by Grant Allen
9 Boulevard des Isles d’Or, Hyères,
Feb. 39 (1880).
Dear Mr. Spencer, — Many thanks for your note and kind inquiries. I am glad to say that my health has on the whole very decidedly improved since coming here, and that I hope to return in the spring fit for work again. We have not left Hyères, which we think on further acquaintance is the best fitted for invalids of all the Riviera towns; but last week I had not been feeling so well, and wanted change, so we went over to Nice for eight days, merely by way of a short trip. Our winter here has been really delightful, and we are now enjoying most lovely spring weather. I am extremely thankful that I have been enabled to escape this very severe winter in England. I hope your stay in Egypt was a pleasant one, and that you have returned stronger and fresher, to give us a new instalment of the Sociology. From your inquiries about the aloes, I am inclined to suppose you are turning your attention once more for a while to biological questions.
As regards the aloe, I shall be very glad to get you the leaf you wish for, and have no doubt I shall be easily able to do so. But we do not propose returning to England till the first week in May; and therefore I think (as you may want it for some immediate purpose) I had better get the first one I can find, and send it to you by Parcels Express. I suppose I am right in understanding you to mean the large prickly Agave, which grows all about the rocks at Hyères, and has a flowering stem some fifteen feet or so high. — Yours very sincerely, GRANT ALLEN.
That Allen would not have joined the ranks of professional novelists but for ‘res angusta domi’ is almost certain, and the first steps were taken with some little reluctance, because this meant quittance, at least for the time being, of realms charged with the speculations and inquiries dear to his heart. But he was a better story-teller than he knew; ‘a most successful artist,’ such is the judgement of Mr. Andrew Lang, ‘in the art for which he did not care.’ He cared, however, more and more for it as time went on, taking a real pleasure in plot and construction, and finding that pleasure enhanced by the opportunity which the novel afforded as the vehicle whereby heedful ear might be gained for views and opinions which, otherwise, would obtain no hearing. In his judgement, all fiction was, to borrow a term from chemistry, allotropic. He used to say that on two plots hang ‘all the law and the prophets’ in story-telling. ‘A loves B; B loves A. Hence smooth sailing. A loves B; B loves C. Hence complications.’ Our common friend, Canon Isaac Taylor, tackled him one evening at Aldeburgh on the trouble which all novelists must have in settling the fate of their characters. ‘For example, your villains; what do you do with them?—’ Oh, replied Allen, ‘we make them into canons!’ The story of the stages by which he took ‘the downward path’ (‘the upward path, one may say,’ so writes Mr. Andrew Lang, ‘judging by many of his excellent stories,’) has been told and retold by himself; but, for the completeness of this Memoir, his latest version, given in the Introduction to ‘Twelve Tales,’ selected by himself, and issued shortly before his death, must be given here: —
‘For many years after I took to the trade of author, I confined my writings to scientific or quasi-scientific subjects, having indeed little or no idea that I possessed in the germ the faculty of story-telling. But on one occasion, about the year 1880 (if I recollect aright), wishing to contribute an article to “Belgravia” on the improbability of a man’s being able to recognise a ghost as such, even if he saw one, and the impossibility of his being able to apply any test of credibility to an apparition’s statements, I ventured for the better development of my subject to throw the argument into the form of a narrative. I did not regard this narrative as a story: I looked upon it merely as a convenient method of displaying a scientific truth. However, the gods and Mr. Chatto thought otherwise. For, a month or two later, Mr. Chatto wrote to ask me if I could supply “Belgravia” with “another story.” Not a little surprised at this request, I sat down, like an obedient workman, and tried to write one at my employer’s bidding. I distrusted my own ability to do so, it is true; but Mr. Chatto, I thought, being a dealer in the article, must know better than I; and I was far too poor a craftsman at that time to refuse any reasonable offer of employment. So I did my best, “crassa Minerva.” To my great astonishment, my second story was accepted and printed like my first: the curious in such matters (if there be any) will, find them both in the volume entitled “Strange Stories” (published by Messrs. Chatto and Windus) under the headings of “Our Scientific Observations on a Ghost,” and “My New Year’s Eve among the Mummies.”
‘From that day forward for some years I continued at Mr. Chatto’s request to supply short stories from time to time to “Belgravia,” a magazine which he then edited. But I did not regard these my tentative tales in any serious light: and, fearing that they might stand in the way of such little scientific reputation as I possessed, I published them all under the prudent pseudonym of “J. Arbuthnot Wilson.” I do not know that I should have got much further on the downward path which leads to fiction, had it not been for the intervention of my good friend the late Mr. James Payn. When he undertook the editorship of the “Cornhill,” he determined at first to turn it into a magazine of stories only, and began to look about him for fresh blood to press into the service. Among the writers he then secured (I seem to recollect) were Dr. Conan Doyle and Mr. Stanley Weyman. Now, under Mr. Leslie Stephen’s editorship, I had been accustomed to contribute to the “Cornhill” occasional papers on scientific subjects: and one morning by an odd coincidence, I received two notes simultaneously from the new editor. The first of them was addressed to me by my real name; in it, Mr. Payn courteously but briefly informed me that he returned one such scientific article which I had sent for his consideration, as he had determined in future to exclude everything but fiction from the magazine — a decision which he afterwards saw reason to rescind. The second letter, forwarded through Messrs. Chatto and Windus, was addressed to me under my assumed name of “J. Arbuthnot Wilson,” and begged that unknown person to submit to Mr. Payn a few stories “like your admirable Mr. Chung.” Now, this Mr. Chung was a tale of a Chinese attaché in England, who fell in love with an English girl: I had first printed it, like the others of that date, in the pages of “Belgravia.” (Later on, it was included in the volume of “Strange Stories,” where any hypothetical explorer may still find it) Till that moment, I had never regarded my excursions into fiction in any serious light, setting down Mr. Chatto’s liking for them to that gentleman’s amiability, or else to his well-known scientific penchant But when a novelist like Mr. James Payn spoke well of my work — nay, more; desired to secure it for his practically new magazine — I began to think there might really be something in my stories worth following up by a more serious effort ‘Thus encouraged, I launched out upon what I venture to think was the first voyage ever made in our time into the Romance of the Clash of Races — since so much exploited. I wrote two short stories, “The Reverend John Creedy” and “The Curate of Churnside,” both of which I sent to Mr. Payn, in response to his invitation. He was kind enough to like them, and they were duly published in the “Cornhill.” At the time, their reception was disappointing: but gradually, since then, I have learned from incidental remarks that many people read them and remembered them; indeed, I have reason to think that these first serious efforts of mine at telling a story were among my most successful attempts at the art of fiction. Once launched as a professional story-teller by this fortuitous combination of circumstances, I continued at the trade, and wrote a number of tales for the “Cornhill” and other magazines, up till the year 1884, when I collected a few of them into a volume of “Strange Stories,” under my own name, for the first time casting off the veil of anonymity or the cloak of a pseudonym.
In the same year I also began my career as a novelist properly so called, by producing my first long novel, “Philistia.”’
A re-perusal of the eleven reprinted stories (the twelfth, ‘The Churchwarden’s Brother,’ is ‘entirely new, never having appeared in pu
blic before on this or on any other stage’) shows that if the elementary materials to which the novelist is restricted are few, Allen showed exceptional deftness in the various combinations he effected through them. It also shows with what strenuous unwavering purpose he made fiction the channel of philosophy and science, while not obtruding either to the detriment of interest in the story.
The dozen samples referred to above were chosen, Allen tells us, as illustrating best in different keys the various types of tale to which he devoted himself. In making this selection, he stood outside his work, and took (what few men can take), his own ‘parallax’ correctly. In ‘The Reverend John Creedy,’ the keynote is the persistence of atavism, or reversion to the original type; in ‘Frasine’s First Communion,’ it is the morality of the French marriage law in legitimising offspring born before the marriage of their parents; in ‘The Child of the Phalanstery,’ it is the weeding out of the unfit for the physical and moral wellbeing of the community; in ‘The Abbé’s Repentance,’ it is the dominance of the man over the celibate priest, and the self-sacrifice on fall from ideals opposed to Nature; in ‘Wolverden Tower,’ it is the old and not yet wholly extinct custom of foundation-sacrifice, or the walling-in of a victim to the disturbed earth-spirit when a building is erected; in ‘Janet’s Nemesis,’ it is the revenge of Nature on woman’s neglect or abnegation of her highest function; in ‘Langalula,’ it is the veneer of the ‘converted’ negro, and in ‘The Curate of Churnside’ the veneer of the ‘converted’ scoundrel; in ‘Cecca’s Lover,’ the light ethics of the Italian temperament, or the dependence of morals, which is as certain as that of physical constitution, on climate; in ‘The Backslider,’ the destruction of creed by culture; in ‘John Cann’s Treasure,’ the lust of gain that overreaches itself; in ‘Ivan Greet’s Masterpiece,’ the unattained ideal; and in ‘The Churchwarden’s Brother,’ another psychological study, inherited tendencies being illustrated in a staunch ‘pillar of the Church.’ In one of his most ingenious novels, ‘The Great Taboo,’ the savage theory of the soul as an intermittent tenant of the body, of which Mr. Frazer makes suggestive use in ‘The Golden Bough,’ is the ‘motif.’ It is handled with great dexterity. In his ‘Sign of the Ship’ (‘Longman’s Magazine,’ December 1899) Mr. Andrew Lang has an interesting note on ‘Kalee’s Shrine’ (1886), which is described on the title-page as by Grant Allen and May Cotes. He says: ‘ The germ of the tale was sent to me by a lady, and I suggested her collaboration with Mr. Allen. There was something of “the supernatural” (which he detested) in the romance, so he cut some nerve or other of the heroine’s, and rounded the point in that way, though he knew that he was writing false science. (It was the ‘inhibitory nerve’ of the heroine’s eyelid, the cutting of which had impossible consequences (p. 191). — E. C.) Anything was better than “the supernatural,” even a consciously false explanation. For such reasons I used to tell Mr. Allen that he was really as obscurantist as any Inquisitor. He thought that the end (science) justified the means. Once, I think, he did confess to something of this defect in conversation, or perhaps he only “put the question by,” as one of the many on which we could never agree. He was a most charming companion, and marvelled much that one could never see the world as he saw it He would give a little evolutionary lecture, and I would answer, “God is great” There were irreconcilable differences!’ To which Mr. Lang adds elsewhere (‘Daily News,’ 28th October 1899): ‘As one born to differ from Mr. Allen in almost every conceivable point, I never could irritate him by opposition, and this I am anxious to record as a proof of the wonderful sweetness of his nature.’ But, as his friend Mr. Purcell humorously says: ‘To find myself in agreement with Mr. Allen on any question whatever, critical, social, political, would indeed be a painful breach in a friendship which has subsisted for a quarter of a century without one cloud of acquiescence, concession, or retractation on either side. His philosophy I denounce as heretical, yet delight in; it is a pleasure to confound his detestable cutthroat politics; his panaceas for social ills I regard as deadliest poison, yet I would not have him drop them’ (Review of ‘The Lower Slopes’— ‘Academy,’ 31st March 1894).
The long ‘Sturm und Drang’ period was now followed by years into which, whatever of interruption to work might enter through ill-health and resulting moments of depression (‘my right lung will never be quite right,’ he says in a letter of June 1880 to Mr. Nicholson), he put an astounding amount of labour. But fiction was, with him, provision of means for higher ends; and, while busy over the short story or the regulation three-volume novel, there was no pause in the pursuit of studies, or in the gathering of facts, bearing on his cherished ‘magnum opus’ — an ‘ Inquiry into the Origins of Religions.’ Concerning the first (and, as events turned out, the only) instalment of this work, published in 1897 under the title ‘The Evolution of the Idea of God,’ he says in the preface: ‘I have been engaged upon collecting and comparing materials for more than twenty years. I have been engaged in writing my book for more than ten.’ Fortunately, as in some degree lightening mechanical labour, his memory was of the best Its capacity, contents, and accuracy were such that as Mr. Le Gallienae says in his charming assessment of the man, the phrase became current whenever any question was seeking answer, ‘We must look it’ up in Grant’ — (‘Fortnightly Review,’ December 1899, p. 1007). Between whiles he reports himself to Mr. Nicholson as ‘evolutionising for the “St. James’s Gazette,”’ and a month after that as having undertaken the book on ‘Anglo-Saxon Britain,’ to which Professor York Powell approvingly refers (p. 32); while there — are hints of — treatment of other subjects in this letter to Mr. Spencer, written at Lyme Regis 14th September 1880: —
Many thanks for the Appendix to ‘First Principles,’ which I have read with great interest. Most of the criticisms prove, as you abundantly show, that their authors are really incapable of understanding highly abstract reasoning. It is curious to see how wrong even a man like Leslie goes. I long ago noticed, in talking with ordinary intelligent scholars at Oxford, that they always accused you of vagueness, and could not see that your carefully guarded abstractness of statement was absolutely necessary in order to cover all the ground of your wide generalisations. They always wanted to use some more concrete expression which would limit your meaning to a part only of its original denotation. The worst of it is, replies of this sort fail to strike any ordinary critic, just because of this necessary limitation of understanding.
May I venture to call your attention to an article of mine in this month’s ‘Cornhill’ on the ‘Growth of Sculpture,’ which I think will interest you? I have never asked you to read anything of the sort before, because I know how valuable your time is; but I think in this case you would like to do so, as it carries out a few of your conclusions into a special field. — Yours very sincerely,
GRANT ALLEN.
Allen was no lover of that ‘squalid village’ London. ‘There are those who admire it... For myself, I love better the densely-peopled fields than this human desert, this beflagged and macadamised man-made solitude.’ ’Tis a matter about which contention is vain: ‘chacun à son goût.’ So in 1881 he settled at Dorking, finding among the Surrey hills and vales exhaustless wealth of material, and gathering round him at ‘The Nook’ an ever-widening circle drawn to him by a magnetic sweetness and old-world courtesy that disarmed the most prejudiced. And, there, no light attraction and privilege was his in the neighbourship of Mr. Meredith, who in a letter now before me says: ‘You know how highly I prized Grant Allen’s literary work, and the warmth of my feeling for him personally.’ That love of Nature, with its penetration of many a secret, which suffuses all the work of George Meredith, finding, as it seems to some of us, its fullest expression in his ‘Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth’ (the title itself is for the ‘healing of the nations’), and which, in the talks and gossipy essays of Grant Allen, invested every wayside weed with interest and deep meaning, was a spiritual bond between them, as it is between all who dra
w the inspiration of life from the Great Mother.
The somewhat relaxing air of Dorking, however, told against him in the winter; and as dryness and sunshine were his breath of life, he went southwards for a series of years to Algiers, or the Riviera, or Tyrol, or Italy, always ‘redeeming the time,’ storing up material for novel, or essay on science or art, or for historical guide-book. Here is a dainty little letter from Algiers to his boy. His writing, always marvellously clear, lost none of that virtue when reduced to the ‘hand’ now reproduced in facsimile.
Although somewhat anticipative, it is convenient to insert here the impression made by him on fellow-sojourners, and this has pleasant record in the following communication from Miss Bird, writing on behalf of her venerable brother, Dr. George Bird, whose friendships embrace a range of time including Leigh Hunt and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
6 Windmill Hill, Hampstead,
N.W. 12th Jan., 1900.
Dear Mr. Clodd, — We promised you a few words about our winters at Antibes with Grant Allen. George’s hand gets quickly tired, so I write for him. We have no letters of Grant’s, and no specimens of his writing, except interesting inscriptions in the books he gave us.
We first went to Antibes in January 1891, tempted there by a letter in the ‘Pall Mall Budget’ written by Grant Allen, and entitled ‘Why not Antibes?’ In this letter he sets forth, in tempting colours, the charms of the Cap d’Antibes, ‘the long low spit of dull olive grey land projected into the sea between Nice and Cannes.’ He gave an outline of the astonishing natural beauties, endless bays, grey rocks, blue sea, snowy Alps, Esterels sunsets, and warmly recommended the Grand Hôtel du Cap, the only hotel on the promontory, as precisely suited to the necessities of ‘the sturdy invalid.’ On the strength of that letter we went to Antibes, and began an intimate friendship with Grant Allen that was severed only by his death. We spent four winters there; and, although drawn southward by the blue sea and sunshine, the real magnet was Grant Allen. He was the first to discover to us the delights of the place — wild and free, with no obstructive; wire barriers, and open to all comers. His letter enticed numerous other sunshine-seekers, and he was always on the alert to do the honours of the enchanted region. Indeed, on these occasions, he had almost proprietory manners! When prevented from doing the honours, he charged George to do them for him. He was eager that the newcomer should get his first impression from the Light House Hill — an eminence from which the whole panorama of sea and mountain was disclosed to best advantage. And he loved to watch the sunsets from the grey rock-bound garden of Mr. Wyllie — the most beautiful garden in Europe — liberally opened to all comers at stated periods, and, to special friends, never closed.
