Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

We search the mighty world above and under,

  Yet nowhere find the soul we fain would find,

  Speech in the hollow rumbling of the thunder,

  Words in the whispering wind.

  We yearn for brotherhood with lake and mountain;

  Our conscious soul seeks conscious sympathy,

  Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain,

  Gods on the craggy height and roaring sea.

  We find but soulless sequences of matter,

  Fact linked to fact by adamantine rods,

  Eternal bonds of former sense and latter,

  Dead laws for living Gods.

  They care not any whit for pain or pleasure

  That seem to men the sum and end of all:

  Dumb force and barren number are their measure;

  What can be, shall be, though the great world fall.

  They take no heed of man or man’s deserving,

  Reck not what happy lives they make or mar,

  Work out their fatal will, unswerved, unswerving,

  And know not that they are.

  Can lifeless law beget on senseless matter

  The fuller life of self-reflecting thought?

  Or may the pregnant soul itself but scatter

  These myriad fancies through a world of nought?

  Are all these outer shapes a vain illusion

  (As in deep tones our clearest prophet sings),

  And mind alone, set free from vague confusion,

  The inmost core of things?

  The city lies below me, wrapped in slumber;

  Mute and unmoved in all her streets she lies:

  Mid rapid thoughts that throng me without number

  Flashes the image of an old surmise:

  Her hopes and fears and griefs are all suspended;

  Ten thousand souls throughout her precincts take

  Sleep, in whose bosom life and death are blended,

  And I alone awake.

  Am I alone the solitary centre

  Of all the seeming universe around,

  With mocking senses through whose portals enter

  Unmeaning fantasies of sight and sound?

  Are all the countless minds wherewith I people

  The empty forms that float before my eyes

  Vain as the cloud that girds the distant steeple

  With snowy canopies?

  Yet though the world be but myself unfolded,

  Soul bent again on soul in mystic play,

  No less each sense and thought and act is moulded,

  By dead necessities I may not sway.

  Some mightier power against my will can move me,

  Some potent nothing force and overawe;

  Though I be all that is, I feel above me

  The godhead of blind law.

  I seem a passive consciousness of passion

  Poised in the boundless vault of empty space;

  A mirror for strange shapes of alien fashion

  That come and go before my lonely face.

  My soul that reigns the mistress of creation,

  That grasps within herself the sum of things,

  Wears round her feet the gyves of limitation,

  And fetters bind her wings.

  The sense I fain would feel I cannot summon;

  The sense I fain would shirk I cannot shun:

  I know the measured sequence that they come in;

  I may not change the grooves wherein they run.

  I know not if they be but phantom faces

  Whose being is but seeming, seen awry:

  They pass, I know not how, and leave no traces;

  They come I know not why.

  My inmost hope, my deepest aspiration,

  Each quiver of my brain, each breath I draw,

  Fear curdling up the blood, love’s wild pulsation,

  Work surely out the inevitable law:

  The will herself that pants for freedom, flouting

  Its soulless despotism, yet works it out:

  Ay, even though I doubt, my very doubting

  Fulfils the law I doubt.

  So, dimly cloaked in infinite disguises,

  The hopes I seem to grasp again dissolve,

  And through their vacant images arises

  The central problem that I may not solve;

  Till, like this fading creeper’s blighted blossom,

  My life too fade before some wintry breath,

  And sink at last upon the peaceful bosom

  Of all-embracing death.

  But now that far and wide the pale horizon,

  Faint grey to eastward, darker on the west,

  Lights up the misty sphere its border lies on,

  My weary brain has need of gentle rest.

  The growing haze of sunrise gives me warning

  To check these wayward thoughts that dive too deep.

  Perchance a little light will come with morning,

  Perchance I shall but sleep.

  A BALLADE OF EVOLUTION

  IN the mud of the Cambrian main

  Did our earliest ancestor dive:

  From a shapeless albuminous grain

  We mortals our being derive.

  He could split himself up into five,

  Or roll himself round like a ball;

  For the fittest will always survive,

  While the weakliest go to the wall.

  As an active ascidian again

  Fresh forms he began to contrive,

  Till he grew to a fish with a brain,

  And brought forth a mammal alive.

  With his rivals he next had to strive

  To woo him a mate and a thrall;

  So the handsomest managed to wive,

  While the ugliest went to the wall.

  At length as an ape he was fain

  The nuts of the forest to rive,

  Till he took to the low-lying plain,

  And proceeded his fellows to knive.

  Thus did cannibal men first arrive

  One another to swallow and maul:

  And the strongest continued to thrive,

  While the weakliest went to the wall.

  ENVOY

  Prince, in our civilised hive,

  Now money’s the measure of all;

  And the wealthy in coaches can drive,

  While the needier go to the wall.

  THE RETURN OF APHRODITE

  DEEP in Cythera a cave,

  Pealing a thunderous paean,

  Roars, as the shivering wave

  Whitens the purple Ægean:

  There to astonish the globe,

  Terrible, beautiful, mighty,

  Clad with desire as a robe,

  Rose Aphrodite.

  Never again upon earth

  Like her arose any other;

  Got without labour or birth,

  Sprung without father or mother:

  Zeus, from his aery home,

  Seeing the roseate water

  Lift her aloft on its foam,

  Hailed her his daughter.

  Sweet was her shape, and is now;

  Sweeter the breath of her kisses;

  Delicate ivory brow;

  Wealth of ambrosial tresses;

  Mouth that no favour denies;

  Cheek that no ardour abashes;

  Languishing eyelids and eyes,

  Languishing lashes.

  Then, as her luminous face

  Shone like the ocean that bore her,

  Every nation and race

  Worshipped her, falling before her;

  Chaplets they culled for her fane,

  Fairer than any can cull us;

  Greece gave her Sappho’s refrain,

  Rome her Catullus.

  Soft was the sound of their lyre,

  Luscious their lay without cloying,

  Till, as a billow of fire,

  Crushing, consuming, destroying,

  Wasting her wines in their spleen,

  Spilling her costly
cosmetics,

  Swept the implacable, lean

  Horde of ascetics.

  Darkness they spread over earth,

  Sorrow and fasting of faces;

  Mute was the music of mirth,

  Hushed was the chorus of Graces;

  Back to the womb of the wave,

  Terrible, beautiful, mighty,

  Back with the boons that she gave

  Sank Aphrodite.

  Down the abysses of time

  Rolled the unchangeable ages,

  Reft of the glory of rhyme

  Graven in passionate pages;

  Sad was the measure, and cold,

  Dead to the language of kisses;

  Sadly the centuries rolled

  Down the abysses.

  Now in the ends of the earth

  Tenderer singers and sweeter,

  Smit with a ravening dearth,

  Cry on the goddess and greet her;

  Cry with their rapturous eyes

  Flashing the fire of emotion;

  Call her again to arise

  Fresh from the ocean.

  Hot as of old are their songs,

  Breathing of odorous tresses,

  Murmur of amorous tongues,

  Ardour of fervid caresses;

  Trilled with a tremulous mouth

  Into the ear of the corner,

  Warm as the breath of the South,

  Soft as the Summer.

  Under the depth of the wave,

  Hearing their passionate numbers,

  Piercing her innermost cave,

  Waken her out of her slumbers,

  Soothed with the sound of their strain,

  Beautiful, merciful, mighty,

  Back to the nations again

  Comes Aphrodite.

  SUNDAY AT BRAEMAR

  ALONE amid the solemn heathy desert

  Whose bleak brown sides o’erhang Braemar,

  I sit, this misty Scottish August Sabbath,

  High up the spurs of Lochnagar.

  Above, fierce swirls of moaning autumn weather

  Drive on thin wreaths of vaporous cloud;

  While, hanging low, the blight that dims the background

  Spreads o’er heaven’s face its sullen shroud.

  Beneath me heaves afar one solid ocean,

  Wave after wave of moor and ben,

  Flung seething up in granite-crested billow,

  Or sunk in troughs of sweeping glen.

  No laughing eye of silver-rippled lakelet,

  But black expanse of peaty loch,

  Whose moody depths unstirred obscurely mirror

  Fantastic forms of gaunt grey rock.

  No golden croft or grassy-tedded homestead;

  No close-cropped lawn of ruddled sheep;

  But holt and hurst where roam high-antlered faces,

  And purple moors where grey grouse creep.

  While here and there some low-browed, turf-built shieling

  Peeps out through friths of fir or birk,

  Where frowns, austere, elect, the shingled steeple

  That tops some sombre granite kirk.

  But leagues between, a vagrant sunbeam flashes

  On palace wall or castled pride,

  Thronged with gay-kilted crowds whose lairdly pleasures

  Spread Libyan desert far and wide.

  Who thrust across wild waves of western ocean

  Disacred remnants of great clans;

  Who gave to fir and whins and forest roamers

  The generous haughs that once were man’s.

  As dazed I scan this weary waste of heather,

  And desolate haunts of bird or deer,

  And lonely homes of selfish Saxon splendour,

  A southern cry rings in my ear.

  A cry that, bursting from ten thousand bosoms,

  Awoke from midnight into noon

  Marseille, Bordeaux, Saint Etienne, Lyon, Paris,

  With lips that shrieked ‘Vive la Commune!’

  My thirsty vision pants for sunlit waters,

  And luscious glebe of vine-clad lands,

  And chanted psalms of universal freedom,

  And sacred grasp of brotherly hands:

  Pants to behold the ruddy Highland ranger,

  With fair-cheeked sons of English soil,

  Linked to the sunburnt throng of southern cities

  In one vast commonwealth of toil:

  Banded to break the pride of hoarded treasure,

  Or insolent boast of lordly birth:

  To fling the equal boon of freeborn manhood

  Through all the spreading skirts of earth:

  No longer with the red right hand of slaughter,

  Nor eyes made drunk with blood and wine;

  But sober sweat of brows whose slow endeavour

  Piles surely up the grand design:

  Not eager to forestall in raw impatience

  The lagging wheels of distant years,

  But planning well a deep-set revolution,

  Unstained by blot of blood or tears.

  Till once again that holy cry re-echo

  From mightier crowds and louder still,

  Through ocean-sundered streets, with happier auspice

  Of undivided human will:

  And once again this dreary Scottish landscape

  With golden dimples smile afar,

  Spreading the nobler wealth of happy harvests

  High up the slopes of Lochnagar:

  While, side by side, the men of many nations

  Blend in one boundless league and free,

  As Thames and Seine, St. Lawrence, Nile, and

  Ganges

  Mingle in one illimitable sea.

  THE FIRST IDEALIST

  A JELLY-FISH swam in a tropical sea,

  And he said, ‘This world it consists of Me:

  There’s nothing above and nothing below

  That a jelly-fish ever can possibly know

  (Since we’ve got no sight, or hearing, or smell),

  Beyond what our single sense can tell.

  Now, all that I learn from the sense of touch

  Is the fact of my feelings, viewed as such.

  But to think they have any external cause

  Is an inference clean against logical laws.

  Again, to suppose, as I’ve hitherto done,

  There are other jelly-fish under the sun,

  Is a pure assumption that can’t be backed

  By a jot of proof or a single fact.

  In short, like Hume, I very much doubt

  If there’s anything else at all without.

  So I come at last to the plain conclusion,

  When the subject is fairly set free from confusion,

  That the universe simply centres in Me,

  And if I were not, then nothing would be.’

  That minute, a shark, who was strolling by,

  Just gulped him down, in the twink of an eye

  And he died, with a few convulsive twists.

  But, somehow, the universe still exists.

  FOR AMY LEVV’S URN

  THIS bitter age that pits our maids with men

  Wore out her woman’s heart before its time:

  Too wan and pale,

  She strove to scale

  The icy peaks of unimagined rhyme.

  There, worlds broke sunless on her frighted ken;

  The mountain air struck chill on her frail breath:

  Fainting she fell, all weary with her climb,

  And kissed the soft, sweet lips of pitying death.

  A PRAYER

  A CROWNED Caprice is god of this world;

  On his stony breast are his white wings furled.

  No ear to listen, no eye to see,

  No heart to feel for a man hath he.

  But his pitiless arm is swift to smite;

  And his mute lips utter one word of might,

  Mid the clash of gentler souls and rougher,

  ‘Wrong must thou d
o, or wrong must suffer.’

  Then grant, oh dumb blind god, at least that we

  Rather the sufferers than the doers be.

  IN CORAL LAND

  A TINY fay

  Deep nestling lay

  In a purple bay

  Unruffled

  On whose crystal floor

  The distant roar

  From the surf-bound shore

  Was muffled.

  With his fairy wife

  He passed his life

  Undimmed by strife

  Or quarrel;

  And the live-long day

  They would merrily play

  Through a labyrinth gay

  With coral.

  They loved to dwell

  In a pearly shell,

  And to deck their cell

  With amber:

  Or amid the caves

  That the ripplet laves

  And the beryl paves

  To clamber.

  By the limpet’s home

  And the vaulted dome

  Where the starfish roam

  They’d linger;

  In the mackerel’s jaw

  And the lobster’s claw

  They’d push and withdraw

  A finger.

  And queer little things

  With filmy wings

  And floating strings

  To guide them,

  Of softest mould,

  In swarms untold,

  Tumbled and rolled

  Beside them.

  On a darting shrimp

  Our frolicsome imp

  With bridle of gimp

  Would gambol;

  Or astride on the back

  Of a sea-horse black

  (As a gentleman’s hack)

  He’d amble.

  Of emerald green

  And sapphire’s sheen

  He made his queen

  A tiar;

  And the merry two

  Their whole life through

  Were as happy as you

  And I are.

  But if you say

  You think this lay

  Of the tiny fay

  Too silly,

  Let it have such praise

  As my eye betrays

  To your own sweet gaze,

  My Millie!

  For a man, he tries,

  And he toils and sighs,

  To be mighty wise

  And witty;

  But a dear little dame

  Has enough of fame

  If she wins the name

  Of pretty.

  AN ANSWER

  ‘But there! no man ever loved any woman well enough to love

  her only.’ — Extract from a Letter.

  THE shallow pool, content to woo the charms

  Of one coy mead, gapes dry in August days:

  The mightiest ocean winds enamoured arms

  Round countless capes in deep caressing bays.