by Grant Allen
I would probably never have gone any further on my downward path had it not been for the accidental intervention of another believer in my powers as a story-writer. I had sent to Belgravia a little tale about a Chinaman, entitled ‘Mr. Chung,’ and written perhaps rather more seriously and carefully than my previous efforts. This happened to attract the attention of Mr. James Payn, who had then just succeeded to the editorship of the Cornhill. I had been a constant contributor to the Cornhill under Leslie Stephen’s management, and by a singular coincidence I received almost at the same time two letters from Mr. Payn, one of them addressed to me in my own name, and regretting that he would probably be unable to insert my scientific papers in his magazine in future; the other, sent through Chatto & Windus to the imaginary J. Arbuthnot Wilson, and asking for a short story somewhat in the style of my ‘admirable Mr. Chung.’
Encouraged by the discovery that so good a judge of fiction thought well of my humble efforts at story-writing, I sat down at once and produced two pieces for the Cornhill. One was ‘The Reverend John Creedy’ — a tale of a black parson who reverted to savagery — which has perhaps attracted more attention than any other of my short stories. The other, which I myself immensely prefer, was ‘The Curate of Churnside.’ Both were so well noticed that I began to think seriously of fiction as an alternative subject. In the course of the next year I wrote several more sketches of the same sort, which were published, either anonymously or still under the pseudonym, in the Cornhill, Longmans’, The Gentleman’s, and Belgravia. If I recollect aright, the first suggestion to collect and reprint them all in a single volume came from Mr. Chatto. They were published as ‘Strange Stories,’ under my own name, and I thus, for the first time, acknowledged my desertion of my earliest loves — science and philosophy — for the less profound but more lucrative pursuit of literature.
A SHELF IN THE STUDY
‘Strange Stories’ was well received and well reviewed. Its reception gave me confidence for future ventures. Acting upon James Payn’s advice, I set to work seriously upon a three-volume novel. My first idea was to call it ‘Born out of Due Time,’ as it narrated the struggles of a Socialist thinker a century in front of his generation; but, at Mr. Chatto’s suggestion, the title was afterwards changed to ‘Philistia.’ I desired, if possible, to run it through the Cornhill, and Mr. Payn promised to take it into his most favourable consideration for that purpose. However, when the unfinished manuscript was submitted in due time to his editorial eye, he rightly objected that it was far too socialistic for the tastes of his public. He said it would rather repel than attract readers. I was disappointed at the time. I see now that, as an editor, he was perfectly right; I was giving the public what I felt and thought and believed myself, not what the public felt and thought and wanted. The education of an English novelist consists entirely in learning to subordinate all his own ideas and tastes and opinions to the wishes and beliefs of the inexorable British matron.
‘THANK YOU, SIR’
Mr. Chatto, however, was prepared to accept the undoubted risk of publishing ‘Philistia.’ Only, to meet his views, the dénoûment was altered. In the original version, the hero came to a bad end, as a hero in real life who is in advance of his age, and consistent and honest, must always do. But the British matron, it seems, likes her novels to ‘end well’; so I married him off instead, and made him live happily ever afterward. Mr. Chatto gave me a lump sum down for serial rights and copyright, and ran ‘Philistia’ through the pages of The Gentleman’s. When it finally appeared in book form, it obtained on the whole more praise than blame, and, as it paid a great deal better than scientific journalism, it decided me that my rôle in life henceforth must be that of a novelist. And a novelist I now am, good, bad, or indifferent.
If anybody gathers, however, from this simple narrative, that my upward path from obscurity to a very modest modicum of popularity and success was a smooth and easy one, he is immensely mistaken. I had a ten years’ hard struggle for bread, into the details of which I don’t care to enter. It left me broken in health and spirit, with all the vitality and vivacity crushed out of me. I suppose the object of this series of papers is to warn off ingenuous and aspiring youth from the hardest worked and worst paid of the professions. If so, I would say earnestly to the ingenuous and aspiring— ‘Brain for brain, in no market can you sell your abilities to such poor advantage. Don’t take to literature if you’ve capital enough in hand to buy a good broom, and energy enough to annex a vacant crossing.’
The Biography
Allen, c. 1895
Grant Allen: A Memoir by Edward Clodd
‘Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart’
The original frontispiece
MEMOIR
‘I am in harmony with all that is a part of thy harmony, great Universe. For me nothing is early and nothing late that is in season for thee. All is fruit for me which thy seasons bear, O Nature! From thee, in thee, and unto thee are all things. “Dear City of Cecrops!” saith the poet; and wilt not thou say, “Dear City of God.”’
MARCUS AURELIUS (iv. 33).
‘For love we earth then serve we all;
Her mystic secret then is ours.’
GEORGE MEREDITH:
‘The Thrush in February.’
CHARLES GRANT BLAIRFINDIE ALLEN was born at Alwington, near Kingston, Canada, on the 24th February 1848. His father, J. Antisell Allen, sometime scholar of Trinity College, Dublin, was the son of Jonathan Allen of Killaloe, County Clare, an Irish barrister of some repute, who married his cousin, a daughter of Joseph Antisell of Arborhill, Tipperary. On taking holy orders, Nr. Antisell Allen settled for a time in London, and left for Canada in 1840, where his first charge was at Christieville, in the Province of Quebec. He finally became incumbent of Holy Trinity Church on Wolfe Island, Lake Ontario, in 1848. This followed on his marriage with Charlotte Catherine Ann Grant, only daughter of Charles William, fifth Baron de Longueüil, to whose memory, on his death in 1848, his widow had caused that church to be erected.
The title of Baron de Longueüil was bestowed by Louis XIV. in 1700 upon one Charles le Moyne de Longueüil for distinguished services in camp and court in Canada. Francis Parkman, the eminent historian of the French in the New World, speaks of le Moyne as ‘founder of a family, the most truly eminent in Canada.’ The succession of the Grants to the title came through the marriage of Marie Charles Joseph, Baroness de Longueüil in her own right, with Captain David Alexander Grant of Blairfindie, whose ancestors had fled to Canada after the battle of Culloden in 1746. The eldest son, Charles William, fifth Baron de Longueüil, married Caroline, daughter of General Coffin of Nora Scotia, in 1781, and had as issue Charles Irwin, the sixth Baron, and Charlotte, mother of Grant Allen.
One of Grant Allen’s sisters, Mrs. Maud Fergusson, says in a letter to me, ‘There was much protesting blood in us.’ General Coffin, the father of three sons, one of whom became a general, and the other two admirals, sacrificed his property on his refusal to submit to American rule after the War of Independence, and in Jacobite times the Grants of Blairfindie were ‘agin the Government’ My friend, Mr. J. M. Bulloch, has furnished me with some particulars concerning that family, and makes reference to Colonel Allardyce’s ‘Historical Papers of the Jacobite Period’ (printed by the New Spalding Club, 1895), in which occurs mention of the adhesion of the Grants to the Stuart cause. In the list of heritors who in the latter part of October 1699 (exactly two hundred years before Grant Allen’s death) gave bonds ‘for their peaceable behaviour,’ the name ‘John Grant of Blairfindie and his men’ is included. But their descendants were ‘out in the’45,’ and, after Culloden, four sons of the laird of Blairfindie, whose house was burnt by the Crown, escaped the axe by flight, probably by way of France, to America. Yet the Government had ‘scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it,’ since in a Report on the Highlands sent by one Lieutenant
Ogilvy to Henry Fox in 1750, mention is made of ‘John Grant, brother to Blairfindie in Glenlivett,’ as ‘listing men for the French service.’ The Lieutenant adds: ‘I shall do my best endeavour to get proof against him so that I may apprehend him.’
It is pretty certain that David Alexander Grant was descended from one of the American refugees. That some of the fugitives remained on the Continent is proved by letters from an Abbé, Peter Grant of Rome, in 1760-1765, to his relatives, which are quoted in Sir William Fraser’s privately printed ‘History of the Grants.’ The Abbé had a ‘nephew’ who called himself Baron de Blairfindie, and who was Colonel of the Legion Royale of France in 1774.
To the majority of readers, genealogies are as dry as logarithms. But, in these days, when the doctrine of heredity is in the air, the clues to a man’s physical and mental constitution are sought for in his ancestry and surroundings. Irish on the father’s side, and Scotch, with admixture of French, on the mother’s side, showing in his features a striking resemblance to the de Longueüil type, Grant Allen was well-nigh as pure-blooded a Celt as, in the subtle blending of European races, is possible. Therein is the key to his wonderful versatility, alertness, and power of easy, rapid passage from one subject to another, qualities, perilous enough, if unchecked, but which in him were, happily, usually controlled by the scientific spirit But, as Mr. Clement Shorter remarks in an incisive article in the ‘Bookman,’ December 1899, ‘it should not be necessary to emphasise the Celtic element in Grant Allen, because he was always insisting upon it himself, and because he did more than any one else to popularise the theory of the Celtic element in literature first propounded by Renan and Matthew Arnold.’ The spirit of inquiry which made every field of observation fruitful to himself and to his fellows was inherited from his father, himself a lover of living things,- and still, in his now advanced age, an eager student of their works and ways. Thence came, likewise, the spirit of gentleness and of sympathy, which, in the father, explains his revolt against the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed, the reading of which, being then compulsory, involved his resignation of the incumbency of Holy Trinity. That was in 1852. Mrs. Fergusson suggests that Grant Allen inherited his artistic sense’ (by which is probably meant his sense of harmony and colour, for he could not draw), ‘from his mother,’ who is described as ‘a woman of great strength and nobility of character, of wide and cultivated mind, honourable and generous, and possessed of great business capacity,’ the ‘complex parentage explaining his manysidedness.’ Emerson says, ‘Whoso would be a man must be a Nonconformist,’ and rebel and heretic are one in temperament, because each is opposed to the existing order of things; and the Jacobite, the loyalist, and the broad-minded theologian who ‘blent their blood’ produced in Allen a man whose life-note was revolt As he sung in one of his finest poems —
‘If systems that be are the order of God,
Revolt Is a part of the order.’
In many respects his boyhood was enviable. It was spent amidst scenes giving full, free play to that love of Nature which was to have brilliant and accurate expression in groups of charming essays. Parts of Wolfe Island and of Howe Island belonged to his family, and there, amongst these and other of the ‘Thousand Isles,’ he found happy hunting-ground for flower, and bird, and insect ‘Something of the glamour of childhood,’ he says, ‘surrounds the region still in my eyes; sweeter flowers blow there than anywhere else on this prosaic planet; bigger fish lurk among the crevices; bluer birds flit between the honeysuckle; and livelier squirrels gambol upon the hickory trees than in any other cases of this oblate spheroid. I see the orange lilies and the ladies’ slippers still by the reflected light of ten-year-old memories.’ Mrs. Fergusson records her impressions of ‘a kind, delicate, thoughtful, elder brother, extremely gentle towards all living creatures, and showing quite early an intense interest in all plants and animals. I remember that he used to set me to watch birds for him when he was, I suppose, at his lessons, and my pride if I could find the first “hepatica” or “sanguinaria” for him (plants corresponding with the snowdrop and violet as harbingers of a Canadian spring). I can still remember how delightful it was to be told by him of the habits and nests of the golden oriole, the humming birds, and about the great green moths and curious stick insects.’ Never, as his sister’s remarks imply, robust enough to enter into the rough games of boyhood, he cultivated no physical exercises, save that of skating — a necessity in the long Canadian winter, whose dreariness and monotony of whiteness chilled his bones. Outside his rambles, fishing appears to have been his sole diversion, a plea in its favour being, as he said to one of his sisters, that it ‘gave him time to think.’
Until the family left Canada, the father was tutor to his sons. He tells me that ‘Grant began Greek six weeks before he was seven years of age. He commenced writing a book, as he called it, at the same age. His mother saw him one day very busy at his little table; and on her asking him what he was doing, he said, “Oh, mother, I am writing a book on ‘War or Peace; which shall it be?’ and this is the chapter on Peace.” As a very little child, he would ask the, most thoughtful questions, making me wonder what was passing through his mind.’
If his boyhood was enviable, so was his school life and training, since it ministered to a temperament which was cosmopolitan. Pride of descent, and, more than that, hatred of oppression, go far to explain his Celtic sympathies, but the world was his country. Of patriotism, which, in righteous spleen against the abuses sheltered under the name, Dr. Johnson defined as ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel,’ Grant Allen speaks as ‘one of those lowest vices which most often masquerade in false garb as a virtue.’ Of course, he had in his mind that spurious, aggressive form whose motto is ‘my country, right or wrong;’ but the explanation of his frequent disclaimer of patriotism in any form is to be sought in his colonial birth, his mixed descent, and his education in America, France, and England, all inimical to the fostering of national sentiment, and to the love of any fatherland. And that had the inevitable result of keeping him out of touch with those inherent tendencies in the mass of men to which the persistence of race-feeling is due.
When he was thirteen years old, the family removed to Newhaven, Conn., where he and an elder brother, who predeceased him, were placed under the care of a tutor from the neighbouring College of Yale. The next move, ‘for the education of the children,’ as his father tells me, was in 1862 across the seas to France, where he was sent to school at the College Impériale, Dieppe. Then, about a year before his parents’ return to Canada, he was transferred to King Edward’s School, Birmingham. His progress and promise justified an effort on the part of his family to give him a university training, and in Michaelmas term, 1867, he matriculated at Merton College, Oxford. There he won the Senior Classical Postmastership (the technical term for Scholar at Merton), which was tenable for five years, and carried with it a stipend of £80 per annum. In the teeth of many difficulties, as will be seen presently, he gained a first class in Mods, in Trinity Term 1869, and a second class in Greats in Trinity Term 1870, returning for a day or two in 1871 to take his B.A., when he removed his name from the College books. So far as the intellectual inheritance into which he entered goes, he was happy in the time of his arrival. The current of ideas gave impetus to thoughts and speculations which were carrying him in the same direction. Between the issue of Herbert Spencer’s ‘Principles of Psychology’ (1855) and ‘Principles of Biology’ (1864), there had appeared Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ (1859) and Huxley’s ‘Man’s Place in Nature’ (1863). In i860 the ‘home of lost causes,’ as Matthew Arnold calls his beloved Oxford (Preface to ‘Essays in Criticism’), had witnessed another defeat, when Huxley opposed the fact of the common descent of man and ape to the rhetorical fictions of Bishop Wilberforce. Although the agitation had died away, it left a wholly changed atmosphere in which the freest thought could breathe. And the enthusiasts of that time, to whom the doctrine of Evolution appealed as a philosophy including man, ‘body
, soul, and spirit,’ within the laws of unbroken causation, had some warrant for belief in the triumph of a faith to which, a generation later, the recrudescence of superstition has, in the swing of the human pendulum, given a temporary check. Philosophy and Science, which Allen treated as one, were his first loves; and throughout his life, however much compelled to consort with a more frivolous mistress, he made her, more often than not, the servant of her rivals. His attitude, as will be shown presently in the interesting reminiscences contributed by his friend Professor York Powell, was then one of unqualified adhesion to the faith as it is in Herbert Spencer. And with some modifications hardly affecting the fundamentals of that faith, his attitude remained unchanged to the end. Of course, appreciation of the writings of Spencer, Darwin, and other authorities came the more readily to a youth who brought to the study of them a number of facts which he had collected since the days when he roamed about the ‘Thousand Isles,’ facts whose significance those writings revealed. And, moreover, having, from his earliest boyhood dismissed, if he ever held it, all belief in the supernatural, his was no sudden conversion, but the orderly development of a mind attuned to the new evangel. Twenty years after leaving Oxford, he gives this as the conclusion of the whole matter of the ‘Gospel according to Herbert Spencer’: ‘Know yourself, and your own place in the universe about you. Fear no phantoms, but face realities. Understand your own Body, and the light cast upon it by the analogy of other bodies. Understand your own Mind, and the light cast upon it by the history and evolution of other minds. Understand the phenomena, organic or inorganic, physical or psychical, by which you are surrounded, and the laws to which they severally conform. Understand the Society of which you are a member, and learn from like analogies the origin and functions of its various parts. So, in your capacity as an individual, will you govern your own path through the world aright; so, in your capacity as parent, will you produce and bring up better units for the composition of the Society in future; so, in your capacity as citizen, will you help to mould the State, of which you are a part, to ultimate conformity with Truth and Justice. In contradistinction to all the preachers of Faith — that is to say, of contented and uncritical Ignorance — Mr. Spencer stands forth as the preacher of Knowledge. And though his own contributions to it are endless — for he is a born généraliser, and even his conversation consists mainly of generalisations — yet his one greatest addition to the world’s stock may aptly be summed up in the phrase he himself prefixes to the published list of his works, “The Doctrine of Evolution.” He alone has taught us the orderly development of the cosmos as a whole, and of every one of its component parts, in accordance with a single universal law of synthetic development.’