Mysterious Wisdom (5 page)

 

Why hire a lodging in a house unknown

For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own?

This second weaning, needless as it is,

How does it lacerate both your heart and his!

 

Maybe Palmer followed the same pleading tack.
By the time autumn came, his parents had brought him home. The Merchant Taylors' experiment had lasted barely six months.

 

 

Palmer was delighted to be back in familiar surroundings from which, like the protagonist of Cowper's most famous work, ‘The Task', he could peep at the world through ‘the loop holes of retreat'; watch ‘the stir/ of the Great Babel', but not ‘feel the crowd'. Seclusion was always to suit him and most of all when it was shared with a small companionable group. ‘SNUG', he was later to write: ‘how much lies in that little word . . . Did you never put up your feet on the fender and . . . wish you could
roll
yourself up like a dormouse? . . . a cosy corner is the thing to sit down in.'
21

His nurse, Mary Ward, was a cherished member of his homely circle. More than just a hired help, she became a much-loved part of the family with which she would remain for the rest of her life. She was clearly an unusual woman for, at a time when most servants would have been illiterate, she had read deeply from her two most treasured volumes: the Bible and a popular copy of Milton's verse. It was to Mary, Palmer said, that he owed his first true poetic experience, one that would shape his vision for the rest of his life.

Palmer had not yet turned four at the time and had still been living in Surrey Square where, tucked up in bed on a winter night, he remembered lying wakefully, watching the moon rising through the bare elm branches, floating away into a deep violet dusk. Its silvery light flooded into his room. Palmer gazed at the shadows that were cast by the trees, at their shapes fiddling and tangling upon painted walls. But it was Mary, he said, who gave meaning to these ephemeral patterns, fixing a picture of them forever in his head. ‘Well do I remember,' he recalled many years later, ‘while the long shadows of moonlight were stealing over an ancient room, her repeating from Dr Young: “Fond man, the vision of a moment made,/ Dream of a dream, and shadow of a shade!”'
22
This couplet – Edward Young's poetic echo of the philosophical allegory in which Plato imagines that mankind is imprisoned in a cave, perceiving reality only in the form of its shadows as they are cast by a fire upon surrounding walls – entranced the youthful Palmer. Shadows for him accrued a soulful new resonance from then on, conjuring not just an awareness of life's fragile mysteries but also a wistful yearning for a greater reality beyond. Again and again, as an artist, he would paint crepuscular scenes. ‘Of all creatures the owls and I love twilight best,'
23
he would say.

Mary Ward also instilled a deep reverence for the poetry of Milton. She would have known the great poet's work from her youth when it had been very much part of popular culture, its epic dramas inspiring the era's leading artists or conjured up for the masses in the Eidophusikon, an entertainment palace in London's Leicester Square in which, by means of complicated systems of mirrors and pulleys, huge theatrical paintings of Miltonic scenes were made to appear to move. Mary had a Tonson's pocket Milton, an illustrated collection of his poems which, first published by Jacob Tonson in 1688, was to run into more than sixty editions between 1770 and 1825. This was the volume, seldom far from her side, from which Mary would recite to Sam as a child and which she would bequeath him upon her death. It was a legacy he would always treasure, along with her pair of simple, roughly worked spectacles and the tin ear-trumpet which she used in old age. Binding the book with brass corners, he would carry it in his pocket for more than twenty years. He came to know most of it by heart. Its images stocked his artistic imagination; its sonorous rhythms stirred the depths of his soul. ‘I am never in a “lull” about Milton,' he would write more than fifty years later; ‘. . . nor can tell how many times I have read his poems . . . He never tires.'
24
‘I do believe his stanzas will be read in heaven.'
25

Mary Ward became almost a second mother to Palmer. She had to be for, on 18 January 1818, his real mother suddenly died. She was not yet forty. Sam was almost thirteen and was visiting his grandfather when an uncle arrived to break the tragic news. ‘It was like a sharp sword sent through the length of me,'
26
he wrote.

 

Portrait of Sam Palmer
1819 by Henry Walter.

This is likeness of Palmer taken by his childhood

friend presents a solemn fourteen year old at

the very beginning of his artistic career.

3

The Beginnings of an Artist

 

Oh that I had had the human bones broken about my stupid head

from
The Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

The death of a devoted mother would fall heavily on any young boy, but for the home-loving Sam it was particularly painful. He struggled to cope with a confusion of feelings and even many years later the wounds had not healed. He would sit and weep softly over Cowper's
On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture
, a work which, recalling the poet's own bereavement, would always move Palmer to tears.

 

My mother! when I learn'd that thou wast dead,

Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed?

Hover'd thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son,

Wretch even then, life's journey just begun?

Perhaps thou gav'st me, though unseen, a kiss;

Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss . . .

 

It was, he thought, the most affecting poem in the English language.

The more practical consequence of the loss, however, was to set people thinking about the direction which thirteen-year-old Sam's life should take. An artistic path, it was decided, would suit his proclivities. Attitudes to painters had altered greatly over the course of the previous fifty years. Where formerly they had been considered mere craftsman, by the end of the eighteenth century they had acquired professional respect. Immanuel Kant had effected what he had himself claimed to be the equivalent of a Copernican revolution in philosophy: where Enlightenment thinkers had sought to describe a strictly objective world, he had argued that reality could only be interpreted from the unique viewpoint of each individual and in so doing he had paved the way for Romanticism. He had set the creative spirit free to soar up to imaginative pinnacles, to a place where the dreamer could commune with a higher reality and the visionary discover truths in the solitude of his soul.

Palmer, as a boy, had dreamt of becoming an author like his grandfather. He had attempted verse from early youth, but as a poet he was never to advance
beyond an ornately self-conscious style:

 

Methinks the lingring, dying ray

Of twilight time, doth seem more fair,

And lights the soul up more than day,

When wide-spread, sultry sunshines are.

Yet all is right and all most fair,

For Thou, dear God, hast formed all;

Thou deckest ev'ry little flower

Thou guidest ev'ry planet ball

And mark'st when sparrows fall.
1

 

In prose, however, Palmer was to discover a more authentic voice. His letters reveal a descriptive verve, a stylistic flair and freshness of perception that suggest that, had he shed a lecturing tone of long-winded and sometimes pious pomposity, he might have made something of the writer's calling. He speaks of ‘our earthly hopes' being ‘shed like shirt buttons';
2
he describes a damaged etching plate as being ‘bent up like an earwig disturbed in an egg-plum';
3
he explains that ‘to stuff the mind with a legion of little facts makes it stupid and heavy as a bed is made heavy by its fullness of light feathers';
4
he describes the tortured flourishes of modern operas as running ‘up and down, backwards and forward, and round and round, like a squirrel in his cage'.
5

‘Attention [is] the daughter of Curiosity who seldom can be prevailed upon to go anywhere without her mother,'
6
Palmer wrote; or ‘in the North when there happens to be a dull summer – nothing but grey grey grey – the poor mind begins to feel as if it were going to bed with cold feet'.
7
His images are resonant and his relish for language can almost be tasted on the tongue when he describes a cup of cocoa with its ‘oleaginous globosities bobbing about as you stir it like porpoises of the deep'
8
or discusses the ‘sapid hotch potch' of Southey, in which he has been ‘routing like a hungry hog',
9
or rails against ‘all this gaseous rhodomontade about the Ideal'.
10

However for all the vigour of the copious letters that Palmer would write throughout the course of his life, his literary ambitions, remained those of the ‘true bookworm'. ‘Some place their bliss in action,' he wrote to his boyhood friend Walter Williams in 1839, effortlessly slipping in a line from Pope, but on ‘a dull, pattering, gusty December day, which forbids our wishes to rove beyond the tops of the chimney-pots', what he would most want would be ‘a good register stove; a sofa strewed with books; a reading friend, and above all, a locked door forbidding impertinent intrusions'. A day like this, he wrote, punctuated by ‘a light dinner about one o'clock', ‘a little prosy chat (not too argumentative), just to help digestion; then books again, till blessed green-tea-time winds us up for
Macbeth
or
Hamlet
',
11
was his idea of ecstasy.

As far as a profession was concerned, however, it was decided that Palmer should apply himself to the visual arts. Looking back, he considered the choice misguided. ‘It is too commonly the case,' he observed, that when a young man ‘prefers scribbling over paper to his Latin and Greek, he is supposed to have a “taste for painting”'.
12
He had liked music and architecture more, he said. His earliest known picture – a tiny watercolour done when he was seven of a windmill, with a man fishing in the pond in front of it – though dated and proudly preserved by his mother (and then kept by him for his ‘dear Mother's'
13
sake), reveals no especial talent although its small size and rural subject matter might be considered prescient.

It is possible that his family had pushed him towards painting because they felt they were pursuing a deceased mother's wish. Martha had always encouraged her son's creative efforts. In an 1814 letter from Margate she told her husband that Sam had been sketching the local church for a cousin and that now this same relative wanted a picture of a mackerel too. This letter, however, also hinted at the source of the misunderstanding regarding his choice of career. His earliest artistic forays, he much later explained, stemmed not from an inborn attraction to painting but from a ‘passionate love' – and the expression was not too strong, he assured his correspondent – ‘for the traditions and monuments of the Church; its cloistered abbeys
, cathedrals and minsters', which he was always imagining and trying to draw; ‘spoiling much paper with pencils, crayons and watercolours'.
14