Interview with Grant Allen (1889)

"COLIN CLOUT" AT HOME. AN INTERVIEW WITH MR. GRANT ALLEN

Reprinted in the Brisbane Courier 24 December 1889, 7.

In a little leafy nook nestling in the great Surrey Weald, around which stand the everlasting hills, just out of Dorking, I found ‘Colin Clout’ at home (says a correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette). It was one of those sweet autumn days he can describe so well ; great shadows floated across the hillside, and bands of sunlight were stretched across the dark green sward, and his own dainty little house was in delightful contrast to all. Stepping into his study I found myself in the presence of a tall, delicate-looking, clever-faced man, who thus greeted me: "Well, where shall we begin our chat?"

I replied that his recent article in the Fortnightly upon the woman question would perhaps be our best starting-point, to which he at once acceded, and plunged in medias res with a reassertion of his published opinion that the first duty of women was motherhood, and to this end he would educate them.

"I would not deny women the privileges of men; they should have the suffrage even, if they wanted it, but then a sensible woman would not want it. Few women, even if they had it, would exercise it. For they would be mainly influenced by their husbands; to a great extent the franchise would unfit them for their main function in life. Every woman ought to be married – in a well-ordered community an old maid ought to be and to feel herself an anomaly."

"Now, Mr. Allen, how about your method of work? Colin Clout, for instance; you must have been a close student of nature to write those delightful idylls?"

"Well, you see, I have always been so interested in nature. I lived all my boyhood's days upon one of the Thousand Islands. The country pure and simple was my earliest memory – that splendid Canadian country. I drew in nature at every breath ; then, as a school-boy at King Edward's school in Birmingham – for, a democrat from my birth, I had no liking for the more aristocratic schools – I was an earnest member of the school Local Natural History Club. I grew up a Darwinian, never anything else but an evolutionist; look at this microscope," and here he drew my attention to a beautiful instrument upon which was a silver tablet telling the beholder that it was the gift to Grant Allen of Charles Darwin and a few friends.

"Darwin, whom I never met in the flesh, but who was ever my great friend. And so you see I came to the writing of Colin Clout. It was mostly written in Dorsetshire, and generally each paper was penned after a walk. I would go out to a place or to a certain object, or some particular thing caught my eye and fancy for the moment. Having got my hint, back I went to work.

" Yes," continued Mr. Allen, "my Dorset dialect is good; my wife is 'Dorsetshire' herself, and knows it well. I was rather amused some time ago when, placing my plot in Suffolk, I tried my hand at the dialect of that county. A young railway clerk wrote and told me it was 'dreadful'. I was amused at his letter, and wrote and suggested he should revise it all before the story came out in book form, which he did – admirably. Then in In all Shades, my negro dialect there is good. By-the-bye you know Trinidad. Did you detect that I had written really of Jamaica, where I lived for three years, but placed my dramatis personae in Trinidad?"

"Yes," I replied, "I was much puzzled, and besides the dialect there is negro-French Patois, not English."

"Well," he replied, " I will go into that later."

I then tackled Mr. Allen upon the dialect question. "Isn't it overdone – the Americans hardly write anything else, all following in the splendid wake left behind him by Mark Twain, and notably in that clever Huck Finn of his?"

"Perhaps, but it is a healthy reaction after the stately periods of a bygone day. We must depict life as it is; we must be realistic. There is the language of the salon and the patois of the peasant.

"Novel-writing," said Mr. Allen, "with me was quite an accident. I wrote an article once for Belgravia about a ghost; this I threw for convenience sake into the form of a story, though it really was scientific. Chatto printed it and then wrote to ask me for another story, and after this I went on writing stories for him at his request, but I thought little of them myself and signed them 'J. Arbuthnot Wilson.' James Payn saw one called 'Mr. Chung,' liked it, and asked me to write for Cornhill, which I did. I wrote the 'Rev. John Greedy'."

"Ah," I replied, "that was very weird; was it true?"

"Yes, in the main ; a black man really did marry a white woman and then went back to savagery."

"You so truly depict in The Devil’s Die and In all Shades the awful prejudice against colour, a prejudice the depth and strength of which only we who have been in the West Indies can really appreciate," I remarked; "they cannot understand it in England, but both your books are so true; but, as the Negro stump orator hath it, ‘we are digressing’."

Mr. Allen smilingly went on: "Well, I then took to writing short stories, then Payn advised me to try novels, and I wrote Philistia. I found then that I could live on novels while I might starve on science. A reviewer the other day said 'I was not in earnest.' Now this was very hard lines on me. I never write what I really think about anything, for if I did I should be put in prison, and the population of these islands would fall upon me and stone me till I died. At best, what I write, having regard to the welfare of my family, is a mere toned-down fraction of what I really think and feel. Not in earnest! Why for years I have been trying hard as matter of business to imitate the tone of the people from whom I differ in every possible idea, religious, social, political, ethical, psychological, biological, philosophical, and literary – and now, now, NOW I am jauntily informed, ‘I am not in earnest!’”

After which a dead silence, which I at length timidly broke by saying, "You have studied medicine, have you not, as witness your doctors in The Devil's Die?"

"Well, yes, all technicalities there are from a medical jurisprudence book; I go to scientific and statistical authority for everything. In my ‘poisoning’ stories I work from a priori and not from individual cases in a police court. I am fairly correct in my details, but I sometimes wilfully distort details."

"And now for my concluding questions. What are you doing now?" and I pointed to his desk, upon which lay an open Bible and some of his tiny and exquisitely dainty calligraphy, a calligraphy not altogether free from the clever affectation of the Oxford man, for he was an Oxford man, and proudly boasts that as far back as '68 he was one of the founders of the “Oxford Home Rule Union.”

"Oh! that. I am engaged now upon a series of articles dealing with the origins of religion. If I were a Hibbert lecturer I would make them Hibbert lectures, but I must publish them as I can; they are being done for the love of it. I regard it all from an historical point of view. The interest to me is this. Here are a wide set of human opinions – how did man ever come to get them? All the higher forms of religion even now contain traces of the earlier stages. The human race goes so far back.”

Here I intervened. "Yes; where do you cradle its infancy – in far Chaldea or as the new theory has it, in North-west Europe, or do you hold the 'glacial-period-primeval man?"

"Oh," was the smiling reply, "in my opinion the human race goes as far back as the Miocene period, so far back that our existing continents can hardly have assumed their present shapes when man first appeared, and as the whole world was then tropical in climate, man may have appeared anywhere."

"Your rate of work, Mr. Allen?"

"Well, roughly speaking, two novels a year, many short stories, many magazine articles, and a fair amount of journalism. But as I have said before, all my bent is botany and science. No, I would not advise anyone to 'go in' for literature; the tendency is always to run after a rising man, and so, though education goes on apace, too much pace perhaps, and magazines and papers increase with knowledge, and though the prizes will be greater and the number of readers far larger, yet I do not think that the march of education is in favour of literary men; they will want more doctors, more lawyers, more tailors, but the same number of writers of books will always suffice. Good-bye, I shan't see you again for some time, as I am off to botanise in Egypt. A short time ago it was Algeria, which resulted in The Tents of Shem in the Graphic; there hangs one of the original sketches" – and he pointed to the dainty walls, upon which were several delightfully artistic productions, notably two native Japanese winter scenes, beautiful as a dream. And so – he to Egypt, I to Babylon.