by Grant Allen
‘The Woman who Did.’ Before, however, sending, as Mr. Andrew Lang calls it, ‘his message in the matter of Ethics to the world and town’ from the Hilltop, Allen tarried on the ‘Lower Slopes’ to issue, under that title, a volume of verse, ‘Reminiscences of Excursions round the Base of Helicon, undertaken for the most part in early manhood.’ In the crowd of minor poets, with plenty of voice, but in some cases not much to sing about, the statelier, more subdued, and reflective note of Allen’s verse caught the ear of only a few. But it has, like all his work, elements that arrest and interest; it has the distinction of a certain inevitableness; the themes are serious; the feeling is deep and genuine. Content is reached only through discontent, and the ‘motif’ of the volume (which, by the way, has one poem, ‘In Coral Land,’ worthy of a place in every anthology of light verse) is not so much in the restatement of the old question of the subjectivity of the universe, as in the majestic stanzas ‘In Magdalen Tower’; nor in the group on Evolution, from the fantastic ‘ballade’ to the lines to Mr. Spencer, as in five poems, from ‘In the Night Watches’ to ‘Sunday Night at Mabille,’ which are the outcome of Allen’s burning wrath at Society’s heedless sacrifice of woman for her sister’s virtue. This is shown in the following letter
12th Feb. ‘94.
My dear Stead, — I am sending you my little volume of verses. There are three pieces in it I very much wish you to read. Those three pieces are called ‘In the Night Watches,’ ‘Passiflora Sanguines,’ and ‘Mylitta.’ If you read those three, I don’t care about the rest of them.
There are two men in England really in earnest about the horrible slavery of prostitution. You are one, and I am the other. Don’t condemn without reading. Read those three, and then read ‘Sunday Night at Mabille,’ and If you don’t agree with me, at least you will feel we are working together towards the same aim, no matter by what diverse and seemingly opposite methods. — Yours very sincerely,
GRANT ALLEN.
Judging from existing materials, there was no considerable bulk from which to select; but among the poems, copies of which, as has been remarked, Allen placed in the custody of Mr. Franklin Richards, is one more personal than those published, which before passing from further reference to ‘The Lower Slopes’ may have record here: —
LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS
(To Alexandre Dumas, fils.)
One book of yours I keep where’er I roam,
Prophet and friend and teacher, dear Dumas,
A dog’s-eared, thumb-marked, paper-covered tome,
‘La Dame aux Camélias.’
It lies upon my table day and night,
For sober English friends to eye askance
In pious awe the tale whose witching sleight
Corrupted godless France.
But little heed I if they blame or praise,
For round that book sweet souvenirs entwine:
I keep it for a memory of the days
When Maimie first was mine.
In those bright hours of newly-wedded love
Maimie and I on many a summer noon
Sat with one book between us where the grove
Slopes toward the tumbling Rhône.
Fast rose the silent tears, and hotly fell,
Till every drop in both our eyes was dried
Over the sacred page whose sad words tell
How Marguerite Gautier died.
And later when my Maimie’s cheek was pale,
And weak her failing voice and low her breath,
And in her bloodless hands we read the tale
Of slowly creeping death.
Yet would she often raise her heavy head
To fix upon my face a tearful glance,
And whisper, ‘Read me from the book we read
Long, long ago, in France.’
And now my Maimie cheers my heart no more;
Her face is only with me in my dreams;
But every little word she loved of yore
To me thrice sacred seems.
And so, where’er my lonely steps may roam,
Prophet and friend and teacher, dear Dumas,
I thank you for that paper-covered tome,
‘La Dame aux Camélias.’
‘Mylitta’ and its allied group, together with articles of the type of the ‘New Hedonism’(‘Fortnightly Review,’ October 1894), were preludes to a concrete and dramatic presentment of Allen’s views in ‘The Woman who Did.’ But writing a book is one thing, and getting it published is another. And when the publishers would have none of it, it seems that Allen, whose feelings were then at fever heat, threatened, to destroy the manuscript, whereupon his old friend Nicholson offered to take it into the immortal custody of the Bodleian. Allen replied: —
Thanks for your flattering suggestion. But on reflection I’ll adopt a middle course. I’ll keep the MS. during my lifetime, and ask my wife to pass it on to you after my departure from a planet which I shall have scanty cause to remember with gratitude.
But, finally, Mr. John Lane agreed to issue it, and so in 1895 the defiant book was launched with the inscription already quoted: ‘To my dear Wife; to whom haring dedicated my twenty happiest years, I dedicate also this brief memorial of a less fortunate love.’
On the fly-leaf of the copy which Allen sent me, he wrote ‘This my Evangel,’ and it was with the ardour of a Paul or a Francis Xavier that he proclaimed his gospel of freedom between man and woman in all their relations as the basis of a higher morality. The plot had no great element of novelty; and there were passages in the book which furnished another illustration that the conviction of a mission is fatal to the play of humour. But the seriousness of aim was beyond question. The late Bishop Magee, in a debate on the liquor traffic in the House of Lords, declared, in brave and memorable words, that he would ‘rather see England free than sober’; and, in like spirit, Allen declared that he would rather see England free than moral; Le that he would rather have sex relations unfettered than bound by conventions which involved woman’s degradation. Better, he contended, a society of free, healthy mothers than of enslaved prostitutes; a society in which woman should not only be at liberty, but encouraged, to ‘develop equally every fibre of her own nature’ than one exhibiting the spectacle of a smug world winking complacently at the ‘substitution of prostitution for marriage through the springtide of manhood.’ With the recognition that, under certain circumstances, marriage is dissoluble, the old theory of its sacramental character vanishes. But the State says, ‘You must be immoral if you would be divorced,’ and it remains for the Legislature to enlarge the reasons warranting divorce, so that anomalies, such e g as the refusal of release to couples having a common desire for freedom, may be abolished. In Allen’s view, however, concessions of this sort were only for ‘the present distress,’ and ignoring these, he passed to attack the policy of the ‘advanced’ women who, clamouring for political status and larger share in the pursuits of men, threw contempt on that maternity, ‘not to desire which should be a woman’s shame.... Whether we have wives or not — and that is a minor point about which I, for one, am supremely unprejudiced — we must at least have mothers’; and to encourage repression of appetites which, next to hunger, are the most imperious of our needs, is to contribute to the deterioration of the race, and to the extinction of the best types of the race. In view of woman’s supreme and special functions, Allen argued that ‘life should be made as light and easy and free for her as possible,’ the care and support of herself and offspring being, in the last resort, a charge upon the community. As hereafter shown, he insisted that the adoption of his views involved neither abolition of monogamy nor promiscuous intercourse, but tended, through the exercise of a cultured freedom, and a deepening sense of common responsibilities, to more assured permanence of relations.
During long centuries, and Christianity has much to answer for in the matter, the sexual has been treated as opposed to the moral. Life, in Stoic phrase, According to nature,’ has been restrained a
nd tabooed by artificial codes of ethics, and, hence, suppression has produced its inevitable results in pruriency and nameless vices. And, to-day, things go on in the old blind, blundering fashion; the best-intentioned seeking what is called ‘the promotion of public morality by clearing the streets and filling the music-halls, instead of striking at the taproot of the infamy, namely, the selfish economic conditions by which even some among these best-intentioned (let it be hoped, unwittingly) profit, but which drive women on ‘the town,’ and prevent men from marrying early.
Matthew Arnold, quoting Henri Martin, describes the Celt as ‘always ready to react against the despotism of fact’; and in his treatment of the marriage question, the Celtic element in Allen would appear to have had unrestricted play. The economic obstacles troubled him but slightly; his enthusiasm obscured the enormous complexity of the problem. For human nature being what it is, with still remote approach to expulsion of ‘the ape and tiger,’ the effectiveness of his scheme must always be limited to the narrow zone where lofty conceptions of sex relations and of mutual obligation prevail. There will doubtless be drastic changes in our marriage laws within no very remote period; but a survey of the past, and a wide outlook on the present, give little encouragement to Allen’s hope that civilised mankind, to say nothing of barbarous peoples, will ever wholly displace an institution which, however based on illogical compromises, further evidences how in the moral, as in the material sphere, evolution is adaptation and adjustment But although ideals may be impracticable, approximation to them should none the less be striven after, and those at which Allen aimed are towards the freeing of the spirit from the bondage of the flesh. As George Meredith finely says: ‘The difference between appetite and love is shown when a man, after years of service, can hear and see and admire the possible, and still desire in worship....’ Then there is ‘a new start in our existence, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in the good, gross earth; the senses running their live sap, and the minds companioned, and the spirits made one by the whole-natured conjunction. In sooth, a happy prospect for the sons and daughters of Earth, divinely indicating more than happiness; the speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of certain nobler races, now very dimly imagined’ (‘Diana of the Crossways,’ chap, xxxvii p. 338, Edition 1885).
Allen had no illusions as to any immediate fulfilment of his ideal, nor as to its embodiment in the exact shape which he designed. He did not even urge the experiment upon those who seemed willing to make it. ‘No man or woman,’ he says, ‘can go through life in consistent obedience to any high principle. We must bow to circumstance.’ As for what follows: —
We have no share in the soil
Whereto we have led our heirs;
We have borne the brunt of the toil,
But the fruit is theirs.
For the vineyards are goodly and wide,
And more than a man may count;
But our graves shall be on the side
Of the Moabite mount.
His words on the marriage problem have added weight in the fact that his own domestic life was of the happiest; the love of wife knowing no change, save that it ripened with the years, while zest in all to which he put his hand was quickened by the hopes wrapped up in the future of his boy. However, the world knew little of this, and believed the worst that it heard. It argued that a man who attacked the institution of marriage and defended free love must be a libertine; it declared that his separation from his wife was notorious, whereas the fact is that he was never happy on the rare occasions that he was away from her. When an ‘interview’ with Allen, published in an evening paper, closed with the words, ‘He is happily married’; the compositor soothed his doubts by thus punctuating it: ‘He is, happily, married.’
‘The innumerable array of anæmic and tailored persons who occupy the face of this planet with so much propriety’ (the words are Robert Louis Stevenson’s) had their stale and stock prejudices consulted, as usual, by the majority of the press in its reception of ‘The Woman who Did.’
In the case of a widely-circulated newspaper the book was sent to Mr. Coulson Kernahan, with a request that he would ‘cut it up’ and the author also. Mr. Kernahan says: ‘I told the editor that I would see him further before I’d join the cowardly cur-pack that yelped at such a man. There was a great deal in the book from which I personally dissented, but the spirit of it, and the courage and sincerity of it, I certainly sympathised with.’ Mr. Stead, to whom Allen had sent a set of advance proofs, published a summary of the story, with copious extracts, in the ‘Review of Reviews’ (March 1895), because he believed ‘that the book was its own best antidote.’ But the monopolists of the bookstalls in Ireland refused to sell the serial, declining, as they informed Mr. Stead, ‘to be made the vehicle for the distribution of attacks upon the most fundamental institution of the Christian State.’ By the courtesy of Mr. Stead the article in the ‘Review of Reviews’ was sent in proof to Allen through his nephew, and elicited the following letter: —
The Croft, Hind Head, Haalemere,
Wednesday.
My dear Grantie, — I return herewith the whole of the proofs, about which I have no suggestion to make, save one verbal correction. Of course, as a matter of business, I am glad to have so good an advertisement; but I confess, so far as the personal effect upon Stead is concerned, I am a little disappointed to have effected so little. I hoped for more acquiescence, once my position was clear, and my eager desire for a higher ideal of life made evident. It is strange to me that a man who has been so much misunderstood and misrepresented himself should have no greater fellow-feeling for another, equally misconceived by the general public. ‘Thought,’ said John Stuart Mill, ‘will always sympathise with thought.’ I had hoped that earnestness would also always sympathise with earnestness. And how strange that he should miss the point that I am the first person to plead that the question of the child is the key of the situation! I have for the first time in the world’s history invented the conception of parental responsibility, and my first reviewer positively accuses me of overlooking and ignoring it! I rubbed my eyes as I read; surely, thought I, he must be speaking of some other person! Is not the whole gist of the book its passionate appeal against promiscuity, its insistence upon the fact that we have no right to disregard the dictates of parental responsibility, to become or refuse to become parents under the impulse of impure or unworthy motives, but simply because this man or that woman is or is not the one pointed out to us as the proper father or mother of our children? I confess the whole review bewildered me; it sounded like the review of some other man’s book who had been maintaining the exact opposite of my own propositions. However, I mustn’t run on. I’m afraid Stead is unconsciously becoming the greatest bulwark of the institution of prostitution; but go it will, all the same, and ‘The Woman who Did’ is the first shot fired in the war against it.
Forgive warmth, I don’t often flare up like this, but the subject has made me hot and excited. Use your own discretion whether you show this letter to Stead or not. You know him better than I do, and you know how he is likely to take a burst of righteous emotion. — Affectionately yours,
G. A.
‘Hot and excited’; that was his state of mind for some time after the issue of a book on which, as he said in a letter to me, he ‘had staked his all.’ He adds: ‘If it fails to boom, I go under for ever. I hope, therefore, you will talk about it to your friends, no matter how unacquiescently. It is a serious crisis for me, and only a boom will ever pull me through.’ The sequel shows that he greatly exaggerated the effect of the publication of the book upon his future work, although for about a year the ‘Woman who Did’ and ‘The British Barbarians’ made a less ready market for his wares; and if (which is doubtful) these books cost him any old friendships, they secured him many sympathising tributes from strangers. ‘In contrast to these there came this note from a clerical acquaintance evoking a dignified reply, of w
hich, fortunately, a copy was found among Allen’s papers.
30th Dec. (1895).
Sir, — I feel that I ought to let you know that it is a great distress to me to be unable to ask you to my house, or to hold intercourse with you. But this is impossible while you treat my Divine Master as you are doing. And I cannot forget the Apostle’s command: ‘If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine (the doctrine of Christ), receive him not into your house, neither bid him Godspeed. For he that biddeth him Godspeed is partaker of his evil deeds’ (2 John x. II). — Yours sincerely,
New Year’s Day, 1896.
Dear Sir, — I thank you for your candid and honest letter. So far as I am concerned, I do not think it was necessary for you to write it. No man is bound to know another, or to give any reason why he does not know him. The slight acquaintance that has existed between us might therefore have died out naturally without the need for a formal explanation.
As you have been at the trouble to write, however, I cannot but acknowledge and answer your letter. Let me say then at once that I respect you far more for it than I can respect those who do not so fully act up to their convictions. For my own part, I am ready to form acquaintances with all men who honestly desire to live justly and rightly; but then, I have no positive command laid upon me, as you have; nor would I accept the command of any master, even an omnipotent one, unless it commended itself to my own conscience. I recognise that you are acting in accordance with principle, and I readily admit that, thinking and believing as you do, no other course is open to you.
Dare I venture to add one line of explanation as to my own standpoint? To me, the first religious duty of man consists in the obligation to form a distinct conception for himself of the universe in which he lives and of his own relation to it. He ought to satisfy himself what he is, whence he comes, and whither he goeth. In matters of such fundamental importance, he ought not to rest content with any second-hand or hearsay evidence. He ought not to believe whatever he is told, but to search the universe, in order to see whether these things are so. Many years of study, historical, anthropological, scientific, and philosophical, have convinced me that the system of the universe which you accept as true is baseless and untenable. I firmly and earnestly believe that I am in possession of truths of the deepest importance to humanity, and that I am working for the establishment of a higher, nobler, and purer society than any yet contemplated upon earth. In this belief I may be mistaken, but I conceive it to be correct, and, therefore, I feel myself justified in acting upon it. I don’t think the theory of Christianity is historically justifiable; and if it is not true, I cannot do other than endeavour to point out its untenability to others. You, I take it for granted, have equally investigated these subjects, and have been led to form a different opinion. We must, therefore, necessarily work one against the other in these particulars. I repeat that, so far as I am concerned, such a difference of abstract aim forms no barrier to social intercourse, but I fully recognise that, in your case, the opposite conclusion may be obligatory. I quite feel that I cannot myself associate with certain persons whose principles and actions seem to me debasing and degrading, and that I do some violence to my sympathies by even associating with those who appear to me to be enemies of human progress and moral order. I can therefore only respect the motives of your letter, though I regret that any honest and earnest person should feel himself unable to meet me on cordial terms of human fellowship. For myself, I shall regard you in future with the more respect for the candour and good faith with which you have written to me. — Faithfully yours,
