Mysterious Wisdom (13 page)

They would pore for quiet hours over books of prints. Blake was ‘anything but sectarian or exclusive', Palmer said, and ‘found sources of delight through the whole range of art'.
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‘He did not look out for the works of the purest ages, but for the purest work of every age and country.'
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Dwelling with particular affection on the rare and perfect talent of Fra Angelico, Blake nurtured Palmer's interest in sacred art and helped to deepen his understanding of the medieval era as well as of Michelangelo and Albrecht Dürer, although the reverential Palmer was taken aback when the old visionary, studying the designs of the latter, suddenly grew angry with the acclaimed German master and scolded him for neglecting some area of detail. ‘No authority or popular consent could influence [Blake] against his deliberate judgement,' Palmer observed.
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This was a man who would converse over dinner of the follies of Plato or the mistakes of Jesus Christ.

Sometimes Palmer and Blake would visit exhibitions together. Palmer was always to remember one particular trip when Blake was standing in the Royal Academy praising a picture by Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, a painter who was later to be tried and condemned as a murdering poisoner. There was Blake, he recalled ‘in his plain black suit and
rather
broad-brimmed, but not quakerish hat, standing so quietly among all the dressed-up, rustling, swelling people, and myself thinking “How little you know
who
is among you!”'
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Blake's health was declining rapidly at this time. He was all ‘bones and sinews . . . strings and bobbins, like a weaver's loom',
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said a friend. In the spring and summer of 1825 he suffered terrible shivering fits that confined him to bed. It may have been gallstones causing an inflamed bladder, modern doctors suggest. Bile was mixing with the blood, declared the medics of the day. Blake simply called it ‘this abominable ague'. He felt frail ‘as a young lark with no feathers'.
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Linnell was concerned. He offered Blake and his wife free lodging in his London house and, in 1826, suggested that they should move northwards to be near him in Hampstead in a cottage for which he would pay. Both offers were declined. Blake, who suffered from terrible bowel problems, was reluctant to travel. Just reading Wordsworth's
The Excursion
was enough to set off an intestinal tumult. Besides, he had always considered the north to be malefic, if not positively devilish. He certainly did not want to take up residence there.

When in good health, however, he still liked to make day trips to the Hampstead home that the Linnells first rented in the summer of 1823. It was a part of Collins Farm, a rambling red-roofed dwelling on the west side of the heath, looking out towards gorse slopes on one side and meadows in which the children could romp freely on the other. The move had proved a happy experiment and Linnell's growing family had thrived. The following year he had taken over the rent of the whole building and, though he still spent the working week in his studio, it is there at Collins Farm that the modern-day visitor can find the English Heritage plaque that commemorates not only his residence but also the fact that Blake was his frequent house guest.

Blake liked to visit on Sundays and often, passing Palmer's Broad Street home, he would pick him up on the way. They always went on foot – the alternative, a bumpy cabriolet ride, being considered by Blake ‘a rumble I fear I could not go through'.
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Not that Palmer would have minded. Walking with Blake, he said, was like walking with the prophet Isaiah. He kindled the imagination, transforming even London's ‘charter'd streets'
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into a bejewelled City of God.

The conversation of these walking companions might be guessed at. Perhaps Blake told Palmer about the 1780 Gordon Riots when, after Parliament had drafted a bill lifting restrictions from Roman Catholics, cries of ‘No Popery!' had rung through the capital. A pitched battle between mob and militia had taken place in Broad Street where Palmer now lived. Blake, as a young man strolling home, had been swept up by the rabble, borne on its tide towards Newgate where rioters with sledgehammers and torches had set the prison on fire. He never forgot the flickering leap of the flames and the shrieks of trapped felons; the images of conflagration and chaos that pervade his poetry may in part, Ackroyd has suggested, spring from this harrowing memory.

The two would have doubtless spent much time discussing artistic matters. They might well have talked about Cowper, whose works they both loved: Palmer because they reminded him of his dead mother; Blake because Cowper who, suffering from manic religious fits had spent months in an asylum, seemed to him the very type of the mad poet most to be pitied and celebrated. They would have dwelt on Milton, for Blake recognised in this stubborn rebel an artistic forerunner who shared not just a sacred vision but a poetic mission to arouse England from spiritual slumber and return it to the state of ancient grace which it had enjoyed in the times when (as Milton put it) the ‘Druids created the cathedral of philosophy'.
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And maybe Blake described to Palmer the hallucinatory visits he had received from this long-deceased English poet who had appeared to him both in the guise of a youth and an old, grey-bearded man.

Following the meandering course of the River Fleet, the pair left London behind for the fresh air of the open fields. To walk with Blake in the country was ‘to perceive the soul of beauty through the forms of matter',
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Palmer wrote. They would pause to rest on their way up Haverstock Hill, the dome of St Paul's behind them and, on clear days, the towers of Westminster Abbey also visible beyond. Blake may have told Palmer, whose reverence for England's ecclesiastical architecture he shared, how this abbey had been the home of ‘his earliest and most sacred recollections'.
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Blake had been sent there by Basire to make drawings of its tombs and had spent many solitary hours alone among its bright splendours, amid the coloured waxworks and painted funeral effigies, the marbles and mosaics, the stained glass and gilded decorations from which his rich sense of colour may have first arisen. Memories of the old cathedral enchanted him all his life and he would often recall the wondrous moment when he saw the spirits which dwelt amid its Gothic vaults; when its ‘aisles and galleries . . . suddenly filled with a great procession of monks and priests, choristers and censer-bearers, and his entranced ear heard the chant of plain-song and chorale, while the vaulted room trembled to the sound of organ music'.
20
Blake often talked of his visions: when he said ‘my visions', the journalist Henry Crabb Robinson recalled, ‘it was in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of trivial matters that everyone understands'.
21

The Linnell children would watch for their father's two friends as they crested the brow of the hill, their coat tails flapping, their pockets stuffed to bulging with pencils and scraps of paper and volumes of poetry, and sometimes also a book brought along as a present for Mrs Linnell. At a wave of greeting from Blake, the lively troupe would come rushing: Hannah at the fore, her gold ringlets flying, her plump cheeks flushed pink. Children loved Blake, Palmer recalled, for he had not ‘the least taint of affectation about him',
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and Blake in his turn loved them back. He liked to listen to them playing in the courtyard below his flat, their laughter echoing round the brick. One visitor remembered once being led to the window and Blake, leaning out, pointing at the little ones beneath. ‘That is heaven,' he had said. ‘He thought that no one could be truly great who had not humbled himself “even as a little child”,' Palmer recalled.
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The Linnell children remembered Blake as ‘a grave and sedate gentleman, with white hair, a lofty brow, large lambent eyes [and] . . . a kind and gentle manner',
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whose gaze would fill with tears when their mother, Mary, sat at the pianoforte to play one of his favourite Scottish songs. Blake was easily moved to tears and Palmer recalled the time when, dwelling upon the beauty of the parable of the prodigal son, he had begun to read it but at the words ‘when he was yet a great way off his father saw him' had found himself unable to go further. Blake also liked to sing and would choose his own poems or some simple popular melody while Palmer with his rich tenor and the high-piping children would join in.

Sometimes Hannah would bring her pet cat in a big furry armful. Blake shared Palmer's opinion of these creatures: ‘so much more quiet in her expressions of attachment than a dog'.
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Once Blake showed them a book of pictures he had done as a boy of fourteen, including a drawing of a grasshopper that they had all particularly liked. Occasionally he would take out his pencils to sketch. Three delicate drawings of a baby survive. Blake would tell the children stories. He could make his listeners laugh with such tales as that of the time that he had been sent a flask of walnut oil to try out as a solvent for his paints. Blake had tasted it and then gone on tasting it until the whole lot had been drunk. The artistic experiment had never taken place.

Constable may also have visited. He had lodgings just across the heath and knew the Linnells, although the only conversation recorded between him and Blake was that which took place as the old visionary leafed through one of his sketchbooks. ‘Why, this is not a drawing, but
inspiration
,' he had said as he had admired a picture of Hampstead trees; whereupon Constable had replied: ‘I never knew it before; I meant it for a drawing.'
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As the evenings drew in, Blake liked to stand at the door, enjoying the mild summer air. He would gaze out in tranquil reverie at the hills or, sitting peacefully in the arbour at the end of the garden, would ruminate with the cows that chewed the cud on the far side of the fence. Sometimes Varley would arrive along with Mulready or other guests and they would sit down to dinners that lasted late into the night, starting with intense artistic discussions and ending with arguments and laughter and jokes. Linnell shared Mulready's knack for mimicry and could imitate their foul-mouthed professor, Fuseli, so well that it may have been one of his impersonations that led the Academician to remark: ‘It is very good; it is better than I could have done myself.' A sketch by Linnell shows Varley and Blake conversing after dinner. Varley, caught in the middle of animated conversation, is probably trying to convince Blake of the truth of his astrological theories. He was riveted by horoscopes and, upon meeting a new person, would immediately ask them their date of birth, whereupon he would start unstuffing his huge sail pockets of their cargo of almanacs. He believed firmly in his forecasts. One day, calculating that Uranus was about to exert a malign influence on his life which would reach its peak at midday, he took the precaution of remaining in bed. As the clock struck twelve there came a cry of ‘Fire!' and Varley, rushing out, discovered that his house was in flames. He was so delighted to have predicted the disaster that the damage to his home didn't bother him at all. Varley believed in Blake's spiritual visitants as ardently as Blake himself and, in 1819, they had held a series of seances during which, between nine in the evening and three in the morning, Blake would keep open studio to any heavenly caller. Herod, Socrates, Mahomet, Owen Glendower and Voltaire were among the more notable figures that dropped in and Blake, sitting with his sketchpad, took all their portraits.

Darkness would long since have fallen when Mary Linnell bundled Blake warmly up in a shawl and sent a servant with a lantern to guide him and Palmer back across the heath. From there, the two would walk slowly homewards under the stars. The mythological stories of the glittering constellations felt far more real to Blake than the scientific discoveries of his day and Palmer was always to remember him, roused irritably from his silence, when talk at a friend's house had turned to the vastness of space: ‘It is false!' he had declared. ‘I walked the other evening to the end of the earth, and touched the sky with my finger.'
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8

The Oxford Sepias

 

A mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul