For years, however, Herbert’s main companion was Palmer, though he was only too pitifully aware that he was not the first choice. ‘You may please God be a balm to my heart – but I fear the odds are against it,’51 his father had once told him. And yet, as Herbert pragmatically put it, he was ‘one of those who love the society of their children and, as we were now thrown together more than before, I soon learned to look upon him not only as a most indulgent teacher, but as a favourite companion’.52 To the isolated Hub, to be with his parent was to step into a charmed sphere. He hardly missed playthings, he said, for there were artistic projects to take the place of toys and Palmer knew how to make these amusing. One of Herbert’s earliest memories was of sitting in a baby chair helping to mount drawings: ‘an opportunity for mischief and mess which he turned into an elementary lesson in painstaking’,53 he recalled. Palmer bore patiently with childhood bunglings and he and his son became brothers-in-arms against Hannah’s domestic onslaughts. They would retreat into the studio together to work on assorted makeshifts, to mend slippers with boiling cobbler’s wax or prepare materials for art. Sometimes they made expeditions to other parts of the house for various purposes kept secret from Hannah, once firing a gun up the flue of the hall chimney in a catastrophic attempt to clean out the soot.
Herbert would have liked to have gone to school but his parents were terrified for his health. ‘Dear Herbert is so delicate, though without any specific disease, that we hardly think he will live to grow up,’54 Palmer told the boy’s godfather, Reed. Besides there was no educational establishment in the area that seemed quite to suit because, although there was a local grammar school with a clergyman for a headmaster, Hannah, having heard that the blacksmith’s son went there, wouldn’t let her own son attend. Palmer mocked her snobbery and yet accepted it: Herbert was kept at home where his father started teaching him, giving him lessons in Latin, arithmetic, drawing and English. These were administered in infinitesimal doses, Herbert remembered. He would have liked to work more, but Palmer, while acknowledging that he was quite as quick as his brother, would not let him, even when he was twelve, spend more than half an hour with his lesson books.
When Harry Cope was sent down by his parents to avoid a London epidemic, or when the Redgraves and their daughters came to visit, Herbert was thrilled. He loved his stays at the Hooks’ or the Wrights’ and was delighted when he was sent a little white dog called Phil to look after. He fed it sugar lumps and rolled around with it playfully on the lawn. Unfortunately the dog was less happy, growing more and more homesick, expressing its grief in a continuous falsetto howl until eventually, making a dash for the gate, it escaped. When it returned a week later it looked emaciated and the pads of its feet were quite worn.
A friend encouraged Herbert to start collecting beetles, a hobby that soon developed into an entomological mania as he spent hour after hour in pursuit of butterflies and moths. He wanted to be a naturalist when he grew up. His father was not completely discouraging. ‘He allowed me to gloat over my captures,’ Herbert remembered, ‘thinking that good might come in the shape of nicety of handling, and habits of observation.’55 But when he tried further to enlist his father’s attention and showed him his boxes and setting boards he was firmly rebuffed. ‘The proper study of mankind is man,’ his father admonished with a quotation from Pope. He far preferred ‘the other B – Biography’ to beetles. ‘It’s biography that makes moral muscle,’ he said. ‘All the great men have set venerated models before them, and tried to work up to them.’56
For all the many years that he had lived in rural Shoreham, for all the long hours he had spent admiring natural beauty, his father could not have answered even the most elementary questions on the sciences, Herbert said. Palmer could not have recognised any but the most common of plants, insects or birds. Herbert did not give up his hobby, however, and his uncle, John Linnell, who had become the curator of the entomological collection at Reigate Museum, would occasionally invite him to visit. Herbert learned to handle the tiny brittle specimens without breaking them and it was to this precision of touch that he was later to attribute the aptitude for etching which his father would one day appreciate.
Herbert’s other childhood pastime was, somewhat improbably, military drill. It was Mrs Redgrave who had recommended it, she alone realising that the boy, walled up with his grieving parents and lacking proper exercise, ran a very real risk of going into decline. There followed, Herbert said, ‘a long and delightful period of instruction by an ex-sergeant major of the Grenadier Guards; whose course in my case went further than usual and included Broad-sword exercise with single-sticks’.57 It was to lead to a lifelong fascination with firearms. When Herbert was seventeen, the eccentric Mrs George presented him with a gun: a splendid fowling piece that he showed his drill master. ‘The sergeant thought the stock quite a master-piece,’ Palmer recorded, ‘and kept fondling it after the manner of a doll.’58
Herbert came to enjoy an increasingly vivid relationship with his father who little by little, amid constant fears of overtaxing his mind and perpetual anxieties over his health, began cautiously to expand his education. Realising that his son would never acquire enough classical learning to follow a leading profession, he would have liked him to have become a farmer instead but there was no prospect of ever being able to purchase enough land, so Palmer, without paying the slightest heed to Herbert’s zoological bent, decided that he should become an artist. This, Herbert said, revived a love of teaching which thereupon began ‘every day and more or less, all day’.59 ‘For more than fifteen years I was gradually taught S.P.’s views on the principles of Art,’ he said: ‘on composition; on clouds and skies; the imperative importance of linear and aerial perspective; and a host of other matters which went to form his great tests of good and bad in Art – to form his intensely earnest creed.’60
At the age of fourteen Herbert was enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools. He was beginning to learn a profession – ‘a great Christian duty’61 Palmer told him, but an arduous task. Letters from father to son were increasingly crammed with instructions. Palmer wanted to give Herbert the sort of academic grounding that he himself had lacked. Geometry and perspective had to be properly tackled, he told him; and though the former could feel like that ‘sudden check presented’ during a field walk in Cornwall by a high stone wall, there was ‘nothing for it but to get over’.62 Further to that, the figure had to be mastered. ‘Don’t think it’s enough to let a lesson merely lie upon memory,’ Palmer said; ‘make sure that it enters you as a power.’ It is ‘of very little use to know how many degrees the scapular bone will stretch to, unless you fix the information by making small sketches of your own.’63 Withdraw to the quiet of the library, Palmer recommended and, after issuing page after page of advice, he instructed his son to read it all twice. Everything could become a lesson, Herbert remembered. ‘All that we did in the garden – all that we saw through the trees of the wide view over Surrey and Sussex, he used to explain in order to demonstrate his views and his principles in regard to composition, and chiaroscuro, and colour, and Poetic Art. The Past for Poets; the Present for Pigs.’64
Herbert was steeped in his father’s vision: quirky and stubborn, outmoded and strange; but always infused with an animating passion. ‘How could a child, even a stunted, prematurely old, and ignorant child, avoid the fascination of such a teaching?’65 he asked.
The garden was one of the greatest shared pleasures of Palmer and Herbert. It was a steep stretch of land divided by a holly and laurel hedge from the precipitous furze field beyond, with sloping lawns and two cedars around which rabbits chased and a copse of larch and beech that was rustling with squirrels and birds. This was their little kingdom – or at least the small patch that lay outside the studio window was for, though a gardener (taking his orders from Hannah) kept the lawns and the flowerbeds in strict suburban order, one little area was exempt from his jurisdiction. There in that corner, Palmer told Julia Richmond, ‘nothing that is
beautiful comes amiss’.66 All his favourite flowers grew in untidy profusion: foxgloves and harebells, honeysuckles and primroses; wood anemones and narcissi, his ‘dear convolvuli’67 and ‘loveliest of all’68 the woodbine. Pottering about in his patched old shoes, wielding an enormous worm-eaten whalebone-ribbed umbrella wrapped clumsily with string, Palmer tended them all. Each was a friend. His ‘pet narcissus’ was ‘the eye of the garden’;69 the blue gentian which flowered so delightfully in January was procured because Mr Ruskin had described it as growing so profusely and brightly in the Alps that walking amongst it had felt almost like walking through heaven; and, if the gardener surreptitiously flung one of his plants over the hedge, he would bring it back tenderly and replant it again.
The garden was far from the lush Eden that he would have hoped, for the soil was dry and sandy, and water, a precious commodity pumped up by hand from a tank, was so limited in summer that it had to be bought for a ha’penny a bucket, and even though Herbert and Palmer, inspired by a passage from the Georgics, together devised a system of artificial irrigation, many of the plants would still wilt away. Palmer would save all his washing water for his pets. And when a new maid, set to weeding, accidentally uprooted the harebells that for three years he had been encouraging, Palmer gave way to one of his rare angry fits. Another was provoked when Hannah dispatched a housemaid to tell him that his trousers were embarrassingly shabby. Palmer took his walking stick, his son remembered, and started violently lambasting the ornamental yew.
Palmer and Herbert would sit in the garden listening to the whitethroats and nightingales that sang in the hedges (though Palmer would complain that the latter kept him awake). They would watch the thunderstorms as they came rolling in. His pleasure in these storms, said Herbert, ‘was quite as keen as in the days when the peals, rolling from combe to combe among the hills had called forth the Ancients from their cottages’ and ‘as a tempest crept towards us in twilight . . . the flashes, to his delight, sometimes revealing stupendous chains of cloud mountains – we simply revelled in the sight, till the great drops upon the dust and the crash of near thunder drove us in doors’.70
Sometimes Palmer, with Herbert beside him, would range further, cutting low winding paths through the surrounding shrubs. These led to hidden arbours from which they could peep out secretly at surrounding views. Once they made a little bench together. Palmer was not a proficient carpenter but he had a reverence for all handicrafts and lamented the ‘moral debasement’ of a society in which ‘court dress was looked upon with more respect than a carpenter’s tool basket’. ‘The things in harmony with religion and art,’ he said, ‘are not fashionable follies but tool baskets, spades and ploughs, house brooms, dusters, gridirons and pudding bags.’71 On another occasion, Herbert recalled, ‘by means of prodigious expense of time and toil, we raised a small hillock (“The Spectacular Mount” as we called it) whence, over a very unclassical paling, we could get a downward glimpse of the steepest slope . . . and imagine if we liked, that it was haunted by a faun or two, or perhaps a beautiful Dryad.’72 With the help of their fantasies (and the large heap of kitchen breakages which had gone into the construction of their ‘Mount’), a prim suburban patch was transformed into a charming wilderness in which every twig had its work to do: it helped to shut out the sight of the hideous slate-roofed villas which, as the months went by, were steadily multiplying below.
By the time he was sixty, Palmer had lost all his former pleasure in walking. ‘How much has been written upon exercise, how little upon keeping still,’ he complained; and yet ‘we owe the discoveries of Newton not to his legs but to his chair.’ He would recount the story of how the great thinker, when lodging out of town, had been seen lounging about by his landlady who had declared that he was but ‘a poor creature and would never be anything better than a philosopher’. The people in the next house had also seen him sitting by the hour in the garden blowing bubbles of soap and had concluded that he was an idiot. ‘How proud I should be to be thought an idiot by most people I know,’73 Palmer wrote. He preferred the universe of hill and dale that could be found in the Belvedere torso, he said, to the undulating landscapes of Reigate, but instructed to take more exercise he would embark obediently every morning on what he described as ‘my monotonous walk’.74 There were only two practicable routes and both had been spoiled by development. Flinging on an old garden hat and a veteran Inverness cape, seizing a pocket edition of The Bucolics, he would stride to a certain five-barred gate, touch it and then stomp back in disgust, much as a member of a chain gang goes back after exercise to prison, Herbert wrote.
Once Palmer had thought that he would go mad if he couldn’t escape on his sketching trips, but after moving to Redhill he never returned to the wilds of the West Country again. Memories of journeys made with More crowded too painfully upon his mind; besides, as he aged, bad weather and the illnesses which accompanied it began to take an ever heavier toll. Instead, he made do with sketching what he could see from his windows. Matter abounded, he insisted, even though the sunset couldn’t be properly seen and, apart from a sewage works, there was not ‘that sparkle of water which no landscape can be without’ for the ‘sullen Mole’ that wound through the valley, when it could not run underground, seemed to him to make a point of running out of sight. Herbert vividly remembered his father’s joy when, one year, after heavy rains, this sullen Mole revealed itself as a veritable river winding in and out among the spreading meadows.75
Palmer continued, however, to make the occasional trip to Margate, even though in his last years these trips would be made alone since the resort was no longer considered sufficiently fashionable for Hannah. The train had made holiday excursions cheaply available to the masses and, as Palmer explained to Redgrave, ‘people won’t go there; for if they do they see poorish folks enjoying themselves, which of course is quite shocking!’76 Hannah now preferred Brighton. ‘One must be genteel writing to Brighton,’77 Palmer told his son, the words in italics being scripted with an elaborate flourish. He did not accompany his wife in 1865 when, complete rest having been ordered after illness, she took a long autumn holiday with her sisters for which her father paid and again, in 1866, his family travelled without him to ‘that respectable mud-side resort, The Marina St Leonards’. ‘I can’t make the letters slant enough,’ Palmer mocked.78
In the summers Palmer regularly paid a visit to James Clarke Hook. His relationship with this artist is a little unexpected. The athletic Hook was almost fifteen years younger than him and when he had first walked into an Etching Club meeting Palmer certainly hadn’t foreseen that he and his wife Rosalie – ‘so discreet, so genial, and so good’79 – would become such close friends. Beyond art they did not share many interests: Hook loved sailing and fly fishing and shooting; but Palmer would look forward for weeks to a stay in his Surrey home for, Herbert said, ‘loving dearly the breath of cows, the sweet smell of the new furrow, and all the wonders of the gardener’s art’, Silverbeck seemed (as his sketchbooks and letters testify) an Elysium compared to ‘the prim, densely peopled neighbourhood of Red Hill’.80 Herbert loved the company of Hook’s sons, a pair of amphibious boys, never happier than when in water and always keen to tempt visitors, Palmer among them, onto the pond for a voyage in one of their homemade craft. The attendant catastrophes were proverbial, Herbert recalled.
During the annual cleaning onslaught Palmer would still be turned out ‘neck and crop for a couple of days’,81 while his books (no volume too venerable for its covers to be banged), his papers, portfolios and plaster casts were deposited on the lawn to be vigorously dusted, while carpets were beaten, floors re-varnished and armies of earwigs routed from his painting rags. He would find refuge with friends, usually Hook or Richmond, while Herbert remained a loyal ally on the home front, receiving letters of detailed instruction on such tasks as the oiling of shelves. ‘What a hideous vortex is all this domestic perturbation!’ exclaimed Palmer. ‘Orpheus looked back on purpose: he dreaded a second bout
of housekeeping.’82
The occasional trip made by Palmer to London was always preceded by a tremendous kerfuffle as Herbert, who loved to accompany him, remembered only too well. ‘For days, perhaps weeks, beforehand,’ he said, ‘a list of things to be seen, done and got, was carefully compiled . . . and the route was systematically planned out so as to economise time to the utmost.’ Then ‘on the eventful morning, the broadcloth coat with the long, flowing skirt was brought forth, and the white cravat was adjusted with unusual care. One or more sets of underclothing were donned, according to the time of year, and sometimes indeed a second pair of trousers in severe weather. The silver spectacles were reluctantly laid aside for those of thin steel, and a mighty silk hat was disinterred from a box where it dwelt secure for months together . . . I verily believe that that hat,’ Herbert added, ‘was the biggest that could be bought. The label on the bandbox had been directed by the hatter to “The Rev S. Palmer” and there was certainly a sort of very venerable curl about the brim.’83
Arriving at the station at least half an hour too early, father and son would walk back and forth, Herbert squirming with embarrassment at the attention which his father’s outfit attracted while the pacing Palmer remained perfectly oblivious. Even if its oddness were pointed out to him, he would not, Herbert wrote, have been in the least put out. It was not that he wilfully sought eccentricity but few things, he believed, were more pernicious than the dread of being peculiar. Once in London he devoted himself to showing his son everything of interest that lay in their route, stopping dead in the middle of the pavement, regardless how crowded, to point out some church spire or memorable spot. On one occasion, Herbert recalled, when his father had been walking with a young friend, Palmer had suddenly drawn up short before a milliner’s shop and begun with some vehemence to declaim loudly against the ‘Jezebel Tops’ within. This was his name for the silk-ribboned bonnets on display for the biblical Jezebel with her love of finery had become for Palmer the very paradigm of a woman of high fashion. A few passers-by, scenting his eccentricity, had stopped and his father, turning, had found that his erstwhile companion had fled in mortification and that he was standing alone at the centre of a gathering crowd. And yet for all the embarrassment that his father would cause him, what Herbert remembered most particularly about Palmer was his unfailing courtesy to everyone he encountered, regardless of class or wealth.
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