Mysterious Wisdom (27 page)

 

 

Palmer felt as if the walls of his Eden had been breached. He was an old-fashioned high Tory who voted with what he believed to be the best motives. ‘As I love our fine British peasantry,' he explained to Richmond in 1828, ‘I think best of the old high Tories, because I find they give most liberty to the poor, and were not morose, sullen and bloodthirsty like the whigs, liberty jacks and dissenters whose cruelty when they reign'd, was as bad as that of the worst times of the worst papists; only more sly and smoothlier varnish'd over with a thin shew of reason.'
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Palmer was deeply distrustful of revolutionary principles. To him, the ancient institutions of England were sacred, and foremost among these was the Anglican Church. He had been unsettled by the emancipation of the Catholics; now he was deeply disturbed by discussion of the abolition of tithes, for this ecclesiastical tax – a time-honoured method of providing for the clergy which required members of a parish to hand over 10 per cent of their income – seemed to him symbol of the sacramental unity that existed between a pastor and his people. To abolish it, Palmer believed, would be to hurl a firebrand into the heart of the peaceful procession that winds its way homewards in
Coming from Evening Church
.

In 1832, with the passing of the Reform Bill, Palmer was finally dug out of his political corner. Believing that the only hope for his now defeated faction lay in winning seats in the upcoming general election, he laid down his brushes and took up a pamphleteer's quill, penning
An Address to the Electors of West Kent
in support of his local Tory candidate Sir William Geary. France, he warned, had ‘obtained her freedom: and, alas! immediately lost it again, irretrievably: by confiding it, as the people of England are at this moment confiding their own – to revolutionary empirics . . . Shall we mistake her ravings for the voice of Delphic Sibyl' Palmer asked, ‘and proceed to model, or rather unmodel, every institution of our country, and tumble them all together, into the semblance of that kingless, lawless, churchless, Godless, comfortless, and most chaotic Utopia of French philosophy? . . . Farmers of Kent – we are tempted with a share of the promised spoliation of the CHURCH! – There was a time when every Kentish yeoman would have spurned at the wretch who should have dared to tickle him with such a bait – to offer him such an insult! But piety and honour are in the sepulchre.'

‘Is this the rant of a fanatic?' asked Palmer. The answer he offered was a resounding ‘NO': ‘It is the zealous but sober voice of one who dares to speak what millions think.' So, ‘let us rally once more,' he concluded, ‘round the noble standard of Old Kentish Loyalty; and defend it to the last . . . If we perish in the contest; let it not be, O spirit of Albion, as recreants and dastards: but with Thy standard clenched in our grasp, or folded about our hearts!'

Signing it ‘an elector' – Palmer, as a property owner, was qualified to vote – he sent copies of the pamphlet to the local papers. The
Kentish Observer
, even though it supported the Tories, ignored it; the pro-reform
Kentish Gazette
dismissed it as the ‘ravings of this maniac', and Linnell was far from happy, not simply because Palmer had taken an Establishment stance, but because he had parodied the language of the great republican Milton to do so: ‘The same fountain does not send forth sweet water and bitter,' he declared.
30

Palmer's candidate came last in the poll and the painter was never to resort to so direct a form of political involvement again.

14

The Sensual and the Spiritual

 

The visions of the soul being perfect are the only

true standard by which nature must be tried

from
The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

It was not brutish indifference that left Palmer blind to the hardships of the labourer's life. ‘Nothing more refreshes the spirits than a battle for the rights of the poor,'
1
he would later write. But as a young man in Shoreham, his head swirling with visions, he failed to see the reality that lay right in front of him because he was looking straight through it in search of some higher truth.

Palmer was inflexibly committed to a religious path. There was but one way to heaven, he informed Richmond in 1832, and that was a narrow one; there was but one Apostolic altar, one Holy of Holies, and that was the Anglican Church. To turn away from it, he believed, was to turn towards the devil of whose actual existence he remained all his life convinced. Satan's deepest artifice, he declared, was to infuse the mind with doubt as to whether there was any devil at all. Everyone, even the implacably anti-Establishment Linnell, would be regularly subjected to his rants, with only his ‘poor dear old nurse' Mary let off the hook: ‘though a misled Baptist,' Palmer wrote, he was sure that she would ‘sing among the redeemed forever'.
2

The Ancients in Shoreham all attended church regularly, said their prayers daily and set out to channel their talents along a religious course. Richmond's first Royal Academy exhibit was an 1825 painting of a recumbent Abel; the young Tatham completed a design showing the biblical Gideon and, Calvert's pictures before he finally let his pantheistic inclinations loose, making images of frolicking couples and pastoral nudes that had rather less to do with spiritual salvation than the sexual propagation of pagan fertility rites, were pervaded with Christian mysticism. ‘These are God's fields, this is God's brook and these are God's sheep and lambs,' he once gushed as he showed off his latest landscape to Linnell. ‘Then why don't you mark them with a big G?' his acerbic onlooker commented, alluding to the practice whereby a shepherd would mark his flock with an initial so that, if a sheep strayed, it could be identified.

Palmer never fulfilled his ambition to paint biblical subjects, but he discovered in landscape a parallel path towards God. ‘What if earth/ Be but the shadow of Heaven?' Milton had asked in
Paradise Lost
.
Seculum est speculum
– the world below is a glass to discover the world above – the seventeenth-century clergyman John Flavel had said in his
Husbandry Spiritualised
, a volume which, finding religious significance in everyday rural practices, was to become a much favoured Shoreham tome. Palmer believed that, through art, the world could be elevated to a higher plane; that the painter, after a protracted struggle, could escape ‘“like a bird out of the snare of the fowler” from the NATURALISTIC . . . towards his “Jerusalem”, the IDEAL'.
3

Palmer's artistic impulses had found their beginnings in his love of church buildings. Now in Shoreham he turned the entire world into a cathedral for the worship of religion's higher mysteries. He did not see shabby shepherds, their skin grimed with grease; he saw an image of Christ caring for his earthly flock. He did not gaze upon groups of rough bucolics with grumbling stomachs and grimy clothes; he looked from afar and descried minor saints. In his transubstantiated realm, trees became the columns of soaring Gothic vaults; the full moon a rose window amid trellising boughs. Earth grew into a new Eden under his brush. How happy are those who ‘find Him and adore Him everywhere, as they investigate His beautiful creation',
4
he declared. As he peered into chestnut flowers to paint the delicate pink stamens; as he watched a swallow's breast brushing the tips of ripe corn; as he noted every leaf shape, palmate, falcate and pinnate; or studied every texture, hatched, stippled and striped, he was trying to transcend the merely literal. The outward senses, he believed, could be turned against their own ‘fleshliness'; they could be trained to ‘drink in thro' their grosser pores wisdom and virtue to the soul'.
5

It seems hardly surprising, then, to find that Palmer was a deeply sensual man. As someone takes care of the horse that carries him, he said, a person should take care of the body which carries his soul. He was obsessed with matters of health. Coughs, colds and sniffles were constantly debated. Damp, draughts and icy east winds were seen as a deadly peril; padding and defensive flannels a must. Gout, scarlet fever, jaundice and pneumonia were all ailments encountered in the course of his life, but in the absence of any more serious problem he would make a tremendous to-do over a scratch.

Short and rather stocky, with a tendency to corpulence, Palmer had a gluttonous streak. When he wrote of eating goose, ‘that great king of birds', or its ‘humbler but no less delicious relative, the duck',
6
it was with such orgiastic relish that a reader can almost see the grease running in glistening dribbles down his chin. The constitutionally lean Linnell mocked him for his greed. ‘When Palmer a duck did buy/ he laid it not on the shelf/ but stuffed it full on the sly/ and with it he stuffed himself.' But Palmer grew used to such taunts and revelled in his luxuries. However busy he found himself, he would always try to find some time in the evening in which he could ‘loll and roll about like a cat on the rug', he said. It was the best way to oil the wheels ‘and make the old mud cart of existence roll on without creaking'.
7
He was a snuff taker and pipe smoker who found it hard to give up tobacco. Even cultural pleasures took on a sensual cast. The ‘chastity of most of the Antique is too mild and pure for my gross appetite to relish', he wrote, and though he could imagine that some ‘have a very refin'd pleasure in a boil'd chicken' he would take ‘the
rich experience
of roasted goose' any day, which is to chicken what Michelangelo is to the Antique.
8

Blake had seen sex as a form of spiritual freedom, a lack of restraint which could let the hidebound soul loose. All his life he had taken an obsessive, even pornographic, pleasure in the practice. The Ancients were a great deal less liberated. But still, a sense of their sexuality constantly simmers. Missing Richmond dreadfully after he has returned to London, Palmer resorted to a letter, ‘that wing of lovers' thoughts', to fill the ‘gasping hiatus'
9
that his friend's departure has left. ‘Oh, if we loved one another's souls as we ought to love, methinks our eyes would so run down with rivers of water that we could scarce any more enjoy the shining of the sun,'
10
he exclaimed. He enjoyed a similar closeness to Calvert and, though few of his missives to this older man survive, even a fragment can convey their perhaps slightly suspect intimacy. ‘Like a blind baby feeling for the breast knows the taste of milk,' but has ‘a somewhat precocious appetite for cream', Palmer wrote, he could find the cream in one of Calvert's pictures.
11
All his life, he was to keep a handful of titillating woodcuts by his friend in a secret portfolio – ‘mind toners'
12
he called them – and a few of the erotic prints once belonging to the Greek collector, Alexander Constantine Ionides (who, in the mid-1820s, had been a close friend of Calvert's) and now in the V&A, could quite possibly have been engraved by Palmer.

It has even been speculated that Palmer indulged homosexual tendencies. He was not an assertively masculine character, but there is no proof that the shared frolics and fervid intimacies of Shoreham ever amounted to anything more than an overspill of youth's frothing passions. Palmer's natural proclivities inclined towards women. He missed female company in Shoreham and, writing to London, asked Richmond to ‘most adoringly, vehemently, and kissingly present my quaint but true knightly devotion to the young Ladies One and All'. His request that these ladies should honour him occasionally with their thoughts – even if it be ‘only to set their pretty mouths a-giggle at the remembrance of my spectacles'
13
– offers a glimpse of the flirtations he enjoyed. At the end of this letter, in an impetuous postscript added apropos of nothing in particular, he declared: ‘I am looking for a wife.'
14
A year almost to the day later he was still looking. ‘
I want a Wife sadly
!
'
15
he confided to Linnell. He longed for ‘a nice tight armful of a spirited young lady,' he told him a few weeks later; a ‘young wife to kiss and be kiss'd by, on whose breast to lay a head aching with study into whose heart to pour our joys'. ‘You
have
such a wife,' he wrote enviously: ‘I only in feeble imagining.'
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