Mysterious Wisdom (44 page)

Herbert thought his father would have been better if he had remained unmarried. ‘Imagine the results if, unhampered [by] a Kensington villa, two servants and an idol,' he wrote – the idol being Thomas More – ‘he had been able to depart each spring, carefree and happy, and practically rich to new beauty and old associations.'
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Palmer would probably have concurred, albeit for very different reasons. Parental anxiety, which began, he wrote, ‘when a child begins to walk, for beginning to walk is beginning to tumble',
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turned a screw on the heart. When, at the end of 1859, the family was struck down by scarlet fever, he grew almost demented with worry. The ‘pain suffered for sick children, of anxiety terror and sometimes inconsolable grief – are a very very abundant offset to the desolateness of celibacy,' he told Richmond. ‘We should by no means persuade those to marry who are content to be single.'
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‘O! this grinding world there is no Leisure for anything,'
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Palmer, in 1843, had cried out to his wife. Now, fifteen years later, he felt completely crushed. He began commending mournfully sentimental poems about death to Hannah. ‘I could go quietly,' he told her, ‘like a poor sheep under the first hedge and lie down and die.'
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To Richmond, he described himself as ‘a squashed worm'.
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‘I seem doomed never to see again that first flush of summer splendour which entranced me at Shoreham,'
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he lamented. He was in his mid-fifties. His dreams were all past. He had become nothing but ‘a living flour mill which has to grind corn for others',
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he wrote.

19

A Bitter Blow

 

The Catastrophe of My Life

from
The Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

Even as Palmer's dreams were being ground down to dust, his hopes for his son mounted higher and higher. Hardly a letter passed between them which was not burdened with educational, moral or religious advice – and usually all three at once. Little wonder that More often yearned to escape. For a while, he dreamt of going to sea. The life of a mariner must have felt far more enticing than the career of a clergyman which his father had in store but, discouraged from the other side by a disapproving mother, nothing ever came of his nautical plans.

More did make one spirited bid for freedom. At the age of fourteen, he and Richmond's son, Willie, ran away from the homes where they were ‘nurtured like cucumbers',
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and, with four pence between them, set off to seek their fortunes alone. Many years afterwards, Willie (by then Sir William Richmond Blake) described what happened in the adventure that became known to both families as ‘The Escapade'.

He and More were great friends and, since early childhood, had spent many happy hours in each other's company, sharing a piano teacher and reading books together, making suits of armour out of paper and glue and playing chess secretly late into the night. But, Willie said, they felt restricted by the artificiality of town life and so decided one day to escape to Windsor. It was March when they set off in a pair of greatcoats purloined from their parents, getting as far as Hammersmith before, remembering that they had no money to pay for their supper, they decided to call in on some nearby Palmer relations to borrow half a crown. They then trotted determinedly on and, though questioned by police on Barnes Common, were not detained. As they crossed Bushey Park, they imagined that they were living the free life of their fathers at Shoreham.

At Teddington they spent the night at an inn and, waking the next morning, More ordered shaving water, even though there was not a hair on his smooth pink cheeks. Meanwhile Willie, turning up his Eton collars, cut off their corners to make them look like the fashionable stand-ups of the day. The pair then set off again, practising a sermon which they intended later to deliver for money and, eventually reaching a small village, they walked about advertising their upcoming performance before retiring to a pub. Willie sketched a portrait of the landlady in return for their lunch and it was while he was doing so that the pair were finally apprehended and returned by the police to their panic-stricken parents.

Their punishments were stern. Cope was called in to deliver a two-hour lecture to More, while Willie was made to learn by heart the letters sent by friends condemning his selfish flight. The incident, though it did nothing to affect the friendship between the two families, was accorded a disproportionate gravity. The two boys were forbidden from meeting and a short while later, when by chance they passed in the street, More turned his head and looked the other way.

He was set firmly back on his unrelenting path. By the age of sixteen he had won a place at a first-rate grammar school in Kensington. He is ‘a diligent student . . . never idle for a moment . . . a very pleasant and intellectual companion',
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his father recorded; William Haig Brown, the headmaster – known as Old Bill to the boys – concurred. He and Palmer join pedagogical forces. As they saw it, they were arming their pupil for life. But More must more often have felt that he had a hydra-headed monster to battle. No sooner was one task completed than the next cropped up. No sooner had one discipline been mastered than another awaited. Even on holiday, he was pressed to rise early and dedicate two hours to Homer before breakfast had been prepared.

Palmer set intellectual achievement over everything. ‘Skill in music and cricket will not in the least avail you in a college examination,' he warned.
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He discouraged most sport. More did not like it much anyway: boxing, in those days a regular part of a schoolboy's curriculum, made his head feel fuzzy. He preferred more gentle amusements. Inspired most probably by the publication of Philip Henry Gosse's
Evenings at the Microscope
in 1859, he wondered about getting such an instrument of his own. But Palmer was not to be persuaded. He was distrustful of science. Even if More were to find a flea as big as a mastiff, he said, he doubted that it could hop so far into the invisible world as if he watched his morals instead. He was far happier when he found his own enthusiasms reflected in his son. The boy ‘foams with the book mania',
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he proudly informed a friend – though he and his son never communicated more nearly than when they found themselves sitting in the drawing room at Douro Place, playing the upright piano with its red, pleated silk front. More's piano teacher, Mr Woolman, became an admired family friend and, as so often with people who were struggling to make ends meet, Palmer went out of his way to help him to find work.

One of More's favourite pastimes was grangerism, a hobby involving the taking apart of a book so as to reconstruct it with lots of additional illustrations collected from other volumes that had been cut up. More had been introduced to this activity – named after the Reverend James Granger because his 1769
Biographical History of England
proved a much-favoured volume for illustration in this manner – by his friend Mrs George, a woman who had once been admired for her beauty and her ability to drive a four-in-hand, but was now ancient and massive with black gleaming hair and brilliant white teeth. She lived a reclusive life amid a profusion of eighteenth-century treasures, with only ‘Old Tub' her maid and her youthful memories for company. But More would spend hours in her Mayfair home, snipping and sticking as he chatted away.

Mrs George was an eccentric choice of friend for a teenage boy, but at school More had been bullied. Had he been stronger and fitter he might have stood up to his classmates. He was funny and lively, clever and daring, but his health was failing and, at the beginning of 1859, he fell dangerously ill. Palmer, though concerned, did not cease to push his son and before long More was confined to his bed with a writing desk balanced on his knees and his schoolmaster visiting, inviting him to borrow any books that he required. More penned poems to his classmates, which apparently brought tears to their eyes when they read them. He clearly had his father's taste for sentimental verse.

That summer, on holiday in Hastings, More was constantly badgered by letters from his father. Though he was not idle, Palmer told him, his danger was ‘
aliud agere
'
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– a propensity to let the mind drift away from the matter immediately in hand. More kicked against the traces. A man with no ‘
aliud agere
' was likely to be a mere animal, he replied. His father was determined to keep him firmly in harness. Concentration, accuracy and ‘painstaking' were indispensable, he insisted and the ensuing holiday which More took in Berkshire was punctuated by reminders that he was about to enter his decisive year; that his chances of going to college – and he needed to win an open scholarship – would depend entirely on the next few months. He must not just do the requisite work, but do it as if he
liked it
. He must measure himself only against the very best.

More entered his final school year, but that December, first he, then his brother, contracted scarlet fever. Hannah spent hours in the sick room with sponges and compresses, potions and broths. This time it was Herbert who caused the greater concern. But by the next term More was off school again, recuperating in Surrey from a bout of rheumatic fever. Fretful letters arrived from his father: ‘If you go in to the garden without a cap your complement of life will be ended,'
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he admonished. And yet, even as he warned him neurotically against damp shoes and long walks, he goaded him to keep up with his work. More went on to come second only to the head boy in his end of term exams.

If More had won a place at Oxford, his father would have been prepared to follow him, to make a new start himself; but during the ensuing term the boy's energy began seriously to flag. Several times, overcome by sudden drowsiness after his three o'clock dinner, More fell asleep at his desk. He was mortified to find that these lapses offended his master, a teacher with whom he would often stroll, arm in arm. He penned his apology in verse:

 

St Paul was preaching, Entychus

Unhappy fell asleep

Unable though attentive all

His wakeful sense to keep.

He fell from the window – and if I

From prized favour fall,

Would choose to sleep as he had slept

Unless awaked by Paul.

 

But, though the master quickly forgave him, the dreadful tiredness did not pass.

In the summer of 1860, More took a walking holiday with a school friend, Arthur Symonds. They toured Surrey and Kent, and, even if the trip was somewhat less impulsive that the infamous ‘Escapade', the pair enjoyed some fairly lively boyish adventures all the same. One day they had a narrow escape when, dashing for shelter from a sudden downpour, they found themselves struggling to get through a gate. At that moment a great fork of lightning struck the road just ahead of them. Had it not been for the obstacle, they would have been standing at the exact point which it hit, More told his mother, who had already been quite enough alarmed by the fact that he had not carried an umbrella, without a frazzling lightning fork being added to her fears. More revelled in the freedom of his tour and wrote a poem which he illustrated with little sketches afterwards. But his father, who believed that two hours of work in the morning were worth four in the evening, was anxious that his Greek was being left until too late in the day. He was as much relieved as delighted when his beloved boy was safely back and, ensconced at the home of a Mrs Hodges in Kent, had resumed a more sedentary life. ‘I trust your legs sowed their wild oats and that you will see the folly of fatiguing yourself,'
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Palmer wrote testily, as though a few days spent wandering about the home counties without galoshes had been some perilous adventure.

In March 1861, More's health again broke down. Cadaverously thin, he left school to stay with friends in Slough while his father set off, trawling the country with sketchbooks and carpet bag, to find some suitable spot for the boy to recover. After much tramping, he alighted on High Ashes, a small farmhouse perched on the brow of a steep heathland slope a few miles from Abinger in Surrey. Palmer's artist friend, Redgrave, had a country cottage nearby. Linnell, although he never visited, considered it too bleak a spot for a convalescent, but to More's eight-year-old brother it seemed an earthly paradise. Herbert ran amok, playing with the local boys and riding the shaggy-hooved farm horses, until eventually his mother had to rein him back in.

Soon the invalided More was also out of bed and, though too weak to do much more than just vegetate – he was living discreetly ‘
à la cabbage
',
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he joked – he passed the time gazing out of the window towards pearly horizons of a hue that would have been familiar from his father's work. He pressed spring flowers and started learning the violin. His father, who had lent him his fiddle, teased that he would frighten the pigs with his tuneless scrapings.

As More grew stronger, he started to ramble about in the knee-deep heather, to follow the threads of silvery brooks or shoot rabbits in the furze. His father was predictably alarmed, fearing that he would either blow off his hand or fall foul of game laws. He recounted the story of a man who had shot dead his sister by mistake. Palmer had no time for country sports. ‘How few are out of their teens at sixty!' he once wrote to Reed. ‘How few people have put away their toys. They have only changed them – grown out of their pellet and popgun into partridge shooting.'
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Meanwhile a chest full of Latin and Greek books, rail-freighted down from London at considerable expense, awaited More's attention.