Mysterious Wisdom (53 page)

The decline of religion was another thorn in his side. In the fast-growing towns, neither Anglican minister nor Nonconformist pastor could maintain proper contact with his congregation – not even with the indirect allurements of charitable handouts or free education in Sunday schools. The latest scientific discoveries did not help. The faith espoused by Paley's
Natural Theology
, a foundation stone of Palmer's religious belief, had been steadily eroded by strong new currents of evolutionary thought. The discovery of fossils in Tierra del Fuego had posed possibilities which the biblical creation story could not account for. Charles Darwin's 1859
On the Origin of Species
shook the moral and metaphysical framework of Western civilisation: it questioned the belief that man was set above the beasts, a unique species sharing in and aspiring to divine love. This greatly disturbed Palmer who kept up to date with developments by reading periodicals. Deplorable as he found ‘the encroachments of tasteless dissipation upon all that is most precious in English domestic life, there is yet a viler and more alarming defection,' he declared, which is ‘that air of independence of God'
12
that rises from ‘athletic young atheists who have outgrown their souls'.
13
The whole mental and moral atmosphere reeked with infidelity,
14
he ranted. Educated Christians were becoming less religious than the average pagan of antiquity. The nation, quite literally, was going to the devil. He would not part with Chapter 58 of Isaiah for all the dismal millions of ages or cavernous bone-grubbing of the geologists, he insisted. His faith was that of Augustine and Anselm, Bacon and Milton, Dante and Pascal. ‘Would these men have thrown away their Bibles because coral reefs took a long time forming, or somebody fancied himself the grandson of an ape?'
15
As far as Palmer was concerned, progress was never so rapid as when it was running down hill.

 

 

Palmer withdrew into the peaceful world of his study as he had once withdrawn to the seclusion of a rural valley and it was there, amid loved books and artistic treasures, amid prayers and meditations and rambling memories, that he rediscovered a lost vision. It might not have been as fervid as it had been in Shoreham, but during the Furze Hill exile of the final part of his life he worked on the finest pictures he had created since his youth.

‘If we had ventured into his study on a certain autumn day in 1864,' Herbert wrote, ‘we should have found him, glue-brush in hand, joining together two millboards with a broad strip of rough canvas. When this was dry, behold a primitive portfolio! We should have seen him fix upon it a great label bearing the giant letters “MIL”, and then begin a long and thoughtful search through the other portfolios, which, crammed to bursting, lined the room. One by one he reflectively picked out from the classical divisions of each, sketches from nature, small and large; highly finished or mere pencil indications with written memoranda, and tiny effect “blots” on scraps of paper.'
16
This was the start of one of the two projects that were to dominate his last two decades.

The inception of this project has, slightly fancifully, been compared by a previous biographer, Raymond Lister, to that of the commissioning of Mozart's
Requiem
. The great musician was approached shortly before his death by a mysterious stranger whom he, perhaps already suffering fits of the hallucinatory fever that would eventually kill him, thought to be an emissary of the supernatural world. The music of the
Requiem
obsessed Mozart until the end of his life. Palmer's commission was less dramatic but equally strange; and a grave and portentous stranger also called the tune. His name was Leonard Rowe Valpy, a Lincoln's Inn solicitor who included John Ruskin among his clients and pursued an ardent and often strongly opinionated sideline as a connoisseur and collector of art.

Palmer, for all that Ruskin had never followed up his first passing interest in his work, had continued to admire this critic and, in 1870, would gratefully receive a copy of his
Queen of the Air
inscribed ‘Samuel Palmer with John Ruskin's love'. He shared his appreciation for the Pre-Raphaelites and he and Millais had found much to agree upon when they had one day happened to find themselves standing side by side admiring a painting by Turner. ‘What an admirable man Rossetti must be!'
17
Palmer had exclaimed on first encountering his poetry. Rossetti in his turn had found much to praise in Palmer's work. He predicted a successful future for his poetic landscapes and he was right. In the wake of the Pre-Raphaelites' espousal of the Ancients' belief in the spiritual integrity of the medieval art, there was a noticeable shift in critical opinions of Palmer. To a cultural world that had been introduced to the myriad-hued canvases of Holman Hunt, Palmer's blazing sunsets and flaring dawns no longer looked startling. ‘Mr Palmer may rush into chromatic regions where other artists fear even to breathe,' wrote an
Art Journal
critic in 1866, ‘but still in the midst of madness there is a method which reconciles the spectator to the result.'
18
Palmer came to be seen as an exponent of what one writer labelled a ‘polychromatic school'. ‘Mr Ruskin in past years pronounced this artist the coming man,' the
Art Journal
declared in 1866. ‘Accordingly Mr Palmer now realises his prediction.'

In 1863, Valpy had bought one of Palmer's paintings from the winter exhibition of the Old Watercolour Society. It was a small (now lost) landscape showing a chapel by a bridge. Valpy had contacted the painter and – in a first sign of the opinionated bullying that would lead to later collisions – had asked whether he would take the work back and tone the light down a little. Palmer, bending as was too often his wont to the demands of an overbearing character, had obliged and so had begun a friendship which, developing through copious correspondence, was to play a stimulating if sometimes upsetting role in his declining years, rousing Palmer from his isolation, stirring his mind to fresh argument and his imagination to renewed vigour even as his physical capacities began to fail.

Herbert, ten at the time of first meeting Valpy, was not inclined to like him. His face was keen, stern and dark, he recalled, with a low retreating forehead and black hair in places turning grey. He had a ‘reluctant smile, and a deep, deliberate diction [that] seemed to forbid the associating him with any of the luxuries of life, or (save in religious matters) with its emotions'. When it came to ‘the lighter vein of table talk', he was even less responsive that Linnell.
19
He also ‘had a fine repertory of what he imagined to be studio gestures', Herbert noted acerbically, exclamations and attitudes of a sort from which Palmer was completely free.
20
He believed himself to be a man of distinguished sensibilities who ‘sought refreshment in nature's deepest and highest utterances'; who could ‘revel in the tints of a dying bramble-leaf, and who could fling his law, and his caution, and his seriousness behind him, before a beautiful landscape or a resplendent sunset'.
21
These poetic inclinations impressed Herbert's open-hearted father. When in the summer of 1864, Valpy contacted him, wondering if he had ‘anything in hand which specially affected his “inner sympathies”',
22
Palmer wrote excitedly back: ‘You read my thoughts! . . . Only three days have passed since I did begin the meditation of a subject which, for twenty years, has affected my sympathies with sevenfold inwardness; though now, for the first time, I seem to feel in some sort the power of realising it.'
23
This long-dreamt-of project was a set of small works inspired by Milton's meditations on mirth and melancholy:
L'Allegro
and
Il Penseroso.
Palmer had frequently painted other Miltonic subjects, but these two pastoral odes
– for which Blake had once completed designs – appealed to his deepest affections.

They would hardly have appealed to the tastes of his times. The mid-Victorian preference was for big, polished pictures that told colourful stories; that conveyed moral messages or captured the densely packed drama of contemporary life. William Powell Frith's panorama
The Derby Day
,
with its crowds of top-hatted race-goers, its fashionable carriages and barefooted gypsies, its picnickers, yokels and acrobats, had stolen the show at the Royal Academy in 1858. A rail had had to be erected to hold back the gawping crush. Hubert Von Herkomer had found enormous popularity with his conscience-stirring depictions of the lives of the poor and Ford Madox Brown had been admired for such sentimental scenarios as
The Last of England
in which a pair of anxious emigrants are shown huddled on the deck of an Antipodean-bound ship, or his richly symbolic
Work
which, taking him twelve years to complete, set out to show labour as it affects all strata of society. Landseer, too, had become a great favourite with his anthropomorphised portraits of pets and his proud cervine monarchs, which, presiding over their wild Scottish glens, had done much to popularise the Highland dream which the Queen and her consort had first made fashionable by decamping for Balmoral. Royal holidays in Deeside set a new trend for country life. But sporting pleasures amid heather-clad rocks could hardly have been further from Palmer's pastoral ideal.

Palmer was only too aware that in accepting Valpy's commission much would have to be sacrificed, but he was prepared to make the commitment and finally, in April 1865, after months of contemplation and planning, it had been settled that there would be eight, small watercolours, four from
L'Allegro
and four from
Il Penseroso
. He initially intended them to be twinned, demonstrating oppositions of mood and varieties of effects to their best advantage and though in the end he did not achieve this, doing three from the first poem and five from the next, echoes of the planned pairing can still be spotted. The optimistic promise of a rising sun, for instance, may be compared to the quiet solemnity of a gathering dusk.

Palmer embarked on his Milton project with a spring in his step. ‘Without aiming at anything beyond or outside my tether,' he ventured, ‘I hope, if it be not presumption, to produce a few things that may justly be called a work of art.'
24
These works of art – though the final one was never quite finished to his satisfaction – were to become his obsession for the last seventeen years of his life.

 

 

Palmer ransacked his portfolios, perusing his sketches, bringing together the best of them, combining ‘mappy Buckinghamshire treatment'
25
with ‘southern Dartmoor sentiment',
26
to evoke that imaginative realm in which he had wandered since boyhood. It must have been a delight – most of all when he drifted back through memories of Shoreham: ‘It is a breaking out of village fever long after contact,' he said.
27
The commission was never far from his thoughts and, although beset by other duties, he managed to work away ‘
heart
and
sou
l
'
28
in whatever time he could spare, sometimes first thing in the morning, sometimes last thing at night. ‘Milton's nuts are worth the trouble of cracking,' he told Valpy, ‘for each has a kernel in it. Monkeys and illustrators are apt to make faces when they crack and find nothing.'
29
Confined to his chair by an asthma attack, Palmer made the most of his indisposition, leafing through his portfolios and, one evening, while chatting to John Preston Wright, he paused suddenly in mid-flow, asking his friend to remain in position because he wanted to sketch the way his coat was falling for one of the works.