Mysterious Wisdom (38 page)

This socially inept little man felt far more at ease scrambling about in the mountains than negotiating the pinnacles of London society. He felt quite at home as, guided only by the sound of the torrent, he clambered down a Welsh rock face at dusk or joined the evening gossipers in the chimney corner of a hostelry. He would sit as the villagers smoked peacefully over their tankards, or join them eating their pilchard pies ‘clouted' with clotted cream. He would chat to a landlady in the kitchen one evening as she milked the goat; or scratch the pigs that snubbed about in the yard. Such scratching seemed to the animals, he observed, ‘a pleasure equivalent to honours among mankind'.
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And when one week in Wales the weather was particularly wild, he walled up by a fire, reading his way straight through a seven-volume edition of Samuel Richardson's
The History of Sir Charles Grandison
for the second time.

Palmer would return to London laden with work: with the sort of broad landscape sketches that he had learnt to do in Italy, with crayon studies of dawns and sunsets and twilights; views of wheat fields and coastlines and mountains and farmyards; studies of foliage and wildflowers, rustic cottages and ancient machinery. These would be worked up into the elaborately composed landscapes that, throughout the 1840s, he continued to produce. But they, like the Italian compositions that he worked on simultaneously, had little success. His admiration for nature was undiminished, but he had lost his idiosyncratic panache. The rich glow that used to illuminate his images was replaced by a superficial garishness. His handling had grown increasingly conventional. He had sacrificed personal vision for a fashionable style that he hoped would please.

With growing desperation, Palmer tried to identify the causes of his failure. His energies were dissipated in endless theorising, diffused in the slew of notes that he accumulated in a portfolio labelled ‘Written Memoranda' in which, like some mad secretary taking minutes at a meeting between an artist and his subject, he tried to record on paper every difficulty of composition and design. The world's natural phenomena were boiled down into columns and bullet points and lists and laws. But it did no good. In the decade that followed the birth of his son in 1842, Palmer, according to his accounts, sold some forty-five pictures for an average price of around £16 each. This was simply not enough to support a family and, in one letter to Linnell, he confessed that he had ‘only one sovereign in the house – most of which will be paid away today'.
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Hannah could not help. As her work was again and again rejected, her hopes declined apace. The once-spirited little redhead turned picture after picture face to the wall.

 

 

In 1844, Hannah gave birth to her second child, a grey-eyed girl who was christened Mary Elizabeth. Family life offered the Palmers some consolation for the loss of their once cherished vision – of husband and wife working away busily in a peaceably shared studio, he stretching the canvases, she grinding colours, while some bright little maid made their beds and boiled the dinner potatoes. Palmer would read aloud to his wife in the evenings and in 1848, away on a sketching trip, he wrote to tell her how greatly she was missed. ‘Your charms my dear Annie are no weak inducement to lure me back,' he pined. ‘To me you are fairer than at 17 and though by this time I have got pretty well used to your scolding your love is always fresh and always precious. I hope to prove myself worthy of it by renewed exertions in Art.'
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In Italy, Palmer had felt himself a manly figure, protecting his pretty young wife from the improper advances of impudent Neapolitans, beating off a wild cow in the Roman
campagna
with his sketchbook and confronting a furious knife-wielding landlord with aplomb. Now, he found himself unable to provide properly for his family. And, as Anny finally abandoned her artistic aspirations, and with them the engagement with painterly problems which would have led to a sympathy with her husband's plight, she began to turn more and more to her parents. Linnell became an increasingly overbearing presence in his son-in-law's life. On top of this, Palmer's health was not good. ‘The filthy coal pit of London'
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aggravated his asthma, leaving him debilitated, wheezing and weak. The man who had used to stride lonely hills by moonlight would no longer go out and deliver a letter of an evening in London because he was fearful of catching a cold.

Financial anxieties strained Palmer further. Turning his problems over and over in his head, he was all but incapable of making decisions. He continued to consult Linnell on everything, from how much he should charge for his services as a teacher to which doctor he should hire to attend on his children. At one point, Linnell took it upon himself to go behind Palmer's back to John Giles and ask him directly how Palmer's finances stood: Giles was persuaded to impart some information, though later wrote refusing to disclose anything further and expressing regret that he had already told so much. This stand against his authority must have taken Linnell aback for, more usually, when god-like he dispensed money or advice, it was received with tail-wagging gratitude by his son-in-law. Meanwhile his adoring daughter seemed almost to have equated him with a divinity. Writing to thank him for funding a recuperative trip to Margate for her and her son, who had both been ill, she declared the improvement in their healths ‘a great blessing for which I feel a great thankfulness to God and to you for so kindly helping us to procure it'.
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A new low point in Palmer's career came in 1846 when an art dealer called round to Grove Street full of extraordinary professions of indifference as to buying. He could only be persuaded to stretch his humiliatingly low offers for Palmer's paintings when he learnt that Linnell had had a hand in retouching a few. Instead of feeling mortified, Palmer wrote gratefully to his father-in-law. With an ‘hour or two of your skill on the Ponte Rotto', he told him, that painting too might also sell.
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As Palmer watched his ambitions grow increasingly improbable, he laid more and more store in the future of his son and set about trying to turn him into a paradigm of religious piety, of diligence, learning and devotion, of filial obedience and moral rectitude. His dreams were to become a heavy burden on the delicate young boy.

Palmer was a devoted father. He would carry Thomas More around the city on his shoulders, hoisting him even higher when he wanted to see above a crowd; take him on day trips to Primrose Hill to drink tea; invite him into his study and show him how to draw, teach him his alphabet from a big box of letters or how to play the piano by putting his fingers on the keys. Often he would read to him from his own favourite volumes so that the cadences of Blake's
Songs of Innocence
were interwoven with More's earliest memories and by the age of five he had learnt
The Lord is my Shepherd
by heart.

More was not yet three years old when he received the first of the many letters that his father was to write to him. Palmer sent it from Guildford. ‘I went so fast in the steam coach!' he wrote. ‘How you would like it! Here are high hills and the birds sing in the trees.' ‘Who loves Thomas More?' he asked at the end of the letter. ‘PAPA!' came the answer in capital letters.
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Palmer was attuned to a child's imagination. He knew how to select the stories that would most delight his son and often added illustrations to the margins of his letters. He sketched a fair that he had seen in Surrey, telling his son of its ‘little men not so high as the table . . . and men without arms that could hold a pen between their toes . . . and a learned pig that knew his letters'.
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He dispatched missives from purple moors where, had his son been there, he said, he would have lain down to roll in the heather; or from sandy beaches in which he would have loved to dig. He wrote from a pier from which a little girl had just taken a six-foot tumble without breaking anything (though More, who was delicate, had just broken his leg by tripping in the hall); and from landscapes which had once been trodden by a race of giants. Their bones could still be dug up from the soil, Palmer said. His descriptions could be wonderfully vivid. ‘I wish you were here,' he wrote from a rocky promontory, ‘although you would really be frightened to look down from these savage rocks at the foam of the sea far beneath dashing against them. For some moments perhaps the waters are sucked into a black cavern, and then forced out again in a cloud of white foam with a deep growl like thunder.'
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Palmer greatly missed his son when they were apart. He tried to keep up their lessons. Transcribing two bars of music, he instructed More to: ‘place your thumb upon C' and ‘play slowly'.
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He told him to shut his eyes when his face was being washed so that the soap wouldn't sting. He explained how italics work – ‘read the slanting words a little more loudly than the rest'
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– and, having sent a postscript requesting him to send a kiss to his little sister, he remembered to tell him: ‘P.S. means “Post Scriptum – or after written”.'
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As the boy grew older he began to respond, sending his father drawings – ‘I think the man sitting upon the coach box is the best you have done'
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Palmer praised – and then, at the age of six, his first letter. And yet, for all his manifest tenderness, Palmer never passed over an opportunity for moral instruction. It began in his very first letter when More was instructed to: ‘Ask GOD to make you a good boy,'
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and it never stopped from that point on. A lively description of a travelling fair with its mermaid woman and fiery lynx was spoiled by what, even in an era of Victorian values, must have sounded a death knell to joy. People come from as far as fifteen miles to enjoy the fair, Palmer wrote, ‘but I think that is silly because it takes up so much of their time. I think we should spend our time in doing things that are useful – in learning to
make
things – being careful not to break them – and we should try to be very good and wise.'
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The moral hectoring seldom let up. ‘The way to become Good is to pray to the Good and Blessed God to make you good,'
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he informed two-year-old More. ‘Talk to your Mamma about the Holy Child Jesus,' he instructed him when he was three. ‘You should try most of all to be good at those times when you feel inclined to be naughty,'
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he told him. ‘My dear boy pray daily to the blessed Jesus to make you something like what He was when He was the same age as you.'
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Anything could provide the excuse for a sermon: a walk to a cliff edge was fodder for a grim meditation upon the end of the world and the loss of a tooth, in exchange for which More had been given a book, the starting point of a lecture on loss and gain. The letters stacked up into a weighty burden of advice. It was not unusual for the period. Nursery stories of that era were heavily freighted and often frightening to boot. Anna Laetitia Barbauld's
Lessons for Children
was among More's bedtime books. He knew the tale of the little lamb that, not liking to be penned up at night, had ignored its mother's warnings and stayed out after dark to play. The wolf had come along, carrying the errant creature away to ‘a dismal dark den all covered with blood and bones'
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to feed it to her cubs.