22
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’,1 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,’2 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’,3 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,’4 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’.5
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’6 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.7
Progress was predictably protracted. ‘It is my misfortune to work slowly,’ Palmer had once told his friend Hamerton, ‘not from any wish to niggle, but because I cannot otherwise get certain shimmerings of light and mysteries of shadow.’8 This was an artist who ‘would sooner die that put a pinch of incense on the great golden altar of Mediocrity,’ his son said, and his ‘ten poor little Vs’,9 of which not a line could be put down without premeditation, were more deeply thought out than anything else he had ever done. His father crept painstakingly into the ‘mystic maze’10 of his work. ‘Copper bites into time as greedily as acid into copper,’11 he lamented. But with one of his ‘dear teazing, tickling’12 plates before him and a beloved needle, sharpened three-quarter-wise like a bayonet, in his hand, he did not miss the bright tinctures of his watercolour palette at all. Outline, he had always believed, was the one ‘great difficulty; the only first step and great accomplishment of art’. Once that had been attained, the ‘prey’ was caught and the rest was merely ‘cooking and garnishing it’.13 Having lost sight of this purity for so long amid the colourful palettes of Victorian fashion, he returned to his ideal: the ‘aerial gloom’14 of the etcher. He would become so utterly absorbed, he once told Howard Wright, that time and place would vanish. He would step into the world of the picture he was making: into ‘that land never to be reached but always to be striven for’.15 ‘Those who have seen him sitting, sable in hand, hour after hour behind the tissue paper, pencilling in varnish silver cloudlets round a moon; or have seen him revelling in the ferocity of the seething mordant with which he sometimes loved to excavate an emphatic passage will not wonder that he achieved only thirteen etchings in his life,’ his son said.16
How different his life had become from that of his old mentor. Linnell was by then a fêted Victorian figure. Sitting in his grand library at Redstone, bringing fine brandies and clarets up from his extensive cellar (when the doctors advised him to give up drinking he abandoned the former but stubbornly continued to drink wine into extreme old age), he would entertain the many dealers who came to call. Offered both his ale and theology at table, they preferred the former, he observed, his penetrating stare magnified by the two pairs of spectacles which he wore, one on top of the other, for close work. He was under no illusions. He called these middlemen the ‘DDs’, which stood for ‘Dodgy Dealers’, and always insisted on taking a deposit even when negotiating with the most reputable of firms. Linnell seldom worked for more than two hours consecutively on any one picture before changing it for another canvas or alternative pastime. He had always considered himself to be above all else a craftsman and he churned out his landscapes like he churned out his batches of bread. At their best they were as muscular as ever: loudly proclaiming the majesty of nature, they appealed to the bold tastes of the era’s self-made men.
Palmer, in contrast, lived a secluded life. Much of his time was passed in peaceful musing as the greater proportion of any picture that he did was achieved, his son said, not by manual work but mental concentration. To the industrious Linnell it would have looked like idleness; but Palmer’s contemplation was often so profound that even his wife would not venture to disturb it. Furze Hill House would remain silent long into the night while only a mile or two away, at Redstone, Linnell would be presiding over a drawing-room gathering, ‘loudly laying down the law on politics and wrangling over the daily newspapers’.17 The work on his easel upstairs would be forgotten until the next day.
In 1875, Linnell was given his first one-man show; but his eyes were fading. He found it increasingly difficult to authenticate the paintings which dealers brought him and occasionally he made a mistake. Once, he had condemned a picture outright, only on further inspection to discover that it was one of the several Palmers which, thirty years earlier, he had retouched. Problems were beginning to arise with his homemade varnishes and some of his earlier canvases were flaking and cracked. Linnell’s health was also deteriorating. Sometimes he complained of giddiness. His memory was failing him and often he found himself confused. He had rheumatism in one hip, wore a hernia truss and had to cup his hand to his ear when anyone spoke. But he still remained stolid in faith, firm in conviction and stalwart in character. When one of his sons, Thomas, a twin who had a limp and a stammer, announced that he was going to marry the serving girl to whom he had proposed while she was cleaning the grate, all the family was affronted except this stubborn patriarch who, never forgetting his own humble origins, was prepared to accept a housemaid as his daughter-in-law.
Holman Hunt, calling at Redstone with his wife, offered among the last descriptions of Linnell. He was greeted at the door, Hunt remembered, by the master of the house with his Bible raised aloft, demanding in stentorian tones to know whether he had mastered his New Testament teachings. ‘He would not allow me to evade the question,’ Hunt said. It was as if he had recognised that he was coming towards the end of his life and that there would never again be an opportunity for him ‘to deliver his sacredest message of all to me, and he would not fail, although when he regarded my reply as failing in thoroughness, he had to reproach me, which he did unsparingly’.18
Linnell, Hunt said, was a man who ‘all his life had striven after truth in way and in word’.19 Herbert was less tolerant: he detested his grandfather’s ‘raging rancorous homemade religion’20 and, acutely aware of familial strains, regarded the old man as a bullying martinet. He disliked staying at Redstone. Hannah, after the death of her mother, began to spend less time there too. She grew gentler and more loving towards Palmer as she entered old age and gradually, united once more in spirit and affection to the man whom she had married when she was little more than a child, became once more his indefatigable companion, always to be found close beside him, solicitous for his happiness and watchful for his comfort and health.
Forty years earlier, as a young artist in Shoreham, Palmer had dreamt of a wife who would read to him when his eyes were tired; now Hannah spent her evenings doing exactly that, or just peaceably sewing while he sat and wrote letters – often, for the sake of economy, on torn-off half sheets of paper that his correspondents had not used. One day, they were to be found sharing the sort of playful in-joke that, as newlyweds in Italy, they had enjoyed. Mary, their maid, had mentioned something called an ‘anversand’; the pair of them, pricking up their ears ‘with the most conjugal unanimity’, set off on a humorous quest to find out how others of their household pronounced the word. Jane, from Redhill, it turned out, had ‘always had a name for “&”: she calls it an ampsisand’, while their man-of-all-work informed them that he always heard it called ‘asverasand’.21
Steadfast in their affection for their ‘dear old church of England’,22 Palmer and Hannah continued to attend services together on Sundays, two small bundled figures among the poorer members of the congregation, preferring always the humbler place to the prominent pew, though, when a High Church service was introduced, Hannah, more wary than her husband of extravagant ritual, decided to move to an evangelical congregation while Palmer continued to worship at the local church.
Sometimes, in the afternoons, they would go out for country drives. Hiring a cart, they would trundle away until the odious villas had been left far behind them and they were creaking along through the open countryside. Both Palmer and Hannah were apprehensive about horses and Palmer was almost as nervous of the contraptions that they pulled: ‘In all vehicles but a wheelbarrow or a bicycle,’ he warned an old friend, ‘it is useful to remember that there are but two or four lynch pins between us and death.’23 But, with the sleepiest and most venerable of ponies in harness and the most soothing of drivers atop the box, they would jog along the lanes or creep up the steep hills enjoying the fine views that unfolded around them and condemning any modern innovations which they came across. Their favourite route lay through Gatton where a line of ancient yews marked out the old pilgrims’ way. It was here Herbert said that, from the vantage point of the fly, his father had made his last drawings from nature. They are just a few lines, but they show that he had not lost his affection for trees.
Among the most vivid images of the Palmers in old age is that offered by Hamerton’s wife who, preparing a memoir of her late husband,24 recalled a visit that they had once made to Furze Hill. It was only in the late 1870s that the Hamertons, after long correspondence, finally paid a much-anticipated visit. They were disappointed when, arriving at the house, they were told that Palmer was confined to his bed, far too ill to get up and play host to anyone.
The Hamertons were shown into the dining room to be offered refreshment before taking their leave. ‘The room was warmed by a good fire, but darkened by the blinds being down and the curtains drawn,’ Mrs Hamerton remembered. ‘The rays of a golden sunset diffused through the apertures a strange and mysterious glow.’ This, she wrote, ‘suddenly seemed to surround and envelop an apparition, standing half visible on the threshold of the noiselessly opened door. A remarkably expressive head emerged from the bundle of shawls, which moved forward with feeble and tottering steps – it was Mr Palmer. His wife could not trust her eyes, but as soon as she became convinced of the reality of his presence, she hastened to make him comfortable in an armchair by the fire, and to arrange the shawls over his head, and knees with the most touching solicitude.’ Clearly Palmer would still go to some lengths to find the intellectual companionship that he had all his life sought. ‘“I could not resist it,” he pleaded; “I have looked forward to this meeting with so much longing.”’
‘His eyes sparkled, his countenance became animated, and regardless of his wraps, he accompanied his fluent talk with eloquent gestures – to the despair of his wife, who had enough to do in replacing caps and rugs,’ Mrs Hamerton said. ‘He put all his soul and energy (and now there was no lack of it) into his speech.’ His conversation kindled the enthusiasm of his listeners who were charmed by his liveliness and riveted by his anecdotes of Turner and Blake. But he was attentive too, Mrs Hamerton remembered, and would listen ‘with so vivid an interest and sympathy that his mere looks were an encouragement. My husband was afraid of detaining him, but he declared he felt quite well and strong – “the visiting angels had put to flight the lurking enemy”.’
Palmer felt so revived in the course of the visit that he even felt hungry and so, ‘nothing loth,’ his guests recorded, ‘we sat down to an excellent tea with delicious butter and new-laid eggs, with the impression of sharing the life of elves, and of being entertained by a genie at the head of the table and served by a kind fairy. This feeling originated no doubt in the small stature of Mr and Mrs Palmer; in the strange effect of light under which our host first appeared to us, and lastly in the noiseless promptitude with which the repast was spread on the table, whilst the darkness of the room gave way to brightness, just as happens in fairy tales.’25
Palmer described himself as a hermit in his last years. Less and less often would he pay evening visits to old friends in Reigate. Away from familiar surroundings he would grow horribly flustered and he could seldom find the strength to go to London any more. Even climbing the steps to the station platform would take his breath quite away; if he did use the train he would travel ‘swathed like a mummy’26 in shawls. By the end of the 1870s he no longer even troubled to send his apologies to the Watercolour Society or Etching Club when he missed their meetings. The president of the former greatly missed him as much for his role in discussions as for their exchanges of snuff but, having lost ‘that locomotive power which distinguishes the animal from the vegetable kingdom’, said Palmer, they could not ‘expect monthly excuses from a cabbage’.27
Confined to the house and, when the weather was cold, to just two rooms (his ‘den’ and the drawing room), he carried on with his projects. He was working harder now than he had at thirty, he said, getting in four hours’ work – ‘with my whole mind bent upon it’ – before dinner; sometimes, having supped lightly on an egg and a dry rusk, resuming his labours afterwards and carrying on into the night. Outside, the wind might be blowing along the ridges, the great Wellingtonia in the garden would moan and lash, but ‘however much tempests may rage before and after, the Hours of ART-WORK MUST BE QUIET HOURS’, Palmer told his son. ‘When we want a lambent flame we clear the grate getting the noise and dust over for the time. If anything bustles me I am forced to sit still and make an artificial quiet before I can put the right touch.’28
He rarely saw the Ancients in person, now. They were all growing too frail to travel. But they continued to exchange news. Richmond had bought a house in Wiltshire, which he was restoring as a hobby. Palmer was disappointed when, in 1879, he wouldn’t accompany him on a seaside holiday: ‘Can’t you come down and have a social groan over things in general?’29 he begged. He missed a good grumble with his old friend. Giles kept him abreast of developments in debates of the sort that they had both always loved, dispatching newspaper clippings along with his letters. The interests of deceased Ancients were not neglected. Finch’s widow was seventy-two years old when, in 1880, Palmer applied on her behalf for a charitable bequest and secured her £20. Nor was Blake forgotten: when the Cornhill Magazine had published an article declaring that the poet had been mad and consigned to an asylum, Palmer had leapt to his defence, penning a letter to say that he remembered Blake ‘in the quiet consistency of his daily life, as one of the sanest, if not thoroughly sane men I have ever known’.30 To the very last years of his life, he remained loyal and when, in 1878, he read that the Quakers, having become proprietors of the church where Blake lay buried, were building over the churchyard, he was outraged. ‘They have rummaged the dust of John Bunyan; torn up in gobbets what fleshly remains there were of William Blake,’31 he wrote.
Palmer’s interests, however, were not confined solely to the past. When his godson Willie Richmond was appointed to the illustrious post of Slade Professor of Fine Art, he warmly congratulated him. ‘It is kind of you to remember old friends just in the moment of success when people generally forget them,’ he wrote in 1879.32 And he still kept up with Richmond’s daughter, Julia, who, in 1881, bought his painting of a bright cloud. Her father had thought well of it too, he told her with delight. He was thrilled to hear that her child Hilda had started learning the violin. It ‘demands exactitude of tune which the pianoforte lacks’,33 he enthused, adding ‘the value of everything on earth,’ as he had always propounded, ‘is pretty much in proportion to the difficulty acquiring it’.34
Palmer’s delight in children never flagged. He followed the progress of all his friends’ offspring, inquiring of John Wright’s ‘dear Earnest’ who suffered from fits; sending love and advice to the Stephens’s son Holly (short for Holman, after Holman Hunt) and enthusiastically praising the etchings of Hamerton’s boy. Sometimes his missives smacked of an old illiberality. A stern letter to Holly’s father suggested a bowdlerised edition of Shakespeare, for the boy has been deriving improper amusement from the poet. ‘The pagan Juvenal says that PURITY should be inscribed over the door of every house where there is a boy,’35 Palmer admonished. But for the most part, his affection and generosity shone more brightly with age.
Though his physical strength waned, his mind remained strong. Palmer, even in old age, liked to stay alert to everything from the latest ecclesiastical appointment through news of an earthquake in Quito to the loss of six fowl from a neighbouring farm. ‘When old people begin to talk about themselves it is time their families interfered,’ he wrote, though the manner of interference, he acknowledged, differed in different nations: ‘In some the elders are hunted up into a tree, pelted down with stones and then eaten.’36 He remained to the end a vivid conversationalist, entertaining his listeners with the passion of his convictions, the coolness of his incredulity, the ingenuity of his defences and the energy of his attacks. He was equally masterful at drawing people out. He would sit quietly while some enthusiastic friend trotted his favourite hobby to and fro before him, said Herbert, agreeing with his companion as far as he thought possible and preferring to overlook blunders rather than pull someone up. He tried hard to sympathise with everyone’s stance. And yet, he was maddeningly pig-headed about his own point of view and once he had set off on one of his rants, he would seldom admit defeat. Just when his antagonist felt assured of victory he would suddenly, ‘by some ingenious manoeuvre, some energetic confession of faith, or an abrupt retreat into the strongholds of paradox’ show that he ‘valued the arguments, and the evidence and the authority, not a snap of his fingers, against his own cherished convictions’.37 It must have been infuriating – particularly when, as Herbert suspected, he didn’t necessarily hold to the belief he so pig-headedly espoused.
Palmer continued to read with all his usual passion and prejudice – though he now needed books printed in larger type – revelling in anything from religious tracts to the old companions of his youth, a pile of which in their ancient leather bindings would always be stacked on his table alongside his drawings and the current volume of his commonplace book. In 1880 he thanked Cope for sending him the latest biography of Milton. It was the sixth he had read in his life, he said, but each had only whetted his appetite for the next. He busily harvested anecdotes from newspapers and periodicals – anything from the tale of a Prussian woman who was pregnant with five children to the story of a cat who travelled 200 miles in four days – for the amusement of Wright who kept a compendium of such peculiarities. Palmer himself was notoriously credulous and could be as entirely persuaded of the capture of a mighty sea serpent at Oban as he was of the actual existence of the devil. In old age he also discovered a fascination for mathematics and, like his father before him, started to carry an algebra book and bag of scribbling paper about with him, keeping it beside his pillow at night. His calculations showed a lamentable want of success and his arithmetic, his son remembered, became something of a family joke.
In 1875 another of the Ancients, Frederick Tatham, became the second of the little band to die. It was he who had done most to help Blake in his frail final years and he had inherited, through his widow whom he had taken in as a housekeeper, many of Blake’s late works. He had subsequently fallen under the thrall of a millenarian sect, however, and, persuaded that Blake’s ideas were blasphemous, was said to have sold whatever was vendible and consigned the rest of the great visionary’s legacy to the fire: plates, blocks, manuscripts, volumes of verse prepared for the press, six or seven epic poems as long as Homer and twenty tragedies as long as Macbeth – all, it was rumoured, went up in smoke. ‘A piteous gag had been thrust in to the mouth of Blake’s corpse,’ declared William Michael Rossetti (brother of the artist). If Frederick Tatham is remembered at all, it is for this act of terrible destruction. It would certainly have clouded his friendship with Palmer, but at the moment of his passing Palmer remembered only the young man he had once loved. ‘I seldom think of Shoreham without recalling his persistent and self-denying kindness to a poor cottager whose sores he daily dressed with his own hands,’38 he wrote.
In 1877, John Wright was given the living of the vicar of Newborough in Staffordshire. Palmer was greatly to miss the ‘weekly treat’39 of a long Monday evening talk and although the pair continued their lively epistolary exchanges – their good-humoured intimacy is evoked by such inscrutable lines as ‘at next meeting, Remlapacious hopes to tell of the curious laughing spider stomachial’40 – they were never to be able to meet up again regularly for, in 1881, Wright was appointed to his father-in-law’s old Shropshire incumbency, a post in which he would remain for the rest of his working life. ‘If you feel lonely, a shepherd with a little flock upon a hill,’ Palmer told him in 1877, ‘think of my loneliness, frozen up and crippled up from the haunts of men, from my London friends.’41 He was feeling rather sorry for himself at the time, having just failed to muster the energy to attend a ‘dearly longed-for Blake exhibition’42 in the capital. Soon, Palmer was not even keeping one of his beloved tabbies for company. ‘I am not the man I was before I left off keeping cats,’43 he mourned in 1879.
Herbert, by this time, was no longer living with his parents. He had rented a studio in Newman Street, London – a good, light, artist’s workplace of the sort that his father had never had – but he returned to Furze Hill regularly. It was he who persuaded Palmer to install a printing press in the house. Herbert had been taught how to print by Frederick Goulding, one of the great copperplate experts of that day, and now he and his father set to work on producing their own impressions of The Bellman and The Lonely Tower. From this time on, Palmer’s letters to his son often turned into lists of instructions. Occasionally he would grow intemperate. ‘Pray, throw your brown ink into the dust hole,’ he would cry. Brown ink is ‘beastly’.44 He wanted only black. But more often, with the help of laboriously precise explanations, father and son operated harmoniously together. They showed the same meticulous attention to detail. ‘The edge of the tree A,’ Palmer wrote, marking out a Scotch pine on an accompanying sketch, ‘is at the top a trifle too light . . . the sucking lamb’s bended knee is slightly too light at the joint . . . perhaps the dark side of the provender trough is too hard wiped.’45
Herbert, mastering the art of printing, managed to coax from even the most worn-out plates some of the finest proofs of his father’s works. He was paid for his efforts; he needed the money because by then he had met the woman whom he hoped to marry. Yet Palmer was never truly to value his talent with the press and eventually, just at the moment when Herbert felt his prospects were brightest, he was persuaded to give printing up on the grounds that it was less an art than a trade. He had, however, by 1880, managed to save enough to be able to afford to make Helen Margaret Tidbury his wife.
In May 1880, John Giles died. According to one account, he was run over by an omnibus – mown down, quite literally, by the progress that all his life he had fought. Richmond arranged for him – ‘the greatest and dearest friend that I had on earth’ – to be buried in Highgate Cemetery (where Finch also lay) in the same grave in which he and his family would later be interred. It would not be long before the first of them arrived. Early the next year Richmond’s wife, Julia, passed away, just twelve days before their golden wedding anniversary. Richmond was distraught: ‘On January 12th I laid the dear and faithful partner of all my joys and sorrows in the grave and my heart is well-nigh broken. My pencil as it were, fell from me and the love of art left me. I wholly gave up professional engagements and spent most of the year wandering in artlessness’.46
Palmer tried to comfort his friend. ‘Had your affliction befallen me,’ he wrote, ‘I should have been left almost alone upon earth.’47 But Richmond, he reminded him, had the blessing of a family. He recommended books that could bring comfort – devotional meditations and the works of Pascal – and he wrote to the young Julia, who was going round daily to visit her father, suggesting that she coax him back to ‘medicinal’48 work.
Palmer was now in his mid-seventies. All too aware of the brevity of the time that remained to him, he found comfort in such stories as that of a Bishop Butler who, just a few days before his death, had been strolling in his garden in the company of his chaplain: ‘I feel that my feet are upon the rock,’49 he had said. On warm summer evenings, Palmer too would still wander into the garden and, leaning on his staff, stand gazing at whichever of his wild flowers struggled on. He revelled in his old prints and Shoreham memories, said Herbert. His folio volumes were still kept piled on his table and the contents of his etching cupboard in orderly array. And he still kept on working. He might be found sketching a fine cloudscape or sunset from his windows or pondering one of his pastoral designs. His friends, encouraging him, kept up his hopes. ‘I feel like a promising youth with remarkably light hair,’50 Palmer laughed. And though, to the very end of his life, he suffered from his old disinclination to get on with his tasks, he had at last formed the habit ‘of taking the bull by the horns’: ‘[I] always find that after a little grunting he comes along like a lamb,’ he said.51 When instructed by a doctor to lie on a sofa and do nothing, Palmer managed to do so only for a couple of minutes before rising again with an impatient howl.
The weather was harsh in Palmer’s final winter. Snowstorms swept over the country and he found himself mostly confined to the house. Day after day he would sit in his room, pulling out the pages of an almanac sent to him by Hook. On 18 January 1881, a great blizzard struck, sweeping a white blanket across southern England. Drifts as deep as lamp posts blocked miles of road and track.
Palmer, bundled up in the rough flannel coat of a navvy, retired to the bed in his studio. From there, he worked on the watercolours of his Milton series, completing two paintings – The Prospect and The Eastern Gate – both images of dawn and both submitted for exhibition that year. Looking at his Eastern Gate – a picture of a powerful, bare-chested ploughman guiding his pair of yoked oxen out onto sun-flooded slopes – it is hard not to be moved by a parallel vision of its maker: a little old man bundled up in his bed with the flaring radiance of that glorious dawn breaking like the blare of a trumpet in his head.
As the warmer days of spring approached, Palmer rose and flew to his Virgils. He finished his designs for the second eclogue and, having abandoned it at first attempt, returned with redoubled zest to preparing the tenth. Sometimes working at the washstand that doubled up as a desk, more often remaining in bed, he continued, but the only work that would ever be completed was Early Morning (or Opening the Fold), which had been published the previous year by the Fine Art Society. This image of the shepherd’s penned flock rushing out of the fold with the first rays of new light spoke perhaps of Palmer’s own yearning for the dawn of a new world. ‘If I were quite certain of rejoining my beloved ones, I should chide the slow hours which separated me,’52 he wrote in April that year. At the beginning of May he was taken ill and by the middle of the month his family had given up hope of him pulling through. Yet he continued to talk cheerfully, his mind ranging freely across familiar pastures, discussing among other things the continuation of his long cherished Virgils. His eyes would brighten with pleasure as he contemplated the difficulties to be overcome.
Palmer’s earthly affairs were all sorted. The previous summer – shortly before his son’s marriage – he had written his will leaving Hannah modestly provided for, but, knowing that her father would continue to look after her, leaving as much as possible as an annuity to his son. He had suggested that Herbert’s fiancée should be given one of the Palmer family bibles and recorded as much as he could remember of his ancestry for a member of the Giles family who had shown an interest. Palmer had few possessions of any financial value to leave. A man who did not even own a watch – what use would he have had of it in his life of peaceful routine? – counted among his most treasured possessions an old shepherd’s smock, a huge battered straw hat, a pair of steel-rimmed glasses that had once belonged to his nurse, a few relics of Blake’s and a handful of fragmentary casts from the antique. The most precious thing he had ever had was his vision. He had put it down in his pictures. Hannah did not want these to go to auction, Palmer told his son.
The elegant local doctor, in regular attendance at all the most handsome Reigate homes, must have looked a little askance at his latest patient. He would not have thought much of the muddled little room with its makeshift furniture and its cluttered shelves nor of its occupant, the diminutive figure who sat, propped up by pillows, an old cigar box on the table beside him in which were lovingly hoarded a row of densely scratched copperplates. The Homeward Star – an image capturing that magical moment when the first star of the evening rises into the night – would regularly have been pulled out of this case. It was probably the very last piece that Palmer worked on before he gave up entirely, only, from then on, from time to time stretching out a frail hand, its seams deeply stained with etcher’s ink, to lay it on the cigar box as if its mere presence could offer him comfort in some way.
Palmer suffered the last days of his final illness with the patience that he had been taught by a long and difficult life. He regretted the trouble that he was giving. Hannah sat by his bedside, an attentive figure, for hour after hour, her watch periodically relieved by Richmond who, sitting peacefully by the bedside, must have felt a great loneliness as he watched this companion of his youth slipping slowly away.
On the morning of 24 May 1881, Palmer asked that his son be called into his room. Herbert leaned over his father but he could only guess at the words that were whispered into his ear. A touch of their hands was to be their farewell. Palmer died later that day. When Herbert returned he found Richmond reading prayers by the bedside, his voice broken by grief.
Palmer was not buried beside More, but in what was then a shady corner of Reigate churchyard. It was a fresh showery spring morning of the sort that he would have loved. The leaves of the elm trees cast a dappling shadow and, as the pastor read the words of the liturgy which Palmer had always so loved, a skylark hung singing in the sky far above. Just as the last words of the service faded, it dropped down silently into the grass.
The grave is modest. It is fairly hard to find now. A low and narrow length of local stone, its carved ribs forming a cross, lies amid the long grass. Pale lichens spread across it like opening blossoms. ‘He that believeth in me though he were dead yet shall he live,’53 is inscribed in Gothic script. A church tower presides over the scene. The church had always been the lynchpin of Palmer’s world and standing there gazing up at it, it is hard not to recall the lonely tower of his picture. The etching that he made from this painting is among the finest works in this medium by any English artist and the bright pinpoint of light that he picked out from the darkness has become for posterity a symbol of all that he stood for.
It is this bright speck of shining that inspired the poet William Butler Yeats. He described it in a poem that he wrote to the moon:
The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,
An image of mysterious wisdom won through toil.54