by Grant Allen
GRANT ALLEN.
Messrs. Chatto and Windus.
TO THE SAME.
(1883.)
Gentlemen, — Thanks for your letter respecting my novel ‘Born out of Due Time.’ I am glad you sire able to accept it for the ‘Gentleman’s.’ The MS. has not yet arrived, but as soon as it does I will go over the earlier part at once, and let you have the first few instalments at the earliest possible date.
As to a pseudonym, I should prefer some other than ‘J. Arbuthnot Wilson,’ as I wish to keep my authorship of this book quite private. What do you say to ‘Cecil Strong’ or ‘Cecil Force’? — Faithfully yours,
GRANT ALLEN.
The Nook, Dorking (1883).
Dear Mr. Chatto, — Many thanks for your letter of hints about my unfinished novel. ‘Philistia’ is certainly a very taking title, and I shall be very glad to adopt it. If you want to announce the novel In your programme for the ‘Gentleman’s’(as I suppose you will), I think it had better be under that name.
As to not killing: Ernest le Breton, I hardly see how one is to get out of it. To me, it seems almost the only possible end. If you feel very strongly that readers won’t allow him to be killed, I will try to find some other alternative, but it will be difficult to manage. If one made him recover or get on well in the world, then there would be no ‘dénouement,’ and, as a matter of character, I doubt whether such a person ever ‘would’ get on well. However, I shall be guided by you in the matter; and if you think it indispensable that Ernest should live, I will try to work out another conclusion. I intended from the first that Ronald should marry Selah; and if Ernest doesn’t die, there is no reason why Lady Hilda shouldn’t marry Berkely.
Yours very faithfully,
GRANT ALLEN.
The Nook, Dorking, Friday (1884).
My dear Clodd, — Many thanks for your long and kind critical letter. It is awfully good of you to have taken so much pains about it. I’m afraid I can’t conscientiously say I would have done as much myself for any other fellow’s novel. Your strictures are exceedingly useful, and very much coincide with James Payn’s. As to the fate of Ernest le Breton, however, I am so completely with you that in the story as originally written he did actually die of starvation, or something very like it, and it was vaguely foreshadowed that Arthur Berkely died, or would marry Edie after a due and decent interval. But Chatto was dead against this melancholy ending, and the actual termination, with its double marriage, was all arranged to meet his views of what the public would imperatively demand in such a situation. So far, I have had three or four reviews, all far more favourable than I could have. anticipated, especially as the reviewers were evidently quite unaware that the novel was not by a perfectly new and inexperienced writer.
Pray do not measure my gratitude for your long letter by the shortness of my reply. I am hard at work just at present finishing a ‘third ‘novel, and I have been writing at it all day long to-day until (as you see) my fingers almost refuse to form the letters as I write them.... — I am ever yours very sincerely,
GRANT ALLEN.
TO PROFESSOR G. CROOM ROBERTSON.
The Nook, Dorking, Feb. 23 (1885).
My dear Robertson, — You spoke so kindly and encouragingly to me yesterday morning that you revived for a moment hopes about my literary and scientific work which I have long myself laid aside. But on soberer second thoughts, I feel almost convinced that it would be best for me not to try writing a really good novel, for I won’t succeed. I am content now to make a comfortable living for Nellie and the boy by hackwork. Four or five years ago I couldn’t do that: thanks to you and other kind friends, I can now do it easily. Would it not be a pity by pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp of reputation to endanger my now fairly ensured position as a good sound hack? The fact is, you think (in your goodness of heart) far better of the than I now think of myself. I ought to have told you yesterday that I am profoundly convinced I can never do any work above mediocrity, in the judgment of other people. Of course, I like the work myself (I know I am a bad critic), but it isn’t good enough to satisfy real judges.
‘Philistia’ is to me a great proof of this. I put my whole soul into it. Payn and others encouraged me to think I might write a novel. I fell to with the eager confidence that I was producing a really good work. That confidence and enthusiasm I can never again replace. When it was finished, I felt I had done my utmost But Payn didn’t care for it, and, what was more, even people sympathetic with myself and with the ideas it expressed weren’t taken by it. I have put into it my very best, and it’s quite clear that the best isn’t good enough. I didn’t write hastily. I satisfied utterly my own critical faculty, and I can’t do any better. Indeed, I can never again do so well. Now, this hasn’t at all cast me down or disappointed me. I haven’t so much ambition for myself as you are kind enough to have for me. I never cared for the chance of literary reputation except as a means of making a livelihood for Nellie and the boy. I can now make a livelihood easily; and I ought to turn to whatever will make it best. I shall doubtless write more novels, many of which will hit the public taste better than ‘Philistia,’ for I am learning to do the sensational things that please the editors. I am trying with each new novel to go a step lower to catch the market. Still, your evident seriousness yesterday has so far prevailed upon me that I think I will really try one novel, following the dictates of my own nature. But what I fear is that not only will it not please the public, but it won’t even please you — you who would be so glad to be pleased if only it were possible. I shall hesitate as to whether it is right to throw away upon such a forlorn hope time that might be spent on almost certain moneygetting for the needs of the family. Excuse this egotistical letter. — Yours ever, with no end of thanks, G. A.
Letters of this sort, expressing moods, and, therefore, unstable states of mind, must be taken with some qualification. Allen’s strong bent towards science, and the consciousness of what, unhampered, he might have accomplished in it, invited contrasts, causing depression to which his frank, highly-wrought nature gave emphasis both in talk and correspondence. The mood passed, and soon after this he was putting heart and soul into a monograph on Darwin, which was published in the same year, and about which Mr. Spencer writes as follows
38 Queen’s Gardens, Bayswater, W.
22nd Oct.’85.
My dear Allen, — I am much obliged to you for the copy of your little volume contributed to the series of English Worthies. This obligation is, however, small compared with that under which you have laid me by various passages in the volume. Evidently you have striven, and successfully striven, to do justice all round, alike to Darwin’s predecessors and to his contemporaries. It is a thing which biographers very rarely attempt to do. They habitually try rather not only to magnify their heroes, but to dwarf or ignore other men.
I have all the more reason to thank you for what you have done in setting forth in various places the relations in which I stand towards the evolutionary doctrine, because it is a thing which I have not been able to do myself, and which none of my friends have hitherto taken occasion to do for me. Of course, the continual misstatements publicly made or implied, I have been, for these five-and-twenty years, obliged to pass in silence; because not only would it have been in bad taste for me to take any overt step in rectification of them, but doubtless by most I should have been regarded with alienated feelings rather than as one who had not been fairly dealt with. Of course, too, it has been out of the question for me to say anything about the matter to those of my friends who well know that a rectification is needed, and from whom one might fitly have been expected. To you, therefore, as having been the first to make any adequate representation of the state of the case, I feel all the more indebted.
Respecting your volume under its impersonal aspects, I am glad you have furnished so good a sample of what may be distinguished as philosophical biography — biography which deals with its subject as a product not only of family antecedents, but of social ant
ecedents, and traces his development in connection with the influence of his own time. This you have done, I think, very satisfactorily — so satisfactorily, indeed, that I feel myself as now having a very much clearer conception of Darwin’s relation to biological science and general thought than I had before. I hope the book will get all the large credit which it deserves. — Very sincerely yours,
HERBERT SPENCER.
The years from 1885 to 1894 have a fairly even record, and may be lightly passed over. 1886 was a busy one, the issues therein comprising ‘Kalee’s Shrine’ (some of the scenes in which are laid at Aldeburgh, described under the name of Thorborough-on-Sea); ‘For Maimie’s Sake’; ‘In all Shades’; ‘Flowers and their Pedigrees,’ to which last-named reference has been made by Professor Vines (see p. 77); and ‘Common Sense Science,’ the preface to which is dated from ‘Thoreau’s Town,’ Concord. Allen, with his wife and son, paid a visit to his old home and to the States that year, writing on his return to Mr. Charles Longman under date of September 27th
.. I am back again, much set up in health by my four months’ holiday. I have lots of articles] in my head for the ‘Magazine,’ and one of them is now actually in progress. Another, about Concord, where we stopped with the Lothrops in Hawthorne’s house, visited Walden Pond and all Thoreau’s haunts, and lived with the memories of Emerson and old John Brown, ought to just suit the taste of your readers....
From 1887 to 1889 the output was mainly in fiction— ‘The Devil’s Die’; ‘This Mortal Coil,’ etc., and in miscellaneous articles, among these being one in the ‘Fortnightly Review’ (Vol. XLVI. 1889) entitled ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question,’ in which Allen ventilated opinions long seething in his mind; opinions which, as hinted in his letter to Professor Croom Robertson, he was eager to proclaim through the medium of a novel. But four years were to elapse before ‘The Woman who Did’ was written, and another two years before it was published; stray essays, of the type of ‘A Glimpse into Utopia’ (reprinted in ‘Post-Prandial Philosophy’), in which the main theory of that book was formulated, being, meanwhile, issued to prepare the way before it The publication of ‘Force and Energy’ (1888) has been already spoken of, but this further reference gives occasion to note that, here, as in the case of any other book adversely reviewed, Allen did not turn aside to answer his critics. He ‘strove with none,’ not because, in Lander’s arrogant words, ‘none were worth his strife,’ but because he had learned what is learned soon, or never learned, the barrenness of controversy. Delusions and errors do not perish by debate; they perish under the slow and steady operation of changes to which they are unable to adapt themselves. The atmosphere, purified of its noxious elements, is life-sustaining to truth alone, and error dies of inanition. For this reason, Allen refused, as a general rule, to have anything to do with propagandist associations. Not long before his death he replied as follows to a request from Mr. Charles Watts for a contribution to the ‘Agnostic Annual’:— ‘I think that thought upon all subjects should be set forth by the ordinary channels; advanced thought only loses by isolation. None but Agnostics read Agnostic reviews, and it is no use trying to convert the already converted. Slow half-hints in the acknowledged organs of thought do far more good in the end. I have never believed in fighting; I believe in permeation.’
An excellent ‘counsel of perfection’ now the battle is half won; but it is obvious that if advance yet to be secured depended for success upon admission of its views in ‘the acknowledged organs of thought,’ it would be considerably handicapped. Most writers, even when avoiding an aggressive tone, and adopting, as ‘a more excellent way,’ the allusive or suggestive method of conveying their opinions, have, nevertheless, experience of mutilation by editors who, from commercial or timorous motives, truckle to the susceptibilities of illiterate and prejudiced readers. As if any reform was ever instituted, or abuse swept away, without wounding some ignorant or bigoted person’s susceptibilities ‘Allen was for some years a member of the Fabian Society, but this comported with the attitude just indicated, since that organisation, working on the lines of its eponym, plays a waiting game, and supersedes force by persuasion. And, moreover, as will be seen presently, keen as was his interest in the movement, there was growing concentration of thought and energy upon the emancipation of woman in other directions than those at which Socialism primarily aimed.
The Nook, Dorking,
Aug. 15 (1886).
Dear Mr. Spencer, — Many thanks for your kind present of your pamphlet on Individualism. I have read it all through very carefully, and I think I may say with almost unvarying assent to every proposition it contained. When I turn from the common political writing of the day to your reasoned sociological conclusions, I feel it is like turning from the mediaeval verbiage about lightning being due to a conglobation of fulgureous exhalations by a circumfixed humour, to the definite results of modern physics.
The only point where I do not find myself in complete accord (and that is perhaps more due to your comparative silence than to anything else) is that I attach relatively more importance to the initial injustice done by the permitted monopoly of raw material in a few hands. It seems to me that individualism, in order to be just, must strive hard for an equalisation of original condition by the removal of all artificial advantages. The great reservoir of natural wealth that we sum up as land (including mines, etc.) ought, it seems to me, to be nationalised before we can say that the individual is allowed free play. [Allen was a strong supporter of Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace’s scheme of Land Nationalisation.] While he is thwarted in obtaining his fair share of raw material, he is being put at a disadvantage by artificial laws. But I daresay if one sets together what you have said in ‘Social Statics’ and in the ‘Principles of Sociology ‘ on this matter, the apparent difference is really minimised. In all other respects I think your book carries the profoundest conviction, and helps to keep one up against the advancing phalanx of meddlesomeness.
Excuse my writing at such length; but I know you expect only to influence an individual citizen here and there, and I believe you like to hear that a few such are actually helped on by what you have written. — Yours very sincerely,
GRANT ALLEN.
A land nationaliser, yet buying an acre or two for his house and garden, and speculating in an acre or two more; an unbeliever, yet willing to take the oath by the ‘help’ of God in a court of justice; a perfervid advocate of the independence of man and woman in all the relations of life, yet the most devoted of husbands; an opponent (the case was argued between him and Prince Kropotkin at my house) of the destruction of monuments and buildings, however shameful the deeds associated with them, Allen was from early manhood till death a soul in revolt against conventions that dwarf and corrupt, and against political and economic conditions that enslave. The sense of unity and continuity which is the outcome of acceptance of the theory of evolution explains why he was content to watch the slow grinding of the mills of progress, and also why, when it was now and again suggested that he should make some bold stroke for freedom, he would humorously say, ‘You forget that I was brought up in the family of a clergyman of the Church of England.’ If, therefore, he refused to take any active part in movements which had his sympathy, this was not because he lacked courage, but because experience and reading of the past had taught him to leave the betterment of things to the disintegrating effects of time. Here it may be opportune to print a few sentences from Herbert Spencer’s ‘First Principles,’ which were Allen’s favourite quotation from that book: —
Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himself by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view. Let him duly realise the fact that opinion is the agency through which character adapts external arrangements to itself — that his opinion rightly forms part of this agency — is a unit of force, constituting, with other such units, the general power which works out social changes; and he will perceiv
e that he may properly give full utterance to his innermost conviction, leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and repugnance to others. He, with all his capacities, and aspirations, and beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of his time. He must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future; and that his thoughts sure as children born to him, which he may not carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly consider himself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the Unknown Cause; and when the Unknown Cause produces in him a certain belief, he is thereby authorised to profess and act out that belief. For, to render in their highest sense the words of the poet: —
‘ — Nature is made better by no mean,
