Mysterious Wisdom (49 page)

An occasional letter to Calvert also survives, although Calvert by now had become something of a recluse. He had lost his visionary spirit and, befriending the fashionable artist William Etty, had sacrificed his integrity so far as to become little more than a mimic of this then applauded painter's style. His work was so derivative that when, in 1850, at a sale of Etty's work, Calvert had seen a painting of his own being sold he had shouted out to the auctioneer: ‘That is not Etty's,' to which the auctioneer had replied: ‘A gentleman present has declared that the study is not genuine, but buyers would do well to bear in mind that the same gentleman was bidding for it.' Calvert dissipated his talent on pointless projects, among them the development of an impenetrable musical theory of colour: it climbed from the ‘golden earth' of the chryseic, he suggested, ascending through the rubiate to the celestial saphirrine. Even Palmer thought he was wasting his time. Deputed by friends to express his misgivings, he wrote Calvert a letter which, thankfully, his old friend decided to take in good heart. ‘You have been friendly enough, under the delicacy of suggestion, to caution me in regard to my protracted study of colour,' he wrote in 1868. ‘You will be glad to hear that the past summer saw the chase . . . at an end, though not abandoned.'
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Palmer maintained several of his more recent London friendships, including those with the artists Hook, Cope and Redgrave. Sometimes they would go to stay with each other, and when they were apart they would enjoy lively epistolary interchanges on anything from the profundities of Milton to the manifold advantage of larger engravings (Palmer argued this last point by using handwriting that grew first larger and larger and then shrank again to a size that could hardly be read). He was delighted to hear from his former pupils and, though Palmer was no longer being paid to teach them, the Misses Twining and Wilkinson continued to receive pages of the most punctilious painting instructions, painstaking descriptions of his own slow-learned and long-practised techniques.

Palmer also engaged with eccentric affability with several of his neighbours: a preacher whom he had met in the lane and regaled with horror stories of extravagant living and the distortion of the human skeleton through the use of stays (‘which surprised him', Palmer observed
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) and a Miss Thomas who usually called round as he was about to have dinner. He would eat in front of her ‘like the Kings of France', he wrote. ‘I told her I was not up to the politeness of the French Court in the reign of Louis XIV. When the king would show a particular mark of favour, he took a morsel of something, a sweetmeat perhaps, and having bitten of a piece for himself, sent the rest down the table to the favourite guest.'
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Palmer must himself have been the subject of much amused local gossip.

Other new friendships were struck up. In the summer of 1864, Palmer advised Edwin Wilkins Fields, a law reformer and amateur artist, on a forthcoming trip to Cornwall in a letter which, coming complete with a little illustrative sketch, was packed with helpful information on anything from viewpoints to guidebooks to how to keep his feet dry. Fields, an old friend of Henry Crabb Robinson, was a great admirer of Finch and proposed that Palmer should do a series of illustrations to accompany a memoir. He was disappointed when Palmer refused, not just because he didn't have the time, but to translate Finch's pictures into ‘dashing woodcuts would be as difficult', he explained, as ‘to write a nightingale symphony for a brass band'.
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Palmer and Fields maintained a lively correspondence punctuated with occasional visits to each other's homes. ‘Will you name an hour for a “hot joint” or leave yourself free and have it cold?'
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Palmer wanted to know in advance of one of his calls.

Frederick George Stephens, a former artist turned critic and collector, was another new acquaintance of Furze Hill years. He had been a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, posing as Ferdinand being lured by an impish green Ariel for Millais and as Jesus washing the feet of Peter for Ford Madox Brown. Stephens, however, had lost faith in his own talents and, putting down his brushes, become a public mouthpiece for the group instead. By the time he met Palmer he had written a number of books, among them a monograph on William Mulready. He may well have been contemplating his next subject when he first came to Furze Hill. If so, the plan never matured, but he appreciated and collected Palmer's work and, as the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, relished the opportunity of discussing the treasures of the museum's collection with a fellow connoisseur.

Palmer had a particular fondness for the company of young people. His friendships with men and women whom he had first known as children flourished into a fond maturity. Julia Richmond remained a particular favourite. When she told him of her engagement to a Mr Robinson whom she had met in Iona, he was almost as thrilled as a parent might have been; later he took so much pleasure in the news of the birth of a lively daughter (christened Iona) that he said he felt like an honorary grandfather to the child. The other Richmond children were also important to Palmer and though, especially in the months immediately after More's death, he found it painful to imagine their close family life – their ‘dear parents sitting down in the evening surrounded by their treasures'
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– he remained in many ways a part of their precious circle. ‘A letter would refresh me, but I like a long one full of matter,'
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he told Laura. Walter and John were treated to a somewhat gruesome meditation upon how suffering leads to sympathy (‘I dread coming near anyone who has never been in trouble,' Palmer told them; ‘he might tear me in pieces for his amusement; as the old feudal lords . . . When, after a hard day's hunting, they came home very tired, it is said that they found warm human blood refreshing to steep their feet in'
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). He warmly congratulated Inglis on his academic success and earnestly warned him against drinking cold water when he was very hot and the illness not long after their wedding of Willie Richmond's wife led to endless fussings about ‘defensive flannels',
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recommendations of milk and cream with a dessert spoon of brandy and optimistic tales of neighbours who had survived with only one lung. Unfortunately Inglis's wife had tuberculosis and died little more than a year later.

Frances, Redgrave's eldest daughter, had also become a friend. Herbert particularly relished her visits. When she stayed at Furze Hill, he remembered, ‘it seemed changed, glorified serene and full of new interests'.
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Palmer greatly enjoyed the company of her younger sister too. He nicknamed her ‘Preceptress' after she had teased him about his grotesque attempts at pronouncing French – shove-do-over for
chef d'oeuvre
– and this intelligent young woman, brought up by her father (of whom she was later to publish a memoir) in the company of Academicians, fostered a deep and lasting affection for him in return, as well as a firm belief in the integrity of his work.

Palmer took a warm interest in the wellbeing of Cope's son Harry whom he had first got to know in 1863 when, escaping an epidemic that had broken out in Kensington, he had come to stay for a few weeks at Furze Hill. He continued to follow the boy's progress from then on, imagining him busy over his books in his ‘snug quaintly-angled room'
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when he went up to Oxford. And Hook's son Bryan – another friend of Herbert's – was also a favourite. ‘You and I are such old friends that I quite missed you,'
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Palmer told him after one visit and Bryan became the beneficiary of Palmer's favourite pieces of advice: he was instructed to always tackle the most unpleasant task that faced him first and to give his whole mind to one thing at a time. You will call me ‘a fusty, rusty, musty, old “fogy” for my pains', Palmer wrote before teasingly arguing that, though fogy was slang, one of its definitions (Palmer would frequently have recourse to his several dictionaries) was ‘a stickler for old things', which was not, he insisted, a term of reproach.
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The most important friendship which Palmer forged in his Furze Hill years was that with a neighbouring family, the Wrights. Mrs Wright was the daughter of his own father's bookish companion Dr Williams (in whose Nonconformist library the records of Palmer's birth had been lodged) and she, having married a wealthy parson, Thomas Preston Wright, now lived in Reigate in a grand house with extensive grounds, a model farm and stables. She had two sons: John Preston and Thomas Howard. They were still schoolboys when the Palmers moved to Redhill and he would entertain them with tales of his Shoreham antics which years later they would parody in a humorous story set in the fictional headquarters of Cobweb Castle. As they grew up – John going to Cambridge and taking holy orders to end up eventually as Prebendary of Hereford Cathedral, Thomas studying at Oxford and becoming a barrister – they offered an increasingly treasured companionship. He took to them almost as if they had been his own, Herbert recorded, welcoming their visits ‘till in time these became a settled ordinance interrupted only by school and university duties. Poems, essays, magazine articles, red-hot schemes for various sweeping reforms – all were brought and laid before him; but not always with the anticipated success in securing a straightforward opinion.'
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Shut away in the studio, seated either side of the table – John Wright with a meerschaum, Palmer with an old-fashioned churchwarden's pipe – long, animated, opinionated, sometimes mocking and occasionally intemperate discussions would take place, their favourite point of dispute being the relevance of antiquity as Palmer defended ancient authors and their philosophies from the ingenious and often feigned attacks of these ardent exponents of contemporary thought. When the boys were away at university they kept up their varied and vehement conversations via letters, sometimes infrequent, sometimes arriving in flurries, dense with allusions, quotations and references and burdened, as so often, with endless advice. Here in these missives was Palmer's mind in full flight: they are not the ‘negligently elegant . . . natty native grace-Gainsborough kind of letters'
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which fashion found tasteful; they poured from his mind like a pent-up torrent. Here Palmer would pick up ideas and run with them, or return over and over to some favourite
bête noire
; using one tiny incident as an excuse for a sermon, railing and preaching, recommending and advising, ranting and confiding, fussing and fuming and dragging entire casts of peripheral characters into the debate. In one letter, Alcides, Cerberus, Lord Bacon, Bishop Horsley and Pythagoras all crop up in the space of a few paragraphs. The boys would write back and Palmer would carry their letters about in his ample waistcoat pockets for days, perusing them frequently, picking over their points one by one.

Sometimes the Wright brothers must have thought him an insufferable fusspot. Once he managed to turn Howard red with rage. But for the most part they enormously appreciated Palmer and, many years later, after his death, they wrote to Herbert recalling their memories of his father. ‘Though he doubted human nature and belittled and abused mankind, at times with freedom and acerbity, he never distrusted a human being,' they reflected. ‘I never heard him utter a hard word of any person in the world and I do not believe that he cherished a hard thought of anyone he had ever spoken with. His attacks were not against men and women but against qualities, vices, wickednesses . . . if he had striven with every fibre to make himself an ordinary being he would have failed . . . his was the life that knew nothing of the common and sordid incentive to action,' they said.
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The Palmers settled into a routine at Furze Hill. Breakfast would be early and was invariably followed by family prayers at which Palmer would read from the Bible, selecting passages he thought apposite or revisiting such grisly old favourites as the story of Judith or Ahab and Jezebel. Then, if the weather was good, he would spend half an hour in the garden before giving Herbert his lesson and himself retiring to his studio to work.

At home he always wore shabby, paint-stained clothes, rescued from a marauding wife who would have preferred to see them burnt. He would find strange and elaborate techniques of repairing them, recalled Herbert, who became his co-conspirator. Together they would stealthily patch up his battered old shoes by a laborious but ‘entirely original process'
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of their own.