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.