Mysterious Wisdom (19 page)

It was around this time, however, that the fiscal circumstances of the Palmer brothers suddenly improved. In 1825, William Giles died leaving both his grandsons a legacy which, when all the paperwork had eventually been completed, amounted to a far from insignificant £3,000 apiece. William decided on the strength of it that he wanted to become a sculptor. Samuel, no longer bound to London by the need to attract paying clients, was free to pursue his ambitions in remote rural peace. Towards the end of 1826 he bought a dilapidated cottage, small and dark and overrun by rodents. The Ancients nicknamed it Rat Abbey. But the determinedly parsimonious Palmer was unperturbed: ‘I will not infringe a penny of the money God has sent me, beyond the interest, but live and study in patience and hope,'
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he told Richmond. This cottage would remain his home for well over a year.

Meanwhile, Palmer's father had started muttering about taking a new wife, a prospect which did not please his prosperous brother Nathanial who, already irritated at having to support a sibling who persisted in dabbling so degradingly in trade, did not want to have to deal with any potentially embarrassing and financially cumbersome dalliances on top. He issued an ultimatum: either his brother would live the life of a gentleman of leisure, and live it as a widower to boot, or he would have to forfeit his annual allowance. The path ahead, for the time being at least, was plain. Palmer's father loved his books but his Baptist convictions were equally firm. He decided to accept his brother's terms, to relinquish his unremunerative business, leave his dingy London house and retire to Shoreham to pursue a leisured existence, with his own private library and Mary Ward as a housekeeper, and a local congregation to whom he could expound his ideas of salvation, hustling their souls heavenward, as his grandson was later to put it, ‘with much sweating and thumping of cushions'
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to expedite them on their way.

In March 1827, Palmer's father sold up his stock in a sale which, taking place over the course of three days, brought him £133.6s. Not long afterwards, packing up his books and domestic accoutrements, he carted his entire household to Shoreham. By the end of 1828 he was ensconced at Waterhouse, a pretty Queen Anne building which he rented at the bottom of the village, overlooking the pack bridge. It was not as ostentatious then as it looks now,
for a Georgian façade has since been added giving it an air of contrived grandeur; but to the locals it would certainly have seemed a gentleman's residence with its six spacious rooms and its servants' attics, its little walled garden sloping down to the river and its expansive aspects of far-off tree-crowned slopes.

 

 

Shoreham felt like a secret haven to the Ancients: ‘a valley so hidden', as Calvert was to put it, ‘that it looked as if the devil had not yet found it out'.
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Palmer would often paint it protected by a foreground of sheltering hills. It was his sanctum. Away from ‘horrid smoky London with all its begrimed finery and sooty shows',
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he could search for that simplicity of purpose which he so admired in Blake, a man who managed to live ‘without a mask; his aim single, his path straightforwards, and his wants few' so that he could be ‘free, noble, and happy'.
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Palmer had some time since abandoned his dandified pretensions. He had caught sight of his full-length reflection in a London shop window and, after a long pause for self-critical consideration, declared: ‘No more finery for a gentleman as short as you!'
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From then on his dress would be humble, if decidedly eccentric, as a caricature scribbled by Richmond in 1825 makes clear. The painter is depicted from the back, a dishevelled figure with voluminous overcoat, furled umbrella, clumpy boots and broad-brimmed hat. ‘Learn thou the goodness of thy clothes to prize/ By their own use and not another's eyes,'
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Palmer would chant aphoristically. He came increasingly to detest the affectations of fashion, preferring clothes made with a more rigorously practical regard for comfort, hard wear and, of course, pocket capacity.

In Shoreham he began to adopt the sort of biblical look which the Nazarenes had favoured and, in both a chalk sketch and a miniature done by Richmond in 1829, an idealised ‘Ancient' emerges who, with his clipped beard and shoulder-brushing locks, serene downcast gaze and long antique robes, looks pronouncedly Christ-like – an association further affirmed by Richmond's first attempt at a portrait of Jesus. The robed and bearded figure who sits by the well in his 1828 painting of
Christ and the Woman of Samaria
bears a strong resemblance to Palmer who quite possibly posed.

To the locals, Palmer would have appeared outlandish. Beards were not much worn at that time, except by soldiers, and were considered positively suspect in Establishment circles. Even as late as 1840, when the radical Mr George Frederick Muntz appeared in Parliament with a flourishing growth of facial hair, there were many who felt that he was issuing his own peculiar hirsute insult to English parliamentary institutions. In more bohemian company, however, the beard was coming back and the once pink-cheeked Palmer was proud to be sporting his cutting-edge credentials. ‘The artists have at last an opportunity of wearing the beard unmolested,' he informed Linnell that summer. ‘I understand from the papers that it is become the height of fashion.'
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Palmer persuaded Mary Ward to stitch him a large and extraordinary cloak. In winter he would furl it warmly around him, pulling up its hood against the inclement weather; but in summer, when the heat in the valley was basting, he would wear a canvas jacket and a huge circular straw hat: a functional if flamboyant adornment which, cropping up in several of his paintings, became for this scion of a family who had made their money in millinery a long-cherished symbol of his Shoreham days. He must have made a peculiar sight, stumping about the hills, stool in one hand, umbrella in the other, pockets stuffed with sketching pads, long auburn locks straggling from under the brim of his great woven-straw cartwheel, while he peered at far distant views through spectacles so ‘scratched and scribbled over' that their two misty spheres of light looked, he said, like ‘the sun in a fog or a dirty dish in a dark pantry'.
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His fellow Ancients, however, did not follow his dress code. They couldn't afford to look so shambolic. It was all very well for Palmer, with his financial legacy, to enjoin his companions to trust in the Lord – ‘our blessed Lord teaches us not to be anxious about the morrow' he told Richmond, ‘spiritual difficulties should be the only serious trouble of a bright intellectual essence: other disturbances are for the most part terrific phantoms which vanish on approach'
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– but the rest of the Ancients were encumbered by what must have felt like a far-from phantasmic need to earn a living. Even Calvert with his private income had to bear in mind his familial duties, not to mention his sense of social propriety. The only person who remained permanently in Shoreham with Palmer was his brother William, who by then was pursuing his own unpromising sculptural career.

Calvert liked to visit whenever he could and, in the autumn of 1825, he brought Blake and his wife along with him by stagecoach. The old visionary was very unwell by then and had spent most of that year confined to his bed, but though still plagued by shivering fits and his perennial stomach complaints, he enjoyed the trip, spending profitable hours tucked up by the fire discussing books with Palmer's father. It has been suggested that his
Jerusalem
was inspired by, if not actually written in, the village, that Shoreham's rainy skylines were his ‘clouded hills'. The rest of the Ancients turned up periodically for visits, staying with Palmer at first in his rodent-infested hovel and later, and far more comfortably, with his father at Waterhouse. Sometimes they would lodge with locals as flurried exchanges of letters discussing rooms and their various merits and rental prices attest.

The ardent young men relished their time in the valley as much as any holiday. In 1827, in the month of May when the orchards and hedgerows were overspilling with blossom, the fields crowded with wild flowers and the pastures springing up lush, Walter, Sherman and Frederick Tatham all came to visit. A short while later, Richmond, having sold his first ever miniature for three guineas, rented a room from a labourer for two shillings a week – he was particularly delighted to discover that John Wesley had held a meeting in that very chamber – and joined his fellows in Kent determined to eke his money out for as long as he could. Richmond was always to remember those weeks. ‘I believe no human being was ever happier than I was in that first independent taste of really beautiful countryside along with my dear friends,'
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he would write.

Linnell had originally tried to dissuade Palmer from retiring to his rural retreat. He would be washed up in a cultural backwater, he had warned. But he also enjoyed periodic trips to the valley. ‘I have been at many places,' he wrote after a stay in the summer of 1828, but ‘I never was anywhere so much at liberty.'
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He found ‘benefit' and peacefulness in Shoreham's ‘Sylvan Bower'
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and he set about making his typically thorough arrangements to bring his entire family, his wife and their (by then five) children – the little Leonardos or little Ancients
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as they were playfully nicknamed – down to enjoy the harvest home.

 

 

‘If we wait for a pure community large or small while human nature lasts, we shall wait in vain,'
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declared Palmer. He knew that the ideal society could never exist. And yet for all that the Ancients were rather fragmented, they had a powerful sense of shared purpose and prayerfulness, of friendship and happiness that enriched their lives. They sought out the simple pleasures of a world in which the spiritual was spied through the veil of nature and, as Palmer was later to put it, ‘the beautiful was loved for itself'.
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They rose early at Shoreham, beginning their days – or at least
endeavouring
to, Palmer admitted – by dwelling on a passage from scripture. They gloried in the loveliness of the dawn, often rising in darkness and slipping out while the mists were still lingering low by the river and the oxen still drowsing unyoked in their stalls, to sit on their camp stools and watch for day's coming. And then, when the first creeping pinkness had flared and flamed outwards in a conflagration of dawn gold, they would gather up their things and walk home through its wonders together, singing praises to God for his radiant light.

Having breakfasted simply on bread and apples, they would bathe in the river, even in winter when the swift icy currents must have made them splash and yelp. Such vigorous daily ablutions were a new departure for Palmer who had until then been content to wash only once a week. ‘I feel ever grateful to Mr Tatham for teaching me to “sweeten my carcass”,'
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he would later write. For the rest of his life he remained ‘an inveterate body-washer'. The whole human race could be divided spiritually into the converted and unconverted and bodily into ‘the washers and stinkers',
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he concluded, and when many years later a woman politely inquired of him what, in one word, he considered to be England's greatest national virtue, he pronounced without a moment's hesitation: ‘Cleanliness.' ‘Yes! We may look down from the organ gallery of St Paul's Knightsbridge in the London season and say “Every one of you has taken a tub this morning!” In what other country could
that
be said?'
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