Mysterious Wisdom (56 page)

 

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'
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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'.
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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.'
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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?'
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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'.
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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,'
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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.
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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',
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he enthused, adding ‘the value of everything on earth,' as he had always propounded, ‘is pretty much in proportion to the difficulty acquiring it'.
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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,'
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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.'
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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'.
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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,'
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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'
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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'
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– 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.'
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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'
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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,'
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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'.
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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.'
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Herbert, mastering the art of printing, managed to coax from even the most worn-out plates some of the finest proofs of his father's works. He was paid for his efforts; he needed the money because by then he had met the woman whom he hoped to marry. Yet Palmer was never truly to value his talent with the press and eventually, just at the moment when Herbert felt his prospects were brightest, he was persuaded to give printing up on the grounds that it was less an art than a trade. He had, however, by 1880, managed to save enough to be able to afford to make Helen Margaret Tidbury his wife.

In May 1880, John Giles died. According to one account, he was run over by an omnibus – mown down, quite literally, by the progress that all his life he had fought. Richmond arranged for him – ‘the greatest and dearest friend that I had on earth' – to be buried in Highgate Cemetery
(where Finch also lay) in the same grave in which he and his family would later be interred. It would not be long before the first of them arrived. Early the next year Richmond's wife, Julia, passed away, just twelve days before their golden wedding anniversary. Richmond was distraught: ‘On January 12th I laid the dear and faithful partner of all my joys and sorrows in the grave and my heart is well-nigh broken. My pencil as it were, fell from me and the love of art left me. I wholly gave up professional engagements and spent most of the year wandering in artlessness'.
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