Mysterious Wisdom (52 page)

During the annual cleaning onslaught Palmer would still be turned out ‘neck and crop for a couple of days',
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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.'
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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.

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'
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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.'
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Once, on a cold winter's day, ‘swathed like a mummy and at risk of [his] worthless life',
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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'.
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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.'
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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.'
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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'
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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.'
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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'.
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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 Balmoral, 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,'
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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',
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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.'
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