Mysterious Wisdom (54 page)

The Milton series spent a great deal of time packed safely away in a special bone box. But Palmer had always been a slow worker. ‘When our work is on the easel, I wish we were obliged to sit a quarter of an hour with our hands tied, to have time for forethought,'
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he had once told a pupil. He did not want to add one touch without proper consideration, he said. Often he would pause, just at that moment when he was about to apply the paint and, quite unconsciously, lay his palette and brushes aside to sit there instead, gazing for hours at a time. He had to wait for the right moment for, as he told Valpy, there are ‘gossamer films and tendernesses . . . which are not always done at the proper time, but come strangely when one cannot account for it'.
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His inching progress was the result of a minutely calibrated balance between technical knowledge and poetic inspiration, between judgement and impulse, thinking and feeling, fear and joy.

Valpy was initially very much involved in the process. Palmer informed him of every development, from the breaking up of a crimson tone which he thought would depress a saffron to the improvements that might be effected by a few faint touches of grey. Though Valpy was rather too literal-minded for an artist who sought out the spirit not the letter of a text, Palmer hoped to persuade him along a more imaginative path. As he exulted in the ‘unutterable going-in-itiveness'
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of his project, he failed to heed warning signs. Palmer had been put into artistic harness, Herbert observed, with the interfering Valpy holding the reins. Before long, he feared, Valpy would be riding roughshod over his father's sensibilities. The Wrights felt a similar distrust, Howard at one point becoming so incensed by the lawyer's pomposity and the dull drone of his talk that he withdrew to Herbert's bedroom to unburden himself of his contempt. The judgement of the youths was, unfortunately, to prove only too right.

Valpy grew increasingly impatient at the long delay. Soon a taut courtesy took the place of enthusiastic optimism; the correspondence thinned until, in 1875, Palmer, whose letters had once poured out in an excitable gabble, found himself struggling to put his emotions into words. No amount of explanation could stand in for feeling, he said, citing the story of Lord Stafford's housemaid who had stood leaning on her broom before a wondrous Claude not because it excited her curiosity, he explained, but because ‘she thought she was in Heaven'.
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Claude and Poussin, he said, ‘did not attempt to satisfy that curiosity of the eye which an intelligent tourist ever feeds and never sates'. They were not attempting merely to reproduce a scene: ‘They knew that every hedgerow contains more matter than could be crowded into a picture gallery; and that supposing they could deceive the eye, the real impression could not be completed but by touch and hearing – the gushing of air and the singing of birds. They addressed not the perception chiefly, but the IMAGINATION, and there is the hinge and essence of the whole matter.'
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It was pretty much the whole matter as far as Palmer and Valpy were concerned. An acquaintanceship which would probably have continued on a remote but equable level came to an abrupt end when Valpy, in 1879, almost fifteen years after he had first commissioned Palmer, decided that the artist should reduce his fee. Palmer was deeply wounded. ‘I loved the subjects, and was willing to be a loser in all but the higher matters of Art and Friendship,' he wrote. ‘I do not in the least complain that I have lost a thousand pounds by them . . . but I considered your taste and feeling so much above the ordinary standards that, in order fully to satisfy them, I have
lavished time without limit or measure
, even after I myself considered the works complete.'
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But, having given up so much time – ‘such a
ridiculous
amount some would say'
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– he decided to continue as he started and keep on doing his very utmost to the last.

 

 

Palmer had begun work on his Milton series at a time when it was becoming fashionable for artists to show their sketches: a rapid – and hence highly profitable – form of expression that could summon from its viewers an immediate response. But Palmer thought this practice superficial, a symptom of urban society's more general malaise. He sought instead a more profound form of perception, a spiritual revelation that would come only through long contemplation and meditative prayer. The eight Milton pictures ripened slowly to fruition,
A Towered City
,
The Lonely Tower
and
The Dripping Eaves
being completed in 1868,
The Curfew
in 1870,
The Waters Murmuring
in 1877 and then
The Prospect
and
The Open Gate
eleven years later in 1888, while the last image,
The Bellman
, he never considered to be fully completed. Together they represent the summation of his watercolour career: Palmer, sinking slowly down through the sediments of his memory, brought his imagination to rest on a bedrock of undisturbed myth. As his mind wandered amid the lands of his literary visions, amid Arcadian dreams and Virgilian stories, medieval fantasies and Spenserian pastorals, he drew together the images that had informed and shaped his own life: the sleeping shepherd that he had first admired as a student; the ‘monumental oak' which Milton had inspired him to draw, the pastoral beauties of the Ancients' Kentish valleys, the tall craggy skylines of his Welsh sketching trips; the luminous seascapes of tramps around Devon; the thick-moted sunlight of an Italian honeymoon. He remembered the classical aesthetic of Poussin; the tranquil poetry of Claude Lorrain, the crepuscular mystery of a Gothic aesthetic, the vaporous atmospheres of Dutch landscape.

Palmer was by then an old man. His eyes were dimming, but his memories glowed all the brighter for that. He was becoming like the bellman of his final painting, a lone figure walking through huddled village streets, tolling the passing of a day at its close. As the horned cattle clustered in the lee of the hedgerows, as the labourers sat to their suppers by shining lamplight, as the church tower reflected the last glories of sunset and the chimney smoke rose into a gathering dark, he marked the passing of an era of pastoral peace.

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The Lonely Tower

 

A mysterious wisdom won by toil

William Butler Yeats,
The Phases of the Moon

 

The Lonely Tower
is the most evocative of Palmer's late works. It shows a ruined turret standing on the edge of a cliff, a proud remnant of something once greater keeping solitary watch over the quiet of the night. Far below, a crescent moon drifts from a cloud-streaked horizon; above, the sky's violet spaces are twinkling with stars. A late traveller guides his ox-cart along a track that winds through one corner. Two shepherds gaze upwards from the grassy foreground. They are contemplating the lantern which glows from the tower's upper window: a bright ember burning on the edge of the world. A barn owl skims pale as a ghost along a shadowy stream bed. It feels almost as if it could fly free of the picture: the spirit of this twilit vision released.

When the first version of this watercolour was exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society in 1868 it was accompanied by the quotation from
Il Penseroso
that had inspired it:

 

Or let my lamp at midnight hour,

Be seen in some high lonely tower,

Where I may oft outwatch the Bear,

With thrice great Hermes.

 

As he sat up late at night, alone in his studio, Palmer must have empathised with Milton's solitary thinker. Through his studio windows he could see as far as Leith Hill. It was probably the fortified folly that still stands upon its summit that he painted. To Palmer this monument would have been freighted with significance: it stood near High Ashes farm where More had suffered his last illness and beyond it lay his son's never-to-be-visited burial place. Palmer painted a picture laden with coded references to his lost boy. The position of the stars – he painted Ursa Major (the Great Bear) in accordance with Milton's poem – is that which would have been observed on the day of More's death. In the bewildered agony of that grief-stricken moment, the bright patterns of this constellation had been branded onto his memory.

The other major project that obsessed Palmer throughout the last years of his life also developed out of his relationship with his son. Palmer had always loved Virgil's
Eclogues
and for decades had dreamt of making his own English translation. After More's death this project became to him a precious ‘resource in the deepest distress of mind',
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he told Calvert whom he frequently consulted on the more puzzling Latin phrases. Palmer explored everything from the history of the poems' scholarly exegesis, to their possible relevance to the modern political world. His texts were never far from his side and, in 1863, required to have his photographic portrait taken for the Old Watercolour Society, he posed with a copy of the
Eclogues
in his hand. ‘You can cut out [the Virgil] and throw the old man who holds it in the fire,'
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he wrote as he sent Calvert one of the prints.

If a visitor to Furze Hill had examined the pile of books that lay on Palmer's table they would have found among them one in manuscript form: ‘a manuscript so interlined, erased, and cut about for the insertion of new slips of matter, that but little of the original volume remained',
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Herbert said. But no one ever caught him perusing this because a knock at the door was a sign for it to be hastily slipped away. Herbert alone was party to this project and he was highly sceptical. ‘I think the idea of having his name associated within the covers of a real, published book, with the work of an immortal poet, betrayed him into unwonted castle building,'
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he wrote. Certainly, to the modern reader who stumbles across the volume that was only finally published after Palmer's death, the heavy-handed rhymes, ornate language and coy bowdlerisation feel more ludicrous than evocative: Palmer turned the second eclogue, a hymn to pederastic love, into a decorous heterosexual poem.

When, in 1872, he had all but completed his translation, he took Hamerton into his confidence who managed with some difficulty to persuade him that the
Eclogues
should not be published without accompanying illustrations. And so, in May of that year, fleeing the annual spring-cleaning, Palmer took refuge in Margate where he embarked on the second phase of his Virgil project. By the time he came home he had decided upon the ten subjects he would draw and one or two of the designs were already in a fairly advanced state. He imagined, Herbert recalled, that there existed some wonderful new photomechanical process which would make perfect facsimiles of his work; but there was not and so eventually, after long and unfruitful discussion, Hamerton suggested that he might start etching instead. He can't have known what this would mean, said Herbert, to a man who was ‘incapable by nature and training of doing anything whatever by halves', who had ‘throughout the whole of his life been mountaineering among the mental Alps that were always overtopped by some still more inaccess­ible peak'.
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A vision of an exquisite little headpiece at the start of each eclogue began to develop in Palmer's head. He would aim for ‘poetic compression' rather than ‘landscape diffuseness'
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and so the works would be small. But this was not an undertaking that could be measured in terms of size. Laying in a dozen tremendously solid copperplates and a stock of the fiercest nitrous acid, Palmer was embarking on a project which, though calculated to occupy only 240 square inches, would take up the rest of his life.

‘Once more  . . . the doors of the little Etching cupboard stood open, the acid fumed and needles were diligently sharpened . . . the conversation ran on half a hundred delightful technicalities,' Herbert wrote, his own interest flaring as the etching began. ‘The “Vs” became a by-word between us,' he recalled; ‘a portfolio full of the most carefully selected material was promoted to a chair of its own; an old cigar box was made into a rack for ten plates' as a ‘sole remaining hobby' took the bit between its teeth.
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