Mysterious Wisdom (40 page)

His other problems, however, were less easily solved. He felt, he said, ‘MISERABLY HAMPERED' by his duties.
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Whenever he tried to get away to the country, ‘some horrid teaching engagement' would ‘snare him by the leg'.
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How could the omnibus office at Paddington be compared with Devon's Mount Edgecombe, or the Kilburn Road with the ‘thunder fraught' Hamoaze (the estuary of the Tamar)? he wondered.
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The warm weather that delighted those holidaying in the country seemed to him, stuck in the capital, more like a glaring and uncomfortable heat.

‘I must, D.V. [
Deus Vult
or
Deo Volente
meaning ‘God willing' is a medieval acronym that peppers Palmer's letters and notes] strike out at once into a NEW STYLE. SIMPLE SUBJECT; BOLD EFFECT; BROAD RAPID EXECUTION,'
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he resolved after a sketching trip in 1847. From the late 1840s a new energy infused his work. He visited King Arthur's Castle at Tintagel: a huge bluff of ‘tumbled about'
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rock that Turner in 1815 had painted, assaulted by powerful shipwrecking storms. Discovering a little hut in which he could shelter, he sketched the rocky masses heaving upwards like waves against his horizon; a sudden rainy squall blowing across the slopes, tossing glittering seagulls and fragments of light.

Palmer also embarked around this time on a series of literary scenes. He painted the departure of Ulysses from the sea-nymph Calypso's rocky home: their sad farewell set against the sinking sun's gold. He depicted Christian's descent into the Valley of Humiliation: a lowering drama that discovers a lone hero on the brink of his greatest battle. Accounting meticulously for every literary detail – the red cloak that falls from Christian's shoulder reveals that his back is unprotected by armour which is why he will later stand and fight the foul fiend Apollyon rather than flee – Palmer worked for hours on each of these pieces. Yet, exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society in 1848, his image from
Pilgrim's Progress
was returned unsold. The picturesque formulas of such fellow members as Thomas Miles Richardson and William Collingswood Smith (both elected associates in the same year as Palmer) were far more widely preferred. A disappointed Palmer vowed to ‘foreswear HOLLOW compositions' such as Calypso; to stop painting ‘great spaces of sky' and ‘TAKE SHELTER in TREES'. ‘Directly poetical subjects are less saleable,'
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he decided. But his tastes were too deeply engrained to abandon. He was stranded on rocky islands of romance. In 1850, he chose a subject from
Robinson Crusoe
, a novel which must have appealed particularly to a painter who had been all but marooned.

Like the famous literary outcast, he made the best of what he had: which was watercolour. Working on large pieces of board, he continued to test the capacities of this medium, tackling his ambitious subjects with panache, infusing his elaborate compositions with light. He still harboured yearnings to become an oil painter and, though for a while these were encouraged by his close friend, the enthusiastic amateur artist and deaf mute John Reed, for all his persistent efforts, for all the notes that he kept so punctiliously in a portfolio devoted to the mysteries of this material, his hopes were consistently frustrated. Palmer ran down an analytical dead end. The stacks of stretched canvases, primed panels and never completed pictures that were discovered after his death in his lumber room bore a sad testimony to his failed dreams.

Palmer, however, was learning to work a little more quickly, for, though he compared his paintings to ‘apples which will not ripen till they have been kept a long while in the cupboard', he no longer ‘pored and bored'
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over them as he used to, he said, but instead worked on four or five at once. In 1852 he sold everything at the Old Watercolour Society exhibition and afterwards received a commission from a Mr White – albeit a small one to be sold at a third of the exhibition price – who subsequently asked him to do a further seven pieces. Then at last, in 1854, after an eleven-year wait in which the continuing appearance of his name in the lower list – the list of associate rather than full members – had come to feel like an annual stigma, he was elected a full member of the Old Watercolour Society. He was as relieved as he was delighted. ‘Almost every member said I ought to have been in before,' he wrote.
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The family can hardly have looked forward to Christmas 1848 as they approached the first anniversary of little Mary's death, but it was to turn out to be even unhappier than they had anticipated. On 17 December, Palmer's father died. The generous if chaotic old man who had been so much a part of Sam's carefree childhood, of the dreams and delights of his rural Shoreham days, had rather faded from his married existence, his paternal role supplanted by the more competent Linnell. His sudden death stirred up deep sediments of memory, unsettling emotions of gratitude and regret. ‘The first gush of tears came with the thought, “How he loved my childhood's soul and MIND – how he laboured to improve them, sitting in the house and walking in the fields!”' Palmer wrote.
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He had lost his gentlest and most faithful ally. That spring he was to lose another when, in April 1849, Henry Walter, his boyhood friend and fellow Ancient, also passed away. Palmer, recovering from a protracted bout of illness, felt ‘
worn through
with the dejection of the sudden news and the prostration of
utter fatigue
',
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he told Richmond. He could not even get down to Torquay to pay his last respects for he had cried off from so many teaching obligations that he could do so no more.

Thomas More must have wished that Palmer had taken a leaf from his own father's book for, where the young Sam had been set free to discover his own course, More found himself forced upon an ever more narrowly prescriptive path. Intense religiosity was part of every Victorian upbringing. Achievement was highly valued in a progressive age. Contemporary attitudes to education were caricatured by Charles Dickens in his
Dombey and Son
, in which the unfortunate scion of the eponymous Dombey is put into the hands of a teacher whose system is ‘not to encourage a child's mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower; but to open it by force like an oyster'.
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‘Education,' said Palmer, ‘including at its foundation the fear and love of God, is all in all.'
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He regarded the process as a personal hobby, if not a holy calling. Schoolwork he believed to be ‘nothing short of divine'.
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There was nothing on earth more delightful, he declared, than the training of one's child. His son, even more precious now that Mary was gone, was his guinea pig. He set about giving More a thorough education with nothing ‘loose or slippery' and no ‘show or parade'. Palmer, who admired Milton for knowing Homer by heart before he was sixteen, saw difficulty as a challenge and diligence as the vehicle by which one could rise to meet it. It is ‘very difficult to do anything well from the blacking of shoes upwards',
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he said, but by taking pains one could achieve things both wisely and well. He believed firmly in the advantages of parental influence. He would not, he insisted, hand over his first born to some hired pedagogue, to some crinoline-clad nurse bawling angrily at her charges. ‘While ladies say they can't trust their servants with their keys,' he wrote to Miss Twining (who, having written a pamphlet on workhouse schooling, was always prepared to discuss such matters), ‘we see that they
can
trust them with their children: trust them at a most impressible age to take their shape and bent of mind and soul from hirelings! What then is the momentous business that can drag the mother from those dearest hours of her life,
her mornings with her children?
No business at all. You have answered the question. It is the hatred of conscientious painstaking in which and through which alone comes the delight of duty.'
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‘Home influence is maternal influence and
that
we
know
has formed the best and greatest men,'
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he concluded.

Palmer, however, believed with Locke that children's constitutions could be ‘either spoil'd or at least harm'd by Cockering and Tenderness'.
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He vigorously espoused the virtues of beating. ‘Flog on!' as his great aunt had said when an uncle, who had run away from home to enjoy the 1780 riots, had been found asleep among the cavalry horses in the Royal Exchange. Palmer would sometimes tell the story of one of his cousins who, though he had known perfectly well how to spell a word in his school book, had stubbornly refused to prove it to his parents. ‘They gave him a cold bath, whipped out the demon for a time,' Palmer remembered. But it always came back. Once, Palmer had managed to coax the boy into spelling the word privately. He had done so correctly, and his cousin had reported as much; ‘But soon after he was up the next morning he was playing hare to the hounds round the garden, till they caught him at last and brought him in for a birching.' That ‘birching was blest' Palmer had concluded, for ‘I saw him the other day, a worthy, cheerful old gentleman'.
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The ‘most calamitous of our birthdays', Palmer once declared, was that on which we ‘become too old for whipping',
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while ‘the disuse of those few moderate twigs of birch in our nurseries', he told a friend many years later, ‘is a patent infatuation'.
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And yet, for all his strenuous advocation of the virtues of corporal punishment – ‘Will boys learn at home without the distant probability of the strap?'
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Palmer wondered – the rod remained in his house for the most part a mere threat. He rarely punished and, when he did, the penalties imposed were slight. Indeed, looking back many years later on his efforts to educate his son, he declared paradoxically that ‘the peculiar excellence of home teaching' lay ‘in the earliest lessons being made pleasant', that a child should be beguiled and not beaten and that – bar an occasional correction for idleness – for every cuff given by an ill-tempered parent, the parent deserved to receive a dozen back – ‘and pretty hard ones too'.
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The foundations of More's future were dauntingly solid. ‘I do think a boy should
know by heart
and
understand
some short Latin Grammar – the Eton say – and should go through the first book of Euclid with a private tutor before going to school,' Palmer said.
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Latin was fundamental – ‘for without it I do not think the best English has ever been written or spoken: and as speech pre-eminently distinguishes us from the brutes . . . we ought surely to speak well'
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– so, though prosody could be deferred for a while, irregular verbs and syntax needed to be ‘thoroughly mastered so that they can never be forgotten – and syntax wants the pains of home teaching that it may be
understood
as well as got by rote'.
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More was encouraged to draw. He was taught to read aloud, enunciating properly so that he could entertain his mother while she was sketching or amuse the family as they gathered round the fire. He shared his father's love of music and played the piano; one day, when their piano tuner failed to turn up, Palmer worried terribly that the jarring notes might do his son's ear lasting damage. More particularly liked the organ. As a fourteen-year-old, on holiday in Margate, he would rise at half past six to spend his mornings playing Handel and Corelli on the instrument at the town baths. A year later, officiating temporarily as an organist at a church in Earl's Court, he proved highly proficient, playing the congregation out with a rousing
Hallelujah Chorus.
He and his father filled happy hours discussing ‘fugues, stop-diapasons, open-diapasons, double-diapasons, the swell, swell-couplers, principals, fifteenths, sequialteras, bourdon, and double sets of 32-feet pipes!'
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Palmer recalled. And, in 1858, he took his son to Crystal Palace where they drifted happily about amid the displays of pictures ‘while from the distant, great organ, sweet streams of melody spread like perfume through the halls'.
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