A Great English Painter
Samuel Palmer : The Visionary Years. By Geoffrey Grigson. (Kegan Paul. 42s.)
" 0 ! BLESSED BIOGRAPHY," Samuel Palmer turned from imagining the amusement of Sir Thomas More and his family to exclaim, " which hast embalmed a few of the graces of so many great and good people." It is such a biography, or the heart of it, that Mr. Grigson has written. His aim is simply to reflect the man, and no generalisation, moral or polemic, is allowed to mar the effect. The task of valuing and revaluing the artist is left where it belongs, in the hands of the painters who have been looking at him in recent years. If the picture lacks these evidences of personal closeness to its subject which mark the Life and Letters it is also without its tiredness ; the long years of recollection are in the background here, instead of obscuring the view. Often a memory of the luminous meditations of Redhill will add for the reader a depth to the eccentric outline of the early letters. Mr. Grigson deals only with the years in which Palmer made that contribution to British painting which is apparently so far from being exhausted. We could not have hoped to have had them done half so well.
The inclusion of this figure, fanatical and enchanting, this crinkle- crankle Goth who had also, although it escaped his son, the most delightful vein of comic talk, among the pillars of the national school in whose vestibule he has been left to wait for so long, is now com- plete. And it adds to our knowledge not only of national canons, but of art in general. Palmer is the pure type of the artist whose eye, however penetrating, has the task of fortifying and corroborating an idea. No British painter who looked so closely at the world has been so little infected as he in his great years by the method which has been peculiarly typical of the art of Northern Europe in modern times—the method of Constable and Chardin and Rembrandt. Against their search for the one visible happening, the single act of direct observation, which, rehearsed in all its authenticity, can become an emblem of the whole, Palmer and his kind set the opposite pursuit. His object was a deliberate epitome—for him as for Breughel no landscape was perfect without water—and an epitome not so much of configuration as of feeling. His distaste for " the naturalist by profession " was of the deepest ; in the studies which Mr. Grigson has assembled we can watch him liberating a meadow, an apple tree, from its particularity. For Palmer the surface of the phenomenal world, which has borne the impress of such gigantic personal utterances, became a "dreamy and mistic glitter."
Palmer's idea, the idea of natural excess, of divine grace abound-
ing in the Shoreham fields, was heavily besieged. It was besieged not only by the moribund ideal of the immediate past, and the particular with its own deadness, the Dutch taste, but also by Linnell's sharpness, Richmond's success. He was confirmed in his way by a love for the masters of linear abundance, for Duren and Bonasone ; the tale of his sources both illuminates and demolishes the conventional notion of a romantic tradition. He received little support from his peers among contemporary painters. " Girtin's twilight, beautiful," he noted, " but did he know the grand old men ?" And in the end it was the ideal, in its irresistible Italian guise, which destroyed the idea. No sadder words are recorded of our painters than Palmer's later reflections on himself.
In spite of his son's bonfire, which " lasted for days," we know an uncommon amount about Palmerfrom his development we can add some rare details to what we know of aesthetic anatomy. The old school of writers upon the painter of the " Tempesta " used invariably to meditate on what blessedness it was descended on him in boyhood in " the hills of Castelfranco • with Palmer we are luckier, we can lay our hands on one of the precise experiences. The moon that rose for him, before he was four, between the branches of an elm, to be fixed for ever by a couplet of Milton ready and waiting on the lips of—such creatures no longer breathe—his nurse, must be read of in his own words. And with personal history there is interlocked, as we may suspect it always is in the great moments of painting, the iconographic. The infant's moon is also the light of Beulah, of Bunyan's land on the borders of heaven and Blake's.
Mr. Grigson is able to discover similarly double ancestry for much that is characteristic of Palmer's matter ; the learning and the feel- ing with which he traces such complicated conjunctions are beyond praise. The rare critical appreciations which he allows himself form an almost equally positive contribution to our knowledge. But first and last his essay is a biography, an embalming of grace, belong- ing beside the Life and Letters and hardly more likely to be replaced. The importance of the book would have justified an even more generous allowance of plates ; so little is excluded of the best that remains to us from these years that it seems a pity that any should have been missed. It is to be hoped that the hungry multitude which awaits such books as this, at a rather lower price, will make enough noise to penetrate to its excellent publishers and influence their calculations on the next occasion. LAWRENCE GowING.
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