Mysterious Wisdom (14 page)

from
The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

Palmer was in awe of Blake. Leafing through his portfolios, he would marvel at their vitality, at the ‘spectral pigmies, rolling, flying, leaping among the letters; the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and bursts of flame'. The pages seemed almost to tremble under his touch. ‘As a picture has been said to be something between a thing and a thought, so in some of the type books over which Blake had long brooded, with his brooding of fire, the very paper seems to come to life,' Palmer said. When he had finished, he would lay the portfolio as tenderly back down on the table as if he ‘had been handling something which was alive'.
1

Blake flung open the windows of Palmer's youthful imagination; through them he could see further than he had ever seen before. He began to work in new ways. Already in his 1824 sketchbook he had begun dashing down his drawings with an impulsive energy. By the autumn of 1825 he had written to a Mr Bennett who had commissioned him just a few months previously, to warn him that he might be surprised by his new style. At first, he promised to take back any which displeased their new owner and listen to suggestions as to how they might then be improved, but a few weeks later he thought better of this offer. ‘I will no more, by God's grace, seek to moderate for the sake of pleasing men,' he wrote. ‘The artist who knows propriety will not cringe or apologise when the eye of judgement is fixed upon his work.'
2

Palmer took his cue from the uncompromising Blake whose ideas from this point on pervaded his development – from his loftiest ambitions to some technical aide-memoire: remember ‘that most excellent remark of Mr B's . . . how a tint equivalent to a shadow is made by the outlines of many little forms in one mass'.
3
If Palmer did not completely lose his own trajectory it was in large part because he never really understood his new mentor.

Palmer's approach to nature was quintessentially Romantic. The philosophers of the Enlightenment era had, broadly speaking, regarded the human and the natural as two opposing poles; but in the latter half of the eighteenth century ideas had started to undergo an important shift in their course. Where the Age of Reason had argued, along with Thomas Hobbes, that man in a ‘state of nature' has no notion of goodness and is vicious because he knows nothing of virtue, in the Romantic era Jean-Jacques Rousseau posited that, on the contrary, ‘uncorrupted morals' prevail in natural man. Though his belief in the ‘noble savage' (an oxymoron that was, in fact, first introduced not by him but by the British poet John Dryden in his 1672 play
The Conquest of Granada
) has been greatly exaggerated by subsequent history – Rousseau never actually suggested that human beings in a state of nature behave morally – he did argue that morality was not essentially a construct of society. Rather, he considered it to be ‘natural' in the sense that it was innate in so far as it was a product of man's instinctive reluctance to bear witness to suffering; whereas civilisation, as Rousseau saw it, was essentially artificial and bred inequality, envy, and unnatural desires.

By the time Rousseau's final book, his 1782
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
, was published, Europe had become a far safer place to travel. Its citizens felt freer to journey for the purpose of pleasure alone. The heights of the mountains, the depths of the woods, the dramas of the thunderstorm were no longer merely hazards to be overcome, but awesome experiences to be enjoyed and pondered, to be appreciated almost as aesthetic performances. Nature had come to be seen as a source of the sensations that would arouse the emotions that provoked imaginative visions which, opening man's perceptions to divine powers, could act as a morally improving force.

Blake's work, however, for all that it is full of references to animal and plant life, did not stem from naturalistic observation. His creatures played a purely symbolic role. His lamb or his tiger, his stately raven or sinister worm, were emblems. They embodied the states of the human soul: the good and the evil, the innocence or experience. Nature, in all its profusion and variety, was just so much obfuscating material as far as he was concerned. It was ‘the work of the devil', he even once said.
4

The young Palmer would have been confused. He saw spiritual meanings shining forth from material beauties and was becoming, if anything, more attentive to the natural world. He particularly admired Blake's landscapes, delightedly perusing his Virgil woodcuts. They were ‘visions of little dells and nooks, and corners of Paradise', he said: ‘models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry'.
5
Several drawings in Palmer's 1824 sketchbook show similar views, sweeping valleys and looping rivers, peaceful shepherds and floating clouds, but it was not so much the scenery as the mood which pervaded it that captivated Palmer. He was entranced by the ‘sentiment' which Blake, through his contrast of solemn depth and vivid brilliancy, managed to conjure; by a quality quite ‘unlike the gaudy daylight of this world', which seemed to him to offer a precious glimpse of that which ‘all the most holy, studious saints and sages' have enjoyed: that ‘rest which remaineth to the people of God'. It was this numinous atmosphere that he too wanted to capture: ‘a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul'.
6
Before he met Blake, Palmer had been planning a landscape in which the hills of David and the hills of Dulwich would be as one, but now it would no longer be enough merely to ‘unite scattered recollections' into ‘a Dulwich-looking whole'. He must evoke that diaphanous half-light which speaks of divine presence; which would make these same hills promise that ‘the country beyond them is Paradise'.
7

A set of six sepia drawings survive from this period. Palmer was proud of them: they are all signed; all but one has been dated ‘1825'. He kept them among his possessions almost until the end of his life. Now in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, and known as the Oxford Sepias, they present a series of peaceful rural scenes: a smocked ploughman harnessing his curly-polled bullock, a hare loping its solitary way through the woods, a recumbent man reading amid a ripening cornfield, a pipe-playing shepherd with his gathered flock. Three of the drawings describe the delicate clarity of daybreak, three the gentle closing in of the dusk. Palmer captures the glimmering magic of these transitional moments to perfection. He sees the first paling of the sky in the earliest morning; notices the long shadows cast by a just risen sun; observes the way that the darkness is drawn into the folds of a landscape; delights in the sprinkled brightness of a crescent moon.

Palmer used a sepia ink, extracted from cuttlefish, and applied it in washes so that some parts of the picture surface were left unpainted (the moon shines with the white of the underlying paper); others were built upon layer by layer, lines fattened and thickened by a viscous pigment made, as Blake would have taught him, by mixing the sepia with gum arabic. Slowly he would assemble the images in obsessive detail, from the tiniest figure perched on the furthest horizon, to the little horned molluscs that probe a foreground. As he elaborated, observing the courtship of a pair of song thrushes, the translucent fungi that sprout in the damp, the individual shape of every different tree leaf, the characteristic texture of every trunk, he moved towards an oddly magnified view of the world in which every detail assumes a significance, becomes part of a patchwork of myriad patterns which draws their many elements into a harmonious whole.

The varnish was also made of gum, again applied layer by layer, each coat given time to dry between applications and in a very uneven manner so that where there was more pigment it became an impasto – a layer so thick it is textured – and where there was no paint it formed an all-but-transparent veil. Palmer would have known that the black sepia would fade with time to rich brown and the gum slowly darken to an amber tone. He would have foreseen the golden glow that these works now possess. And it was this luminosity that he most wanted to capture. His landscapes are consecrated by a beneficent light.

9

The Primitive

 

A pure quaint crinkle-crankle goth

from
The Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

Blake was obsessed with the idea of a lapsed spiritual age. All his life he would look for what he called ‘lost originals',
1
peering back through the layers of successive civilisations, through the veils of history and the confusions of belief, to discover the purified lineaments of some fundamental truth. It was in Westminster Abbey that he had first glimpsed it, he told Palmer. It was there that, with ‘his mind simplified by Gothic forms & his Fancy imbued with the livid twilight of past days', he had found what he knew to be ‘a true Art'.
2
The abbey's Gothic memorials had revealed a ‘simple and plain road to a style . . . unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice'. They had taught him how, by working within native traditions, he could recapture the unsullied virtues of the artists he most admired: the sanctified purity of Fra Angelico's frescos, the linear chastity of Mantegna's designs, the innocent perfection of Raphael's paintings, the hieratic clarity of Dürer's woodcuts. ‘Everything connected with Gothic art and churches, and their builders, was a
passion
to him,'
3
Palmer recalled.

Blake was not alone in his preoccupation with the past. In the eighteenth century, inspired by a growing fascination with the researches of such historical figures as John Aubrey, who had made haphazard investigations into anything from pre-Catholic rituals in the lives of the peasantry to circular depressions in the ground at Stonehenge, or William Stukeley, who had published recondite studies of druidical cultures and giant geomantic ‘worms', the people of England began popularly to indulge a passion for antiquarianism. It developed into a sort of national hobby and by the time that Blake was growing up the country was crawling with amateurs hunting for evidence of ancient tombs or heathen temples, shamanistic totems or the lost city of Atlantis; Blake was certainly not the only person to believe that the British Isles might be the last surviving remnant of this legendary antediluvian empire. What might in retrospect look like a cranky predilection for esoterica was very much a product of the cultural fashions of the period.

Blake encouraged his ardent young protégé to look back to primitive beginnings, to try to recover the dreams of an earlier age. Often what might now in Palmer's work appear most forward-looking – the simplifications of shape to the point of abstraction or the distortions of scale – was paradoxically intended to be facing in the opposite direction: to be gazing backwards towards the beauties of a long bygone age.

 

 

Palmer's feeling for Gothic art forms, for the soaring grandeur and spiritual grace of a vernacular British aesthetic, accorded well with the wider mood of his era. In 1815, with the battle of Waterloo, the Napoleonic wars had come at last to an end. A society which had battened down its hatches through decades of conflict had suddenly been flung open. Change had flooded in and with it all sorts of problems. Hundreds of thousands of demobilised servicemen were now looking for civilian work. There was mass unemployment in the towns and cities and, in the farms and villages from which the soldiers had first come, prospects were not hopeful. Harvests were bad for several years in succession. Britain was entering a prolonged period of agricultural depression.

The five years following 1815 were to bring Britain closer to complete social breakdown than any others in its history. Radical voices which, for so long, had been stifled by an atmosphere of resolute patriotism now rang out. England became a theatre for mass rallies and marches and uprisings. What was subsequently to become known as the industrial revolution had dawned. Manual labour was giving way to the machine; coal and steam power were starting to fuel huge increases in production; and with the creation of improved turnpike roads and the construction of railways and canals, manufactured goods could be transported more efficiently around the country. Trade underwent a tremendous expansion as consumerist appetites steadily swelled.

A sudden dramatic increase in the country's population was a powerful driving force, propelling it ever faster towards change. Couples began marrying younger and so producing more children who could be nurtured better as the economy grew. Agricultural methods improved and a public health system slowly emerged. Average life expectancy, which had not risen above thirty-seven for the previous century, now lengthened: by 1820 it had reached forty-one. Census returns show that between 1801 and 1821 the population expanded from 8.9 million to 12 million, an increase of 35 per cent. It would continue to grow rapidly from then on. A rural economy could never be expected to support this flourishing population. People left the countryside to try to make a living in the towns as thriving new industries offered better hope of employment and the prospect of higher wages. At the beginning of the century only about a quarter of the population would have been urban; by 1881 this proportion had risen to 80 per cent.