Mysterious Wisdom (4 page)

 

 

Following paths that led out through an unregulated straggle of development, past smoking brick kilns and pens of muddy hogs, by piles of stinking refuse and the discarded corpses of dogs, Palmer and his father would head off in search of rural pleasures. Sometimes they would go eastwards, following the river as it broadened between banks of smelly mud towards the village of Greenwich where a gentle chalky slope had once provided a picturesque setting for Henry VIII's palace (long since demolished and replaced by Wren's seamen's hospital) and a steep hill rising above offered a fashionable perch for the home of some Palmer relations on whom father and son would occasionally pay a call. At other times they would wander southwards across the fields to Peckham, then still a quiet country spot, though at night timid villagers would not have risked the walk home for fear of footpads. It was in these very fields that, some fifty years earlier, the great visionary William Blake had been witness to heavenly apparitions. He had seen bright-feathered angels roosting in branches and, gazing out across hayfields, had spotted glorious seraphim. But for Palmer it was Dulwich rather than Peckham that was to become what he later, under Blake's intoxicating influence, would describe as the ‘gate into the world of vision',
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and Dulwich lay a little further on.

One way to walk there was along the ridge of Herne Hill, passing under chestnut boughs and between billowing lilac bushes before descending downwards into lush meadowlands. The village itself was then still prettily rustic with cows and sheep ambling down its grass-lined streets. A few fine houses were scattered along the lanes and upon the gentler slopes. There was a common where gypsies camped with their donkeys, where the butchers grazed their cattle and old women chivvied their flocks of flat-footed geese. There was a village pond with a mill and a couple of public houses to which young men would ride out. Families would enjoy pleasant day trips in picturesque surroundings. And it was here, to this village, that Dickens imagined the amiable Mr Pickwick retiring.

The River Effra, now flowing for the most part underground, wound through it, a slender rivulet, its plaiting currents crisscrossed by little wooden bridges leading up to the cottages which nestled among sheltering laburnums and hawthorns. The young Sam, like the critic John Ruskin – whom he was later to know – learnt much of his love of nature here, sharing the same sort of boyish pleasures that Ruskin describes: squatting down by the waters, poring over the tadpoles that squiggled in pools, stuffing himself with blackberries from the over-spilling hedges, collecting bunches of cowslips and gathering the wild dill from which the village –
Dilwihs
or
Dylways
meaning ‘the damp meadow where dill grows' – takes its name. And later, also like Ruskin, Palmer would bitterly lament the development, that ‘foul and unnatural enlargement of London',
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which would lead to the destruction of this enchanted spot. He was always to treasure it, a rural idyll in his memory. ‘Remember the Dulwich sentiment at very late twilight time,' he would note, ‘with the rising dews . . . like a delicious dream.'
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The relationship which Sam and his father now forged set a pattern for the strong male friendships that Palmer was always to foster. The pair must have presented a companionable picture, walking side by side along country lanes, the elder striding along in a flapping overcoat, the younger bobbing beside him in short jacket and cap making periodic forays into hedgerows and fields to fetch birds' nests or flint stones, mushrooms or beech nuts. There were treasures to be hoarded and Sam, having emerged in one bound ‘from short petticoats . . . into trousers and . . . O rapture! – into
pockets'
,
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had found just the place. Amid the lucky-dip of delights – ‘gingerbread nuts, story books, toffy, squirts and pop guns'
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– which his bulging pockets harboured, he would always keep his most prized gift of a knife. One day he had asked his father to file its blade even sharper and it had had to be explained to him that if an edge was too finely honed it would do nothing but shave because, if put to any other purpose, it would turn. Palmer would discover in this advice a metaphorical lesson: the human mind, also, could become too acute. ‘Whatever sharpens narrows,'
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as the philosopher Francis Bacon, whom he would frequently cite, had once said.

Palmer's own education was broad. Considered too fragile for school, the foundations of his learning were laid at home. The Bible was a bedrock. Sam was made to learn a passage from it daily. But his father, on very rare occasions with the aid of a rod, also taught him good Latin and the rudiments of Greek. He was allowed to graze freely in the pastures of literature with only the vaguest of programmes to guide him. Volumes discovered in solitude were to become matchless companions. ‘There is nothing like books,' as he would later say: ‘of all things sold incomparably the cheapest, of all pleasures the least palling, they take up little room, keep quiet when they are not wanted and, when taken up, bring us face to face with the choicest men who ever lived, at their choicest moments.'
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The lessons of these men were to form the weft of his life. He would never forget, for example, his first reading of Pope's
Essay on Criticism
, a didactic composition which pursues a discussion as to whether poetry should be ‘natural' or written according to set classical rules. Pope resolves the problem by arguing that classical rules are natural. It was an idea that Palmer was later to explore in his painting. Joseph Glanville's
Sadducimus Triumphatus
, which decried scepticism about witchcraft, was, with its lurid illustrations and its tales of drumming spirits, a particularly favoured volume according with his boyish tastes but also, in its more serious aspects – its reconciliation of the rise of science with supernatural powers – serving to validate his faith in metaphysical possibilities, preparing him for his meeting with Blake, who believed ardently in magic.

Palmer's father added to his knowledge on their rambles through the country, talking and reciting and reading to him as they walked from one of the little vellum-bound notebooks which he always kept tucked into a waistcoat pocket. These books were stuffed with a haphazard assortment of observations, quotations and facts which had been harvested randomly from whatever he happened to be reading. Ranging from the scribbled solution to an algebraic problem, through a few lines of poetry to the religious pronouncements of some admired divine, their ideas would, one by one, be slipped into the formative mind of young Sam.

Palmer's father, in many ways, was not a good role model. An unworldly dreamer, he could be carefully methodical in small things; but when it came to matters of more serious import – not least, financial provision for his family – he was prepared to act upon improvident whim. Even when it became obvious that he was misguided, he would continue stubbornly on. Once, finding the gate to a bridge over a river locked, he had without hesitation waded straight out into the flow. And yet, he was as lenient as he could be obstinate and Palmer was always to remember the day when, due for a birching, he had pleaded with his parent to turn his mind to other more pleasant matters and so been let off.

Many years later, Palmer would look back with gratitude on the upbringing that an affectionate and enthusiastic father, a man who had ‘loved knowledge for its own sake',
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had offered him. He would always value the kindness and, even more importantly, ‘the liberality'
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with which he had been allowed to pursue his interests when a more worldly parent, eager to be rid of financial encumbrance, would have pushed his son into trade.

 

 

Around 1814 the Palmer family left Surrey Square, moving to Houndsditch on the eastern border of the City of London. This road is now a steep gulley of glass, all but deserted outside business hours, but then it was part of a labyrinth of narrow, crowded streets, overlooked by ramshackle houses and blocked by horse-drawn-traffic jams. The move was probably made for financial reasons. Two young sons were not cheap to support and the bookselling business, it was hoped, would be brisker in this part of the capital where a stallholder, setting out his wares on the pavement, could attract the custom of walkers returning from work in the City to the residential West End. To the country-loving Sam, however, the change would have felt bleak. Houndsditch was rough, surrounded by the notorious rookeries of the Jewish Quarter and famous for its rag fair: a ‘mass of old clothes, grease, patches, tatters and remnants of decayed prosperity and splendour'.
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It was said that a silk handkerchief could be bought back here within hours of its having being stolen.
It was certainly not a salubrious area and Palmer would later recall with disgust the sight of a dead man's brains lying in the middle of Ludgate Hill with only a little hastily scattered sawdust to cover them.

Worse was to come. In May 1817, Sam was sent away to school. Merchant Taylors' was chosen: an institution founded in 1561 by the City livery company of that name. Now located outside London, in Palmer's day it was established in some bare old buildings in Suffolk Lane in the shadow of St Paul's. The school motto,
Concordia Parvae Res Crescunt
– ‘small things grow in harmony' – could almost have served as a professional maxim for the painter that Palmer was to become, but it far from reflected his experiences at the time. A cosseted child with a tendency to shed ‘delicious tears at performances on the organ'
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did not cope well with the coarse rough and tumble of school life.

The diminutive twelve-year-old with his thick russet hair, his pale complexion and his asthmatic's cough, gazed with misgiving at the boisterous creatures around him. ‘I . . . thought they resembled baboons,' he later wrote. He was always to disdain the public school system in which ‘the fag crawls to be kicked, and, in his turn, kicks the fag who crawls to him', even as he sardonically acknowledged that the system ‘perfectly represents and so admirably prepares for the requirements of public life' for ‘what is statesmanship but successful crawling and kicking?'
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The timid young Palmer sought, as ever, a safe haven in books and it may well have been around this time that his particular affection for the work of William Cowper was nurtured. Cowper, then, was one of the nation's most popular poets. His homely vision was deeply to move Palmer. He saw his mother as the living counterpart of the domestic paragons of Cowper's verse and ‘Tirocinium' – a poem in which Cowper urges a clerical friend not to send his sons off to boarding school but to opt for private tuition instead – contained painful resonances for the unhappy little boy.