A POET ENGRAVER

WILLIAM JAMES LINTON

II.—HIS BOOKS AND HIS ART

'Poets are all who love, who feel, great truths,
And tell them;—and the truth of truths is love.'
Bailey's Festus.

WE have seen how various were Linton's tastes and sympathies. Drawing and engraving, poetry, Nature-study to some small extent, biography, magazine editing, and extreme politics—extreme for the age—relating not only to England, but to most of Europe: all these occupied his attention, not in turn, but continuously.

Dealing with his published volumes, we must give first place to his autobiographical 'Memories.' They are of ever-increasing value to the student of the evolution of the nineteenth century, for they are crammed with recollections and estimations of its makers, and with illustrations of the old 'condition of England' question. One of the earliest things that impressed him was the tolling of George III.'s 'passing bell.' Another was the trial of Queen Caroline and the popular excitement consequent thereon, and somewhat later the sordid funeral permitted her, 'the shabbiest notable funeral I ever saw,' he says. 'The demoralizing craze for State lotteries,' the wild debauchery of the Court, press-gangs and fights between these and butchers armed with long knives, Government terrorism over the Press and the right of public speech, riots in Wales for the purpose of demolishing turnpikes, and many more such things are recorded; and they unquestionably impelled him to take the side of the people against their despotic rulers. Concurrently with these, however, he records the progressive movements and struggles of the working-classes for social and political emancipation, and for education and for such equality of opportunity as wise laws can secure. In the course of his narrative we meet, in addition to the continental agitators and ultra-Radicals and Chartists of England, and the Duffys, Mitchells, O'Connells, O'Connors, and O'Briens of Ireland, galaxies of literary celebrities, and men in the foremost ranks of Art and Science.

He shows himself to have had strong prejudices for or against people, and he never scruples to record his opinions quite frankly. Of Thornton Hunt and his relations to the pretty wife of G. H. Lewes and to Lewes himself, he remarks that the legal husband 'asserted his belief in Communistic principles,' the two men only quarrelling over the expense of the double family! This Lewes is that historian of philosophy, be it remembered, with whom 'George Eliot' lived, though he was undivorced. For some reason or other, Samuel Carter Hall, author and editor of the Art Journal, was Linton's pet aversion. He asserts—I know not with what truth—that Charles Dickens made him sit for the portrait of 'Pecksniff.' Robert Owen, the founder of 'New Harmony' and of other socialistic and co-operative enterprises, he stigmatizes as impracticable, and 'a dry and unimaginative creature.' On the other hand, he has many pleasant and generous things to say about Ruskin, 'the poet beyond all verse-makers of his time,' and 'a man of the noblest nature'; Derwent Coleridge, with whom he rambled around Keswick, and who appeared to him to be 'a sensible, well-informed, genial and liberal clergyman'; Harriet Martineau, who lived near enough to be on visiting terms, 'a good-looking, comely, interesting old lady, very deaf, but cheerful and eager for news which she did not always catch correctly'; and many another, including the Americans, Whittier (of whom he wrote a life), Longfellow, and Emerson.

Linton's biographies of 'European Republicans'—mostly reprints of magazine articles—are graphic and sympathetic. His sketch of Mazzini's career I cannot say is the best extant, but it is good, and is the result of a warm and life-long personal friendship. His great work—for such it truly is—'The Masters of Wood-Engraving,' is not only the best of a series of publications he issued on the history and technique of his own art, but is, and always will be, the text-book of the subject. Wood-engraving is now almost entirely superseded by the various photographic 'processes.'

His other purely literary productions ranged from a volume of children's stories, 'The Flower and the Star,' to 'Poems and Translations.' The children of days of long ago, when really good books for them were scarce, must have hung delighted over the apparently impromptu fairy-tales about the flowers of the sky and the stars of the earth commingling; and how the dear little boy Dreamy Eyes, and his sisters Softcheek and Brightface, sought and found them 'under the golden oak-buds of the great oak,' and under the bushes clothed with delicate young leaves of the honeysuckle, or in the evening glow, where the great red sun went down, like a ball of fire, behind the sea. Linton was a true poet. His muse was a lyric rather than an epic or dramatic one.

'Youth came: I lay at beauty's feet;
She smiled, and said my song was sweet.'

His first volume of poetry was entitled 'The Plaint of Freedom,' and one of its themes evoked a tribute in verse from W. S. Landor. 'Claribel,' seldom quoted now, was his second venture. 'Grenville's Last Fight,' published in this collection, is a spirited ballad of a sea-fight in the Western Main, when the Spanish fleet attacked the solitary English man-of-war, 'drove on us like so many hornets' nests, thinking their multitudes would bear us down,' and yet failed to conquer her, because her captain sank her rather than surrender.

Other pieces, too long to include here, are short enough to be set to music, and would be worth more than the sentimental or garish theatre stuff too many young ladies indulge in nowadays; such as—

'Oh, happy days of innocence and song,
When Love was ever welcome, never wrong,
When words were from the heart, when folk were fain
To answer truth with truthfulness again;
Oh, happy days of innocence and song.'

And again, 'The Silenced Singer'—silenced on account of the consummation of his hope in the winning of his mate, when the nest was built, and he had 'closed in the round of his content.'

And, once again, 'Mind Your Knitting,' after the style of Beranger, relating how the blind old mother heard the soft footfall of a lover, and noted the cessation of her daughter's clicking needles' task. 'Tis the cat that you hear moving!'

'You speak false to me;
I'd like Robert better, loving
You more openly.
Lucy! mind your knitting.'

It is right to say a few words about Linton as an artist. He was engaged upon much better work than the illustrated weekly papers which were at first his sheet-anchor. He was, for instance, employed by Alexander Gilchrist to reproduce the quaint and exquisitely-coloured designs of William Blake. These beautiful reproductions are before me as I write, and they have not only the necessary accuracy of copied design, but also delicacy of touch sufficient to make them virtually indistinguishable from the master's own work. His own etchings adorn the fine volume on the Lake Country, written by his wife, Mrs. Lynn Linton. There are few such drawings done nowadays. Photography has, in some respects, greater accuracy, yet there is accuracy of insight illuminated by the artist-mind in Linton's wood-cuts, whether these be of some pouring torrent on the river Duddon, a view of the 'Old Man' from Brantwood, a group of castellated boulders on the 'sad seashore,' a jutting crag upon Great Gable, or only a fallen pine on the fell-side, or a banner-like mist clinging to a mountain peak. He had a pretty fashion of illustrating his own writings, which has increased their value in the eyes of collectors. 'Claribel' is thus brightened, and some may even prefer the pencilled pictures to the written drama. 'The Flower and the Star' has its landscapes, too, and its representations of Jack climbing the beanstalk in the full moonlight, of the three people who cooked an egg, and of other items that make the stories what they are. Even his 'Ferns of the English Lake Country' have his own copies of the fronds he gathered. My edition is coloured by hand, though whether by himself or not I cannot say. 'He is a wood-engraver first, and a poet afterwards,' says one friendly critic. The same critic adds, 'As a translator, Mr. Linton has few equals'; and yet, on the whole, heretical as it may seem, I prefer his own utterances to his translations, and like best to have them decorated by his own pencil, for his draughtmanship and his poetic fancies are as the two edges of one sword with which he fought his way to a place in our literary Valhalla. They both belonged to his love-service of humanity as he understood that service. His own prayer may be appropriately quoted:

'I am not worthy, Love! to claim a place
In thy close sanctuary; but of thy grace
Admit me to the outer courts, and so
In time that inner worship I may learn,
And on thy Altar burn
The sacrifice of woe!'

He loved his race—too often at the cost of his own home happiness—and most of what trials and troubles he had were the fruits of his unselfishness.

CONISTON

'Coniston Lake, that long and narrow sheet of water stretching its six miles of blue between the fells, deserves a more generous appreciation than what it has met with, and a more popular acceptance. And now that it has a railroad probing its very heart, it is likely that lovers will come round it as thickly as round Windermere and Derwentwater. Take the circuit round the lake, beginning at the Waterhead on the west side, and going southwards towards Furness, past the islands and by Brantwood on the east, as one example of the sweetness and the richness of the place. There is first that grand Old Man, at the foot of which you reverently walk, overshadowed by his huge crags as you pass through the ancient village of Church Coniston—one of those quaint villages with the flavour of old times about them, and the generous beautifying of Nature around, so characteristic of our lake country. The old deer-park, where once the lord held his high days of sport and revelry, and which has still the inheritance of richer foliage and nobler growth than belong elsewhere, is one of those flavourings; so is that ivied and venerable house, Coniston Hall, where the Flemings used to live, and which was the residence for a time of the Countess of Pembroke—"Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother"—but which is now only a farmhouse famous for its sheep-clipping.'—Eliza Lynn Linton; The Lake Country.

V

A SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST

ELIZA LYNN LINTON

I.—THE WOMAN

'She was one of the bravest of the morally brave, for she suffered from that kind of local ostracism, consequent on her unorthodox opinions, which in a manner isolated her and reduced her society to a few—fit, if you will, but few all the same—yet she never relaxed her propagandism.'—E. Lynn Linton: Free Shooting.

THE little dare-devil girl,' as Canon Rawnsley, not without justification, calls her, was born in 1822, at Crosthwaite Vicarage, Keswick. All that remains of her on earth lies beneath the shadow of Crosthwaite Church—'the Lake Cathedral,' as she herself has styled it—an edifice oft 'restored' since St. Kentigern from his wattled preaching-house sounded forth the Gospel of Christ among the pagan dalesmen thirteen centuries ago. Her father was the Vicar. He was left with a large family of children on his hands at the death of his wife, five months after Eliza was born. Mr. Lynn was an educated man, and, according to his lights, a respectable minister. By contrast with the carousing, wrestling, boxing parsons of Cumberland in his day—as they are so graphically described by our authoress in more than one of her novels—he was a gentleman and a Christian. When his father-in-law (the Bishop of Carlisle) asked him what he would do about the serious charge of so many motherless sons and daughters, his reply was, 'I shall sit in my study and smoke my pipe, and commit them to Providence.' This he did, breaking the monotony of his secluded life by wielding the rod among his rude tribe of passionate lads and high-spirited girls, and spending the nights in prayer for them. The topsy-turveyest book that ever was written is Mrs. Linton's 'Christopher Kirkland.' It must be alluded to—somewhat out of place—because it is autobiographical, and is used as such by Mr. Layard, her historian. It is her life-story, with the sexes of the characters transposed. This transformation of men into women and women into men makes the book most grotesque in places, and quite incomprehensible to readers who have not the key. Read it, however, inside out, or upside down, as it were, and it is then not only understandable, but interesting and informing. It is, in reality, the mine from which almost all important facts about her have been quarried. She seems to have been a 'naughty boy' kind of girl, holding her own bravely in a household which she likens to 'a farmyard full of cockerels and pullets for ever pecking and sparring at one another.' Yet she had her fits of moodiness and day-dreaming. Her short sight helped to make her enjoy solitariness, and induced a habit of lonely study and thought. From such books as she could get hold of she taught herself languages, and obtained a fair knowledge of literature. Unable, however, to accommodate herself to the strange government of her father and the waywardness of her brothers and sisters, she (twenty-three years of age, with a twelvemonth's allowance in her pocket) went up to London to try her fortunes. Henceforth we may unite her lively and interesting booklet,'My Literary Life,' with 'Christopher Kirkland.' She obtained work on the Morning Chronicle, just purchased by the 'Peelite' party, and edited by the redoubtable John Douglas Cook. Her description of her first introduction to the terrible presence of her impatient, irascible commander-in-chief is graphic.

'So you are the little girl who has written that queer book, and you want to be one of the press-gang, do you?' was his salutation. 'Yes, I am the woman.' 'Woman you call yourself?' and more rough-mannered, but not unkindly, words of the same sort followed. For two years she was 'handy man' on the paper—the first woman on a newspaper staff to draw a salary. Then she visited Italy, and afterwards lived in Paris as correspondent for an English paper. Her London home was near the British Museum, where she kept up her reading. During her studies and her press employment she had found time to write and publish several novels, and contributed to All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens. Her first story brought forth a sonnet in her praise from Walter Savage Landor, and her association with Dickens introduced her to many other well-known literary men and women. She had inherited Gad's Hill, Kent, from her father, and this property she sold to Charles Dickens. Dickens had fallen in love with the place when a boy, and had even then resolved to buy it if ever he was able. Thackeray she knew, too, and he called upon her while she was in Paris, climbing five toilsome flights of stairs to reach the little rooms she shared with another young Anglo-French woman—bed and sitting-rooms combined. Landor she first met in Bath, where he then lived, and she was visiting. She was in a shop, 'when in there came an old man, still sturdy, vigorous, upright, alert,' dressed in brown, but negligently, and unbrushed. The keen eyes, lofty brow, and sweet smile attracted her. When she heard his name—she knew some of his 'Imaginary Conversations' by heart—she expressed her joy. 'And who is this little girl who is so glad to see an old man?' The question and answer made them friends on the spot, and they remained so for many years afterwards, she paying long visits to his house, and becoming his 'dear daughter,' while she always spoke and wrote to the old lion as 'father.'

It was in 1858 that her marriage with W. J. Linton took place. She had had a love episode in earlier life which probably left its mark upon her character; but this marriage can hardly claim any romance as its inspiration. It is even said that she agreed to wed the artist partly from pity and partly to test her educational theories upon his six children. The secluded life at Brantwood became irksome to her, and the Lintons moved to Leinster Square, Bayswater, where the City life became equally irksome to her husband. Then came the separation, and Linton's departure for America, Mrs. Lynn Linton occupying various quarters in London, working on the Saturday Review, writing more novels, patronizing and generously helping young lady aspirants for literary successes, and making herself the centre of charming circles of friends and guests. In the lofty Queen Anne's Mansions, rising like a hill-summit above the flat plains and lake of St. James's Park, she had an upper chamber—airy, quiet, and virtually inaccessible to all except the privileged and welcomed of her choice. She had her turn, as so many of her generation had, at the fashionable spiritualism of Home and other tricksters, and with theosophists like Sinnett, but was not entrapped by either, for, though her views were 'free' and 'advanced,' her struggles and her environments secured her the saving grace of common-sense. She was more nearly allied in thought to Voysey and Professor Clifford than to the more mystical unbelievers. She was a hard worker, and lived comfortably by her pen. Idleness for her would have meant 'suicidal vacancy.'

Failing somewhat in health, she tried change of air at Malvern with little avail, and her eyesight failed her, so that writing became difficult. She realized that the end was approaching. It arrived in 1898, when she was seventy-six years old. 'She faced the inevitable' with more of the resignation of the stoic than the assurance of the Christian. Canon Rawnsley preached her funeral sermon, and placed her mental attitude in the most favourable light, and 'with a sure and certain hope' in his own heart of her 'resurrection to eternal life.' So let us also leave her in God's all-just, all-merciful keeping. Her own belief was in 'Nirvana.' Her remains were cremated, and the ashes conveyed to Crosthwaite, where Robert Southey also is buried. Landor concludes his ode to her with 'Pure heart, and lofty soul, Eliza Lynn.' I think (let me say it reverently) that God Himself might thus speak of her, for I find these words in one of her later letters: 'We are all, all, all His children, and He does not speak to us apart, but to us all in our own language, equally according to our age—that is, our knowledge and civilization. To Him I live, and in Him I believe, but all the rest is dark.'

WOMEN AND POLITICS

'We do not find that European homes are made wretched, or that husbands are set at nought, because our women may choose their own religion, their own priest, and have unchecked intercourse with the family physician.

'Is it impossible to imagine a woman sweet and yet strong, high-minded and yet modest, tender if self-reliant, womanly if well-educated? Would a fine political conscience necessarily deaden-or depress the domestic one? Surely not! A fine political conscience would be only so much added—it would take nothing away. If women thought worthily about politics, as about smuggling and other things of the same class, they would be all the grander in every relation, because having so much clearer perception of baseness, and so much higher standard of nobleness.

'At all events, the phase of women's rights has to be worked through to its ultimate. If found impracticable, delusive, subversive, in the working, it will have to be put down again. It is all a question of power, both in the getting and the using.'—Eliza Lynn Linton: Ourselves.

A SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST

ELIZA LYNN LINTON

II.—HER BOOKS

'My dear friend, Mrs. Lynn Linton, had lived through a long and eventful career, known all the interesting people of her day, and carried on intimate correspondence with all sorts and conditions of minds and characters. Her sympathies did not begin and end with literature; they strayed into many and wider regions of thought and activity.'—Beatrice Harraden.

SEVERAL of her novels were written at Brantwood—'Lizzie Lorton,' 'Sowing the Wind,' and 'Grasp Your Nettle,' certainly, and some others probably. I like to fancy the buxom, spectacled lady of strongly-defined, yet cheery, features sitting in the window of the study, and pausing in the midst of her composition to gaze at the magnificent prospect of woods, waters, and towering mountain summits. But to fancy her one must first dispossess the study of everything Ruskinesque. Ruskin's Delia Robbia treasure, his paintings from Italy, and by Burne Jones, bookcases with illuminated missals, polished agates of rare striations and burning colours—all these must go, and plain furniture, worn and faded, replace them, with, perhaps, some examples of her husband's art and craft littered about. Her enforced quietude made her literary output regular while living here. The extraordinary topsy-turvy autobiographical piece of 'fiction' called 'Stephen Kirkland'—already alluded to, and drawn upon for details of her life—belongs to a later date. So also does 'The Second Youth of Theodora Desanges,' another curious medley of impossibilities. It is the story of a woman who, at eighty years of age, had an illness which left her prostrate, but which led to her physical renewal—fresh, dark, rippling hair, blooming cheeks, rounded form and limbs, in fact, to ripe, desirable girlhood—while leaving her, of course, with the experience and world-wisdom of a knowing old grandmother. The metamorphosis brings her into a tissue of difficulties with those who were in the secret of it, and counted her as one of the most perverse and wilful of frauds, and into another tissue of another sort with those, especially young men, who, seeing only the goddess and worshipping her, thought she was playing upon them with wicked sarcasm when she tried seriously to explain what she really was. Her social adventures have a certain coherency in the telling; but a sense of unreality, and, in fact, of ridiculous impossibility, haunts you all through the narrative. The real value of the book (published posthumously), according to her friend and editor, G. S. Layard, lies in the fact that it contains her last message to the world—a gloomy gospel of humanity—'good news, if you will, to the race, but disaster for the individual.' Her farewell words are like a mingled evening of sunshine and passing cloud. The whole book is full of petty 'isms,' and soured comments, of pessimism overlying golden truths, which, however, have to be dug for, and some deserved satire of undesirable men and things. To use a crude simile, the whole volume reminds one of the celebrated American road which began and continued for a while as a 'turnpike,' but finished in a 'coon-track' running up a tree! 'Lizzie Lorton' is a book of different character. The one link it has with most, if not all, Mrs. Linton's books is the vein of mingled passion and tragedy that traverses it. The one charm it has beyond most others is the fresh breeze from the hills that seems to blow through it when the authoress condescends to be simply descriptive of places and people in the region of Wastwater and the Langdales. Her pen-pictures will do not only for her imaginary 'Greyrigg,' but for a hundred other dales and hillsides, lakes, tarns, and waters, and her portraits for a score of other country-folk and rural parsons to be found hereaway half a century ago, besides those she names. It is, if a tragic, yet a common story of love misplaced and at cross-purposes. Like many others of hers, this novel has been reproduced in the modern one-volume form—unfortunately in the badly-printed 'yellow-backs,' once the chief form in which light literature was obtainable at railway bookstalls.

'Through the Long Night,' written later than the Brantwood period, has, I cannot but feel convinced, been largely drawn from Coniston surroundings and Coniston society, as she knew the latter. It is not, I believe, considered one of her best productions. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the plot is more carefully elaborated, the characters are much more powerfully and convincingly conceived, and the interest is better sustained than in any other I know, though I do not profess to have read every one of her novels. The tragic element is strongly present, and the intentionally humorous entirely absent. There are melodramatic incidents that were not needed, and there is something that 'puts one's back up' when the angelic Lady Elizabeth condescends at last to marry the selfish despot who had broken her rival's heart, after driving her from home by his complicity with falsehood and forgery. The book by which she is best known to many of our generation (published in a sixpenny paper edition) is 'Joshua Davidson.' Issued at first anonymously, just after the close of the Franco-German war, and while the doings of the Paris Communists were fresh in everybody's mind, it took mighty hold of a certain class of reader, and will continue to do so. It ventilates her peculiar views of some of the sayings of Jesus our Lord, 'Great David's Greater Son.' The simple-souled Cornish peasant is represented as taking the Master's parabolic sayings as so many literal commands to be implicitly and literally obeyed by all men, reasonably and unreasonably. Thus he prays for the removal of a mountain, and gets a shock to his religious sense when the mountain moves not. Perhaps he was—or Mrs. Linton was, if she is recording any past experiences of her own—like the old lady who offered prayer for the same thing, and who, on awaking in the morning to find the hill she objected to still blotting out her view, cried: 'I never expected it would go!' Or, if Joshua is intended to have had faith, perhaps his literary creator might have corrected the absurd conclusions she lands him in had she read John Bunyan's account of his own actual experiences as recorded in 'Grace Abounding.' This work, from the episode I thus criticise, to the implied parallel between the priests' Gethsemane-mob of hired scoundrels and the poor blind 'common people' of Paris, seems to me now, on re-perusing it, as it did decades ago—just a poor, catchy sort of playing up to the shallow wits in the gallery of popular literature, to whom Christianity is not sufficiently exciting to be worth serious study. Another of her writings which made much stir was her celebrated magazine article, 'The Girl of the Period,' which appeared in the Saturday Review in its slashing days (The Saturday Reviler John Bright christened it). If unscrupulous, it was a power then—a poor, third-rate affair to-day, as little thought of as are the ancient lucubrations of the Quarterly or Old Ebony of our fathers. How well we remember the sensation she made by this tirade on the younger members of her sex. She certainly had 'changed sides' on the woman question of the hour, and, rightly or wrongly, she suffered inevitably for doing so. Such stinging phrases as she flung at her quondam friends—'sexless tribe,' 'shrieking sisterhood'—were expected from the Saturday, but to find the hand that formed and hurled them was one of their own was too much for those by whom they were hit! When the modern mother was shown to be no better than she should be, and the modern virgin represented as envying the demi-monde, no wonder the feminine world was set on fire! There are many other of her writings remaining unnoticed. Only two earlier ones—her first endeavours, the now quite forgotten 'Azeth the Egyptian' and 'Anymone'—and her 'Witch Stories' can be alluded to. The last is still read by the curious in occult lore, and is a compilation made from researches in the British Museum during the time of her girlhood, when she lodged near it, and was struggling to get her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder to literary fame. Some degree of fame and emolument we have seen that she attained to. Whether she will be known after the last of her readers of her own generation is dead is a very doubtful question. It is one that can be best answered by publishers. If they deem her worth republishing in cheap and creditable editions, she may hit the public taste a little longer, but only thus.

A MOUNTAIN CRAG AT CONISTON

'The principal flank of Yewdale is formed by a steep range of crag, thrown out from the greater mass of Wetherlam, and known as Yewdale Crag.

'It is almost entirely composed of basalt, or hard volcanic ash, and is of supreme interest among the southern hills of the Lake District, as being practically the first rise of the great mountains of England out of the lowlands of England.

'And it chances that my own study window being just opposite this crag, and not more than a mile from it as the bird flies, I have it always staring me, as it were, in the face, and asking again and again, when I look up from writing any of my books: "How did I come here?"

* * * * *

'But as I regain my collected thought, the mocking question ceases, and the divine one forms itself, in the voice of vale and streamlet, and in the shadowy lettering of the engraven rock.

'"Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding."'—John Ruskin: Yewdale and its Streamlets.

Photo by Hills & Saunders, Oxford.

JOHN RUSKIN IN OLD AGE.

[Enlarge image]

VI