by Grant Allen
Meantime, in the unhappy bandying about of the name ‘Christian,’ let the thoughtful ponder who most ‘acts like’ one — the man who echoes the ‘patriotic’ songs of the music-hall, or the man who replies, as Allen did, to a request that he would contribute an article on the defence of the Dominion to the Canadian Year Book (1898)
You can know very little of my aims and ideals if you think I would willingly do anything to help on a work whose avowed object is to arouse ‘military enthusiasm.’ Military enthusiasm means enthusiasm for killing people. My desire in life has been not to kill, but to help and aid all mankind, irrespective of nationality, creed, language, or colour. I hate war, and everything that leads to it, as I hate murder, rapine, or the ill-treatment of women. I dislike slavery, however cloaked under the disguise of ‘Imperialism.’ I contribute gladly to works designed to strengthen the bonds of amity between nations and to render war impossible, but I cannot contribute to one which aims at making peaceable Canadian citizens throw themselves into the devouring whirlpool of militarism.
The abolition of war is probably only more remote than the abolition of legal marriage, but protests against what Burke calls ‘the thriving sophisms of barbarous national pride, and the eternal fallacies of war and conquest,’ have their uses in curbing passions inherent in human nature. Allen’s views about militarism are involved in his hatred of wrong-doing and his sympathy with suffering, and in a world whose institutions rest, in the last resort, on force, he was a ‘pilgrim and a stranger.’ If he often expressed his views with unpalatable plainness, it was because the attention of the multitude can be aroused only through force of presentment Careful to observe by virtue of an inborn gentleness the courtesies of life, there was, nevertheless, no ‘hedging’ of opinion to accommodate himself to his company. For example, he agreed with George III. (it was certainly the only thing in which he did agree with that monarch) that a good deal of Shakespeare was ‘sad stuff’ — Darwin, it may be remembered, found it ‘intolerably dull,’ — and, in general, Allen was consistent in maintaining that the writers of the Elizabethan age are not to be compared to those of our era. Free from the vanities, narrownesses, and petty jealousies which often accompany the literary temper, he was generous to a fault in his assessment of the work of his contemporaries, and this, consequently, to the occasional impairment of his judgement. ‘They say,’ he wrote jocosely to Mr. Longman, ‘that I discover a new poet once a fortnight If so, I must have begun six weeks ago, for my discoveries up to date are Watson, Davidson, Le Gallienne, and, to tell you the truth, I am not in the least ashamed of them.’ He encloses a poem by a new writer in whom he sees promise, and this was the sort of thing he was constantly doing for his fellow-craftsmen. His own struggles, never hardening the heart, begot sympathy with theirs.
The happiness of his domestic relations has been touched upon, and perhaps enough has been indicated, both in the personal tributes and correspondence printed in this memoir, as to the affection which he inspired and the delight which his comradeship afforded. But my own intimate relations with Allen for well-nigh twenty years is warrant for adding that a more lovable, considerate, true, and sympathetic friend there could not be, while it would be hard to find his equal as a suggestive and inspiring companion, the catholicity of whose tastes and the breadth of whose knowledge, touched by enthusiasm ever to know more, made his society a perennial delight The man was greater than his books. His talk was, as Lewes says of Plato’s dialogues, full of ‘speculative yeast’ For whether he dissected a flower or described a picture, or unravelled an etymology; whether he analysed an individual character, or a race-temperament; or whether he expounded theories of origins, from origin of sex to origin of belief in spiritual beings, he was as suggestive as he was illuminative and instructive. Touched by enthusiasm ever to know more of a universe and its contents which begot in him no feeling of reverence, but which fed his sense of wonder — such was Allen: always learning. To quote from Mr. Frederic Harrison’s address delivered at Woking, when ‘the body was committed to the purifying action of fire’; ‘no disease, no exhaustion of body or brain, no care or anxiety, no distraction from the visible world without, could stifle his intense eagerness of mind to follow out his ideas, to complete his observations, to push on the work in hand. Few men had a more frail and suffering bodily frame. Not many men have had more pressing cares and obstacles. Few living men have undertaken so bewildering a range of studies — ever had, to use a homely expression, so many irons in the fire — irons, be it said, of strange incongruity and divergence. A man, too, of intense sensitiveness to the acts and thoughts of those around him, a man of extraordinary sensibility to the charms of Art and Nature — a mind peculiarly responsive to the most subtle suggestions of any word, or book, or person, or flower, or creature that might cross his path.’
His eagerness to be ever learning was equalled only by his willingness to impart all that he knew. The companions of his rambles will remember how, when his eye rested on some plant that held a lesson in evolution in its leaves or petals, he would pluck it, stand still, and make it the text of a delightful sermon. And, as the following letter shows, his busy pen would set aside its task to answer a question about things which he never wearied of expounding: —
The Croft, Hind Head, Haslemere,
Sat. (13th April 1895).
My dear Miss Cox, — No; your plant is ‘not’ a cryptogam, and its resemblance to a fern is purely external. It is an asparagus, and the apparent leaves or leaflets are really branches. There are few or no true leaves, and the few there are take the reduced form of scales. A true fern has no stem to speak of, and each frond comes up spirally coiled — has, as we say, a circinate vernation. If you watch common asparagus growing (and now is the time to do it), you will see, on the contrary, that it sends up a stout true stem, with scale-like leaves, and that the branches divide and become very numerous, mostly leafless, but function-like leaves, as in gorse and broom. A few true leaves or bracts, however, occur on the peduncles of the flowers. In flower, berry, etc., the asparagus is just an ordinary lily. Garden asparagus produces its branches evenly all round, like a spruce-fir; this climbing kind produces them flattened out laterally against a wall, like so many creepers, such as ivy or Virginia creeper. It is this one-sided and flattened arrangement of the branches that makes the plant look at first sight like a fern or lycopodium.
The article, with which you so kindly assisted me, has long been accepted by Knowles for the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ but I don’t know why he is holding it over from month to month. I have another on hand about which I shall venture (after that one appears) to ask if you will give me once more the benefit of your wide reading. In haste. — Yours very sincerely,
— GRANT ALLEN.
(The reference here is to a still unpublished paper on ‘The Last Trump.’)
Naturalist, anthropologist, physicist, historian, poet, novelist, essayist, critic — what place is to be assigned to this versatile, well-equipped worker? Time, whose perspective is necessary for the assignment of his place to every man, will alone determine what, if any, of Allen’s writings will survive. One thing is sure, that whether a man apply himself to a single subject, or to many subjects, the bulk of what he writes, sufficing for the day, survives not beyond the day. They are among the wise, therefore, who content themselves with the reflection that mayhap something here and there dropped from their pens may filter through the minds of their fellows for entertainment or for profit.
Save for the few Immortals, man has short memory of his fellows. A line or two of record is the most that the multitude of those who, ‘having served their generation, fell on sleep,’ may reckon upon, if they care to reckon at all. For surely, in the approval and sympathy of contemporaries there is sufficing stimulus to honest work, and it should content a man if those who knew him well hold remembrance of him dear. Such remembrance has Grant Allen in the circle of friends wherein his death has made so large a gap — friends to whose lips ther
e rises the lament of old: —
‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed;
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, laid long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take.’
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Series Contents
Series One
Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D.H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Gaskell
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
George Eliot
H. G. Wells
Henry James
Ivan Turgenev
Jack London
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Series Two
Alexander Pushkin
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Andrew Lang
Anthony Trollope
Bram Stoker
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
Edith Wharton
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G. K. Chesterton
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Herman Melville
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Series Three
Ambrose Bierce
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Charles Lever
Émile Zola
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George Gissing
George Orwell
Guy de Maupassant
H. P. Lovecraft
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Henry Fielding
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James Fenimore Cooper
John Buchan
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Jonathan Swift
Kate Chopin
Katherine Mansfield
L. M. Montgomery
Laurence Sterne
Mary Shelley
Sheridan Le Fanu
Washington Irving
Series Four
Arnold Bennett
Arthur Machen
Beatrix Potter
Bret Harte
Captain Frederick Marryat
Charles Kingsley
Charles Reade
G. A. Henty
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Wallace
E. M. Forster
E. Nesbit
George Meredith
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jerome K. Jerome
John Ruskin
Maria Edgeworth
M. E. Braddon
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M. R. James
R. M. Ballantyne
Robert E. Howard
Samuel Johnson
Stendhal
Stephen Crane
Zane Grey
Series Five
Algernon Blackwood
Anatole France
Beaumont and Fletcher
Charles Darwin
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Edward Gibbon
E. F. Benson
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Bernard Shaw
George MacDonald
Hilaire Belloc
John Bunyan
John Webster
Margaret Oliphant
Maxim Gorky
Oliver Goldsmith
Radclyffe Hall
Robert W. Chambers
Samuel Butler
Samuel Richardson
Sir Thomas Malory
Thomas Carlyle
William Harrison Ainsworth
William Dean Howells
William Morris
Series Six
Anthony Hope
Aphra Behn
Arthur Morrison
Baroness Emma Orczy
Captain Mayne Reid
Charlotte M. Yonge
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
E. W. Hornung
Ellen Wood
Frances Burney
Frank Norris
Frank R. Stockton
Hall Caine
Horace Walpole
One Thousand and One Nights
R. Austin Freeman
Rafael Sabatini
Saki
Samuel Pepys
Sir Issac Newton
Stanley J. Weyman
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Middleton
Voltaire
William Hazlitt
William Hope Hodgson
Series Seven
Adam Smith
Benjamin Disraeli
Confucius
David Hume
E. M. Delafield
E. Phillips Oppenheim
Edmund Burke
Ernest Hemingway
Frances Trollope
Galileo Galilei
Guy Boothby
Hans Christian Andersen
Ian Fleming
Immanuel Kant
Karl Marx
Kenneth Grahame
Lytton Strachey
Mary Wollstonecraft
Michel de Montaigne
René Descartes
Richard Marsh
Sax Rohmer
Sir Richard Burton
Talbot Mundy
Thomas Babington Macaulay
W. W. Jacobs
Series Eight
Anna Katharine Green
Arthur Schopenhauer
The Brothers Grimm
C. S. Lewis
Charles and Mary Lamb
Elizabeth von Arnim
Ernest Bramah
Francis Bacon
Gilbert and Sullivan
Grant Allen
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Hugh Walpole
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
John Locke
John Muir
Joseph Addison
Lafcadio Hearn
Lord Dunsany
Marie Corelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
Ouida
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Sigmund Freud
Theodore
Dreiser
Walter Pater
W. Somerset Maugham
Series Nine
Aldous Huxley
August Strindberg
Booth Tarkington
C. S. Forester
Erasmus
Eugene Sue
Fergus Hume
Franz Kafka
Gertrude Stein
Giovanni Boccaccio
Izaak Walton
J. M. Synge
Johanna Spyri
John Galt
Maurice Leblanc
Max Brand
Molière
Norse Sagas
R. D. Blackmore
R. S. Surtees
Sir Thomas More
Stephen Leacock
The Harvard Classics
Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Paine
William James
Ancient Classics
Achilles Tatius
Aeschylus
Ammianus Marcellinus
Apollodorus
Appian
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Aristophanes
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Bede
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Claudian
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Demosthenes
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Euripides
Frontius
Herodotus
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Horace
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Josephus
Julian
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Juvenal
Livy
Longus
