Mysterious Wisdom (21 page)

Later, as an elderly hypochondriac nervously alert to potential causes of ill health, Palmer would repent these prolonged late-night stints. ‘Sir Walter Scott got all his day's work done before breakfast,' he informed a pupil. ‘I fell early into the opposite habits which I deeply regret.'
39
But at the time those long winter evenings, pulled like warm coats around them, felt delightfully homely, especially after Palmer moved from the incommodious Rat Abbey into the far more comfortable Waterhouse. He loved the ‘never-cloying luxury' of long ‘quiet intellectual evenings to those who are fagged out by the day'.
40
Gathered round the fire, the Ancients would listen to the music of the river as it rushed down to the millrace, to Palmer playing his fiddle or picking out tunes on the piano, while Finch sang along choosing the sort of ‘sweet pathetick'
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melodies that his friends most loved.

Long after the last amber glow of the neighbours' candlelit lattices had faded, the young men would be sitting there, indulging in their agreeable ceremonies of pipe-smoking and snuff-taking, puffing and tamping and pinching and blowing as they sipped at their bowls of ‘dear precious green tea'.
42
Palmer and Richmond (whose mother sent him parcels of tea and sugar from London) had a particular passion for this drink and a letter passes between them in which Palmer minutely instructs his friend on how to discriminate Hyson (which should be ‘of a full-sized grain, of a blooming appearance, very dry, and crisp') from its superior Gunpowder (which ‘should have a beautiful bloom upon it, which will not bear the breath', be of ‘greenish hue' and ‘a fragrant pungent taste').
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But green tea – or
terre verte
as they called it, after the artist's pigment – was their particular favourite and even years later a bowl of it would stir nostalgic memories for Palmer of quiet Shoreham evenings and ‘nice long old-fashioned talks'
44
by the fire.

These conversations were made up of an ‘entertaining medley'
45
of poetry and art, religion and politics, though they could easily descend into acrimonious theological bickerings, not least when Palmer's father was entertaining Primitive Baptists or Linnell had invested in the latest proselytising tract. Palmer relished a tough quarrel and revelled in long-running intellectual tussles. But more even than talking, the Ancients loved to read. ‘Blessed books – any one of which is worth all the toggery we ever put on our backs,'
46
said Palmer. With ‘
opodeldoc
[a powerfully aromatic liniment, supposedly invented by Paracelsus, made of soap dissolved in alcohol, to which camphor and herbal essences, most notably wormwood, had been added] rubbed into the forehead to wake the brain up' and ‘a Great Gorge of old poetry to get up the dreaming',
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he was happy. When the wind howled bitterly round the chimney pots and the rain beat in gusts against panes, he and his fellow Ancients would place the steaming teapot by the fire and, reaching down the tall folios from the bookshelves, tuck themselves peacefully into their tomes. These precious interludes, passed ‘recreating myself with good books',
48
were times which Palmer was always to look back on and treasure. ‘I am really glad I had a dose and glut of reading at Shoreham,' he would write many years later, for some savour of it always remained, he said, ‘like the relish of wine in an empty cask'.
49

Eventually it would be time to retire. Palmer would go up to his bed, with its mattress of local sheep's wool (‘a feather bed costs 14 guineas and is not my lot'
50
) with a hop sack coverlet thrown over it if he needed extra warmth, and lie there listening to the calls of the owls as they swept through the trees, the creaking of the floorboards and the bark of the foxes. And maybe, beyond that, so constant that he barely even caught it, the deep background hum of a profound sense of peace. ‘We less enjoy life than listen to the sound of its machinery,'
51
Palmer later wrote. He would always look back to his time in Shoreham as a moment of blessed tranquillity; as a time of stillness which for the rest of his life he would seek.

 

 

William Blake died within a year of Palmer moving to Shoreham. Richmond gave Palmer the news. ‘He died on Sunday night at 6 o'clock in most glorious manner,' he told him. ‘He said He was going to that country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten'd and He burst out in Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.'
52
It was Richmond who finally closed Blake's eyelids and kissed him as he lay in his work room in Fountain Court. John Linnell, with characteristic efficiency, helped to arrange the burial and five days later the Ancients followed Blake's humble elm coffin to the dissenters' burial ground in Bunhill Fields in north London where both his parents had already been buried and where their brilliant son was now laid, at a cost of nineteen shillings, in a common grave. Palmer wasn't there. It was a loss he must have felt keenly, despite his conviction that they would meet again in heaven one day. For the rest of his life he kept among his most treasured mementos a message card designed for Cumberland, the last work Blake had completed, and his pair of big, round, steel-rimmed glasses, their lenses bleared by many years of use. The memory of Blake bound the circle of Ancients even more closely together. They were to become his most impassioned defenders
.
‘He was one of the few to be met with in our passage through life, who are not in some way or other, “double-minded” and inconsistent with themselves; one of the very few who cannot be depressed by neglect, and to whose name rank and station could add no lustre,'
53
Palmer would say.

It was Linnell, however, who was most immediately affected by his death. He had been much involved in his affairs during his last feeble months and had lent Blake's widow, Catherine, the money to pay for the ceremony, moving her afterwards into his Cirencester Place studio ostensibly as a housekeeper, but in fact to take care of her. He had lost a friend whom he had profoundly respected and his health began to break down shortly afterwards. One day, queuing at the bank, he found himself too weak to wait any longer and had to return home. Soon, all other restorative measures having failed, he was compulsively inhaling twelve bottles of oxygen a day.

In 1828, finding the constant back-and-forth journey too taxing, he moved his family back from Hampstead to a rented house in Bayswater. But he still kept up a punishing work schedule: rising early in the morning to work at his painting, continuing his teaching (he was by then much in demand as a tutor), educating his children, making bread (he would often leave his sitters for a few moments to knead the dough), brewing beer and, as if all this wasn't sufficient, hatching a scheme to build a new house. Having consulted with the architect Tatham, undergone all his usual pecuniary calculations and negotiated a complex web of barter arrangements by which he would trade paintings for building work, he embarked on the project. By the autumn of 1829, foundations had been laid in Porchester Terrace and, within the stipulated year, the new home was finished, by which time Linnell, having taken a hand in everything from the drawing up of the first plans to the digging of the cesspool, was installing a bread oven and a cast-iron kitchen range.

Beside all this determined industry, the un-timetabled hours that he passed in Shoreham must have felt even more beguiling and back in London, after a visit, he began dreaming of pastoral Kentish scenes. Palmer, manifestly delighted, did everything he could to encourage his return. A succession of letters passed back and forth between them, discussing potential accommodation, organising help from a farmer's daughter (down to the specific details of her responsibilities: her father would not like her to wash dishes or be under the cook doing scullery work), negotiating prices, giving the times of the coaches and making arrangements to meet them. Palmer would happily walk up to the toll road at the top of the hill at Shoreham on the off-chance that Linnell might be on a certain coach. He worried about whether his mentor could bear the uncushioned jolting of a cart without springs and on one occasion, when Linnell was feeling particularly weak, the Ancients procured a wheelbarrow in which to push him about.

 

 

The Palmers did everything they could to make their guests welcome at Waterhouse. There was always a bowl of apples left out on the table and a kettle of tea left brewing on the hob. When Calvert and his wife came to visit they were given the best room because they were married and, when one of their sons fell dangerously ill, the Palmers looked after him in Shoreham while he convalesced. ‘In all probability it saved his life,'
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the boy's grandmother thanked them. If there were not enough rooms, Palmer would move out to lodgings above the village bakery and, if walkers from London arrived in the middle of the night, his father would not only get up to greet them but give them his own bed so that they could enjoy a well-earned sleep.

Palmer made as few visits as possible to ‘the great national dusthole'.
55
‘I purpose never again to see London by daylight,' he declared in 1834. Between 1831 and 1835 he bought four more properties in Shoreham which he let out to locals, planning to live off the meagre rental income until his career gathered pace. He would own these cottages for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, his fellow Ancients ran his errands in the capital – visiting framers, looking out books, delivering messages or purchasing materials that ranged from the sheets of thick Bristol board, which he most liked to draw on, to a mussel shell of powdered gold for a miniature that he planned to paint. Palmer, in return, dispatched potatoes to Tatham at two shillings a bushel, sacks of hops to Linnell and to Richmond flagons of cider for his bowels.

Alone in Shoreham, however, Palmer greatly missed his friends – he laments not being present for a cricket match in Linnell's garden – and constantly chivvied his fellow Ancients to visit: the harvest is coming; the days are glorious; the hopping season has begun, the weather is fine, they must hurry before it breaks. ‘Why do Walter and Mr Calvert fancy Shoreham a hundred miles of
f
?' he complained in 1828. ‘Let them get on the road by chance and walk a bit and ride a bit and they will soon look down on the valley.'
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The winter months when the roads were not conducive to travelling, when the weather was ‘fogg'd and cloudy' and the ‘landscape a sickly white or grey',
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often left him solitary and in the summer, when sudden rains turned the roads into mires, sending torrents rushing down the hillsides and leaving the fruit carts stranded up to their axles in three foot of water, he would feel the inconvenience of his isolation acutely.

The Ancients kept in touch by writing long letters to each other in which they discussed their activities, ideas and discoveries. ‘Punctually devote half an hour every evening to setting down the prominent circumstances of your day; particularly anything pictorial or intellectual,'
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Palmer instructed Richmond as he set off to Italy in 1828. ‘Pray write me a more minute account than the last of what you get up to “from morn to dewy eve”.'
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He fretted about the parlous state of the postal service with its delays and misdirections. ‘I want so much to be talking to you that you see I cannot wait to be coming to town,' he told Richmond in a letter which ‘dribbled out' as he walked in the neighbouring Lullingstone Park, as he sat in the peace of a local farmer's garden or scribbled at a table after supper at home.
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These periodically updated missives took the place of a conversation; a pen, the place of an arm tucked companionably into his own.