in the adventure that became known to both families as ‘The Escapade’.

  He and More were great friends and, since early childhood, had spent many happy hours in each other’s company, sharing a piano teacher and reading books together, making suits of armour out of paper and glue and playing chess secretly late into the night. But, Willie said, they felt restricted by the artificiality of town life and so decided one day to escape to Windsor. It was March when they set off in a pair of greatcoats purloined from their parents, getting as far as Hammersmith before, remembering that they had no money to pay for their supper, they decided to call in on some nearby Palmer relations to borrow half a crown. They then trotted determinedly on and, though questioned by police on Barnes Common, were not detained. As they crossed Bushey Park, they imagined that they were living the free life of their fathers at Shoreham.

  At Teddington they spent the night at an inn and, waking the next morning, More ordered shaving water, even though there was not a hair on his smooth pink cheeks. Meanwhile Willie, turning up his Eton collars, cut off their corners to make them look like the fashionable stand-ups of the day. The pair then set off again, practising a sermon which they intended later to deliver for money and, eventually reaching a small village, they walked about advertising their upcoming performance before retiring to a pub. Willie sketched a portrait of the landlady in return for their lunch and it was while he was doing so that the pair were finally apprehended and returned by the police to their panic-stricken parents.

  Their punishments were stern. Cope was called in to deliver a two-hour lecture to More, while Willie was made to learn by heart the letters sent by friends condemning his selfish flight. The incident, though it did nothing to affect the friendship between the two families, was accorded a disproportionate gravity. The two boys were forbidden from meeting and a short while later, when by chance they passed in the street, More turned his head and looked the other way.

  He was set firmly back on his unrelenting path. By the age of sixteen he had won a place at a first-rate grammar school in Kensington. He is ‘a diligent student . . . never idle for a moment . . . a very pleasant and intellectual companion’,2 his father recorded; William Haig Brown, the headmaster – known as Old Bill to the boys – concurred. He and Palmer join pedagogical forces. As they saw it, they were arming their pupil for life. But More must more ofte
n have felt that he had a hydra-headed monster to battle. No sooner was one task completed than the next cropped up. No sooner had one discipline been mastered than another awaited. Even on holiday, he was pressed to rise early and dedicate two hours to Homer before breakfast had been prepared.

  Palmer set intellectual achievement over everything. ‘Skill in music and cricket will not in the least avail you in a college examination,’ he warned.3 He discouraged most sport. More did not like it much anyway: boxing, in those days a regular part of a schoolboy’s curriculum, made his head feel fuzzy. He preferred more gentle amusements. Inspired most probably by the publication of Philip Henry Gosse’s Evenings at the Microscope in 1859, he wondered about getting such an instrument of his own. But Palmer was not to be persuaded. He was distrustful of science. Even if More were to find a flea as big as a mastiff, he said, he doubted that it could hop so far into the invisible world as if he watched his morals instead. He was far happier when he found his own enthusiasms reflected in his son. The boy ‘foams with the book mania’,4 he proudly informed a friend – though he and his son never communicated more nearly than when they found themselves sitting in the drawing room at Douro Place, playing the upright piano with its red, pleated silk front. More’s piano teacher, Mr Woolman, became an admired family friend and, as so often with people who were struggling to make ends meet, Palmer went out of his way to help him to find work.