Mysterious Wisdom (20 page)

The Ancients would often spend the entire day out of doors, roaming about in their valley of vision with their sketchbooks and brushes, their pockets packed with apples and bladders of pigment and volumes of poetry, their minds stuffed with visions of ideal delight. To read Palmer's letters or look at his Shoreham pictures or even take a stroll through the still largely unspoilt valley in which he lived, is to discover a sense of the pleasures he enjoyed: the surging enthusiasms of spring when the orchards are a frothing profusion of blossom and the pale pink of the dog roses drape every hedge, when the woods are alive with the jays' angry clatter and the young calves bleat shrilly from the little thatched crofts; the sweltering delights of the summer when Palmer would stalk through the cornfields, plodding slowly uphill towards the ridge-top heights where crickets filled the air with their frying-pan sizzle and speckled fritillaries skipped over the chalk. When the sun was too high, he would often sit dreaming on the shady banks of the river watching the flash of the kingfishers under the oaks, the damselflies flickering and the trout lazily rising among the silver twist of the willows and the glinting puzzles of gnats. In autumn, the valley was at its richest. He would watch the stooping harvesters wading through the corn, feasting on blackberries until his fingers were stained purple and crunching at handfuls of hazelnuts. Palmer particularly loved nuts and would stuff his enormous pockets full of them, cracking them loudly between his teeth as he shuffled through the leaves like some acorn-grubbing hog. And in winter, when the pace of life was much slower and the landscape more still, Palmer would often stay in by his fire to work, listening to the rhythm of the flails as they thumped the stone threshing floor, the rush of the river swollen up by rain, the tapping of branches against the panes of the windows and, occasionally, to the thick muffled silence of snow.

Sometimes the Ancients ventured further afield on their sketching trips, pausing in the hop gardens of the hamlet of Underriver, delighting in the architecture of the medieval Ightham Mote, visiting Edenbridge and Anne Boleyn's childhood home, Hever Castle, or walking to Chiddingstone about three miles beyond, the sort of picturesque village which Palmer would later revisit to find the mills, old forges and cottage doors which could lend character to his work. Occasionally they would follow the Darent upstream in the direction of Westerham from where, climbing up to the village of Brasted Chart, they could gaze out across ‘the softly melting richness'
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of a view which stretched on a clear day as far as the Isle of Wight; or they would make detours to other beauty spots, to the place they referred to as ‘Pig and Whistle Valley' after the name of the flint cottage that stood at its head, or to the beacon at Rooks Hill overlooking Underriver. Palmer would later paint the view from its summit: a narrow slice of landscape leading towards far-off horizons of hazy blue. When Linnell came to visit, Palmer took him and his children on a tour of all his favourite sites. Linnell was ‘delighted with the scenery', he reported excitedly to Richmond, ‘and says he has seen higher hills but never finer scenes'
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and the children were thrilled to be trundling along in an open cart.

It was landscape that the Ancients most loved, and particularly when they were wandering through it together, rolling along arm in arm, seeing God in everything from the little ‘garden'd labyrinths' at the bottom of the valley to the great swelling masses of the ‘thymy downs'.
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These young men were not moving through the same world as the village dwellers, they were not wandering through fields that had to be ploughed, planted and cropped; seeing sheep which would stray if their watcher fell asleep or corn sheaves that would buckle the bones of their spines. Their suns did not rise on a day of hard labour or their dewy twilights bring a damp rheumatic ache. They were moving through the ‘dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise'.
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The landscape of Shoreham had for them been transubstantiated by the poetry that they loved: they would often recite it as they drifted along, letting the rhythms of Virgil or Milton roll out along lanes and rumble down valley slopes. Palmer was always to be particular about the art of recitation. He would study how actors spoke. One did not make oneself heard over long distances by bawling, he would later instruct a young protégée, ‘but by speaking very distinctly and giving . . . words their proper and proportioned emphasis'.
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‘Do not grunt or snuffle the words through your nose or choak them in your throat or bite them with your teeth,' he would tell her, ‘but throw them boldly out until they resound again.'
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Palmer was also a fine singer. His powerful tenor ringing out from the hilltops could be heard far down in the valley below. Sometimes, when the thunderclouds gathered in the summer's sultry heat, huge towers of cumulus massing along the horizons, building and boiling in vast staggering banks, the Ancients would wait out on the ridges until the tempest broke. Then, when the skies were shot through by great bolts of lightning and the rain was dashing down in sheets, they would make their way homewards through the storm together pitting their loud chorus against the rumbling thunderclaps.

The Ancients dined as simply as they breakfasted; probably, as was customary in those days, at about three o'clock. The mainstay of their diet was milk, eggs and bread, supplemented with the occasional piece of meat: perhaps a bit of mutton bought from some local farmer, a plump pheasant or partridge from the woods or on high days and holidays a fat goose. They would buy seasonal fruits and vegetables – radishes and gooseberries are mentioned – from neighbouring cot­­tagers and throughout the autumn there would be an abundance of local apples, served up by Mary Ward in puddings and pies or roasted and stewed for the sake of the bowels with whose functions Palmer and his friends were consistently preoccupied. Sometimes they ate too much and Giles, taking a swim too soon after dinner one day, found himself greatly discomfited by the sensation that a large ‘quartern loaf'
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had got stuck in his digestive tract.

The apples would be pressed by the locals to make cider which, when the harvest had been good, could be bought ‘undiluted and unadulterated',
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for as little as a shilling a gallon: so cheap, Palmer told Linnell, who planned to take some back to London, that farmers were giving it to workers instead of the normal table beer. Palmer and his fellow Ancients never consumed anything stronger than this local brew, but they appeared to have drunk it in such profuse quantities that even heavily diluted it had an effect – not least if the bacchanalian antics depicted in Calvert's woodcut
The Cyder Feast
are anything to go by.

The Ancients particularly loved the ‘perfumed and enchanted twilight'
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of the warm summer evenings and long after the last heavy-uddered cows had swayed home from their pastures, after the weary labourer had returned to his supper and the slow grey heron flapped home to its roost, they would linger, swishing through the cornfields as the hills turned to dark silhouettes and the moon slowly opened her ‘golden eye'. She shed a ‘mild, a grateful, an unearthly lustre on the inmost spirits', Palmer said.
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Sometimes, as darkness drew in, the young men would walk up through the village to a nearby chalk quarry and there, in a natural stone theatre carved out of the slopes, they would deliver a concert at the tops of their voices. They particularly loved Purcell's music to
The Tempest
 
(in those days it was thought to have been written by Matthew Locke), growing wilder and wilder as they sang it louder and louder, their faces glimmering eerily as they danced in the night. Often they set off on long rambles through the herb-scented darkness, their familiar landscapes made mysterious by the sprinkling moonlight. The locals nicknamed them the
Extollagers
, a mixture of extoller and astrologer, most probably, or as Palmer jokily defined it: one who ‘went by the stars, a strange gentleman whose sketching stool, unseen before in those parts, was mistaken for a celestial instrument'.
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One of their favourite haunts, Finch recalled, was a tangled lane that led away from the village and was flanked by rows of old beeches with great writhing roots. Some years before, this lane had been the scene of a murder and the excitable Ancients thrilled at the very thought. The lane became their theatre, a site for re-enactments of fantastical scenes as the friends staged their own versions of the sort of spooky
tableaux vivants
that Fuseli's Gothic paintings had made so fashionable or made the dark corridor ring with their operatic renditions. One night they decided to walk to Bromley churchyard to meditate among the tombs, but were spotted by suspicious locals and reported to the watch who accosted them with raised bayonets accusing them of taking part in the then lucrative practice of tomb-robbing. The encounter came to nothing in the end. Everything was explicable. And the Ancients weren't deterred from undertaking further moonlit jaunts. Another night, the church clock had already struck ten by the time they decided on a whim to set out on an eight- or nine-mile walk along the ridges to Sevenoaks in search of a copy of the novel,
The Mysteries of Udolpho
: a ludicrously overwrought tale of supernatural terrors which, when first published some twenty years earlier, had whipped convoluted Gothic fantasies up into a fashion. Jane Austen had ridiculed it in
Northanger Abbey
in which her impressionable young heroine, riveted by such histrionic stories, starts to imagine her acquaintances to be characters in a lurid drama, but Palmer remained a fan of its author, Ann Radcliffe (‘dear old aunt Radcliffe'). Some sixty years later he still had his ‘ancient fragile'
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copy of her
Udolpho
and wished that he could get hold of her other volumes in print of a size that his by then ageing eyes could read.

Local rumours would have done little to soothe the febrile imagination. Like most rural communities, the villagers harboured all sorts of superstitions, stories of spirits whose dread secrets had been passed down from generation to generation. They told tales of snakes ‘of the bigness of a man's leg', of deadly lizards which ‘basked sleepily on out-of-the-way banks where men never pass'.
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One stout local yeoman professed that, jogging home from market through the valley at twilight, he had seen a flying reptile which by dint of whip and spur he had overtaken and killed, leaving its remains to be seen by all unbelievers the next day, lying on a wall at Otford, wings and tail, complete.

The arrival of Blake – a man who had played host to any number of otherworldly callers – only fanned their enthusiasms and one evening they all set off together to a ‘haunted mansion in a shadowy paddock' where, as Palmer remembered it, ‘sceptics had seen more than they could account for'.
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Shuffling and whispering and hushing each other, glancing at Blake by the light of the veering lantern and giggling and nudging no doubt, they arrived and waited but any urge to laughter, however nervous, soon came to an abrupt stop when they heard a curious rattling. Drawing together they listened in a scared but expectant silence. It was Calvert, the most practical among them, who moved soft-footed towards the source of the sound while Palmer, more tentatively, followed with lantern raised. They listened again. Tap . . . tap . . . tap, came the sound. They peered more closely. And it was only then that they made their discovery: a snail was inching its way up the mullion, its shell tapping noisily against the glass pane. Not that this mundane revelation would dissuade them from their ardent belief in supernatural forces. Palmer was convinced that he had had a clairvoyant experience one night when, leaving Blake and his fellow Ancients in Shoreham, he set off on an errand to London. Not very long after he had left, Blake, sitting at the table, suddenly put his hand to his forehead and said: ‘Palmer is come . . . he is walking up the road.'

‘Oh, Mr Blake,' Calvert told him, ‘he is gone to London, we saw him off in the coach.'

‘No. He's coming through the wicket,' Blake clearly contradicted. A few seconds later the latch was indeed raised and Palmer stepped into the room. It turned out that the stagecoach had broken down just outside the village and so he had returned.

Palmer would relish such experiences all his life and would happily recount tales of mystic canary birds or haunted toy horses. He was delighted, some fifty years after leaving Shoreham, to find an article in the
Spectator
by someone who, while ridiculing rustic credulity, thought a terror of ghosts a far more reasonable response to tradition than mere dismissal of what one cannot at once explain. As Palmer himself rather pompously declared, having returned in 1870 to Margate where he had spent ‘among the most interesting evenings of my life' in a haunted house, his impression was ‘that, making all allowance for imposture and mistake, there was a residuum of evidence which no candid mind could resist'.
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The Ancients, however, only indulged in their eccentric nocturnal jaunts from time to time. In autumn, as the fragrant smoke of the homeward-plodding labourers' pipes drifted along the lanes, their own thoughts would also turn to the hearth. In the cold of the winter they preferred to remain by the fire. Frequently they would stay up into the small hours, working by candlelight as a little ink sketch of Richmond done by Palmer attests. Huddled up in his warm dressing gown, a long, tasselled night cap pulled over his head, he scratches away diligently at his engraving. It is his
Shepherd
, a note by Palmer informs us: an elegant but unfinished pastoral composition that had been inspired by the engravings of Blake.