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_.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Hills & Saunders, Oxford._
JOHN RUSKIN IN OLD AGE.]
VI
THE PHILOSOPHER OF BRANTWOOD
JOHN RUSKIN
I.--THE MAN
'Alas! there was in John Ruskin a strain of the Knight of La Mancha,
and he, too, had to learn that in this world and in our age
Knight-errantry, however chivalrous in spirit, medieval romance,
however beautiful as poetry, will not avail to reform the world with
nothing but a rusty lance and a spavined charger. It is magnificent,
it may be war, but it is not a real social philosophy, nor is it a
possible religion.'--FREDERIC HARRISON.
To write of the Lake celebrities without including the greatest of them
all would be like mapping our mountains and omitting Scawfell, or the
waters and forgetting Windermere. Yet to add anything to the countless
essays and biographies seems presumptuous. For the filling in of this
merest outline of one aspect of a noble life readers must become
diligent students of John Ruskin, and his books, and his exponents.
There are lives of him, appreciations of him and of his teachings,
monographs on his personality, on his relation to the Lake District, on
his views about Art, on his social politics and religion, on his Bible
references, and on every other light-reflecting facet of this
many-sided soul. In fact, no other man has lived in recent years whose
innermost being has been so extensively and so deeply probed, so exposed
to the universal gaze, or who has been so worshipfully followed, and, at
the same time, by another set, so resolutely opposed. When we turn to a
bibliography we stand amazed, not only that any author should be so
prolific, or even that he should possess so much first-hand knowledge of
so many matters, but that he should have done so much about such a
variety of things so marvellously well. A juvenile verse-maker of
promise developing into an unrivalled prose-poet and word-painter; a
draftsman of capacity from his youth up, if not naturally a colourist,
and an insistent teacher of style, yet an art critic with sympathetic
feelings, who knew what he was talking about (which, it is to be feared,
the majority do not); a mineralogist who wrote about stones and dust and
ores, both scientifically and poetically, as if he were in love with
their intrinsic and extrinsic beauties, and no less so with the unseen
rythmic dances of their molecules during crystallization; a geologist
who sought to explain by ice-gougings and water-chisellings, and by the
crushings and infoldings of volcanic pressure, the outlines of the vales
and hills whose forms and many-hued draperies his cultured eye delighted
in; the champion of a great artist who had been attacked without insight
by _Blackwood_, and in his championship evolving a classic--the classic
for ages to come--on 'Modern Painters'; an investigator of the ultimate
principles of architecture and sculpture, whose steps being led to
Venice, is impelled to write about her stones, thus to become nothing
less than a historian of that wonderful oligarchy; an observer of all
winged creatures about him, who sees in the swallow's circling flight,
and in the robin's cheery presence, eternal laws of art and mechanism
from which he can teach great truths to half-fledged undergraduates of
Oxford; a lover of the independent peasantry of Lakeland, who for their
sakes learns road-making, and sets them to cultivate home-industries,
and who writes strange, and frequently unpractical, suggestions for the
betterment of their condition, and for making the whole world sweeter;
how can such a man, intellectual giant and gladiator though he be,
remain always victor over so wide an area? He is often spoken of as 'The
Master.' Doubtless most of us have so styled him in relation to one
excursus of his or another that has specially captivated us. But it
seems to me that Mr. Frederic Harrison, his latest biographer and
personal intimate, is right when he says: 'The author of more than
eighty distinct works upon so miscellaneous a field, of masses of
poetry, lectures, letters, as well as substantial treatises, was of
necessity rather a stimulus than an authority, an influence rather than
a master.' Any claim on his behalf to speak the _mot d'ordre_ on any
given topic challenges the thoughtful reader, and lays upon him the duty
of closely looking at every emphatic statement, every unsupported
opinion, every clever aphorism put forth as an axiom. The recognition
that he is merely a force, though a mighty one, an impulsion and an
inspiration rather than a revealer and spokesman of the final word,
allows the mind to be swept along by the impetuous current of his
eloquence, rejoicing and untrammelled, and suffers it to be braced and
helped by him. The danger in this case may be, however, that the young
and inexperienced, lost in admiration at the marvellous beauty of his
language, and the obvious truth of so much that he says--intoxicated by
the wine of the kingdom which he so unrestrainedly pours forth--are
unable to notice how often the elixir tastes of the earthen amphora
containing it. The dogmatism of his precocious boyhood never left him in
after-life. Indeed, disappointment at the non-acceptance of so many of
his views by the world at large accentuated it. His delighted outlook on
Nature, his abiding joy in all things pure and lovely, his intense
hatred of moral ugliness and deformity, caused him too often to forget
that others had high and holy aspirations, and abhorrences of wrong, who
did not see through glasses made after the pattern that suited his own
peculiar vision. His complete, almost child-like, absorption in the
humour of the passing moment sometimes made him mistake a swift impulse
for the discovery of a new philosophic or scientific law, and placed him
in inconsistent and contradictory positions, and made his arguments so
full of inconsequences as to provoke no little amusement among
logicians. So, then, let us be content to take him for just what he is,
and no more--an erratic genius, but a genius of the very first order; a
discursive preacher, but a preacher who arouses, and thrills, and sends
you back into the world to live a better life; a prophet who
exaggerates, and is often incoherent with needless fury, but exhibiting
in his mission and messages to England a veritable commingling of
Carmel's Prophet of Fire, with Jerusalem's 'Evangelical' poet-prophet; a
Reformer who fails to see the standpoint of many whom he denounces in
social politics and economics, but a reformer, nevertheless, who
foreknows a bright to-morrow for the peoples, and who labours to hasten
its coming. Take him for all this, and you will accompany him a long
way, cautiously, yet reverently and lovingly, and find in him a rare
comrade, an unfailing and candid interpreter of your own soul, as well
as of many old enigmas that confront it.
John Ruskin's connection with the Lakes dates from his childhood, when
he visited the locality with his parents. 'I remember Friar's Crag at
Derwentwater when I was four years old.' He received an inspiration for
his muse from Skiddaw when only nine:
'Skiddaw, upon thy heights the sun shines bright,
But only for a moment; then gives place
Unto a playful cloud, which on thy brow
Sports wantonly.'