As by my side thou art,
To sit and see thy dear eyes shine
With bonfires of the heart!
And Young Love smiles so sweet and shy
From warm and balmy deeps,
As under-leaf the fruit may try
To hide, yet archly peeps;
Gliding along in our fairy boat,
With prospering skies above,
Over the sea of time we float
To another New World of Love.'
This lake-poet is not the Laureate of the love of courtship, but of
wedded bliss.
'Oh, lay thy hand in mine, dear!
We're growing old, we're growing old!
But time hath brought no sign, dear!
That hearts grow cold, that hearts grow cold!'
begins another of what may be called the 'Darby and Joan' type.
Of the liberty songs, many are familiar to progressive politicians, or
were till we got our terrible set-back at the late 'Khaki' election.
They need reissuing in a popular form. Most people who read anything of
this nature will remember the stanzas with the refrain:
'This world is full of beauty, as other worlds above,
And if we did our duty it might be as full of love.'
Such another is 'The People's Advent,' and the best of them 'The Earth
for All,' two lines in which were often quoted in former days of
agitation:
'Your Mother Earth, that gave you birth,
You only own her for a grave.'
Massey's longer poems I dare not even begin to quote from, only giving a
few solitary gems of thought by way of conclusion:
'I heard Faith's low sweet singing in the night.
And groping through the darkness touch'd God's hand.'
'Ye sometimes lead my feet on the Angel-side of life.'
'Nature at heart is very pitiful,
How gentle is the hand doth gently pull
The coverlet of flowers o'er the face
Of death! and light up his dark dwelling-place!'
'Creeds, empires, systems rot with age,
But the great people's ever youthful:
And it shall write the future's page
To our humanity more truthful.'
Says Gilfillan (a half-forgotten author himself): 'Probably since Burns
there has been no such instance of a strong, untaught poet rising up
from the ranks by a few strides, grasping eminence by the very mane, and
vaulting into a seat so commanding with such ease and perfect
mastery.'
A NIGHT RAMBLE
'I can recall ... our delight in the moonlight walk from the
Windermere station by the Lakeside to Ambleside, that loveliest five
miles in all England; our next day's climb (the track missed) over
the Stake Pass, after bathing under the fells in a pool at the head
of Langdale; how we lingered, dallying with our joy, on the mountain
tops till night came on, a cloudy night of late September, after a
day of autumn glory, overtaking us before we could reach the
Borrowdale road; how, unable even to grope our way, we lay down
together on the stones to sleep, and awakened by rain, crept under
an overhanging rock, and cold and hungry, smoked our pipes and
talked till the dawning light enabled us to find a path to
Stonethwaite; how we sat in a cottage porch to await the rising of
the inmates and welcome a breakfast of bad coffee and mutton-ham so
salt that it scarified our mouths. No grave-minded man was either of
the pair who went laughing and singing, if somewhat limping, on
their way.'--WILLIAM JAMES LINTON: _Memories_.
IV
A POET ENGRAVER
WILLIAM JAMES LINTON
I.--THE MAN
'I would build up in my own mind
A temple unto Truth,
And on its shrine an offering bind--
My age and youth.'
W. J. LINTON.
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 mountain-land, 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."'
THE SILENCED SINGER
'The nest is built, the song hath ceased:
The minstrel joineth in the feast,
So singeth not. The poet's verse,
Crippled by Hymen's household curse,
Follows no more its hungry quest.
Well if love's feathers line the nest.
'Yet blame not that beside the fire
Love hangeth up his unstrung lyre!
How sing of hope when Hope hath fled,
Joy whispering lip to lip instead?
Or how repeat the tuneful moan
When the Obdurate's all my own?
'Love, like the lark, while soaring sings:
Wouldst have him spread again his wings?
What careth he for higher skies
Who on the heart of harvest lies,
And finds both sun and firmament
Closed in the round of his content?'
WILLIAM JAMES LINTON.
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
LIZA 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.