Palmer, in contrast, lived a secluded life. Much of his time was passed in peaceful musing as the greater proportion of any picture that he did was achieved, his son said, not by manual work but mental concentration. To the industrious Linnell it would have looked like idleness; but Palmer’s contemplation was often so profound that even his wife would not venture to disturb it. Furze Hill House would remain silent long into the night while only a mile or two away, at Redstone, Linnell would be presiding over a drawing-room gathering, ‘loudly laying down the law on politics and wrangling over the daily newspapers’.17 The work on his easel upstairs would be forgotten until the next day.
In 1875, Linnell was given his first one-man show; but his eyes were fading. He found it increasingly difficult to authenticate the paintings which dealers brought him and occasionally he made a mistake. Once, he had condemned a picture outright, only on further inspection to discover that it was one of the several Palmers which, thirty years earlier, he had retouched. Problems were beginning to arise with his homemade varnishes and some of his earlier canvases were flaking and cracked. Linnell’s health was also deteriorating. Sometimes he complained of giddiness. His memory was failing him and often he found himself confused. He had rheumatism in one hip, wore a hernia truss and had to cup his hand to his ear when anyone spoke. But he still remained stolid in faith, firm in conviction and stalwart in character. When one of his sons, Thomas, a twin who had a limp and a stammer, announced that he was going to marry the serving girl to whom he had proposed while she was cleaning the grate, all the family was affronted except this stubborn patriarch who, never forgetting his own humble origins, was prepared to accept a housemaid as his daughter-in-law.
Holman Hunt, calling at Redstone with his wife, offered among the last descriptions of Linnell. He was greeted at the door, Hunt remembered, by the master of the house with his Bible raised aloft, demanding in stentorian tones to know whether he had mastered his New Testament teachings. ‘He would not allow me to evade the question,’ Hunt said. It was as if he had recognised that he was coming towards the end of his life and that there would never again be an opportunity for him ‘to deliver his sacredest message of all to me, and he would not fail, although when he regarded my reply as failing in thoroughness, he had to reproach me, which he did unsparingly’.18
Linnell, Hunt said, was a man who ‘all his life had striven after truth in way and in word’.19 Herbert was less tolerant: he detested his grandfather’s ‘raging rancorous homemade religion’20 and, acutely aware of familial strains, regarded the old man as a bullying martinet. He disliked staying at Redstone. Hannah, after the death of her mother, began to spend less time there too. She grew gentler and more loving towards Palmer as she entered old age and gradually, united once more in spirit and affection to the man whom she had married when she was little more than a child, became once more his indefatigable companion, always to be found close beside him, solicitous for his happiness and watchful for his comfort and health.
Forty years earlier, as a young artist in Shoreham, Palmer had dreamt of a wife who would read to him when his eyes were tired; now Hannah spent her evenings doing exactly that, or just peaceably sewing while he sat and wrote letters – often, for the sake of economy, on torn-off half sheets of paper that his correspondents had not used. One day, they were to be found sharing the sort of playful in-joke that, as newlyweds in Italy, they had enjoyed. Mary, their maid, had mentioned something called an ‘anversand’; the pair of them, pricking up their ears ‘with the most conjugal unanimity’, set off on a humorous quest to find out how others of their household pronounced the word. Jane, from Redhill, it turned out, had ‘always had a name for “&”: she calls it an ampsisand’, while their man-of-all-work informed them that he always heard it called ‘asverasand’.21
Steadfast in their affection for their ‘dear old church of England’,22 Palmer and Hannah continued to attend services together on Sundays, two small bundled figures among the poorer members of the congregation, preferring always the humbler place to the prominent pew, though, when a High Church service was introduced, Hannah, more wary than her husband of extravagant ritual, decided to move to an evangelical congregation while Palmer continued to worship at the local church.
Sometimes, in the afternoons, they would go out for country drives. Hiring a cart, they would trundle away until the odious villas had been left far behind them and they were creaking along through the open countryside. Both Palmer and Hannah were apprehensive about horses and Palmer was almost as nervous of the contraptions that they pulled: ‘In all vehicles but a wheelbarrow or a bicycle,’ he warned an old friend, ‘it is useful to remember that there are but two or four lynch pins between us and death.’23 But, with the sleepiest and most venerable of ponies in harness and the most soothing of drivers atop the box, they would jog along the lanes or creep up the steep hills enjoying the fine views that unfolded around them and condemning any modern innovations which they came across. Their favourite route lay through Gatton where a line of ancient yews marked out the old pilgrims’ way. It was here Herbert said that, from the vantage point of the fly, his father had made his last drawings from nature. They are just a few lines, but they show that he had not lost his affection for trees.
Among the most vivid images of the Palmers in old age is that offered by Hamerton’s wife who, preparing a memoir of her late husband,24 recalled a visit that they had once made to Furze Hill. It was only in the late 1870s that the Hamertons, after long correspondence, finally paid a much-anticipated visit. They were disappointed when, arriving at the house, they were told that Palmer was confined to his bed, far too ill to get up and play host to anyone.
The Hamertons were shown into the dining room to be offered refreshment before taking their leave. ‘The room was warmed by a good fire, but darkened by the blinds being down and the curtains drawn,’ Mrs Hamerton remembered. ‘The rays of a golden sunset diffused through the apertures a strange and mysterious glow.’ This, she wrote, ‘suddenly seemed to surround and envelop an apparition, standing half visible on the threshold of the noiselessly opened door. A remarkably expressive head emerged from the bundle of shawls, which moved forward with feeble and tottering steps – it was Mr Palmer. His wife could not trust her eyes, but as soon as she became convinced of the reality of his presence, she hastened to make him comfortable in an armchair by the fire, and to arrange the shawls over his head, and knees with the most touching solicitude.’ Clearly Palmer would still go to some lengths to find the intellectual companionship that he had all his life sought. ‘“I could not resist it,” he pleaded; “I have looked forward to this meeting with so much longing.”’
‘His eyes sparkled, his countenance became animated, and regardless of his wraps, he accompanied his fluent talk with eloquent gestures – to the despair of his wife, who had enough to do in replacing caps and rugs,’ Mrs Hamerton said. ‘He put all his soul and energy (and now there was no lack of it) into his speech.’ His conversation kindled the enthusiasm of his listeners who were charmed by his liveliness and riveted by his anecdotes of Turner and Blake. But he was attentive too, Mrs Hamerton remembered, and would listen ‘with so vivid an interest and sympathy that his mere looks were an encouragement. My husband was afraid of detaining him, but he declared he felt quite well and strong – “the visiting angels had put to flight the lurking enemy”.’
Palmer felt so revived in the course of the visit that he even felt hungry and so, ‘nothing loth,’ his guests recorded, ‘we sat down to an excellent tea with delicious butter and new-laid eggs, with the impression of sharing the life of elves, and of being entertained by a genie at the head of the table and served by a kind fairy. This feeling originated no doubt in the small stature of Mr and Mrs Palmer; in the strange effect of light under which our host first appeared to us, and lastly in the noiseless promptitude with which the repast was spread on the table, whilst the darkness of the room gave way to brightness, just as happens in fairy tales.’25
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Palmer described himself as a hermit in his last years. Less and less often would he pay evening visits to old friends in Reigate. Away from familiar surroundings he would grow horribly flustered and he could seldom find the strength to go to London any more. Even climbing the steps to the station platform would take his breath quite away; if he did use the train he would travel ‘swathed like a mummy’26 in shawls. By the end of the 1870s he no longer even troubled to send his apologies to the Watercolour Society or Etching Club when he missed their meetings. The president of the former greatly missed him as much for his role in discussions as for their exchanges of snuff but, having lost ‘that locomotive power which distinguishes the animal from the vegetable kingdom’, said Palmer, they could not ‘expect monthly excuses from a cabbage’.27
Confined to the house and, when the weather was cold, to just two rooms (his ‘den’ and the drawing room), he carried on with his projects. He was working harder now than he had at thirty, he said, getting in four hours’ work – ‘with my whole mind bent upon it’ – before dinner; sometimes, having supped lightly on an egg and a dry rusk, resuming his labours afterwards and carrying on into the night. Outside, the wind might be blowing along the ridges, the great Wellingtonia in the garden would moan and lash, but ‘however much tempests may rage before and after, the Hours of ART-WORK MUST BE QUIET HOURS’, Palmer told his son. ‘When we want a lambent flame we clear the grate getting the noise and dust over for the time. If anything bustles me I am forced to sit still and make an artificial quiet before I can put the right touch.’28
He rarely saw the Ancients in person, now. They were all growing too frail to travel. But they continued to exchange news. Richmond had bought a house in Wiltshire, which he was restoring as a hobby. Palmer was disappointed when, in 1879, he wouldn’t accompany him on a seaside holiday: ‘Can’t you come down and have a social groan over things in general?’29 he begged. He missed a good grumble with his old friend. Giles kept him abreast of developments in debates of the sort that they had both always loved, dispatching newspaper clippings along with his letters. The interests of deceased Ancients were not neglected. Finch’s widow was seventy-two years old when, in 1880, Palmer applied on her behalf for a charitable bequest and secured her £20. Nor was Blake forgotten: when the Cornhill Magazine had published an article declaring that the poet had been mad and consigned to an asylum, Palmer had leapt to his defence, penning a letter to say that he remembered Blake ‘in the quiet consistency of his daily life, as one of the sanest, if not thoroughly sane men I have ever known’.30 To the very last years of his life, he remained loyal and when, in 1878, he read that the Quakers, having become proprietors of the church where Blake lay buried, were building over the churchyard, he was outraged. ‘They have rummaged the dust of John Bunyan; torn up in gobbets what fleshly remains there were of William Blake,’31 he wrote.
Palmer’s interests, however, were not confined solely to the past. When his godson Willie Richmond was appointed to the illustrious post of Slade Professor of Fine Art, he warmly congratulated him. ‘It is kind of you to remember old friends just in the moment of success when people generally forget them,’ he wrote in 1879.32 And he still kept up with Richmond’s daughter, Julia, who, in 1881, bought his painting of a bright cloud. Her father had thought well of it too, he told her with delight. He was thrilled to hear that her child Hilda had started learning the violin. It ‘demands exactitude of tune which the pianoforte lacks’,33 he enthused, adding ‘the value of everything on earth,’ as he had always propounded, ‘is pretty much in proportion to the difficulty acquiring it’.34
Palmer’s delight in children never flagged. He followed the progress of all his friends’ offspring, inquiring of John Wright’s ‘dear Earnest’ who suffered from fits; sending love and advice to the Stephens’s son Holly (short for Holman, after Holman Hunt) and enthusiastically praising the etchings of Hamerton’s boy. Sometimes his missives smacked of an old illiberality. A stern letter to Holly’s father suggested a bowdlerised edition of Shakespeare, for the boy has been deriving improper amusement from the poet. ‘The pagan Juvenal says that PURITY should be inscribed over the door of every house where there is a boy,’35 Palmer admonished. But for the most part, his affection and generosity shone more brightly with age.
Though his physical strength waned, his mind remained strong. Palmer, even in old age, liked to stay alert to everything from the latest ecclesiastical appointment through news of an earthquake in Quito to the loss of six fowl from a neighbouring farm. ‘When old people begin to talk about themselves it is time their families interfered,’ he wrote, though the manner of interference, he acknowledged, differed in different nations: ‘In some the elders are hunted up into a tree, pelted down with stones and then eaten.’36 He remained to the end a vivid conversationalist, entertaining his listeners with the passion of his convictions, the coolness of his incredulity, the ingenuity of his defences and the energy of his attacks. He was equally masterful at drawing people out. He would sit quietly while some enthusiastic friend trotted his favourite hobby to and fro before him, said Herbert, agreeing with his companion as far as he thought possible and preferring to overlook blunders rather than pull someone up. He tried hard to sympathise with everyone’s stance. And yet, he was maddeningly pig-headed about his own point of view and once he had set off on one of his rants, he would seldom admit defeat. Just when his antagonist felt assured of victory he would suddenly, ‘by some ingenious manoeuvre, some energetic confession of faith, or an abrupt retreat into the strongholds of paradox’ show that he ‘valued the arguments, and the evidence and the authority, not a snap of his fingers, against his own cherished convictions’.37 It must have been infuriating – particularly when, as Herbert suspected, he didn’t necessarily hold to the belief he so pig-headedly espoused.
Palmer continued to read with all his usual passion and prejudice – though he now needed books printed in larger type – revelling in anything from religious tracts to the old companions of his youth, a pile of which in their ancient leather bindings would always be stacked on his table alongside his drawings and the current volume of his commonplace book. In 1880 he thanked Cope for sending him the latest biography of Milton. It was the sixth he had read in his life, he said, but each had only whetted his appetite for the next. He busily harvested anecdotes from newspapers and periodicals – anything from the tale of a Prussian woman who was pregnant with five children to the story of a cat who travelled 200 miles in four days – for the amusement of Wright who kept a compendium of such peculiarities. Palmer himself was notoriously credulous and could be as entirely persuaded of the capture of a mighty sea serpent at Oban as he was of the actual existence of the devil. In old age he also discovered a fascination for mathematics and, like his father before him, started to carry an algebra book and bag of scribbling paper about with him, keeping it beside his pillow at night. His calculations showed a lamentable want of success and his arithmetic, his son remembered, became something of a family joke.
In 1875 another of the Ancients, Frederick Tatham, became the second of the little band to die. It was he who had done most to help Blake in his frail final years and he had inherited, through his widow whom he had taken in as a housekeeper, many of Blake’s late works. He had subsequently fallen under the thrall of a millenarian sect, however, and, persuaded that Blake’s ideas were blasphemous, was said to have sold whatever was vendible and consigned the rest of the great visionary’s legacy to the fire: plates, blocks, manuscripts, volumes of verse prepared for the press, six or seven epic poems as long as Homer and twenty tragedies as long as Macbeth – all, it was rumoured, went up in smoke. ‘A piteous gag had been thrust in to the mouth of Blake’s corpse,’ declared William Michael Rossetti (brother of the artist). If Frederick Tatham is remembered at all, it is for this act of terrible destruction. It would certainly have clouded his friendship with Palmer, but at the moment of his passing Palmer remembered only the young man he had once loved. ‘
I seldom think of Shoreham without recalling his persistent and self-denying kindness to a poor cottager whose sores he daily dressed with his own hands,’38 he wrote.
In 1877, John Wright was given the living of the vicar of Newborough in Staffordshire. Palmer was greatly to miss the ‘weekly treat’39 of a long Monday evening talk and although the pair continued their lively epistolary exchanges – their good-humoured intimacy is evoked by such inscrutable lines as ‘at next meeting, Remlapacious hopes to tell of the curious laughing spider stomachial’40 – they were never to be able to meet up again regularly for, in 1881, Wright was appointed to his father-in-law’s old Shropshire incumbency, a post in which he would remain for the rest of his working life. ‘If you feel lonely, a shepherd with a little flock upon a hill,’ Palmer told him in 1877, ‘think of my loneliness, frozen up and crippled up from the haunts of men, from my London friends.’41 He was feeling rather sorry for himself at the time, having just failed to muster the energy to attend a ‘dearly longed-for Blake exhibition’42 in the capital. Soon, Palmer was not even keeping one of his beloved tabbies for company. ‘I am not the man I was before I left off keeping cats,’43 he mourned in 1879.
Herbert, by this time, was no longer living with his parents. He had rented a studio in Newman Street, London – a good, light, artist’s workplace of the sort that his father had never had – but he returned to Furze Hill regularly. It was he who persuaded Palmer to install a printing press in the house. Herbert had been taught how to print by Frederick Goulding, one of the great copperplate experts of that day, and now he and his father set to work on producing their own impressions of The Bellman and The Lonely Tower. From this time on, Palmer’s letters to his son often turned into lists of instructions. Occasionally he would grow intemperate. ‘Pray, throw your brown ink into the dust hole,’ he would cry. Brown ink is ‘beastly’.44 He wanted only black. But more often, with the help of laboriously precise explanations, father and son operated harmoniously together. They showed the same meticulous attention to detail. ‘The edge of the tree A,’ Palmer wrote, marking out a Scotch pine on an accompanying sketch, ‘is at the top a trifle too light . . . the sucking lamb’s bended knee is slightly too light at the joint . . . perhaps the dark side of the provender trough is too hard wiped.’45
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