Delphi collected works o.., p.1057
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 1057
GRANT ALLEN.
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: —
Hôtel de l’Europe,
Milan, Sunday.
Dearest old Man, — The riots here began on Friday. But we heard nothing of them at Venice, and left there yesterday morning in blissful ignorance. Arriving here, we found great crowds in the streets, and were driven up by unfamiliar ways; shops all shut; no carriages. We soon learnt that a barricade had been erected in this very street, and that the military had only carried it a few minutes before our arrival. As mother had been ordered perfect rest and no agitation, this was not very good for her. All the afternoon, crowds formed, and the soldiers patrolled: tramp, tramp, tramp, with occasional dashes of cavalry. Having a front room with a balcony, we could see everything. At eleven at night, a state of siege was proclaimed, and the streets cleared, but ineffectually. All the night through we slept little, hearing the tramping and galloping of soldiers, and getting up every now and then to see if anything was happening. This morning, I proposed to mother to go on to Generoso, but she is so very tired that, in spite of the state of siege, she prefers to rest here. Tomorrow, if nothing unforeseen occurs, we will start early, and go for a week to the Hôtel Generoso-Kulm, Canton Ticino, Switzerland. You will have seen all the main facts of the row in the papers (sooner than we know them here), but I mention them just as showing how they affected us personally.
Dear mother has had a serious breakdown in Venice, and must be kept quiet and taken care of for months. I too have over-worked myself and given way, and must rest for some time. We will therefore probably not be home much before the first of June. We don’t anticipate any difficulty in getting away from here to-morrow.
Milan and all Italy are in a revolutionary mood. It will not surprise me to find a Republic proclaimed in the next three days or so. Milan gives the keynote, as the richest and most industrial town in Italy. Rome only follows. — In haste, your loving,
DADS.
Lugano, Sunday, 5 p m.
After writing the above (about 10 this morning) at Milan, mother and I went out into the Cathedral square, meaning to go into the Gallery. We found the place cut off by cordons of soldiers, and as mother had by that time walked as far as she ought, I took her back to the Europa. Then I went out myself, but found cordons of soldiers blocking every way, except for people going to the station. When I got back to the Europa, they advised us to leave, saying if we did not get away to-day, there was no knowing when we might do so. So we packed at ten minutes’ notice, and caught the 12.30 northward, without lunch. We arrived at Lugano at three, or a little after, and drove to the Splendide in the Splendide ‘bus, the conductor having assured us that there was plenty of room. When we got there, not a bed vacant. They sent us on to the Parc, where the people showed us a room in a distant dépendance, without ‘salle à manger,’ and where mother would have had to walk a great distance uphill after each meal. We were worn out by this time, and wished ourselves back in the peace and comfort of revolutionary Milan. Lugano was choke full. At last I found a room here in a little German hotel called the Métropole, and to-morrow we propose, if we are well enough, to go up to Monte Generoso. But we are very weak and ill, and not sure whether we can get rooms there. As to letters, I think I will telegraph where to send them. Just at present, we are very sorry for ourselves, and a little down-hearted. We are in a cheerless place, alone, just when we need comfort and good cooking.
This is a grumbling letter, but you know how one feels when one is ill and tired, and the fates persistently go against one. United love. — Ever your own affectionate
DADS.
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,
Why should a sob
For the vaguest smart
One moment throb
Through the tiniest heart?
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 pseudomysteries loosely grouped under the term ‘supernatural,’ when the natural held unexplained matters weighty enough to occupy the life of a man, were it lengthened an 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: —
A crowned Caprice is god of this world;
On his stony breast are his white wings furled.
No ear to listen, no eye to see,
No heart to feel for a man hath he.
But his pitiless arm is swift to smite:
And his mute lips utter one word of might,
“Mid the clash of gentler souls and rougher,
Wrong must thou do, or wrong must suffer.’
Then grant, O dumb, blind god, at least that we
Rather the sufferers than the doers be.
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.
