SAMUEL PALMER.* Tan story of this artist's life and work,
which has just been written by his son, and published by the Fine-Art Society, forms, in the simplicity of its record, as notable a contrast as could be desired to the noisy art charlatanism which is a marked feature of the present day. We seem transported into another age than that of the nineteenth century, when we read of the calm, unhurried life of " plain living and high thinking," which the subject of this biography led for more than seventy peaceful years. We can scarcely believe that within hearing of London's " want and woe," it was possible to live from youth to manhood, and manhood to age, a life which was one of idyllic simplicity, and yet neither ignorant nor unintellec- tual. Artists who have despised popular applause, and lived for themselves and their work, we have heard of ere now, though their names of late years have been few and far between ; but an artist like the late Mr. Palmer, whose interest extended almost equally to all intellectual pursuits, and yet who was contented to spend his days in the narrow groove of suburban and rustic life, and to find his greatest pleasure in reading aloud some favourite author after the day's work was done, is rare indeed.
On reading this memoir, we are struck most vividly with the fact that this little-known, unpretentious artist, this dweller amongst rustics in a little-known country village, had un- doubtedly discovered the secret which the wisest and the wealthiest seek in vain, and bad learned how to live. Intense joy and continual interest in every variety of Nature, an unfail- ing power of work, perfect contentment with small means, a heart full of affection for his children and his friends, and a constant pleasure in their society, and above all, an ever-fresh delight in the works of his favourite authors, these made up the pleasures of his life. An artist, a musician, and a scholar, be was above all a malt, taking a simple, healthy pleasure in all that occurred round him, and preserving to the end of a long life his interest in the art and works with which his life had begun. For him, there seem to have been none of the ordinary trials and deficiencies of the artistic nature, and it is as if, touched by his single-hearted devotion, the stern goddess of Art had laid aside her character of Nemesis, and become only a pleasant companion, and a devoted friend. The story of the life, in so far as its incidents are concerned, can be told in a sentence. A quiet boyhood was passed in studying to be a painter, a quiet manhood and old age spent in painting. The record is so perfectly uneventful, that the most important landmarks therein are the removal from one place of residence to another, and a two years' trip in Italy, taken after his mar- riage, in company with Mr. and Mrs. George Richmond.
Out of his seventy-seven years of life, Mr. Palmer spent twenty-six in the prime of his manhood in the suburban districts of London, but of these years his son tells us scarcely anything. They seem to have been devoted to painting, and training his eldest son, and they were closed by the one great sorrow of the
• Samuel Palmer: a Memoir. London : The Pine-Art Society.
painter's life, the death of that son from over-work. After this event, the painter never lived near or in London again, but settled down in a picturesque part of Surrey known as Mead Vale, in a house which stands upon a range of sandhills near Reigate, and overlooks the Kentish and the Surrey Downs. Here, for the last twenty years of his life, the artist lived and worked, and it is chiefly of this period which his son speaks in the memoir before ns. Here is his account of the manner in which the day was spent :- "Though fond of reading and designing, sometimes rather far into the night, he was seldom late in rising, and at this time he competed with the writer who should be the ' lark,' or first to appear in the morning. After breakfast and prayers, he would spend, perhaps, half an hour in the garden, and then would return into his study, to work intensely until an early dinner; that over, he would usually take a-short nap, reading till he fell asleep, and awaked, he would go to his work again till tea-time. Then the garden once more or a short walk, and finally the sacred hours' to be devoted (when there were no visitors) to literature, letter-writing, or designing."
To gain any idea of the peculiar charm of Samuel Palmer's work, it is necessary to bear in mind the object which the painter had in view, and it will be according as the- spectator prizes or despises that aim that he will care for or disregard the work in question. For beyond nearly all painting with which we are acquainted, that of Samuel Palmer is the most fully penetrated and interfused with the spirit of its author ; and for those who either do not understand or do not sympathise with that spirit, its attractiveness is very slight. The enormous technical skill which is manifested in various respects will not suffice to arrest the imagination of those whose artistic feeling revolts from the conventionalism of the composition, and the intentional surrender in many places of realistic truth. And it is also likely that many of those who are opposed to the prevailing realism in Art will find that here the ideal is too closely wedded to the natural, to satisfy their taste. Every one, it is true, can appreciate the vivid power with which Mr. Palmer's sun shines through inter- lacing boughs and leaves, and most can see the delicacy and depth of his chiaroscuro ; but to those, and they are very many, who do not rejoice in colour and see it clearly, the rainbow hues of the painter's skies and landscapes are only a source of offence, and are dubbed unnatural or unpleasant, without more ado.
The main beauty of the work, however, is scarcely to be sought for in its technical excellence, great as in most respects that is, but in the spiritual power of the painter, which sub- dues into one complete expression of feeling the various scattered unities with which he deals. He uses colours and forms as a poet does words, to build up some poetic conception. His com- position is not constructed upon a barren theory—geometrical or aesthetic—but with a view to enhance the meaning of the scene, or the words which his pictures have to illustrate. The- late Mr. Rossetti wrote, some time back, on this subject:— " Such a manifestation of spiritual force absolutely present— though not isolated, as in Blake—has certainly never been united with native landscape-power in the same degree as Palmer's works display; while, when his glorious colouring is abandoned for the practice of etching, the same exceptional unity of soul and sense appears again, with the same rare use of manipulative material. The possessors of his works have what must grow in influence, just as the possessors of Blake's creations are beginning to find ; but with Palmer the process must be more positive and infinitely more rapid, since, white a specially select artist to the few, he has a realistic side, on which he touches the many, more than Blake can ever do."
It is this spiritual meaning that few people will be able to
interpret in Palmer's pictures. What does the present generation of picture-buyers and picture-seers know or care about the song of Tityrus, or " Meliboeus's Restoration to his Patrimony 1' P What, indeed, does it care for the inner flavour of the Miltonic poems of "L'Allegro " and "Il Penseroso P"
Now, these pictures of Palmer's are (without seeking for alliteration) pure, peaceful, and pleasant. They smack of by- gone times, of uncomplicated lives. There is a fading-classic- flavour about them, as of a rustic Claude, but no trace of the weariness, worry, or nineteenth-century hopelessness of Turner.
They are not of life, they are beside it. They partly accept and partly disdain the world of reality; they live in it at second-hand, as it were, seeing it through the medium of a poet's fancies. Their strength is that throughout their dreaming there runs a solid streak of meaning. The artist was nourished on Milton, Shakespeare, and Nature, and in his pictures we have the three combined. More difficult and more dangerous, in these present critic-ridiculing days, is it to see or say bow far these pictures are modified by or hint at the musical
genius of their painter. That there is curious harmony about them, as of modulated sound, can scarcely be denied; and perhaps between the harmonies of colour which were Palmer's birth- right, and the harmonies of sound which seem to have been his second nature, there does exist some strange connection. In any case, the rhythm of Milton's poetry appears to be ,fitly reproduced, or to have a fitting analogue, in many of these pictures ; there is in them all the dignity, the im- pressiveness, the concentration, and the splendour which we are accustomed to associate with the work of the -author of " Paradise Lost." More than this, they have that strange " timelessness " of character which removes work from all chance of being outgrown,—by fading fashion or altered opinions. They depend in no way upon the tastes of a minute, but upon something which, to the artist at least, seemed eternally true and beautiful. There is in them no caprice, no self-assertion, no slovenliness. The work, whatever we may think of it, has been built up bit by bit, with love and patience, on the most solid foundation that its author could see :—" What- soever things were noble, whatsoever things were lovely, what- soever things were of good report," he has endeavoured to in- troduce therein ; and with all patience and all humility, for more than sixty years, this artist worked day by day, without striving for name or seeking for wealth, to give to his compositions one little added spark of beauty, one finer touch of meaning. And now,—
"After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well."
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