21
I am never in a ‘lull’ about Milton . . . he never tires
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
With the loss of his son, Palmer had lost also his faith in painting. ‘It seems to me better,’ he wrote, seven years after More’s death, ‘that a man should be a good active citizen and a good Christian, than able to tickle and amuse the public by any dexterity in the arts.’1 And yet he kept on working. His pictures, watercolours of sheep shearers bending to their labours, of oxen ploughing at sunset and maids milking in fields, are amalgams of his pastoral memories. He wandered back through his dreams like some homecoming ghost. But the world through which he drifted had been irrevocably lost.
Palmer, peeping with xenophobic eyes at the French Revolution, may once have worried about revolution in England by a rising underclass, but it was not a peasant rabble that was now threatening his country: it was people like him. In the decades following the 1850s, the once small and sharply defined middle class began expanding enormously. Profits engendered by the industrial revolution led to the growth of banks and accountancy firms, insurance and advertising companies, trading and retail outlets. Office life flourished. In London, huge armies of functionaries set up home at the fringes of the city and, from the late 1860s onwards, in new dormitory towns. File after file of terraced or semi-detached buildings marched outwards across the fields, a brick and mortar testimony to the power of a new propertied class.
These functionaries came, broadly speaking, to be seen as the lower-middle class while those working in the professions, the doctors, lawyers and clergy, the more respectable shop owners and businessmen with gentlemanly origins and university backgrounds, slowly hived off into an upper-middle class. Leaving the filthy industrial ghettoes of the cities and the identikit terraces of their expanding outskirts, they moved into airier, more socially exclusive suburbs. There they built the sort of houses that they felt could reflect their superior status. They indulged in their fantasies, adapting the architect’s pattern book designs with towers and bay windows, balconies and porches, steep slate roofs and fancy shingles. These were the homes that Palmer watched multiplying out of his window. ‘Little villas with big names . . . and genteel mansions, each with a smaller garden and a more imposing façade than its predecessor, engulfed field after field,’2 wrote Herbert. For Palmer, it felt like the last straw when the only old farm that was left in the region was bought up and converted into a hideous ‘park’ with trim roads, iron hurdles and manicured grounds.
Palmer was only too aware that he himself occupied the sort of Gothic Revival fantasy which he most detested, or that he too benefited from the ‘metallic pea-shooter’,3 the train which made living there possible and which could transport him to the capital within a few hours. And yet he shared few of the interests of his neighbours. He mocked the gentility to which the upper-middle classes – bound to the gentry by virtue of being property owners – aspired in order to maintain their distance from the workers below. He deplored the ridiculous etiquette of these ‘carriage and poodle people’:4 men in sparrow tails sipping coffee and dandies in fashionable horse-drawn gigs. He mocked the ludicrous elaborations of Reigate speech. ‘The white convolvuli are commencing their tortuosities,’ he laughed. He despised the ‘genteel-life-servant-keeping-system’. If he were alone again, he said (and often he must have wished that he was), he would live in a hut near a wholesome cookshop and be his own housemaid and char.
‘We are such geese of routine, such fools of fashion,’ he wrote, ‘that if rat pie . . . I beg pardon, tart is the genteel word, became a favourite at Balmoral, in a short time they would be seen on every dinner table in London, with tails elegantly coiled and arranged outside the crust.’5 ‘If we merely ask ourselves what people will say of us then we are rotten to the core,’6 he declared. ‘Sometimes,’ Herbert remembered, ‘when a friend was dining with us, my father would appear at the table with a ring upon his little finger, an unwonted ornament which he would ostentatiously display. The guest was sure, sooner or later, to notice not only the ring (it was a plain, substantial-looking hoop) but a markedly genteel bearing and gesture. But, towards the end of the meal, a dangling screw would appear where the stone is usually set, thus showing that the jewel was nothing more than a new and highly lacquered picture-frame ring. This, the wearer would continue to show off with mincing attitudes and “Reigate-genteel conversation”.’7
Female fashion in all its perverse manifestations became Palmer’s particular bugbear: the low-cut evening dresses worn in all weathers, the ‘shameless bold-faced-jig Jezebel tops’ that are ‘miscalled bonnets’,8 the enormous cage crinolines, ‘meshes and lime twigs of Parisian Strumpets’,9 the predilection for little feet ‘not perceiving that largeness and littleness are equally deformed and that the beauty of any part lies in its just proportion to the whole’;10 and perhaps most abominable of all: the fashion for tight stays. On this last subject, Palmer was at one with the author Charles Kingsley, a vociferous member (along with the artist G. F. Watts and the architect Edward William Godwin) of an anti-tight-lacing league. Again and again Palmer railed against the ‘curse’ of these ‘Babylonish gyves’. ‘It is the business of the Devil to deface the works of God, and of God’s loveliest work,’ he would thunder: ‘these hateful corsets cramp and impede the vitals, utterly destroy the shapeliness and grace which we in our hopeless barbarism fancy they improve, and even twist and distort the bony structure. They impair the action of the lungs and heart, corrupt the breath, prevent ease and gracefulness of movement and sometimes any sudden movement at all but at the cost of sudden death.’11
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 soul’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.
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,’30 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’.31 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’32 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’.33 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.’34
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.’35 But, having given up so much time – ‘such a ridiculous amount some would say’36 – 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.