MR. LINTON succeeded Gerald Massey as occupant of Brantwood. He came there from a home at Miteside, on the west coast of Cumberland, to which he had retired from London with his first wife and their family. He had been a member of an eminent wood-engraving firm, doing virtually all the earlier pictorial work for the Illustrated London News, and when the proprietors of that journal commenced a block-making department of their own, he withdrew from his Hatton Garden business and sought to bring his other connection with him to the North. He had fallen in love with our beautiful mountainland, he tells us, while on a walking tour with a once well-known and promising young poet—the late Ebenezer Jones—too soon cut off by consumption. Of this friend Linton afterwards wrote an affectionate appreciation, extolling his 'joyous and most passionate nature'—joyous under happy influences, passionate when his quick intuitions of right and wrong were outraged by injustice. Perhaps it was due to this excursion that Jones learned to love the rain.
'More than the wind, more than the snow,
More than the sunshine, I love rain;
Whether it droppeth soft and low,
Whether it rusheth amain.'
At Miteside, near the confluence of two becks that flowed from Wast Water screes, and in which aforetime the Romans fished for pearl-mussels, and under a line of fells, Linton lived in full enjoyment of the wild beauty of the country, till the owner needing the house, he had to quit it. Just at that moment Brantwood came into the market, and, with a little of his own and some mortgage money, he purchased it. Shortly after removing into it his wife died. She was the sister of another of his many poetic and republican friends—Thomas Wade—a man who, according to his brother-in-law, should have made a great name in literature, but missed doing so! They were a nest of singing-birds those vigorous young Radicals of three-quarters of a century ago, singing not only of the better day they worked to bring in, but, as Wade did, of the circling hills and wave-swept shores and 'all the amplitude of air and sea brooding in starry vastness.' What sort of a life Mrs. Linton had lived with her husband I do not know. That he must have often tried her patience and upset her domestic arrangements and felicities goes almost without saying. He was of an ardent and impulsive nature, deeply committed to European republicanism and its leaders, such as Mazzini, the inspired conspirator, who loved God as he loved liberty and Italian unity; such as the Abbé Lamennais, that noble French soul athirst for love, who shook off the Papacy and the priesthood, and died, 'believing in God, loving the people'; such as the wealthy, University-trained Russian aristocrat, Herzen, who was imprisoned, sent to Siberia, and finally exiled under the old 'drill sergeant,' Czar Nicholas. For meeting with these in public or in private her husband would leave her continually alone with her children, after his day's work was done, and spend in feeding the poorer outlaws the money he had toiled for, and very frequently would bring some hunted refugee home to live, or even to prepare to die, in his house. Charles Stolzman, the Pole, he sheltered at Brantwood, tended through his last sad hours, sent to Millom to recruit, and when he finished his earthly career, in the little churchyard beneath the shadow of the lake mountains, Linton laid to rest the body of the one whom he revered as a true, manly, upright patriot. The very appearance of Linton while at Coniston suggests, according to the portraits preserved of him, a man of penetrating intellect, erratic and versatile genius, impulsive generosity, and little common-sense. His head was a noble one, with long, white hair and beard, belonging either to an artist or a model, as might be preferred. In his eccentricity he not only brought to Brantwood his engraving work and his friends from many nations, but printers, also, for the printing and publishing of his advanced newspaper—printers full of comradeship with their master, and getting paid when and how they could, or not at all, as things prospered or otherwise. And all this happened while the restless energy of the man set him sketching and engraving charming vignettes of this romantic district—some of the choicest we have among the thousand and one volumes about the lakes—collecting and writing about the local ferns, tramping the mountains, often having forgotten to take either food or money, and writing verses or translating them from his favourite French poets. One would have liked immensely to know the man, but certainly not to have lived with him.
After the death of his wife—the Miss Wade spoken of—he was left with young children on his hands, and shortly afterwards he married Eliza Lynn, the novelist, better known as Mrs. Lynn Linton, whose birthplace was Crosthwaite Rectory, at Keswick. This marriage was anything but satisfactory, as any onlooker would have foretold in regard to a union between two such unusual and pronounced characters. After a while, Brantwood being let, London was tried, the wife mingling in intellectual and sparkling society, and trying to induce her husband to appreciate it, the husband working fitfully at his art—in which he excelled—and living uneconomically among his beloved European republicans, editing magazines and papers that did not pay, and getting his letters opened with Mazzini's and others by the British Post Office, under the orders of Sir James Graham, M.P. for Carlisle, and Home Secretary. Men of my age remember well the storm of indignation that raged through the country at this flagrant violation of English liberties, and the 'anti-Graham' wafers we fastened our envelopes with by way of 'passive resistance' to the outrage.
'Incompatibility of temperament' is, I believe, in some of the United States considered a just ground for divorce. It led to separation, by mutual consent, between the Lintons, their selling Brantwood to Ruskin, W. J. going to America, where he ended his days, and Eliza residing mostly in London, the centre of an attached circle, and making herself notorious for essays we shall have to speak of in another article. Yet husband and wife continued to correspond on most affectionate terms till death separated them finally.
Linton maintained himself by his craft to which he had been apprenticed, and which he loved too well to abandon, and occupied much of his time in literary pursuits, becoming, like Carlyle, Kingsley, and many another youthful reformer, timid in old age, and desiring, as John Bright said of Earl Russell, to 'rest and be thankful'—and as John Bright himself did when such new movements as Irish self-government in Irish affairs came inevitably to the front.
He was born in London in 1812. A biographer wrote of him, after he was eighty years of age: 'Mr. Linton is one of those who never grow old. His notes are sweeter and clearer to-day than they were fifty years ago.' He died at eighty-six, in 1898; I can say nothing of his latter end. He, like his second wife, held 'advanced,' or—as some of us hold—retrogressive views on religion. Yet, to judge by expressions in his works, God and another world still kept a hold upon his thoughts. Few men succeed, after all, in making themselves atheists or believers in soullessness or annihilation. Latent thoughts will out, in some way or other, in imaginative literature, or in passionate, profane swearing, or in ejaculatory prayer wrung from the heart by adversity.
Victor Hugo closes a song translated by Linton with: 'The tomb said—
"Of the souls come in my power
I fashion the angels fair."'