by Grant Allen
There was always a sort of tussle as to who should walk with Grant Allen — and no wonder — for could his talks on these occasions have been recorded they would have furnished exquisite new chapters for ‘The Evolutionist at Large,’ or ‘Vignettes from Nature.’ He would stop at a rosemary-crowned bank, take out his pocket-knife, and begin to scoop, and from a special spot, to untrained eyes looking a mere grey tangle, he would dig out a corkshaped portion of earth and show you the nest of a trapdoor spider. Or he would suddenly kick away a big stone in his path and reveal the snuggery of a scorpion; or he would gather a blossom, and handing round his inseparable companion, his pocket lens, would describe with enthusiasm the subtle devices by which at a special moment in its life the expanded blossom compels the visit of the pollen-carrying bee or other insect. His keen eye was always the quickest to discover the first anemone of the spring or the earliest grape hyacinth. He knew exactly not only where to look, but the day of the month on which the opening flower was due. His discourse on natural miracles was permeated to the core by his evolutionist views, making one realise, that to the flower, as to the insect, life is a struggle as ceaseless and inevitable as it Is to human beings. George used to say that if he had a son to educate he should like to give Grant Allen £1000 a year to take the lad a weekly walk in the country. Of course, you know how Grant Allen used to deplore the fact that young people, even those with the so-called highest advantages, are brought up to know next to nothing of the natural marvels that surround them; and he used to get laughed at for saying, ‘What a misfortune it is we should let our boys’ schooling interfere with their education!’ There was nothing in the shape of excitement in the life at Antibes. If we wanted shops or gaieties or gambling, we had to make a journey to Nice or Monte Carlo. But the life at the beautiful Cap, except on rare occasions, sufficed. Almost every day we had a picnic, each person carrying his own simple lunch. Grant Allen never started with us — the morning was the time he gave to work. We named a favourite spot, and when his task was over he and his wife (and his son when there for the holidays) used to join us. The myrtle bushes abounding at the Cap supplied us with perfumed springy couches. It was a favourite trick to walk slowly backwards into these compact wind-cropped masses; and as we crushed our way leisurely down, the air became charged with delicious resinous exhalations. The myrtle bushes were so springy and elastic, that after such apparent rough usage they speedily raised their heads again. Unlike some writers who, in company, are dumb, Grant Allen never spared himself, but always gave the best that was in him, always assuming an interest on the part of the listeners, and always accommodating his talk to the least intelligent among us.
There was one curious thing about him — he never seemed to read. Practically he travelled without books. Certainly he didn’t own a dictionary. In his sitting-room at Antibes there was barely a bookshelf, and no sign of ‘literature’ except the current magazine and newspaper, and perhaps the last new poet. If he did use a book of reference, it was Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough,’ or the ‘Flore Française’ of Gillet and Magne. This last-named was annotated in his small distinct hand, and the notes ought to be invaluable for any new edition. I have heard him say the best reading in the world was the ‘Continental Bradshaw,’ and I have seen him sitting for long spells on a journey south, entirely captivated by the problems he found in its pages. But if he could do without books, he could not do without pictures; bare walls froze ‘the genial current of his soul’; and he would bring with him autotypes of old masters or send to London for them, to decorate his sitting-room. After the picnic and the walks came the tea, and many a visitor to his many-windowed room will remember the flaming sunsets beyond the Esterels, sunsets so gorgeous that artists declared they were too ‘dramatic’ for the brush. One of the things that charmed him was the view of Corsica occasionally visible at sunset: he would then rush to friends’ rooms and beseech them not to lose a sight so rare and glorious. Evening brought the sociable hour in the big hall of the Cap, or the round game of romps for children, in which he enthusiastically joined. Or there would be a gathering in Grant Allen’s room, when the talk would turn on every subject, from the wickedness of ground rents to the merits of the last new poet. The commonplace and the conventional seemed to vanish in his company, and we loved to follow him into an ideal land where he vividly pictured things not as they are, but as he hoped they might become. At the Antibes Hotel it was natural that the majority he met differed from him, but to dissentients he was invariably gentle and forbearing. And it not unfrequently happened that a sharp opponent, if not converted, would be turned into a respectful listener. The countless letters he received from admirers and sympathisers heartened him and made him feel his pioneer work bore ample fruit. He never deviated from the one great object of his life — (‘to make the world accept as a truism in the next generation what it rejected as a paradox in the present generation.’ He had the singular power of reading countenances and diagnosing racial features. He would astonish people by saying, ‘You are a Piet,’ or ‘You come from Devonshire,’ or ‘Your father was French and your mother English’ — and he seldom went astray in his definitions. We gave him plenty of opportunity of practising this penetrating and intuitive gift.
We count the day we first met Grant Allen as a festival in our calendar. He seemed to endow his friends with a new set of faculties; and now, years after, we never take our walks abroad without feeling how much we owe to his illuminating talk and inspiring companionship. — Yours affectionately,
ALICE L. BIRD.
The admirable little volume, entitled ‘Anglo-Saxon Britain,’ in which, following his bent, the record of political events is subordinated to that of the growth of social institutions, was published in 1881; in the same year a reprint of scientific essays under the title of ‘The Evolutionist at Large’ was issued, concerning which Darwin wrote: —
I have this minute read the last word of ‘The Evolutionist at Large,’ and I hope that you will not think me troublesome if I tell you how much the whole has pleased me. Who can tell how many young persons your chapters may bring up to be good working evolutionists! I quite envy you your power of writing — your words flow so easily, clearly, and pleasantly. Some of your statements seemed to me rather too bold; but I do not know that this much signifies in a work of the kind, and may perhaps be an advantage. Several of your views are quite new to me, and seem extremely probable. But I had not intended to scribble so much.
One chief object in my writing has been to ask you, busy as you are, to send me, whenever you can spare time, a ‘very few lines,’ saying how your health is; for I was grieved to have last winter a very poor account of your health. — Yours sincerely, —
CH. DARWIN.
In 1882 another series, entitled ‘Vignettes from Nature,’ was issued; and remembering that a critic, whose cleverness is qualified by a certain supercilious cocksureness, spoke of Allen as ‘occasionally accurate,’ it is a satisfaction to have an authoritative answer to that sneer in the following letter
4 Marlborough Place, Abbey Road, N.W., and May 1882.
Dear Mr. Grant Allen, — Many thanks for your delightful ‘Vignettes from Nature.’ If Falstaff had been soaked in Evolution instead of sack, I think he might have ‘babbled o’ green fields’ in some such genial fashion. I am not quite sure whether you will take this as a compliment or not; but it is meant for a great one, ‘honest Jack’ being, to my mind, a great philosopher.
I have no fault to find on the score of accuracy wherever I have dipped or rambled through your book; on the contrary, I find much to admire in the way you conjoin precision with popularity — a very difficult art.
I hope you will think of what I ventured to suggest about ‘Colin Clout’s Calendar.’ With a few illustrations to help ignorant people to find what they ought to see, I would not wish for a better lure to the study of nature. — . Ever yours very faithfully, —
T. H. HUXLEY.
The writer of a memoir should obtr
ude himself as little as possible, since the reader is in no wise concerned with him. But the personal note cannot be wholly avoided. And, relating matters in due order, it may be said that although we had corresponded some time previously, Allen and myself did not meet till February 1882. That friendship had its beginning in the knowledge of community of taste in scientific pursuits, and of large, although not complete, agreement on social questions, while its growth into affectionate relationship was fostered by intercourse as frequent as circumstances permitted. To myself it brought advantages beyond my power to reciprocate, because these were derived from contact with an original and suggestive mind, well equipped by a fortunate variety in its training, by singularly acute faculty of observation, and by travel. Among the occasions of close touch with him which memory will cherish are a six-weeks’ trip to Egypt in the winter of 1889, and the Whitsuntide symposia at Aldeburgh from 1882 to 1898, when, with rare break in the record, and then sorely missed, Allen was one of the little party that ‘tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.’ There was no ‘chiel amang us takin’ notes’ of that talk, which ran so full and fast and free, and the charm of which was in its spontaneity. Always throwing himself into the heart and fun of things, he initiated the custom of electing a laureate of the occasion, the choice more than once, of course, falling on himself. The last poem which he wrote in that capacity was at the gathering in 1896. Hitherto unpublished, it has, perhaps, fit place in this connection for the light and happy way in which he speaks of the friends who forgathered in different years; while the lilt and swing of its graceful stanzas show with what mastery he, who had no ear for music, could handle metre.
WHITSUN AT ALDEBURGH
What care we at Whitsun, my Clodd,
For sage Presidential Addresses?
For Max on each Aryan god,
Or Lang upon Psyche’s caresses?
What reck we if ages to come
Forget us, appraise us, or quote us,
If our fame be sonorous or dumb,
As we skim on the Alde in the Lotus?
Not a craft with our pinnace can vie!
On our agile white wings we are passing ’em!
Yet we Chronicle each as we fly —
For have we not with us our Massingham?
‘Ho, Sam, for a reef in the sail!’
We said, with the wind on our quarter!
‘Pray silence! a story from Whale!
And another, to cap it, from Shorter!’
On the ultramarine of the sky
Flake-white are the hurrying fleeces:
Holman Hunt, as you see them float by
In their infinite airy caprices,
Has art any daintier tints
For the humours of Eurus and Notus
Than the colour that dances and glints,
As we glide on the Alde in the Lotus?
What whiffs of salt foam on oar lips!
What odours of May and of orris!
What gossip, as smoothly she slips!
What tales of Rossetti and Morris!
What memories cling to her thwarts
Of speech that of old was not tardy?
What nuggets of gold in her quartz —
Cotter Morison, Meredith, Hardy!
Was it Gissing who sat by me here
When Du Chaillu discoursed the gorilla?
Or Taylor who taught me to steer,
Ungrazed, ‘twixt Charybdis and Scylla?
Had Powell some saga to tell,
Or did Beddard prosect Lepidotus,
Or Sully lure truth from her well,
As we lolled on the Aide in the Lotus?
Bethink you, my host, how at Snape,
When the sky and the stream were no duller;
We moored by a tide-begot cape,
For Moore to enshrine it in colour;
And lo — as the sunset unrolled —
A shimmering broad El dorado!
For the mud was as mountains of gold,
And as Tyrian purple the shadow!
So, still by her gunwale to-day;
Ye slaves of the journalist galley,
Tis sweet to forget for a day
The din of the street and the alley,
What matter to you and to me
That the million outweigh and outvote us,
If once in a year we are free,
As we float on the Aide in the Lotus?
In the intervals between writing short stories and scientific essays, the third collection of these last-named being issued in 1883 under the title of ‘Colin Clout’s Calendar,’ Allen was busy over his first long novel, ‘Philistia.’ After running in serial form through the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ it was published in three volumes in 1884, ‘Cecil Power’ appearing on the title-page as the author. Allen’s motives for the temporary use of ‘noms-de-plume’ — from ‘J. Arbuthnot Wilson’ to ‘Olive Pratt Rayner’ — were, first, the feeling that the writer of serious books and essays who appears under his own name as the writer of sensational stories stands the risk of scant justice from critics; and next, the satisfaction and amusement derived from testing the acumen of the reader in discovering the real author. Generally the ruse was successful, although Richard Proctor (who himself used more than one pseudonym), meeting him at my house soon after our friendship began, charged him with the authorship of ‘The Reverend John Creedy,’ and Mr. Lang tells us that he also detected Grant Allen under the veil of ‘J. Arbuthnot Wilson.’
‘Philistia’ possesses the interest attaching to all novels into which the autobiographical element enters; and, moreover, it gave larger scope for the conveyance of its author’s socialistic views. The following letters, telling of the steps in its preparation, and of Allen’s feelings about its reception, may be prefaced by one to Mr. Herbert Spencer, which, though of earlier date, has bearing on the matter
Broad Street, Lyme,
April 17 (1882).
Dear Mr. Spencer, — Many thanks for your kind present of ‘Political Institutions.’ I have read part of it as it appeared, and shall read the remainder with great interest.
To me it has always seemed that the value of your method and the importance of your results was at least quite as great in the department of human affairs as elsewhere: the dry light of scientific procedure is most wanted where the intellect is most often warped by social prejudices. But it is not astonishing that the Englishmen who hold India and would dragoon Ireland into submission think otherwise.
I am glad to see another instalment of the ‘Sociology’ fairly completed, and that one of the most necessary ones. Though individual effort can do so very little, it is yet a great thing to have begun the political education of future generations in this way, and to have clearly defined the true tendencies of industrialism. For myself, I have felt always that the ‘Study of Sociology,’ and the first volume of the ‘Principles,’ helped me greatly to form my political opinions, and to reject some really anti-industrial and nonindividualist communistic views, derived from France and Germany, which I had been inclined to when I first began to think about these things. It is a great point to be clearly shown exactly which of one’s aspirations are consistent with one another, and which are mutually destructive. There must be hundreds who, like myself, would probably never have arrived at these generalisations themselves, yet can recognise their truth when presented with the evidence. Even if you only succeed in making those who are already in fibre industrialists better understand the nature of their own creed, and the natural tendencies of their own type, you will have done a great deal. More than that I suppose you hardly expect, at least in the way of practical result.
For my own part, I feel that your writings have often helped to make me choose the right side in doubtful questions, when perhaps if left to my own lights I might have wavered towards the wrong one — especially where current Liberalism has adopted essentially militant methods. Pray excuse this confession of personal adherence; but I sometimes feel as though in p
olitical matters you must almost be discouraged; almost be wearied of your task as a voice crying in the wilderness; and every individual attentive hearer is here perhaps worth the numbering. Among so much interested and prejudiced political brawling, I for one am glad to look for argument and convincing demonstration to one calm and unbiassed intelligence. Please don’t acknowledge this letter. — Yours very sincerely, —
GRANT ALLEN.
The Nook, Horsham Road,
Dorking (1883).
Gentlemen, — Thanks for your note just received. I will try shortly to send you a story for ‘Belgravia.’
I write now, however, about a bigger piece of work which I have at present on hand. Mr. James Payn’s kind notice of my ‘Mr. Chung’ in your ‘Annual,’ and still more of two stories I have since contributed to the ‘Cornhill ‘ under his management— ‘The Backslider’ and ‘The Reverend John Creedy’ — has induced me to set to work upon a three-volume novel, which is now in an advanced stage of preparation (as the circulars say), and will probably be finished before Christmas. Mr. Payn has kindly promised that Smith and Elder will publish it for me on fair terms; but owing to its political tones (it deals with Socialism and some other pressing: questions) he doesn’t think he could use it for the ‘Cornhill.’ I am anxious, however, to get it first published in a magazine, if possible; and if you think there is any probability that you might be able to let it run through Belgravia,’ I should like to let you have a look at it before closing with his offer. I ought to say that I want it to be published under a pseudonym — I had thought of a lady’s name — and that I wish its authorship to be treated as confidential. — Yours very faithfully,
