Palmer always had an aim in mind on these trips: some mission that, in his pencilled list of things-to-be-done, had been printed in large letters. He made the most of his opportunity to visit the London galleries and could remain in front of one painting for an hour or more, sometimes returning with amusing anecdotes of things he had overheard while he stood. Once, while ‘drinking in’84 a work by Fuseli at Somerset House, a man and a woman had come by. ‘What’s that?’ the woman had asked. ‘“Oh, that’s imagination,” said he, with a most contemptuous emphasis upon the word. “Come along!” giving her a vigorous pull to the next picture.’85 Once, on a cold winter’s day, ‘swathed like a mummy and at risk of [his] worthless life’,86 Palmer went to London expressly to look at a canvas by Poussin; on another occasion the object of his journey was to study ‘a bit one inch square, in a single picture’.87
Usually he would meet up with old acquaintances, joining Richmond in the portrait gallery or dining at Giles’s house. He was tremendously touched to find himself welcomed. ‘I am everywhere claimed by friends,’ he told Herbert, ‘and all but pulled in pieces with kindness. The finest Burgundy is broached.’88 Occasionally he would make a much-treasured purchase: an old book or print, a photograph of some favourite picture or a miniature antique bust. ‘These were the things that found their way into his bag or pockets during the day,’ Herbert reflected, ‘and they gave him that keen pleasure known only to cultured men of small means who grievously pine for an object for months before they venture to buy it.’89
For the most part, as the 1860s progressed, Palmer preferred to remain at home. His letters are peppered with excuses and apologies for cancelled plans. His ‘old acquaintance asthma’90 remained a problem and he was constantly afflicted with colds because his house – for all that it had been chosen for its bracing dry atmosphere – turned out to be horribly exposed to the winds. ‘The Draughts’, he called it at the head of one letter. ‘Bronchitis window’, he addressed another. The East wind could discover him even in his bed. And so, more and more often, he remained housebound, sitting in his studio bundled up against chills, watching the evenings drawing in earlier and earlier, the leafless tree branches being battered by rain. It must have come as quite a shock to the valetudinarian fusser when his younger brother, William, died first. Five years younger than Palmer, he was only in his mid-fifties when he passed away in 1866.
Palmer’s study was his kingdom, a walled citadel in which everything mattered and meant something to its eccentric ruler. Words would be chalked up on his easel, clues to some truth or maxim which he wished to keep in mind. ‘Parsley’ was one that Herbert particularly recalled. It referred to an anecdote he had recently read which had been related thus: ‘I happened one day to converse with an excellent French cook about the delicate art which he professed. Among the dishes for which my friend had a deserved reputation was a certain gâteau de foie which had a very exquisite flavour. The principal ingredient, not in quantity but in power, was the liver of the fowl, but there were several other ingredients also and among these was a leaf or two of parsley. He told me the influence of the parsley was a good illustration of his theory about art. If the parsley were omitted, the flavour he aimed at was not produced at all; but on the other hand, if the parsley was the least excessive, then the gâteau, instead of being a delicacy for gourmets, became an uneatable mess.’91
Palmer would talk to himself as he shuffled about, chatting away audibly with imaginary companions who were familiarly known as Mr Jackson, Mr Jinks, and Mr Jick, and who played an everyday part in the family circle, though a new housemaid, whose previous master had also talked to himself and had ended his days in a mental asylum, would be heard after a couple of days in her new post bewailing her bad luck to have entered the service of yet another gentleman who was ‘queer in the head’.92 It was the same girl, Palmer was to recall, who had expressed her astonishment that her employer should have two frames of tailors’ patterns hanging up in the drawing room: the ‘patterns’, it turned out, being Blake’s Pastorals. But Palmer was untroubled by what people thought of him. He continued, unperturbed, in the quiet tenor of a life so peaceably uneventful that small occurrences of a sort that would more normally be forgotten became, much to the amusement of friends, progressively magnified by his imagination until they were remembered as great adventures.
21
The Milton Series
I am never in a ‘lull’ about Milton . . . he never tires
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
With the loss of his son, Palmer had lost also his faith in painting. ‘It seems to me better,’ he wrote, seven years after More’s death, ‘that a man should be a good active citizen and a good Christian, than able to tickle and amuse the public by any dexterity in the arts.’1 And yet he kept on working. His pictures, watercolours of sheep shearers bending to their labours, of oxen ploughing at sunset and maids milking in fields, are amalgams of his pastoral memories. He wandered back through his dreams like some homecoming ghost. But the world through which he drifted had been irrevocably lost.
Palmer, peeping with xenophobic eyes at the French Revolution, may once have worried about revolution in England by a rising underclass, but it was not a peasant rabble that was now threatening his country: it was people like him. In the decades following the 1850s, the once small and sharply defined middle class began expanding enormously. Profits engendered by the industrial revolution led to the growth of banks and accountancy firms, insurance and advertising companies, trading and retail outlets. Office life flourished. In London, huge armies of functionaries set up home at the fringes of the city and, from the late 1860s onwards, in new dormitory towns. File after file of terraced or semi-detached buildings marched outwards across the fields, a brick and mortar testimony to the power of a new propertied class.
These functionaries came, broadly speaking, to be seen as the lower-middle class while those working in the professions, the doctors, lawyers and clergy, the more respectable shop owners and businessmen with gentlemanly origins and university backgrounds, slowly hived off into an upper-middle class. Leaving the filthy industrial ghettoes of the cities and the identikit terraces of their expanding outskirts, they moved into airier, more socially exclusive suburbs. There they built the sort of houses that they felt could reflect their superior status. They indulged in their fantasies, adapting the architect’s pattern book designs with towers and bay windows, balconies and porches, steep slate roofs and fancy shingles. These were the homes that Palmer watched multiplying out of his window. ‘Little villas with big names . . . and genteel mansions, each with a smaller garden and a more imposing façade than its predecessor, engulfed field after field,’2 wrote Herbert. For Palmer, it felt like the last straw when the only old farm that was left in the region was bought up and converted into a hideous ‘park’ with trim roads, iron hurdles and manicured grounds.
Palmer was only too aware that he himself occupied the sort of Gothic Revival fantasy which he most detested, or that he too benefited from the ‘metallic pea-shooter’,3 the train which made living there possible and which could transport him to the capital within a few hours. And yet he shared few of the interests of his neighbours. He mocked the gentility to which the upper-middle classes – bound to the gentry by virtue of being property owners – aspired in order to maintain their distance from the workers below. He deplored the ridiculous etiquette of these ‘carriage and poodle people’:4 men in sparrow tails sipping coffee and dandies in fashionable horse-drawn gigs. He mocked the ludicrous elaborations of Reigate speech. ‘The white convolvuli are commencing their tortuosities,’ he laughed. He despised the ‘genteel-life-servant-keeping-system’. If he were alone again, he said (and often he must have wished that he was), he would live in a hut near a wholesome cookshop and be his own housemaid and char.
‘We are such geese of routine, such fools of fashion,’ he wrote, ‘that if rat pie . . . I beg pardon, tart is the genteel word, became a favourite at Balm
oral, in a short time they would be seen on every dinner table in London, with tails elegantly coiled and arranged outside the crust.’5 ‘If we merely ask ourselves what people will say of us then we are rotten to the core,’6 he declared. ‘Sometimes,’ Herbert remembered, ‘when a friend was dining with us, my father would appear at the table with a ring upon his little finger, an unwonted ornament which he would ostentatiously display. The guest was sure, sooner or later, to notice not only the ring (it was a plain, substantial-looking hoop) but a markedly genteel bearing and gesture. But, towards the end of the meal, a dangling screw would appear where the stone is usually set, thus showing that the jewel was nothing more than a new and highly lacquered picture-frame ring. This, the wearer would continue to show off with mincing attitudes and “Reigate-genteel conversation”.’7
Female fashion in all its perverse manifestations became Palmer’s particular bugbear: the low-cut evening dresses worn in all weathers, the ‘shameless bold-faced-jig Jezebel tops’ that are ‘miscalled bonnets’,8 the enormous cage crinolines, ‘meshes and lime twigs of Parisian Strumpets’,9 the predilection for little feet ‘not perceiving that largeness and littleness are equally deformed and that the beauty of any part lies in its just proportion to the whole’;10 and perhaps most abominable of all: the fashion for tight stays. On this last subject, Palmer was at one with the author Charles Kingsley, a vociferous member (along with the artist G. F. Watts and the architect Edward William Godwin) of an anti-tight-lacing league. Again and again Palmer railed against the ‘curse’ of these ‘Babylonish gyves’. ‘It is the business of the Devil to deface the works of God, and of God’s loveliest work,’ he would thunder: ‘these hateful corsets cramp and impede the vitals, utterly destroy the shapeliness and grace which we in our hopeless barbarism fancy they improve, and even twist and distort the bony structure. They impair the action of the lungs and heart, corrupt the breath, prevent ease and gracefulness of movement and sometimes any sudden movement at all but at the cost of sudden death.’11
The decline of religion was another thorn in his side. In the fast-growing towns, neither Anglican minister nor Nonconformist pastor could maintain proper contact with his congregation – not even with the indirect allurements of charitable handouts or free education in Sunday schools. The latest scientific discoveries did not help. The faith espoused by Paley’s Natural Theology, a foundation stone of Palmer’s religious belief, had been steadily eroded by strong new currents of evolutionary thought. The discovery of fossils in Tierra del Fuego had posed possibilities which the biblical creation story could not account for. Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species shook the moral and metaphysical framework of Western civilisation: it questioned the belief that man was set above the beasts, a unique species sharing in and aspiring to divine love. This greatly disturbed Palmer who kept up to date with developments by reading periodicals. Deplorable as he found ‘the encroachments of tasteless dissipation upon all that is most precious in English domestic life, there is yet a viler and more alarming defection,’ he declared, which is ‘that air of independence of God’12 that rises from ‘athletic young atheists who have outgrown their souls’.13 The whole mental and moral atmosphere reeked with infidelity,14 he ranted. Educated Christians were becoming less religious than the average pagan of antiquity. The nation, quite literally, was going to the devil. He would not part with Chapter 58 of Isaiah for all the dismal millions of ages or cavernous bone-grubbing of the geologists, he insisted. His faith was that of Augustine and Anselm, Bacon and Milton, Dante and Pascal. ‘Would these men have thrown away their Bibles because coral reefs took a long time forming, or somebody fancied himself the grandson of an ape?’15 As far as Palmer was concerned, progress was never so rapid as when it was running down hill.
Palmer withdrew into the peaceful world of his study as he had once withdrawn to the seclusion of a rural valley and it was there, amid loved books and artistic treasures, amid prayers and meditations and rambling memories, that he rediscovered a lost vision. It might not have been as fervid as it had been in Shoreham, but during the Furze Hill exile of the final part of his life he worked on the finest pictures he had created since his youth.
‘If we had ventured into his study on a certain autumn day in 1864,’ Herbert wrote, ‘we should have found him, glue-brush in hand, joining together two millboards with a broad strip of rough canvas. When this was dry, behold a primitive portfolio! We should have seen him fix upon it a great label bearing the giant letters “MIL”, and then begin a long and thoughtful search through the other portfolios, which, crammed to bursting, lined the room. One by one he reflectively picked out from the classical divisions of each, sketches from nature, small and large; highly finished or mere pencil indications with written memoranda, and tiny effect “blots” on scraps of paper.’16 This was the start of one of the two projects that were to dominate his last two decades.
The inception of this project has, slightly fancifully, been compared by a previous biographer, Raymond Lister, to that of the commissioning of Mozart’s Requiem. The great musician was approached shortly before his death by a mysterious stranger whom he, perhaps already suffering fits of the hallucinatory fever that would eventually kill him, thought to be an emissary of the supernatural world. The music of the Requiem obsessed Mozart until the end of his life. Palmer’s commission was less dramatic but equally strange; and a grave and portentous stranger also called the tune. His name was Leonard Rowe Valpy, a Lincoln’s Inn solicitor who included John Ruskin among his clients and pursued an ardent and often strongly opinionated sideline as a connoisseur and collector of art.
Palmer, for all that Ruskin had never followed up his first passing interest in his work, had continued to admire this critic and, in 1870, would gratefully receive a copy of his Queen of the Air inscribed ‘Samuel Palmer with John Ruskin’s love’. He shared his appreciation for the Pre-Raphaelites and he and Millais had found much to agree upon when they had one day happened to find themselves standing side by side admiring a painting by Turner. ‘What an admirable man Rossetti must be!’17 Palmer had exclaimed on first encountering his poetry. Rossetti in his turn had found much to praise in Palmer’s work. He predicted a successful future for his poetic landscapes and he was right. In the wake of the Pre-Raphaelites’ espousal of the Ancients’ belief in the spiritual integrity of the medieval art, there was a noticeable shift in critical opinions of Palmer. To a cultural world that had been introduced to the myriad-hued canvases of Holman Hunt, Palmer’s blazing sunsets and flaring dawns no longer looked startling. ‘Mr Palmer may rush into chromatic regions where other artists fear even to breathe,’ wrote an Art Journal critic in 1866, ‘but still in the midst of madness there is a method which reconciles the spectator to the result.’18 Palmer came to be seen as an exponent of what one writer labelled a ‘polychromatic school’. ‘Mr Ruskin in past years pronounced this artist the coming man,’ the Art Journal declared in 1866. ‘Accordingly Mr Palmer now realises his prediction.’
In 1863, Valpy had bought one of Palmer’s paintings from the winter exhibition of the Old Watercolour Society. It was a small (now lost) landscape showing a chapel by a bridge. Valpy had contacted the painter and – in a first sign of the opinionated bullying that would lead to later collisions – had asked whether he would take the work back and tone the light down a little. Palmer, bending as was too often his wont to the demands of an overbearing character, had obliged and so had begun a friendship which, developing through copious correspondence, was to play a stimulating if sometimes upsetting role in his declining years, rousing Palmer from his isolation, stirring his mind to fresh argument and his imagination to renewed vigour even as his physical capacities began to fail.
Herbert, ten at the time of first meeting Valpy, was not inclined to like him. His face was keen, stern and dark, he recalled, with a low retreating forehead and black hair in places turning grey. He had a ‘reluctant smile, and a deep, deliberate diction [that] seemed to forbid the asso
ciating him with any of the luxuries of life, or (save in religious matters) with its emotions’. When it came to ‘the lighter vein of table talk’, he was even less responsive that Linnell.19 He also ‘had a fine repertory of what he imagined to be studio gestures’, Herbert noted acerbically, exclamations and attitudes of a sort from which Palmer was completely free.20 He believed himself to be a man of distinguished sensibilities who ‘sought refreshment in nature’s deepest and highest utterances’; who could ‘revel in the tints of a dying bramble-leaf, and who could fling his law, and his caution, and his seriousness behind him, before a beautiful landscape or a resplendent sunset’.21 These poetic inclinations impressed Herbert’s open-hearted father. When in the summer of 1864, Valpy contacted him, wondering if he had ‘anything in hand which specially affected his “inner sympathies”’,22 Palmer wrote excitedly back: ‘You read my thoughts! . . . Only three days have passed since I did begin the meditation of a subject which, for twenty years, has affected my sympathies with sevenfold inwardness; though now, for the first time, I seem to feel in some sort the power of realising it.’23 This long-dreamt-of project was a set of small works inspired by Milton’s meditations on mirth and melancholy: L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. Palmer had frequently painted other Miltonic subjects, but these two pastoral odes – for which Blake had once completed designs – appealed to his deepest affections.
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