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diff --git a/42476-0.txt b/42476-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..834afdb --- /dev/null +++ b/42476-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6297 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42476 *** + +Transcriber's Notes: +(1) Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text + by =equal signs=. +(2) Obvious punctuation, spelling and typographical errors + have been corrected. + + +[Illustration: +_Photo by Green Bros., Grasmere._ + + DOVE COTTAGE, GRASMERE. + + As it was when the Home of the Wordsworths (1799-1808) + and De Quincey (1808-1830). + +_Frontispiece._] + + + + + LITERARY CELEBRITIES + OF THE + ENGLISH LAKE-DISTRICT + + BY + FREDERICK SESSIONS, F.R.G.S. + AUTHOR OF 'ISAIAH, POET-PROPHET AND REFORMER' + + _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_ + + 'There is scarcely anything so interesting to man as his brother + man; because there is nothing else which so acts on his sympathies; + and sympathy is perhaps the most powerful of forces. We may feel + much interest in a Thing, more in a Truth, but most of all only in a + Man.' + MYERS' 'LECTURES ON GREAT MEN' + + + LONDON + ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. + 1905 + + + + + PREFACE + + +This is neither a handbook nor a guide to the haunts of our Lake +Celebrities. Yet it may, perhaps, serve in some sort the purposes of +both. + +It is not the result of any fresh or original research. I claim only to +have condensed many biographies, and to have provided an index to the +literary status of the men and women of whom I treat, some of whose +works are scarce, and some too voluminous for ordinary readers. + +These essays were written during leisure hours towards the close of a +busy life. They were published first in two different newspapers. This +will account for their form, and for the absence of either alphabetical +or chronological sequence. The earlier ones were written for friends in +my old home in the South; the later ones for my new friends in the +North. In bringing them together into book form I have remembered the +increasing number of tourists who require food for the mind as well as +for the body, and I have remembered my own want, in years past, of some +concise account of those whose names were perpetually before me while +moving from place to place in these attractive regions. + +To such tourists especially I respectfully dedicate my biographic +sketches, though not without a hope that they may reach, and be of use +to, a still wider circle of readers. + + FREDERICK SESSIONS. + + +THE BRANT, +KENDAL. + + + + + CONTENTS + + + PAGE + + Author's Preface iii + + I. THE ENGLISH OPIUM EATER: THOMAS DE QUINCEY: + 1.--THE MAN 3 + 2.--HIS BOOKS 11 + + II. A PIONEER OF POLITICAL REFORM: HARRIET + MARTINEAU 21 + + III. A LOVER OF BEAUTY: GERALD MASSEY 29 + + IV. A POET ENGRAVER: WILLIAM JAMES LINTON: + 1.--THE MAN 37 + 2.--HIS BOOKS AND HIS ART 43 + + V. A SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST: ELIZA LYNN LINTON: + 1.--THE WOMAN 51 + 2.--HER BOOKS 57 + + VI. THE PHILOSOPHER OF BRANTWOOD: JOHN RUSKIN: + 1.--THE MAN 65 + 2.--HIS ART-TEACHING AND HIS BOOKS 75 + + VII. A GREAT LIFE MARRED: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 85 + + VIII. A LIFE TO PITY: HARTLEY COLERIDGE 95 + + IX. GEORGE THE FOURTH'S LAUREATE: ROBERT SOUTHEY 103 + + X. VICTORIA'S FIRST LAUREATE: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 113 + + XI. A FRIEND OF GREAT POETS: CHARLES LLOYD 123 + + XII.'CHRISTOPHER NORTH': JOHN WILSON 131 + + XIII. THE CHAMPION OF LORD BACON: JAMES SPEDDING 141 + + XIV. TWO BEAUTIFUL LIVES: WILLIAM AND LUCY SMITH 149 + + XV. TWO BROAD THINKERS: FREDERIC AND F. W. H. MEYER + (FATHER AND SON) 157 + + XVI. A RELIGIOUS MEDIEVALIST: FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER: + 1.--THE MAN 167 + 2.--HIS BOOKS 177 + + XVII. JOHN RUSKIN'S FRIENDS: THE SISTERS OF THE + THWAITE, AND THEIR BROTHER 187 + + XVIII. A LEARNED YOUNG LADY: ELIZABETH SMITH 195 + + XIX. A COUNTRY DOCTOR AND HIS STORIES (FOLK-SPEECH): + DR. ALEXANDER CRAIG GIBSON 203 + + XX. TWO PIONEER EDUCATIONISTS: THOMAS AND + MATTHEW ARNOLD 213 + + XXI. 'DRUNKEN BARNABY': RICHARD BRAITHWAITE 223 + + XXII. LAST WORDS ABOUT OUR CELEBRITIES 233 + + + + + LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS + + + DOVE COTTAGE, GRASMERE _Frontispiece_ + + THOMAS DE QUINCEY _facing page_ 3 + + THE KNOLL, AMBLESIDE " 21 + + BRANTWOOD, CONISTON LAKE " 29 + + JOHN RUSKIN IN OLD AGE " 65 + + THE HOUSE AT HERNE HILL IN WHICH RUSKIN WAS + BORN IN 1819 " 75 + + MEDALLION ON THE RUSKIN MEMORIAL, DERWENTWATER " 82 + + SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE " 85 + + NAB COTTAGE, RYDAL " 95 + + WINE STREET, BRISTOL " 103 + + SOUTHEY'S MONUMENT IN CROSTHWAITE CHURCH, + KESWICK " 109 + + JOSEPH COTTLE, OF BRISTOL " 113 + + OLD BRATHAY " 123 + + CHARLES LLOYD AND HIS WIFE " 128 + + ELLERAY, WINDERMERE " 131 + + VIEW OF WINDERMERE " 167 + + YEWDALE " 187 + + HAWKESHEAD, FROM ESTHWAITE WATER " 203 + + FOX HOW, AMBLESIDE " 213 + + BURNESIDE HALL, NEAR KENDAL " 223 + + SWARTHMORE HALL, ULVERSTONE " 233 + + + + + GRASMERE AND DOVE COTTAGE + + + 'Once I absolutely went forwards from Coniston to the very verge of +Hammerscar, from which the whole Vale of Grasmere suddenly breaks upon +the view in a style of almost theatrical surprise, with its lovely +valley stretching before the eye in the distance, the lake lying +immediately below, with its solemn ark-like island of four and a half +acres in size seemingly floating on its surface, and its exquisite +outline on the opposite shore, revealing all its little bays and wild +sylvan margins, feathered to the edge with wild flowers and ferns. In +one quarter, a little wood, stretching for about half a mile towards the +outlet of the lake; more directly in opposition to the spectator, a few +green fields; and beyond them, just two bowshots from the water, a +little white cottage gleaming from the midst of trees, with a vast and +seemingly never-ending series of ascents, rising above it to the height +of more than three thousand feet. That little cottage was Wordsworth's +from the time of his marriage, and earlier; in fact, from the beginning +of the century to the year 1808. Afterwards, for many a year it was +mine.'--THOMAS DE QUINCEY: _Autobiographic Sketches_. + + +[Illustration: + THOMAS DE QUINCEY. +By A. C. Lucchesi.] + + + + + THE ENGLISH OPIUM EATER + + THOMAS DE QUINCEY + + I.--THE MAN + + + 'Oh! Mr. de Quinshy--sir, but you're a pleasant cretur--and were I + ask't to gie a notion o' your mainners to them that had never seen + you, I should just use twa words, Urbanity and Amenity.'--The + ETTRICK SHEPHERD in _Noctes Ambrosianæ_. + +Had you been in Edinburgh on a certain day of the early spring in the +year 1850, you might have met a little, undersized, slight-framed man, +with a somewhat stealthy tread, and shy, furtive glances--like one who +dreads being watched and overtaken--stepping quickly along the streets. +He is dressed in an overcoat, buttoned close to the chin, beneath which +is no other coat. At first sight you think him a youth. On a nearer +approach you notice his hair is turning gray, and that his +fair-complexioned face and massive brow are mapped all over with the +finest of fine wrinkles, denoting his age, which is actually almost +sixty-five. Let us see where he goes. Presently he reaches the +publishing office of _Hogg's Instructor_, and the weird little man is +shown into the editor's office, and as he seems tired out with the ten +miles' walk he says he has taken from his village home, he is kindly +told to seat himself. No sooner has he done so, than he produces from +one of his pockets a packet of manuscript sheets and a small handbrush +from another. He tells the astonished editor that he is Thomas De +Quincey, whose name by that time was known all over the English-speaking +world, and that he wishes to contribute to the new periodical. As he +talks, he unfolds each separate sheet, and, carefully wiping it with his +brush, lays it on the desk. Editor Hogg goes to his safe and places a +sufficient sum in the hands of the shy stranger, and thus begins a fast +friendship and a literary connection which results in the publication of +some fourteen volumes of scattered essays--essays the like of which are +not to be found elsewhere in our mother tongue either for learning or +for inimitable force and elegance of style. The friendship only ended +with the death of De Quincey nine years later. + +Now let us follow him to his home. His wife has been dead some years. On +her death the eldest daughter, still a mere girl, took upon herself the +care of the other children and their loving and famous, but most +eccentric, father. She removed the household to the village of Lasswade, +and their cottage made for them and all their visitors a bright and +happy centre of attraction. It is night ere he reaches his home, but +that is no matter, for he is in the habit of taking long and lonely +rambles far into the night and early morning, flitting about so silently +as to startle benighted travellers as if they had seen a ghost. This +night he has walked enough, and retires to his own room--a room crowded +with a confused mass of books, which leave only a narrow passage along +which he can just screw himself into his chair by the fire. A +wineglassful of laudanum is poured out by him from a decanter close at +hand, and he drinks it off, though it is of strength sufficient to kill +two or three ordinary people. Now, for a while, is his season of +recuperation and brilliant writing, till, as daylight approaches, he +turns into his simple bedroom and sleeps. Next day, probably, and for +many days thereafter we should seek him in vain at these his +headquarters, for he has other lodgings, two or three of them, in the +City, each simply running over with books. Into one of these +hiding-places we are introduced by one of his own essays, wherein he +amusingly describes his efforts, aided by his daughters, to discover a +manuscript which he desired to publish, and which was found at last at +the bottom of a metal bath crammed with papers, receipts, letters, and +folios of his own neat handwriting. He has left some other bundles of +valuable books and essays at some booksellers, whose very name and +address he has forgotten, for he has literally no memory at all for such +mundane things, and no kind of idea of the value of money. He would sue +for the loan of a few shillings _in forma pauperis_ when scores of +pounds were due to him from publishers who would have been only too glad +to settle with him promptly. A bank bill or a large note would lie +inside some book till its hiding-place was forgotten, simply because he +had not the remotest idea how to turn it into cash. On the other hand, +when it was cashed he was lavishly generous to every beggar and impostor +whom he came across, being one of the most genuinely sympathetic of men, +ready to talk with the unfortunates of the pavements, with no thought +of sin or shame in his heart, and to do them a good turn; and so fond of +little children that one of his greatest griefs--the death of +Wordsworth's infant daughter--was undoubtedly amongst the acutest pains +of his life. Earning money, after his early struggles were over, more +freely than most literary men of the day, so careless and so +simple-minded was he that he had to fly for sanctuary from his creditors +within the precincts of Holyrood, from whence he was only free to come +forth on Sundays, and if perchance he was decoyed into some friend's +house, and stayed late unwittingly, entrancing the company with his +torrents of living eloquence and unexampled knowledge, there he had to +lie _perdu_ till Sunday came round again. + +Loving, and beloved of all who knew him, unsophisticated and child-like +as he was in middle and later manhood, he had had as rough an experience +of the dark and troublous side of the world as any man of his century. + +He was born in Manchester, where his father, who died early of +consumption, was a well-to-do manufacturer. His mother, who was of a +socially higher grade, and of a rigid Puritan character, never +understood her sensitive son, and never took him to her heart or entered +his. Very touching are the autobiographic accounts he gives of his +sensations on the death of a little sister; how he stole into the silent +chamber and kissed the cold lips, and fell apparently into a kind of +trance, which, young as he was, made his eyes fill 'with the golden +fulness of life'; 'a vault,' he says, 'seemed to open in the zenith of +the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever. I, in spirit, rose as +if on billows that also ran up the shaft for ever; and the billows +seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran before us and fled +away for ever,' and so he goes on, 'till,' says he, 'I slept ... and +when I awoke I found myself standing, as before, close to my sister's +bed.' Later, too, in church, the organ music awoke within him the deep +mysticism of his nature, and he beheld with inner vision, as the solemn +notes pealed and sobbed, dreams and visions, and heard oracles, and had +with God, as he supposed, 'communion undisturbed.' These dream-echoes +haunted him more or less all his life. And it was this delicate, refined +nature which was terrorized and domineered over by a rough, fighting +elder brother, who forced him into conflict with town boys and +victimized him incessantly at home. It was this quick-learning, +preternaturally intelligent boy--who could beat all his schoolmates at +Greek and other book-knowledge--who was sent to dull and cruel masters, +who misused him and drove him in the end to run away and hide himself in +Wales, and afterwards in London. In the great Metropolis, in a desolate +old house at the corner of Greek Street and Soho Square, with only a +little waif of a girl to share his misery and solitude, he spent many +months, his only other acquaintances a hard old lawyer, who made him a +tool, and a girl of the streets, whom he calls 'Poor Ann of Oxford +Street,' who had rescued him from death when he lay famishing on a +doorstep. + +How he was discovered by his family; how he was sent to Oxford, and how +when there his sensitiveness led him to shirk the examinations for his +degree; how he went to the lakes of Westmorland to live, edited a Kendal +newspaper, associated with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Professor +Wilson, and many another celebrity of the day; how he married a farmer's +daughter, who made him an exemplary wife; how he had contracted the +terrific opium habit, and how he fought it, conquered it, and fell again +before it; how he filled, even in the days of his poverty and struggling +life, one cottage after another with precious volumes of ancient and +modern lore; and how he migrated northward, and lived in and near +Edinburgh, as he was doing when we first met him--all these things you +must read for yourselves in his 'English Opium Eater,' and in his +entrancing 'Autobiographic Sketches,' or else in a Life of him by Dr. +Japp or by Professor Masson. + +His death came not unawares to terminate a period of helpless weariness +with some delirium, the after-effects of opium doses. But even in +delirium his dreams, though they greatly tried him, revealed the gentle +spirit of the man. Telling his daughter one of them, he said: 'You know +I and the children were invited to the Great Supper--the Great Supper of +Jesus Christ. So, wishing the children to have suitable dresses for such +an occasion, I had them all dressed in white. They were dressed from +head to foot in white. But some rough men in the streets of Edinburgh, +as we passed on our way to the Supper, seeing the little things in +complete white, laughed and jeered at us, and made the children much +ashamed.' His daughter records: 'As the waves of death rolled faster and +faster over him, suddenly out of the abyss we saw him throw up his arms, +which to the last retained their strength, and he said distinctly, and +as if in great surprise, "Sister, sister, sister!"' So he fell on +sleep. + + + + + OF BOOKS AND CONVERSATION + + + 'A great scholar, in the highest sense of the term, is not one who + depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and + electrical power of combination, bringing together from the four + winds, like the Angel of the Resurrection, what else were dust from + dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life. + + 'And of this let everyone be assured--that he owes to the + impassioned books which he has read, many a thousand more of + emotions than he can consciously trace back to them. Dim by their + origination, these emotions yet arise in him, and mould him through + life like the forgotten incidents of childhood. + + 'Books teach by one machinery, conversation by another; and if these + resources were trained into correspondence to their own separate + ideals, they might become reciprocally the complements of each + other.'--THOMAS DE QUINCEY: _Essay on Pope_. + + + + + THE ENGLISH OPIUM EATER + + THOMAS DE QUINCEY + + II.--HIS BOOKS + + + 'De Quincey! farewell! Many pleasing hours have we spent in the + perusal of thy eloquent page, and not a few in listening to thy + piercing words. Not a few tears have we given to thy early sorrows. + With no little emotion have we followed the current of thy romantic + narrative.' --GILFILLAN'S _Literary Portraits_. + + +We have already seen that De Quincey's collected essays filled, in the +edition prepared by himself, as many as fourteen volumes. How many there +are in the more recent edition by Professor Masson I do not at the +moment remember, but they are in most public libraries, and can be +heartily commended both for their careful annotation and the excellence +of their typography. This latter point is a great one for the +book-lover, who believes that everything he reads should be pleasant to +handle and a delight to the eyes, provided always that its price is +within reach of a moderately-filled purse. + +Of the quality of the contents of the fourteen volumes there are diverse +critical opinions. Let me appraise a few of them before offering my own. +Dr. Traill ('Social England'), while speaking highly of our author's +remarkable powers of literary expression, his wit, pathos, and humour, +considers him 'unequal' in merit, and is almost absurdly wrong when he +talks of De Quincey dividing a certain portion of his life 'between +Bohemianizing in London and lion-hunting in the Lake District.' Two more +utterly unsuitable words could hardly have been found with which to +describe the early experiences of our quaint, little, oversensitive +'Thomas Paperverius,' as Hill Burton calls him in 'The Book Hunter,' +than 'Bohemianizing' and 'lion-hunting.' We will, however, forgive Dr. +Traill, since one who was by nature an unsympathetic critic could not +possibly rise above his own customary level, and also because he gives +De Quincey a place of honour as the originator of the modern school of +'prose poets,' represented by Professor Wilson, his contemporary, and in +later years by John Ruskin. + +The Professor Wilson here named is, of course, he who is still known by +his _nom de plume_ of 'Christopher North.' Close friends were these two +great walkers, great talkers, and great writers. At first sight an +ill-assorted pair must they have seemed to anyone who met them together +on the hills above Windermere, the Celtic giant striding along, like one +of Ossian's heroes, with 'his yellow hair streaming upon the wind,' and +his undersized comrade half running by his side. As they climbed the +mountain they were fain to discourse of all things in heaven and on +earth, for they were both eclectics of a high order, both deeply versed +in German literature and metaphysics, both keenly observant of Nature +and of current events, and both excellent classical and English +scholars. The more Wilson knew of De Quincey the better he liked and +appreciated him, even though an occasional little breeze ruffled the +calmness of their intercourse. The latter owed to 'Kit' his introduction +to _Blackwood's Magazine_, of which he was then editor-in-chief. You +will also remember--you, at any rate, who are familiar with the charming +'Noctes Ambrosianæ' (though, I fear, you are in a sad minority in these +days of scrappy periodicals and flimsy popular fiction)--but you of the +elect few will remember the genial fun which Wilson pokes at 'The Opium +Eater,' and how cleverly he imitates his all but inimitable style, and +banters him on his out-of-the way bits of Attic or Teutonic lore, as +well as on his habits of tagging on one idea to another till he bids +fair to lay the whole universe under contribution to his analytical and +illuminative conversation. You will remember, further, that he puts into +the mouth of 'The Ettrick Shepherd' many such passages as the following, +professing to tease pleasantly the subject of them: 'As for "The Opium +Eater," he lives in a world o' his ain, where there are nae magazines o' +ony sort, but o' hail and sleet, and thunder, and lichtnin', and +pyramids, and Babylonian terraces, covering wi' their fallen gardens, +that are now naething but roots and trunks o' trees, and bricks o' +pleasure houses, the unknown tombs o' them that belonged once to the +Beasts o' the Revelation,' and much more of the same sort of chaff, +running into a paragraph three times the length of this quotation. + +Crabbe Robinson, in his 'Diary,' that wonderful repertoire of chit-chat +about the celebrities of his day, says 'all that De Quincey wrote is +curious if not valuable; commencing with his best-known "Confessions of +an English Opium Eater," and ending with his scandalous but +painfully-interesting autobiography in _Tait's Magazine_.' Scandalous +quotha! This most 'valuable' production has passed into our choicest +literature, while Mr. Robinson's own memoranda are barely known, if at +all, beyond a small circle of bookworms. The 'Diary' has become a mere +quarry in which historians and biographers dig for their building +materials, while De Quincey's life is a more enduring monument to his +fame than if it had been of marble. + +George Gilfillan has far more nearly hit the mark when he pens this +critique: 'In all his writings we find a lavish display of learning. You +see it bursting out, whether he will or no; never dragged in as by +cart-ropes; and his allusions, glancing in all directions, show even +more than his direct quotations that his learning is encyclopædic. His +book of reference is the brain. Nor must we forget his style. It is +massive, masculine, and energetic; ponderous in its construction, slow +in its motion, thoroughly English, yet thickly sprinkled with archaisms +and big words, peppered to just the proper degree with the condiments of +simile, metaphor, and poetic quotation; select, without being +fastidious; strong, without being harsh; elaborate, without being +starched into formal and false precision.' + +We will pass now from these critical estimates to our own mere likings +and preferences among De Quincey's very voluminous 'Selections Grave and +Gay.' I give the first place--the place of vantage and of honour--to the +autobiography already alluded to above, for it burns and scintillates +with the fire of genius, kindled by the action of unique experiences +upon a unique temperament. Next must come, of course, the +'Confessions,' which made him famous in the first instance. This is a +volume from which, in my limited space, I can make no typical extracts, +meandering as the pages do among golden visions and uncanny dreams +begotten by the hideous narcotic drug, and lingering lovingly among +picturesque sketches of the men and maidens of the villages and country +towns he strayed to during his flight from school and home, giving us +glimpses now of 'elaborate and pompous sunsets hanging over the +mountains of Wales,' and anon plunging us into the profoundest depths of +German philosophy and theology. Sometimes he makes us smile at a curious +and unexpected phrase, or some simile that is apt, and yet at first +sight seems incongruous, with a spice of exaggeration, such as the +statement that the shoulders of the porter who carried away his trunk +were 'broad as Salisbury Plain.' + +One of the most characteristic of his tales is that of 'The Spanish +Military Nun,' a true narrative, unearthed by him from the authentic +lore of Spain, of an episode in the conquest of South America, and +relating to a certain Catarina (prettily called by him 'our dear Kate') +who escaped from a convent in the mother country, donned armour, fought +battles and duels, was beloved by marriageable girls, forced a passage +across the Andes, and finally was drowned in the Western Atlantic. The +story is told with humour and much feeling, and has no counterpart, +except in the narrative similarly discovered and freely translated by +Southey, called 'The Expedition of Orsua, and the Crimes of Aguirre.' + +Perhaps the most celebrated of his essays, though, I fancy, better +known by its title than actually read, is that 'On Murder considered as +one of the Fine Arts.' It is an elaborate _jeu d'esprit_, of which the +grave introduction, brimming over with fun, not a muscle of the author's +face moving in the telling, commences thus: 'Most of us who read books +have probably heard of a Society for the Promotion of Vice, of the +Hell-fire Club, founded in the last century by Sir Francis Dashwood. At +Brighton, I think it was, that a society was formed for the suppression +of virtue. That society was itself suppressed; but I am sorry to say +that another exists in London of a character still more atrocious. In +tendency it may be denominated a Society for the Encouragement of +Murder, but according to their own delicate euphemismos is styled "The +Society of Connoisseurs in Murder." They profess to be curious in +homicide; amateurs and dilettante in the various modes of carnage, and, +in short, murder-fanciers.' + +Probably to the majority of his readers his 'English Mail-Coach,' with +its sub-chapters on 'The Glory of Motion,' 'The Vision of Sudden Death,' +and 'Dream Fugue,' will be the most attractive of all his pieces. We who +are old enough to remember 'The Arrow,' 'The Rival,' 'The Tally-Ho,' and +other four-horse mail-coaches, on which we rode seventy miles to and +from boarding-school, or to visit far-off country relatives, can enter +into the spirit of these sketches _con amore_. The young folk, who have +ridden only in hansom-cabs and excursion trains, have little idea of the +perils and pains, and the pleasures, of old coaching days, on the old +coaching roads, or at the old coaching inns, in weary winter rides, or +glorious sunny jaunts in summer time. They should certainly read these +essays, and learn how their parents and grandparents travelled in days +antecedent to steam and electricity. + +If sterner qualities are needed by more laborious readers, let me +commend to their attention that marvel of historic picture-writing, 'The +Revolt of the Tartars'; or 'The Essenes' may suit them, if they be +biblical students, even though they may not agree with De Quincey's +conclusions; or there is that painstaking, minutely-descriptive chapter +on 'The Toilet of a Hebrew Lady.' If they inquire for political +knowledge--and, indeed, this is sadly lacking, not only among working +men, but even more by professional men, who live outside the contact and +struggle with the hardships and necessities of business life--where will +you find anything more convincing, anywhere any severer logic, than that +in the dissertations on Political Economy? I say nothing of his other +historical, philosophical, and theological writings--his theories, +speculations, and researches--for I would advise none to begin the +systematic study of De Quincey with these. I would recommend beginners +to taste first his sketches of contemporary writers and his lighter +papers, and then, if they find they acquire a liking for these, to pass +on to the more recondite. I confess that, however fascinating his +literary style may be, it requires some little culture to appreciate it +at the outset. If a first attempt prove no success, let the +'Miscellanies' be laid aside for a while, till the man himself has +become well known and companionable. Then a second attempt can hardly be +a failure. + +Let me finish this article by inviting my readers' perusal of that +masterpiece of Jean Paul Richter's, so ably translated by our 'old man +eloquent,' and forming the appendix to his essay on the system of the +heavens. It begins, 'And God called up from dreams a man into the +vestibule of heaven, saying, "Come thou hither, and see the glory of My +house." And to His angels He said, "Take him and undress him from his +robes of flesh, and put a new breath into his nostrils, and arm him with +sail-broad wings for flight. Only touch not with any change his human +heart--the heart that weeps and trembles." It was done, and with a +mighty angel for his guide, the man stood ready for his infinite voyage, +and from the terraces of heaven, without sound or farewell, at once they +wheeled away into endless space.' + + + + + THE BRATHAY VALLEY, AMBLESIDE + + + 'It is the place for the earliest flowers of the spring, and + distinguished by the broom growing thickly on the bank of the river, + and yellow globe-ranunculus flourishing on the rocks at the brink, + or in the midst of the stream. In the autumn, the side of Loughrigg, + which overhangs the valley, is splendid with flowering heather. The + opposite character of this and the sister valley is striking, and + led to the remark of a resident of Ambleside that if one wants a + meditative walk in winter, one goes round the Brathay Valley--sure + to meet nobody but the postman, whereas, if one needs recreation + after a morning of study, the walk should be round the Rothay + Valley, where one is sure to meet all one's acquaintances. The + finest view in this valley, one of the finest in the whole district, + is from Skelwith Fold.... The stranger will hardly aver that he ever + saw a more perfect picture than this, with the fall (Skelwith Force) + in the centre, closed in by rock and wood on either hand, and by + Langdale Pikes behind.'--HARRIET MARTINEAU: _Guide to the Lakes_. + + +[Illustration: +_Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._ + + THE KNOLL, AMBLESIDE. + + The Home of Harriet Martineau (1855-1876).] + + + + + II + + A PIONEER OF POLITICAL REFORM + + HARRIET MARTINEAU + + + 'She was born to be a destroyer of slavery, in whatever form, in + whatever place, all over the world, wherever she saw or thought of + it ... in the degraded offspring of former English poor-law ... in + English serfdom forty years ago ... in the fruits of any + abuse--social, legislative, or administrative--or in actual + slavery.'--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. + + +Perhaps the most instructive and reliable book ever written about the +actual condition of England, and about her people's struggles for light, +liberty, and better conditions of life during the first half of the +nineteenth century is Miss Martineau's 'History of the Thirty Years' +Peace.' It is emphatically a citizen's history as distinguished from a +partizan politician's, and it ought to be read, together with her +'Introduction' to it, by every young man who desires to possess an +intelligent acquaintance with the social problems of his age and +country. The ignorance of the present generation of youthful electors, +when compared with the knowledge of their parents at a similar time of +life, often astounds me. It is probably due to two causes--first, to the +fact that their fathers were, forty or fifty years ago, only just +emerging from the dust and smoke of hard-fought political battles, and +so had the causes of them well engrained into their minds, while they of +this generation have not yet so much as 'smelt powder' in the struggle +against still-existing grievances; and, secondly, that the present-day +education in elementary schools practically ignores the teaching of +history, while ordinary secondary schools teach English history only in +'samples,' and those seldom of the most modern periods. No other of +Harriet Martineau's works will take rank with her 'Thirty Years' Peace,' +yet they all had a great reputation when she was reckoned the greatest +living English woman, and they nearly all had a wide sale, though, +having been written for passing purposes, they naturally died +out of the popular memory when their purposes were accomplished, +and fresh interests had come into view. They were mostly +stories--novelettes--written to illustrate such questions as the then +burning ones of free trade, colonization by emigration of the pauper and +the criminal, the incidence and amendment of the Poor Laws, the +repression and punishment of crime, actual and ideal systems of +taxation, the relationships of capital and labour, and the like. In +addition to these, she wrote a few volumes of pure fiction, some +reminiscences of travel in the East--through Egypt, across the Sinaitic +desert, and northwards past Jerusalem to Damascus--and some others +respecting her stay in the United States of America in the troublous +anti-slavery times preceding the Civil War. In her earlier days she also +wrote some religious and theological essays and sketches for Unitarian +magazines. Of her fictions, two may be mentioned--'Deerbrook,' which she +considered her masterpiece, and 'Feats on the Fjord.' The latter was +favourite reading of my own boyhood. I took it to Norway with me in +later days, and found it in every way a most accurate description of +Scandinavian farm life, as well as of coast and mountain scenery--in +fact, quite as much so as the stories of Björnstjerne Björnson himself. +The extraordinary thing about this is that the authoress had never been +in Norway, and took all the settings of her hero's adventures from +narratives of other people's travels. + +Her autobiography--written when, in advancing age, heart-disease had +marked her for its victim at no distant date--with the appendix thereto, +compiled by her devoted friend, Mrs. Chapman--furnishes us with all the +available materials for a sketch of her life; and, indeed, it is the +most valuable of all her multitudinous productions, with the exception +already noted. It is the story of a noble and unceasing struggle, +successfully carried through, against internal difficulties, both mental +and physical of no ordinary character, and against external ones that +would have beaten any commonplace person. It is, however, also a +revelation of spiritual processes and of gradual abandonment of +once-cherished beliefs that does not fascinate us, and leaves us with +grave doubts as to the acuteness of her philosophical insight, and of +her grasp of real Christian teaching. Perhaps, too, it was natural that +her independence of character, and her constant overwork and overstrain, +should lead her into impatience of the frailties of others, and quicken +her contempt for many of the celebrities she knew personally. + +Born in 1802 of Unitarian parents, in Norwich, she grew to be a shy, +sensitive, but quietly-observant and clever girl. Her upbringing was on +the repressive lines of a conscientious but narrow-minded mother, who +was without sympathy for, or knowledge of, her 'ugly duckling's' +yearnings or capacity. The last thing the mother dreamed of was that the +'ugly duckling' was in truth a cygnet, whose swan-plumage the world +would one day recognise. The daughter longed inexpressibly for words and +deeds of parental love which never came to her, and so she grew silent, +introspective, and morbid. In mature age she became morbidly ashamed of +her childhood's, perhaps inevitable, morbidness. When her literary +instincts were bound to find a vent, her first venture in magazine +articles had to be made in secret, and, when they were discovered, +efforts were made to repress any continuation of them, and she was +sternly told to stick to her sewing-needle. She was fortunate in being +sent to a good day-school, which counteracted by its learned and genial +atmosphere the influences of home. It was, too, a blessing in disguise +when, her never robust health failing, her parents sent her to relatives +in Bristol, whose joyous spirits and cultured tastes were an inspiration +to her. A tendency to deafness, which became chronic, and at last +compelled the habitual use of an ear-trumpet, did not, till she +conquered the disadvantage by her brave fortitude, make her desirous of +company or help her to make much way in it. + +The one trusted friend of her youth was her beloved younger brother +James, afterwards the eminent Unitarian minister and theologian. To him +she confided her secret aspirations, and he encouraged her finally to +proceed to London and try and find a publisher for the series of +political economy stories she projected writing. Her heroic efforts to +find someone who would risk putting them on the market is one of the +romances of literary biography. + +Her father was dead. The manufacturing firm in which her mother's monies +were invested had failed. She was alone in London, and without knowledge +or influence. How she 'trudged many miles through the clay of the +streets, and the fog of the gloomiest December,' only to be rejected, +sometimes politely, and sometimes rudely, by everyone to whom she showed +her MSS. and explained her scheme; and how at last she despairingly +accepted what seemed almost impossible, and certainly were unreasonable, +terms, offered by a young bookseller without business connections; how a +wealthy relative unexpectedly stepped in to guarantee a portion of her +personal risk; and how she suddenly sprang into fame--are not all these +things faithfully set forth in her autobiographical chapter headed 'Aged +Twenty-nine'? From depths of discouragement that would have effectually +damped most aspiring authors she at once became a 'society lion,' or +rather, to retain our former metaphor, she was hailed as one of the +swans of literature, and, as was said of the royal bird in Andersen's +parable, 'the most beautiful of them all.' She endured a long and +terrible strain, while for several years producing a story a month, +which broke down her health seriously, yet she attended nearly every +evening some social function, which brought her into intimacy with the +most celebrated men and women of her generation. + +It is in her records of this period that the most unpleasant traits in +her disposition become apparent. Almost every page betokens a spirit of +captious criticism of her acquaintances, and almost every one is +belittled by her. + +About this time, too, Unitarianism lost altogether its slackening hold +of her. She saw that its dogmas were entirely contrary to Scripture +revelation and teaching, but instead of rectifying her faith to the +Christian standard, she abandoned the standard itself, and became an +avowed Positivist. She writes herself down as a convinced +'Necessitarian,' though if anyone's life and conduct effectually belied +such a creed it was hers. No one ever gave stronger proofs of a +self-determined will, free from all external or internal compulsion, +than she. + +Money as well as fame became now her well-earned portion, and she found +herself able to purchase an annuity, spend some time abroad, and buy +land and build a house thereon at Ambleside, by the shores of beautiful +Winander. In this charming home she spent her declining years, following +her favourite pursuits, advocating mesmerism, which she considered had +raised her up from a long-endured nervous prostration, and playing with +success the part of the Lady Bountiful to the neighbourhood. It was +whilst at this place that she translated the works of Comte, and lost +thereby, what she valued most in the world--the intimacy of her beloved +brother James, who, like herself, a model of conscientiousness, publicly +reviewed her introductions and comments with some severity. Both brother +and sister had opinions, held them tenaciously, and expressed them +fearlessly. On her side no sign of change from Positivism was ever +given. The same dauntless spirit which bore her through the anti-slavery +campaign, when in America she was threatened by the slave-owners with +personal violence, upheld her now in her championship of the philosophy +of altruism without a Divine Fatherhood. We believe her mistaken, but +admire her unflinching adhesion to what she deemed the truth. + +It was in her beautiful house, The Knoll, that she passed behind the +veil, and entered into the clear seeing of eternity. She died, says her +closest friend and biographer, 'in the summer sunset of her home amid +the Westmorland mountains, on June 27, 1876, after twenty-one years of +diligent, devoted, suffering, joyful years there, attended by the family +friends she most loved, and in possession of all her mental powers up +till the last expiring day, aged seventy-four years.' She lies among her +kindred, descendants of French refugees, in the old cemetery at +Birmingham. + +In her maidenhood she had once loved, and been beloved by one of the +other sex, but events occurred to prevent the consummation of her love +by marriage, and it proved a happy escape. Thenceforward she lived only +to endure + + 'Many a lofty struggle for the sake + Of duties, sternly, faithfully fulfilled, + For which the anxious mind must watch and wake, + And the strong feelings of the heart be stilled.' + + + + + THE TRUE POET + + + 'Who wears a singing-robe is richly dight; + The Poet, he is richer than a King. + He plucks the veil from hidden loveliness; + His gusts of music stir the shadowing boughs, + To let in glory on the darkened soul. + Upon the hills of light he plants his feet + To lure the people up with heart and voice; + At humblest human hearths drops dews divine + To feed the violet virtues nestling there. + His hands adorn the poorest house of life + With rare abiding shapes of loveliness. + All things obey his soul's creative eye; + For him earth ripens fruit-like in the light; + Green April comes to him with smiling tears, + Like some sweet maiden who transfigured stands + In dewy light of first love's rosy dawn, + And yields all secret preciousness, his Bride. + He reaps the Autumn without scythe or sickle; + And in the sweet low singing of the corn + Hears Plenty hush the pining Poor.' + + GERALD MASSEY. + + +[Illustration: + BRANTWOOD, CONISTON LAKE. + + Successively the Home of Gerald Massey, William J. and + Eliza Lynn Linton, and John Ruskin.] + + + + + III + + A LOVER OF BEAUTY + + GERALD MASSEY + + + 'Like the Norseman of whom he sings, he is everywhere true, brave, + generous, and free. He is before all things a patriot. He has an + intense belief in the genius of England as the champion of liberty, + and the pioneer of freedom.'--_The Poets and the Poetry of the + Century._ + + +He is still living, some seventy-five years of age, and it is difficult +to write anything of the nature of a biography of one still amongst us. +There are a few facts, however, patent to all the world, which may be +fitly reproduced. Perhaps the most striking of these is that, like +'Festus Bailey,' he did his best poetical work in his young manhood, and +the early promise of ripening in power and of richer fruit-bearing has +not been fulfilled. Massey, writing some sweet and inspiring lyrics, and +giving evidence of acute appreciation of the masters of literature in +his once well-known lectures, seems to have lost himself in a maze of +Egyptian and anti-Christian pseudo-philosophies even less edifying than +the science evolved from the 'inner consciousness' of such holy men as +Jacob Behmen, Peter Sterry, or Swedenborg, and as incomprehensible to +the ordinary mind as the strange mysticism of William Blake. He has, as +a poet, which was his true function in life, committed intellectual +suicide, and his resurrection into mythical regions and pamphleteering +on 'Luniolatry,' 'The Seven Souls of Man,' 'The Coming Religion,' and +other such subjects, will not only fail to add to his fame, but in the +future will be remembered merely by curiosity-hunters as the vagaries of +a capable but erratic genius. Like his own Atle the Fur-Hunter in +chasing the squirrel, he has lost his sledge-load of treasures. I know +that he does not personally think so, and that some, at least, of his +friends agree with him. He found verse-making insufficient for +subsistence--as, indeed, might have been expected--and it has been +written of him that in turning to his final career he began to + + 'Dredge the old sea-bottoms of the Past, + Lover of Beauty who gave up all for Truth.' + +Still, we shall ever regret the change. + +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.' + +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_. + + +[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.' + + +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_. + + +[Illustration: +_Photo by Hills & Saunders, Oxford._ + + 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.' + +It is in his 'Seven Lamps of Architecture' that the pæan on Giotto's +Campanile occurs, wherein he tells us how, as a boy, he despised it, and +how since then he lived beside it many a day and looked upon it from his +window 'by sunlight and moonlight, noting the bright, smooth, sunny +surface and glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so +white, so faint, so crystalline, that their slight shapes are hardly +traced in darkness on the eastern sky, that serene height of mountain +alabaster, coloured like a morning cloud, and chased like a sea-shell.' +His minute observation of form and colour in mountain gloom and mountain +glory, in rushing torrents, and in feathered songster, and his +unrivalled powers of description, must be an inspiration to all +right-minded artists, notwithstanding his unsparing and incisive +criticisms in his 'Notes on Pictures.' His scientific knowledge, too, +stood him in good stead. His words on mountain sculpture, with an +illustration from the Aiguilles or needle-pointed Alpine peaks, too long +for full quotation, may well be cited. 'Nature gives us in these +mountains a clear demonstration of her will. She is here driven to make +fracture the law of being. She cannot tuft the rock-edges with moss, or +round them by water, or hide them with leaves and roots. She is bound to +produce a form, admirable to human beings, by continual breaking away of +substances. And behold--so soon as she is compelled to do this, she +changes the law of fracture itself. "Growth," she seems to say, "is not +essential to my work, nor concealment, nor softness; but curvature is; +and if I must produce my forms by breaking, then the fracture shall be +in curves. If, instead of dew and sunshine, the only instruments I am to +use are the lightning and the frost, then the forked tongues and crystal +wedges shall still work out my laws of tender line. Devastation instead +of nurture may be the task of all my elements, and age after age may +only prolong the renovated ruin; but the appointments of typical beauty +which have been made over all creatures shall not therefore be +abandoned, and the rocks shall be ruled in their perpetual perishing, by +the same ordinances that direct the bending of the reed, and the +blushing of the rose." The cloud, the currents of trickling water, an +interior knot of quartz, help the work of shaping, and the dew "with a +touch more tender than a child's finger--as silent and slight as the +fall of a half-checked tear on a maiden's cheek" help to fix for ever +the form of peak and precipice, and hew the leagues of lifted granite, +into shapes that divide the earth and its kingdoms. Then the colouring +of the mountains is not done only by the chemical constituents of their +rocks, but by the jewellery of the flowers--the dark bell-gentian, the +light blue star-gentian, the alpine rose, the highland heather, the +many-hued blossom-masses, and the golden softness of deep, warm, +amber-coloured mosses.' + +It is not always easy to follow Ruskin's own canons of Art in his +exaltation of Turner--as, for instance, in the article of 'Truth touched +with Imagination'--in such a picture as Whitby. There the painter's +cliffs are unnatural and impossible, reminding us more of a straight-cut +pound of cheese than anything ever seen in Nature--specially at Whitby! +We are tempted to praise Turner more for revealing Ruskin than Ruskin +for discovering Turner! Thus, in describing Heysham, it is Ruskin who in +'Harbours of England' gives us the true and very graphic painting, and +Turner a glorified and unrecognisable one. 'A simple, north-country +village on the shore of Morecambe Bay, not in the common sense a +picturesque village; there are no pretty bow-windows, or red roofs, or +rocky steps of entrance to the rustic doors, or quaint gables; nothing +but a single street of thatched and chiefly clay-built cottages ranged +in a somewhat monotonous line, the roofs so green with moss that at +first we hardly discern the houses from the fields and trees. The +village street is closed at the end by a wooden gate, indicating the +little traffic there is on the road through it, giving it the look of a +large farmstead, in which a right of way lies through the yard.' The +rutty roads, the decayed fencing--haystacks and pigstyes--the +parsonage--the church--the craggy limestone rocks amid the brushwood, +and the pleasant turf upon their brows, the gleams of shallow water on +the sandy shore, the fisher-boat on the beach--all help us to see old +Heysham rather through the eyes of the prose-poet than those of the +painter he is lauding. + +Opening other--excluding his more voluminous--books, 'Love's Meinie' or +'Proserpina' to wit--the one of birds and the other of flowers--what +exquisite passages meet us on every page! What Ruskinite does not revel +in such as those contrasting the flight of the eagle and the seagull +with that of the swallow, or as that speaking of 'the beauty of the bird +that lives with you in your own houses, and which purifies for you, from +its insect pestilence, the air that you breathe. Thus the sweet domestic +thing has done, for men, at least, these four thousand years. She has +been their companion, not of the home merely, but of the hearth, and the +threshold; companion only endeared by departure, and showing better her +loving-kindness by her faithful return.' She is a type of the stranger, +or the supplicant, herald of our summer, 'who glances through our days +of gladness'--and he gives us much more of the same sweet poetry about +her. Then there are sentences like that outburst of joy at the discovery +of the blue asphodel in the fields beyond Monte Mario--'a spire two feet +high, of more than two hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue +as well as the flowers. Heaven send all honest people the gathering of +the like, in Elysian fields, some day!' + +Ruskin confessed ignorance of the writings of political economists, of +which he had read none but Adam Smith's--twenty years before--and his +continual travesty of them as though 'buying in the cheapest market and +selling in the dearest'--labour included--was their sole message to the +world, makes it difficult to quote from his more philosophical or social +science works. It must be remembered that Smith had forestalled Ruskin +in stating that wage-earners had a right to a living wage, and that +others, like Jeremy Bentham, had forestalled him in the doctrine of the +'greatest good of the greatest number' underlying his own strictures on +our land system. + +In his usual contradictory way he sometimes tells us the sword must +still be whetted to settle international disputes. At others he calls +war the mother of all evils, and writes paragraphs worthy of Carlyle on +the French and English villagers from their respective Drumdrudges, +pitying the peasantry upon whom the losses and cruelties fall, and +denouncing the squires who officer them and lead them to death. Women he +calls upon to exercise their influence in favour of peace, because they +can, if they will, put an end to all wars for ever. The idleness of the +upper classes, and the seeking of outlets for their capital by +financial speculators are, he says, its chief causes, and +ill-accumulated moneys are spent on it. In all this an ever-increasing +multitude of Christians agree with him, as well as in his denunciation +of the inhumanity of mere mercenary commerce uncontrolled by +consideration for others, and in his pleadings for purer and happier +homes, equal opportunities of education, and the glory and grace of +honest labour. When a man who has done much for the good of his fellows +can write of Ruskin in the second phase of his literary career, 'to him +I owe the guidance of my life, all its best impulses, and its worthiest +efforts,' we may be sure his later books were really great, +notwithstanding their blemishes. + +[Illustration: (Faithfully yours J Ruskin) + + JOHN RUSKIN'S HANDWRITING IN ADVANCED LIFE.] + + +[Illustration: + MEDALLION ON THE RUSKIN MEMORIAL, DERWENTWATER. + + By A. C. Lucchesi.] + + + + + VIEWS FROM GRETA HALL + + + 'This Greta Hall is a house on a small eminence, a furlong from + Keswick, in the county of Cumberland. Yes, my dear Sir, here I am, + with Skiddaw at my back--on my right hand the Bassenthwaite Water, + with its majestic _case_ of mountains, all of simplest outline. + Looking slant, direct over the feather of this infamous pen, I see + the sun setting. My God! what a scene! Right before me is a great + _camp_ of single mountains--each in shape resembles a giant's + tent--and to the left, but closer to it far than the Bassenthwaite + Water to my right, is the Lake of Keswick, with its islands and + white sails, and glossy lights of evening,--crowned with green + meadows; but the three remaining sides are encircled by the most + fantastic mountains that ever earthquakes made in sport, as + fantastic as if Nature had laughed herself into the convulsion in + which they were made. Close behind me flows the Greta; I hear its + murmuring distinctly. Then it curves round, almost in a + semi-circle, and is now catching the purple lights of the scattered + clouds above it directly before me.'--_A letter of Samuel Taylor + Coleridge's._ + + +[Illustration: + + SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. + + From a Painting by G. Dawe, R.A.] + + + + + VII + + A GREAT LIFE MARRED + + SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE + + + 'This illustrious man, the largest and most spacious intellect, the + subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet + existed among men.'--DE QUINCEY. + + +In him we have another of our intellectual giants, a many-sided man, a +poet, a theologian, a politician, or, in Charles Lamb's well-known +phrase, a logician, a metaphysician, a bard. He was a fortunate man in +so far as he has attained literary immortality. He was a singularly +unfortunate man in so far as his natural character was deficient in +will-power, and lacking in that subtle but invaluable property known as +common-sense. His story, once you begin it, holds you, like the story of +his own 'long, lank, brown, and ancient Mariner's,' captive to the end, +it is so full of pathetic romance. + +Garrulous, kind-hearted old Bookseller Cottle, of Bristol, very minor +poet himself, yet devoted to letters, and staunch friend in their utmost +need to an afterwards famous band of young men, tells us how Robert +Lovell, an inexperienced and sanguine Quaker, was carried away by a +Socialistic colonization scheme to be tested on the banks of the +Susquehannah--the community to be called a Pantisocracy--from which +injustice, wrath, anger, clamour, and evil-speaking, were to be +excluded, thereby setting an example of human perfectability. Four young +men, Lovell said, had joined the movement, who were to embark at Bristol +for the American colonies--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Cambridge with +whom the idea was supposed to have originated, Robert Southey and George +Burnett from Oxford, and himself. In due time he introduced his +friends--Southey, 'tall, dignified, possessing great suavity of manners, +an eye piercing, with a countenance full of genius, kindliness, and +intelligence'; Burnett, son of a Somersetshire farmer, who soon vanished +from sight--never, indeed, comes fairly into it; and Coleridge, with 'an +eye, a brow, and a forehead indicative of commanding genius.' The last +soon applied on behalf of the fraternity for a loan, not to pay for the +emigrants' sea passage, but their lodgings bill! The good man lent £5, +and afterwards advanced Coleridge £30, taking the value back in MSS. as +he could secure them. Meanwhile, Coleridge lectured to small audiences +on somewhat abstruse subjects for a Bristol population, and managed to +fall in love with a sister of his friend Lovell's wife, a third of these +Miss Frickers becoming engaged to and marrying Southey, though he had +not the remotest prospect of supporting a family. Lecturing and +literature had not paid, Pantisocracy had perished in the bud, and +Coleridge had not in any other direction shown the least capacity for +dealing with every-day affairs. His antecedents both proved, and had +intensified, his want of sagacity. + +Born in 1772, into the large family of a learned Devonshire clergyman, +who was also Head Master of a Grammar School--'a gentle and kindly +eccentric'--he lost his father when only nine years of age, and was +sent to the Blue Coat School (Christ's Hospital) in London. Here Charles +Lamb was his schoolfellow. He grew, ere he left it, to be a tall lad of +striking presence, with long black hair. At nineteen he was sent to +Cambridge University. From Cambridge--owing, it is now generally +believed, to some disappointment in a love affair, though others will +have it that it was owing to debts recklessly contracted--he went up to +London with little money in his pocket, and enlisted as a private in a +regiment of light cavalry, under the assumed name of Silas Titus +Comberback. In this regiment he remained only four months, proving 'an +execrable rider, a negligent groom of his horse, and generally a slack +and slovenly trooper.' Here a Latin quotation scribbled on a whitewashed +wall discovered him, and led to his discharge, a visit to Oxford and an +introduction to Lovell and Southey, then students, made him a more +decided Pantisocratist, then a Bristolian, a protégé of Cottle and +Charles Lloyd, and a benedict. In 1795 he was married at St. Mary de +Redcliffe Church, and the thriftless pair set up housekeeping forthwith +in a rose-covered cottage at Clevedon, then a village on the shores of +the Severn Sea, though now a fashionable watering-place. Little +furniture, no cash, no income beyond a promise of a guinea and a half +for every hundred lines of copy, whether in rhyme or blank verse, +offered a poor matrimonial prospect. Two days after the wedding, +however, Cottle sent him 'with the aid of the grocer, and the shoemaker, +and the brewer, and the tin-man, and the glass-man, and the brazier,' +all he required--and more. In this retreat Coleridge did some necessary +bread-winning with his pen, but still more planning and projecting of +great world-astonishing magazines. Combined with his fancy for +projecting big schemes was an unconquerable habit of procrastination. +'His strongest intentions were but feebly supported after his first +paroxysm of resolve.' Such a man was unlikely to launch a serial on the +world successfully. He issued circulars of a paper to be called _The +Watchman_, travelled through the Midlands into Lancashire and Yorkshire +to obtain subscribers, and issued a few numbers, and then it collapsed. +In his travels he made the acquaintance of Lloyd, afterwards of +Ambleside, who found him in books, and made a home for him at Nether +Stowey. Wordsworth was then at Alfoxden, a close adjoining village. It +was during a walk taken by the two poets over the Quantock Hills that +their joint volume 'Lyrical Ballads,' was conceived, and that the +'Ancient Mariner' was partly written. 'Christabel' is another product of +this period of Coleridge's life, and what has been aptly called the +dream-poem of 'Kubla-Khan.' It was also now that he avowed himself a +Unitarian, and commenced to preach in the chapels of that sect. +Travelling to Shropshire in this ministry he captivated young William +Hazlitt by his extraordinary discourses in public and in private, who +records how it seemed to him poetry and philosophy were met together in +the preacher, truth and genius had embraced under the eye and sanction +of religion. At this time, he adds, Coleridge's personal appearance was +of one above the middle height, inclining to be corpulent, with hair +still raven-black, forehead broad and high, light as if built of ivory, +projecting brows, with rolling, bright eyes beneath them, and a mouth +'gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent.' His preaching, too, brought him +into contact with the generous De Quincey, and with the two Wedgwoods, +the eminent Staffordshire potters, who defrayed the expenses of himself +and William and Dorothy Wordsworth to Germany, and granted Coleridge a +pension to enable him to devote his life to literature. On their return, +Coleridge went to London on the staff of the _Morning Post_, in the +columns of which he did first-class work. + +In 1800 he removed his family to Keswick. He came to that town in many +respects a changed man. The torrents of revolutionary talk he indulged +in during his undergraduate days had lapsed into ultra-Toryism under the +reaction from the disappointed hopes excited by the upheaval in France, +but chiefly from his connection with the London Tory organ, although, as +his German biographer somewhat grimly remarks, 'a trace of his +partiality for the community of goods lingered in his blood; he never +ceased to live upon his friends'! The Church of England doctrines he was +intended to imbibe at school and college had given way before +Unitarianism and the mysticism and pantheism of the Continent. Goethe, +Kant, and Lessing had become his masters. He came, too, in broken +health. At Keswick dwelt a good man in Greta Hall, or rather in the +smaller of the two houses now known by that name. Mr. Jackson, who +started as a common carrier, was a well-to-do man, and had accumulated a +library. He charged Coleridge half the proper rent for the other +cottage, and gave him access to his books. There seemed no reason why +our poet-philosopher should not have been happier here than ever before. +But the end of his poetical career was at hand. 'Opium,' says De +Quincey, himself a victim to the drug, 'killed Coleridge as a poet.' He +began taking the deadly poison to allay the pains of gout, to which he +was a martyr. His 'Ode to Dejection' is undoubtedly his dirge over the +grave of his muse. In his hours of awakening he gave himself afresh to +philosophy to compel mental activity. He found the study an alleviation, +but by no means a cure. An artist friend took him a voyage up the +Mediterranean. On returning to his care-worn wife he found himself +without sufficient means for the support of a growing family, though Sir +George Beaumont, of Coleorton, and the ever-faithful Cottle and Sir +Humphry Davy, helped him and interested themselves on his behalf, to +enable him to earn something by lecturing in London. Returning again to +the Lake Country, he started another weekly paper, which he called _The +Friend_. It failed to capture the public, and ceased at the +twenty-seventh number. He had magazine and review work, and published +something. The opium habit still increased till these Kendal Black Drops +(he probably so calls them because he first procured them as a quack +medicine from this town) were at last taken in doses amounting to two +quarts of laudanum in a week. Yet he was visited by the Lambs, the +Wordsworths, Hazlitt, Professor Wilson, and many another who admired and +loved him for his genius and his unique personality. In four years' time +his brother-in-law, Robert Southey, and his family joined him at Greta +Hall. On the other hand, the Wedgwood annual allowance was withdrawn, on +the ground that his side of the agreement was not being fulfilled. More +and more he drifted about from place to place, leaving his wife and +children to the care of their relatives. One while he stayed with the +Wordsworths at Grasmere, and another with a benevolent friend at Calne +(he was three years there), till his generous host's means being much +reduced he was compelled to withdraw his hospitality. Here he had been +partly weaned from opium, but on going up to London in search of a +livelihood he fell back under its complete tyranny. In a kind of +desperation he carried his case to a Dr. Gillman, of Highgate. This +gentleman, an able physician and a man of standing and culture, was +happily married, and needed no 'paying guest,' but as Professor Brandle +puts it, 'the spell of his talk, and the repute of his name, vanquished +the Gillmans at once, and from that time he became the inmate and friend +of the family, and remained so till his end.' Here in this beautiful +home--beautiful in its then countrified surroundings, beautiful in its +moral atmosphere--he was once again happy, and for no fewer than sixteen +years. No opium was permitted within the walls. His wife and children, +and friendly visitors like Irving, Hallam, Maurice, Hare, and T. H. +Green, were welcomed. He became an undoubted Christian, and a powerful +advocate of a form of orthodoxy commoner now than it was then--an +attractive Anglican theology impregnated with the German type of +platonic philosophy. His utter simplicity of character was never lost, +and, unfortunately, his endeavours after pecuniary recovery were +thwarted by a scoundrelly publisher cheating him of large sums he had +fairly earned by hard work and genius. It was at this time he issued +'Aids to Reflection,' 'Lay Sermons,' and other memorable books. + +Towards the end of his days he suffered much, notably from an affection +of the heart, which 'bent his figure, furrowed his face, and hindered +his work.' Finding death within sight, he settled what outward affairs +he had to settle, ordered mourning rings for his friends, composed an +epitaph for his tombstone, and in a marvellous calm, not begotten of +narcotics, but of a living faith, he passed away into the fulness of +light, in the year of our Lord 1834, and the sixty-second of his age. + +What is the true estimate of his character? His was empathically a +self-marred life. With a steady, reliable temperament and will he might +have achieved one of the very highest positions among England's greatest +men. 'Frailty,' cries a modern essayist, 'thy name is Genius.' His +conversational powers were unequalled, and attracted eminent people from +afar to hear him pour forth his brilliant scientific knowledge, +philosophic speculations, and wealth of illustration. It is true that +Charles Lamb adjudged him too great a monopolist of the situation. +'Lamb,' was the response, 'did you ever hear me preach?' 'I never heard +you do anything else,' retorted Lamb. His talks were really spontaneous +orations which electrified his hearers. That ineffectual outward life of +his, so full of latent possibilities, has not, happily, been +altogether thrown away. Both the pre-opium-drinking days and the +post-opium-drinking were long enough for him to influence the thoughts +and teaching of his own and future ages, and he still leavens the +literature of the pulpit and the desk. His poetry yet delights young and +old. It is comforting to know that one whom the 'Circean Chalice' had +driven to wish for annihilation, and created in him a desire to place +himself in a madhouse, could write from his death-bed to a 'dear +god-son' that on the brink of the grave he had proved Christ to be an +Almighty Redeemer, who had reconciled God, and given him, under all +pains and infirmities, 'the peace that passeth understanding.' + +His literary output I will neither expound nor criticise, tempting as it +is to do both. His poems are on the shelves of every well-selected +library, however small. His more solid works are not for the general +public. They are too profound, and go far too deeply into the secret +springs of life and thought, too far afield into the Divine and human +undercurrents of motive and action; are too theological, too +speculative, to lay hold of any but those who themselves are, in their +spheres, and to some extent, at least, guides and moulders of other +men's emotions and duties. They are essentially books for the patiently +reflective, who learn that they may teach. If spiritual things are only +spiritually discerned, so also are philosophical theories, methods, and +categories appreciated only by those who have a natural leaning towards +them, and some degree of training. Nine-tenths of my readers will be +'practical' men and women, to whom his revelations will seem guess-work +and his intuitions dreams. But if any want a delicate and subtle +analysis of Coleridge's mind, and whatsoever was in it, they may read +the late Walter Pater's 'Appreciation' of him. + + + + + TO BE READ AT HIS GRAVESIDE + + + 'I have no particular choice of a churchyard, but I would repose, if + possible, where there were no proud monuments, no new-fangled + obelisks or mausoleums, heathen in everything but taste, and not + Christian in that. Nothing that betokened aristocracy, unless it + were the venerable memorial of some old family long extinct. If the + village school adjoined the churchyard, so much the better. But all + this must be as He will. I am greatly pleased with the fancy of + Anaxagoras, whose sole request of the people of Lampsacus was, that + the children might have a holiday on the anniversary of his death. + But I would have the holiday on the day of my funeral. I would + connect the happiness of childhood with the peace of the dead, not + with the struggles of the dying.'--_Written on a book-margin by + Hartley Coleridge._ + + +[Illustration: + + _Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._ + + NAB COTTAGE, RYDAL. + + The Home of De Quincey's Father-in-law (see p. 8), and + afterwards of Hartley Coleridge.] + + + + + VIII + + A LIFE TO PITY + + HARTLEY COLERIDGE + + + 'Hartley Coleridge has come much nearer us, and probably you might + see as much of him as you liked. Of genius he has not a little, and + talent enough for fifty.'--WORDSWORTH. + + 'Dined at Mrs. Fletcher's. H. Coleridge behaved very well. He read + some verses on Dr. Arnold which I could not comprehend, he read them + so unpleasantly; and he sang a comic song that kept me very grave. + He left us quite early.'--CRABBE ROBINSON'S _Diary_. + +Poor 'Lile Hartley'--_little_ Hartley, as the neighbours called him--is +one of the most pathetic figures in English literature. Undersized in +body, of promising intellect from childhood, of child-like simplicity in +character, devoid of self-control, and overmastered by the alcoholic +habit, as his father was by the opium habit, he is at once pitiable, +excusable, and lovable. As you ride from Ambleside to Grasmere you pass +a low cottage on your right, just beneath Nab Scarr, where the young +farmer and his wife lived who cared so unselfishly for him and for his +comfort and welfare. It is locally known as 'Coleridge's Cottage.' Here +he lived in later manhood, followed and brought home tenderly, when he +had wandered away, by his kind-hearted caretakers, and writing prose +essays and sweet sonnets in hours of freedom from his besetment. + +By birth Hartley Coleridge belongs to the West Country, having come into +the world while his parents lived on Redcliffe Hill, Bristol, shortly +after their return from their little flower-covered, poverty-stricken +Clevedon Cottage. The National Dictionary of Biography is in error in +giving Rose Cottage as his birthplace. It was beyond all doubt Bristol, +and he was born during the autumn of 1796. 'A pretty and engaging +child,' his brother Derwent says he was. There must have been something +attractive about the babe, for it is given to few to be apostrophized by +two poets at so early an age, especially by two such as his own father +and his father's friend, William Wordsworth. Great things were +anticipated for him in the future by both the seers. He was taken to +London for a visit when three years old, and, after being mystified by +the street lamps, he suddenly exclaimed: 'Oh! now I know what the stars +are: they are lamps that have been good upon earth, and have gone up +into heaven!' At six years of age he was removed with the family to +Keswick. Here for a season the two households of Coleridge and Southey +dwelt at Greta Hall, an occurrence which seems in many ways to have +remarkably influenced his career. Those who came in contact with him at +this place speak of him as pouring forth, with flashing eyes, strange +speculations far beyond his years, and weaving wild inventions. His +dreamy boyhood was varied by another stay in London and a visit to +Bristol, in both which places further mundane knowledge was acquired, +only to be forthwith transmuted into the visions which filled his mental +life. His very play related to the history of a kind of Utopia, its +populations, its geography, its constitution, its wars, its politics. +'Ejuxria' was the name he gave his island kingdom, and he prolonged the +existence of it for himself and his playmates beyond the length of the +famous thousand and one nights of the Eastern story-teller. Everything +he saw, everything he read, became forthwith 'Ejuxrian.' This habit of +introversion and lack of practicality changed its forms as he grew +older, but never left him. When at length he went to a boarding-school +at Ambleside--or, rather, was placed in a clergyman's house near it with +a few other boys for private tuition--his power of improvization was +encouraged by his companions demanding long-drawn-out romances from him, +while his morbid tendencies and consciousness of his small stature +induced the habit of lonely wanderings and musing. + +Desultory reading and frequent intercourse with his father's +friends--Southey, Wordsworth, Professor Wilson, De Quincey, and Charles +Lloyd--formed the chief part of his early education. He seems to have +been as a schoolboy truthful, dutiful, and thoughtful, but with great +infirmity of will and subject to paroxysms of passion and heartbroken +repentance. From school to Oxford University was a natural and proper +advance. Unfortunately, his rare conversational qualities made him much +sought after for students' wine parties. The result of this was that, +although he passed his exams creditably, and won an Oriel Fellowship, +he was judged to have forfeited this Fellowship by his intemperance. +The authorities were inexorable. No expostulation or influence could +save him. It is probable some freedom of speech offensive to the +narrow-minded dons of his day had something to do with their hardness. +Sympathy and kindly common-sense might have recovered him just then from +his snare. As it was, he tried for literary employment in London with +little success, though his tarriance there resulted in a further +development of his alcoholic tendency. Thence he drifted back to +Ambleside, where he tried school-keeping, but in vain. He had no +disciplinary power, and one by one his pupils were removed, till the +school collapsed. From there he went to the Grasmere Cottage, already +spoken of, facing the lovely little lake of Rydal, a blue island-dotted +gem framed in with lofty green mountains. Everybody loved the lonely, +affectionate man--a keen observer of Nature, an inspired writer of +poetry--and everybody grieved when the end came one winter's day of +1849, and his remains were buried in Grasmere Churchyard. There a little +group of us stood but a while ago, reverently uncovered, beneath the +yews that overshadow his grave and the graves of the Wordsworth family. +That he knew his weakness and lamented it, and at seasons valiantly +struggled to overcome it, is certain, and one cannot help wondering +whether he would not have triumphed ultimately had he lived in a +teetotal age, when he could have been surrounded by abstaining +companions, who would have sheltered him and kept him out of perpetually +recurrent temptations. Some of his more personal verses are sadly +suggestive both of his struggle and his need: + + 'A woeful thing it is to find + No trust secure in weak mankind, + But tenfold woe betide the elf + Who knows not how to trust himself.' + +And again he writes: + + 'Oh woeful impotence of weak resolve, + Recorded rashly to the writer's shame, + Days pass away, and Time's large orbs revolve, + And every day behold me still the same, + Till oft-neglected purpose loses aim, + And hope becomes a flat, unheeded lie, + And conscience, weary with the work of blame, + In seeming slumber droops her wistful eye, + As if she would resign her unregarded ministry.' + +Passing lightly over his 'Northern Worthies,' some dozen or so of +biographic sketches, good and capable 'pot-boilers'--yet 'pot-boilers' +essentially--one comes to his essays, written for _Blackwood_ and other +magazines and papers, and his marginalia written in his books and +published after his death. We cannot but be struck with the immense +variety of subjects dealt with in his essays. Many of them are signed by +a pseudonym, such as 'Thersites' if on 'Heathen Mythology'--or 'Tom +Thumb the Great' if 'Brief Observations upon Brevity'--or 'Ignoramus' if +a series on the 'Fine Arts'--and very few were issued in his own name. +Some are full of quaint humour, such as 'Thoughts on Horsemanship, by a +Pedestrian,' 'A Nursery Lecture delivered by an Old Bachelor.' Others +have a fine literary flavour, as, for example, 'Shakespeare, a Tory and +a Gentleman,' or 'On the Character of Hamlet.' It is, however, as a +sonnetteer he will be longest remembered, and as a writer of +miscellaneous verses. When rowing round Grasmere Lake the other day we +recalled his lines, beginning: + + 'Within the compass of a little vale + There lies a lake unknown in fairy tale, + Which not a poet knew in ancient days, + When all the world believed in ghosts and fays; + Yet on that lake I have beheld a boat + That seemed a fairy pinnace all afloat, + On some blest mission to a distant isle + To do meet worship in some ruined pile, + Where long of yore the Fairies used to meet + And haply hallow with their last retreat.' + +Sometimes, too, when religious controversies grow warm around the good +old revelation those verses of his come to remembrance, called 'The Word +of God': + + 'In holy books we read how God hath spoken + To holy men in many different ways; + But hath the present work'd no sign or token? + Is God quite silent in these latter days? + + 'And hath our Heavenly Sire departed quite, + And left His poor babes in this world alone, + And only left for blind belief--not sight-- + Some quaint old riddles in a tongue unknown?' + +Hartley Coleridge's longer and more ambitious pieces do not commend +themselves to the public as do his shorter ones. His _forte_ was in-- + + 'Singing of the little rills + That trickle down the yellow hills + To drive the Fairies' water-mills;' + +of children whom he doted upon,--of 'the merry lark that bids a blithe +good-morrow,'--of 'summer rain'--of 'rose, and violet, and pansy, each +with its tale of love'--of poor Mary Magdalene. From his own soul, as +from Mary's, it may be the Lord has 'wiped off the soiling of despair.' +May we find it has been so when we ourselves reach the great hereafter. + + + + + KESWICK IN WINTER + + + 'Summer is not the season for this country. Coleridge says, and says + well, that then it is like a theatre at noon. There are _no goings + on_ under a clear sky.... The very snow, which you would perhaps + think must monotonize the mountains, gives new varieties; it brings + out their recesses and designates all their inequalities, it + impresses a better feeling of their height, and it reflects such + tints of saffron, or fawn, or rose-colour to the evening sun. _O + Maria Santissima!_ Mount Horeb with the glory upon its summit might + have been more glorious, but not more beautiful than Skiddaw in his + pelisse of ermine. I will not quarrel with frost, though the fellow + has the impudence to take me by the nose. The lakeside has such ten + thousand charms; a fleece of snow or of the hoar-frost lies on the + fallen trees or large stones; the grass-points, that just peer above + the water, are powdered with diamonds; the ice on the margin with + chains of crystal, and such veins and wavy lines of beauty as mock + all art; and, to crown all, Coleridge and I have found out that + stones thrown upon the lake, when frozen, made a noise like singing + birds, and when you whirl on it a large flake of ice, away the + shivers slide, chirping and warbling like a flight of finches.'--_A + letter of Robert Southey's._ + +[Illustration: WINE STREET, BRISTOL. + + The Birthplace of Robert Southey.] + + + + + IX + + GEORGE THE FOURTH'S LAUREATE + + ROBERT SOUTHEY + + + 'I could say much of Mr. Southey, at this time; of his + constitutional cheerfulness, of the polish of his manners, of his + dignity, and at the same time of his unassuming deportment, as well + as of the general respect which his talent, conduct, and + conversation excited.'--JOSEPH COTTLE, _Southey's first publisher_. + + +He was the most bookish and the most learned Laureate of them all. As a +poet, he was inferior to Wordsworth and Tennyson, yet superior to Pye or +Austin. He was a native of Bristol, where his father was an unsuccessful +linen-draper in Wine Street. Heredity had little or nothing to do with +the evolution of Robert's genius, except so far as from his mother's +alertness of intellect and happy temperament he received a foundation +upon which he was enabled to build his literary future. Industry, and a +great practical capacity, animated by a sanguine spirit, carried him +through a life of unremitting toil, and conquered difficulties that +would have crushed or disheartened most men. + +He first saw the light on August 12, 1774. 'Is it a boy?' asked the +mother. 'Ay,' replied the nurse, 'a great ugly boy'; and the mother, +when she saw the 'great red creature,' feared she should never be able +to love him! However, he soon grew to be a handsome, curly-headed lad, +sensitive, and very much alive. The Southeys being 'under water' most of +their time, their first-born was adopted by a half-sister of the wife. +Aunt Tylor lived in Bath. To Bath, then, he was removed, and the +fashionable, theatre-going spinster, even over-nice and fastidious in +her love of spotless cleanliness, and very imperious in her manner, did +her duty conscientiously by her charge, letting him, however, attend +dramatic entertainments, and read all he could lay hands on, till he was +old enough to be sent to school. The 'Academy' selected was fully as low +as the average of the 'Do-the-boys' Halls of the day. The master was a +broken-down tradesman who had married his drunken servant-maid, and the +school broke up shortly with a free fight between the proprietor and his +son. Two years here had added little to the pupil's knowledge. He gained +most by his private reading. The next four years were spent in attending +as a day-boarder in the classes of a bewigged, irascible little +Welshman, with whom he learned Latin and the Church Catechism. 'Who +taught you to read, boy?' inquired schoolmaster Williams. 'My aunt, +sir.' 'Then tell your aunt that my old horse, dead these twenty years, +could have done it better!' This naturally terminated his attendance at +that school. The aunt left Bath shortly thereafter, and finally settled +at Bristol, Southey going with her, and still poring over Spenser, +Sidney, Pope's Homer and translations of Tasso, Ariosto, and Josephus. +By-and-by he was promoted to Westminster School to continue his Latin, +which he remembered for reading though not for writing, and to learn +Greek, which he afterwards forgot. A bias for history developed itself +here, and he found a good library in the house of a friend in Dean's +Yard, scarcely out of bounds. Here he studied Gibbon, Rousseau, and +Epictetus. Authorship in a school journal was tried, and so successfully +that his criticism on the ways of a stupid, 'flogging' preceptor, whose +name may well pass into oblivion, led to his expulsion, and the expelled +lad, whose name will never be obliterated, returned to his aunt in +Bristol. + +Robert Southey had a maternal uncle, a clergyman, and English chaplain +at Lisbon, who became more to him than a father, the real father having +failed in business and died of a broken heart. Mr. Hill sent his nephew +to Oxford, designing to make a clergyman of him. The Dean of Christ +Church, however, hearing that the tall, handsome, enthusiastic young +poet and Radical had been turned out of Westminster for daring to attack +that fine old English institution, flogging in the great public schools, +rejected his application. Balliol received him. Here he made some +lifelong and most valuable friendships, one bringing him a future +pension of £160 a year to aid him in his devotion to literature, an +allowance continued, with unusual generosity, till he had made his mark, +and Government had remunerated him for his eminent services. He owed as +little to Oxford as to lower schools. All he learned, he tells us, was +some swimming and boating. He wrote his epic poem, 'Joan of Arc,' in his +nineteenth year; refused to enter into orders, 'joyfully bade adieu to +Oxford,' tried to learn medicine, but hated the dissecting-room too much +to follow it; had an interview with Coleridge, imbibed 'Pantisocracy,' +returned to Bristol once more, fell in love with Edith Fricker, sister +of Lovell's and Coleridge's wives, and was refused his Aunt Tylor's +house in consequence of his erratic opinions and misdoings. His +Portuguese uncle now stepped in to wean him from those ultra-democratic +views, as they were then considered, though nowadays almost commonplaces +of Toryism, and to relieve his pecuniary necessities. Pantisocracy, +supplemented by a little lecturing and a little publishing, had not +proved profitable, and poor Southey frequently knew the want of a +dinner. Mr. Hill was over in England, and took his relative back with +him. To make all fast, however, Robert and his beloved Edith, his +faithful, loving, and every way admirable wife for many years, got +themselves married in St. Mary de Redcliffe Church on the morning of the +day the former started from Bristol on his travels. They could not raise +the price of the wife's wedding-ring between them, and kind-hearted +Bookseller Cottle lent the requisite guinea. They parted at the +church-door, Southey going first to Madrid, and then to Lisbon and its +environs. In the Spanish peninsula were many valuable libraries hidden +away in monasteries. These he ransacked, learning the tongues in which +they were written, or printed, posting himself up in Portuguese history, +translating the romance of the Cid, and bringing back with him a number +of valuable books and documents. It was one of the pleasantest and most +profitable periods of his life, was this trip to the old medieval, +Catholic world of modern Portugal, though he came home with an intense +dislike of Romanism. But he returned to England and commenced studying +law in London, forgetting all he learned the moment his law books were +closed, and writing his second great poem, 'Madoc,' in the intervals of +reading Blackstone and Littleton and Coke. A holiday near Christchurch +followed during the bright summer weather of 1797 with wife and mother, +brother Tom just released from a French prison, brother-in-law +Coleridge, Bookseller Cottle, Friend Lloyd, Charles Lamb, and John +Rickman; and then a homeless time, sometimes in London, sometimes in +Bristol, and once among the literati of Norwich. Then ensued a residence +at Westbury-on-Trym in a pretty cottage, and an acquaintance with Davy, +afterwards the celebrated Sir Humphrey. Another trip to Portugal, this +time accompanied by his Edith, involved more study, and produced another +poem--'Thalaba.' Coleridge, it will be remembered, had removed to +Keswick, to Greta Hall. He now wrote for the Southeys to join him there, +which they did, and it was their home as long as their lives lasted. +Here Robert toiled at literature for his daily bread, living a strenuous +life not for his own and his growing family's sake alone, but for the +Coleridges during Samuel's sad lapses into the opium habit, and for the +widowed Mrs. Lovell and her child also. There was a time when I could +not like Robert Southey as man or author. His longer poems seemed prosy, +and most of his shorter ones trivial, and his prose lacking in sympathy +with humanity, and his books narrow in their outlook on life. He seemed +to be commonplace and cold, and every way humdrum. Fuller acquaintance +with the author and his works has not greatly changed one's views, about +some of his verses, but it has brought acquaintance with some books of +extraordinary merit wherein prejudice fades into quaintness of thought +and expression not altogether unpleasant, and since one's youthful days +the commonplace virtues of domestic life and home cheerfulness and the +heroism that toils and struggles unseen, and bears its life's burdens +uncomplainingly, have received a spiritual glorification far beyond that +which is due to the showy, romantic, good-for-nothing selfishness of the +plunger who neglects his responsibilities while captivating the +onlookers. + +Life at Keswick was apparently a monotonous one. To-day was as +yesterday, and to-morrow as to-day, with the exception of short journeys +away, always leavened by longings to be at home. Each forty-eight hours +was mapped out with as much regularity as social claims would permit. +Reading, writing, walking among the beautiful landscapes of Keswick, and +the hearty enjoyment of relaxation in the midst of his numerous family +circle, had all their allotted times, with the hours of rest and sleep, +for Southey needed sleep and exercise to keep in good order the bodily +functions his very existence as an author depended upon. Yet did he +never refuse to be interviewed by legitimate callers--that is, those who +brought their own literary credentials with them, or introductions from +those he knew. Among the men who sought him for his works' sake was +Shelley during the time of his compulsory retirement at Keswick. He +carried on also a very large private correspondence. His 'selected' +letters alone fill four volumes. He befriended Kirke White, the poet, +with wise counsel and friendly sympathies, and Charlotte Brontë, and not +a few now quite unknown poets, struggling to make names for themselves +among the stars of English poesie. The correspondents to whom he +unbent, and showed the real man behind the books he wrote, included such +geniuses as Bishop Lightfoot, Sir Walter Scott, Walter Savage Landor +(who was an inspiration to him), Sir Henry Taylor, and, of course, the +Lake Poets so well known to us all by now. + +[Illustration: + _Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._ + + SOUTHEY'S MONUMENT IN CROSTHWAITE CHURCH, KESWICK.] + +The losses, occurring in every extensive family, came from time to time +to tear the fibres of Southey's loving and sensitive heart. Children +died, or married and left him, and at length his brave, and +dearly-beloved wife's mental faculties decayed, and after some time of +gradual and hopeless failure, she died in 1837. Two years later he +married another excellent woman, though of quite different type from his +deeply-mourned Edith. This was Caroline Bowles, who was a literary lady +and poetess, and had been a correspondent for some time. He never fully +recovered the shock of his first wife's loss, and his own later years +were beclouded with brain disease resulting in something not quite +imbecility, and yet bordering upon it, in which he seemed to live in a +perpetual dream. A fever hastened his end, which came in the month of +March, 1843. His successor in the Laureateship and his son-in-law were +the only strangers present in Crosthwaite Churchyard at the funeral. It +was a cloudy day on which he was buried, but as the service was ending a +ray of sunshine touched the grave, and reminded the mourners of the +better light in the world beyond into which his soul had entered. +Southey was all his life a sincerely religious man. His refusal to enter +the Anglican priesthood in youth, and his championship of liberal views, +and even the narrowness of his later opinions on affairs of State and +Church--in other words, his bigoted Toryism--were all due to the +sincerity of his convictions, and his loyalty to what he thought at the +time to be the truth. The best short life you can have of Southey is +Edward Dowden's in 'English Men of Letters.' + +Of his longer poems the world takes small account, though there is +undoubted poetry in them. It preserves chiefly his ballads, things like +the 'Battle of Blenheim,' 'How the Water Comes Down at Lodore,' 'The Old +Woman of Berkley,' and so forth, which can be found in most anthologies. +His prose writings were principally task-work, bread-winners, +painstaking, and mostly reliable. His 'Life of Nelson' has still a +circulation, and is probably the most popular of his books. His 'Life of +John Wesley' is pre-eminently a Churchman's appreciation of one to +whom he tried to be just, but had no kind of sympathy with. The works +which best show us Southey himself are his 'Uneducated Poets,' a +readable group of short biographies of his humbler brethren, to some of +whom he had been personally a benefactor; his 'Book of the Church,' a +volume of biographical sketches of builders and martyrs of the Church of +England; his 'Commonplace Book,' which shows the marvellous industry of +the man in collecting materials for his life-work; and, above all, that +curious assortment of odds and ends of erudition connected by the +thinnest thread of a story, around which the quaint old-world learning +winds and winds endlessly with something of Rabelaisian humour without +its grossness. This, of course, is 'The Doctor,' a book once captured +from an acquaintance of mine by hospital surgeons on the ground that +'medical' works were not permitted to patients! This book, written for +his own delectation and for the justification of his friends, is +particularly suitable for long, wet winter evenings by a cosy fireside, +and one that can be opened anywhere to disclose 'a feast of reason and a +flow of soul' to the reader. + +[Illustration: JOSEPH COTTLE, OF BRISTOL. + B. 1770. D. 1853. + + Friend and Patron of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, and + their first Publisher (see pp. 85, 87, 106). + + Portrait (æt. 50) by Branwhite, also of Bristol.] + + + + + X + + VICTORIA'S FIRST LAUREATE + + WILLIAM WORDSWORTH + + + 'The Age grew sated with her frail wit, + Herself waxed weary on her loveless throne. + Men felt life's tide, the sweep and surge of it, + And craved a living voice, a natural tone.' + From _Wordsworth's Grave_, by WILLIAM WATSON. + +Wordsworth is, of course, the greatest poet of the English Lake school. +He is also the only one born in the lake counties, educated and, with +slight exception, resident all his life within them. His birthplace was +Cockermouth, his school the Grammar School of Hawkshead; his +residences--except what time he briefly dwelt among the southern +Quantock Hills--were at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and Rydal Mount; his +burial-place was among his kinsfolk in a quiet corner of Grasmere +Churchyard, beneath the sycamores and yews. Most of his compeers and +friends--Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, Charles Lloyd, John Wilson, and +even Hartley Coleridge--were born elsewhere, and came to live among +these northern mountains in youth or manhood. + +He wrote, also, more about our district, and wrote it better, than any +other. This was partly due to patriotic devotion to his native corner +of our common fatherland, partly because the love of rambling was +ingrained in his being, chiefly because he was intuitively a +Nature-poet, looking below the grand and the lovely into the mystical +heart and core of sights and sounds that conceal and yet reveal their +Creator, Fashioner, and Upholder. He was the inspired interpreter of +things which ordinary men have not spiritual knowledge to +understand--which, indeed, the majority do not so much as behold dimly +until one of God's seers lifts the enshrouding veil. + +Born in 1770, he died at noon on April 23, 1850. No one now living was +contemporary with his birth. Middle-aged admirers of his poems, +middle-aged controverters of his claim to pre-eminence, well remember +the shadow of death that fell across the nation's heart when they heard +the laureate had passed away. 'Surely,' writes F. W. H. Myers, 'of him, +if of anyone, we may think as a man who was so in accord with Nature, so +at one with the very soul of things, that there can be no mansion of the +universe which shall not be to him a home, no governor that will not +accept him among his servants, and satisfy him with love and peace.' +There are few events to record between his earthly birth and his birth +into the upper kingdom--or shall we say his return to that kingdom?--if +there is anything in his own suggestion that-- + + 'Not in entire forgetfulness, + And not in utter nakedness, + But trailing clouds of glory do we come + From God who is our home.' + +His was a domestic life after he left Cambridge, and had done some +Continental travel and some in Scotland. It was spent in cottage homes +with his beloved sister Dorothy, for a short while in Dorsetshire, +another short while at Alfoxden, in Somerset, and then till his marriage +at Grasmere. He was married to Mary Hutchinson at Penrith in 1802. As +his family grew he removed successively into two larger houses, and +eventually settled at Rydal Mount. Here his life was one of attention to +his small Government appointment of stamp distributor, wandering 'lonely +as a cloud,' and muttering to himself so much that the peasants deemed +him half crazy; meditating upon and composing his immortal poems; and, +after he had become famous, receiving literary guests from all the +English-speaking peoples. His biography is a biography of the mind, a +history of mental processes and tendencies, a record of the gradual +creation of his own anthology. There are innumerable lives of him, of +less or greater length, from the old one of Paxton Hood, and the most +full and capable by his own nephew, and by Professor Knight, to the +latest in the 'English Men of Letters Series.' Professor Knight, too, +has given the world excellent editions of his poems, excellent +selections therefrom, and a charming review of his connection with the +lakes. All these are accessible to ordinary readers and +hero-worshippers. It will answer my purpose best in this place to note +only his local Nature-verses. Yet I may, perhaps, remind this generation +that Wordsworth had to win his spurs--the recognition of his right to be +ranked in any degree as a poet--and still more to be considered a +teacher of his race. His earlier effusions passed through a veritable +fire of scornful criticism. 'Primroses,' 'Daffodils,' 'Pet Lambs,' 'Idle +Shepherd Boys,' 'Alice Fells' and 'Lucy Grays,' and 'Lines to a +Friend's Spade,' were altogether too trivial themes for the responsible +and serious muse, while 'Peter Bell' was a special subject of scorn. +'Poems of Sentiment' were merely 'sentimental.' The sonnets and larger +pieces, particularly 'The Excursion,' were too heavy, and too laboured +to be readable. Pantheism was charged upon him as an objectionable +creed. Time justified him largely, and Wordsworth Societies helped to do +so still further, though in some respects the slashing critics may have +had fair ground. No other poet of his calibre is so unequal in the +quality of his output. Wordsworth's poems are by no means, it cannot be +too much insisted upon, all on the same high plane of merit, and many +will never pass into the world's best thought, as nearly all Tennyson's +have, to say nothing of Shakespeare's or Milton's. + +He was pre-eminently a revealer of the kingdom of Nature, as seen in the +mountains and lakes, the birds, the flowers, the peasantry of the +counties of Westmorland and Cumberland, and the over-sea portion of +Lancashire. Not only did he write an admirable guide for travellers and +tourists in these regions, but there is scarcely a section of this land +that he has not rendered classic ground by connecting with it some +incident, some allusion, some poetical idealizing. Where shall I begin? +With Windermere, of course. You remember this in the Prelude? + + 'When summer came, + Our pastime was, on bright half-holidays, + To sweep along the plain of Windermere + With rival oar; and the selected bourne + Was now an island musical with birds + That sang and ceased not; now a sister isle + Beneath the oak's umbrageous covert--sown + With lilies of the valley like a field; + And now a third small island, where survived + In solitude the ruins of a shrine + Once to Our Lady dedicate, and served + Daily with chanted rites.' + +Better still than this is another passage from the same poem: + + 'There was a boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs + And islands of Winander! Many a time + At evening, when the earliest stars began + To move along the edges of the hills, + Rising or setting, would he stand alone + Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake, + And there with fingers interwoven, both hands + Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth + Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, + Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, + That they might answer him, and they would shout + Across the watery vale, and shout again, + Responsive to his call, with quivering peals, + And long halloos and screams and echoes, long + Redoubled, and redoubled--concourse wild + Of jocund din; and when a lengthened pause + Of silence came, and baffled his best skill, + Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung + Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise + Has carried far into his heart the voice + Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene + Would enter unawares into his mind, + With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, + Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received + Into the bosom of the steady lake.' + +Perhaps it is merely from old associations--the love one had for skating +on the flooded and frozen Severn-side meadows, when in one's +'teens'--yet I confess I like even better than either of the foregoing +extracts those lines describing the scene when our poet and his +schoolmates, 'all shod with steel,' 'hissed along the polished ice in +games confederate,' over the wintry floor of Windermere Lake, lines +which lead up to + + 'Ye Presences of Nature in the sky + And on the earth. Ye visions of the hills! + And souls of lonely places! Can I think + A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed + Such ministry. When ye through many a year + Haunting me thus among my boyish sports, + On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills, + Impressed upon all forms the characters + Of danger or desire; and thus did make + The surface of the universal earth + With triumph and delight, with hope and fear, + Work like a sea?' + +Wordsworth did not write much referring to Derwentwater. It was not size +so much as beauty that captivated his imagination. What little there is +may well be passed over for the poems connected with Ullswater--that +English Lake Lucerne--and Helvellyn. Three years after his marriage he +visited these regions in a stormy November. Of this short tour he has +left a journal, and to its credit we place several of his descriptive +verses, notably 'The Pass of Kirkstone,' omitted in some editions of his +works. Therein he tells us how the mists, though they obscured the +distant views, magnified even the smaller objects close at hand, so that +a stone wall might be taken for a monument of ancient grandeur, and the +grassy tracts in the semi-light for tarns. The rocks appeared like ruins +left by the Deluge, or to altars fit for Druid service, but never +carrying the sacred fire unless the glow-worm lit the nightly sacrifice. +On another tour it was that his sister Dorothy, always his good genius, +called his attention to the gorgeous bed of daffodils, in the woods +below Gowbarrow Park--afterwards made famous by his sonnet. 'I never saw +daffodils,' he records in his journal, 'so beautiful. They grew among +the mossy stones about them. Some rested their heads on these stones +like a pillow, the others tossed, and reeled, and danced, and seemed as +if they half laughed in the wind, they looked so gay and glancing.' +There is also in the journal a paragraph about a singular and magnified +reflection about Lyulph's Tower in this lake, though the tower itself +was hidden from him behind an eminence. It was on this second tour he +wrote, near Brothers Water, verses, somewhat too like a catalogue of +articles on view, that close with this happy lilt: + + 'There's joy in the mountains, + There's life in the fountains, + Small clouds are sailing, + Blue sky prevailing-- + The rain is over and gone.' + +It is among these lines the fancy occurs of which the critics made such +surpassing fun--for themselves, certainly: + + 'The cattle are grazing, + Their heads never raising, + There are forty feeding like one.' + +Not a bad illustration, after all, is this of the facile descent from +the sublime into bathos. To the Ullswater period we owe, of course, 'The +Somnambulist,' a legend of Aira Force, and a sonnet to Clarkson, the +abolitionist, who lived at the foot of the lake. Helvellyn appears in +many poems. Grasmere and Rydal, as is only natural, still more often, +with their ancient mountains imparting to him 'dream and visionary +impulses,' their 'thick umbrage' of beech-trees, their fir-trees beyond +the Wishing Gate, and their 'massy ways carried across these heights by +human perseverance.' Of the River Duddon he has given us a series of +sonnets, some three dozen in number, of which we may hold 'The +Stepping-Stones' to be the best, and 'The After-Thought' the best for me +to close with, for it is representative of his subtler feelings: + + 'I thought of thee, my partner and my guide[A] + As being past away.--Vain sympathies! + For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes, + I see what was, and is, and will abide; + Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide; + The form remains, the function never dies; + While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise, + We men, who in the morn of youth, defied + The elements, must vanish;--be it so! + Enough, if something from our hands have power + To live, and act, and serve the future hour; + And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, + Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, + We feel that we are greater than we know.' + +[A] The river. + + + + + HIS PRAYER FOR POETIC INSPIRATION + + + 'Celestial Spirit which erewhile didst deign + Our elder Milton's hallowed prayer to hear, + Do thou inspire my tributary strain, + Breathe thou through every word that sense severe + Of TRUTH; and if ought eloquent appear, + Let it to everyone be manifest, + That it flows from that empyrian clear, + Where thou beside God's throne, a heavenly guest, + With vision beatific evermore art blessed!' + CHARLES LLOYD: _Stanzas_. + +[Illustration: + + _Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._ + + OLD BRATHAY. + The Home of Charles Lloyd.] + + + + + XI + + A FRIEND OF GREAT POETS + + CHARLES LLOYD + + + 'Long, long, within my aching heart, + The grateful sense shall cherished be; + I'll think less meanly of myself, + That Lloyd will sometimes think on me.' + CHARLES LAMB. + + +Many will, no doubt, ask who this man was, and where he lived? Such a +question shows small acquaintance with either the biographies or +writings of the great poets of the Lake School, or of Charles Lamb or +Thomas De Quincey. He was the personal and highly-valued friend of them +all, and his name and residence are too frequently mentioned in their +letters and publications to escape the notice of even casual readers. He +was the collaborateur of S. T. Coleridge and Charles Lamb in their first +joint volume of poems, published by Joseph Cottle, bookseller, of +Bristol, their kind patron in early days of struggle. He became a +'celebrity' of this district when he went to reside at Low Brathay, near +Ambleside, fixing his home by the rushing rivulet of the Langdales, and +beneath the lofty summit of Loughrigg, the mountain beloved of Fosters, +and Arnolds, and their compeers and neighbours. He was born in 1775 at +Birmingham, his father being a member of the Society of Friends, one of +the wealthy banking firm, and a philanthropist and man of culture. He, +the elder Lloyd, was a lover and translator of Homer and Horace, and +specially a student of Greek literature, thereby helping to disprove the +random assertion of a recent novelist that the Quakerism of the past +generation was utterly antagonistic to the culture and spirit of old +Greece. + +When Charles was about of age, and had declined entering his father's +bank, that he might give himself up to poesy, Coleridge visited +Birmingham on the profitless errand of obtaining subscriptions to his +magazine. He took a great liking to the new and rising author, and +followed him to Bristol. Coleridge was very poor (Wedgewood's pension +had not yet been granted), and was very shiftless to boot. Lloyd +provided him with a free home and with access to sorely-needed books. +When Coleridge removed to Nether Stowey, on the Quantock Hills, Lloyd +went too, and again kept house. Here they were near Wordsworth, then +residing at Alfoxden. One result of this acquaintance was the marriage +of Lloyd's sister to a younger brother of the future Laureate. A +strange, unpractical company these poets and philosophers were, and +their ways were erratic. The story of their inability to put a collar on +their pony till shown by a servant-girl, is well known. The landlord of +Alfoxden refused to renew the letting of the house to Wordsworth because +of his rumoured odd manners and habits. Here, at Nether Stowey, poor +Lloyd appears first to have developed the epilepsy that, increasing in +intensity, at last ended in madness. He was, no doubt in consequence of +these fits, liable to extreme depression, and his morbidness, a source +of anxiety and irritation to his friends, may have lain at the root of a +quarrel between them, which the indispensable Cottle helped to settle, +relating to their joint authorship, to which Lloyd had contributed the +larger quantity of MSS. and the larger share of funds, if not the more +excellent material. + +As a poet and novelist he is now virtually forgotten. I can find no +copies of his works in any public or subscription library in this +locality, nor is there one of them in the invaluable London Library +among all its hundreds of thousands of volumes. Yet those that exist are +worth much money. In a second-hand dealer's catalogue I see there is a +copy of the poems priced at no less than fifty shillings, at least ten +times its original price. His novels I have failed altogether to find. +'Edmund Oliver' embodies the account, transferred to a fictitious hero, +of Coleridge's disappointment in love while at Cambridge, an event which +led to his enlisting in a cavalry regiment. It tells nothing but the +truth when it humorously narrates the rough-riding experiences and the +torture of the unhorsemanlike student-soldier, and pictures the +astonishment of a cultured officer on discovering a Latin inscription on +a stable wall, and on inquiry a trooper able to converse in Greek and +ready to discuss at egregious length the most abstruse questions in +philosophy. This episode alone makes the book interesting to collectors. + +But though neither 'Edmund Oliver,' a novel in two volumes; nor 'The Duc +d'Ormond,' a tragedy; nor 'Beritola,' a tale; nor even 'Desultory +Thoughts in London,' are easy to find outside the British Museum +Library, yet Lloyd clearly deserves a nearer approach to immortality +than he has attained. De Quincey writes of him in his 'Literary +Reminiscences': 'At Brathay lived Charles Lloyd. Far as he might be +below the others I have mentioned, he could not be called a common man. +Common! He was a man never to be forgotten! He was somewhat too +Rousseauish, but he had in conversation the most extraordinary powers +for analysis of a certain kind, applied to the philosophy of manners and +the most delicate nuances of social life.' He could not be a mere +hanger-on to greater men to whom several poets addressed sonnets of +affection and admiration. Charles Lamb, whose contributions to the early +joint volume were few, while he speaks of Lloyd's as over a hundred, +'though only his choice fish,' is quite enthusiastic, exclaiming: + + 'Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, + Why were't thou not born in my father's dwelling, + So we might talk of the old familiar faces?' + +One, and the chief, labour undertaken by Lloyd at Brathay, after his +marriage and permanent settlement there, was a voluminous translation of +Alfieri's poetical works from the Italian. It is spoken of as faithful +to the original and full of the truest poetic insight. In the judgment +of competent critics his translations were better than his own +compositions, even of those of his later years, such as his 'Nugæ +Canoræ,' published about the same time as Professor Wilson's 'Isle of +Palms,' of which, by-the-by he received a presentation copy as a token +of regard from the author, with whom he was on intimate terms. Lamb in +writing to Lloyd, gives him rather a back-handed testimonial when he +says, 'Your verses are as good and wholesome as prose,' while in another +letter he says, 'Your lines are not to be understood on one leg! They +are sinuous and to be won with wrestling.' Probably the key to this +remark is contained in Talfourd's statement that Lloyd wrote 'with a +facility fatal to excellence.' On the other hand, the spitefully +sarcastic and foolish sentences of Byron, uttered against Wordsworth and +his 'school,' inclusive of the subject of this paper, seem almost +beneath contempt: + + 'Vulgar Wordsworth,' quoth he, 'the meanest object of + the holy group, + Whose verse of all but childish prattle void, + Seems blessed harmony to Lambe and Lloyd.' + +Lambe (whose name should have no 'e' at the end) and Lloyd, he adds in a +footnote, are 'the most ignoble followers of Southey and Co.' Fancy a +Byron sneering at Southey, Wordsworth, and Lamb! These, at least, are +equal, if not superior, to himself, even if Lloyd is confessedly beneath +him in merit. However, I can, fortunately, give my readers a specimen of +one of Lloyd's sonnets, admired and preserved by Bernard Barton. It is +addressed to God on behalf of his own father, the Birmingham +philanthropist: + + 'Oh Thou who, when Thou mad'st the heart of man, + Implanted'st there, as paramount to all, + Immortal conscience; do Thou deign to scan + With favouring eye these lays which would recall + Man to his due allegiance. Nothing can + Thrive without Thee; hence at Thy throne I fall + And Thee implore to go forth in the van + Of these my numbers, Lord of great and small! + Bless Thou these lays, and, with a reverent voice, + Next to Thyself would I my father place + Close at Thy threshold; true to his youth's choice + His deeds with conscience ever have kept pace; + Great Father, bid my "earthly sire" rejoice, + A white-robed Christian in Thy safe embrace.' + +Bernard Barton calls it a 'noble sonnet.' + +But the end was nearing. The fits and morbid impressions were followed +by illusory voices and cries, and at last Wilson writes his wife: 'Poor +Lloyd is in a madhouse.' He seems to have been for awhile in the +well-known 'Retreat' at York, from whence he escaped, and was ultimately +removed to an asylum in France, where, after some years, he died. In +happier days he had married a Miss Pemberton, who is said to have been +carried off by Southey on his friend's behalf. She was a capable and +appreciated housewife, but her sanity did not prevent the transmission +of her husband's disease to his son, the Rev. Owen Lloyd, a highly +respected clergyman, with his father's poetic tastes and genius, and a +close friend of 'lile' Hartley Coleridge. + +Such, in brief, is the story, interesting yet melancholy, of one whose +high character and culture and rare social qualities endeared him to a +wide circle of men in the first literary ranks, and who was cordially +esteemed by another and outer circle, in which was Leigh Hunt, who +writes of him as 'a Latinist--much shaken by illness, but of an acute +mind, and metaphysical.' + +[Illustration: CHARLES LLOYD AND HIS WIFE. From a rare Painting. By +permission of J. M. Dent, Esq.] + + + + + THE COMING OF THE YACHTS TO WINDERMERE + REGATTA + + + 'Bowness Bay is the rendezvous for the Fleet. And lo! from all the + airts, coming in the sunshine, flights of felicitous wide-winged + creatures, whose snow-white lustre, in bright confusion hurrying to + and fro, adorns, disturbs, and dazzles the broad blue bosom of the + Queen of Lakes. Southwards from forest Fell-Foot beneath the Beacon + Hill, gathering glory from the sylvan bays of green Graithwaite, and + the templed promontory of stately Storrs, before the sea-borne wind, + the wild swans, all, float up the watery vale of beauty and of + peace. Out from that still haven, overshadowed by the Elm-grove, + where the old parsonage sleeps, comes the _Emma_ murmuring from the + water-lilies, and as her mainsail rises to salute the sunshine, in + proud impatience lets go her anchor the fair _Gazelle_. As if to + breathe themselves before the start, cutter and schooner in amity + stand across the ripple, till their gaffs seem to cut the sweet + woods of Furness Fells, and they put about, each on less than her + own length, ere that breezeless bay may show, among the inverted + umbrage, the drooping shadows of their canvass. Lo! Swinburne the + Skilful sallies from his pebbly pier, in his tiny skiff that seems + all sail; and the _Norway Nautilus_, as the wind slackens, leads the + van of the Fairy squadron which heaven might now cover with one of + her small clouds, did she choose to drop it from the sky.'--JOHN + WILSON: _Christopher at the Lakes_. + + +[Illustration: + _Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside_ + + ELLERAY, WINDERMERE. + + The Home of Professor John Wilson, as it then was.] + + + + + XII + + 'CHRISTOPHER NORTH' + + JOHN WILSON + + + 'Tories! Yes! we are Tories. Our faith is in the Divine right of + kings. But easy, my boys, easy; all free men are kings, and they + hold their empire from heaven. That is our political, philosophical, + moral, religious creed. In its spirit we have lived, and in its + spirit we hope to die.'--_Recreations of Christopher North._ + + +In the days of my youth--say half a century ago--with extraordinary +avidity my reading contemporaries devoured the 'Noctes Ambrosianæ' of +'Christopher North,' mastering the barbaric Scotch dialect of Galloway, +in which the Ettrick Shepherd is made to speak, for the delightsomeness +of his imagination and his quaintly-expressed notions about men and +matters. Nowadays, if I mention the books to any young fellow of +twenty-five to thirty-five, I am stared at as blankly as if I had asked +was he intimately acquainted with the man in the moon! In Alfred Miles's +fine volumes, 'The Poets of the Century,' his poems are not even quoted, +and his very name is merely lumped in with a number of the smaller fry +of North Britain; while Mr. Stedman, in 'Victorian Poets,' will have it +that his verses had become 'antiquated' even before their author's +death. Wilson has been overshadowed by our Southeys, Coleridges, +Wordsworths, and Ruskins, though he was greater, more interesting, more +lovable as a mere human being than any of them, and deserves to be as +long remembered for his books. A generation that calls Kipling a poet, +and makes an Alfred Austin its Laureate, may indeed be expected to +forget many of the men of true genius honoured by their fathers. + +Wilson came into the Lake Country in 1807 from Paisley, where he was +born twenty-two years previously. He had recently buried his father, +from whom he had inherited some £40,000. The property he purchased, and +retained in his possession till his decease in 1854, was a small +farmhouse and its lands, known as Elleray. It is situated on the slopes +of Orrest Head, so well beloved of Windermere residents, and so +frequented by tourists on account of the magnificent prospect it +commands. He added to the house, and converted it into a charming home +for a wife and growing family, and a haven of rest for himself in his +frequent retirements from his future busy professional life in +Edinburgh. It was pulled down about forty years ago, when the estate +changed hands. From either of the lofty ranges enclosing the romantic +Troutbeck Valley there is one of the most magnificent mountain views in +all England. The tumbled masses, immortal weather-beaten +monarchs--Wansfell, Loughrigg, and their compeers and allies, and, +farther off, the Langdale Pikes (twin cloud-piercing giants), and +Cringle Crags, and 'The Old Man' of Coniston, and, on a clearer day than +usual, the dominating summit of distant Scafell--these, their sunshine +and shadows, their waving woodlands, their stretches of purple heather +and vast brown beds of bracken, their foaming cascades and garrulous +streams, and the blue inland sea at their feet dotted with verdant +islands and white-sailed yachts, and traversed by elegant steam +gondolas thronged with happy 'trippers,' are all visible in one +never-to-be-forgotten picture arranged in the wisdom of the Almighty for +the pleasure of His people. Such an outlook, but from a lower altitude, +delighted daily the eyes of Nature-loving Wilson, whose very prose was +poetry, of a calibre not less than Kingsley's in his celebrated +'Devonshire Idylls,' or than Ruskin's rhapsodies on Switzerland. His +ardent temperament and unusual virility compelled him to throw himself +heartily into almost every possible form of physical and intellectual +enjoyment. There never was such a man as he for undertaking everything +and anything, and for doing nothing badly, including the art of +'loafing,' when he was in the cue for it. Nearly six feet high, +broad-shouldered--'lish,' as they say here (meaning 'lissom,' as +Southerners say, or 'lithe,' as the dictionaries have it)--blue-eyed, +loosely arrayed, and collarless, he strode along the vales or over the +fells, doing his thirty and forty miles at a stretch, or rode his famous +pony Colonsay in a still-remembered trotting-match, or, with a couple of +like-minded friends he chased a bull by moonlight across the uplands, +each of the huntsmen being armed with a long spear. He was a mighty +fisherman, storing numberless rods and artificial flies among the books +of his library, and even whiling away the tedium of his last illness by +arranging and rearranging the latter, and recalling as he did so the +exploits of former days accomplished with the aid of this one or that, +for sometimes his catches had amounted to as many as eighteen and +twenty dozen of trouts in a day. He was an adept at wrestling and at +boxing, throwing or being thrown with keen enjoyment of the tussle, and +attacking and punishing professional pugilists or bullies of the fair, +if in his opinion oppression or unfair play were evidenced. He kept a +fleet of sailing-boats on the lake, and was dubbed 'Lord High Admiral of +Windermere,' and he was as expert a swimmer as he was a sailor, +delighting in occasionally frightening his shipmates by feigned +accidents, and then having a boisterous laugh at their fears for him. +Cock-fighting was at that time a 'gentlemanly' sport, and his breed of +game-cocks was celebrated far and near. He seems never to have kept +fewer than fifty at once. As great a conversationist and humorous and +jovial companion as he was an athlete, he was much sought after for +dinner and supper parties, while at balls he was accounted the best of +dancers. So universal a genius in all manly outdoor pastimes, and so +genial a friend within doors, was liable to many temptations in that +sadly too 'drinking' age, and as a young man he certainly was often the +worse for liquor, as his own letters help to prove. Yet was he never +quarrelsome, never did he put forth his strength and skill for any low +or mean purpose, never but in play or in defence of the ill-used. +'Everybody loved him,' records his daughter, rich and poor, and the dumb +animals also. Many stories are told of his chivalrous and gallant +conduct, especially towards womanhood, and of the wonderful combination +in his character of almost feminine tenderness and sympathy with the +roistering vigour of an ancient Viking. He would keep patient watch at +night by a sick servant's bed, tend with his own hands some wounded dog; +and there is on record the fact of a fledgling sparrow taking refuge in +his study, and being fed and cared for and so tamed that it stayed as a +denizen of the same room for at least eleven years. + +The delightful time at Elleray was crowned with a still higher happiness +when he married a beautiful and engaging lady, every way his peer in +bodily graces and in mind, whom he loved passionately, and for whose +death in middle life he grieved so deeply that he never fully recovered +the blow, though so exceptionally blessed with affectionate and able +children and eminent sons-in-law. His married days at Elleray were by no +means all spent in mere physical enjoyments and recreation. They were +full of literary and social occupations. All his great contemporaries +and neighbours were frequent guests. At their reunions there was +first-rate talk, and often competitions in versifying some given theme, +or some other proof was forthcoming that the circle was one of learning +and talent. De Quincey was, though insignificant in stature, and obliged +to trot by the side of the stalwart Wilson, one of his most valued +touring companions. Hartley Coleridge was always welcomed, and on one +occasion he was detained a prisoner in his own interest for a fortnight, +in order to prevent an outbreak of intoxication, and to secure some +promised contribution for an editor who was to pay him cash for his +needs. Here, too, came other well-known litterateurs to see and converse +with the rising poet and journalist, and perchance to go a-fishing with +him in the becks and tarns of the neighbourhood. It was at this period +that his greatest poems were written, and some published--for instance, +'The Isle of Palms,' and 'The City of the Plague,' the former a story of +shipwrecked lovers, and the latter one of London during the Great +Plague, introducing a wandering Magdalene from Grasmere whose memory +goes back, in the hour of trouble, to her 'beautiful land of mountains, +lakes, and woods,' to the 'green and primrose banks of her own Rydal +Lake,' and the 'deep hush of Grasmere Vale,' and the waters 'reflecting +all the heavens.' His society and surroundings, as well as his +instincts, encouraged the poetic vein, already evinced by his having won +the Oxford Newdigate Prize during his University days. + +Alas, these halcyon hours were over all too soon for the +hitherto-fortunate couple! The wife's dower was a handsome one, but the +far larger property of the husband was swept away by the fraudulence of +a relative who was his trustee. The family had to leave Elleray for the +home of Mrs. Wilson, senior, in Edinburgh, though the Windermere house +was retained, and frequently returned to after the early stress of +changed circumstances was over. Cruel as was the wrench, it brought out +the better side of Wilson's disposition. He murmured not, bowing before +the trial with real Christian resignation, and at the same moment +bracing himself to the task of earning a subsistence with truly noble +fortitude. In the Scotch metropolis he soon became connected with the +newly-started _Blackwood's Magazine_, and was, with Lockhart, one of the +ruling spirits of that famous periodical. For long years his wit, his +rhetoric, his trenchant and slashing criticisms, his keen insight into +literary merit, his almost incredible fertility of subject-matter (he +sometimes, under pressure, wrote the whole of the articles for a +particular number), speedily lifted it to the foremost place among +similar journals, and made it the fiercest organ of the most rampant +intellectual Toryism that Britain has ever known, bitterly hated, sorely +dreaded, yet bought by friend and foe alike, and read wherever our +language was understood. It is worth any reader's while to buy at some +second-hand bookseller's 'The Recreations of Christopher North' and the +'Noctes,' both reprints from 'Old Ebony.' + +Suddenly there occurred a vacancy in the University Professorship of +Moral Philosophy. Wilson tried for the post against Sir William +Hamilton. All the influence of a grateful and unscrupulous Tory +administration (that of Lord Liverpool, George IV.'s first Premier) was +exerted on his behalf, and they handled the unreformed City Corporation, +in whose appointment the Professorship lay, as voters in rotten boroughs +were then handled. John Wilson secured the chair, to the great scandal +of the other side, who truly pointed out that he had had no +philosophical training nor known bias to ethical studies, while his +previous life had given no evidence of his fitness to teach morals to +young men. As a matter of fact, however, this was a turning-point in his +own spiritual career. He took the advice of Sir Walter Scott to +'forswear sack, purge, and live cleanly like a gentleman.' He set +himself diligently to the study of his new subject, and mastered it. He +never published any system of Moral Philosophy. He has made no such mark +in the history of philosophy as did his great competitor. Yet, far +beyond almost any teacher of modern times, he achieved the highest of +all distinctions--that of being beloved, reverenced, almost idolized, +by generations of students during a term of thirty years, moulding and +shaping the lives of multitudes of public men and of those who create +the national welfare in schools and colleges, and filling them with +noble aspirations and ideals. His was a 'muscular Christianity,' taught +and practised long ere the term was invented and popularized. + +His strenuous life was now, at the end of the thirty years of occupancy +of the chair, drawing to its close. A paralytic stroke obliged him to +resign. After a lingering time of gradual decay the fine spirit--erring, +repentant, forgiven, witnessing mightily for the higher and better side +of human nature--passed into a world of kindred souls, as he wished it +might, ''mid the blest stillness of a Sabbath day.' + + + + + THE PROFESSIONAL CRITIC + + + 'Of all creatures that feed upon the earth, the professional critic + is the one whose judgment I least value for any purpose except + advertisement. But of all writers, the one whom he sits in judgment + on is also the one whom he is least qualified to assume a + superiority over. For is it likely that a man, who has written a + serious book about anything in the world, should not know more about + that thing than one who merely reads his book for the purpose of + reviewing it. But so it must be, and a discreet man must just let it + be. What I want to know is whether men and women and children who + care nothing about me, but take an intelligent interest in the + subject, find the book readable. What its other merits are nobody + knows so well as I.'--_A letter to Lord Tennyson by James Spedding._ + + + + + XIII + + THE CHAMPION OF LORD BACON + + JAMES SPEDDING + + 'Bacon, like Moses, led us forth at last; + The barren wilderness he pass'd, + Did on the very border stand + Of the blest promised land, + And from the mountain top of his exalted wit, + Saw it himself, and show'd us it.' + ABRAHAM COWLEY. + + +He was a 'Baconian specialist.' Specialists are seldom known to the +public, and seldom read, even when known by name, except by the chosen +few they write for. His life of the great philosopher and +essayist--Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans, and Baron Verulam, +etc.--in seven volumes, is the standard biography. The fourteen +additional volumes of Bacon's works, edited by Spedding and two +coadjutors, is the standard edition of these. There is a smaller form of +the 'Life and Letters' in a couple of volumes--a condensation of the +completer edition--and also done by Spedding. He spent thirty years in +gathering materials, and putting them in order. 'Minute, accurate, and +dry,' his _magnum opus_ can never become popular; but it is exhaustive, +leaving nothing more to be said on the subject. It will be seen at once +what infinite pains he must have taken to perfect his self-imposed +task--how he must have searched, and searched again, in all available +libraries and depositories of old MSS., old letters, old records of +State and documents in private hands--how he must have written and +rewritten, added, struck out, and revised over and over during that long +period, as new facts cropped up or new views occurred to his mind. Says +Mrs. Lynn Linton of him: 'He was one who touched the crown of the ideal +student, whose justice of judgment was on a par with his sweetness of +nature, whose intellectual force was matched by his serenity, his +patience, his self-mastery, his purity.' There is another book of +his--'Evenings with a Reviewer'--written to defend Bacon from unfounded +aspersions on his character made by Macaulay, and by Pope at an earlier +period. This was originally printed for private circulation among a few +friends, and was not given to the world till after the decease of our +author. It is cast in the conversational form affected by Vaughan in his +'Hours with the Mystics,' by Smith, of Keswick, in 'Thorndale' and +'Gravenhurst,' and in similar works where it is desired that all sides +shall be fairly presented, and the whole of the issues involved +thoroughly thrashed out and carefully summed up. + +It is confirming to those of us who remain sceptics in relation to the +Shakespeare-Bacon theory, and who believe 'The Great Cryptogram' to +exist only in some kink of the brain of its first exponent, and not in +any of Shakespeare's plays or poems, that so painstaking and minute an +investigator--one so utterly conversant with all that Bacon ever did or +wrote, one so familiar with his contemporaries and his age, even to the +analysis of the respective shares of Shakespeare and Fletcher in the +composition of 'Henry VIII.'--never seems to have for a moment suspected +any sort of literary co-partnership between the philosopher and the +actor. + +Apart, however, from any questions of literature, and his high place +among its leading lights, James Spedding's personal character and his +association on terms of equality with the most eminent men of his day, +and the regard in which he was held by them, makes him an interesting +and important man of mark in the district--one whose memory should not +be allowed to die. + +He was the son of a Cumberland squire living at Mirehouse, on +Bassenthwaite Water. The estate, lying on the eastern shore, is a little +north of where the River Derwent discharges itself into the lake, and at +the foot of mighty Skiddaw. Mirehouse Woods clothe the slopes of Skiddaw +Dodd. He was born in 1808, sent to school at Bury St. Edmunds, and +afterwards went to Cambridge University. At college he took no high +degree. He was, nevertheless, an eminent 'Apostle'--eloquent in debate, +though calm and unimpassioned. Does anyone ask who and what Cambridge +'Apostles' were? They were a band of ardent spirits among the +undergraduates, holding regular meetings, and often foregathering in +each others' rooms to discuss tobacco and coffee, and where, says +Carlyle in his 'Life of Sterling' (who was a member), 'was much logic +and other spiritual fencing, and ingenuous collision, probably of a +really superior quality in that kind, for not a few of the then +disputants have since proved themselves men of parts, and attained +distinction in the intellectual walks of life.' Besides Spedding and +Sterling, this genial circle of comrades included the Tennysons, Trench +(afterwards Archbishop), Arthur Hallam, Frederick Denison Maurice (the +founder of the club, and toasted as such at one of its annual dinners), +and many another of equal or little less fame--a band of youthful +friends who, as the future Laureate wrote, held debate + + 'On mind and art, + And labour and the changing mart, + And all the framework of the land.' + +Of Spedding himself Lord Tennyson wrote in later days: 'He was the Pope +among us young men--the wisest man I ever knew.' With this opinion +agrees the report of Caroline Fox as to a remark of Samuel Laurence, the +portrait painter: 'Spedding has the most beautiful combination of noble +qualities I ever met with.' + +Leaving the University, James Spedding went, in 1835, into the Colonial +Office, under Sir Henry Taylor, author of 'Philip van Artevelde,' a +chief with tastes wholly congenial to those of his youthful subordinate. +During the time he remained in the Civil Service he went with Lord +Ashburton as travelling secretary to the Commission appointed to settle +the United States dispute with this nation as to the proper line of +their North-West boundary. He acquitted himself so ably in his +Government work that he was offered the post of an Under-Secretary of +State at a salary of £2,000 a year. This he refused in order to give +himself entirely to literature. Mr. Gladstone entertained the highest +opinion of his abilities and integrity, and greatly lamented his +decision not to serve his country in the post for which he was so +obviously fitted. Still later in life Mr. Gladstone tried to persuade +him to take the Professorship of History at Cambridge--a prospect which +had no more attractions for Spedding than Government officialism. + +Spedding never married. He was wedded to his self-chosen life-work of +building up the standard biography of Bacon. He was, however, by no +means a man of one idea. He was an ardent Liberal in politics, and +during the awful upheaval of the European nations, about the middle of +last century, he became even a vehement partisan of the Hungarian +Revolution, and of Louis Kossuth and its other leaders. He was a votary +of Keats, and of Tennyson, the latter staying with him twice at +Mirehouse. He was an ardent admirer of the celebrated Jenny Lind, the +'Swedish Nightingale.' He was also an advocate of phonetic 'reform,' as +it was called, not merely, it is to be feared, for the sake of promoting +the study and commercial use of shorthand reporting, but with the view +of actually changing the orthography of our ancient language. With all +its difficulties and peculiarities, one would have felt lasting regret +had he and his coadjutors succeeded in their raid on our historical and +ethnological inheritance in the English spelling-book. He was, +furthermore, a careful student of handwriting. The last-named study was +necessitated by his continuous poring over the MSS. relating to his +sixteenth- and seventeenth-century investigations. + +Some people who had observed Spedding's patient and leisurely methods of +study, and his calmness and deliberation of thought and verbal +expression, considered him of a lazy disposition, and as strangely +lacking in energy. This was an erroneous judgment. He was certainly +cautious, because acute in noticing details, and refused to commit +himself without due, and perhaps sometimes undue, premeditation, but he +frequently assumed purposely an air of ignorance when he was merely +endeavouring to draw others out, and he was fond of adopting the +Socratic method with those whom he conversed, in order to get at the +bottom of them, or of the subject under discussion. His memory was an +exceedingly retentive one. To a friend he writes: 'I have no copy of +"The Palace of Art," but when you come I shall be happy to repeat it to +you.' Readers of Tennyson know that this poem contains seventy-four +stanzas, besides the prelude to it. He was, like so many others in this +series, a contributor to _Blackwood_, and to the _Edinburgh_ and the +_Gentleman's Magazine_ as well. In the _Edinburgh_ he reviewed +Tennyson's first book with discrimination and with appreciation. + +The chief fascination about Spedding, I say again, was undoubtedly his +commanding personality and his abiding comradeship with the greatest men +of genius among his contemporaries. Such diverse characters as James +Anthony Froude and Edward Fitzgerald were among his intimates. He was +with Froude on that historian's first visit to Thomas Carlyle, and +Fitzgerald called to see him in the hospital where he died. It was in +1881 that he was knocked down by a cab in London, and carried to St. +George's. On his death-bed, says Fitzgerald, he was 'all patience,' +refusing to hear the cabman blamed, and, indeed, fully exonerating him. + +When Spedding's brother died, the friend of them both, Alfred Tennyson, +wrote to James in touching sympathy with his loss, a noble poem which, +in the volume, is inscribed simply 'To J. S.' The last two verses may +fitly conclude this sketch, for they apply as much to one brother as to +the other: + + 'Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace; + Sleep, holy spirit, tender soul, + While the stars burn, the moons increase, + And the great ages onward roll. + + Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet, + Nothing comes to thee new or strange; + Sleep full of rest from head to feet-- + Lie still, dry dust, secure of change.' + + + + + THE BLESSING OF A FULL LIFE + + + 'Deep streams run still, and why? Not because there are no + obstructions, but because they altogether overflow those stones or + rocks round which the shallow stream has to make its noisy way. 'Tis + the full life that saves us from the little noisy troubles of + life.'--WILLIAM SMITH. + + * * * * * + + + 'So when our complaining + Tells of constant strife + With some moveless hindrance + In our path of life, + + 'What we need is only + Fulness of our own. + If the current deepen, + Never mind the stone! + + 'Let the fuller nature + Flow its mass above; + Cover it with pity, + Cover it with love.' + LUCY SMITH. + + + + + XIV + + TWO BEAUTIFUL LIVES + + WILLIAM AND LUCY SMITH + + + 'As unto the bow the cord is, + So unto the man is woman, + Though she bends him, she obeys him, + Though she draws him, yet she follows. + Useless each without the other.' + LONGFELLOW'S _Hiawatha_. + +Two rarely beautiful lives were theirs--close-welded, and thereby each +sharing and each doubling the beauty of the other. Their beauty was +spiritual, intellectual, influential. + +William sprang from the mercantile classes of the Metropolis--from a +race of evangelical Free Churchmen of such liberal leanings as to throw +no obstacle in his way of becoming a theological and metaphysical +thinker of a decidedly 'advanced' type; while an elder brother became an +eloquent Episcopalian preacher at the celebrated Temple Church. + +Lucy, whose maiden name was Cummings, was the daughter of a medical man +who had married a lady socially superior to himself, and was brought up +by her parents in an atmosphere of 'Welsh Calvinism.' + +William was a shy, sensitive boy and lad, learning quickly, given to +introspection, and taking a high place in his schools. His university +life was spent at Glasgow--Oxford and Cambridge being at that time (the +late forties of last century) closed against all except Anglicans--and +there his mental bias towards philosophy was strengthened and developed, +especially by the teaching of Dr. Chalmers. From college he was sent to +study law under the well-known author, Sharon Turner. This study he +cordially detested, yet in after-years he confessed that compulsory +training for the Bar had invigorated and disciplined his reasoning +powers to a degree he learned to be grateful for. Some travels abroad, +too, though at a later period--notably to Italy--matured his character +and widened his outlook. His first literary efforts were articles which +were accepted by the _Athenæum_, then just started. In that paper, and +in _Blackwood_ (is it not singular that most of our Lake celebrities +were contributors to 'Old Ebony'?) he had frequent enough insertions to +earn thereby a modest income--small, but sure, and sufficient for the +limited needs of a quiet-living single man. For years he followed the +career of an essayist and reviewer, pondering deeply meanwhile problems +that seem to admit of no definite solution during the present +limitations of human knowledge--problems which have bewildered +Christians and non-Christians alike for centuries past, and, if Milton's +authority may be relied upon, even the fallen principalities and powers +in Hades--'Fixed Fate, Freewill, Foreknowledge Absolute'--the origin of +evil, the eternal duration of sin's consequences, the nature of sin +itself, the possibility of finding and knowing God, the attainment of +final certitude on any question other than mathematical, the relation of +revealed or natural religion to science, the unalterable reign of law in +mental and moral as well as in physical regions--these, and many similar +enigmas, whirled perpetually through his brain, and would not rest till +at least an honest attempt had been made to solve them. The necessity +that appeared to be laid on him to discover answers to the practically +unanswerable induced a habit of seclusion and a shrinking from any +society that might interrupt the flow of speculative thought. He would +pass people in the streets and the country roads absolutely without +seeing them; and though cheerful and apt in conversation when obliged to +meet his fellows, he invariably preferred to be alone on long mountain +walks that he might think his own thoughts, and by meditation work out +his difficulties, and record in his MSS. for future publication the +conclusions he had arrived at, even though those conclusions amounted to +no more than that none could be attained to! It was while residing in +solitary seclusion, first at sunny Bowness upon Windermere Lake and then +across the watershed at Keswick, on the rainier side of the mountains, +that his great books 'Thorndale' and 'Gravenhurst' were wrought in the +secret recesses of his soul. The first, the sub-title of which is 'The +Conflict of Opinion,' is constructed on the conversational model, as, +indeed, is the second also. Materialist, Roman Catholic, Theist, or +Unitarian, and Scientific Evolutionist, all are heard with fairness and +courtesy, and the discussions are intensely interesting to readers with +thoughtful minds. But there is, after all has been said that can be +said, nothing more than an open verdict returned on the highest themes +that can occupy human attention. There is no more settlement of any of +the vast questions debated for the inquirer who has discarded Divine +revelation than for him who accepts it in whole or in part. +'Gravenhurst' has for a secondary title 'Knowing and Feeling: a +Contribution to Psychology.' So far as it leads us to an end that end +seems hardly distinguishable from the Eastern 'Necessitarianism,' or +'Fatalism,' in which all metaphysicians sooner or later engulf us who +get rid of human responsibility for sin and its consequences by making +the Creator the author of both moral and material evil. Yet the +conclusions are logical if only certain premises are granted. Both books +are crowded with sweet and helpful thoughts--wayside flowers of +brilliancy and fragrancy, the gathering of which may easily lure the +reader from the watchfulness needed in travelling along these winding +roads, so destitute of authoritative sign-posts; the sign-posts erected +by previous explorers having been cut down by more modern pedestrians, +because, forsooth! the painted directions were faded, and they had no +brush wherewith to freshen them! + +While William was thus developing his life-work and weaving his +intellectual robes, Lucy was growing into her charming womanhood amid +the happy surroundings of her home in North Wales, and evolving the +noblest of characters through self-denial and loving devotion to others. +As a girl she was highly educated. When past her girlhood she proved a +handsome and cultured lady, sought in marriage by at least two men, both +of whose offers she refused, but neither of whom espoused any other. She +remained single that she might help retrieve the fortunes of her +parents, which had become so reduced that the house endeared to them by +long residence had to be sold, and her own little patrimony given up to +the clearance of debt. The broken father and mother were thenceforth +tended, and, indeed, partly supported, by Lucy, who earned something by +making translations from German, and in similar ways, till she lost them +both in one sad week. + +It was by an apparent chance, though by a very real providence of God, +that these two met, William Smith and Lucy Cummings, while mother and +daughter were in one set of apartments of a Keswick lodging-house, and +'Thorndale Smith,' as he came to be called, in an upper. A pleasant +comradeship began on purely literary matters, and ripened into warm +friendship, and frequent correspondence after parting for the season, +till they met again some time afterwards at Patterdale. Then it was that +friendship suddenly sprang upwards into the unique form of love most +exquisitely portrayed in the ideal biography written of her husband by +Lucy, after his premature decease. This biography was written originally +for private circulation among her friends, and was afterwards attached, +as a preface, to a new edition of 'Gravenhurst.' It is one of the most +lovely stories of wedded life in our English tongue. All that poets have +imagined of 'The Angel of the House,' of love's wealth, of love's +visions, of 'Love's Young Dream,' seem to have been realized in the +experiences of these kindred souls, brought together at a later period +in life than most people enter on the married state. After a period of +unalloyed happiness William's health began to fail, and a long time of +anxious watching fell to Lucy Smith. Still was their talk ever of higher +things and of the deeper problems of life and humanity. Despite his +assumed negative position with regard to much that Christians hold to be +essential truth, there was an undercurrent of devout belief in God left +in William's heart, as is evidenced by lines in his verses, as for +example: + + 'Earth can be earth, yet rise + Into the region of God's dwelling-place + If Light and Love are what we call His skies.' + +In his 'Athelwood,' too--a tragedy, set on the stage and played by +Macready and Helen Faucit--there are passages, notably those put into +the mouth of Dunston, which show the same thing: + + 'God, where art Thou? + I call for Thee, they give me but a world, + Thy mechanism; I call aloud for Thee, + My Father, Friend, Sustainer, Teacher, Judge.' + +Still more remarkable was his impromptu acknowledgment when he lay +dying, and his wife, referring to some of his published views, said: +'William, such love as mine for you cannot be the result of mere +mechanism or vital forces, can it?' 'Oh, no,' he responded; 'it has a +far higher source.' 'Once,' adds his wife, 'I saw the hands clasped as +in a speechless communion with the Unseen, and twice I caught the solemn +word "God" uttered, not in a tone of appeal or entreaty, but as if the +supreme contemplation which had been his very life meant more, revealed +more, than ever!' In a former article I pointed out how seldom +professed, and even perfectly sincere, doubters ever entirely shake off +the impressions of Divine reality and the Divine Presence. My own +conviction is that the God whom they seek (I am not thinking of the +unbelief that springs from moral unfaithfulness or obliquity) does, +after all, touch their hands in the darkness, and the Christ whom they +fail to understand has included them in His great and universal +atonement. It may be that the Holy Spirit, who shows the things of +Christ to men, gives them a saving view of Calvary as they pass through +the Valley of the Shadow. I cannot believe that any _bonâ fide_ seeker +after God ever became a 'lost soul' in any sense of those awful words, +even though his seeking endured for a lifetime without conscious +finding. + +Lucy Smith survived her husband's death at Brighton several years, often +making her way back to their beloved Borrowdale, where some of their +intensest happiness had been experienced, and to Patterdale, where their +first love was awakened. In the latter place there are 'exquisite shade +of birch-trees on high ground' where she and her lover read together and +recited poetry--his or hers or another's; peeps of Ullswater through the +woods; mossy knolls and sequestered grassy walks; and all had +memory-voices for her in the midst of their outward quietude. She had, +as might have been foretold, imbibed much of her husband's philosophy, +and in some directions her cherished 'orthodoxy' of opinion had reached +its vanishing point, but her orthodoxy of heart was not touched +adversely. It actually grew as life passed onward, and her sunset-lights +glowed with the radiancy of heaven. William's real creed, 'God, +Immortality, Progress'--a noble residuum, after all--was hers with great +assurance, and she writes that she shared 'his craving for fellowship in +Christ's deep love, and for a willing acceptance of His sufferings.' +They both looked to being united--to quote her own words from her +verses--'In, life more high in seeing, serving God, in nearer, nobler +ways.' She ripened in character, in lovable ways, in self-forgetting +devotion to her friends, till her poet-heart ceased to beat, and her +yearnings after a fuller and more perfect soul-life were at length +realized through the mercies and merits of the One she knew but in part, +though He knew her, and her aspirations and difficulties, through and +through. + + + + + THE BIBLE AND ITS REVELATIONS + + + Wherever its Revelations of the essentials of Deity and Humanity + occur they may and must be considered as the most solemn and + precious of all the contents of the Bible. But even of these it + should be specially noted that they are for the most part + progressive. The Bible contains, in fact, a series as well as a + collection of Revelations--a series, of which the earliest terms are + the least, and which very gradually, and not quite uniformly, rises + to its height, and only after long centuries reaches its final terms + in Him who was Himself the highest Revelation which man can be + conceived capable of receiving in the flesh. That there is such a + progression in the Revelation of truth and duty in the Bible must be + obvious at once to anyone who considers the gradual manner in which + those two greatest of all ideas--God and Immortality--are disclosed + in it, and how the great duty of loving all men as ourselves, and + considering every man as our brother, was never at all insisted on + under the older dispensations.--REV. FREDERIC MYERS: _Catholic + Thoughts on the Bible and Theology_. + + + + + XV + + TWO BROAD THINKERS + + FREDERIC AND F. W. H. MYERS + + (FATHER AND SON) + + + 'Must then all quests be nought, all voyage vain, + All hopes the illusion of the whirling brain? + Or are there eyes beyond earth's veil that see, + Dreamers made strong to dream what is to be?' + F. W. H. MYERS: _The Renewal of Youth_. + + +Frederic Myers, of Keswick, is still known by his once-celebrated +'Lectures on Great Men,' and by his two volumes of 'Catholic Thoughts' +on the Church and on the Bible and theology. The lectures were delivered +to his parishioners. The series commenced about 1840, in accordance with +his strong conviction that a clergyman should be the educator as well as +the spiritual guide of his flock, and as a consequence of his horror at +the 'dreadful separation and want of sympathy of the various orders and +classes of modern society.' Remember the period to which these words +were applied. It was several years after this that Maurice, Kingsley, +Ludlow, and their friends commenced their remarkable movement for +bringing the influence, learning, and wealth of the better social strata +to the aid of the poorer. Since those early days of awakening to the +claims of human brotherhood many things have happened to draw 'the +various classes and orders of men' nearer together. Cruel taxes upon the +food of the masses, for the further enrichment of the rich, have been +swept away. The awakening of the democracy has brought it political +power, and with this power the felt necessity for national education. +The abolition of child-labour, the regulation and inspection of +factories, mines, and workshops, the removal of many sectarian +restrictions upon religious equality, an interest in sanitation and the +preservation of public health, and many other such things for which the +great 'middle classes' have steadfastly laboured side by side with the +wage-earners, are results of the transfer of power from the few to the +many. Such matters as these, now looked upon as among the common-places +of civic life, were then hardly deemed by their most sanguine advocates +as within the reach of 'practical politics.' Kindly-hearted Christian +pastors, of the type of Frederic Myers, were few and far between, though +wherever they existed they provoked among the people that element of +'Divine discontent' which found many voices ere it was appeased, from +the decent respectability of Christian Socialism to the plebeian, and +often extravagant, cries of Chartism. + +Myers, and such as he, fitly began the movement, though scarcely +consciously, by seeking 'to call forth the powers within man, by the +culture of his whole nature; energy of all kinds--with the simultaneous +cultivation of his sympathies, the nurture of truthfulness, justice, +love, and faith.' He strove to awaken a spiritual ambition among his +hearers by setting before their mental vision the struggles and the +conquests of men who had resolved to achieve something worth the +winning, and who had in their day become epoch-makers--who had possessed +in eminent degree the qualities we all ought ever to cherish, according +to our capacities, and our opportunities for self-development. His dozen +specimen characters are well chosen from the regions of religion, +adventure, and statesmanship. His two other books are devoted to the +solution of questions then being much debated after the commencement of +the Romeward Oxford movement known as 'Tractarianism.' The earlier +one--that on the Church--was originally printed for private circulation. +It is well for us that it was fully published at a later date, for +though that era was prophetic of the coming of political advancement, it +also set in motion a retrograde religious stream of thought and practice +which is still flowing through the Anglican Church, and affecting the +spiritual well-being of the nation. The principles enunciated in this +masterly reply to Newman's doctrine of the Church, and his thorough +examination of the sacerdotal claims of the Puseyite Oxonians can never +become antiquated. With him the primary idea of the Christian Church is +of a brotherhood of 'men worshipping Christ as the revelation of the +Highest.' Equality of Christian privilege is, in his view, so +characteristic of its constitution that the existence of a priestly +caste within its borders is destructive of it. Christian faith is in +Christ Himself, and not in doctrines or formulas of even the holiest and +wisest men. In the true and universal--_i.e._, the Catholic--Church +there can be no majestry, only a ministry. It is a Spiritual Republic in +which no worldly distinctions can be recognised. 'Apostolic Sucsession,' +in the High Anglican and Romish sense of the phrase, has no place +therein, and no room exists for any human assumption over the minds and +souls of believers in Christ within the purely spiritual Church, which +is His body. Many readers will naturally see some lack of logical +sequence in the argument which follows as to the relation of the +Established Anglican Church to this Catholic and Spiritual one. That the +conclusions reached on this point do not seem necessarily to flow from +the premises must surely be conceded by all. Either legitimate +conclusions must be drawn from the assumed fundamental position, or +fresh premises must be granted. Nevertheless, as the Scriptural ground +of his position was generally accepted, his timely work certainly helped +to save the Church of England from the medievalist enemies within its +own borders. Instead of their carrying the Establishment over to Rome, +several of the ablest leaders of the new ritualistic movement severed +themselves from its communion, and, as is well known, entered the Papal +fold, some rising to great honour and dignity within it. + +The 'Thoughts on the Bible and Theology' involve the theory that sacred +literature 'contains, rather than consists of, special revelations.' In +it, though not wholly Divine, 'the Divine Spirit may mingle with the +human, and mingling, overmaster it.' It has infirmities and +imperfections, but, he hastens to add, 'less in proportion to its holy +truths than the chaff is to the wheat in any harvest--yea, is even only +as the small dust of the balance compared with the greatest weight that +the balance will weigh.' His theological teaching cannot be presented +satisfactorily in a few lines, and it must be, therefore, dismissed with +the sole remark that, though far from being rationalistic, it appears +highly rational, as it is based on the written words of God, and is not +derived from the dogmas and traditions of Churchmen. + +Frederic Myers was born in London in 1811, educated at home and at +Cambridge, and became perpetual curate of St. John's, Keswick, in 1839, +holding that living till his death in 1851, thus giving twelve years of +his prime to the thoughtful activities of his ministry, and to the +liberalizing of the Church of England. + +Frederic William Henry Myers was the son of Frederic by his second wife. +He was born at Keswick, and this town was, of course, the headquarters +of his boyhood and youth. Therefore we claim him for the Lake District, +though the necessities of his official life made it expedient to reside +afterwards in the Metropolis. The year of his birth was 1843, Blackheath +and Cheltenham were the places of his school education, and Cambridge +was his Alma Mater. His classical knowledge and his memory were +especially good. He could recite the whole of 'Virgil,' and had a love, +spoken of as 'enthusiastic,' for Pindar, Æschylus, and Homer. His +culture was widened by a trip to the East, and another to America. +Somewhat of an athlete and a good swimmer, he once swam across the +Niagara River below the Falls. Returning to England, he became one of +her late Majesty's School Inspectors. He died in 1901. This brief +summary of his life must suffice. + +His literary output is of more value to us than are the details of his +personal career. This output all thinking men will be grateful for, +whatever their opinions about his teaching on telepathy, hypnotism, and +so forth. Had he only given the world his well-known poem on 'St. +Paul,' he would have contributed more than most hymn-writers have done +to its moral profiting. If the old Hebrew Seer was one who saw visions +of the future through Time's manifold veils, and visions of Jehovah +behind the marching cohorts of human generations, and who also had the +Divine gift of 'discernment of spirits,' surely F. W. H. Myers may be +called a nineteenth century seer. He solved in his prose works for many +an earnest seeker after the truth many a scientific doubt respecting God +and Immortality, while in his principal poem he seems to identify +himself with the great Apostle in the yearning and the self-abandonment +essential to such a herald of the Cross. As he wrote, he must have +entered into close sympathy with the flaming desires with which Paul's +breast was burning, and the love with which he ached for souls whom he +set himself to win for the Kingdom of Heaven. To present the inner life +of him whom Christ Himself chose to fill the vacant office of the fallen +Judas was a daring venture, but successful. He makes Paul say: + + 'Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest + Cannot confound Him nor deny; + Yea, with one voice, O world, though thou deniest, + Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.' + +Myers made the great choice, ranking himself among those 'who,' as he +puts it, 'suppose themselves to discern spiritual verities,' amid a +tumult of Agnosticism and positive philosophy which arose about that +time, partly, perhaps, as a result of the reaction from that exaggerated +High Church teaching opposed by his father. Accepting the actual +discoveries of experimental science without question, he yet maintained +there is both direct and indirect evidence that the cosmic laws of +uniformity, conservation of energy, and evolution, do not exhaust the +controlling laws of the universe, nor explain all classes of phenomena. +There is, at least, a fourth cosmic law as ascertainable as any of the +others by observation and experiment. To this fourth law the greatest +poets, such as Goethe, Wordsworth, Tennyson, to say nothing of the still +greater Semitic Poets, have helped to introduce mankind, and psychical +research has demonstrated their scientific truth. 'Life, consciousness, +and thought' are facts not fully explained by physiology. The communion +of mind with mind without speech or bodily contact or proximity is as +certain as that of X rays or wireless telegraphy. The communion of the +human soul with the Oversoul of the Universe is not a dream, but a fact +as indubitable as the fact of gravitation. The study of these facts, +their modes of motion, and the laws which govern them, bring careful +philosophers to the conclusion that behind the natural law is an active +will, and behind natural force and evolution one universal and +intelligent motive power. Mental and spiritual phenomena are +ignored--or, for some obscure reason, at any rate neglected--by the +ordinary man of science. No real all-round student of cosmic +appearances, and the laws and influences that control and guide them to +cosmic ends, can afford to shut his eyes to the existence of clues +which, whenever they have been loyally followed, have led along the +chain of cause and effect to the ultimate discovery of God and +Immortality. He who follows the Gleam, everywhere shining before him, +arrives sooner or later, whatever he thinks of the creeds of the sects, +at the abode of the Eternal Presence, leaving the Land of Negations far +behind him. This is the substance, or at least the fair interpretation, +of the ideas woven throughout the series of Essays written by our author +on 'Science and a Future Life,' 'Charles Darwin and Agnosticism,' +'Tennyson as Prophet,' and 'Modern Poets and Cosmic Law.' At a later +period he put forth in support of his views, in collaboration with two +others, a large collection of instances, gathered from definite +experiences of witnesses, of 'Phantasms of the Living.' These evidences +occupy two bulky volumes. He may have been sometimes too credulous. Some +of his alleged facts may have needed closer examination. His deductions +from observations may not always have been accurate, yet his argument is +strong in itself, strongly fortified, and apparently, as a whole, still +unshaken. He was, as he says of Tennyson, 'the proclaimer of man's +spirit as part and parcel of the Universe, and indestructible at the +very root of things,' and as such he has restored to many a doubter, +unsettled by scientific materialism, his latent self-hood, his +'subliminal soul,' his realization of the invisible world, and a belief +in that intellectual 'Cosmic Will' which common men persist in calling +'God.' + +Myers wrote a few sketches of men and women of the hour, under the title +of 'Classical Essays,' terse, readable, and displaying literary insight. +The most recent 'Life of Wordsworth,' with whose semi-pantheism he had +much sympathy, is his also. Nor was St. Paul his only excursion into the +realms of poesy. 'The Renewal of Youth and Other Poems' is his. Little +of its contents, however, rise to the level of his religious poem, and +some are distinctly trivial. Since penning this sentence I have +happened upon an 'Appreciation' of the volume mentioned, by the late +John Addington Symonds. He likens the muse of Myers to a 'flute of +silver, or a fife of gold,' through which he breathed strains, now +stronger, now weaker, according to the degree of his inspiration. 'To +some ears this instrument may seem too artificial, too metallic,' for +his wont was to select words for their colour-values and their +sonority--for the mode of saying things rather than for the expression +of new and original thoughts. Symonds finds in the poetry not only a +special message of God and Immortality, but a declaration of the happy +influence of womanhood in human affairs. Whether or not this judgment is +right on the last point, it is certain that the all-absorbing intuition +of the poet's soul was that of an eternal life for mankind, not an +immortality of the species at the expense of the individual, by +sacrifice and extinction, but of every separate being: + + 'Oh, dreadful thought, that all our sires and we + Are but foundations of a race to be-- + Stones which are thrust in earth, to build thereon + Some white delight, some Parian Parthenon!' + + + + + THE VIEW FROM HELVELLYN + + + 'There to the north the silver Solway shone, + And Criffel, by the hazy atmosphere + Lifted from off the earth, did then appear + A nodding island or a cloud-built throne. + And there, a spot half fancied and half seen, + Was sunny Carlisle; and by hillside green + Lay Penrith with its beacon of red stone. + + 'Southward through pale blue steam the eye might glance + Along the Yorkshire fells, and o'er the rest, + My native hill, dear Ingleboro's crest, + Rose shapely, like a cap of maintenance. + The classic Duddon, Leven, and clear Kent + A trident of fair estuaries sent, + Which did among the mountain roots advance. + + 'Westward, a region of tumultuous hills, + With here and there a tongue of azure lake + And ridge of fir, upon the eye did break. + But chiefest wonder are the tarns and rills + And giant coves, where great Helvellyn broods + Upon his own majestic solitudes, + Which even now the sunlight barely fills.' + FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER: _Poems_. + +[Illustration: + _Photo by Brunskill, Bowness_ + + VIEW OF WINDERMERE. + + Summer Lake and Copse-wood Green.'--FABER.] + + + + + XVI + + A RELIGIOUS MEDIEVALIST + + FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER + + I.--THE MAN + + + 'Especially did he endeavour to study the spirit of the Church at + its foundation head, in the City of Rome, under the shadow of St. + Peter's Chair. Fully recognising the claims of his own country to + his labours, he made it his business to introduce into it in every + possible way the devotions and practices which are consecrated by + the usage of Rome.'--FATHER BOWDEN'S _Life of Faber_. + + +Of Huguenot descent, his ancestors having fled from France to England to +avoid the persecutions arising out of the 'Edict of Nantes,' and of +Evangelical Church of England training, he early developed an unexpected +'spurt' towards Romanism, and that rather of the medieval Italian than +of the modern English type. + +Starting from such a parentage and such environments as this, it becomes +an interesting study of character and temperament, and of the forces +that mould and direct them, to trace the gradual development of ideas, +and habits, through boyhood to youth, and youth to manhood. The key to +his having ultimately become a priestly devotee of a mystical form of +Mariolatry, is only secured by a careful perusal of his letters, books, +and poetry; of his memoir by Father Bowden; and such fragmentary +notices of him as contemporaries have given us. His life itself, as we +read it, must furnish us with clues by which to follow the labyrinths of +his mind to the end it reached. + +He was born in 1814 at Calverley, near Leeds, of which parish his father +was the vicar. The family removed the following year to Bishop Auckland +on Mr. Faber becoming secretary to the Bishop of Durham. As he grew to +boyhood the circumstances of his home-life wrought a development of +character beyond his years, his precociousness was stimulated by his +parents, and his ardent devotion to work or play gave promise of future +eminence. The beautiful scenery around him encouraged his romantic +tendencies. Sent to a private clerical school at Kirkby Stephen, he was +never really free from ecclesiastical influences at any point of his +outlook on the world. His imaginative disposition was still further +quickened, and his poetical tastes and instincts acquired a direction +for life in the midst of the wild Westmorland hills, for 'solitude is +the nurse of enthusiasm.' He took long rambles over mountain and fell, +rebuilding in fancy the ruined castles of the eastern borderland, and +the abbeys of the western, repeopling them with steel-clad knights, and +ladies fair and gay, or with monks chanting their vespers as the great +sun went down in glory beyond the clear-cut ramparts guarding the blue +inland meres. If one reads no farther than the index to his verses one +sees at a glance how firm a grasp the enchanted region had upon his +affections, beginning to secure them even then, intensifying the grasp +while he lived in young manhood at Ambleside, and recurring to his +memory when far away by 'Adria's sapphire waters,' or beneath the shadow +of St. Mary's in his 'dear City' of Oxford. Helvellyn and Loughrigg, +when sunshine and storm combine to throw rainbow-bridges from peak to +peak; the little babbling rivers Rothay and Brathay, when their +glittering foam-bells danced beneath the autumn-tinted trees; the green +vale of Rydal, where the thrushes pipe the whole day through--were each +as much, or perhaps more, to him, and appealed as clamourously for the +weaving of a lay, as great Parnassus himself, or even as 'the sweet +Styrian Lake.' Amidst the wind-sounds in the 'brotherhood of trees' and +the bird-voices of the daytime--nay, in the very night-silences of the +towers and fastnesses of the 'awful sanctuary God hath built' in the +Lake District--he heard 'the echoes of Church bells,' and dreamed dreams +of fonts and altars at which he might serve his 'mother' as her priest. + +Educational progress compelled him, after a short tariance at +Shrewsbury, to go forward to Harrow. Here he would ride and swim, but he +would not play. Instead of giving himself up to the healthy commingling +of learning and the usual school athletics, he thought and thought, till +he began to think himself an unbeliever in Divine mysteries. From Harrow +to Balliol College, Oxford, was a natural transition. He left his +infidel doubts and temptations behind, only, however, to come under the +influence of the Tractarian flood then streaming through the University, +and sweeping some of its best sons towards Rome. He was specially +attracted by the preaching of Newman, who was then engaged in +constructing a theology from the writings of Anglican Fathers, showing +that the Church of England was Roman in its teaching though not Papal in +government. + +While at Oxford he remained, as all through his career, pure, truthful, +sincere, and studious, though ever romantic and impulsive. One of his +best impulses was to read his Bible twice from beginning to end, +prayerfully and meditatively, without note or comment. This brought him +back for a season to the Evangelicalism he had been reared in. Attending +Newman's sermons and lectures turned him once more to Church tradition +and authority. He soon left his Bible for sacramentalism and all its +concommitants. His friends accused him of vacillation. 'No, not +vacillation,' he answered; 'but oscillation.' Perhaps we may say his +course was like the Borrowdale road, which an old guide-book says +'serpentizes.' Under Newman's more intimate friendship and guidance he +was set to the translation of Patristic writings, while still reading +for ordination, and began to hope Tractarianism would 'soon saturate' +the Church of England. Pursuing his theological studies, winning the +Newdigate Prize, and receiving a Fellowship from his college, he, of +course, took in due time deacon's and priest's orders, and left Oxford +to undertake a tutorship in the household of Mr. Harrison, of Ambleside. + +Into the parochial work of Ambleside he threw himself _con amore_, the +incumbent being old and feeble. From thence he went on a brief tour +through Belgium, returning with another set-back from Rome owing to what +he had seen of the low intellectual state and morals of the Belgium +priesthood. It was during the period of his Ambleside tutorship that he +became acquainted with Wordsworth, whom he accompanied on long walks, +the elder poet 'muttering verses to himself' in the intervals of +conversation. + +Somewhat later came the memorable tour of Europe, and visit to Rome, +with his pupils, which practically sealed his conversion. The perusal of +the records of this journey in his 'Sights and Thoughts in Foreign +Countries' affords a curious revelation of biased history (and therefore +often very inaccurate), an interesting account of his mental +perplexities, and of the wonderful organization of the Papal hierarchy, +enabling it to shadow his steps and 'create an atmosphere' around him +wherever he went. This time he carried letters of introduction from the +astute Dr. Wiseman, which assured his seeing the æsthetic best of all +the great cathedrals and institutions of the Church, in each country he +traversed, and helped him to shut the eyes of his memory to +Inquisitions, and persecutions, and the pride and licentiousness of +Popes and Cardinals, and to the grosser side of popular superstition, +comprising the annals of the places he visited, and to the story of +Italy especially. He had a keen sense of the misdeeds of poor people +provoked to reprisals by the tyranny of kings and priests, but never +breathed a word--for he failed to notice anything wrong--against the +Church that was courting him, and was coquetting with others like him in +the Anglican Communion of that day. At Rome the cultured and winsome Dr. +Grant was selected as his chaperon, and once more the attractive figment +of a world-dominion of an united Church was dangled before his +imaginative mind amidst the music and incense of elaborate ceremonials +appealing to his senses. The kindness and sympathy of those who were +watching over him effectually removed the last veil between him and +Roman doctrine. The Pope accorded him an interview in private, and he +prostrated himself to kiss his feet and receive his benediction. The +Pope was already the 'Holy Father' to him, and he is able in his letters +of this date, though still nominally an Anglican, to pledge himself to a +life-crusade against the detestable and diabolic heresy of Protestantism +'as being' what he calls 'the devil's masterpiece.' + +After all this, one wonders how he could have persuaded himself it was +right to accept, on his return to England, the living of Elton, in +Huntingdonshire. He did so, however, and for the space of two years he +did his utmost to Romanize the district. His charming manners, and +natural persuasiveness, the vein of superstition in him (evidenced by +his kissing relics and touching them for healing), which fitted well +with the ignorance of his rural parishioners, gave him such influence in +this direction that when, in 1845, he somewhat suddenly relinquished his +pastorate, and was officially united with the Roman Church, he carried +off with him several of his young men, who were the nucleus of his +Brotherhood of the Will of God in Birmingham. + +From this time forward, the Church having gained a priest but, as +Wordsworth said, 'England having lost a poet,' there was developed in +him a neurotic mysticism impelling him to ascetic neglect of his body, +and suppression of human affections and responsibilities, which preyed +on his physical frame, producing incessant headaches, and complete +prostrations, and unquestionably shortened his days on earth. His love +fixed on such intangible objects as Mary and the saints, rather than the +living Christ, indulges itself in luscious outbreathings towards her who +was not only to him Queen of Heaven and of Purgatory, and Mother of God, +but his 'dear Mama,' his 'dearest Mama,' in whose 'fondling care,' and +under whose 'sweet caress' he dwelt, finding, he tells her, 'Our home, +deep in Thee, eternally, eternally.' His favourite saints are 'Joseph +our Father,' and St. Wilfrid, whom he adopted as his patron, and from +whom his monks were called 'Wilfridians.' He lived henceforth a life of +self-renunciation, the will of God being accepted by him as made known +through his superiors in the Roman priesthood. He devoted his time, +substance, and skill to church building, and creation of monastic +brotherhoods, in Birmingham, in Shropshire, in the City of London, and +finally at Brompton, ere long merging his order in that of the Oratory +of St. Philip Neri--an Italian confraternity introduced into England by +Newman, a missionary body formed for proselytizing the poor and the +young. Besides the beautiful church of St. Wilfrid's erected under the +auspices of the Earl of Shrewsbury, there is the well-known Brompton +Oratory, wherein his preaching, magnetizing rather by its fervour and +picturesqueness than convincing by its reason and logic, held +congregations of thousands spell-bound, who were partly, no doubt, +attracted by his fame, though quite as much by the exquisite singing of +the hymns of his composition and the lavish ceremonies of the Mass. It +proved an immense strain upon his nervous system, the daily necessity of +feeding the monks, building his churches slowly but magnificently, +supplying the vestments, the lights, the incense, and all the other +thousand and one requirements of so gorgeous a ritual. He failed under +it in 1863, and died while only forty-nine years of age, prematurely +worn out and aged. + +Protestant as I am, at the extreme antipodes of conviction, religious +experience, education, and sympathies from Father Faber, I doubt not +his soul went straight to the Great All Father, the only 'Holy Father,' +without the help of Masses to liberate it from any intermediate +imprisonment, or process of purification, and without need of +intercession from our Lord's virgin Mother, or from any portion of the +pantheon of Roman saints. Some of his objectionable opinions and +teachings--some that are very terrible to us--as well as many that are +common to all true Christians, will be noticed in the next article, and +there may only be added now a caution to many Protestants, as well as to +many of the Church of Rome, not to confound wrong views with moral +wrong-doing, nor to make a man's intellectual mistakes the measure of +his presumed status before the throne of his God. 'Shall not the Judge +of all the earth do right,' when He sits in judgment upon the soul? As +Faber's own celebrated hymn declares: + + 'The love of God is broader, + Than the measures of man's mind; + And the Heart of the Eternal, + Is most wonderfully kind.' + + + + + COME TO JESUS + + + 'Souls of men! why will ye scatter + Like a crowd of frightened sheep? + Foolish hearts! why will ye wander + From a love so true and deep? + + 'Was there ever kindest shepherd + Half so gentle, half so sweet, + As the Saviour who would have us + Come and gather round His feet? + + 'It is God: His love looks mighty, + But is mightier than it seems: + 'Tis our Father: and His fondness + Goes far out beyond our dreams. + + 'There's a wideness in God's mercy, + Like the wideness of the sea; + There's a kindness in His justice, + Which is more than liberty. + + 'There is no place where earth's sorrows + Are more felt than up in heaven; + There is no place where earth's failings + Have such kindly judgment given.' + FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER: _Hymns_. + + + + + A RELIGIOUS MEDIEVALIST + + FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER + + II.--HIS BOOKS + + + 'At the evening service, after a few preliminary words, he told his + people that the doctrines he had taught them, though true, were not + those of the Church of England; that, as far as the Church of + England had a voice, she had denounced them.'--FATHER BOWDEN'S _Life + of Faber_. + + +Faber's mental output is a reflex of his character. I assumed this by +using his letters and poems as the matrix of the life I sought to +present my readers with. Neither I nor they found them rocks of barren +quartz. They contained much gold--'yea, much fine gold'--of +conscientiousness, devotion, and self-abnegation; of poetic, oratorical +fervour; of rare zeal for the Church of his adoption. But with the fine +gold there is also much dross. There are, for instance, not a few +passages in 'Sights and Thoughts in Foreign Churches' of a startling +kind to Englishmen--a book, be it remembered, written while the author +was an Anglican clergyman. To him Charles I. was more than 'Charles the +Martyr.' He was a King, 'conformed to the image of his Master through +suffering.' Most of us will ask whether, supposing Jesus of Nazareth had +been King in Charles's stead, there would have been any ship-money, any +Star-Chamber, or any Civil War? Surely no man bears the image of Christ +any farther than he comports himself Christly in politics and general +public as in private life. Christ is a poor Master to serve if Charles +was an image of Him. The admitted tyranny and licentiousness of the +French Bourbons seemed to him to be condoned because they were great at +building churches and convents. National struggles for liberty, and +their champions, are usually presented in their worst lights, and the +freer the nation the bitterer his words about her. The American Republic +is thus a 'proud invalid' for whom there is no cure except by 'a +multiplication of bishops, and then a monarchy.' In this book occurs his +famous passage in favour of burning heretics. His attempted palliation, +or modification, of the passage when challenged by Crabbe Robinson, the +Diarist, on their ramble together to Eskdale Tarn, is disingenuous. The +objectionable sentiment is explicitly made by 'the stranger,' who is as +distinctly alleged to be Faber himself by his biographer, and virtually +admitted to Robinson to be so. Here is the excerpt: 'Persecution belongs +not, strictly speaking, to the Church. Her weapon, and a most dire one, +is excommunication, whereby she cuts off the offender from the fountains +of life in this world, and makes him over from her own judgment to that +of Heaven in the world to come. But surely it is the duty of a Christian +State to deprive such an excommunicate person of every social right and +privilege; to lay on him such pains and penalties as may seem good to +the wisdom of the law, or even, if they so judge, to sweep him from the +earth; in other words, to put him to death. The least that can be done +is make a civil death to follow an ecclesiastical death, and this must +be done where the Church and State stand in right relation to each +other.' To the ultramontane views promulgated in this book might be +added others from his letters and published sermons, as, for instance, +the phrase, 'the pernicious influence of Protestant ragged schools'; +that in which he opposes the reading of the English Bible because its +'uncommon beauty and marvellous English' made it 'the stronghold of +heresy'; those in which he elaborately argues for the 'adoration' of +Mary ('surely it must be called so,' he says); the many in which he +disparages the Reformation and applauds the blessings which the Church, +and the Papacy in particular, had bestowed upon the nations; and those, +once more, in which he declares a man has no rights as man conferred on +him by the Bible, unless he be a Christian (by which he means a +Churchman, for he says so), and dilating on the misery and unrest of +that Protectionist period, proposes no remedies other than obedience to +the Church, the keeping of saints' days and holy days, and the sweeping +away of the 'indecent system of pews'! Incredible as it may seem, every +one of these proposals is seriously propounded in 'A Churchman's +Politics in Disturbed Times.' + +One might make large quotations from the Oratory sermons full of +descriptions, graphic even to gruesomeness, of the bodily agony of Jesus +on the Cross, powerful enough to stir emotional women into hysterical +weeping, and to bring them into a profound, if temporary and unreal, +sentiment of fellowship with His sufferings, leaving Him still afar off +as a risen and personal Friend, and leaving them unmoved by the +bleeding figure on the crucifix in the silent recess till the next +cerebral excitement. The whole of my articles might be taken up with +extracts from his hymns that are simply astounding to the unprejudiced +mind in their luscious sentimentality towards Mary and the saints. Of +these it may be said the expressions do not necessarily mean all to a +Catholic that they seem to a Protestant to imply. But is that so? Who +that has watched and heard Italian or Irish worship, or studied the +biographies and writings of the Romanist mystics of Italy or Spain, can +possibly doubt their perfect sincerity? Is it not an entirely natural +transfer of ardent love from the Redeemer to His mother happening +concurrently with the priestly transfer of worship, of 'adoration,' from +Him to her? Her images are bedecked with flowers and gorgeous attire, +and her shrines are brilliantly lighted and are perfumed with incense. +His image stands in a dark, neglected, railed-off side-chapel, in all +the great cathedrals and rural churches of Romanist Europe. + +Some of Faber's best prose is curiously reserved for lamentations over +the decay of Paganism!--the 'beautiful births of Greek faith, most +radiant legends, springing from every hard and barren spot, like +unnumbered springs out of the Parnassian caverns, or the leafy sides of +Citheron, or the bee-haunted slope of pale Hymettus.' 'The decline of +Paganism was mournful and undignified. Faith after faith went out, like +the extinguishing of lamps in a temple, or the paling of the marsh-fires +before the rising sun.' Yet were the old creeds full of symbols, and the +'whole of external nature an assemblage of forms and vases capable of, +and actually filled with, the Spirit,' and so Greek Paganism was the +expression of a wish to 'write God's name on all things beautiful and +true.' We can re-echo his dirge and acknowledge the saner, more cheerful +side of the 'Paganism' that feels after God, 'if haply it may find Him'; +but what a contrast between his attitude towards the non-Christian world +and the fellow-Christians--not lacking in as holy teaching or living as +his own--whom he had left, for an approachment towards image-worship! + +Let us see, now, however, what he can do in description of places and +scenery, in both prose and poetry. Here is his first impression of +Venice: 'How is it to be described? What words can I use to express that +vision, that thing of magic that lay before us?... Never was so wan a +sunlight, never was there so pale a blue, as stood round about Venice +that day. And there it was, a most visionary city, rising as if by +enchantment out of the gentle-mannered Adriatic, the waveless Adriatic. +One by one rose steeple, tower, and dome, street, and marble palace; +they rose to our eyes slowly, as from the weedy deeps; and then they and +their images wavered and floated, like a dream, upon the pale, sunny +sea. As we glided onward from Fusina in our gondola, the beautiful +buildings, with their strange Eastern architecture, seemed like fairy +ships, to totter, to steady themselves, to come to anchor one by one, +and where the shadow was, and where the palace was, you scarce could +tell. And there was San Marco, and there the Ducal Palace, and there the +Bridge of Sighs, and the very shades of the Balbi, Foscari, Pisani, +Bembi, seemed to hover about the winged Lion of St. Mark. And all this, +all, to the right and left, all was Venice; and it needed the sharp +grating of the gondola against the stairs to bid us be sure it was not +all a dream.' + +He says of Milan Cathedral that 'In the moonlight it disarms criticism. +When the moon's full splendour streams on Milan roofs, and overflows +upon its lofty buttresses; when the liquid radiance trickles down the +glory-cinctured heads of the marble saints, like the oil from Aaron's +beard, and every fretted pinnacle, and every sculptured spout ran with +light as they might have run with rain in a thunder-shower, who would +dare to say there was a fault in that affecting miracle of Christian +Art?' Of Corfu, the most perfect earthly Elysium I myself have seen, +though I first saw it when returning from the Far East, he writes: 'What +traveller does not know the delight of getting among foliage whose shape +and hues are not like those of his native land? The interior of the +island of Corfu was to us a sweet foretaste of Oriental foliage. We rode +among strange hedges of huge cactus, fields of a blue-flowering grain, +occasional palms, clouds of blue and white gum cistus, myrtle-shoots +smelling in the sun, little forests of the many-branched arbutus, marshy +nooks of blossoming oleander, venerable dull olives and lemon groves +jewelled with pale yellow fruit. It was a dream of childhood realized, +and brought with it some dreary remembrances barbed with poignant +sorrows. Dreams, alas! are never realized till the freshness of the +heart is gone, and their beauty has lost all that wildness which made it +in imagination so desirable.' + +'Sir Lancelot,' his longest and most ambitious poem, though finished at +Ambleside in 1847, was issued from his Elton Vicarage two years later, +and is under the guise of 'an attempt to embody and illustrate the +social and ecclesiastical spirit of the thirteenth century,' avowedly an +allegory of the soul seeking for that which it is represented as finding +only when brought 'back to the foot of Peter's sovran chair.' To us its +chief interest lies in his portraiture of our Westmorland surroundings. +The hermitage to which the returned Crusader wends his way lies + + 'Within the Vale of Troutbeck, where towards the head + There is a single woody hill, enclosed + Within the mountains, yet apart and low. + Amid the underwood around, it seems + Like a huge animal recumbent there, + Not without grace; and sweetly apt it is + To catch all wandering sunbeams as they pass, + Or volatile lights in transit o'er the vale.' + +Who among us does not recognise it? Who does not know 'the bell-shaped +mountain which the wild winds ring full mournfully'? And the beck, too, +where the ouzel flits even in winter on the 'ice-rimmed stones,' and the +banks, whereon Sir Lancelot might lie and watch 'the flowery troops in +pageant movable'--the snowdrops 'like a flock of children purely white,' +the 'deep Lent-lilies, like constellations girt with lesser orbs.' When +he crosses to the western sea 'angry and purple, far and wide outspread +in stormy grandeur,' we go with him, and as we wander thitherward see +Scawfell 'palpitating in the haze,' feel 'the tingling of the woodlands' +at night-time down the valley of the Duddon, and learn how Esk is +'suckled in sylvan places' by 'clusters of wild tarns.' + +Among his minor local poems 'English Hedges'--the Saxon hedgerows--are +apostrophized: + + 'The hedges still survive, shelters for flowers, + An habitation for the singing birds, + Cool banks of shadow, grateful to the herds, + A charm scarce known in any land but ours.' + +And in 'Mountain Tarns' he sings: + + 'There is a power to bless + In hillside loneliness-- + In tarns and dreary places-- + A virtue in the brook, + A freshness in the look + Of mountains' joyless faces-- + And so when life is dull, + Or when my heart is full + Because my dreams have frowned, + I wander up the rills + To stones and tarns, and hills-- + I go there to be crowned.' + +If we turn to Faber's purely devotional writings, such as 'All for +Jesus,' and can forget, or slide over, the subtle insinuations of Romish +doctrines, and the curious blending of saints and sacraments, popes and +priests, confessions and penances, with earnest appeals on behalf of +Jesus, at one time as though the soul's salvation depended solely on +ceremonials and priestly absolutions, and at another time as if on +'Jesus only,' one may find much help and light in many beautiful +passages--as, for example: 'Who can look into the world and not see how +God's glory is lost upon the earth? It is the interests of Jesus that we +should seek and find it. Apart from clear acts of great and grievous +sin, how is God forgotten, clean forgotten, by the greatest part of +mankind! They live as if there were no God. It is not as if they openly +rebelled against Him. They pass over and ignore Him. He is an +inconvenience in His own world, an impertinence in His own creation. So +He has been quietly set on one side, as if He were an idol out of +fashion, and in the way. Men of science, and politicians, have agreed on +this, and men of business and wealth think it altogether the most decent +thing to be silent about God, for it is difficult to speak of Him, or +have a view of Him, without allowing too much to Him.... Half a dozen +men, going about God's world, seeking nothing but God's glory--they +would remove mountains. This was promised to faith--why should not we be +the men to do it?' + +Similarly burning words, apart from his descriptions of Calvary, might +be quoted from his sermons, but, alas! these would lack the passionate +personality behind them, with the flashing eye, the expressive +emphasizing hands, and, above all, the voice rising like the swelling of +bells in the steeple, or tender as a silver chord trembling into +silence. Without the spirit to make them live, let us not try to +reproduce them. + + + + + THE BLACK ANT + + + This fly is an inhabitant of woods and coppices, and is very + abundant in the neighbourhood of the English Lakes. The nest is + often of enormous size, sometimes containing more than a cart-load + of sticks and small twigs. The Vale of Duddon swarms with wood ants, + and is the only place where I have seen the wryneck, which is said + to feed principally on these insects. Like other ants, they have the + enjoyment of wings for a few weeks in each year, and often, as the + proverb says, "to their sorrow," as by them they are conveyed to + places where they suffer greatly from birds, as well as from fishes. + They generally make their appearance in August and September. Body, + a strand of peacock's herl, and one of black ostrich's herl laid on + together; silk, dark brown; wing, the lightest part of a starling's + quill; hackle from a black cock.'--JOHN BEEVER: _Practical + Fly-Fishing_. + +[Illustration: + _Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._ + + YEWDALE. + + The Favourite Valley of John Ruskin (see p. 64), and + of the Sisters of the Thwaite.] + + + + + XVII + + JOHN RUSKIN'S FRIENDS + + THE SISTERS OF THE THWAITE, AND THEIR + BROTHER + + + 'Nature takes the hue of a man's own feeling, and he finds in it + what he brings to it. In proportion as he becomes more intelligent + and holy, so does it become more beautiful and significant to + him.'--HUGH MACMILLAN. + +John Ruskin's later years were gladdened by the friendship of the Miss +Beevers, especially that of Miss Susie, the younger of the two. To her, +though so near a neighbour that a short boat-row to the water-head of +Coniston Lake would take him across, he wrote no fewer than 2,000 +letters. The best of these, or at any rate those most suitable for the +public, form the book called 'Hortus Inclusus,' arranged by the +professor's 'Master of Industries at Loughrigg,' Mr. Albert Fleming, and +prefaced by Ruskin himself. The very title-page of the little collection +shows the love he bore his friends: 'Messages from the Wood to the +Garden, sent in happy days to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, +Coniston, by their thankful friend, John Ruskin, LL.D., D.C.L.' The +introductory words of this 'thankful friend' tell us much about the +ladies: 'Sources they have been of good, like one of the mountain +springs of the English shepherd land, ever to be found at need. They did +not travel; they did not go up to London in its season; they did not +receive idle visitors to jar or waste their leisure in the waning year. +The poor and the sick could find them always; or, rather, they watched +for and prevented all poverty and pain that care or tenderness could +relieve or heal. Loadstones they were, as steadily bringing the light of +gentle and wise souls about them as the crest of the mountain gives +pause to the moving clouds; in themselves they were types of perfect +womanhood in its constant happiness, queens alike of their own hearts +and of a Paradise in which they knew the names and sympathized with the +spirits of every living creature that God had made to play therein, or +to blossom in its sunshine or shade.' A beautiful description is this of +the cultured English gentlewoman, fortunately for our peasantry by no +means rare. But it is on their literary and intellectual sides, rather +than their philanthropic, that we have to speak of them here. It might +be sufficient guarantee of Miss Susie's high level, at any rate, that +Ruskin wrote to her letters as carefully composed in full mastery of +language, and on as great a variety of topics, as if he had been +consciously inditing another volume of his 'Modern Painters' for +publication. 'The Lost Church in the Campagna' is written to one whom he +knows will understand and appreciate his historical and artistic +allusions. She loved flowers, and studied them enthusiastically. She and +her sister are named in more than one botanical work as authorities on +our mountain plants, and discoverers of rare species and their +localities. Therefore he continually sets down little bits of +blossom-news for his friend--though it be no more than such as this from +Perugia--'the chief flowers here are only broom and bindweed, and I +begin to weary for my heather and for my Susie; but oh, dear! the ways +are long and the days few'; or those scraps from Ingleton, where he +playfully gives all his pretty flowers names of girls, changing the +harsh botanical names into sweet-sounding ones, and consulting his +correspondent as to how far he may venture to separate and rechristen +certain pinks and pearlworts and saxifrages from their ordained family +groups. From Brantwood he discourses to her on his blue and purple +agates and groups of crystals, dwelling on the perfection of some +stone--'its exquisite colour and superb weight, flawless clearness, and +delicate cutting, which makes the light flash from it like a wave of the +lake.' The last letter written by him was to his 'Dearest Susie.' And +her letters to him are treasures of poetic appreciation of Nature and of +book-lore rare in women. 'Did you think of your own quotation from +Homer,' she asks, 'when you told me that field of yours was full of +violets? But where are the four fountains of white water? How delicious +Calypso's fire of finely-chopped cedar!' 'When I was a girl (I was once) +I used to delight in Pope's Homer.... When a schoolgirl going with my +bag of books into Manchester, I used to like Don Quixote and Sir Charles +Grandison with my milk porridge.' 'Coniston would go into your heart if +you could see it now--so very lovely; the oak-trees so early, nearly in +leaf already (May 1). Your beloved blue hyacinths will soon be out, and +the cuckoo has come.... The breezes will bring fern seeds and plant +them, or rather sow them in such fashion as no human being can do. When +time and the showers brought by the west wind have mellowed it a little, +the tiny beginnings of mosses will be there. The sooner this can be done +the better.' She writes to him, too, about wrens and blackbirds, and her +pet squirrel, and other of her pensioners. There is one extract, +somewhat pathetic, yet sweetly patient, that must not be omitted: 'You +are so candid about your age that I shall tell you mine! I am +astonished to find myself sixty-eight--very near the Psalmist's +three-score-and-ten. Much illness and much sorrow, and then I woke to +find myself old, and as if I had lost a great part of my life. Let us +hope it was not all lost.' It was she who made the charming series of +extracts from 'Modern Painters,' published as 'Frondes Agrestes,' +respecting which he writes that they are 'chosen at her pleasure, by the +author's friend, the younger lady of the Thwaite, Coniston,' and adds +his absolute submission to her judgment, and his appreciation of the +grace she did him in writing out every word with her own hands. Over and +above her natural history pursuits and her association with John Ruskin, +she wrote, I am told, many short poems and leaflets on kindness to +animals. She died in 1893, and her grave adjoins her friend's. + +The Beevers were a Manchester family whose father, on his retirement +from business, settled, in 1831, at the Thwaite House. After his death +one of his sons, John, and three of his daughters, Mary, Margaret, and +Susanna, lived on there, unmarried, and contented, it is said of them, +with 'the harvest of a quiet eye.' Miss Margaret died before Ruskin knew +the circle. John Beever, like his sisters, was a naturalist. He was +especially fond of fly-fishing, and on the art of it he wrote a book, of +which a new edition has recently been issued, with a biographical sketch +by W. G. Collingwood, and notes and an extra chapter on char-fishing by +A. and A. R. Severn. Fishing has not directly added much of value to +English literature. The notable exception is, of course, Isaac Walton's +ever-living little book. Great statesmen and tired public men of all +kinds have found rest and change in handling rod and line, and many +pleasant little brochures exist of smaller men's experiences and +enjoyment of the gentle craft. To this order belongs Mr. Beever's book. +It is necessarily too technical for the general reader. There is nothing +in it so good as Walton's well-known remark about the nightingale--a +bird never heard, alas! in these northern regions, and therefore much +missed by a southerner like myself--but which 'airy creature breathes +such sweet loud music out of her little instrumental throat, that it +might make mankind to think miracles had not ceased. He that at +midnight, when the very labourer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have +often done, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and +falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted +above earth, and say, Lord, what music hast Thou provided for the saints +in heaven, when Thou affordest bad men such music on earth!' Nor will +you find anything so racy as the 'Compleat Angler's' picture of an +otter-hunt, or as the other of the young milkmaid singing 'that smooth +song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago.' He +has, however, some excellent passages of a literary savour, as, for +example, of the two gentlemen fishing the streams of the pastoral +Yarrow, and convincing the local piscator that 'grouse' was the proper +fly to catch with, and of Frank, the Matlock chaise-driver, who became +to him the revealer of Nature's demand for obedience to her laws--in +other words, he taught him the imitation and use of the actual living +flies on which the trout fed each consecutive day. The list of possible +flies to copy is a formidable one, but the way to make the copies is +fully explained--say, with a feather from the top of a woodcock's wing, +fur from a squirrel's cheek, and orange-silk, or perhaps a feather from +a sea-swallow or a seagull, pale-blue rabbit's fur, and +primrose-coloured silk, or some wool from beneath an old sheep. Then +there follows the method of making rods, the suitable wood, the +dimensions, and the art of securing temporary repairs. There are +appendices on the antiquity of fly-fishing, and on a day's angling in +France. To those of us for whom the mysteries of spring-backs, +spring-duns, March-browns, green-tails, ruddy-flies, and black-headed +reds, and iron-blues, have slight allurements, the more interesting +portions of his life are those spent in making himself acquainted with +the growth and habits of fish, and in constructing a pond behind his +house that he could stock with finny people from the tarns and becks--a +water colony wherein once each year he could handle and examine each +member to see how it progressed. The pond was also a reservoir for a +water-wheel that drove the machinery in his private workshop, where he +turned wooden articles for carving, and made elaborate inlaid mosaics. +There also he printed his sister's little books, and texts for the walls +of Sunday-schools. Children he was fond of, and for their sakes he made +himself--or was his talent innate--a wonderful story-teller, of 'quaint +imagination and humour.' He had seven years of illness, which laid him +aside from his active pursuits, and died no fewer than thirty-four years +before his youngest sister 'Susie.' He does not lie at Coniston, but in +the churchyard at Hawkshead, hard by the old sun-dial on the north side. +In the same graveyard lies another Lake celebrity, of whom something may +be said shortly. + +If fishermen deign to read these articles, let me inform them they can +get Mr. Beever's 'Practical Fly-fishing' through any local bookseller, +from Methuen, of London; and that another book for their perusal is Mr. +John Watson's 'Lake District Fisheries.' I cannot praise or dispraise +either, but competent and knowing men tell me both are the practical +experiences of practical fishermen, and are therefore of real value. + +Some readers may think that Miss Mary Beever has been slighted in favour +of her brother and her younger sister. 'She was,' says Ruskin, 'chiefly +interested in the course of immediate English business, policy, and +progressive science; while Susie lived an aerial and enchanted life, +possessing all the highest joys of imagination.' They were the Martha +and the Mary of the Coniston Bethany, its 'House of Dates,'--its place +of rest and refreshment, not for the incarnate Son of God, the Saviour +of mankind, but for a wearied reformer of human life and lover of all +good things that God has made in the perfection of beauty. They each +contributed their share to his comfort and renovation, and if he was +more attached to the one who could enter into his life-thoughts the most +thoroughly, there is nothing to wonder at in its being so. + + + + + FROM JONAH'S PRAYER + + + 'I will call on Jehovah from my prison, + And He will hear me; + From the womb of the grave I cry. + Thou hearest my voice. + Thou hast cast me into wide waters in the depths of the sea; + And the floods surround me; + All Thy dashing and Thy rolling waves + Pass over me.' + + + + + FROM HABAKKUK'S 'SONG IN PARTS' + + + 'Though the fig-tree did not blossom, + And there be no fruit on the vine; + Though the produce of the olive fail, + Though the parched field yield no food, + Though the flock be cut off from the fold, + And there be no cattle in the stalls; + Yet will I rejoice in Jehovah, + I will exult in God my Saviour. + Jehovah my Lord is my strength. + He will set my feet as the deer's, + He will make me walk in high places.' + ELIZABETH SMITH: _Hebrew Translations_. + + + + + XVIII + + A LEARNED YOUNG LADY + + ELIZABETH SMITH + + + 'What the vast multitudes of women are doing in the world's + activities, and what share their mothers and grandmothers, to the + remotest generations backward, have had in originating culture, is a + question which concerns the whole race.'--PROFESSOR MASON'S _Woman's + Share in Primitive Culture_. + + +Not a very distinctive name, you will say! Who was she? 'The blooming +Elizabeth Smith, whom to know was to revere,' writes the author of an +ancient book called 'Coelebs in Search of a Wife.' But this does not +carry us a long way further. Well, then, she was a young lady, born so +long ago as 1776, near the city of Durham, who lived for several years +at Coniston with her parents and died there when but twenty-nine years +of age. What made her remarkable was not so much her beauty or her +goodness--and she possessed both these physical and spiritual +qualities,--but also, and for our present purpose especially, her poetic +talent and her great linguistic powers and attainments. 'With scarcely +any assistance,' writes one who was intimate with her, 'she was well +acquainted with French, Italian, Spanish, German, Latin, Greek, and +Hebrew languages. She had no inconsiderable knowledge of Arabic and +Persian. She made also considerable philological collections of Welsh, +Chinese, African, and Icelandic words. She was well acquainted with +geometry, algebra, and other branches of the mathematics. She was a very +fine musician. She drew landscapes from nature extremely well, and was +mistress of perspective.' She was more retiring, and even timid, than +she was learned. Let it be remembered that she was born in the days +previous to any thought of the 'emancipation' of woman, or her +'equality' with man, and when the only sphere it was considered proper +for her to fill was that of wife and mother. She might--nay must--bake +and sew, and undertake all the domestic duties of the household, with +one or two 'accomplishments' allowed her, qualifying her to be agreeable +to her husband or father in his leisure moments, and to his guests. It +will be satisfactory to those, if any are left, who still hold the old +theories about the highest feminine virtues, that this talented young +lady, who could calculate the distances and periods of planets, write +verses in rhyme, or in imitation of Ossian, and translate the Book of +Job from the Hebrew, could also make a currant tart, or 'a gown, or a +cap, or any other article of dress, with as much skill' as she displayed +in the region of languages and mathematics. + +Her father was a banker whose business was in the West of England. He +was a wealthy man, and removed, while his daughter was young, from +Durham to one of the loveliest estates in Monmouthshire--Piercefield--on +the cliffs of the river Wye, close to Chepstow's ruined castle, and +within sight of the British Channel. + + 'There, twice a day, the Severn fills, + The salt sea-water passes by, + And hushes half the babbling Wye, + And makes a silence in the hills.' + +Through the length of the park a pathway traverses the winding summits +of the gray limestone rocks, which--clothed with wood, or rising in +naked spires from the water far into the sky--afforded resting-places +for occasional nightingales, and for all the commoner singing birds of +the land, as well as for ravens and innumerable daws. Here she could +find romantic spots at every turn that called forth all her poetical +aspirations and faculties, and filled her imagination with dreams of the +heroes of old Wales, and the stormy warfare of the Marches in the middle +ages. She had quietude enough, too, in the library of the mansion to +pursue her unusual studies successfully, and without interruption from +casual visitors. 'Miss Smith's power of memory,' says the 'National +Dictionary of Biography,' 'and of divination, must have been alike +remarkable, for she rarely consulted a dictionary.' + +At the beginning of William Pitt's great European wars, as well as some +quarter of a century later, after its close, the commercial world was +widely and deeply shaken--as it always is under circumstances that +enrich the few at the cost of the many--Smith's Bank was involved in +many losses, and failed to meet its own liabilities. The ruin of the +firm involved the sale of Piercefield, and the family's departure +therefrom, Mr. Smith purchasing a commission in the army. They went +first to London, and then followed the regiment to Ireland, where +everything was in ferment about the expected French invasion, and +insurrection of the Irish. It was at this period that another and more +famous literary lady was passing through her experiences, which are +recorded in some of the episodes in 'Castle Rackrent' and other famous +novels that delighted our parents. The Smiths were at first entertained +by Lord Kingston, but had shortly to take up their abode in barracks. +Elizabeth's calm cheerfulness and practical support to her mother were +edifying, and brought forth the reserve forces of her unassuming +character very satisfactorily. Her mother's description of their journey +on horseback in those wild regions, as they were in ante-locomotive +days, is worth transcribing from one of her letters to a lady friend. +After a twenty-mile ride they arrived dripping wet. 'Our baggage was not +come, and, owing to the negligence of the quarter-master, there was not +even a bed to rest on. The whole furniture of our apartments consisted +of a piece of a cart-wheel for a fender, a bit of iron, probably from +the same vehicle, for a poker, a dirty deal table, and three +wooden-bottomed chairs. It was the first time we had joined the +regiment, and I was standing by the fire, and perhaps dwelling too much +on the comforts I had lost, when I was roused from my reverie by +Elizabeth's exclaiming, "Oh, what a blessing!" "Blessing!" I replied, +"there seems none left!" "Indeed there is, my dear mother, for see here +is a little cupboard!" I dried my eyes, and endeavoured to learn +fortitude from my daughter.' + +After long wanderings, varied by residences at Bath and in North Wales, +the Smiths stayed for some months at Patterdale. While here the Captain +purchased a little farm, and hired a house at Coniston. The house, +according to the report of a visitor, was not very comfortable. 'The +situation is indeed enchanting, and during the summer months +inconveniences within doors are little felt, but it grieves me to be +convinced of what they must amount to in December.' Here Elizabeth +continued her studies and translations, especially from the German and +Hebrew, and probably at this time read Locke's philosophy, discovering +and criticising some of his inaccuracies. After a five years' most +thorough enjoyment of Coniston--walking, boating, reading--she, staying +out too long one evening beneath a favourite tree with a favourite book, +felt a sharp pain strike suddenly through her chest. She had very +considerably overtaxed her physical powers, and drawn too seriously on +her reserve of nervous energy. It was the beginning of the end. Within a +little more than twelve months she passed to her everlasting rest. Bath, +Matlock, and other places had been tried without avail. At length she +said: 'If I cannot recover here I shall not anywhere,' and refused to be +removed again. In her last letter she says: 'I have learned to look on +life and death with an equal eye, knowing where my hope is fixed.' Her +friend's reply was 'as to a Christian on the verge of eternity.' 'Her +whole life,' her mother adds, 'had been a preparation for death.' The +house called Tent Lodge--where Tennyson afterwards stayed--now stands on +the site where she lived in a tent pitched for her in her father's +grounds. The name is given to the house because of an exclamation of +hers that this would be such a magnificent situation for one. Whenever +we see it we remember the delight of the 'Angel-Spirit' (her mother's +words for her) at the prospect it commands. In the graveyard at +Hawkshead, in which Mr. Beever lies, was buried Elizabeth Smith in +August, 1806, and within the church is a small white marble tablet to +her memory, telling how 'she possessed great talents, exalted virtues, +and humble piety.' The situation of Hawkshead Church and graveyard are +thus described by a contemporary writer: 'On the north is a most awful +scene of mountains heaped upon mountains, in every variety of horrid +shape. Among them sweeps to the north a deep winding chasm, darkened by +overhanging rocks, that the eye cannot pierce, nor the imagination +fathom.... The church is situated on the front of an eminence that +commands the vale, which is floated with Esthwaite Water.' + +Miss Smith's poems were written on the models then in vogue, and would +hardly meet the taste of a generation that has since her days known a +Scott, a Byron, a Wordsworth, a Shelley, a Keats, a Tennyson, and her +stanzas are often long. This extract, descriptive of a calm at +Patterdale, after a mountain hurricane, may furnish some idea of her +style: + + 'The storm is past; the raging wind no more, + Between the mountains rushing, sweeps the vale, + Dashing the billows of the troubled lake + High into the air; the snowy fleece lies thick; + From every bough, from every jutting rock + The crystals hang; the torrents roar has ceased-- + As if that Voice that called creation forth + Had said "Be still." All nature stands aghast, + Suspended by the viewless power of cold.' + +Her translations from Hebrew were her favourite Sunday pursuits, and +those of Jonah's Prayer, and Habakkuk's 'Song in Parts' are, to my mind, +more poetical and more coherent than even our fine authorized version. +In this judgment I find myself confirmed by reading that Archbishop +Magee considered her rendering of 'Job' the best he knew. + +There is no space for lengthy quotations from her prose writings and her +letters, but some short sentences will have to serve as samples of her +manner and her thoughts: + +'To be good and disagreeable is high treason against virtue.' + +'A great genius can render clear and intelligible any subject within the +compass of human knowledge; therefore, what is called a deep book (too +deep to be understood) we may generally conclude is the produce of a +shallow understanding.' + +'Happiness is a very common plant, a native of every soil, yet is some +skill required in gathering it; for many noxious weeds look like it, and +deceive the unwary to their ruin.' + +'Wouldst thou know the true worth of time, employ one hour.' + +'Pleasure is a rose near which there ever grows the thorn of evil. It is +wisdom's work so carefully to cull the rose, as to avoid the thorn.' + +'Why do so many men return coxcombs from their travels? Because they set +out fools!' + +'As the sun breaking forth in winter, so is joy in the season of +affliction. As a shower in the midst of summer, so are the salutary +drops of sorrow mingled in our cup of pleasure.' + +'A happy day is worth enjoying; it exercises the soul for heaven. The +heart that never tastes of pleasure, shuts up, grows stiff, and +incapable of enjoyment. How, then, shall it enter the realms of bliss? A +cold heart can receive no pleasure even there.' + + + + + ON A SHOULDER OF THE 'OLD MAN' + + + 'The ascent becomes dismally laborious here, so much so, that you + are fain to lie down upon the soft, dry mountain grass, to recover + breath, and while doing so, what objection can you have to a little + conversation with the Old Man himself? Listen, then! + + + 'Old Man! Old Man! your sides are brant, + And fearfully hard to climb; + My limbs are weak, and my breath is scant, + So I'll rest me here and rhyme.' + + 'Yes, my sides are steep, and my dells are deep, + And my broad bald brow is high, + And you'll ne'er, should you rhyme till the limit of time, + Find worthier theme than I. + + 'My summit I shroud in the weltering cloud, + And I laugh at the tempest's din; + I am girdled about with stout rock without, + And I've countless wealth within. + + 'My silence is broke by the raven's croak, + And the bark of the mountain fox; + And mine echoes awake to the brown glead's shriek, + As he floats by my hoary rocks.' + + DR. A. C. GIBSON: _Ravings and Ramblings Round + Coniston_. + +[Illustration: + _Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._ + + HAWKESHEAD, FROM ESTHWAITE WATER. + + The Residence of Dr. Gibson, + and Burial-place of Miss Elizabeth Smith. + + + + + XIX + + A COUNTRY DOCTOR AND HIS STORIES + (FOLK-SPEECH) + + DR. ALEXANDER CRAIG GIBSON + + + 'If you are _ill_ at this season, there is no occasion to send for + the doctor--only _stop eating_. Indeed, upon general principles, it + seems to me to be a mistake for people, every time there is a little + thing the matter with them, to be running in such haste for the + "doctor," because, if you are going to die, a doctor can't help you, + and if you are not, there is no occasion for him.'--HONE'S _Table + Book_. + +There are three paragraphs about him--appreciative ones--in Mr. +Bradley's 'Highways and Byways in the Lake District,' and the first of +the three shall furnish me with my own introductory one. 'And who may +Craig Gibson be? Ninety-nine out of a hundred readers will most +assuredly demand to be told. His portrait figures in no shop windows, +nor can his biography in concentrated form be purchased for a penny at +the local stationer's, nor is the house he occupied an item in the round +of the enterprising char-a-banc. Poor Gibson, in short, is not reckoned +among the immortals of the Lake Country, by outsiders at any rate; but, +unlike any of these except Wordsworth, he was a native of it and a +product of the soil. Gibson was, in fact, a country doctor, whose +practice carried him far and wide through hill and dale, among all +classes of people. He had a wonderful knowledge of the country folk, +among whom he laboured until he was forty, and a vast fund of sympathy +and humour, which endeared him to all. With this he combined a passion +for dialect studies, and some genius for writing poems, both of a +humorous and pathetic nature. No man who ever lived had such a mastery +of the varying dialects of Cumberland and Westmorland, or better knew +the inner character and the humour of their rugged people.' + +The only sketch of his life I have been able to find is Mr. Nicholson's +in the 'National Dictionary of Biography,' and that gives no clue to +anything fuller. From this it appears he was born in 1813 at Harrington, +Cumberland, now a town of some 3,000 inhabitants on the London and +North-Western Railway, and on the seashore between Whitehaven and +Workington. An old coloured engraving of it about contemporary with +Gibson's youth shows it as a harbour nearly land-locked by hilly +promontories, and possessing a small stone-built pier. The village, more +ancient than the harbour, was half a mile inland. Gibson's father was +named James, and his mother was Mary Stuart Craig, a member of a Moffat +family. His early education was probably quite local, at any rate we +find that he got his first knowledge of medicine by serving his time +with a practitioner at Whitehaven, and from thence he went to Edinburgh +University to study and to take his diploma, commencing on his own +account at Branthwaite and Ullock, near Cockermouth, when twenty-eight +years of age. He did not remain there long, but in 1843 removed to +Coniston, and married Miss Sarah Bowman of Lamplough the following +year. He remained at Coniston for six years, and then removed to +Hawkshead, where he dwelt for another eight, and then, finding the +country practice, with long rides and exposure to all kinds of mountain +weather, becoming too hard and too heavy for him, he removed to +Bebington in Cheshire, where he remained for fifteen years more, and +when failing health and three score years of life compelled it, lived +there retired until his death in 1874. He is interred in the churchyard +of that village in the neighbourhood of Birkenhead. This is practically +all that is known, and, indeed, is all that need concern us of his +outward biography. His inner is indicated by his books. From them we +gather that he was a pleasant and genial man, who readily found his way +to the hearts of the 'statesmen' and peasantry among whom his +professional calling carried him every day of his life, and with whom he +would hold colloquies in the vernacular, and from whose fireside talks +he would gather the stories and legends he afterwards put together in +prose or verse, to illustrate both the Scandinavian dialects and the +folklore of the north-western shires, as William Barnes has in later +times done for the Saxon speech and thought-modes of the Dorsetshire +people. We are sure, too, that wherever he rode he was a keen observer +and investigator of natural objects among the rocks, and birds, and +flowers, as well as of castles, churches, mansions, schools, and ancient +earthworks. He was a learned geologist, and if you want to be assured of +this you have but to procure a copy of Harriet Martineau's 'Guide to the +Lakes,' and you will find the chapters on geology and mineralogy were +his compilation, though there is no further acknowledgment of the fact +than the presence of his initials, A. C. G., at the end. It is not the +hand of a mere scientific smatterer that can condense with ability into +some dozen or thirteen pages the earth treasures and stratification of +such a mountain-land as ours, respecting which he says, 'As no district +of similar extent displays such a variety of natural beauties in its +external aspect, so does no district present within equally limited +bounds such diversity of geological formation and arrangement, or a like +variety of mineral productions.' He was an excellent botanist, writing +upon the flora of Cumberland, though possibly his knowledge of +ornithology would be little more than that of any intelligent, +nature-loving country doctor almost always in the open. An antiquarian +he certainly was of no mean standing, being a Fellow of the Society of +Antiquaries--a society that asks, unlike many other 'learned' +associations, 'what has he done?' before receiving a member--and he was +a frequent contributor to the 'Transactions of the Historic Society of +Lancashire and Cheshire.' A good example of the quality of his +contributions is that on 'Hawkshead Town, Church, and School.' It is +interesting, and in a small space very enlightening. He tells us that +this is one of the smallest market towns in the kingdom, and he +describes it in a couplet of his own, a 'pattering' rhyme: + + 'A quaint old town is Hawkshead, and an ancient look it + bears, + Its church, its school, its dwellings, its streets, its lands, its + squares, + Are all irregularities--all angles, twists, and crooks, + With penthouses and gables over archways, wents, and nooks.' + +It really has two small 'squares' and one street 'of varying contour, +and width frequently and awkwardly encroached upon by gabled shops +standing at right angles to the roadway and houses by aggressive corners +and low upper stories projected far beyond the foundation-line of the +buildings.' Altogether an eccentric town. Then, after speaking of its +lake, he points out to us the old glacier moraines, and its green +water-meadows, and next branches off into the story of the 'Pilgrimage +of Grace' in 1537, and the tale of the Plague in 1577, and of the +opening of the Quaker cemetery on the picturesque hillside in 1658, and +the founding and upkeep of the parish church with its peal of six bells, +each with its inscription, from which we can transcribe only the first: + + 'Awake, arise, the day's restored, + Awake, arise, to praise the Lord, + Regard, look to, the peal I lead. + 1765.' + +He has, too, many sage remarks to make about 'Drunken Barnaby's' visit, +of which, perhaps, I shall say more in another article. + +But the two books the worthy doctor has specially made his mark with as +regards the general public are 'Folk-Speech Tales and Rhymes of +Cumberland and Districts Adjacent,' and 'The Old Man, or Ravings and +Ramblings around Coniston.' The first has passed through several +editions, and is to be had quite cheaply through second-hand +booksellers; the second is scarcer and dearer. Of the first the +_Saturday Review_ wrote: 'Few people will dare to attack this +odd-looking book, with its unusual accents and its rude phonetic +spelling, and if they do they will not understand it if they have not +had some previous education. But to those who can read it it is full of +racy jokes and rich humour, and will afford infinite amusement when +intelligently undertaken.' This seems to be a tolerably correct +estimate, for, as he tells us in his preface, the tales relating to +Cumberland and Dumfriesshire are in pure Cumbrian--unadulterated, old +Norse-rooted Cumbrian vernacular--and pure Scotch folk-speech. The High +Furness dialect, he says, is rendered impure by the influx of emigrants +from across Morecambe Sands. How can I find specimens short enough? 'Joe +and the Geologist' is in the Cumberland mode. It tells of a lad hired by +a Savant to carry the stones and fossils collected in a two days' +excursion, and how the lad, thinking one stone as good as another, +emptied the leather bag on the sly, filled it again from a +stone-breaker's heap, earned his meals and half a sovereign for his +'hard work,' and managed to send his employer off by coach none the +wiser till he should reach home. + +'When I com nar to Skeal-hill, I fund oald Aberram Achisson sittin' on a +steul breckan steans to mend rwoads wid, an' I axt him if I med full my +ledder pwokes frae his heap. Aberram was varra kaim't an' tell't ma to +tak them as wasn't brocken if I want'd steans, sooa I tell't hoo it was +an' oa' aboot it. T' oald maizlin was like to toytle of his steul wid' +laughin', and said me mudder sud tak gud care on ma, for I was ower +sharp a chap to leeve varra lang i' this warld; but I'd better full ma +pwokes as I liked an' mak on wid' them.' 'The Skulls of Calgarth,' a +North Country Naboth vineyard story with additions, is the only tale in +Westmorland talk. + + 'A house ligs la' an' leansome theear, doon in that oomer dark, + Wi' wide, heigh-risin' chimla-heads, la' roof, an' crumlin' wo', + O' wedder-gra'n an' weed-be grown--for time hes setten t' mark + O' scooers an' scooers o' wearin' years on hantit Co'garth Ho'.' + +To the reader uninstructed in the vernacular his little work, entitled +'The Old Man; or, Ravings and Ramblings Round Coniston,' is more +interesting than 'Folk-Speech.' It contains capital descriptive +passages, some in pointed prose, and some in rhyme. Example of the +latter may be found in 'The Sunken Graves.' + + 'Near Esthwaite Head, remote and lone, + Where crag-born Dudden chafes and raves-- + Unblest by priest--unmarked by stone-- + Were lengthened rows of dateless graves.' + +Of the prose, take these words about Coniston: 'Nowhere else have you +seen wood and water, hill and valley, green-sward and purple heather, +rugged crag and velvet lawn, gray rock and bright-blossoming shrub, +waving forest and spreading coppice brought under the eye at once in +such magnificent proportion and in such bewildering contrast.' He +narrates some exciting fox-hunting experiences of the fell-side farmers +and their hounds; he has some pithy tales of the native peasantry and +their folklore and their customs, as well as of their parsons, poor as +Goldsmith's 'Christian Hero'--passing rich at £40 a year, yet learned +and of cultured minds, though dressed in homespun, and toiling on the +land to eke out a living. His own adventures as a medical man in mists +and storms sweeping across the mountains are sometimes graphic. This +paragraph must suffice us: 'There had been a heavy snow, which for a day +or two, under the influence of soft weather and showers, had been +melting; the whole country was saturated with wet--every road was a +syke, every syke a beck, and every beck a river. The high lands were +covered with a thick, cold, driving, suffocating mist, which every now +and then thinned a little to make way for one of those thorough-bred +mountain showers, of which none can have any conception who have not +faced them on the fells in winter--wetting to the skin and chilling to +the marrow in three seconds, and piercing exposed parts like legions of +pins and needles. The hollows in the roads, which are neither few nor +far between, were filled with snow in a state of semi-fluidity, cold as +if it had been melted with salt, through which I splashed and struggled, +dragging my floundering jaded pony after me with the greatest +difficulty.' + + + + + WRITTEN IN THE WORDSWORTH COUNTRY + + + 'He is dead, and the fruit-bearing day + Of his race is past on the earth; + And darkness returns to our eyes. + For, oh! is it you, is it you, + Moonlight and shadow, and lake, + And mountains, that fill us with joy, + Or the poet who sings you so well? + Is it you, O beauty, O grace, + Or the voice that reveals what you are? + Are ye, like daylight and sun, + Shared and rejoiced in by all? + Or are you immersed in the mass + Of matter, and hard to extract, + Or sunk at the core of the world + Too deep for the most to discern? + Like stars in the deep of the sky, + Which arise on the glass of the sage, + But are lost when their watcher is gone.' + MATTHEW ARNOLD: _The Youth of Nature_. + + +[llustration: + + _Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._ + + FOX HOW, AMBLESIDE. + + The Home of the Arnolds.] + + + + + XX + + TWO PIONEER EDUCATIONISTS + + THOMAS AND MATTHEW ARNOLD + + + 'Speaking of the Arnolds, he (Hartley Coleridge) said they are a + most gifted family. I asked what specially in their education + distinguished them. He rose from the dinner-table, as his manner is, + and answered, "Why, they were suckled on Latin and weaned upon + Greek!"'--CAROLINE FOX'S _Journal_. + +Do not the Ambleside and Grasmere char-a-bancs proclaim on their +back-boards in letters large and ugly that they will 'return by Fox How, +the residence of Dr. Arnold'? And is not the advertised route a pretty +one, despite the disadvantage of its being frequented by thousands of +'trippers' to whom the Arnolds are not even names, and who can hardly be +much illuminated by the drivers? + +When Arnold of Rugby bought the property and built the house for a +holiday home, with the hope of some day retiring permanently to it, he +wrote of its being 'a mountain nest of sweetness.' Even his son Matthew, +more of an introversive than a descriptive poet, more inclined to utter +a thought of Goethe's or quote a song of Beranger's than to dwell on the +inwardness of natural scenery, must perforce write of 'Rotha's living +wave'--the stream that 'sparkles through fields vested for ever with +green,' and of + + 'Moonlight, and shadow, and lake, + And mountains that fill us with joy.' + +The father died in harness, and was buried in Rugby Chapel, and not in +Grasmere, by the Wordsworth graves, as he had hoped. The son spent his +boyhood at Fox How, and returned to it often in later life, for Mrs. Dr. +Arnold remained there--a widow--for many years. + +Thomas Arnold, born in 1795, at Cowes, Isle of Wight, was the son of the +Collector of Customs in that little port. He was educated first at +Westminster, and then for four years at Winchester. As a child he was +stiff, shy, and formal, says Dean Stanley, and after entering Oxford, +indeed until mature life, was a 'lie-a-bed.' Still, he was forward at +school, strong in history and geography, took early to his pen, and had +a good memory for poetry. At the University, a scholar at Corpus +Christi, Fellow of Oriel, he took a first-class in Classics, and two +Chancellor's Prizes in 1815 and 1817. Corpus Christi was a small, +intellectual community, and this fact helped to form his character. He +was, and remained, a Liberal in a society of convinced Tories. Outside +his companionship and his necessary studies the formative influences of +that period of his life were Aristotle, Thucydides, and Wordsworth. He +took 'orders,' and settled at Laleham, near Staines, where he remained +nine years, taking youths as pupils to prepare them for the +Universities. Here six of his children were born, including Matthew, and +here he developed his theories of education, to become so important a +factor in English life by-and-by. Here, too, he pursued diligently his +own deeper studies in the Bible, in theology, and in Roman history. Some +of the sermons preached at this village are incorporated with those, +afterwards so celebrated, delivered to the Rugby School. He became +Head-master of Rugby in 1827. At that time most of the great public +schools with clerical headmasters were in low condition, and upper-class +education was poor. The rich Churchmen held possession of the national +Universities, and social rather than intellectual status was the chief +thing aimed at. Of course there were many noble exceptions among the +undergraduates to this general truth, and Arnold was one of them, and +his compeers at Corpus Christi were others. Rugby as a school was in a +very poor state when he took hold of it. He raised it into one of the +first schools of its kind in the kingdom, and provoked the others into a +healthy competition. It is impossible here to give more than the barest +outline of his magnificent scholastic career. The ordinary reader may +judge for himself of its character by reading Thomas Hughes' 'Tom +Browne's School Days,' and the more studious Stanley's 'Life' of the +Doctor. It has been my own privilege to know several clergymen who were +Arnold's pupils. They reverenced his memory, they spoke of their +intellectual and spiritual obligations to their master in the warmest +terms, and in every case were among the most liberal-minded and cultured +men I have known. They were but examples of hundreds, cleric and lay, of +his excellent modelling. The key to his influence and reforms is found +in his own high Christian character, and, as one biographer says, in the +fact that 'the most strongly-marked feature of his intellect was the +strength and clearness of his conceptions. It seemed the possession of +an inward light so intense that it penetrated on the instant every +subject laid before him, and enabled him to grasp it with the vividness +of sense and the force of reality.' His administrative methods +revolutionized the discipline and the punishments. He relied on the +honour of the boys, and their Christian and gentlemanly characters, and +especially on the right leadership of the older ones, whom he trusted +implicitly, unless found untrustworthy. He had also, and this, +doubtless, was part of his secret, an unusual faculty of right +discernment in the selection of his masters. Character was the basis of +his system--upon that he could build scholarship, without it he would +not try to. 'It is not necessary,' he once said to his pupils, 'that +this school should be a school of 300, or 100, or 50 boys; but it is +necessary it should be a school of Christian gentlemen.' Through good +and evil report, opposition and scoffing, he went on his way, and +conquered. He took his part, too, in liberalizing the Anglican Church. +For defending Bishop Hampden of Hereford, to whose appointment a violent +outcry was raised for alleged unorthodoxy, Arnold nearly lost his own +post. Earl Howe, one of the champions of the narrow-minded heresy +hunters, moved a condemnatory resolution at the Board of +Governors--there being four for, and four against, and none possessing a +casting vote, the headmaster was not suspended, and did not resign. In +1841 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History, and his +lectures remain in their published form as evidences of his accuracy and +lucidity. The next year, however, he was seized with angina pectoris, +and he died just about the time he was intending to retire from his +fourteen years' successful pioneering of the modern methods of secondary +and higher education. His character was well estimated by a writer in +the _Edinburgh Review_, albeit the comparison of Arnold with Milton is +not altogether felicitous in other respects. He says: 'They both so +lived in their great Task-master's eye as to verify Bacon's observation, +in his 'Essay on Atheism,' making themselves akin to God in spirit, and +raising their natures by means of a higher nature than their own.' +Matthew alludes to his father in his poem on Rugby Chapel. This poem is +in awkward metre, and the query might have been answered more positively +than he has ventured to do, if there is any truth whatsoever in the +Christian doctrine of immortality and a 'labour-house vast' seems a poor +substitute for scriptural imagery of the unseen spirit world. + + 'Oh, strong soul, by what shore + Tarriest thou now? For that force, + Surely, has not been left vain! + Somewhere, surely, afar, + In the sounding labour-house vast + Of being is practised that strength, + Zealous, beneficent, firm.' + +Another appreciation of the father by the son is interesting. 'He was +the first English clergyman who could speak as freely on religious +subjects as if he had been a layman.' + +Of Matthew himself there needs little to be said. From whom did he +inherit his strange temperament? His poetry lacks the warmth of feeling +his father would have put into it. His muse is cold, classical, joyless. +His criticisms are keen, incisive, often just, more often marred by +foolish prejudices, almost brutally expressed. To Dissenters he was +intolerant, and never lost a chance of sneering at them, especially for +their want of that culture, or rather that special form of culture, +which he personally affected, and which his own Church had debarred them +from obtaining at the Universities. He laid himself open to the retort +of a leading Nonconformist, who spoke of Mr. Arnold's belief in the +well-known preference of the Almighty for University men. Mr. Herbert +Paul is not wide of the mark when he writes of his re-translations of +the Bible 'making one feel as if one had suddenly swallowed a +fish-bone.' Certainly the perusal of most of his books, such as 'Essays +in Criticism,' 'Culture and Anarchy,' 'Paul and Protestantism,' +'Literature and Dogma,' 'God and the Bible,' gives to the thoughtful +reader a sensation of being drawn by a swift, high-mettled, blood horse, +trying to get his head, and to run away with you over a stony road--the +pace is exhilarating, but the jolting is terrible. His best +contributions to the commonwealth are some of his educational theories +and suggestions, and most of his reports on foreign education, and on +his experience as an Inspector of Schools. In the latter capacity he +laboured for thirty-five years, and the impress of his genius abides. + +Some of his forecasts of the future have come true, others are certain +yet to be fulfilled. He was the real founder of University Extension, +and he urged that the University of London should be made a teaching +institution only. Mr. Paul's estimate of him we may cordially assent to: +'Of all education reformers in the last century, not excepting his +father, Mr. Arnold was the most enlightened, the most far-sighted, and +the most fair-minded.' 'Fair-minded' he assuredly was when dealing with +the practical side of his profession. 'Fair-minded' he always believed +he was. 'Fair-minded' he seldom was on purely political or academic +matters, for then his extraordinary prejudices asserted their +sovereignty over him, and he was helpless beneath their sway. Mr. +Gladstone he disliked so intensely that we should hardly be wrong in +saying he hated him and all his works. + +He exhibited a supercilious contempt for what he chose to brand as the +provincialism of the 'Low Church' and the Free Church; for the +aristocracy, who to him were 'barbarians' for preferring field sports to +the improvement of their minds; for the masses of the community, whom he +dismissed with the epithet 'the populace,' while the middle-classes were +'Philistines' (a word he borrowed from the Germans), because they were +'respectable' and kept gigs! Really all this shows too small a mind, too +circumscribed an outlook on humanity, to qualify Matthew Arnold for a +place among philosophers or national reformers. It is satisfactory to +turn from him as politician and critic of the Bible, of literature, and +of society, to his status as a poet, which, though really secondary to +that as an educationist, he will naturally be most widely remembered by. +His letters, too, recently published, show the pleasant side of his +private life. 'He was a poet of the closet,' is Mr. Stedman's summary of +him. Arthur Clough preferred Alexander Smith (practically a forgotten +minor poet) to the author of 'Empedocles,' and complained of the +obscurity and 'pseudo-Greek inflation' of 'Tristram and Iseult.' 'The +Scholar-Gipsy' is his best elegiac poem; 'The Forsaken Merman' his best +narrative piece; 'Bacchanalia, or the New Age,' his best lyric. This is +from 'The Merman': + + 'Children dear, was it yesterday + We heard the sweet bells over the bay? + In the caverns where we lay, + Through the surf, and through the swell, + The far-off sound of a silver bell? + Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, + Where the winds are all asleep; + Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, + Where the salt weed sways in the stream, + Where the sea-breeze, ranged all round, + Feed in the ooze of their pasture ground; + Where the sea-snakes coil and twine, + Dry their mail, and bask in the brine; + Where great whales come sailing by, + Sail, and sail, with unshut eye, + Round the world for ever and aye? + When did music come this way? + Children dear, was it yesterday?' + +Herein are lines more melodious, and ideas more English, than in other +verses, just because he 'let himself go' more than usual. He was +generally too self-conscious to do this at all. + +His schools were Winchester and Rugby. His college was Balliol. For a +short time he was master under his father. For four years he acted as +private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, and in 1857 was made Inspector of +Schools. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1857 to 1867. He died +suddenly of inherited heart disease while running to catch a tram at +Liverpool in 1888, at sixty-six years of age. All this may be read in +any Dictionary of Biography, and really there is little more to note of +events in his life outside the daily routine of his official career. He +was buried at Laleham, where he was born. Something better might be his +epitaph than his own pessimistic lines: + + 'Creep into this narrow bed, + Creep, and let no more be said.' + + + + + PHILARETVS, HIS INSTRUCTIONS TO HIS + SONNE + + + 'Deare Sonne, as thou art tender to mee, remember these + advertisements of thy careful father. + 'Bee zealous in the service of thy God; ever recommending + in the prime houre of the day all thy ensuing actions to + His gracious protection. + 'Bee constant in thy Resolves, ever grounded on a + religious feare, that they may bee seconded by God's + favour. + 'Bee serious in thy Studies; with all humility crave the + assistance of others, for thy better proficiency. + 'Bee affable to all; familiar to few. + 'Bee to such a constant consort where thou hast hope + to bee a daily proficient. + 'Bee provident and discreetly frugal in thy expense. + 'Honour those in whose charge thou art instructed. + 'And, sweet Jesu, with Thy grace enrich him, to Thy + glory, my comfort. + + 'Thy deare Father, + + 'PHILARETVS.' + + + '_Essais upon the Five Senses, Revived by a new Supplement, + with a pithy one upon Detraction, continued + with sundry Christian Resolves, etc._, by RIC. BRATHVVAYT, + ESQ. (1635). + +[Illustration: + _Photo by Gilbert Hogg, Kendal._ + + BURNESIDE HALL, NEAR KENDAL. + + The Home of Richard Braithwaite.] + + + + + XXI + + DRUNKEN BARNABY + + RICHARD BRAITHWAITE + + + 'A self-deluded fool is he who deems + The head is innocent that moves the hand. + A fount impure may taint a thousand streams. + The devil did not do the work he planned. + He is the very worst of evil pests + Who fears to execute, and but suggests.' + S. C. HALL: _The Trial of Sir Jasper_. + +A mile or so from the picturesque town of Kendal is a village, standing +on both sides of the rushing little river Kent, now called Burneside, +though anciently Barnside. It has a church of old foundation, rebuilt +early in last century, chiefly by private subscription, but partly by +enforced church rates, after the custom of that age. It has a fine +bridge crossed by the road leading to the mountain heights and the long, +deep valleys, so wildly beautiful, and beginning to be so far-famed +through Mrs. Humphrey Ward's romances. Adjoining the bridge is a large +paper-mill, where formerly stood a worsted-mill and patent candle-wick +cutting factory. The village possesses an institute and library, and a +public-house of the Earl Grey type. The people seem contented and +intelligent, and as the number of them has grown from 650 in 1830 to +over 1,000 within fifty years, we may fairly point to it as an +object-lesson for those who desire to see village industries and 'garden +manufacturing villages' multiplied, and through them the neighbouring +farming interests improved and enriched. + +A short stroll towards the northern uplands brings the visitor to a +ruined, ivy-clad Peel-tower, one of those relics of border-warfare days +with which these regions abound. As in many other cases, so in this, +when the times became more settled, a manor-house grew up around the +grim, square-built battlemented tower, which mansion is now, in still +later and quieter days, a farmhouse. To the manor and dwelling succeeded +the subject of this sketch on his father's death in 1610, or shortly +afterwards. He came of a race of Westmorland landed gentry, owning +estates here, and at Ambleside and Appleby. It is not known where he was +born. He was entered as a gentleman commoner at Oriel College, Oxford, +as a native of Northumberland, and it is, of course, possible that his +father, a wealthy man, held residential property in that county. The +internal evidence of his writings, however, has been of late held to be +sufficiently strong to prove him a native of Kendal. His words, in an +address to 'The Aldermen of Kendall,' seem very explicit: + + 'Within that native place where I was born, + It lies in you, dear townsmen, to reforme.' + +Anthony a'Wood, in his 'Athenæ Oxoniensis,' tells how Braithwaite--or, +as he spells the name, Brathwayte--was sent to the University at sixteen +years of age in 1604. He remained there three years, 'avoiding as much +as he could the rough pathes of Logic and Philosophy, and tracing those +smooth ones of Poetry and Roman History, in which at length he did +excell.' Thence he went to Cambridge, studying literature 'in dead and +living authors.' From Cambridge he proceeded to London to read law in +the Inns of Court. In his father's will there are indications, and in +his own later writings there are sorrowful confessions, that, for a +while, at all events, he lived a wild, roystering life in the +Metropolis. 'The day seemed long wherein I did not enjoy these +pleasures; the night long wherein I thought not of them. I knew what +sinne it was to sollicit a maid into lightnesse; or to be drunken with +wine, wherein was excesse; or to suffer mine heart to be oppressed with +surfetting and drunkennesse; yet for all this, run I on still in mine +evil wayes.' His father's death-bed doubts of him, and the tying up of +the estate bequeathed to him, till he had amended, seem to have brought +him to himself. While living at Burneside Hall, during the early days of +the Civil Wars he was made a Captain of the local Royalist trained +bands, a Deputy-Lieutenant, and J.P. for the county, and spent his +leisure in composing and publishing the more serious of his books. Seven +years after entering on his possessions, he married Miss Frances Lawson, +of Darlington, but surreptitiously, probably because of objections +raised by the young lady's parents. It seems to have been more than a +love-match--a happy union of sixteen years' duration--producing a family +of nine--six sons and three daughters. Six years of widowhood, and then +he married a Yorkshire lady, who brought him another manor, Catterick, +where for the future he resided till his death. The sole issue of this +second marriage was a son--Strafford--who was knighted, and was killed +in an engagement with an Algerian man-of-war--in the ship _Mary_, of +which Sir Roger Strickland was commander. In 1673 Richard Braithwaite +died, and was buried in Catterick Parish Church, a mural monument duly +setting forth the fact in customary Latin. Anthony a'Wood says he bore +during his steady years 'the character of a well-bread (_sic_) gentleman +and a good neighbour.' Mr. Haslewood, his most competent editor, has +collected, I know not from whence, some oral traditions of his personal +appearance, interesting as a picture of the seventeenth-century northern +gentry, as well as of the individual. He was, although below the common +stature, one of the handsomest men of the time, and well proportioned, +remarkable for ready wit and humour, and of polished manners and +deportment. He usually wore a light gray coat, a red waistcoat, leather +breeches, and a high-crowned hat. From a full-length portrait in the +first edition of his 'English Gentleman,' which is believed to be his +likeness, he wore also boots, spurs, sword, belt, and cloak. He was so +neat in his appearance, and lively in manner, that his equals bestowed +upon him the nickname of 'Dapper Dick.' + +He earned from later generations a far less enviable soubriquet--that of +'Drunken Barnaby.' This is because he is--and rightly so, without +doubt--credited with the authorship of a notorious book called by him +originally 'Barnabæ Itinerarium, or Barnabee's Journal.' It was done in +Latin and English on opposite pages, to 'most apt numbers reduced, and +to the old tune of Barnabe commonly chanted.' The poem would seem to +have passed out of general recollection, till in 1716 it was +republished by London booksellers under the title of 'Drunken Barnaby's +Four Journeys to the North of England,' and alleged to have been found +among some musty old books that had a long time lain by in a corner, and +now at last 'made publick.' This was a fabricated title with the +intention of catching the public taste, because of a popular ballad of +the same name then current. The Itinerary may well have been the +production of his muse during his London wild-oat days. Drunken and +licentious the traveller certainly was. He gives a rough, coarse picture +of the depraved manners of the times, against which zealous Puritans +were preaching and vigorously protesting. + +Mr. Atkinson, in his 'Worthies of Westmorland,' calls him a 'strolling +minstrel.' A stroller he was, of course, but not a minstrel in any other +sense than as a keeper of a rhyming diary. He also says that 'Drunken +Barnaby' was a nickname of his own choice. This is too cruel! +Braithwaite never called himself so, and the term, when more than a +quarter of a century after his death it was invented for trade purposes, +was supposed to belong, not to Braithwaite at all, but to a certain +'Barnaby Harrington,' a supposed Yorkshire schoolmaster and +horse-dealer. 'Barnabæ Itinerarium' has little merit as poetry. It is +mainly of interest to moderns for the light it throws--like +the water-poet, Taylor's, 'Penniless Pilgrimage,' and his +'Merry-wherry-ferry Voyage'--on the social condition of Stuart and +Commonwealth England, as well as for its local allusions. Take of the +latter, for example, these: + + 'Thence to Sedbergh, sometimes joy-all, + Gamesome, gladsome, richly royal, + But those jolly boys are sunken, + Now scarce once a year one drunken; + There I durst not well be merry, + Farre from home old Foxes werry.[B] + + * * * * * + + 'Thence to Kendall, pure her state is, + Prudent too her magistrate is, + In whose Charter to them granted. + Nothing but a Mayor is wanted;[C] + Here it likes me to be dwelling, + Bousing, loving, stories telling.' + + * * * * * + + 'Thence to Garestang, where are feeding + Heards with large fronts freely breeding; + Thence to Ingleforth I descended, + Where choice bull-calfs will be vended; + Thence to Burton's boundiers pass I, + Faire in flocks, in pastures grassie. + + * * * * * + + 'Thence to Lonesdale, where were at it + Boys that scorn'd quart-ale by statute, + Till they stagger'd, stammer'd, stumbled, + Railed, reeled, rowled, tumbled, + Musing I should be so stranged, + I resolv'd them, I was changed. + + 'To the sinke of sin they drew me, + Where like Hogs in mire they tew me, + Or like Dogs unto their vomit, + But their purpose I o'recommed; + With shut eyes I flung in anger + From those Mates of death and danger.' + +[B] (Old foxes are wary when far from home.) + +[C] It seems a Mayor was granted subsequently. + +On another journey he came to 'Kendall,' and there he did 'what men call +spend all,' drinking 'thick and clammy ale,' and, passing on to +Staveley, drank again all night. He might in those days have well +deserved to be ear-marked for a 'drunken' vagabond, yet it is not fair +to the memory of any man to brand him only and for ever with frolics and +follies and evil deeds of which he afterwards repented, and would gladly +have atoned for. + +We, at all events, would prefer to think of Richard Braithwaite at his +best, and not at his worst. He was the author of fully three score +volumes of prose and poetry, in Latin and in English, essays, sonnets, +madrigals. The titles of only a few can be quoted--'A Strappado for the +Devil,' 'Love's Labyrinth,' 'Shepherd's Tales or Eclogues,' 'Nature's +Embassie,' 'The English Gentleman,' 'The English Gentlewoman,' +'Whimsies, or a New Cast of Characters.' There is a good deal of telling +satire in the last of these: + +'An Almanack-maker is the most notorious knave pickt out of all these, +for under colour of astrology he practices necromancy.' + +'A Gamester--professes himself honest, and publishes himself Cheat upon +discovery. + +'A Traveller is a fraud, if he travaile to novellize himself and not to +benefit his country. + +'A Launderer is also one if she wash her skinne, but staine her soule, +and so soile her inward beauty.' + +In 'A Spiritual Spicerie' he begins a poem: + + 'Morall mixtures or Divine + Aptly culled, and Couch'd in order, + Are like Colours in a Shrine, + Or choice flowers set in a border.' + +In 'Holy Memorials' he bemoans his past waywardness and looseness, and +speaks of being sore perplexed when his own wanton verses were repeated +in his hearing, and 'though I did neither own them nor praise them, yet +must I in another place answer for them, if Hee, on whom I depend, +shall not in these teares which I shed drowne the memory of them.' Like +many of his pious contemporaries, he tried his hand at turning the +Psalms of David into English verse. If they fall short in his +translations of the beauty and strength of our prose versions--and they +have in no degree gripped the churches--these sacred hymns helped to +ripen his own character and faith, and he is very sincere in concluding +his efforts with: + + 'Praise to the God of Heaven, + Be given by Mee a Worme, + That David's numbers in this forme, + To Mee a Worme hath given.' + +Adding on the last leaf, 'Other errours favourably excuse, and amend at +pleasure.' + +The quaintness of his spelling, of his metres, of his expressions, +commend his works to lovers of old literature. Some are reprinted, +others are scarce. The first edition of 'Barnaby' is almost +unobtainable, and that of 'A Survey of History,' a quarto volume with +portrait, has just been offered me for £2. + + + + + SWARTHMORE HALL + + + 'I went through a gate and found myself in a little green paddock, + where there was not even one rose left "to mark where a garden had + been." There were the principal windows--one little window looking + out from George Fox's study; the other two were old-fashioned + bay-windows, much larger. From the uppermost windows Fox used to + preach, sometimes, to his friends in the garden below. Near the + bay-window is the little old doorway, to which two rude stone steps + led up. All else was plain and unpretending. Inside I was shown the + "hall," a quaint, flagged apartment, on the ground-floor, with a + great, old-fashioned fireplace, and with a kind of stone daïs in the + recess of the mullioned window. Here I was told the earliest + meetings of the "Friends" were held. From this room, two steps led + up to a little sanctuary, which was Fox's study; and I felt as if + every footfall there was an intrusion, for that dim-lighted room, + with its tiny lattice and quaint furniture, was the cell of a saint, + "of whom the world was not worthy."'--EDWIN WAUGH: _Rambles in the + Lake Country_. + + +[Illustration: + _Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._ + + SWARTHMORE HALL, ULVERSTONE. + +The Home of Judge and Margaret Fell, and afterwards of George Fox.] + + + + + XXII + + LAST WORDS ABOUT OUR CELEBRITIES + + + 'Adjust your proposed amount of reading to your time and + inclination; but whether that amount be large or small, let it be + varied in its kind, and widely varied. If I have a confident opinion + on any one point connected with the improvement of the human mind, + it is on this.'--DR. THOMAS ARNOLD. + + +This lovely land of lake and mountain, dale and fell, in which my lot is +happily cast in old age, is too full of literary and artistic memories, +as well as ethnological and historic associations for anything to be +given in great detail. Over and above the beauty of its scenery and the +wealth of its natural productions, it offers to the traveller such +visions and glimpses of eminent men and women in the world of letters as +no other spot in the British Islands can show. Almost every village and +hamlet has some connection with a departed worthy of whom it is still +proud. Not to speak for the moment of the relation of Keswick to +Coleridge and Southey, or of Grasmere to De Quincey and the Wordsworths, +or of Coniston to Ruskin, of Ambleside to the Arnolds, or of Windermere +to 'Christopher North,'--of all whom I have treated at length--we have +roadside cottages, pleasant villas, and town houses, laying claim to +special distinction because someone of whom the nation is proud was +born, or lived, or died there. At Ambleside, for instance, near to Fox +How, dwelt William Edward Forster, the unfortunate statesman who would +have been more happily remembered in Ireland, and in connection with +national education by a larger section of his fellow countrymen, had he +entertained, during his public career, the enlightened views of his +devoted father, and the circle in which he and John Bright were trained. +Near there, too, for a time, Felicia Hemans found a peaceful home, after +her many trials, in a cottage still marked on the map as 'Dove's Nest,' +a lovely retreat for a poetess, in good sooth. The archæologist +Nicholson, poor in this world's gear, but rich in ancient lore, helps to +complete the galaxy of 'bright particular stars' that clustered about +the water-head of Winander. + +Here in Kendal we have a tablet on the front of the house where Romney, +the portrait painter, died, carefully and undeservedly (as some think) +tended by the wife whom he had left alone so long. We show the yard in +which was the shop wherein he learned his first trade, and in our town +hall are several valuable pictures of his which will amply repay +visitors for a pilgrimage to our borough. Here lived Dr. Dalton, the +great chemist, once a tutor in our ancient Friends' School; and here +also Gough, the blind botanist, who knew any and every flower by the +feel of it upon his fingers and lips. Mrs. Humphrey Ward has given us +delightful word-pictures of the dales whose gateways we see from our +hillside garden as we look to the mighty summits across the verdant +valley of the Kent. Within a walk from our house stands the old +Baronial Hall where Agnes Strickland gathered material for her 'Queens +of England,' and where she wrote 'copy' for her publishers. The +straggling village of Troutbeck, just beneath yonder huge mountain-dome, +whereon the Baal-fires used to be lighted every midsummer eve, was the +ancestral home of the Hogarths; and in that valley Charlotte Brontë +pondered some of her best works, and sketched her backgrounds from the +moorland heights. Not all her scenery is Yorkshire, whatever Yorkshire +folk may imagine. + +Further afield still, and across the watershed of our Westmorland +ramparts, on the edge of Thirlmere, Hall Caine spent his days in +producing 'The Shadow of a Crime.' + +Away to the westward of us, at the foot of Windermere, where we often +take our Southern friends for afternoon tea in the sweet summer-time, is +Newby Bridge--a place that, with its river and its woods, would have +surely inspired in Kingsley, had he seen it as we have done, another +song like 'Clear and Cool.' + +Here Mrs. Gaskell indited her charming novels of old-world, homely +people, and their ways. Here came up Nathaniel Hawthorne from his +Liverpool Consulate to compose his essays and write appreciative notes +upon the district. + +To the north of us, just beyond the farthest loop of the steep and +winding railway incline, up and down which two-engined trains career all +day long, is Shap, the birthplace of antediluvian glaciers and the +celebrated Egyptologist, Wilkinson. + +Mrs. Ratcliffe, the romancist; Grey, the elegist; William Watson, of +'Wordsworth's Grave'; Turner, the artist; Gilpin, the lover of rough +woodlands; and another Gilpin, 'the Apostle of the North,' in Queen +Mary's days; George Fox and his farmer preachers--founders of Quakerism; +Philip Sidney's sister, the lovely Countess of Pembroke--all these +belong more or less to the Lake Counties, and the homes of most of them, +while resident here, are yet to be seen. Brantwood looks over Coniston +Water to the quaint round chimneys and the gables of the century-stained +hall of the Le Flemings, and beyond it towers the gigantic cone of the +Old Man mountain. Dove Cottage, with its pretty garden laid out by the +hands of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, nestles beneath the wooded hill +at Grasmere. Greta Hall yet stands in Keswick, and the row of +lodging-houses where the author of 'Thorndale' and of 'Gravenhurst' met +the wife who proved the soul of his soul, and has written so sweetly of +her spouse. William Clarkson's retreat is on Ullswater's shore-lands; +and the honeymoon home of Tennyson, 'Tent Lodge,' on those of Coniston. + +Yet long, long after the last stone of all these honoured buildings has +been overthrown to form part of a cottage or a mansion for someone of a +future generation--long, long after the poets' bones laid in Grasmere +burial-ground have mouldered into dust and become part of the life of +the overshadowing trees--long, long after the commemorative marbles in +Crossthwaite Church have become marred beyond recognition--the hills and +streams whose glories were chanted by our Minnesingers of prose and +verse will remain virtually unchanged though with an added glory not +theirs in olden days--the glory of the human soul awakened by them to +truth and beauty--the glory of art and song shining on every valley and +peak. + +There are still some few living amongst us in this 'playground of +England' who are carrying on the literary traditions peculiar to it, of +whom another hand than mine will write hereafter, for they will be men +of mark ere their life-work closes. They have begun well and will finish +better. Nor are the possibilities of further expansions of poetry, or +legend, or history, or prose idylls yet exhausted. There are fields +unbroken awaiting the arrival of him who shall help to brighten a new +age. There are romances, and novels, and epic poems still stored away in +the narrative of the Roman Conquest and occupation; of the creeping +northward of the Saxons from land and sea; of the coming of the +fair-haired Norsemen in their long ships from the north seashores; of +the Kingdom of Strathclyde, with its varying fortunes; of the medieval +barons and their castles; of the dark-age church and its abbeys. There +are odes and lyrics still lingering among the heath-clad fells, and the +sounding forces, and the purling becks, that will be captured and given +to the world some day through the help of him by whom the in-breathing +of the spirit is felt. Our snow-fields on wintry uplands, in sunshine +or glimmering moonlight, are awaiting the pen that can adequately +picture them. + +There are tales of border-raids, and Arthurian legends, and wealth of +fairy lore to be gathered, and 'country memories rich inlaid' by one who +shall be born here, or choose our shires for his home, and shall put on +singing-robes of sufficient quality and colour. 'I would I were a poet +happy-mad,' exclaims one of those whose lives I have epitomized: + + 'I would I were a poet happy-mad, + Up like a lark i' the morning of the times, + To sing above the human harvesters; + Drop fancies, dainty-sweet, to cheer their toil, + And hurry out a ripe luxuriance + Of life in song, as though my heart would break + And sing them sweet and precious memories, + And golden promises, and throbbing hopes; + Hymn the great future with its mystery, + That startles us from out the dark of time, + With secrets numerous as a night of stars.' + + + THE END + + + _Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, London, E.C._ + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary Celebrities of the English +Lake-District, by Frederick Sessions + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42476 *** |