A bucolic paradise
Ronald Blythe examines William Blake’s influence on the work of the 19th-century artist Samuel Palmer
Samuel Palmer was in his early twenties when he wrote in his notebook, ‘The Glories of Heaven might be tried — hymns sung among the hills of Paradise at eventide ... ’ As a subject for a painting he means. Just before this he discovered his paradisal hills at Shoreham on the Kentish coast. And that very same year, 1824, he had also discovered how to paint them, for John Linnell, his future father-in-law, had taken him to visit William Blake. This meeting was profound. Blake was near death and living with his wife in a grubby London back street. Palmer found him ‘lame in bed, of a scalded foot (or leg). There, not inactive, though sixty-seven years old, but hardworking on a bed covered with books sat he up like one of the Antique patriarchs, or a dying Michael Angelo. Thus and thus was he making in the leaves of a great book (folio) the sublimest designs for his (not superior) Dante. He said he began them with fear and trembling. I said, “O! I have enough of fear and trembling.” “Then,” said he, “you’ll do.”... After visiting him, the scene recurs to me afterwards in a kind of vision; and in this most false, corrupt and genteely stupid town my spirit sees his dwelling (the chariot of the sun), as it were an island in the midst of the sea — such a place is it for primitive grandeur.’ There would be further calls on Blake when Palmer would kiss the bell-handle before pulling it.
When he and Linnell and William Calvert settled in the Water House in Shoreham as disciples of Blake, the critics would call them ‘primitive expressionists’ but they dubbed themselves the Ancients. They lived with great simplicity in response to villadom which they saw as a materialistic rash spreading from the old towns and villages of southern England. The geography of Shoreham prevented, or held back for a time, this suburbanism, being the pretty river Darent finding its way to the sea between towering hills, sheep pastures and dwellings which grew out of the soil like plants. There was a feeling of protection from what existed outside it. ‘Coming from Evening Church’ is a picture of divine protection. However, these parishioners are toilers on the day of rest and no Eden-dwellers. They are the humble and meek from the ‘Magnificat’ who on Sundays are spiritually exalted. The artist sees them still caught up in the language of prayer as they wind their way home. They are steeped both in Cranmer’s words and Virgil’s words, the latter without knowing it. The procession is ordinary, yet noble.
A shepherding-fishing family maybe, for coastal workers usually did both tasks, leads its neighbours from worship. Heightened to angelic dimensions a man and his wife walk before grandparents and children, and the labouring community is still dazed by what they have heard, what they have said. In his ‘Song by an Old Shepherd’, William Blake had written:
Whilst Virtue is our walking-staff And Truth a lantern to our path, We can abide life’s pelting storm, That makes our limbs quake, if our hearts be warm.
The figures wear Blakean robes — as did Palmer when without the slightest sense of impropriety he would use himself to model Christ. These villagers are just ‘clothed’. The immensity of moonlight before electricity floods them, and yet, at the same time, darkens the scene making a great drama. The conventional business of going to church is made captivating. Everyone is still saying, ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and by the great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night,’ just as those in the very same church and on the very same path would have murmured:
Before the ending of the day, Creator of the world, we pray That with thy wonted favour thou Wouldst be our guard and keeper now.
Many years later Samuel Palmer’s son, describing Shoreham, wrote, ‘But (the people) toiled on till the harvest-moon gilded their faces and the hungry owl gave them shrill warning of his supper-time ... and the moon herself bore little resemblance to the pallid, small reality we see above us nowadays. She seemed to blush and bend herself towards men (as when she stooped to kiss Endymion ... )’ The artist said that cast shadow was the enforcer of light, ‘that latent springs of poetry’ were to be found in darkness, and that figures in a landscape should be in action. All these requirements are present in ‘Coming from Evening Church’.
He and his friends at Shoreham, were, like Coleridge and Wordsworth, dedicated night-walkers. Kent was sumptuous at nightfall, the hops and apples, the cottages and oasthouses all enriched when the daylight failed. All work ceased except that of shepherds and the basic elements of nature took over. The walkers from Evensong are coming from something new when compared with their hilly route. Palmer’s hills are crushingly present but they are kept in their place by a slender spire and framing leaves. Everything is in transition as in Blake’s ‘Night’:
Farewell, green fields and happy groves, Where flocks have took delight.
Where lambs have nibbled, silent moves The feet of angels bright.
For these folk another day of rest closes in. In the morning — the everlasting fields! The rural circle turns. ❑
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