Chapter XXII: Last Words About Our Celebrities 233 (2)

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.

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_.

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.'

And again, a year later, he contrasts it with the Egyptian Pyramids:

'The touch of man,
Raised pigmy mountains, but gigantic tombs,
The touch of Nature raised the mountain's brow.'

At twelve he saw Scawfell

'So haughty and proud,
While its battlements lofty looked down on the cloud.'

Frequent visits at later periods kept his heart aglow with the romance of these three counties vying so earnestly with each other for supremacy in the glory of mountain-fell, and garrulous beck, dale and dingle, and thunderous force. It was in 1871, when he was nearly fifty-three years old, that he bought from W. J. Linton, the engraver-poet, that Coniston cottage, as it then was, so closely associated with his name for some thirty years thereafter. He gave £1,500 for the property, without seeing it, while lying ill at Matlock. To everybody who knows English literature Brantwood is a household name. On the steep slope of the eastern hills, wood-embowered, with moorland above, and a green field below the highroad, washed by the ripples of the lake on which his boats rocked--one of which, _The Jumping Jenny_, he had designed, painted 'a bright blue with a Greek scroll pattern round the gunwale'--it is in all respects a true poet's paradise. The opinion of Wordsworth was that it commanded the finest view of Coniston 'Old Man' that was to be had anywhere. Linton was not a very practical man, choosing his gardener, not for his skill, but for his shining blue eyes, and letting his demesne go wild, and his abode to rack and ruin. Ruskin created order and beauty out of the wilderness, with a rose-garden and a garden for wild flowers, greatly enlarged the house, made a little harbour on the shore, and a water-works on the fell, all at considerable outlay, evidencing by the construction of his reservoir and conduits that hydraulics and engineering are not best done by untrained enthusiastic amateurs. In this exquisite retreat began what Mr. Harrison speaks of as the second period of his career--the period when, except for his Slade Professorship, he gave himself up, not to the study, for he never can be said to have studied them--the promulgation of theories about social economics. The Slade Professorship was an epoch in University life, and in the history of British art. His classes were crowded. 'That singular voice of his,' writes a pupil long afterwards, 'which would often hold all the theatre breathless, haunts me still.' His Oxford lectures were reprinted as books by Mr. George Allen, formerly a scholar of his at the Working Man's College, and now become manager of his publishing business (which, by-the-by, Mr. Allen managed so well as to bring Mr. Ruskin in some £4,000 a year at a time it was greatly needed). During the intervals of his professorial duties, and especially after ill-health compelled their relinquishment, he wrote those invaluable autobiographic reminiscences contained in 'Præterita' and 'Fors Clavigera'--books the world will never spare, albeit they are so full of petulant denunciations, and quaint extravagances, and inconsequent satires. We forgive all these for the value of the self-revelations of a unique soul, and for the literary gold-mine they present to the commonwealth of the English-speaking races. When retired altogether to this Arcadia he would ramble along the lakeside path, and up the mountain, to the happy valley of Tarn Hows, or round the water-head to Yewdale, 'my little nested dale of the Yew,' with its streamlets wandering through the fern, and its deep water-pockets over which he would stand musing and questioning them--'How came you to be?' or perchance up Tilberthwaite Ghyll, with its zig-zagging wooden bridges after the fashion of a Swiss river-gorge. As he strolled, he would stop to pet some children who, seeing him coming, would await his kindly greeting, or to chat with some ancient shepherd, or some housewife at her cottage door, or possibly he would enter a wayside school-house to puzzle the youngsters with a division sum respecting the sovereign he would leave for them in the schoolmaster's hand. The old 'Professor,' as they called him, was beloved by all, and in his broken years was devotedly cared for and tended by his cousin and adopted daughter, Mrs. Arthur Severn, who lived at Brantwood, and who now with her husband owns the estate. We must remember what he had suffered during his long life, as well as what he had accomplished. 'As we pass beneath the hills,' says he in 'Modern Painters,' 'which have been shaken by earthquake and torn by convulsion, we find periods of perfect repose succeed those of destruction.' He had married unsuitably to satisfy his parents, and the marriage had been nullified. Thrice he was passionately in love, and each disappointment left him sick and despondent, however tenderly remembered and naïvely talked of in old age. His generous money gifts to relatives, and to causes like the Guild of St. George, which lay deep in his affections, as well as, doubtless, some serious lack of lawful 'world-wisdom,' had virtually dissipated the large fortune left him by his father. He was at bay, too, with the rest of the world as to his schemes for its reformation. He had had many serious illnesses, brain fevers included.

At Brantwood, the scenery from his study window, so imposing yet so tranquillizing, his art collections in every room, his admiring and sympathetic neighbours, his own inward assurance of right guidance, combined to give him peace. Among his friends were the Miss Beevers, of The Thwaite--the house at the far end of the lake, nearly opposite the one in which Tennyson spent his honeymoon--with whom the good old man corresponded, and whom he loved with an old-world platonic love honourable to both sides. They must have an article to themselves, these 'sources and loadstones of all good to the village,' worthy as they are of remembrance, with their brother, among our literary celebrities.

During the last ten years of his life he gradually grew more and more feeble, till at length, succumbing to influenza, 'he sank softly asleep,' when near his eighty-first birthday, with his dearest friends around him. He was buried in the God's acre of Coniston, without funereal pomp of black. The pall was of crimson silk embroidered with wild roses, bearing the motto 'Unto this last.' Later the beautifully-artistic cross, designed by his secretary, friend, and authorized biographer, Mr. Collingwood, was erected over the grave. It has allegorical carvings on it of his book-titles. A medallion likeness in bronze by Onslow Ford, R.A., was placed in Westminster Abbey.

I have said nothing of Ruskin's ancestry, nothing even of the 'honourable and distinguished merchant,' his father, nor of his loving, pious, over-careful mother. Neither have I spoken of his education, of his wanderings and residences in Switzerland and Italy, nor of his royal gifts of museums and the like for the benefit primarily of artizans. I have no space to tell of the impulse he gave to art, or to educating wage-earners through Ruskin colleges and in other ways. His physical appearance, his personal habits, his daily dealings with his kind, must be discovered by my readers for themselves. Mr. Collingwood's Life of him has recently been issued at 2s. 6d., and Mr. Harrison's in 'English Men of Letters' at 2s. Acquaintance with these should be the duty and privilege of every educated man and woman.

'The woods, the blossoms, the gift-bearing grasses, have done their parts for a time, but these do service for ever. Trees for the builder's yard, flowers for the bride's chamber, corn for the granary, moss for the grave.

'Yet as in one sense the humblest, in another they are the most honoured of the earth-children. Unfading, as motionless, the worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in lowliness, they neither blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To them, slow-fingered, constant-hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark, eternal tapestries of the hills, to them, slow-pencilled, iris-dyed, the tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance; and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the parched meadow the drooping of its cowslip-gold, far above, among the mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest, star-like, on the stone, and the gathering orange-stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunset of a thousand years.'--JOHN RUSKIN: _Modern Painters_.

THE HOUSE AT HERNE HILL IN WHICH RUSKIN WAS BORN IN 1819.]

THE PHILOSOPHER OF BRANTWOOD

JOHN RUSKIN

II.--HIS ART-TEACHING AND HIS BOOKS

'To crib, cabin, and confine in a dull array of formal propositions
the rich exuberance of Mr. Ruskin's thought would be a needless
injury.'--J. A. HOBSON.

'Is there a gospel (of Art) according to Ruskin?' It is Mr. E. T. Cook, an art-pupil and disciple of his, who asks and answers this question. He, in 'Studies in Ruskin,' and another Oxford pupil, Mr. W. G. Collingwood, in 'The Art Teaching of John Ruskin,' agree that their great teacher did not formulate a creed, though he had definite fundamental principles to explain to the world, which--however much overlaid and obscured by eloquent language and elaborate illustration--were never lost sight of by him, but impregnated all his writings. As in the New Testament there is a revelation from God through Jesus Christ, though it contains nothing akin to a Church Catechism or Westminster Confession of Faith, so in Ruskin there is 'a complete philosophy of Art' without a concise and formulated system that can be packed into one's waistcoat pocket. We must find and arrange our canons for ourselves. The Ruskin 'Gospel of Art'--Mr. Cook's word--or his 'Philosophy of Art'--Mr. Collingwood's word--is merely an old gospel, with a new application--a philosophy of the position of Art with regard to God, and the world, and the soul. 'Truth, sincerity, and nobleness' are essentials of right living, and Art is the outcome and evidence of the right living of the artist. It is the expression of man's rational, disciplined delight in the forms and laws of the creation of which he is a part. The origin of Art is 'imitation touched with delight'--delight, that is to say, in God's work, and not in a man's own. Beauty, no less than reality, strength, and morality, is characteristic of true Art as 'an expression of the Creating Spirit of the universe,' whose handiwork is to be copied. Art is an interpreter of the Divine beauty in things seen; for the inner life of it is religion, its food is the ocular and passionate love of Nature, its health is the humility of its artists. Art looks into the innermost core and centre of phenomena. The true artist sees and makes others see. The greatest Art is that which conveys the greatest number of greatest ideas. It is the declaration of the mind of God-made great men. Fine Art is that in which hand, and head, and heart have worked equally together. In outline, colour, and shade an artist is to discipline himself, that he may become skilful in the seeing of things accurately, and representing them with absolute fidelity. What he sees accurately, however, he is to represent imaginatively, so as to arouse the faculty of imagination and a feeling of praise in others, and to cultivate their nobler instincts, and call forth and feed their souls. Beauty is of two kinds--typical and vital--the first lying in those external qualities of bodies which in some sort represent the Divine attributes; the second in 'the felicitous fulfilment of function in living things.' Ruskin agrees with Hogarth that 'all forms of acknowledged beauty are composed exclusively of curves.' Except in crystals, certain mountain forms, levels of calm water, and alluvial land, there are no lines nor surfaces of Nature without curvature. He adds that what curvature is to lines, so is gradation to shades and colours. He made himself conversant with these truths by independent study, minute investigation, inexhaustible industry in sketching.

Architecture, though subject to different rules and modes of handicraft, is governed also by the same general and spiritual principles. Its 'Seven Lamps' are Sacrifice,--the offering of all that is most costly of material, intention, execution; Truth,--which demands imagination, but will not tolerate deception; Power,--realized through observation of mountain buttresses and domes, cloistered woodland glades, and the rock-walls of the sea; Beauty,--not as mere mask or covering, but gracefully fitted to the conditions and uses of the object to be attained; Life,--expressive of the workman's love of his work, and knowledge of his ends; Memory,--which haunts the workman with shapes and colours he has once noted, and which inspires him with ever fresh ideals; Obedience,--which involves 'chastisement of the passions, discipline of the intellect, subjection of the will.'