by Ann Wroe
A painted Cloth there was
Wherin som ancient Story wrought
A little entertain’d my Thought
Which Light discover’d throu the Glass.
That creeping light nonetheless hinted at other worlds, both outside and in. Not so long before, Jakob Böhme had been drawn into ‘the secret heart of Nature’ by a sunbeam striking a polished pewter plate in the murky room where he sat, mending shoes. The ‘real whispering’ of Nature fascinated the child Traherne too as he sat there, the shoemaker’s son, a prisoner with imprisoned light.35 Windows of his time rarely opened because, through the gap, light might escape. Glaziers held it captive by twisting the thin lead frames inwards and outwards, creating a wavy grid in which more rays could be caught. Light seemed to push and fret at this obstruction. Traherne complained that crystal windows bound his sight as much as ‘Walls of Clay or Mud’ – without them,
The Moon and Stars, the Air and Sun
Into my Chamber com
– as he wished them to, like friends. For Jefferies, during his agonising last illness in 1887, the sunny windowpane of his seaside villa in Worthing was ‘as impenetrable as the twenty-foot wall of the Tower of London’.
Ravilious, though, seemed to relish light through glass. (All transparent structures pleased him, from table jellies upwards; he also loved the ‘marvellous’ light in big tents at country shows, turning the white onions ‘all yallery-green’.) He had a special liking for greenhouses, in which a measure of light was boxed and held apart from the ambient quicksilver, and was almost still. In his engravings for White’s Selborne he featured greenhouses wherever he could: rhomboids, trapezoids and prisms set in the Downs landscape, shining from within. One of his Victorian favourites, the last of eight, survives at Firle in the grounds of the big house, hidden behind the high red-brick wall that runs from the church to the back gate alongside a muddy lane. Nothing can be seen of it, no peeling wooden gable or wink of verdigris panes; but at the foot of the wall bags of leafy beetroot and small, bitterish, pricking cucumbers are laid out for sale, and from a green door invisible hands refill a jam jar with sweet peas.
Here, day by day, having charmed the gruff old gardener, Ravilious came. He barely needed his coat; light was warm, and drowsed, in the pungent stalk-and-leaf spice of tomatoes, the curve of cucumbers and the pink curlicues of cyclamens separated out in pots. Tendrils and vines crept out of the light and into it, but did not trouble the soft glass-sheltered calm. Fruit hung heavily within it. Light settled and grew deep on the whitewashed tables and along the window frames, mingling pleasantly with the whitish smoke from Ravilious’s cigarettes. The windows themselves were seldom open, perhaps sealed up with green moss; all were dimmed by layers of cobweb and the dust of summers past. But at the end of a worn brick footway a glass-paned door might stand ajar, leading to other doors, and thence to ever deeper, brighter and stiller interior space. If doors were not half-open, Ravilious made a feature of their handles, as if daring the viewer to turn them and go in.
Naturally, almost all these greenhouses were silent and unpeopled. In one, the grape-house, a faceless figure with a watering can paused before another open door, a ghost passing through. As in Traherne’s world, no landscape lay beyond the glass; the purpose of the windows was to capture light, calm it and diffuse it. This was the effect that Coleridge obtained from under his mosquito net in Malta, and that Blake sought by pinning muslin over his windows or straining lamplight through tissue paper (as Palmer saw at their first meeting) over his copperplate etchings.36 It was, in its way, a return to dipping or fishing for light by passing it through nets; or creating some sort of magic veil, as Ravilious had learned. He once went overboard with butter muslin, draping a whole room with it (at sixpence a yard) for Diploma Day at the RCA in 1936; and then wandered off the stage, hands in pockets, and disappeared, as he had a habit of doing.
He also peered into shop windows, rectangular dim boxes filled with fur coats, diving helmets, saucepans, bread-loaves, model boats – and with light, too, neon or electric as well as natural, held prisoner among the stock. In a hardware shop light sharpened the saws, rimmed the bowls and swelled, as if to burst, the stone hot-water bottles. In an undertaker’s window light ruffled the robes of a flying marble angel; in the plumassier’s it sneaked down coats, feathered and furred, and perched, stiffly flying, in a glass case of silhouetted birds. In the window of the newsagent’s it lay coiled in Catherine wheels and stuffed in Roman candles, or spilled in gold-paper stars from a rocket that stood unlit, but ready. Each shop proclaimed that light was about to break out and lead, harum-scarum, somewhere else. For the moment, though, it was just about held down.
Ravilious went to the fabric shop of his friend Enid Marx; his pencil caught light swagged on the walls and, with a slow thump, unrolled before the customers.37 He lurked in Buzsard’s cake shop at Marble Arch, where light was held in glass cases and under glass domes with iced spires of sponge. It was on the way to the bus stop at Euston, though, that he discovered the purest temple of light, a tiled milk shop with high windows in which a girl in a white cap and apron, a modern Bridget – a Lyons tea girl, really – poured light from a large jug into a smaller one. This was ‘a beauty altogether’, he told Helen, ‘and if you ever come with me there I must show it to you’. His other shop windows he published in 1938 as lithographs; the Euston dairy he left, perhaps deliberately, in pencil and wash so faint that each shape of light seemed held within a membrane, like milk itself, or bubbles blown in air.
Working artists often made use of extra-strong, light-focusing glass, and with a purpose. Blake needed his huge, round, steel-rimmed lenses and his loupe, or magnifier, for the ‘Minute Neatness of Execution’ and ‘EXACTNESS’ he so prized in drawing, which caught as perfectly as possible that creator-line of light. Everything in art, he declared, was ‘Definite & Determinate’; he had learned this not ‘by Practise but by Inspiration & Vision because Vision is Determinate & Perfect’. Spectacles, his own ‘Perspective-Glass’, helped him to copy down those Visions ‘without Fatigue’.
Blake’s glasses, blurred with years of use, were handed down to Palmer, who preserved them as sacred relics of his kindly, nervous, brilliant master. He had several pairs of his own, however. First, the round-lensed ones he always wore; then an old-fashioned pair, with very thick silver rims, for distant things; large round ones, with neutral-tint lenses, for sunsets and catching light in water; a diminishing mirror for compressing wide views and, lastly, opera glasses, ‘which bring close and make evident the most minute work’, as Blake demanded. All artists, Palmer agreed, should repeat to each other the word ‘exactness’ every morning, as the sun rose.38
A choice selection of these glasses were stuffed into his drawing-coat, contributing to his baggy, foreshortened look. The state of his ‘goggles’, ‘so scrat’d and spoil’d … and scribbled over’, not only put off the ladies; light sometimes mocked him too, so that ‘The least bit of natural scenery reflected from one of my spectacle-glasses laughs me to scorn, and hisses at me.’ But in ‘the present state of our faculties’, as he often sighed, perhaps he could hope for little better. The exception would be when visions came with their own light and sharpness, as in those glowing apples and those haloes round wheat; and they came seldom, after he left Shoreham.
Alfred reported what was left to his father in old age. As he walked out with him through fields of green corn or sweet trefoil on summer evenings, the older Palmer would use ‘peculiarly well-chosen words’ for the tints of the sky; but ‘there was something far more subtle than this, and beyond the power of words to describe. It was probably akin to what he himself had experienced when walking with Blake’. What he had learned then – his father told others – was ‘to perceive the soul of beauty through the forms of matter’.
Coleridge, too, strove to enhance his sightings of light in Nature – almost to wrestle with it, as Jacob had wrestled with the angel at the foot of one of those slanting, sh
ining ladders. In the Lakes and in Germany, like many contemporary painters and tourists, he seems to have made use of ‘grey’ or ‘Claude Lorraine’ filter glasses, which concentrated the landscape into picturesqueness and gave it a twilight glow. He probably also tried the ‘Gause Spectacles’ used ‘to great advantage’ by his friend Sir George Beaumont in his attempts to draw from Nature, reproducing on a small scale that diffusing, muslin effect. More experimentally, Coleridge also looked at scenes in convex mirrors, which made them miniature and exquisite, and played around with coloured glasses, both lenses green (‘O what a lovely Purple when you pull them off’), or a red lens pressed to his left eye and a yellow to his right.39 (‘These experiments must be tried over again & varied.’)
Thoreau, thrown back as usual on his own woodsman’s devices, liked to squint through the bottom of a tumbler, which clothed the landscape in ‘such a mild quiet light’:40
The rough and uneven fields stretch away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon. The clouds … are fit drapery to hang over Persia. The smith’s shop – resting in such a Grecian light is worthy to stand beside the Parthenon.
He saw as clearly, through this ‘pure unwiped hour’, as when he stood ‘at the very abutment of a rainbow’s arch’, admiring the sudden crystal definition of every leaf and grass. This was a lake of prism-radiance so wide that he sported in it like a dolphin: a scene ‘so washed in light, so untried, only to be thridded by clean thoughts’.
The clearest light of all, though, seemed to spring from himself. It came from the ‘sort of exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness’ with which he approached the solitudes of the deep woods and the huckleberry meadows just a few miles outside town, striding into them as if he stepped through ‘an open window’ or ‘a true skylight’, into a world where he was ‘expanded, recreated, enlightened’. This was a world of his own vision, one he had made – and which the merchant, lecturer or congressman could not make, for all their money or verbosity. Equally, Blake had no need of spectacles to see Ololon, his skylark muse, alighting in his Felpham garden, or Enitharmon weaving the glistening fibres of Los on the nearby shore, or the scaled and glaring Ghost of a Flea on the stairs. Those he created and saw for himself. As he explained to one doubter in 1799, ‘I see Every thing I paint In This World … As a man is So he Sees.’
The point was made for Palmer in a different way. Like Blake and Coleridge, he strove to find ‘foci’ in objects or in a landscape, the site where light struck and lingered: especially when it held, like a magnifying lens, the last strong rays of the sun steeping and sinking. For him these were the ‘eye’ of any work, ‘a well-head of dazzling light’ that contained ‘the precious and latent springs of poetry’.41 He fretted that when the sun had set, no such focus remained anywhere. At nineteen, however, he had already noted on the first page of his sketchbook a different and strange effect:
the tower on which the last light glimmered seemed luminous in itself & rather sending out light from itself than reflecting it and I noticed it on other stone buildings going along it was as if they had inherent light somewhat reminding one of mother-of-pearl – it was luminous though pale faint & glimmering…
On another page of his sketchbook, he thought about it further.
[It] sends out a lustre into the heart of him who looks – a mystical and spiritual more than a material light – And with what a richness does it beam out from the neutral coolness of the quite flat sky behind it – it is indeed such a precious luminous tone … silver to paint all the lights in with at first would be invaluable …
It might be futile, though, to rummage in a box of ‘BRIGHTS’. This light was the sort that came unbidden, and from within.
IMMORTAL DIAMOND
The undercliff path that runs from Brighton to Saltdean may be the most light-filled in England. The cliffs are white, their smooth footings white (until they reach the black line of slimy and tenacious seaweed), and midway between the two, as if suspended between water and air, snakes a white concrete path with a low wall on the seaward side. At high tide, with a moderate wind, white foam crashes over in a wild, free, floating cascade. It becomes a game to avoid a soaking, guessing what the lurking sea has in mind beneath the wall. It is not a game – but might be – to wonder which rocks above your head will tremble and tumble, shattering on the path into fan-bursts of white stones.
Almost nothing offers contrast in this scene. Even the sea stocks on the cliff face are white as often as purple, and the grey sea lavender is a scrawl in white dust. (The sea stocks’ clean-petticoat white explains itself; but where that dark, lustrous purple comes from, the colour of Advent chasubles and Lenten veils, is a mystery. Perhaps among the debris of ancient shells in chalk lurks the murex that gave its juice for Roman togas, the pungent treasure of Phoenicia.) Out towards the sea lie black-fringed rock pools, lightly mossed with green, but these fill up rapidly with foam or the reflection of the clouds. Seagulls might be the same white stones that shatter from above, Hopkins’s ‘sparkles … as bright as snowballs’, this time falling in a longer, slower trajectory through the thinly glittering air.1 High-nesting hawks scare off the crows with short, terrifying jabs of flight, not merely because crows are raucous and malicious, but because they are black, and have no place here.
Small wonder that Ravilious, accustomed to this degree of light – the almost abstract severity of land and sea, the persistent brilliance of the sun – fell in love with Iceland and north Norway when he was sent there on his war service in 1940. Working on the deck of HMS Highlander, ‘long past midnight in bright sunshine’, he painted the snow-cloaked distant mountains which he called, in deference to Edward Lear, ‘the hills of the Chankly Bore’. ‘Chankly’ had much of ‘chalk’ in it. White Arctic terns flew past him; he found himself dreaming of fair-haired women and marvelling that he never saw either them, or darkness. It was ‘like some unearthly existence’. Having seen this place, he hoped to go on to Russia or to Greenland, the land of narwhal horns, camouflaged with his white canvas drawing bag against the permanent snow. Going north, as he seemed to imagine it, was a progress into more or less uninterrupted light.
For some hours each day on the Undercliff walkers and cyclists soak up their own quota of brightness, together with dogs, children and the bronzed habitués who come to eat bacon rolls and sip large mugs of tea at the Ovingdean kiosk, which is seldom closed. Daringly, they unfold the communal Sunday papers against the battering breeze – yet more white, regularly inked and slightly yellowed, flapping over the hard white china plates. The low wall keeps off some of it, both wind and glare. I usually buy a slice of banana cake in a white paper bag, and eat it down on the shingle or the rocks with an unobstructed view of the sea.
The rocks are not from hereabouts; they are chunks of grey granite imported for sea defences and for good, hard seats in more placid times. They make a berth to watch occasional fishermen standing in the sea and crab boats fitfully rotating, their sterns stuck with poles of black streamers to mark the pots they are dropping. Both are marooned in light and the flopping, purplish, seaweed-sodden swell. And light is all they catch, for a long time.
Here and there, visitors have left chalk scribbles on the rocks. In fact they have scribbled all along this path, especially on the flat top of the wall, leaving behind names and loves and the languid, looping lines that result when you are wandering and talking with a piece of chalk in your hand. ‘Jaz is Kool.’ ‘Cetaceans are Mega!’ ‘I love you.’ ‘Fulmars rule!’ ‘Down with unpleasantness.’ ‘It’s Saturday.’ And ‘The Sun was here, 9.3.14.’ The lines meander like the track of a snail. They also last longer than you might suppose; so that on deserted evenings or midweek winter storm-days the pure white doodles, names and squiggles still shine in the low light, and will do so until time effaces or replaces them.
The same effect can be seen on the bus that runs back into town. On the top deck in winter the windows are fogged and clouded with cold, criss-crossed with a pattern of old
inscriptions: a palimpsest of fading names and, on the wide front window, once-flamboyant initials laid out in faint equations. HC plus JL have sat here, snuggling in thick jackets, a little drunk perhaps to draw so wildly and large. They may be the same pair who ran up the stairs once from the stop in North Street, both laughing, he shouting to her: ‘You really don’t understand “one decimal place”? You don’t know what “two significant figures” means?’ Two significant figures equal love. The letters shine through, suddenly ignited, when the bus turns a corner into the sun.
Packed on the bus, imprisoned in our breath,
Fogged up and clogged, we sometimes with a sleeve
Sweep a wide arc to wipe the window clean;
So too the sun, struggling and pale beneath
Shroudings of cloud, now elbows a reprieve,
And in his dazzle our graffiti’s seen:
Frost-swirls and curlicues of ancient art,
Lost names – and, finger-drawn, a perfect heart –
All these are ways, at least, of writing ourselves in light; of leaving some memento of our travel through ‘this glassy interval’, as Thomas Lovell Beddoes called life.
The sixteenth-century version of this game was to scratch names and thoughts with a diamond ring on a windowpane. At the Old Hall in Buxton in Derbyshire, now a hotel, Mary Stuart was among those who left her mark there. The mottoes are in Latin, Italian and French as well as English, delicately and beautifully incised. They have lasted far longer than scribbles on a sea wall or fingers in breath-mist could; yet they declare even more eloquently how earthly life flares out, and slips away.
