Mysterious Wisdom (46 page)

He was the ‘most wounded crushed and insignificant of human beings',
28
he said: ‘a blighted palsied parboiled creature'; ‘a poor crazy carcass'
29
‘worthless other than as a curiosity'.
30
‘I have said unto the worm thou art my sister,' Palmer wrote.
31
He could not settle to his painting and yet every hour unoccupied drove him further towards madness. When he caught flu, he was pleased to be at least stupefied; when he recovered, his health felt like a curse for it only left him more sensible to the pain of his grief. On hearing that ‘dearest dearest Finch'
32
had suffered a stroke (his second) he wished that he could die instead of his old friend. It was only after many weeks had passed that he could even say: ‘Yesterday was the
only
day a part of which I have not passed in bitter weeping.'
33

The father's anguish would only have been heightened by the appalling suspicion that he, at least in part, might have been at fault. The doctors decided that More had died of a sudden effusion of blood on the brain. ‘Over-work!' Palmer blurted out to Richmond in his first dreadful rush of despair. Yet if he feared that his relentless study programme had been too much for his son, it was a secret remorse, never openly acknowledged but left to fester and nag. ‘I really
did
treat the dear boy liberally and handsomely,'
34
he later told Julia Richmond. ‘I always discouraged head work for a long while after dinner – and at one time played a game or two at backgammon every afternoon with him to
keep
him from study,'
35
he informed Gilchrist. The death of his son was the fault of the climate, he later insisted. ‘Had we and the grammar school been in a dry bracing air I think my dear one would have been with us now,'
36
he wrote. But it was not his correspondents who needed such assurances; it was Palmer himself.

 

 

Palmer and Hannah returned only briefly to London. Neither could bear the idea of remaining at Douro Place. They could never have gathered again in that cosy parlour without the ghost of their dead son drifting among them; they could never have played the silk-fronted piano without seeing his pale hands moving over the keys. Besides, as Palmer told Richmond, they did have
one
child left and – even if they seemed almost to have given up on him already – they still wanted to do the best for him, which would entail finding ‘a tolerably bracing spot'
37
out of town where Palmer could get on with the work which would provide for what remained of his family.

Where to go, was the problem. The grieving Palmer was too sad to care about scenery: a beautiful view gave him ‘no more pleasure than the contemplation of the kitchen sink'.
38
But while his wife wanted only to linger in the place where she had last seen her son, to have remained at High Ashes would have been more than Palmer could bear and so, two weeks after the death, the Palmer family were to be found in a cramped, rented cottage on Redhill Common, close by to the Linnells, where they planned to stay while they looked for somewhere else. The banalities of house-hunting at least offered Palmer a sense of pragmatic purpose. He was not unaware of the bathos of the situation: ‘The drooping head over which angels watch must be lifted up amidst this unfeeling hard world of ours and – degraded in men's eyes by the sorrow which should make it sacred – peer about and “look sharp” and go on the tramp after hideous boxes with stuccoed sides and slated roofs – called Houses! And we must frequent the sweet society of house agent and pore over their mystic books.'
39

He wanted a healthy rural place, within easy train distance from London, near to Hannah's family and with a grammar school for Herbert, who, he said, must be educated and not left to run with the village boys. Redhill seemed to offer a solution, except neither of them liked the place: even the sight of the railway line, down which their dear boy had gone to die, was harrowing, wrote Palmer, and the view it offered towards the slopes of Leith Hill where their son lay buried was dreadful to his sight. And so, despite all the help and advice of the many friends to whom the Palmers had recourse, the search for a home for the time being proved fruitless. By the end of the summer they had moved into another set of rented lodgings in Reigate.

Palmer crept into that cottage, Herbert remembered, ‘like a sorely wounded animal no longer able to meet his kind'.
40
‘All that is left untouched by the finger of woe is the black cat who was found this morning purring in the copper with two kittens,'
41
Palmer told Julia Richmond. Soon this contented feline would be his only companion, for the cottage was not only incommodious, but damp and, at the doctor's recommendation, the rheumatic Hannah and delicate Herbert retired to Redstone. It was a return which would surely have been encouraged by Linnell, not least since his own wife had fallen ill that summer. He also extended the hand of friendship to Palmer, sending him (as he had once done to Blake) a ton of coal so that he would not be cold. The gesture, however, though thoughtful, was not sufficient to re-warm the relationship between them and the occasional letters Palmer wrote to Linnell during this period are brief, businesslike dispatches. The last token strands of the friendship between them were being allowed to snap.

With nobody but Herbert's old nursemaid to care for him, Palmer was abandoned to his solitary grief. The six months that followed were probably the most melancholy of his life; but he struggled against depression, resolving at the very least to do his duty, to get on with the work that he could not afford to neglect, especially since More's illness had incurred heavy medical costs. When not painting, he tried to ‘ward off the ghastly thoughts' among his ‘dear kind books'.
42
It proved a fairly effective policy. Not only did five drawings by him appear in the 1862 summer show but, in the ‘sweet society' of the authors he loved, he found himself ‘as little miserable as one can be who, in the world, must never more be happy'.
43
He found in the Bible – particularly in the morose narratives of Job and the laments of Exodus – emotional fellowship. And though, when the gospels of two Sundays in succession could proffer nothing more comforting than first the parable of the barren fig tree and then the story of the buried talent, his mind was driven to ever more painful meditations, his faith in the long run stood firm. We may sail in an egg shell, with a straw for a mast and a cobweb for a rope, he wrote, quoting from Ben Jonson; but ‘
then
comes the voice from Heaven, bidding us open our eyes and see, and stretch out our hands and
grasp
the ANCHOR OF THE SOUL . . .'
44

The people he most loved provided another source of consolation. ‘Having nothing left which I do not expect to lose, my entire earthly solace must henceforth be in the wellbeing of my friends,' he told young Julia Richmond, and he implored her ‘whenever another little budget of events accrues' to write. ‘Do not “wonder” in future whether “I shall care to hear from you” for though you are a very young lady you are a very old friend.'
45
It must have tugged at his heart strings to hear that her brother Willie was winning prizes at the Royal Academy, but he still sent the boy a message to say how much he would like him to visit – though, since it was December and he knew how valuable daylight becomes in winter to artists preparing work for Academy exhibition, he would understand if he did not have the time. He fussed over the news that his old friend Richmond had a cold, putting it down to the dampness of the clay he was sculpting, recommending that he light a fire in his studio two hours before he enters so that he may go into warm vapour rather than the chill dank.

Palmer missed his family. When he felt lonely at tea time, he would set out a chair for his little cat Trot. ‘Up jumps poor puss and between us we make a segment of the circle,' he told Mrs George. ‘Even the dumb creatures have gratitude and love in their measure, and the time will come when we shall know that the sagacity which finds a new planet is less essential to the perfection of our nature than gratitude and love.'
46
He was sympathetic when his brother William yet again presented a problem. After more than twenty years working at the British Museum, William had lost his job in the Department of Antiquities, having been absent through illness (he was suffering a disease of the cranial bones and rheumatism, the minutes of a museum sub-committee record) for almost a year. He was facing imminent beggary, said Palmer, who, having apparently forgiven his deceitful sibling for pawning all his pictures, set about trying to contact trustees who might be persuaded to secure more than the basic superannuation allowance for a man who had four mouths to feed. ‘The future of my poor brother's children
rankles
within me,' for they are ‘clothed with all the desolateness and none of the poetry of sorrow',
47
he told Richmond who in his turn, as so often, tried to help out. For a while, it was hoped that William's son might be employed in his place as a museum attendant, but although by January of the following year the father was receiving his £46 pension, there is no record of his boy having been given the job.

Palmer had always been generous but the deep sense of charity that characterised his later years was engendered by sorrow. ‘Perhaps without sorrow there is little sympathy for others,' Palmer suggested; ‘for by sympathy I do not mean any amount of good nature, but fellowship in suffering.'
48
Affliction, he wrote, ‘acts like a vigorous stonebreaker upon the flint of our hard hearts'.
49
And yet, beyond all the brave efforts to rebuild his life, his sadness always lay waiting; often he could do nothing to fight but gave way to his grief. ‘Today the first snow has fallen upon
our
dear boy's grave!' he wrote that winter to Mrs George as he sat alone by his fireside, the wind moaning round the house. ‘It is a foolish fancy; but I have always felt it very sad that, while
we
are warm by our winter fireside, those precious limbs, mouldering though they be, of our lost dear ones, should be far away from us, unhoused and in the damp, cold earth, under the wind, and rain, and frost.'
50

 

 

The single greatest help to Palmer's recovery came in the form of another death. At the end of November, Alexander Gilchrist passed away. Palmer had grown close to him over the five or so years that he had spent working on his
Life of William Blake
and had enjoyed many hours at his family home in Cheyne Walk. He had helped to nurse him through the bout of scarlet fever that had eventually killed him. By shifting his focus from his own loss to a fellow sufferer's predicament, Palmer may have been saved from a more prolonged personal collapse. He proved a staunch friend to Gilchrist's wife, Anne, doing whatever he could to console her, to sustain her spirits and offer her new hope. The letters he sent her were his longest and most philosophical meditations on the process of mourning and Hannah joined him in sending messages of support. ‘Women who have suffered your bereavement,' she told the new widow, ‘are said to be under the
peculiar
protection of the Almighty – subject to his
peculiar
care tenderness and love.'
51