Mysterious Wisdom (11 page)

Encouraged by Linnell, Palmer pays particular attention to trees. He notices how foliage clusters into masses, how sunrays stream through leaves and stars glister through gaps in a canopy of ancient elms. He looks at their distinctive shapes and silhouettes, at their trunks, gnarled, knotted or smooth, twined with clambering ivy, embossed with burly excrescences or silvery supple as a sapling birch. Each tree, he observes, has its own unique character: sometimes they seem almost human, he says: ‘I saw one, a princess walking stately and with a majestic train.'
31
He stares with the concentration of a naturalist at anything from the creviced face of a rock through the patterns of ploughed furrows to the circles of light that surround Saturn's planetary orb. He looks at the bristle-backed hogs in their pens, at his pet cat sleeping, its paws softly curled, at a bony-faced sheep that confronts him head on.

He studies the old masters as Linnell has directed him, admiring the variety of Raphael's textures (‘hard enamel face, soft silky hair and hard jewels on the cape'),
32
or noting how Michelangelo, when working on the Sistine ceiling, would scratch in his outlines with a sharp point and fill the grooves with pitch.
33
‘Outlines cannot be got too black,'
34
he observes. He remembers his mentor's injunction – ‘delightful in the performance'
35
– to look at Dürer and, like this great draughtsman, he sets out to describe entire landscapes with line alone. Linnell has also introduced him to the works of the sixteenth-century Bolognese engraver, Giulio Bonasone. ‘To copy precisely in pen and ink some limb of Bonasone's,' Palmer notes, is to ‘understand shadow in its poetic sleep'.
36

Palmer learns also from his peers. He takes a note of Finch's suggestion of using a ‘dark cool stem'
37
as a framing device and, trying to keep up with Richmond, his former British Museum companion who is now a student at the Royal Academy, he transcribes part of a lecture by Fuseli. Clearly struck by the work of this histrionic painter, Palmer makes sketches of the ‘wicked thief' on the cross; he shows the crucified criminal, head flung violently back, mouth gaping, eyes rolling, as he tugs out his nails amid cartoonish showers of blood. But Palmer, unlike Richmond, does not have the notoriously caustic Fuseli to scold him for his mistakes. He has to be his own master. ‘Place your memorandums . . . more neatly you dirty blackguard,'
38
he admonishes himself in a note.

In the end, however, it is an individual vision that Palmer must discover. This is what he reaches for, most importantly, in his 1824 sketchbook. Scattering stars like a child scatters glitter, casting crinkle-winged bats out upon the twilight, hanging moons like shining lanterns and igniting vast glowing suns, he speaks of the marvels that for him can transform the mundane. His world becomes a magical one in which natural phenomena are personified, where the sky is ‘low in tone', as if ‘preparing to receive the still and solemn night'
39
and the rising moon stands ‘on tiptoe on a green hill top to see if the day be going & if the time of her vice regency be come'.
40
A donkey is transformed into a spindle-legged, bristle-backed, armour-plated monster; the feathers of a bird's wing can lend an angel flight.

Palmer still likes to draw the ecclesiastical architecture that first inspired him, its steeples and arches and traceries and vaults, but more and more frequently his churches are found merging with the landscapes that enfold them. ‘These leaves were a Gothic arch,'
41
Palmer notes as fronds rise in a trefoil that frames a distant tower. Trees grow in groves with church spires. A peasant woman soars solid and columnar as a cathedral pillar. A rustic shepherd becomes a Christ figure. A cornfield takes on a sacramental glow. ‘The earth is full of thy richness': Palmer puts a quote from the psalms on the cover of the Bible that he places unopened in the hands of a recumbent figure who, pondering this wisdom, gazes dreamily out across a far-reaching rural view.

Leaf by leaf, Palmer draws his vision together in his sketchbook of 1824. Here in black and white – with a rare wash of pigment when the prism of a rainbow or the sudden radiance of the sun demands it – is a vivid picture of the young artist's soul. Linnell has sharpened the young man's perceptions. He has shown him how to look. But now Palmer yearns not just to look, but truly to see. He is ready for his meeting with the visionary William Blake.

6

William Blake

 

The Maker, the Inventor; one of the few in any age

from
The Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

William Blake, born the son of a London hosier in 1757, was reared amid nightcaps and stockings, garters and gloves. He could almost have been some star child or changeling, suggests Peter Ackroyd, his most vivid biographer, for right from the beginning he found himself living in a world that was inhabited also by heavenly hosts. He saw seraphim roosting in the trees of Peckham and angels wandering amid the haymakers as they mowed the summer grass. As a boy, his mother had once beaten him for saying that he had just seen the prophet Ezekiel, but it would have taken far more than a mere thrashing to convince him that he was wrong. ‘When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea? . . . Oh no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty,' Blake declared.
1
His soaring imagination slipped free from all earthly restraints, his childhood perceptions of alternative realities unfurling and elaborating over the course of his life into the vast, fantastically complicated and almost incomprehensible mythic system of his books.

‘Blake be an artist & nothing else. In this there is felicity.'
2
A divine messenger had instructed the boy as to what path he should take and so, at the age of ten, having proved hopeless behind the shop counter, Blake was sent off to Henry Par's Drawing School in the Strand, a respected institution which offered the sort of academic training which Palmer was always to wish that he had also had. Blake had long nurtured an interest in art. His indulgent father had got into the habit of buying him prints that, considered dull or unfashionable at that time, could be picked up for mere pennies. These laid the foundations of what was to grow into a valuable collection, the piecemeal sale of which would help to stave off penury in later life. But Blake was also a talented draughtsman and, at the age of fourteen, having completed his first training, he was indentured to the engraver James Basire.

Basire was his second choice. Blake had originally been destined to work with William Ryland but, on meeting him, had refused. ‘Father,' he had said, on leaving the studio, ‘I do not like the man's face
: it looks as if he will live to be hanged
.'
3
His premonition had turned out to be true. Ten years later, charged with the forgery of notes, Ryland would swing from the gallows at Tyburn. Basire, however, was to prove a kind and thorough master. Old-fashioned and peaceable, he instilled in his often-impetuous pupil the virtues of precision and patience. He taught him a carefulness to temper his arrogance. He was embarking on a time-honoured profession, he told him, for the art of engraving went back to the Hebrews and their Chaldean forbears and beyond them, via Zoroaster, maybe even to God who had engraved the tablets of stone which Moses had brought down from the mountain.
4
The hopeful young apprentice could hardly have guessed what a long, arduous, backbreaking, sight-blurring, spirit-battering future his craft held in store for him.

In 1779, Blake enrolled for six years as a student of engraving at the Royal Academy. He was an assiduous learner, though he loathed the life room. What good was the slavish copying from nature, he wondered. Life drawing smelt of mortality. Modern man stripped of his clothing was but a corpse. He was equally revolted by what he saw as the bland urbanity and faux humility of the, by then, grand old man of the Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. He detested his ponderous lectures on the virtues of ‘general beauty' and the pursuit of ‘general truth'. ‘General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess,'
5
Blake raged, scoring the margins of Reynolds's
Discourses
with furious annotations. ‘Damn the Fool'. ‘This Man was Hired to Depress Art' he inked in black letters on the title page.

Blake refused to follow Reynolds's classically influenced course, far preferring the art of what he saw as a profoundly spiritual age: the monuments of Gothic antiquity and the effigies of the medieval church. He was not alone in his tastes. A small community of fellow artists shared his predilection for the Middle Ages, among them Thomas Stothard who, when he had first met Blake, had been working on a set of illustrations to the
Poems of
Ossian
. This Gaelic epic, purporting to record the songs of the blind bard Ossian about the battles of Fingal the warrior, had caused a literary sensation when it was published by James Macpherson in 1773, though subsequently it was condemned as fake. Stothard and Blake became artistic allies but, where the former went on to become an art world grandee, the latter never rose to be more than a jobbing engraver: a craftsman with undoubted skills but some decidedly unconventional views. Blake's choice of a bride did not help. In the aftermath of a failed courtship, he had met a sympathetic but probably illiterate gardener's daughter, Catherine. ‘Do you pity me?' he asked her. ‘Yes indeed I do,' she said. ‘Then I love you,'
6
he replied and shortly afterwards they married. She signed the register with a cross. It was not a liaison that would bring access to society or membership of an Academy which valued social status. Nor did Blake show the sort of financial acumen that a rising artist needed. Detesting ‘the merchant's thin/ Sinewy deception',
7
he refused to engage in a scrabble for wealth and, though Catherine learnt increasingly to help him, he was always to find it difficult to make ends meet.

The fundamental cause of his worldly problems, however, was the fact that he was considered quite mad. Blake was living in the ‘Age of Reason'. René Descartes had set the agenda in the seventeenth century with his mechanistic model of the universe and, ever since, mathematics had been taken as the template of knowledge and science had put nature to stern empirical test. Blake openly professed his loathing for this logical world. He detested Newton with all his ‘wheels and orbits . . . particles, points and lines'.
8
These wheels were to him the cruel ‘cogs tyrannic' which ground up human freedom, destroying ‘harmony and peace'.
9
He hated the empiricism of Francis Bacon and John Locke. It blotted out the light of divinity, he thought. Instead, Blake believed in his visions. A chat in his Lambeth study with the Archangel Gabriel or an impromptu visit from the ghost of a flea – ‘his eager tongue whisking out of his mouth, a cup in his hands to hold the blood and covered with a scaly skin of gold and green'
10
– were to him far more real than any scientific abstract. ‘I do not believe the world is round. I believe it quite flat,' he declared. He had it on good authority: ‘I have conversed with the Spiritual Son,' he explained: ‘I saw him on Primrose Hill.'
11

When discreet inquiries were made as to Blake's eligibility to become an Academician, such fixations were to prove far from helpful. Even Fuseli, a fellow eccentric and, as Blake described him: ‘The only man that e'er I knew/ Who did not almost make me spew',
12
thought that his friend had ‘something of madness about him'.
13
Blake was never to be elected to the Academy. And yet there was clearly something compelling about this small man with his impassioned points of view. ‘Another eccentric little artist', recorded Lady Charlotte Bury in her diary after meeting him at a dinner in 1818. But if on first encounter she had assumed him merely to be an amusing curiosity, she soon found her mind changing. ‘He looks care worn and subdued; but his countenance radiated as he spoke,' she wrote and, though his views were peculiar, they were ‘exalted above the common level of received opinion'. He was ‘full of beautiful imaginations and genius. Every word he uttered spoke the perfect simplicity of his mind and his total ignorance of all worldly matters.'
14

Blake's closest friends certainly recognised his incorruptible talent. Flaxman and Fuseli believed that the time would come when his art would be as esteemed as highly as Michelangelo's; furthermore, he was ‘damned good to steal from',
15
Fuseli said. He and Stothard both collaborated with Blake. Flaxman, too, remained a supporter and together with George Cumberland, an amateur artist and connoisseur of early Italian prints who, like Blake, believed in ‘the inestimable value of the chaste outline',
16
would introduce him to clients. But Blake was uncompromising. His fantasies were too powerful for the tastes of the period. Stothard blamed Fuseli. He had ‘misled' Blake ‘to extravagance'
17
he said, though, in fact, even this most melodramatic of artists had urged Blake to tone down his more unruly outpourings.