Part 3

Some of his best life-work was done by Massey at Brantwood, on the shores of Coniston Water, including 'The Ballad of Babe Christabel,' 'Craig-crook Castle,' and 'War-Waits.' He had come here after a period of stress necessitated by his outward circumstances, which had been of the poorest. His father was a canal-boatman of Tring, in Hertfordshire, and for him, as for all of the wage-earners of those evil days of the Corn Laws and other oppressions, there was virtually no education. He was sent to work in a mill when eight years of age, for twelve hours a day, at 9d. to 1s. 6d. per week. It was the sorrows and sufferings of such little ones as he which inspired Mrs. Browning's never-to-be-forgotten 'Cry of the Children.' Possessed of a resolute will and an inquiring spirit, he taught himself all he could from the very few books accessible to him. While passing through years of poverty and hardship, engaged in straw-plaiting, he associated himself with like-minded youths of his own and a somewhat better social class, threw himself ardently into the progressive movements of the day, and soon found his way into print in some of the restricted and Government-worried local newspapers. When but twenty-one years old he was actually editing a serial called _The Spirit of the Age_. A year later he became one of the secretaries of the Christian Democratic movement headed by Maurice and Kingsley, wrote verses for various publications, and by-and-by mustered courage to issue his 'Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love.' This little book and his next brought him into contact or correspondence with Hepworth Dixon, W. Savage Landor, 'George Eliot,' and Tennyson. Tennyson writes him respecting the 'fine lyrical impulse, and the rich, half-Oriental imagination' he found in his poems. 'George Eliot' is said to have taken him for her model of 'Felix Holt the Radical.' She describes her hero as a somewhat eccentric-mannered young man, shaggy-headed, large-eyed, and strong-limbed, wearing neither waistcoat nor cravat, and in abrupt sentences denouncing unreality and humbug, though amenable to softening social and intellectual influences. This, at any rate, is her introduction of him to her readers. Massey's first love-story (he was happily married) was, at least, as much an idyll, it would appear, as that of Holt, and the deep home love, the consecrated affection of the wedded life, were the inspirations of some of his sweetest lyrics, just as his intense yearnings for the betterment of the common people were that of his patriotic ones. Later in life, after he had left Coniston, we find him an accepted essayist in some leading literary magazines, and a lecturer on literary subjects, living in Edinburgh. Another volume or two, with war songs and ballads among them, evoked by what England has long ago become ashamed of--the Crimean War--completed the first stage of his career, and the only one that concerns us here. He has collected into a volume--adopting a description of himself as 'the most unpublished of authors'--a few of his best poems, which one critic thinks contains everything of his worth preserving. I do not agree with this dictum. Some of his best are omitted, though we have to thank this self-same critic for preserving them for us.

Now comes for me the ungrateful task of selecting from his garden of delights, not posies, but a few blossoms and a few typical petals that may serve to show the form and hue of the blossoms. In doing so, many of the best must of necessity be passed over. Do you know 'Babe Christabel'? Is it not pathetically true to experience? Has it not set many a chord of many a mother's riven heart vibrating as she reads of

'A merry May morn, All in the prime of that sweet time When daisies whiten, woodbines climb, When the dear Babe Christabel was born'?

and how, coming through the 'golden gates of morn' to what seemed a glorious destiny, and touching the earth with a fresh romance for the happy parents, she grew in loveliness only to be caught away, ere reaching womanhood, by angels who gathered her 'delighted as the children do the primrose that is first in spring.' And do you know 'Cousin Winnie'? It is almost as pathetic, and quite as true, only in a different way. It narrates a lad's love for a cousin, married, when she reached maturity, to a friend of his, who brought trouble upon her, and for whom he suffered as she suffered, unable to help, and never telling out his affection for fear of causing division and dissension.

His songs are far from being all sad. They are mostly redolent of bright fancy.

'Pleasant it is, wee wife of mine, 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.'