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[Transcriber Note: The following is a transcription of the hand-written text in the illustration above. Added for reader convenience.]

I don’t know that any phrase or quotation has ever been of much use to me in life, but the two passages most frequently on my life are probably these—

“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

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, Mr. 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 Nova 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 many-sidedness.’ 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—

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 1860 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 generaliser 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.’

Life had been smooth sailing for Allen up to the time of his settlement at Oxford. Soon after this, changes in family circumstances threw him on his own efforts, since resources, outside the Postmastership, he had none. So he earned a little money, in the usual fashion, by coaching. With more chivalry than prudence, he had given hostages to fortune by an early marriage, which, if it called forth his devotion, and brought out his noblest qualities, crippled his energies, and made life a terrible struggle. For, very soon after the marriage, his wife was stricken with paralysis, rendering her totally helpless for two years, when the end came. Whether from the standpoint of health or economy, Oxford was no place for a poor man with an invalid companion, and hence Allen flitted, as circumstances demanded or allowed, from place to place, now living in London, now at the seaside, going up to Oxford only within the limits of residence necessary for securing his degree. In a letter written on New Year’s Day 1870 to Mr. E. B. W. Nicholson, now Bodley’s Librarian, he says:—

Allen’s first known appearance in print was in the pages of the ‘Oxford University Magazine and Review,’ of which only two numbers, December 1869 and January 1870, were published. Mr. Franklin Richards and Mr. Nicholson were joint editors of the first number, to which Allen contributed a dainty little poem entitled ‘Two Portraits,’ reprinted in ‘The Lower Slopes’ under the title ‘Forecast and Fulfilment.’ For the second number he and Mr. Nicholson were responsible, and additional interest attaches itself to the contents, as evidencing Allen’s bent and versatility. He contributed an article on ‘The Positive Aspect of Communism’; a poem entitled ‘In Bushy Park’ (reprinted in ‘The Lower Slopes’); and a short story, ‘Mr. Josiah P. Doolittle’s Electioneering Experiences,’ which, in sprightly style, tells how Josiah P. Doolittle, of Hitchcocksbury University, U.S.A., outwitted a corrupt election committee. The ‘Radical of the Period,’ as Allen styles himself in a letter to Mr. Nicholson, wherein he regrets that he can spare no more time for the magazine, justifies his title in the article on Communism. But it has touches of the ‘Philosophical Radical’ in the better sense of the recognition of evolution in politics. A sentence or two bearing on this may be quoted:—

Passing by the poem—one of many written at this time, and confided to the care of Mr. Franklin Richards, or circulated in manuscript—interest centres in the story, as showing Allen’s early predilection for narrative as vehicle for his views. In many of his scientific papers he slides into the familiar and the personal; trembling, as it were, on the edge of the dramatic presentment of things, as in Hood’s most serious verse we hear the jingle which, unchecked by the theme, would rattle with a pun. Hence it would seem that Allen was driven into fiction much as a duck is driven into water.

He was never a member of the Union, which involved a certain detachment from some men of his years; but there was no lack of arenas of talks and debates ‘de omnibus rebus’ in the rooms of College friends, notably those of Mr. Franklin Richards, where he met Mr. Nicholson, and also of Mr. Bromley, where he met Mr. York Powell, now Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford, who, to the great advantage of this memoir, has been good enough at my request to send the following:—

Mr. Andrew Lang, who did not meet him till he had left Oxford, says in the genial and generous tribute paid to the memory of his friend in the ‘Daily News’ three days after his death: ‘Allen told me how he found scratched on an ancient pane of glass in the window of his rooms a rhyming mediæval Latin verse. The Latin I have forgotten, but the sense was, “Why tarriest thou? what makest thou here, at Oxford?” He caused a wire grating to be placed over the pane, outside, that it might not suffer from the casual pebble of regardless youth. Perhaps not many undergraduates would have taken so much trouble?’ Mr. Bowman, the bursar of Merton, favours me with the following interesting note on this matter:—

The unknown lingerer’s question came home to Allen, and leaving Oxford ‘with a decent degree and nothing much else in particular to brag about,’ he ‘took perforce,’ as he had intimated to his friend Nicholson, ‘to that refuge of the destitute, the trade of schoolmaster.’ In his ‘Sign of the Ship,’ ‘Longman’s Magazine,’ December 1899, Mr. Lang says: ‘Others have written of Mr. Allen’s genius, the most versatile, beyond comparison, of any man in our age. Had he been able to devote himself entirely to physical science, as he desired, it is not for me to conjecture what he might have added to the sum of human knowledge. But his education at Oxford had been classical, and he was an unendowed student of his favourite themes. He had to live by his pen, and by scientific work he could not live.’ In Allen’s own words, ‘to teach Latin and Greek verse at Brighton College, Cheltenham College, Reading Grammar School, successively, was the extremely uncongenial task imposed upon me by the chances of the universe.’ Between his engagements at Cheltenham and Reading he was up at Oxford in 1872 as tutor to the sons of Lord Huntly, and it was then that he met his future wife, Miss Ellen Jerrard, at the house of her brother-in-law, Mr. Franklin Richards, then Lecturer of Trinity College. The union to which that meeting led was charged with a quarter of a century of unalloyed happiness for husband and wife. During that long time, Allen, never in robust health, was often prostrate with serious illness, aggravated, in the earlier years, by privation, and embittered by struggle, but the brave heart and helpful hand of his wife sustained him through it all. And when ‘The Woman Who Did’ was published, this was the inscription: ‘To my dear Wife, to whom I have dedicated my twenty happiest years, I dedicate also this brief memorial of a less fortunate love.’

The meeting with Miss Jerrard was a case of what Allen calls ‘that divinest and deepest of human intuitions, love at first sight’ (‘Falling in Love; with other Essays on more exact Branches of Science,’ p. 7). But to declare that love was another matter: Allen’s affairs were at a low ebb; Miss Jerrard was portionless (had she been dowered, that would have been a fatal bar, since Allen declared that he would never marry a woman who had money), so he possessed his soul in such patience as the heart allowed. But in the spring of 1873 an offer of marriage had warrant in virtue of his successful candidature for the post of Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the newly-founded Government College in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and in June of that year, before the honeymoon had ended, he and Mrs. Allen left England. Judging from the few examples that survive, his letters from Jamaica are the fullest that he ever penned. He was not a great letter-writer. The larger number which have been sent to me, or which are in my possession, are brief and personal; hence the small space filled by illuminative material, so far as letters go, in this memoir. The explanation of their sparseness is that ‘time is money.’ In a short note from Algeria to Mr. Edmund Gosse, Allen says: ‘I am so often ill that moments fit for writing are too precious to be used for anything but bread-winning.’ He gave a jocular turn to this view of the matter one Whitsuntide at Aldeburgh. The party included three philologists, Canon Isaac Taylor, Professor Rhys, and the late Dr. Richard Morris, and one day the talk fell on the number of words used in their common avocations by country working folk. Professor Max Müller was cited as authority for the statement that ‘some agricultural labourers have not three hundred words in their vocabulary’ (‘Lectures on Language,’ i. 308). Allen, at once challenged this, and in his measured, sonorous tones, twirling, as was ever his wont, his little platyscopic lens between finger and thumb, began recounting all the things, and all the parts of things, with which a peasant has to deal every day. Ere the list was half through, Allen had well-nigh reached the stated limit, when he suddenly called out, ‘Look here, you fellows, my price is two guineas a thousand words, and I’m not going on any longer.’

Letters, except when composed with an eye on the printer, are of the highest value, because the writer comes before us in undress, putting on ‘no side,’ as the phrase goes. In Allen’s case, however, the lack of letters is of less moment because of the personal, familiar element which pervades all his work, bringing him into direct touch with his readers. ‘I like your essays,’ said Henri III. to Montaigne.—‘Then, Sire, you’ll like me. I am my essays.’ So might Grant Allen have replied.

In the letters written to his mother-in-law there are some interesting passages about the coloured population of Jamaica, and about the College which had, as its chief object, their education. It will be remembered that he is writing seven years after the negro rebellion, in the suppression of which Governor Eyre took so prominent a part:—

Of the prospects of this College Allen never spoke hopefully. Located in the old Government buildings, it was laid on ambitious lines, whereas, to quote his words years after, ‘it should have been run as a Board School.’ Three months after it was started, he wrote as follows to Mrs. Jerrard:—

As the sequel shows, the College was not abolished till 1876, Allen, in the meantime, succeeding to the Principalship on the death of Mr. Chadwick.

In the same and in other letters some persistent illusions about the tropics are dealt with:—

Speaking of the flora, he says: ‘The fruits, of which one hears so much, are stringy and insipid; the flowers don’t grow; and the “tropical vegetation” is a pure myth.’ As for the fauna, he was wont to remark that there were fewer dangerous and venomous creatures in the tropics than in the British Isles!

There are relics, unfortunately, for the most part, only in fragmentary form, of correspondence on philosophical subjects between him and his brother-in-law, Mr. Franklin Richards. A few extracts from one of these letters have interest as containing the germs of the treatise on ‘Force and Energy’ (first printed for private circulation in 1876, and published in enlarged form in 1888), and also as indicating his course of reading:—

Probably that philosopher’s ‘Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung’ is responsible for the poem called ‘Pessimism,’ which in a subsequent letter Allen sent to Mr. Richards, and which is printed in ‘The Lower Slopes.’

The foregoing extracts show how omnivorous was his taste in reading, and in what variety of fields he browsed. Further hints of this are given in a letter to Mr. Nicholson, under date of 19th September 1880: ‘I spent the latter part of my three years in Jamaica on Anglo-Saxon and Early English History,’ and in the Introduction to his translation of the ‘Attis’ (1892) he says: ‘It is now nearly twenty years ago that I read Catullus’s masterpiece with my class of students in an abortive little Government College in Spanish Town.’ One of his original axioms, full of suggestion, and with the ‘soupçon’ of paradox wherewith so much that he said was flavoured, was, ‘You must never let schooling interfere with education’ (see ‘Eye versus Ear,’ in ‘Post-Prandial Philosophy,’ p. 129). He practised what he preached. Unwavering as he was in the fundamentals of the faith delivered to him in his undergraduate days, the area embraced by that faith was so vast that he had as little need as desire to transcend it. He agreed with Goethe that ‘man is born not to solve the problems of the universe, but to find out where the problem begins, and then to restrain himself within the limits of the comprehensible.’ The thirst after knowledge and the zest to apply it were insatiate in him; to the end of his days he was as a boy at school, as throughout his life he remained a boy at heart. And the fruition of his three years in Jamaica is seen in all his after-work. He came back with a store of facts of surpassing importance for his scientific treatises and fugitive essays; and of materials for his more typical stories, notably ‘The Reverend John Creedy,’ ‘In All Shades,’ and ‘The Devil’s Die.’ As he remarks in a paper on ‘Tropical Education’:—

While Allen was in Jamaica, the deepening impression which the ‘Synthetic Philosophy’ made on him impelled him to address some verses to Mr. Herbert Spencer, which were published twenty years afterwards in ‘The Lower Slopes.’ To these Mr. Spencer made the following acknowledgment, which with subsequent extracts from certain of his letters, he courteously permits me to print:—

On the closing of the College in 1876, Allen, with added intellectual capital, and modest compensation for the abolition of his post, returned to England, whither Mrs. Allen, whose health had suffered from a tropical climate, had preceded him by some months. His return was the resumption of a period of privation which he had not known since the Oxford days. There was no demand for the solid yet attractive wares which he had to offer. Serious himself, he took the public seriously. Three years of absence had put him out of touch with the literary market, and he had to learn through much tribulation that science, outside its commercial application, meant starvation. ‘I produced,’ he says, ‘a hundred or more magazine articles on various philosophical and scientific subjects, every one of which I sent to the editors of leading reviews, and every one of which was punctually “declined with thanks,” or committed without even that polite formality to the editorial wastepaper basket.’ Settled in lodgings for the time being at Oxford, where he earned a little by ‘coaching, he used some of his spare time in writing his first book, ‘Physiological Æsthetics,’ and some of his spare cash—balance of his compensation money—in publishing it.

The central idea of the book—the origin of the higher pleasure which we derive from natural or artistic products—had, as shown in one of his letters to Mr. Richards, occupied his thoughts while in Jamaica. Mr. Ruskin had said that the question ‘why we receive pleasure from some forms and colours and not from others, is no more to be asked or answered than why we like sugar and dislike wormwood.’ And Darwin also, in speaking of the constitution of man and the lower animals for the perception of differences in colours and sounds, had added, ‘but why this should be so we know no more than why certain bodily sensations are agreeable and others disagreeable.’ This was relegating the origin of the gustatory and other senses to the realm of the inexplicable; and hence, armed with Mr. Spencer’s ‘Principles of Psychology,’ Professor Bain’s ‘Senses and Intellect,’ and some current textbooks on physiology, Allen showed how the foundation of all sensation is in the laws of nervous action. ‘I feel convinced,’ he says, ‘that every æsthetic feeling, though it may incidentally contain intellectual and complex emotional factors, has necessarily, for its ultimate and principal component, pleasures of sense, ideal or actual, either as tastes, smells, touches, sounds, forms, or colours’ (p. 193). After showing the general relation of pleasure and pain to our organism and its circumstances, a body of evidence was presented in proof of the origin of existing likes and dislikes in æsthetic matters from the action of natural selection. The argument thus fell into line with the doctrine of Evolution, and warranted the following correspondence on the dedication of the book:—

The letter to Mr. Fry, probably handed by him to Allen for future use, was found with the Spencer correspondence. Mr. Spencer speaks of his special ‘fitness as a teacher and director of teachers. . . . If he can communicate ideas orally as well as he does it by writing, his abilities as an instructor must be unusually high. His book still more than his conversation shows a familiarity with science in general such as would specially fit him for directing an education having for its aim scientific culture at large.’

Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace acknowledged a copy of the book as follows:—

Published, as has been stated, at the author’s risk, ‘Physiological Æsthetics’ was, financially, unsuccessful. The sale did not reach three hundred copies, leaving the author some £50 to the bad. But the book escaped the inglorious fate of a ‘remainder’ by passing ‘out of print’ in a fire at the publishers, who awarded Allen £15 as compensation.

But it had a ‘succès d’estime,’ resulting, indirectly, in cash as well as ‘kudos.’ ‘Not only did it bring me into immediate contact with several among the leaders of thought in London, but,’ Allen adds, ‘it also made my name known in a very modest way, and induced editors—those arbiters of literary fate—to give a second glance at my unfortunate manuscripts. Almost immediately after its appearance, Leslie Stephen (I omit the Mr. “honoris causa”) accepted two papers of mine for publication in the “Cornhill.” “Carving a Coconut” was the first, and it brought me in twelve guineas. That was the very first money I earned in literature. I had been out of work for months, the abolition of my post in Jamaica having thrown me on my beam-ends, and I was overjoyed at so much wealth poured suddenly in upon me. Other magazine articles followed in due course, and before long I was earning a modest—a very modest—and precarious income, yet enough to support myself and my family.’

‘You have done,’ writes Leslie Stephen, ‘what is very rare and very excellent in journalism: you have made a distinct place for yourself, and have done a real service in spreading some popular notions of science. Few journalists can say as much for themselves.’ And in that service Mr. Stephen had given a helping hand by according space to the science-made-easy articles which were produced by Allen, Richard Proctor, and other gifted exponents of those results of modern research which accrued from 1859 onwards. Allen still dallied at intervals with the Muses, and while staying at Lyme Regis, his wife’s native town, in the summer of 1877, he composed ‘Pisgah’ (printed in ‘The Lower Slopes’), and sent it with the following letter to Mr. Spencer:—

Hearty as was the reception of his science ‘middles,’ there was the old trouble of space-limits in the magazines, and resulting uncertainty of income. Hence Allen’s willing acceptance of an offer of continuous work for some months under the late Sir William Hunter in the preparation of his gigantic ‘Gazetteer of India,’ involving removal to Edinburgh. ‘I wrote,’ Allen says, ‘with my own hand the greater part of the articles on the North-West Provinces, the Punjaub, and Sind, in those twelve big volumes.’ Back at Oxford in 1878, he was thrown once more upon fitful and fugitive work, and, casting about for new channels wherein to place it, wrote to Mr. Andrew Chatto, ‘most generous of men, and one of my earliest and staunchest literary supporters . . . to whose kindness and sympathy I owe as much as to any one in England’—a verdict which every one who has had like relations with Mr. Chatto will indorse.

It is needless to burden a brief memoir with letters of more or less the same tenor, and it suffices to note that this offer led to the pleasant results indicated in the tribute paid by author to publisher. The summer of 1878 found Allen again at Lyme Regis, where Jerrard Grant, his only child, was born in July. Meanwhile, from the time of his stay in Edinburgh, he had filled intervals of leisure in preparing another book which was an expansion of materials collected for a chapter on the ‘Genesis of Æsthetics’ in its predecessor. It was entitled ‘The Colour Sense: its Origin and Development; an Essay in Comparative Psychology,’ and was published, in Trübner’s ‘English and Foreign Philosophical Library,’ in 1879. The terms were ‘half-profits,’ a system the charm of which Douglas Jerrold said lies in its leading to no ‘division’ between authors and publishers. At the end of ten years the book had resulted in a total payment of something under £30 to its writer, who sarcastically remarks thereupon, ‘As it took me only eighteen months, and involved little more than five or six thousand references, this result may be regarded as very fair pay for an educated man’s time and labour, and should warrant the reproach of thoughtless critics for deserting the noble pursuit of science in favour of fiction and filthy lucre.’ Briefly stated, the design of the book is to show that the colour sense in man is no recent acquisition, but derived by him from his fruit-eating ancestors, who, by exercise of the sense of vision upon bright-coloured food stuffs, developed a special nervous organisation capable of discriminating between the various shades of colour. In one chapter Allen applied his rare gift of lucid exposition to interpretation of the fascinating theory of flower-fertilisation, and modification of form and colour by insects, which was suggested by Sprengel, and elaborated by Hermann Müller and others. ‘The colour sense of bees and butterflies has metamorphosed the world, and we must seek for its indications on every plain and mountain of every country in the earth’ (p. 94). Following the story of interaction between plant and animal to the human period, Allen effected an easy conquest over the Teutonic theories of development of the colour sense within historical epochs. These theories were supported, on purely philological grounds, by Mr. Gladstone, and others equally conservative, who welcomed and backed arguments, good, bad, or indifferent, against the inclusion of man, ‘body, soul, and spirit,’ as a product of evolution.

Among the letters which the book evoked, the following, from the pen of the distinguished co-formulator with Darwin of the theory of the origin of species, has chief interest:—

In an undated letter (why will people omit a stroke or two, the absence of which—‘experto crede’—often causes hours to be spent in arranging correspondence? Allen was a great sinner in this line), presumably referring to the ‘Colour Sense,’ Darwin says: ‘I have read the whole of your book with “great interest.” It contains very many views new to me, and highly ingenious, and some new facts.

‘I am glad that you defend sexual selection: I have no fear about its ultimate fate, though now at a discount. Wallace’s explanation of, for instance, the display of a Peacock seems to me mere empty words.’

The tribute paid by Darwin, Spencer, and Wallace to Allen’s original contributions to theories which he popularised is sufficing answer to some critics who, let it be hoped, through imperfect acquaintance with his work, accord him no higher level than that of a skilful scientific middle-man. That his modesty claimed only this as his function is the greater warrant for crediting him with the independent collection of facts whose value was recognised by the founders of the doctrine of Evolution. In the preface to the ‘Colour Sense’ he says:—

‘One of the main necessities of science at the present day is the existence of that organising class whose want was pointed out by Comte, and has been further noted by Mr. Herbert Spencer. To this class I would aspire, in a humble capacity, to belong. But the organising student cannot also himself be a specialist in all the sciences whose results he endeavours to co-ordinate; and he must, therefore, depend for his data upon the original work of others. If specialists find technical errors in such co-ordinated results, they should point them out frankly for correction and improvement, but they should not regard them as fit subjects for carping criticism.’ In this connection, it is not out of place to quote what the late Sir Fitzjames Stephen says in reference to Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’: ‘The slight importance of the mistakes which have been discovered in it, shows with what judgement he availed himself of the researches of others. If it is a reproach to use them, it is difficult to see what is the use of making them’ (‘Horæ Sabbaticæ,’ ii. p. 390). And, in fact, the service rendered by a skilful and accurate expositor is not to be lightly under-rated in these days of specialisation in every branch, and in all the minutiæ of science, with its resulting obscuration of the interrelation between all departments of knowledge, and blurring of the sense of unity and continuity.

Although ‘The Colours of Flowers as Illustrated in the British Flora,’ and ‘Flowers and their Pedigrees,’ were not published until some few years after ‘The Colour Sense,’ the development of certain theories in them which could be only hinted at in that book warrants reference to them at this point, and, moreover, they further substantiate the claim made on behalf of Allen’s original work, notably in botany. In this matter it is a privilege to be able to quote the weighty testimony of Dr. Sydney H. Vines, Sherardian Professor of Botany in the University of Oxford, who in kindest response to my request has sent me the following memorandum:—

To the theory that petals have generally been formed from the expanded filaments of stamens, Allen added an ingenious speculation on the original colour of the earliest flowers. The fact that the stamens of flowers of the simplest, and therefore more primitive, type, are yellow, led him to the inference that the earliest flowers derived from them were yellow also. It was shown that the changes in the colours of flowers, which are of course chemically induced, take place in regular order, e.g. yellow flowers becoming white or pink, and then passing through red and purple to blue, this order being without exception and never reversed. In acknowledging a ‘Cornhill’ article on the subject, Darwin wrote: ‘Many years ago I thought it highly probable that petals were in all cases transformed stamens. I forget (excepting the water-lily) what made me think so; but I am sure that your evolutionary argument never occurred to me, as it is too striking and apparently valid ever to be forgotten. I cannot help doubting about petals being naturally yellow: I speak only from vague memory, but I think that the filaments are generally white, or almost white, and surely it is the filament which is developed into the petal. I remember some purple and bright yellow filaments, but these seemed to me to serve by adding colour to the white flower. Is it not the pollen alone which renders most stamens yellow at a cursory glance? Many thanks for the pleasure which your article has given me.’

Darwin, ever generous in recognition of the contributions made by others to the strengthening of his theory, not only gratified Allen by a presentation copy of the ‘Origin of Species,’ which was, of course, accorded the place of honour on his well-filled ‘ex dono auctorum’ shelf, but subscribed towards the gift of a microscope with which a group of scientific friends made him happy.

Such encouragement was as welcome as it was deserved, for Allen was soon to have the lesson that man cannot live by science alone reinforced. Back in London in 1879, he joined the staff of the ‘Daily News.’ The information he had gained when preparing articles for the ‘Indian Gazetteer,’ served him in good stead for leader-writing on the Afghan campaign. But the strain and the late hours which work on a daily paper involved told on his always precarious health, and he accepted with relief the lighter demands of weekly journalism, becoming a principal contributor to ‘London.’ Andrew Lang, Robert Louis Stevenson, and other coming men were on the staff of that brilliant paper. However, as this letter to Mr. Nicholson tells, that channel of support soon dried:—

This letter, touching in its subdued ‘de profundis’ note, with never a word of complaint or querulousness, may perhaps suffice as a quietly rebukeful answer to the remark heard ever and anon, ‘What a pity Grant Allen took to novel-writing!’ Yes; ‘the pity of it.’ An article here and there at uncertain intervals, while the calls of the landlord, the butcher, and the baker, and, unfortunately, the doctor too, were not uncertain. A gratuitous lecture before a well-dined audience, heedless whether the lecturer went back to Grub Street, or ‘No Grub’ Street—why this wonder that he ‘took the downward path that leads to fiction’?

Some miscellaneous work which Mr. Nicholson, who was then librarian of the London Institution, was able to offer, varied by a trip to Guernsey to examine a school there, helped to carry Allen along till the autumn of 1879. But bronchial and other troubles made it necessary that he should winter abroad, and consequently he left Lyme Regis for Hyères, where he remained till May 1880, working, as health permitted, at articles for various magazines.

That Allen would not have joined the ranks of professional novelists but for ‘res angusta domi’ is almost certain, and the first steps were taken with some little reluctance, because this meant quittance, at least for the time being, of realms charged with the speculations and inquiries dear to his heart. But he was a better story-teller than he knew; ‘a most successful artist,’ such is the judgement of Mr. Andrew Lang, ‘in the art for which he did not care.’ He cared, however, more and more for it as time went on, taking a real pleasure in plot and construction, and finding that pleasure enhanced by the opportunity which the novel afforded as the vehicle whereby heedful ear might be gained for views and opinions which otherwise, would obtain no hearing. In his judgement, all fiction was, to borrow a term from chemistry, allotropic. He used to say that on two plots hang ‘all the law and the prophets’ in story-telling. ‘A loves B; B loves A. Hence smooth sailing. A loves B; B loves C. Hence complications.’ Our common friend, Canon Isaac Taylor, tackled him one evening at Aldeburgh on the trouble which all novelists must have in settling the fate of their characters. ‘For example, your villains; what do you do with them?’—‘Oh,’ replied Allen, ‘we make them into canons!’ The story of the stages by which he took ‘the downward path’ (‘the upward path, one may say,’ so writes Mr. Andrew Lang, ‘judging by many of his excellent stories,’) has been told and retold by himself; but, for the completeness of this Memoir, his latest version, given in the Introduction to ‘Twelve Tales,’ selected by himself, and issued shortly before his death, must be given here:—

A re-perusal of the eleven reprinted stories (the twelfth, ‘The Churchwarden’s Brother,’ is ‘entirely new, never having appeared in public before on this or on any other stage’) shows that if the elementary materials to which the novelist is restricted are few, Allen showed exceptional deftness in the various combinations he effected through them. It also shows with what strenuous unwavering purpose he made fiction the channel of philosophy and science, while not obtruding either to the detriment of interest in the story.

The dozen samples referred to above were chosen, Allen tells us, as illustrating best in different keys the various types of tale to which he devoted himself. In making this selection, he stood outside his work, and took (what few men can take), his own ‘parallax’ correctly. In ‘The Reverend John Creedy,’ the keynote is the persistence of atavism, or reversion to the original type; in ‘Frasine’s First Communion,’ it is the morality of the French marriage law in legitimising offspring born before the marriage of their parents; in ‘The Child of the Phalanstery,’ it is the weeding out of the unfit for the physical and moral wellbeing of the community; in ‘The Abbé’s Repentance,’ it is the dominance of the man over the celibate priest, and the self-sacrifice on fall from ideals opposed to Nature; in ‘Wolverden Tower,’ it is the old and not yet wholly extinct custom of foundation-sacrifice, or the walling-in of a victim to the disturbed earth-spirit when a building is erected; in ‘Janet’s Nemesis,’ it is the revenge of Nature on woman’s neglect or abnegation of her highest function; in ‘Langalula,’ it is the veneer of the ‘converted’ negro, and in ‘The Curate of Churnside’ the veneer of the ‘converted’ scoundrel; in ‘Cecca’s Lover,’ the light ethics of the Italian temperament, or the dependence of morals, which is as certain as that of physical constitution, on climate; in ‘The Backslider,’ the destruction of creed by culture; in ‘John Cann’s Treasure,’ the lust of gain that overreaches itself; in ‘Ivan Greet’s Masterpiece,’ the unattained ideal; and in ‘The Churchwarden’s Brother,’ another psychological study, inherited tendencies being illustrated in a staunch ‘pillar of the Church.’ In one of his most ingenious novels, ‘The Great Taboo,’ the savage theory of the soul as an intermittent tenant of the body, of which Mr. Frazer makes suggestive use in ‘The Golden Bough,’ is the ‘motif.’ It is handled with great dexterity. In his ‘Sign of the Ship’ (‘Longman’s Magazine,’ December 1899) Mr. Andrew Lang has an interesting note on ‘Kalee’s Shrine’ (1886), which is described on the title-page as by Grant Allen and May Cotes. He says: ‘The germ of the tale was sent to me by a lady, and I suggested her collaboration with Mr. Allen. There was something of “the supernatural” (which he detested) in the romance, so he cut some nerve or other of the heroine’s, and rounded the point in that way, though he knew that he was writing false science. (It was the ‘inhibitory nerve’ of the heroine’s eyelid, the cutting of which had impossible consequences (p. 191).—E. C.) Anything was better than “the supernatural,” even a consciously false explanation. For such reasons I used to tell Mr. Allen that he was really as obscurantist as any Inquisitor. He thought that the end (science) justified the means. Once, I think, he did confess to something of this defect in conversation, or perhaps he only “put the question by,” as one of the many on which we could never agree. He was a most charming companion, and marvelled much that one could never see the world as he saw it. He would give a little evolutionary lecture, and I would answer, “God is great.” There were irreconcilable differences!’ To which Mr. Lang adds elsewhere (‘Daily News,’ 28th October 1899): ‘As one born to differ from Mr. Allen in almost every conceivable point, I never could irritate him by opposition, and this I am anxious to record as a proof of the wonderful sweetness of his nature.’ But, as his friend Mr. Purcell humorously says: ‘To find myself in agreement with Mr. Allen on any question whatever, critical, social, political, would indeed be a painful breach in a friendship which has subsisted for a quarter of a century without one cloud of acquiescence, concession, or retractation on either side. His philosophy I denounce as heretical, yet delight in; it is a pleasure to confound his detestable cutthroat politics; his panaceas for social ills I regard as deadliest poison, yet I would not have him drop them’ (Review of ‘The Lower Slopes’—‘Academy,’ 31st March 1894).

The long ‘Sturm und Drang’ period was now followed by years into which, whatever of interruption to work might enter through ill-health and resulting moments of depression (‘my right lung will never be quite right,’ he says in a letter of June 1880 to Mr. Nicholson), he put an astounding amount of labour. But fiction was, with him, provision of means for higher ends; and, while busy over the short story or the regulation three-volume novel, there was no pause in the pursuit of studies, or in the gathering of facts, bearing on his cherished ‘magnum opus’—an ‘Inquiry into the Origins of Religions.’ Concerning the first (and, as events turned out, the only) instalment of this work, published in 1897 under the title ‘The Evolution of the Idea of God,’ he says in the preface: ‘I have been engaged upon collecting and comparing materials for more than twenty years. I have been engaged in writing my book for more than ten.’ Fortunately, as in some degree lightening mechanical labour, his memory was of the best. Its capacity, contents, and accuracy were such that, as Mr. Le Gallienne says in his charming assessment of the man, the phrase became current whenever any question was seeking answer, ‘We must look it up in Grant’ (‘Fortnightly Review,’ December 1899, p. 1007). Between whiles he reports himself to Mr. Nicholson as ‘evolutionising for the “St. James’s Gazette,” ’ and a month after that as having undertaken the book on ‘Anglo-Saxon Britain,’ to which Professor York Powell approvingly refers (p. 32); while there are hints of treatment of other subjects in this letter to Mr. Spencer, written at Lyme Regis 14th September 1880:—

Allen was no lover of that ‘squalid village’ London. ‘There are those who admire it. . . . For myself, I love better the densely-peopled fields than this human desert, this beflagged and macadamised man-made solitude.’ ’Tis a matter about which contention is vain: ‘chacun à son goût.’ So in 1881 he settled at Dorking, finding among the Surrey hills and vales exhaustless wealth of material, and gathering round him at ‘The Nook’ an ever-widening circle drawn to him by a magnetic sweetness and old-world courtesy that disarmed the most prejudiced. And, there, no light attraction and privilege was his in the neighbourship of Mr. Meredith, who in a letter now before me says: ‘You know how highly I prized Grant Allen’s literary work, and the warmth of my feeling for him personally.’ That love of Nature, with its penetration of many a secret, which suffuses all the work of George Meredith, finding, as it seems to some of us, its fullest expression in his ‘Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth’ (the title itself is for the ‘healing of the nations’), and which, in the talks and gossipy essays of Grant Allen, invested every wayside weed with interest and deep meaning, was a spiritual bond between them, as it is between all who draw the inspiration of life from the Great Mother.

The somewhat relaxing air of Dorking, however, told against him in the winter; and as dryness and sunshine were his breath of life, he went southwards for a series of years to Algiers, or the Riviera, or Tyrol, or Italy, always ‘redeeming the time,’ storing up material for novel, or essay on science or art, or for historical guide-book. Here is a dainty little letter from Algiers to his boy. His writing, always marvellously clear, lost none of that virtue when reduced to the ‘hand’ now reproduced in facsimile.

[Transcriber Note: The following is a transcription of the hand-written text in the illustration above. Added for reader convenience.]

Although somewhat anticipative, it is convenient to insert here the impression made by him on fellow-sojourners, and this has pleasant record in the following communication from Miss Bird, writing on behalf of her venerable brother, Dr. George Bird, whose friendships embrace a range of time including Leigh Hunt and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

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:—

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:—

The writer of a memoir should obtrude 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 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.

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:—

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:—

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:—

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 Landor’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.

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:—

In acknowledging Mr. Edmund Gosse’s ‘Life’ of his father, Philip Henry Gosse, a naturalist of deservedly high repute in a past generation, Allen wrote:—

The admiration which Allen thus expresses was the more sincere because Mr. Gosse’s ‘individuality’ took the shape of adherence to the exclusive tenets of the sect known as ‘Plymouth Brethren,’ which would have stood ‘four square to all the winds that blow’ against so irreverent and daring a creed as Allen put into mellifluous and noble verse for recital at a dinner of the Omar Khayyám Club a few evenings before he penned the foregoing letter:—

The six-weeks’ trip to Egypt in November till mid-December 1889 gratified Allen’s long-cherished desire to see a country whose monuments interested him chiefly for their religious significance. The journey had its drawbacks, partly on account of anxiety about Mrs. Allen’s health, and partly because of the repulsive sides of Eastern life—the dirt, the squalor, and the mendicancy. But Allen never regretted a visit which he had no desire to repeat, and which yielded a store of material confirming him in the ghost-theory of the origin of religion learned at the feet of Mr. Herbert Spencer. The value of that material was enhanced because the conclusions to which it pointed seemed to him to fall into line with those reached by Mr. Frazer in his ‘Golden Bough,’ a book which influenced Allen profoundly. Agile in acting on any hint, he made, as has been already stated, the central idea of that work the plot of one of his best stories, ‘The Great Taboo’; but Mr. Frazer’s influence is seen in more sober directions, as in the translation of the ‘Attis’ and the ‘Evolution of the Idea of God.’ That he had aptly learned to do ‘the sensational things that please the editors’ is shown not so much in the ‘Tents of Shem’ (1891), wherein some Algerian experiences are utilised, as in his coming out the winner of the thousand pounds prize offered for a novel by the proprietors of ‘Tit-Bits.’ Most of his writings, from a certain sprightliness and note of aggressiveness, brought him numbers of approving or protesting letters, rarely, it is probable, letters of the following laughter-moving type, which may have been penned by the individual who, on hearing the announcement of a lecture on Keats, asked, ‘What are Keats?’ For charity’s sake, the writer’s name and address (a West-end one) are withheld:—

‘What’s Bred in the Bone’ (1891) called forth a host of petitions for loans (always temporary!) from less fortunate brethren and sisters of the craft, compliance with which would have cleared his pockets of thrice the sum paid him. More agreeable letters followed the issue of his daring, and, in the judgement of a majority of critics, successful translation of the ‘Attis’ (1892), ‘the greatest poem in the Latin language . . . the finest flower of the Celtic genius infiltrated by the mystic and mysterious charm of the Oriental imagination.’ (Allen had already suggested, in a footnote to ‘Physiological Æsthetics,’ that Catullus was a Celt.) In this venture, the classical scholar, the poet, and the anthropologist, were manifest, but it is to the last-named that the motive of the translation is due. In an essay which follows the text and translation, Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’ is dexterously worked into the argument of the chapters of Herbert Spencer’s ‘Principles of Sociology,’ wherein the ghost-theory is formulated. All gods, it is argued, were originally ghosts, and ghosts, as the spirits of dead ancestors, supply the ‘germ-plasm’ of religion. The prevalence of belief in tree-gods is explained by the planting of trees on graves, the ghosts of the buried passing into the trees: hence, too, the probable origin of cultivation, the grave being the earliest place sown with seeds. To those who regard ancestor-worship as a secondary stage in the evolution of religion, the argument will remain as unconvincing as it does to Mr. Frazer and Mr. Andrew Lang (who, by the way, are as much at issue with Professor Max Müller and his school as is Mr. Spencer); while to Mr. Herbert Spencer it supplies a missing link in his chain of facts. It is an advantage that the following letters from these several authorities (by whose permission they are here printed) were found among Allen’s papers:—

Mr. Lang tells me that ‘the reference in Kohl meant this. A Red Indian more or less revered a certain tree, not as connected with ancestor-worship, but because it once curtseyed to him.’

The following letter makes brief reference to the foregoing, and throws a glimpse on Allen’s life abroad at this period:—

The question of removing to a more bracing place than Dorking had often been mooted, longing eyes being cast upon Hind Head, whose ‘radiating spurs are perfumed with the aromatic resins of garrulous pinewoods.’ There Allen built a charming cottage on the ‘Hilltop’ overlooking the Devil’s Punch-bowl, removing thither in 1893. The change justified itself, because it enabled him thenceforth to remain in England in the winter, and to be free for trips abroad in the spring, when the brighter and longer days could be utilised for visits to the renowned art galleries, whose contents are described in his, unhappily, incomplete series of ‘Historical Guides.’ Perugia does not appear among the places named in the foregoing letter, but it was there that in the spring of 1893^[1], to quote from a prefatory note, he wrote, ‘for the first time in my life wholly and solely to satisfy my own taste and my own conscience,’ ‘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:—

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:—

‘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:—

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 having 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; i.e. 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 spring-tide 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 and 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:—

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:—

‘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 which, fortunately, a copy was found among Allen’s papers.

The following letter, written to the Rector of Haslemere, falls into line with the foregoing, the occasion being the opposition of that cleric to Allen’s nomination as President of the Haslemere Natural History Society:—

The temporary lull in the demand for Allen’s work had its recompense in giving him opportunity to put into shape some of the materials which he had been long collecting for his book on the Origin of Religions, and also to prepare for press the earlier volumes of his series of Historical Guides. ‘Paris’ and Florence’ were published in 1897, and quickly followed by the ‘Cities of Belgium’ and ‘Venice’; the ‘European Tour,’ issued when he was on his deathbed, being the last completed volume. All of these contain some of his finest work, and are to be unreservedly commended. They were not written to supersede the ordinary guide-books, but to supplement them, and the plan on which they are constructed shows Allen at his best as an exponent of historical evolution. First comes the inquiry, ‘Why a town ever gathered together at all in that particular spot? What induced the aggregation of human beings rather there than elsewhere?’ Next, ‘Why that town grew to social or political importance, and what were the stages by which it assumed its present shape?’ Next, ‘Why it gave rise to that higher form of handicraft which we know as Art, and towards what particular arts it specially gravitated?’ Finally, the books considered in detail the various strata of the growth or development of a town, ‘examining the buildings and works of art which they contain in historical order, and, as far as possible, tracing the courses which led to their evolution, stress being laid upon the origin and meaning of each structure as an organic whole, and upon the allusions or symbols which its fabric embodies.’

Allen’s endorsement of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s theory of ghost-worship—in other words, of the worship of ancestors, as the basis of religion, has been shown in the brief remarks on the ‘Attis,’ and this attitude was strengthened by further reflection and study, notably of the Bible, his familiarity with which little-read and much misunderstood book was unique. In acknowledging a copy of my Presidential Address to the Folklore Society on the opening of the session in 1896, he wrote:—

Some conversations between Allen and his friends upon the title of the book led to the receipt of this interesting letter from Mr. Spencer, whose wise suggestion was adopted:—

When the manuscript was ready for press, Allen sent it to Mr. Benjamin Kidd, author of ‘Social Evolution,’ who had evinced interest in the work, and offered to submit it to the consideration of Messrs. Macmillan. This he did, with the result named in the following letter:—

The book was ultimately published by Mr. Grant Richards, and an edition of seven hundred and fifty copies disposed of in a few weeks. As the price was twenty shillings net, this result was satisfactory. Mr. Herbert Spencer sent some encouraging words: ‘I congratulate you,’ he wrote, ‘on its achievement. I had no idea you had been devoting such an immensity of labour and research to the subject. The bringing together of the evidence in a coherent form and showing its bearing on the current creed can scarcely fail to have a great effect. I hope it may succeed as well pecuniarily as it otherwise will.’

Mr. Stead gave ample space to an analysis of the book in the ‘Review of Reviews,’ receiving the following reply to his inquiry as to suitable illustrations:—

The book did not evoke the discussion which Allen expected. Apart from the indifference (far greater than he thought) about these high matters on the part of a public which in the degree that it cares at all, cares only for settled results, and for these only when prepared in peptonised form, the facts and inferences did not carry conviction to the upholders of the animistic theory of the Origin of Religions. Hence Allen appears to have abandoned the scheme of developing the argument in further volumes at which he hinted in the Preface. Moreover, he was busy in more remunerative fields. Editors were tempting him with better prices than of yore for stories; and to a generation which had forgotten his science-made-easy articles, it was easy work to recast these as ‘Moorland Idylls’ and ‘Flashlights from Nature.’

But fiction prevailed, because, as he says in a letter from Cookham in the autumn of 1897 to Mr. Charles Longman:—

His keen and growing interest in art, mainly as illustrative of evolution in the conceptions which material and spiritual conditions determined, made the preparation of the ‘Historical Guides’ a labour of love, and a warrant for holidays abroad. The series, which secured the flattery of imitation, remains unfinished. It is, therefore, the more refreshing to record that on one side of Allen’s work a certain completeness was reached, and that in a direction which brought him pleasure unalloyed. This was in the contribution of an Introduction and Notes to a book of which above eighty editions have already appeared—‘The Natural History of Selborne.’ Dealing with a work ‘which must be read in the historic, and not in the strictly scientific spirit,’ Allen is sparing in the matter of notes, contenting himself, in the main, with correcting questionable or erroneous statements in the text. In the introduction he contrasts the more limited and simpler conditions under which the old naturalists worked with those enjoyed by their successors of to-day. But the history of scientific progress shows, as, for example, in the case of Galileo’s discoveries, that genius and insight have achieved marvellous results with the simplest apparatus; and even where the obscure collector has gathered materials whose value he knew not, these have often formed the basis of the superstructures which the master-builders in science have raised. In recording the natural history and antiquities of Selborne and its neighbourhood Gilbert White started with no ‘a priori’ theories, still less with the intention of writing a book. He troubled not himself about the origin of life-forms; that all plants and animals were specially created by divine fiat was no matter of question with the parson-naturalist. The science of comparative mythology, with its proofs of the derivation of the Hebrew legend of the Creation from Accadian sources, was unborn; and the disturbing doubts as to the permanence of species which Buffon had covertly expressed, reached not the unruffled life of a Hampshire village. Nevertheless, the things that Gilbert White observed suggested reflections which, had they been pursued, would have brought him face to face with problems whose solution it was left for Spencer, Darwin, and Wallace to achieve. Allen gives a few cogent examples of the old naturalist’s unwitting approach towards certain sides of the theory of natural selection and of the allied theory of subtle interaction between organisms and their surroundings. ‘He was one of the few early naturalists who recognised the importance of the cumulative effect of infinitesimal factors—a truth on which almost the whole of modern biology and geology are built up. As zoologist, as botanist, as meteorologist, as sociologist, he is possessed in anticipation by the modern spirit in every direction. In this respect, it is true, he cannot be named beside his far abler contemporary, Erasmus Darwin; yet while Erasmus Darwin has left behind him great speculations, immensely interesting to the student of science and philosophy, but not to the general reader, Gilbert White has produced a book which will continue to be read for years, both as a model of observation and as the picture of a man, a place, and an epoch’ (p. xxxviii).

Two graphic letters to his son, describing the excitement in Northern Italy during the riots of 1898, at the time when Allen was setting out homeward, may be inserted here:—

The latter half of 1898 found Allen full of commissions for work both grave and gay, and at the turn of the year he renewed his rounds in the art galleries of Italy. The rest may be briefly told. During a stay in Venice in the early spring of 1899, he was attacked with what appeared to be malarial symptoms, but the exact nature of which, on his return home, puzzled a succession of specialists. His condition, despite intermittent gleams of hope, shared by him to the full, became, week after week, more grave; and in the final stages of the malady, which an autopsy proved was deep-seated and incurable, he endured frightful agony, from which, on the 25th October, death brought release. The suffering he underwent was a cruel sequel to a life which never consciously gave pain to any living creature, and to whose exquisitely sensitive temperament pain, not death, was the ‘king of terrors.’ Watching a moth in a candle flame, he asked,

Stevenson’s merciless treatment of Modestine, pricked with goad armed with an inch of pin, and with her foreleg ‘no better than raw beef on the inside,’ which is described in the ‘Travels with a Donkey,’ evoked a protest from Allen; while in his article on ‘The New Hedonism’ (‘Fortnightly Review,’ 1894) he tells this story:—

‘I saw once at the Zoo a pair of chimpanzees, the female of which was dying of consumption. When the keeper opened the box where the two were kept, the little husband clasped his sick wife to his breast with such a pathetic look of mingled terror and protective feeling, that I said at once, “Shut down the lid.” I could not bear to intrude upon this almost human sorrow’ (p. 387).

His feeling about death has explanation in a remarkable article contributed to the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ some seven years ago, in which he describes a narrow escape from drowning in boyhood. He was skating on a lake from which big blocks of ice had been cut the day before, and, unaware of this, went swiftly towards the dangerous spot, which had been only slightly frozen over during the night. He went through, and was carried under the thicker ice beyond, which, on coming to the surface, he tried to break through by butting his head against it. The result was that he was stunned, then numbed by the cold, and water-logged, so that, but for timely help, he must have succumbed. So far as consciousness went, he was dead: artificial respiration and restoratives brought him back to life. And, in his own words, ‘the knowledge that I have thus once experienced in my own person exactly what death is, and tried it fully, has had a great deal to do, I think, with my utter physical indifference to it. I “know” how it feels; and, though it is momentarily uncomfortable (I felt only a sense of cold and damp and breathlessness, a fierce wild struggle, a horrible choking sensation, and then all was over), it isn’t half as bad as breaking your arm or having a tooth drawn. In fact, the actual dying itself, as dying, is quite painless—as painless as falling asleep. It is only the previous struggle, the sense of its approach, that is at all uncomfortable. Even this is much less unpleasant than I should have expected beforehand; and I noted at the time that there was a total absence of any craven shrinking—the sensation was a mere physical one of gasping and choking. Whenever I have stood within a measurable distance of death ever since, my feeling has been always the same—I have been there already, and see no cause to dread it. Of course, one might strongly object to a painful end, on account of its painfulness, and one might shrink, and ought to shrink, from leaving one’s family—especially if young or insufficiently provided for; but death itself, it seems to me, need have absolutely no terrors for a sensible person.’

In Allen’s case, absence of dread of death was accompanied by absence of belief in a future life. This was the logical outcome, not so much of denial, as of what would seem congenital incapacity to conceive that there could be such a thing as the supernatural. In a letter to the ‘Echo,’ on one of the rare occasions that he troubled to correct mis-statements about himself, he said, ‘I am not, and never was, an Agnostic.’ For the Agnostic, in refusing either to affirm or deny as to the existence of anything beyond the phenomenal and outside the range of human experience or of possible knowledge, recognises that it may be. But he expends no time upon it, holding with Bacon that ‘The inquisition of Final Causes is barren, and, like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing.’ He says, ‘I don’t know.’ Allen, on the contrary, said, ‘There is nothing to be known.’

Obviously, there was nothing of the mystic or the transcendentalist (using that term in its Kantian sense) in his mental composition. As an example, in his treatment of Celtic folklore, although the magic of the poetry attracted him, as it attracts us all, he threw the cold, dry light of analysis on the fairydom in endeavouring to prove that the romance of the ‘little folk’ is a confused tradition of a dwarf race, whose nearest representatives are, perhaps, the modern Lapps. And further, his ‘reaction against the despotism of fact’ in the crusade against the institution of marriage was largely affected by undue insistence upon one set of facts to the minimising or excluding of others.

To apply to him what Cotter Morison said of Macaulay, that ‘he had no ear for the finer harmonies of the inner life,’ does not quite convey what one intends; and yet Allen himself would not have taken exception to it. For, again and again, in private chat, he spoke of never having felt awe or reverence in contemplating phenomena that move the multitude of mankind to sacrifice or prayer. He had a full share of the wonder which accompanies boundless curiosity. This was not, however, because he felt himself in the presence of an inscrutable Power, but because what he had learned concerning the interaction and interrelation of things spurred him to more eager effort to discover secrets which would bring further revelation of the unbroken unity of phenomena. This was all that he cared about. And he deemed it a puerile and unworthy thing to use time in discussing the validity of a heap of trivial pseudo-mysteries loosely grouped under the term ‘supernatural,’ when the natural held unexplained matters weighty enough to occupy the life of a man, were it lengthened a hundredfold. For within a man’s very self, to name but one or two of the matters upon which Allen was wont to dilate, lie hid the problems of heredity, with its involved transmission of physical characters and mental tendencies, from generation to generation, through the medium of a speck of matter invisible to the naked eye; the mysterious processes of digestion, since ‘man is what he eats’; and, still more mysterious, those of assimilation, so that in the change of particles, which the nerve-cells ceaselessly undergo, the continuity of the individual abides.

Whether in the dissection of a simple flower or of an elaborated creed, Allen, as a consistent evolutionist, applied the same method. The critical coolness which he brought to analysis of things held dear and sacred was not due to wantonness, nor to disregard of susceptibilities, but to the unshakable conviction that the methods of science are universal in their application. Hence things possessed for him a reality which made him scarcely tolerant of the ‘muzzy’ philosophies wherewith men confuse themselves and their fellows. There may be aptly applied to him what Mr. Mackail eloquently says of Lucretius: ‘His contemplation of existence is no brooding over abstractions: Nature is not in his view the majestic and silent figure before whose unchanging eyes the shifting shadow-shapes go and come; but an essential life, manifesting itself in a million workings, “creatrix, gubernans, daedala rerum.” The universe is filled through all its illimitable spaces by the roar of her working, the ceaseless, unexhausted energy with which she alternates life and death’ (‘Latin Literature,’ p. 77).

And in face of the gross, often revolting, conceptions of deity which prevail among the mass of mankind, civilised as well as uncivilised, giving warrant to the taunt that ‘the best excuse for God is that He does not exist,’ Allen’s lofty ‘prayer’ will have echo in hearts rebellious as his own:—

If the possession of any ‘religion’ be accorded to a man who, in words full of awful import to the orthodox, lived without ‘hope, and without God in the world,’ it must be only as a fundamental part of his ethics. Mr. Andrew Lang says that Allen was ‘the one man he knew’ who, in a certain crisis, ‘acted like a Christian.’ That is, he was true to himself, and therefore, not false to others, since all noble acts lie outside the creeds; and the assumption that the impulse to these acts is a monopoly of Christianity has no warrant either in past or present history. The energies that men apply, or misapply, to the salvation of their souls and the souls of their fellows in ‘a world of doubtful future date,’ men of Allen’s type apply to the remedying of ills in the actual and the present; to the delivery of the mind from the illusory fears which render it ‘all its lifetime subject to bondage.’ One of the mottoes which Montaigne inscribed on the rafters of his tower was, ‘It is not so much things that torment man, as the opinion he has of things,’ and Allen was ever strenuous in effort to redeem others from the slavery of conventional acquiescence.

But the outlook of these latter days chilled his generous enthusiasm. Talks that passed between us (Mr. Le Gallienne makes reference to the like in the opening pages of his article) took written shape in a letter to Mr. Herbert Spencer, who replies under date of 19th July 1898: ‘Your views as to the present aspect of the world are exactly my views, and you have expressed them in a completely parallel way. Two days ago, in answer to a letter of Moncure Conway, similarly expressing dread of the future and urging that I should take part in an effort to form a kind of supreme court of select men to pass opinions on international relations, I said just as you say, that we are in course of rebarbarisation, and that there is no prospect but that of military despotisms, which we are rapidly approaching.’

And a man has, indeed, no small need of faith at a time when all liberal movements have been swept by boisterous currents into a backwater. The spectacle is a strange one for those who are old enough to remember the advances of a past generation in matters political, social, intellectual, and theological. This modern spirit, named Imperialism, which sees its justification and immediate fruitage in a material prosperity and ever-broadening area, has become impatient of restraint, and, heedless of the lessons taught by vanished empires, brushes aside as transcendental and dreamy stuff the ideals whose fulfilment depend not on the multitude of things which a nation possesses. It is deaf to the fact that civilisation has largely come to mean the creation of a heap of artificial wants, with resulting discontent because those wants cannot be gratified. Where there is not impatience at restraint, there is indifference about the deep matters of social and other reforms, in the presence of which a man can only ‘possess his soul in patience’ and nurse the hope that the spirit of aggressiveness and greed which now runs riot may yield to a genuine Imperialism that shall make for the general peace and wellbeing of the world.

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):—

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:—

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 there rises the lament of old:—

THE END

INDEX

Physiological Æsthetics. Henry S. King and Co., London, 1877.
8vo, pp. xii+284.

The Colour Sense: Its Origin and Development. An Essay in Comparative Psychology. London: Trübner and Co., Ludgate Hill, 1879.
8vo, pp. xii+282. Issued as vol. x. of ‘The English and Foreign Philosophical Library.’

Vignettes from Nature. London: Chatto and Windus, 1881.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+229. Essays reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette.

The Evolutionist at Large. London: Chatto and Windus, 1881.
Crown 8vo, pp. xii+215. Reprinted from the St. James’s Gazette.

Early Britain—Anglo-Saxon Britain. London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge 1881.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+237.

The Colours of Flowers as Illustrated in the British Flora. London: Macmillan and Co., 1882.
Crown 8vo, pp. vi+119. In ‘Nature Series.’

Colin Clout’s Calendar. The Record of a Summer. April—October. London: Chatto and Windus, 1883.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+237. Reprinted from the St. James’s Gazette.

Nature Studies. By Grant Allen, Andrew Wilson, Thomas Foster, Edward Clodd, and Richard A. Proctor. London: Wyman and Sons . . . 1883.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+342. In the Series known as ‘Knowledge’ Library.
Grant Allen’s contributions to this volume were articles on—Honey Ants (p. 25); A Winter Weed (p. 43); Hyacinth Bulbs (p. 69); The First Daffodil (p. 84); The Origin of Buttercups (p. 98); Our Ancestors (p. 212); The Beetle’s View of Life (p. 237); What is a Grape? (p. 244); Monkshood (p. 335).

Flowers and their Pedigrees. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1883.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+266. With 54 cuts in the text.

Strange Stories. . . . With a Frontispiece by George du Maurier. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1884.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+356. Contains sixteen stories which originally appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, Longman’s Magazine, and Belgravia, under the pseudonym J. Arbuthnot Wilson.

Philistia. By Cecil Power. In Three Volumes. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1884.
Crown 8vo. Vol. i. pp. viii+312 (pp. i and ii blank); vol. ii. pp. viii+320 (pp. i and ii blank); vol iii. pp. viii+288 (pp. i and ii blank).

Biographies of Working Men. . . . London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge . . . 1884.
Crown 8vo, pp. 192. In the Series known as ‘The People’s Library.’
The biographies included are—Thomas Telford, stonemason; George Stephenson, engine-man; John Gibson, sculptor; William Herschel, bandsman; Jean François Millet, painter; James Garfield, canal-boy; Thomas Edward, shoemaker.

Babylon. By Grant Allen (Cecil Power). In Three Volumes. With twelve Illustrations by P. Macnab. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1885.
Crown 8vo. Vol. i. pp. viii+290, with four illustrations; vol. ii. pp. viii+304, with four illustrations; vol. iii. pp. viii+310, with four illustrations.

Buckle (H. T.) The Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of. London, 1885. Edited by Grant Allen.

Charles Darwin. London: Longmans and Co., 1885.
Crown 8vo, pp. vi+206. In the ‘English Worthies’ Series.’ Edited by Andrew Lang.

In All Shades. A Novel. In Three Volumes. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1886.
Crown 8vo. Vol. i. pp. ix+286; vol. ii. pp. ix+270; vol. iii. pp. ix+288.

The Sole Trustee. London: Northumberland Avenue [S.P.C.K.] 1886.
8vo, coloured paper wrapper, pp. 32. In the Series entitled ‘The Penny Library of Fiction.’

Kalee’s Shrine. By Grant Allen and May Cotes. Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1886.
Foolscap 8vo, pp. 196. In Arrowsmith’s Bristol Library.

For Maimie’s Sake. A Tale of Love and Dynamite. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1886.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+306.

Common Sense Science. Boston, U.S.A., 1887. 12mo. Contains essays specially addressed to an American public.

A Terrible Inheritance . . . London: Northumberland Avenue . . . [S.P.C.K.] 1887.
8vo, picture wrapper, pp. 32. In the Series entitled ‘The Penny Library of Fiction.’

The Beckoning Hand, and Other Stories. London: Chatto and Windus, 1887.
Crown 8vo, pp. vi+341.

This Mortal Coil. A Novel. . . . In Three Volumes. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1888.
Crown 8vo. Vol. i. pp. viii+316; vol. ii. pp. vii+304 (pp. i and ii blank); vol. iii. pp. viii+298 (pp. i and blank, also an extra leaf with publisher’s device).

The White Man’s Foot. . . . With seventeen Illustrations by J. Finnemore. London: Hatchards, Piccadilly, 1888.
Square crown 8vo, pp. viii+216.

The Devil’s Die. A Novel. In Three Volumes. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1888.
Crown 8vo. Vol. i. pp. iv+304; vol. ii. pp. iv+288; vol. iii. pp. iv+306.

Force and Energy. A Theory of Dynamics. London: Longmans and Co., 1888.
8vo, pp. xvi+161.

The Tents of Shem. A Novel. . . . In Three Volumes. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1889.
Crown 8vo. Vol. i. pp. vi+272; vol. ii. pp. iv+278; vol. iii. pp. iv+268.

A Living Apparition. London: Northumberland Avenue [S.P.C.K.], 1889.
8vo, coloured paper wrapper, pp. 32. In the Series entitled ‘Penny Library of Fiction.’

The Jaws of Death. . . . London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co. 1889.
Crown 8vo, picture wrapper, pp. 110. No. iii. of ‘O.U.R. Books.’
The same story, slightly revised, was issued by Jarrold and Sons of Norwich and London in their ‘Daffodil Library’ in 1896.

Dr. Palliser’s Patient. London: S. Mullen, 1889.
Crown 8vo, pp. 152.
A new edition was issued by Messrs. Chatto and Windus in 1893.

Falling in Love. With other Essays on more exact branches of science. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 15 Waterloo Place, 1889.
Large crown 8vo, pp. viii+356. The Essays reprinted in this volume appeared originally in The Cornhill Magazine, Longman’s Magazine, and Fortnightly Review.

The Great Taboo. London: Chatto and Windus, 1890.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+280.

What’s Bred in the Bone. £1000 Prize Novel. . . . London: Tit-Bits Offices, Burleigh Street, Strand, 1891.
Crown 8vo, pp. iv+414.

Recalled to Life. Bristol J. W. Arrowsmith 1891.
Crown 8vo, pp. 266.

Dumaresq’s Daughter. A Novel. In Three Volumes. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1891.
Crown 8vo. Vol. i. pp. vi+260; vol. ii. pp. vi+260; vol. iii. pp. vi+282.

The Duchess of Powysland. A Novel. In Three Volumes. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1892.
Crown 8vo. Vol. i. pp. vi+264; vol. ii. pp. vi+306; vol. iii. pp. vi+272.

The Tidal Thames. With twenty full-page photogravure plates printed on India paper, and [thirty-five] other Illustrations after original drawings by W. L. Wyllie, A.R.A., and descriptive letterpress by Grant Allen. Cassell and Company, Limited: London, Paris, and Melbourne 1892.
Royal folio. Issued in five Parts bound in light-brown boards. Part i. pp. vi+24; Part ii. pp. 25-56; Part iii. pp. 57-80; Part iv. pp. 81-112; Part v. pp. 113-134.
The cover of each Part has a vignette ‘The Nore Lightship.’ This edition was printed ‘for subscribers only.’

Catullus, Caius Valerius, The Attis of. Translated into English Verse, with Dissertations—on The Myth of Attis, on the Origin of Tree-Worship, and on the Galliambic Metre. By Grant Allen, B.A., formerly Postmaster of Merton College, Oxford. London, mdcccxcii. Published by David Nutt, in the Strand.

   [Facing the English title-page is another title-leaf:—]
C. Valeri Catulli Attin. Annotavit, Illustravit, Anglice Reddidit Carolus Grant Allen, B.A., Coll. Merton. Apud Oxon. Olim Portionista. Londini, mdcccxcii. Apud Davidem Nutt, in Via dicta Strand.
Crown 8vo, parchment wrapper with cut, pp. xvi+154.
In the Series entitled ‘Bibliothèque de Carabas.’ Edited by Andrew Lang. Five hundred copies of this edition were issued.

Science in Arcady. . . . London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1892.
Crown 8vo, pp. xiii+304.

An Army Doctor’s Romance. Illustrated by Harry Payne. ‘The Breezy Library’ Series, No. 3. Raphael Tuck and Sons: London, Paris, and New York 1893.
Crown 8vo, bound in embossed boards, coloured, pp. 110. With portrait of Author, coloured frontispiece, and six Illustrations in half-tone.

The Scallywag. . . . In Three Volumes. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1893.
Crown 8vo. Vol. i. pp. vi+256; vol. ii. pp. vi+262; vol. iii. pp. vi+266.

Mr. Grant Allen’s New Story Michael’s Crag, with three hundred and fifty marginal Illustrations in silhouette by Francis Carruthers Gould and Alec Carruthers Gould, 1893. Published by The Leadenhall Press Ltd. . . . Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., Ltd.
Crown 8vo, pp. xii+194 (pp. i and ii blank).

Ivan Greet’s Masterpiece. [Stories.] London: Chatto and Windus, 1893.
Crown 8vo, pp. vi+360.

Blood Royal. A Novel. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1893.
Crown 8vo, pp. vi+282.

Side Lights. By J. Runciman. London, 1893. With Memoir of the Author by Grant Allen.

At Market Value. A Novel. In Two Volumes. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1894.
Crown 8vo. Vol. i. pp. vi+210; vol. ii. pp. vi+222.

Post-Prandial Philosophy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1894.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+214. Reprinted from The Westminster Gazette.

In the Guiana Forest. By J. Rodway. London, 1894. With Introduction by Grant Allen.

The Lower Slopes. Reminiscences of Excursions round the base of Helicon, undertaken for the most part in early manhood by Grant Allen. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, at the Sign of the ‘Bodley Head,’ 1894. Chicago: Stone and Kimball.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+80. With design on title-page by J. Illingworth Kay. Of this edition 600 copies were printed for sale in England.

In Memoriam: George Paul Macdonell. London: Percy Lund and Co. Ltd., 1895.
16mo, paper wrapper, pp. 64. With Portrait of G. P. Macdonell.

The British Barbarians. A Hilltop Novel. . . . London: John Lane, Vigo Street. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895.
Crown 8vo, pp. xxiv+202. With design on title-page by Aubrey Beardsley. Issued in the ‘Keynotes Series.’

Under Sealed Orders. A Novel. . . . In Three Volumes. London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1895.
Crown 8vo. Vol. i. pp. vi+258; vol. ii. pp. vi+244; vol. iii. pp. vi+264.

The Story of the Plants. . . . With Illustrations. London: George Newnes, Ltd., Southampton Street, Strand, 1895.
12mo, pp. 232.

The Woman Who Did. A Hilltop Novel. . . . London: John Lane, Vigo Street. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1896.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+242. Issued in the ‘Keynotes Series.’

Moorland Idylls. . . . London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1896.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+258. Contains 33 short stories.

A Splendid Sin. London: F. V. White and Co., 1896.
Crown 8vo, pp. 228.

The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry into the Origins of Religions. . . . London: Grant Richards, 1897.
Medium 8vo, buckram, pp. x+448. Published at 20s. net.

Grant Allen’s Historical Guides: Paris. London: Grant Richards, 1897.
Fcap. 8vo, limp green cloth, rounded corners, pp. 254. Published at 3s. 6d. net.

Grant Allen’s Historical Guides: Florence. London: Grant Richards, 1897.
Fcap. 8vo, limp green cloth, rounded corners, pp. 260. Published at 3s. 6d. net.

Grant Allen’s Historical Guides: Cities of Belgium. London: Grant Richards, 1897.
Fcap. 8vo, limp green cloth, rounded corners, pp. 230. Published at 3s. 6d. net.

The Type-Writer Girl. By Olive Pratt Rayner. London: C. A. Pearson Ltd., 1897.
Crown 8vo, pp. 261.

An African Millionaire: Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay. . . . With 66 Illustrations by Gordon Browne. London: Grant Richards, 1897.
Crown 8vo, green cloth extra, gilt top, pp. viii+318. Published at 6s.
This story, with the illustrations, appeared as a serial in the Strand Magazine.

Tom Unlimited: A Story for Children. By Martin Leach Warborough. London: Grant Richards, 1897.
Crown 8vo, blue cloth extra, gilt edges, pp. xiv+250. With 56 Illustrations by Gertrude Bradley. Published at 5s.

Grant Allen’s Historical Guides: Venice. London: Grant Richards, 1898.
Fcap. 8vo, limp green cloth, rounded corners, pp. 272. Published at 3s. 6d. net.

The Incidental Bishop. . . . London: C. A. Pearson Ltd., 1898.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+248.

Linnet: A Romance. . . . London: Grant Richards, 1898.
Crown 8vo, blue cloth, pp. vi+394. Published at 6s.

Rosalba: The Story of her Development. By Olive Pratt Rayner. London: C. A. Pearson Ltd., 1899.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+312.

Flashlights on Nature. With 150 Illustrations by Frederick Enock. London: George Newnes, Limited. . . . 1899.
Crown 8vo, pp. viii+312.

Twelve Tales. With a Headpiece, a Tailpiece, and an Intermezzo: Being Select Stories by Grant Allen, chosen and arranged by the Author. London: Grant Richards, 1899.
Demy 8vo, sateen cloth extra, gilt top, pp. xii+352. Published at 6s.
With the exception of the Headpiece, Tailpiece, and Intermezzo, all the stories in this volume had been previously published.

The European Tour: A Handbook for Americans and Colonists. . . . London: Grant Richards, 1899.
Crown 8vo, green cloth, pp. viii+294. Published at 6s.

Miss Cayley’s Adventures. . . . With 79 Illustrations by Gordon Browne. London: Grant Richards, 1899.
Imp. 16mo, dark-blue cloth extra, gilt top, pp. x+330. Published at 6s.
This story, with the illustrations, appeared as a serial in the Strand Magazine.

The Natural History of Selborne. By Gilbert White. Edited, with Notes, by Grant Allen. Illustrated by Edmund H. New. . . . John Lane, The Bodley Head, London and New York, 1900.
4to, pp. xl+528. Mr. Grant Allen’s Introduction occupies pp. xxvi to xl inclusive.
Published originally in 13 Parts during the year 1899.

Hilda Wade. . . . With Illustrations by Gordon Browne. London: Grant Richards, 1900.
Imp. 16mo, dark-blue cloth extra, gilt top, pp. xiv+360. Published at 6s.
This story, with the illustrations, appeared as a serial in the Strand Magazine.

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press

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