How It Feels To Die, By One Who Has Tried It; and Other Stories

Grant Allen

Published: 1900

Categorie(s): Fiction, Short Stories

Source: Peter Morton https://sites.google.com/site/petermortonswebsite/

Prologue to the Feedbooks Edition

 

This is a collection of stories by Grant Allen, published in various years. The title story is personal. Allen nearly drowned when he fell through the ice while skating as a boy in Canada, and wrote about the experience anonymously for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1892. He claimed to have been "as dead as he ever can be or will be" and that he had no "after death" experiences. This suited his atheistic position, of course. In fact he was not "dead" at all; just unconscious, and he was quickly revived by brandy and massage.

The last two are non-fiction essays by Allen about the craft of writing in his time.  Here are brief reviews by Peter Morton:

'A SCRIBBLER'S APOLOGY'. A splendidly agonised piece about the true social worth of the journeyman writer's life, particularly the worth (if any) of the kind of 'tootler' which Allen represents himself as being. Published in the Cornhill in May 1883.

'THE TRADE OF AUTHOR'. This remarkable article, published in the Fortnightly Review in 1889, has just been identified as by Grant Allen. (It is not attributed in the Wellesley Index.) It is a brilliant analysis of the professional writer's plight at the time, worthy to be set against Gissing's New Grub Street.

 

The source is the website by Peter Morton, author of "The Busiest Man in England": Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875-1900, published by Palgrave Macmillan.  The website is linked from the Wikipedia page about Grant Allen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Allen.  Peter Morton's website's direct location is https://sites.google.com/site/petermortonswebsite/.

 

HOW IT FEELS TO DIE. BY ONE WHO HAS TRIED IT. (1892)

 

The July number of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research contains some remarkable experiences by contributors who claim to have been at least temporarily dead. In both cases they allege that they passed into a new and conscious after-death existence. A well-known correspondent who also claims to have been practically dead sends us his experience, which, it will be seen, differs very considerably from those which are related in the Journal of the Psychical Society.

 

All my life long I have been singularly destitute, I believe, of that physical shrinking from death which so many human beings feel so acutely. I do not mean that I am in any hurry to die; as long as things go on tolerably well with me in the world, I have no insuperable objection to continue living; but whenever I stand face to face with death, as has happened to me several times in the course of my career, I regard the prospect of annihilation with perfect equanimity. I can honestly declare that all such occasions my only doubts and fears have been for the safety and the pecuniary position of the survivors, especially of those more immediately dependent upon me. For myself, I have never felt one moment's disquietude. And I attribute this entire absence of fear of death to the unusual fact that I have once already tried dying, and found it by no means a painful or terrifying experience. I mean what I say quite literally. I have not the slightest hesitation in asserting that once in my life I really and truly died — died as dead as it is possible for a human being to die: that that I was afterwards resurrected. I have felt and know the whole feeling of death — not part of it only, but the actual end of dying. I did not stop halfway; I died and was done with it; and when I came back to life again it was no mere case of awaking from which is foolishly called 'suspended animation', but a genuine revival, a restoration of vitality to a man as dead as he ever can be or will be.

 

It happened in this wise; and, though it was a good many years since, I have still a most vivid recollection of every moment of it. I had been skating on a lake in a very cold country. I am intentionally vague because I do not desire to disclose my personality. The surface was smooth as glass, and perfectly free from snow or ridges. But, not far from where I was skating, some men had been cutting out great blocks of ice the day before, for summer use, and had neglected to mark the spot by a danger signal, as compelled by law, so as to prevent accidents. During the night this open space of blue water had frozen over slightly —perhaps an inch thick — forming a continuous sheet with the other and much thicker ice about it, so that from a little distance it was quite impossible to detect the difference. I skated incautiously from the solid ice on to this thinner piece; and, moving with considerable impetus, went through it at once, and was carried on under the thicker and firmer ice beyond it. The first thing I knew was that I found myself plunged suddenly into ice-cold water, and struggling for my life, in skates and winter clothes, against chill and drowning.

 

I went down like lead. When I came up again, it was with my head against the solid ice. If I had had full possession of my faculties, I would have looked about for the hole by which I broke through and endeavoured to swim under water for it. But I was numbed with the cold, and stunned with the suddenness of the unexpected ducking; so, instead of looking for the soft place by which I had got in, I tried ineffectually to break the thick ice over my head by bumping and butting against it. In so doing, I do not doubt, I must have made matters worse by partially stunning myself. At any rate, I could not break it, and was soon completely numbed by the cold. I gasped and swallowed a great deal of water. I felt my lungs filling. A moment of suspense, during which I knew perfectly well I was drowning, intervened; and then — I died. I was drowned and dead. I knew it then, and I have never since for a moment doubted it.

 

Just before I died, however, I noticed — deliberately noticed — for I am psychological by nature — that my whole past life did not come up, as I had been given to understand it would, in a single flash before me. On the contrary, I felt only a sense of cold and damp and breathlessness, a fierce wild struggle, a horrible choking sensation, and then all was over.

 

I was taken out stone-dead. Unless extreme remedies had been applied, I would have remained stone-dead till the present moment. If nothing more had been done, my body would have undergone no further change till decomposition set in. Heart and lungs had ceased to act: I was truly dead; there was nothing more that could happen to me to make me any deader. However, a friend who was skating with me raised the alarm, and I was shortly after pulled out again, still dead, with a boathook. They tried artificial respiration, brandy, heat — all the recognised means of reviving a corpse after drowning. After a while, they brought me back; I began to breathe again. But I call it absurd to speak of my condition meanwhile as one of 'suspended animation'. The phrase is unscientific. I was dead and nothing else: I did not doubt it at the time; I have never since doubted it. Mere theological theorists may talk about something they call the soul not having yet left the body. I know nothing of all that, though I don't see how they can tell so confidently whether in such a case as mine the soul, if any, does not leave the body at once and then come back again. For all I know to the contrary, it may have gone meanwhile to the hypothetical place of departed spirits — always unconscious. But, to omit any such curious and unprofitable inquiries, what I do know is this: that if there had been no artificial respiration I would never have revived again, and my body would have undergone dissolution in due course, without any return of consciousness whatever. So far as consciousness goes, therefore, I was then and there dead, and I never expect to be any deader. And 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, 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, as death, it seems to me, need have absolutely no terrors for a sensible person.

 

Anon. Pall Mall Gazette, 3 September 1892, 1-2.

 

MERIEL STANLEY, POACHER (1900)

 

Meriel Stanley is a singular instance of the natural woman still surviving in our midst. And the natural woman is at war with our civilization. I never see poor Meriel without an inner shudder, when I think of the end to which fate and her own temperament must inevitably hurry her. That shapely brown neck, straight and firm as a column, is all too delicate for a rope. Yet a rope it will be, or I am no true prophet.

 When I say that Meriel is a natural woman I mean what I say, for good and for evil. See her leaning her elbows on the gate that leads from Sir Walter's copse out on to the heather-clad moorland—a tall, lithe figure, with keen, brown face, eager, wistful eyes, and wealth of black hair just peeping from beneath her pink-and-white sunbonnet—a bronzed woman of the people, quivering with suppressed emotion to the tips of the fingers—and you can guess at once the salient points of her character. Hers is the impassioned temperament, embodied in a sound and vigorous frame; take her as a specimen of the natural woman, a savage still at heart, but a savage of the best type, capable of great love, great revenge, great devotion, great self-sacrifice, great crimes, great repentances, but not of anything mean or small or commonplace.

The savage has in him, in the germ, all that the best and worst among civilized men have developed separately—except one thing—consistency. He can rise to splendid heights of generosity and sink to the vile depths of cruelty and shame; but all is momentary; what he cannot compass is sustained action or sustained feeling. He is a creature of moral impulses, for good or bad. The passing mood, the passing emotion sway him. And Meriel is like that. She can love; she can hate; but she cannot be steadily or persistently anything.

In spite of her strange name, she is not a gypsy. At least not consciously. Much gypsy blood lurks unknown in the wild region of Dorset, where the Stanleys live; and Meriel has associated with gypsies and poachers from her childhood upward. She can even "patter Romany" a little, though only as an outsider; but her people have long been settled in this district, and if ever they were members of the Stanley clan, have forgotten it long ago in all save their surname. As to her fantastic Christian name, Meriel, that came to her from an aunt, who inherited it in turn from five generations of female ancestors. Meriel was christened by that name, though the clergyman who baptized her tried hard to modernize and vulgarize it into Muriel; but her mother stood up stoutly against such new-fangled nonsense. "'Twas always Meriel with the Stanleys and Tibbalds," she said, with true pride of race, "ever since I heard tell of 'em; my mauld shall be Meriel, passon will it or passon nill it." And Meriel she was from that day onward.

 

It may surprise you to learn that Meriel was ever christened at all; for when she was a bairn, the nearest church to Greydown was at Upton Parva, seven long miles off across the moor as the crow flies; and the people of Greydown in those days fecked little in most ways of churches and parsons. "They were a barbarous folk up here, zur, " Meriel's father said to me one day, in a rare burst of loquaciousness, for he is a silent man: " I don't suppose you'd 'a found a more barbarous folk anywheres in England, go forty years back, than the Greydown people." And he was quite right. The hill itself stands mainly in Dorset; but it lies at the upper end of three river valleys, and at the junction of three shires; so for ages, it was the refuge of all the gypsies, the horse-copers, the sheep-stealers, the poachers, the miscellaneous riff-raff and outlaws of the neighborhood. Nowadays, their descendants for the most part are honestly occupied in broom-making and basket-weaving; but they do not take readily to steady labor, preferring to be free and to be their own masters—a natural taste which I will confess I share with them. Nevertheless, even in their worst days of barbarism, the Greydowners always christened their children in church, and were married by parson; not that they attached much religious importance to the rite in either case; but they liked the importance of it; that was the regular authorized way of doing things, and they would wish the settled folk down yonder at Upton to know that the Greydowners were every bit as good Christians any day as they were. Because you are a broomsquire, that is no valid reason why you shouldn't behave like other civilized gentlefolk.

 

"Then you really were christened Meriel?" I said to her once interrogatively. And she answered, half-laughing, "Yes; I was christened all right, zur; but I don't suppose it took." And I think she was right; for a verier pagan than Meriel Stanley it would be hard to light upon. As a girl, she grew up on this high, wild moorland, running about shoeless and stockingless among the gorse and heather, and trapping leverets, and browning her shapely legs with paddling in the ponds after newts and tadpoles. To this day, she can tickle trout against any man in Dorsetshire. Her father's cottage lay among tall bracken in a valley or bottom just below the gibbet—that gibbet on which the murderers of the warfaring women were hung in chains a hundred years ago, and which long remained a terror and a warning to evil-doers, the sole symbol of civilization, repressive civilization, in these lonely uplands. You can tell the cottage from others about by the climbing red roses and by the great stacks of dry heather piled outside the door, and waiting to be made up into farmhouse brooms, such as used for rough work in yards and stables. Before Meriel was ten years old, she knew as much about jays and weasels and hawks and foxes as Sir Walter's gamekeeper. She could show you the mottled brown eggs of the night-jar, lying loose on the bare ground without nest or shelter; she could find the wren's callow young and baby stoats in the copse; she had observed at what age the soft little hedgehogs begin to get their prickles hardened, and where the woodcock probed with their long, straight bills after grubs and worms in the soft, spongy moss of the peat-logged hollows. At eighteen, she was tall and beautiful, with wild, unkempt hair; hair long and black and straight and wiry, without a suspicion of curl in it, recalling perhaps the remote Indian blood of her gypsy ancestors, once Jats of the Punjaub. A handsomer girl of her wayward peasant type I have seldom seen. Let me try to describe her.

 

Meriel's head is shapely and well poised on her shoulders—a trait which you will find almost always accompanies the impassioned character. Her neck is erect, and she carries herself proudly. The pose reminds me at times of the portraits of Dante. And indeed, though it may sound odd to compare this wild English moorland girl with the proud, sardonic Tuscan poet, I can recognize in essence a certain community of type between the two. Her eyes are dark and shy, but with sudden flashes in them. The eyebrows and eyelids are black and abundant. Her long, straight hair flows down on her shoulders when loosed—as it often is—or else is gathered up into a great careless bunch at the back of the head, with folds covering the ears, which recall Charlotte Bronte. For her essentials, Meriel is just a Charlotte Bronte undeveloped. Her features are somewhat large, but soft in outline; her chin strong; her mouth has sensuous, thick lips, redeemed by the exquisite curve, like a Rosetti portrait. The hands are long and slender; the fingers have a curious tremulous movement; the whole emotion of the woman comes out in them at times, as it comes out in her heaving bosom, her flashing eye, her close-set lips, her strange wistful expression. She impresses me always as vaguely longing for something above her—something she has never known and never will know—something from which her class and her lack of education for ever divide her.

 

You must know Meriel pretty well, indeed, before you begin to suspect how much there is in her. Like most people of intensely passionate natures, she is not given to speech; her thoughts and feelings lie too deep for words; and even if her pride did not prevent her from saying at all times what she feels, her mere lack of vocabulary would suffice to keep her from voluble self-revelation. Nor is she by any means demonstrative. It is an error to suppose that emotional natures are necessarily given to expressing their emotion either in words or gestures. The exact opposite would be truer. Emotion hides itself. Meriel's manners are quiet and reserved; she is not fitful or restless; you cannot often see how profoundly she is thinking or feeling; only at rare moments does some accident reveal the real depth of her nature. Once I caught her at sunset by the two-step stile that leads from the moor into the Lammmas fields. She did not hear me coming. I crept up behind her, admiring her lithe form, silhouetted against the red sky, as she leaned on the stile and gazed at the crimson and orange clouds before her. When I drew quite near, she turned round with a short sigh. To my surprise, I saw she had tears in her eyes. "That's a beautiful sky, Meriel," I said. She clasped her hands and answered, "Oh, beautiful; beautiful! A sky like that makes one cry, zur, doan't it?" Then, as if she had let herself go too much, she turned and fled, like the wayward forest-haunting thing she is. For a month after, whenever she saw me, she seemed to slink on one side, as if ashamed of having let herself be discovered in the act of admiring nature.

 

A girl of so deeply emotional a temperament could hardly grow up without loving much and loving often. The full wealth of her soul could only expend itself on those she loved profoundly. Even as a child, I remember, she used to creep out of the cottage on summer nights, and go to a spot in the copse where the badger nested; there the badger cubs would steal out, undeterred by the presence of that other wild creature, and play clumsily with their mother in the sober twilight. And Meriel adopted one and loved it, as other children would love a dog or a pigeon. The choice was significant. That sympathetic heart could waste its heart on the veriest bear. Perhaps it was well, for what sort of men could poor Meriel hope to captivate among the chair-menders and basket-makers of her wild moorland home? It is not the man that the woman really loves—especially such impassioned women as this—it is the ideal she makes of him. And a passionate character like Meriel's will erect a golden image of some gamekeeper or some groom, and bow down to it in secret as devotedly and as earnestly as a lady will bow down to her dissolute dragoon or her worthless, drunken cross-country rider. Idealism works this miracle. It is as easy to idealize a laborer or a navvy as an insipid curate or a sneering stock-broker.

 

When Meriel was sixteen, her passion was for the footman at the great house in the valley—the footman with blue livery and padded calves, who spent half the year at the town house in Mayfair and half at Greydown. Not that she ever told her love: it was not the way of girls like Meriel to wear their hearts upon their sleeves. I would doubt if anybody save myself, who am a novelist by trade, and therefore observant of these little signs of emotion, ever so much as guessed it. But day by day, when Alfred was about, Meriel would hover near the gate of the great house, waiting and watching, amply repaid if the hero of her young love came out on his way to the village on some errand, and gave her a passing nod and a "Good day, young woman." She gloated over his livery. I feel sure; gloated over it with the admiration which an earl's daughter feels for a hero's uniform. But Alfred went away some months later "to better himself" at Brighton, and after mourning him for six weeks, Meriel fell a victim to the charms of the stalwart young policeman who arrested Ted Vaughan for causing incendiary heath fires at Highdown Firs. This, of course, was sheer treason to her class; family honor intervened; Septerius Stanley, her father, was the friend and associate of gypsies, and poachers, and tramps, and horse stealers; he could hardly let his daughter consort uncensured with a mere policeman. And the young policeman, himself was not likely to care for so disreputable a connection. In the essence of things, it is true, Meriel was as far above him as a poetess is above an ordinary young city man; but the essence of things, I fear, counts for little or nothing in matrimonial matters. Meriel had to give up her stalwart policeman, and console herself later on with Ted Vaughan himself, when that noble young savage came gaily out of prison.

 

But every man and every woman had one great love in a lifetime; and after many lesser trial trips, Meriel Stanley found hers at last in Joe Arundel, the poacher. You may laugh; but I can tell you an affection like Meriel Stanley's is no laughing matter; the fact that she could idealize a great hulking rowdy and bully like Joe is in itself a strong proof of the woman's deep poetic nature. Outwardly tranquil of demeanor, a dreamer and brooder, Meriel has yet a profound admiration such as the natural woman always feels for the man of courage and the man of action. Do you remember Homer's Andromache? She is the true type of the impassioned woman of these lower grades and lower races—the woman who can love and endure much, to whom crime and bloodshed are but natural attributes of the hero she worships. Hector had attacked the town where Andromache lived, had sacked and burned it, and slain her father and mother, and had carried her off as his wife after the primitive mode of "marriage by capture". And did Andromache hate him for these deeds of violence with all her soul? Not a bit of it; she accepted such little episodes as part of the established order of things, and clung to her Hector, and loved and cherished him, and worshipped him with a worship passing that of the willing chooser. "But Hector," she says to him in that immortal passage which has stirred the hearts of a thousand generations, "but Hector, thou to me art father and mother, and thou to me beloved husband." Meriel Stanley is a survivor of barbarism cast in the same mold. She could have worshipped the man who stole her from her home and slew her parents, if only he had qualities she could respect and idealize.

 

Now Joe Arundel, the poacher, was the whispered terror of his own neighborhood; from childhood up, Meriel had heard all her own set admire and describe with glowing praise the bold acts of this brave and sullen desperado. Joe had been three separate times in prison—a proud distinction; he was even gravely suspected of having murdered the game-keeper, whose corpse was found wrapped up in faded leaves at the bottom of the chestnut copse by Deadman's Hollow. Joe did not admit the impeachment, but neither did he reject it. He tossed his head and looked arrogant whenever the subject was alluded to in his presence. Too proud to deny, too cautious to boast. Meriel would stand by and admire him silently. It was not Meriel's way to be demonstrative either of affection or admiration, only by the quick twitch of her bloodless fingers, by the knitted brow, by the eyes steadily fixed on her chosen hero could one tell how immense was her admiration for the man who had defied the whole banded power of the law and the county, and exposed himself to the risk of a rope for his last portion. Her fists would clinch themselves till the nails dug into the palms and almost drew blood, while Joe talked in dark hints of some little brush with Sir Walter's keepers, or vaguely alluded with picturesque mistiness of thought and language to some fight with the police over a brace or two of pheasants. For, brought up as she had been, passionate rebelliousness was almost a necessary feature of Meriel Stanley's character. She hates law and order with the natural hatred of a hunted creature. What have they ever done for her and hers save harry them into prison, or hound them to the workhouse? The gentry in her eyes are so many oppressors of her wild, free kind; they would drive all the world from the heath and the copse into service or the factories. Meriel wants none such. For her, the open moor and the wide air of heaven!

 

Joe, for his part, did not readily discover that Meriel was in love with him. Joe is not by nature an intuitive creature. He can read the tracks of bird and beast in the snow far more easily than he can read the marks of human feeling or human passion. And Meriel is the sort of girl to fling herself at any man. She falls in love, it is true, easily and rapidly; her passions have the barbaric quickness and certainty. Almost at sight, she says "I love that man," or "I do not." But she says it to herself alone. Torture would not draw from her the overt confession. In that, once more, she is thoroughgoing savage. Your savage woman loves desperately, but in silence. She is coy and wayward. She flies like a squirrel from him who pursues, and then turns and smiles, not because she wishes to escape, but because some deep instinct of her race teaches her that to fly is the proper part of woman. But I could see from an early point in this growing passion how Meriel was letting her love for Joe swallow up her entire nature. She would sit on the logs by her father's house when Joe came round, with her strong, small chin poised on her open hand, and listened while Joe talked to Septerius Stanley, as rapt as if Joe's few jerky, inarticulate sentences were the purest flowers of human eloquence. Did ever man talk like Joe? Did ever man look like him? Six feet two—though a trifle hulking and shambling in gait, I must admit—with a scar on the left cheek won in open fight with those oppressors of the human race, the police, and with courage enough to go on to the bitter end, till fate landed him at last in that lofty position in death he was bound to occupy. Meriel looked and sighed. He was a king among poachers.

 

Night after night she would creep out by the copses where Joe might be found, and as he skulked past her with his bleary-eyed ferret, would suggest to him casually in a careless voice where the best pheasants were likely to be found, or point out which path the keeper had last taken on his evening round through the chestnut plantation. She knew as much of woodland lore as Joe himself, I fancy, and Joe accepted her hints with ungraceful country awkwardness. Still, he thought her "a knowing one," and told her so sometimes. Meriel's brown cheek flushed red through the russet at words of praise from her hero's lips. Anybody but a fool—or Joe—would have known she was in love. But Joe, though a sharp hand at a trap or a net, is not remarkable for the quickness of his instincts.

 

At last one evening as they stood together by the copse (the merry small rabbits gamboling all round them and the corn crake rattling), Meriel told him some points she had observed about the hare's "forms" in the heath; a new wrinkle even to the experienced poacher. Joe gazed at her and smiled—smiled from ear to ear with expansive appreciation. "Meriel maaid," he said slowly, with open mouth and hanging lip, "'ee do know a thing or two, 'ee do! There hain't three maids on Greydown hill knows as much as thee, maaid. If thee an' me was to come together, us 'ould do a good traade in the poachin', 'ouldn't us?"

 

Meriel's heart beat high; Meriel's cheek flushed crimson. He had recognized her at last, then; this prince of men had spoken! She drew away a step or two, with her quick squirrel glance. "Doan't 'ee talk like that, Joe," she said and gave a little toss of the proud black head—yet her voice was tender. " I hain't one for the men. They'm all deceivers."

It dawned across Joe as she withdrew her face, that Meriel really liked him. Joe was a lady's man in his way; but his way was not Meriel's. He slipped his arm round her waist. Meriel tried to evade him; though 'twas a formal evasion. The proud heart was won long ago. Tears stood in Meriel's eyes. Joe Arundel had chosen her!

After that they met nightly on the moor among the tall green gorse, or else in the copse where Joe killed the keeper. That thrill of romance and terror suited Meriel's fancy well; she felt about the copse as some Homeric maiden of Ilion might have felt about the spot where her lover had slain in open fight amighty man among the Myrmidon. Educated and cultivated, she would have wandered by herself and read Shelley and Rossetti; as it was, she stole off to meet Joe in the copse which had been the scene of his greatest and most successful encounter with the despotic forces. Bye and bye, she began to talk to him tentatively of marriage. Joe didn't think much of that—Joe was not by nature a marrying man; he took it they might get along well enough by themselves without the passon and the passon's fees. But there, Meriel's will was iron. All the Stanleys from all time had been duly married in church, and she wouldn't go back upon the tradition of the family. "Passon to Upton Parva won't want to marry we," Joe objected grinning. "Then us can go to Exeter," Meriel answered with grave earnestness, "but married I will be, and to none but thee, Joe Ar'ndel." After that, Joe felt that there was nought for it but to give way. He gave way with a bad grace, and entered a church for the first time since his christening. "It pleases 'er an' it don't hurt me," was the explanation he gave to his poaching pals of his unsportsmanlike conduct. At the same time he made it clearly understood that he did not mean to let his new state seriously interfere with his manner of living.

Once married, Meriel went on loving her worthless husband with the unvarying and incredible devotion of an impassioned nature. Nothing he could do to her seemed to alter her affection. Her man might come home drunk and beat her; that was only natural; men are built that way; and was it not to be expected that a splendid creature like Joe—six feet two in his shoeless feet, and broad shouldered to match—should knock about a weak woman who loved and admired him? Meriel was no shrew. Souls capable of deep feeling are seldom scolds. She endured it all—and worse—because it was Joe's pleasure. Her first baby came. Meriel positively idolized it—her baby—Joe's baby. I doubt if any child in the squire's nursery was ever so much made of as the poacher's brown boy, with his father's eyes, and black hair like his mother's. Not that she talked of her little one much. Meriel never talked much about anything that moved her inmost soul. She had learned to do without sympathy. But one day as I passed her cottage in the glen, she was seated on a log outside the porch where red roses clambered, holding out a foxglove spike to please her baby. "That's a fine boy, Meriel," I said, looking at him. Tears came into her eyes once more. "Yes, he's a tidy, little man, zur," she answered, holding him up to be admired. "They do tell me he favors Joe." And she said it as she might have said "He resembles the prince, his father." The fierce, suppressed earnestness of her tone fairly touched me. "I never saw a prettier baby in my life," I replied. She looked up at me—a shy glance—with gratitude in her eyes; but she answered nothing. Her thoughts were too deep for such words as she knew. Only a poet could have uttered what was passing within her.

I said at the beginning I could never see Meriel without an inner shudder at the fate which is in store for her. What fate? you ask. Well, it seems to me inevitable. I have a sort of premonition of the very way it will come. Some day, Joe will get into a quarrel with some other man about a woman—the other man's wife, and Meriel's rival. The two will fight; and the other man being quicker though less powerful than Joe, will get him down and hold him. Then Meriel will rush in to her faithless husband's aid, and stab his assailant. She would never stab her rival—she is too proud for that, but she would stab the man who for her rival's sake dared attack her hero. The rest follows of course. And those who read the report of the trial in the papers will only know that a poacher's wife, a very bad lot, the daughter and associate of criminals, was sentenced to death for murdering a man her good-for-nothing husband had been quarreling. But I know all, and in some dim way, I can feel for poor Meriel.

 

 

 

 

MERIEL STANLEY, POACHER

by Grant Allen

Transcribed from The Washington Post

Jan. 14, 1900, p. 27

by

Victor A. Berch

 

A STUDY FROM THE NUDE (1895)

 

Harley Binns smoked a short clay pipe. His studio was at Kensington. He painted ideal female figures and he painted them exquisitely. He was thick set, bullet headed, bull-necked, vociferous. You would have known him at first sight for a successful artist.

Harley Binns had a friend who worked in the studio with him. His name was Walter Haselton. He also had a model — a model for the nude — a splendid girl, one of the finest in London. He was proud of his model. Her name was Emily. She was Miss Higgs in public, but in the studio it ran to Emily.

One day, Harley Binns was strolling casually through the High street when Emily came toward him, walking with another girl. Harley Binns, as it chanced, was not only successful; but also an artist. His eye picked out that girl immediately. She had a superb figure — lithe, rounded, proportioned — the figure one paints, one imagines, one dreams about. He could interpret its subtle curves through her simple black dress, for 'twas Harley Binns' trade mentally to disrobe the female form divine as it deployed itself in bodice and skirt before him. This girl's at once attracted him. It wasn't only that its outlines and proportions were perfect; you can get mere mechanical and measurable perfection by paying for them any day. It was that the figure had soul in it. For there is soul, too, in figures. Harley Binns looked at her face. 'Twas a born lady's face — delicate, beautiful, tender. "By Jove," he said to himself in an artistic rapture, "I'd give ten pounds to paint that girl. If I'd a model like that, Burns-Jones himself would go mad with envy."

He paused as she passed, and looked after her. Then, with just a moment's hesitation, he turned again and overtook them. He touched Emily with one hand. "I say," he cried, with a meaning look, "I want to speak to you."

The other girl walked modestly on with a shy glance at the stranger.

But Emily turned around to him, wholly unabashed. "Well, you can't get her then," she said promptly, jumping at his meaning at once, with instinctive quickness. "You are not the first by a great many that has wanted her. But she don't care to sit. She's my cousin, she is. She's been brought up to the drapery. There's plenty more have asked her, and she's always refused. It's no good trying. You won't sit, will you, Clara?"

A dainty blush, such as Harley Binns had never before seen upon a human face, suffused the girl's face as she answered hastily, "Oh, please don't, Emily. However can you?" Harley Binns was more eager than before when he saw that rich color. Blush rose on white lily! It was exquisite, unapproachable.

He drew Emily aside a little. "Look here, my child," he said quietly, in his most persuasive voice, "I'll give your cousin three times the usual fee if ever she'll sit to me, and I'll give you a ten pound note for yourself the day you first bring her round to me at the studio."

The girl nodded and went away. From that day forth, time after time, Harley Binns asked her, "Well, how about Clara?" And time after time the model shook her head. "It's no good," she answered, with some slight contempt. "Clara's a Philistine—that's where it is; she's dreadful prejudiced." For she had picked up to some extent the slang of the studio.

Harley Binns was piqued. So was Emily, too. To both of them it seemed little short of absurd that a girl who waited behind a counter at a petty draper's shop in a back street should give herself the airs and graces of a duchess. "Why, there's plenty 'o duchesses as 'ud sit themselves, if it comes to that, as soon as look at it," Emily observed, pouting.

"They understand the aims of art," Harley Binns responded, adding a touch to the left shoulder. "What can you expect, after all, from a draper's assistant?"

A month or two went by. Then one day at last Emily began to hint that things were not going well in Clara's family. Her mother was a widow, and her rent was in arrears. The children were short of food. Next day—still better—an execution threatened!

Harley Binns saw his chance, and proceeded to take it. He instructed Emily to make a more tempting offer to her cousin than ever. That very afternoon, the draper, as it chanced, "had words" with Clara. He dismissed her for a month. How exceedingly lucky! She could not hold out long. And next morning, in effect, Emily came round to the painter with good news, indeed. Clara's mother was seriously ill and under stress of compulsion—ruin staring her in the face—Clara had consented to earn an honest penny by sitting in the nude to him.

Harley Binns and Walter Haselton were all agog with excitement.

At eleven o'clock, timid, shrinking, terrified, the new model crept in, and still more crimson than before, retired with shame behind the screen to disrobe herself.. That is the model's modesty. She undresses in private. Emily sat by her side to encourage the novice and accustom her to the ordeal. And when the dreaded moment fairly came, and she stood there nude and trembling, with her face in her hands, it was Emily who pushed her forward, more dead than alive, before the discreet curtain.

Harley Binns had guessed right. His breath came and went. She was an ideal model.

As he stood and gazed, waiting to begin a study of her figure in the delicious pose she herself had unconsciously adopted, a curious sight attracted his attention. The girl was blushing! Not with her face only—that would have been nothing new—but with her whole live body. A great wave of red passed over it, undulating; then a great wave of white; then red again rhythmically. It was wonderful, beautiful. Harley Binns seized his brushes, his sketching pad, his water colors. "That's perfect," he cried in artistic rapture. "If only I could that effect on canvas, Walter. I should feel I wasn't afraid of Titian's Venus!"

The girl writhed in terror. She stood there fixed, immovable. "Let me go," she cried, shrinking back. "I- I didn't mean it. I was driven to it. I didn't know what it was like. Oh, how can you be so cruel?"

Walter Haselton gazed hard at her. He was an unsuccessful artist. "Let her go, Binns," he cried, compassionate. "We ought never to have made her do it. She's a sensitive little thing. She's too good for a model."

But Harley Binns, unmoved, went on sketching those strange alternating waves of red and white. You must remember them, of course, on his marvelous "First Sitting" in last year's New Gallery. They coursed over the girl's body still, like ripples over a millpond. "No, no." he answered, drawing a long puff at his stumpy clay pipe. "Now I've got her, I'll keep her. It isn't likely I'd let her go after this, till I'm done with her. She's perfect, that's what she is. I wouldn't give her up now, not for a hundred pounds. Why she's worth every penny of it!"

"For God's sake," the girl cried, cowering, still chained to the spot. "Oh, Emily, cover me! Throw something or other over me!"

But Harley Binns shook his head and still went on sketching. Her pose was just exquisite—no art, all nature. And those shrinking virginal limbs! And that fervor of modesty! It was the picture he wanted, all making itself of itself without his aid or effort. He was charmed and delighted. "Put more coal on, Walter," he said, puffing away; "she's beginning to shiver."

He sketched for nearly an hour. And all that time the poor girl stood riveted, in an agony of shame, despair and horror. At last she mustered up courage to say, "I can't stand it any more. You must let me go now. That's enough—till—tomorrow."

Then Harley Binns let her go. She'd done quite as much as one can reasonably expect the first day for the day figure. The model slunk off behind the screen with furtive terror. Emily helped her to muddle on her clothes again somehow. She came out fully dressed, save for her self respect, but she missed that strangely.

"Good morning," Harley Binns said in his cool way; "here's your money, cash down. You were frightened, I know. You'll get used to it in time."

The girl's hand closed over the coin mechanically and dreamily. It was all for her mother. "Yes, I'll get used to it in time, I suppose," she murmured, half dazed. And so out into the open street, and away in reeling fear from that hateful studio.

All day long, when she was gone, Harley Binns worked hard, like one inspired, at touching up the study. He surpassed himself in delicacy. He saw her still before him. He saw those living waves course crimson through her body. If the worst came to worst, from these first rough hints alone, he could manage with care to work up a picture.

Next morning at eleven Emily opened the studio door, whitefaced. Harley Binns gazed at her in surprise.

"Hullo," he cried, "how's this? I say, child, where's the other one?

"She ain't coming this morning," Emily answered , doggedly.

"Not coming this morning?" the painter repeated, drawing back, and holding his breath. "Why, I've not half done with her!"

"But you've done for her!" Emily retorted, looking hard into his cold blue eyes. "She ain't never coming again. She's gone raving mad in the night, and they've taken her to an asylum."

 

 

 

 

A STUDY FROM THE NUDE

by Grant Allen

 

Transcribed from The Washington Post

March 17, 1895, p. 22

by

Victor A. Berch

 

 

MY ONE GORILLA (1890)

 

I looked up from my beetles. The night was warm.

A naked little black girl crossed the dusty main street of the village just in front of my hut, carrying in her hand what seemed to me in the gloaming the largest blossom I had ever observed since my arrival in Africa. That was a blossom. It looked like an orchid, pale cream-colour in hue, and very fantastic and bizarre in shape; but what specially attracted my attention at first was its peculiar shining and glistening effect, like luminous paint, which made it glow in the grey dusk with a sort of phosphorescent light such as one observes in tropical seas on calm summer evenings.

To a naturalist, of course, such a vision as that was simply irresistible. "Hullo, there, little girl!" I cried out in Fantee, which I had learned by that time to speak pretty fluently; "let me look at your flower, will you? Where on earth did you get it?"

But instead of answering me civilly, like a Christian child, the scared little savage, alarmed at my white face, set up a wild howl of terror and amazement, and bolted off down the street at the top of her speed, as fast as her small bandy legs would carry her.

Well, science is science. I wasn't to be balked of a unique specimen for my great collection by a trick like that. So, flinging away my cigarette and darting out of my hut, I gave chase incontinently, and rushed, full pelt, down the main street of Tulamba, helter-skelter and devil-take-the-hindmost, in pursuit of my ten-year old.

But I reckoned without my host. Children of the Gaboon beat the record for the quarter-mile. I was quite pumped out and panting for breath before I ran that girl to the earth at last, by her mother's door at the far end of the village. A dozen more of the negroes, loitering about on their backs in the dust of the street, had joined the hue and cry with great gusto by that time. They didn't know, to be sure, what the fuss was about; but given a white man—bestower of rum and money—rushing in mad pursuit, and a poor little frightened black girl scampering away for dear life at the top of her speed, in abject bodily terror, and you may confidently reckon on the chivalry of the Gaboon to range itself automatically on the side of the stronger, and to drive the unhappy small child hopelessly into a very bad corner.

When at last I got up with the object of my quest, she was so alarmed and blown with her headlong career that I felt thoroughly ashamed of myself. Even the pursuit of science, I will frankly admit, hardly justified me in so chivvying that frightened little mortal, ten negroes strong, through the street of Tulamba. However, a bright English sixpence, a red silk pocket-handkerchief, and the promise of a box of European sweets from the old half-caste Portuguese trader's shop in the village, soon restored her confidence. Unhappily, it did not restore that broken and draggled, but priceless, orchid. In her headlong flight, the child had crumpled it hopelessly up in her hand, and distorted it almost beyond the possibility of scientific recognition. All I could make out with certainty now was that the orchid belonged to a new and hitherto undescribed species; that it was large and luminous and extremely beautiful; and that if only I could succeed in securing a plant of it, my name was made as a scientific explorer.

The natives crowded round with disinterested advice, and eyed the torn and draggled blossom curiously. "It's a moon-flower," they said in their own dialect. "Very rare. Hard to get. Comes from the deep shades in the great forest."

"How did you come by it, my child?" I asked, coaxingly, of my sobbing little ten-year old.

"My father brought it in," the child answered, with a burst.  "He gave it to me a week ago. He was out in the country of the dwarfs, doing trade. He went for ivory, and he brought this back to me."

"Boys," I cried to the negroes who crowded round, looking on, "do you know where it lives? I want to get one. A good English rifle to any man in Tulamba who guides me to the spot where I can pick a live moon-flower!"

The men shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders dubiously.

"Oh, no," they all answered, like supers at the theatre, with one accord. "Too far! Too dangerous!"

"Why dangerous?" I cried , laughing. "The moon-flower won't bite you. Who says danger in picking a flower?"

My head guide and hunter stood out from the crowd, and looked across at me, awe-struck. "Oh, excellency," he said, in a hushed and frightened voice, "the moon-flower is rare; it is very scarce; it grows only in the dark forest of the inner land where the Ngina dwells. No man dare pick it for fear of the Ngina."

"Oho," said I. "Is that so, my friend? Then I'm not astonished." For Ngina, as no doubt you're already aware, is the native West African name for the gorilla.

Well, I took home the poor draggled blossom to my hut, dissected it carefully, and made what scientific study was possible of its unhappy remains in their much tattered condition. But for the next ten days, as you can readily believe, I could think and talk and dream of nothing but moon-flowers. You can't think what a fascination it exerts on a naturalist explorer's mind—a new orchid like that, as big round as a dessert plate, and marked by so extraordinary and hitherto unknown a peculiarity in plants as phosphorescence. For the moon-flower was phosphorescent; of that I had now not the shadow of a doubt. Its petals gave out by night a faint and dreamy luminousness, which must have made it shine like a moon indeed in the dense dark shade of a tropical African forest.

The more I inquired of the natives about this new plant, the more was my curiosity piqued to possess one. I longed to bring a root of the marvellous bloom to Europe. For the natives all spoke of it with a certain hushed awe or superstitious respect: "It is Ngina's flower," they said. "It grows in dark places—the gardens of Ngina. If any man breaks one off, that is very bad luck; the Ngina will surely overtake and destroy him."

This superstitious awe only inflamed my desire to possess a root. The negroes' stories showed the moon-flower to be really a most unique species. I gathered from what they told me that the blossom had a very long spur or sac, containing honey at its base in great quantities; that it was fertilised and rifled by a huge evening moth, whose proboscis was exactly adapted in length to the spur and its nectary; that it was creamy white in order to attract the insect's eyes in the grey shades of dusk; and that, for the self-same reason, its petals were endowed with the strange quality of phosphorescence, till now unknown in the vegetable kingdom; while it exhaled by night a delicious perfume, strong enough to be perceived at some twenty yards' distance. So great a prize to a man of my tastes was simply irresistible. I made up my mind that, come what might, I must, could and would possess a tuber of the moon-flower.

One fortnight sufficed for me to make my final plans. Heavy bribes overcame the scruples of the negroes. The promise of a good rifle induced the first finder of the first specimen to take service with me as a guide. Fully equipped for a week's march, and well attended with followers all armed to the teeth, I made my start at last for the home of the moon-flower.

To cut a long story short, we went for three days into the primeval shade of the great equatorial African forest. Dense roofs of foliage shut out the light of day; underfoot, the ground was encumbered with thick, tropical brushwood. We crept along cautiously, hacking our way at times among the brake with our cutlasses, and crawling at others through the deep tangle of the underbrush on all fours like monkeys. During all those three days we never caught sight of a single moon-flower. They were growing very rare nowadays, my guide explained in most voluble Fantee. When he was a mere boy, his father found dozens of them; but now, why, you must go miles and miles through the depths of the forest and never so much as light on a specimen.

At last, about noon on the fourth day out, we came upon a torrent, rushing with great velocity among huge boulders, and sending up the spray of its boiling rapids into the trees of the neighbourhood. I sat down to rest, meaning to mix the water from the cool, fresh stream with a spoonful or two of cognac from the flask in my pocket. As I drank it, I tossed back my head and looked up. Something on one of the trees hard by attracted my eyes strangely. A parasite stood out boldly from a fork of the branches, bearing a long, lithe spray of huge luminous flowers as big as dessert-plates. My heart gave a bound; the prize was within sight. I pointed my finger in silence to the tree. All the negroes with one voice raised a loud shout of triumph. Their words rent the air: "The moon-flower—the moon-flower!"

I felt myself for a moment a perfect Stanley or Du Chaillu. I had discovered the most marvellous and beautiful orchid known to science.

In a moment I had tossed off my brandy, laid down my rifle, and mounting on the back of one of my negro porters, was swinging myself up to the lowest branch of the tree where my new treasure shone resplendent in its own dim phosphorescence. I couldn't have trusted any hand but my own to pick or egg out that glorious tuber. I meant to cut it bodily from the bark as it stood, and bear it back in triumph in my own arms to Tulamba.

I had climbed the tree cautiously, and was standing almost within grasp of the prize, when a sudden shout among my followers below startled and discomposed me. I looked down and hesitated. My brain reeled and sickened. A strange sight met my eyes. My negroes, one and all, had taken to their feet down the bed of the stream at the very top of their speed, and were making a most unanimous and inexplicable stampede toward the direction of Tulamba.

For a moment I couldn't imagine what had happened to disconcert them; the, casting my glance casually towards the spot where I had flung down my rifle, I became aware at once of the cause of this commotion. Their retreat was well-timed. By the moss-clad boulders which filled the bed of the torrent, somebody with a big, black face and huge grinning teeth, was standing erect, looking up at me and laughing. I had never seen the somebody's awful features before, but I had no need, for all that, to ask myself his name. I paused face to face with a live male gorilla.

For a moment or two, the creature gazed up at me and grinned. Then he raised my rifle in his arms; held it clumsily before him; and, to my intense surprise, taking a very bad aim, or, rather pointing it aimlessly in the air, pulled both triggers with one hand, and discharged the two barrels at me with one pull, simultaneously. The bullets whizzed past me some ten yards off. They knocked off the twigs beyond my precious moon-flower.

Well, I don't deny, as I say, that I was in a state of blue funk at the creature's gigantic and almost supernatural powers. But still, the moon-flower was at stake, and I wouldn't desert it. I was so horribly frightened that I don't believe wife, or child , or fatherland, or freedom would have induced me to stay one moment alone in such dire extremities. But when it comes to orchids! Well, I say no more than that I am above all things a scientific explorer; each of us has his weakness; and mine is a flower. That touches my heart. For that alone can I be wrought up to the utmost pitch of daring conceivable or possible for me.

So I looked at the huge brute, and I looked at the moon-flower. Slowly and cautiously, gazing down all the time as I went to watch the creature's face, I crept along the branch, took my knife from my pocket, and began to loosen the bark all round the spot where the glorious parasite was all a-growing and all a-blowing. The gorilla, from below, stood watching me and roaring. His roar seemed like an invitation to come down and fight. I never in my life heard anything so awfully human in its deep bass roll. It reminded me of the lowest notes of the stage villain in the Italian operas, magnified, so to speak, two hundred diameters.

Presently, as I went on cutting away the bark, as if for dear life, and loosening the precious tuber, my gorilla, who still remained motionless by his moss-clad boulder, left off his roaring, and appeared to grow interested in the process of the operation. A change came o'er the spirit of his dream. He looked up and wondered, with vague brute curiosity, not unmixed with a certain strange air of low cunning and intelligence. It was clear to me as mud that he was saying to himself inwardly, "Why doesn't the fellow cut and run for his life? Does he think I don't know how to climb a tree? Does he imagine that I couldn't be up there in a jiffy if I liked—to choke or scrag him? What the dickens does he go on hacking away at the bark so quietly like that for, when he ought to be all agog to save his own bacon?"

I despaired of explaining to so rude a creature the imperative nature of scientific need. So with one eye on the orchid and one on the brute, at the risk of contracting a permanent squint for life, I continued to egg out that magnificent moon-flower, root and branch and tuber.

The longer I went on, the closer and more attentively did the gorilla take stock of all my acts and movements. "Well, I declare," I could see him say to himself in the gorilla tongue, opening wide his huge eyes and elevating in surprise his shaggy, brown eyebrows, "such an animal as this I never yet did come across. He isn't one bit afraid, apparently of me, the redoubtable and redoubted king of the great Gaboon forest."

But I was, most consumedly, for all that, though I pretended not to be. Nothing but the presence before my eyes of that magnificent plant would have induced me for one moment to face or confront the unspeakable brute there.

At last I had finished, and held my specimen in my hands entire. The next question now was what to do with it.

I walked slowly and cautiously along the branch of the tree. The gorilla, with his eyes now fixed curiously on the moon-flower, put forth one hairy leg in front of the other, and grinning with a sort of diabolical, brutish good-humour, walked, step for step, on the ground, just as cautiously beneath me.

I came to the end of the bough, and reached the point where interlacing branches enabled me to get on to another tree. I did so somewhat clumsily, for I was handicapped by the moon-flower. The gorilla, still grinning, looked up, and remarked in his own tongue, "I could do that lot, I can tell you, a jolly sight better than you do."

As he smiled those words, I half lost my balance, and, clinging still to my moon-flower in my last chance for life, lowered myself slowly, hand over hand, to the ground in front of him.

With a frightful roar, the creature sprang upon me—and made a wild grab at my precious moon-flower. That was more than human scientific human nature could stand. I turned and fled, carrying my specimen with me. But my pursuer was too quick. He caught me up in a moment. His scowling black face was ghastly to behold; his huge, white teeth gleamed fierce and hideous; his brawny, thick hands could have crushed me to a jelly. I panted and paused. My heart fluttered fast, the stood still within me. There was a second's suspense. At its end, to my infinite horror, he seized—not me-oh no, not me—I might have put up with that—but the priceless moon-flower!

I was helpless to defend myself. Helpless to secure or safeguard my treasure. He took it from me with a grin. I could see through those sunken eyes what was passing in the creature's dim and brutal brain. He was saying to himself, like men at his own low grade of cunning, "If that tuber was worth so much pains to him to get it, it must be worth just as much to me to keep. So, by your leave, my friend, if you'll excuse me, I'll take it."

I stood appalled and gazed at him. The brute snatched that unique specimen of a dying or almost extinct genus in his swarthy, hairy hands of his—raised it bodily to his mouth, crushing and tearing the beautiful petals in his coarse grasp as he went—ate it slowly through, tuber, stem, spray, blossom—and swallowed it conscientiously, with a hideous grimace, to the very last morsel. I had but one grain of consolation or revenge. It was clear the taste was exceedingly nasty.

Then he looked in my face and burst into a loud, discordant laugh. That laugh was hideous.

"Aha!" it said in effect, "so that's all you've got, my fine fellow, after all, for all your pains, and care, and trouble!"

I shut my eyes and waited. My turn would come next. He would rend me in his rage for the nastiness of the taste. I stood still and shuddered. But, alas, he meant only to eat the moon-flower.

When I opened my eyes again, the brute had turned his back without one word of apology, and was walking off at a leisurely pace in contemptuous triumph, shrugging his shoulders as he went, and chuckling low to himself in his vulgar dog-in-the-manger joy and malignancy.

It was four days before I straggled alone, half dead, into Tulamba. I never came across another of those orchids. And that is why at Kew they have still no moon-flower.

 

 

 

 

MY ONE GORILLA

by Grant Allen

 

Transcribed by Victor A. Berch from Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, Aug. 10, 1890

 

 

THE TRADE OF AUTHOR (1889)

I.

 

The question must doubtless often have obtruded itself upon every reflective and philosophic mind — which is but a gracefully oblique periphrasis for describing the readers of this present article — ''How does it happen that the trade of author — a most innocent craft — is so much worse paid and so much more hardly worked than any other respectable calling?'' I don't mean, of course, gravely to inquire, in this age of enlightenment, how it comes to pass that the journeyman writer fails to receive the princely remuneration accorded to great commercial chiefs or financial operators. Naturally, we couldn't expect to be paid on the same proud scale as a sugar-broker or a stock-jobber. We have not so learned political economy in these latter times as not to be well aware of the profound gulf that separates nature's noblemen — the capitalist and the landowner — from the common ruck of mere wage-earning humanity. No; the point I wish to raise here is simply this: How does it arrive that the wage of the average author, usually a person of some little education and some modest intelligence, falls so infinitely below the average wage of the other learned professions to which in like manner men bring but their brains and the skill of their fingers — so infinitely below the wage of a successful barrister, for example, or of the successful doctor, or of the successful parson, or of the successful artist? Envisaged merely as a problem of social economics, this question surely may give us pause for a few minutes in a world which still, after a non-committing fashion, honours literature almost up to the point of regarding its labourers as worthy of their hire — market price, two guineas per thousand.

 

Nor am I speaking now of the literary failures. In every profession there are, of course, dullards, idlers, and still more unfortunates, to whom luck never brings the chance of success; and the profession of letters is fuller of these, I imagine, than any other existing profession. Half the ablest writers in England are wasting their energies daily, I do not doubt, on very ill-paid and laborious journalistic handicraft! They are writing paragraphs. But then similar accidents happen elsewhere. Perhaps many a mute inglorious Eldon lingers among the briefless barristers in the classic recesses of Old Square, as able as any of those that wear silk; many a Sydenham loiters late in remote villages, as clever as any of those that draw their thousand guineas a day for inspecting royal and imperial larynxes. Many an actor struts provincial boards as gifted as those who draw down the plaudits of cultivated London at the Savoy or the Lyceum. It is not of these, however, that I now speak, but of the comparatively successful and well-known authors, the mass of the recognised trade of writers, who still toil on, year after year, on a smaller pittance than the country lawyer, with less prospects of success than the country curate, and with far harder hours than the country surgeon.

 

See, first, how incongruous is this disproportion. If you want to employ a barrister in your case, whose name is known as a special authority only to your solicitor, you will be surprised to find when you come to inquire that his brief is marked a hundred guineas. If you go to the specialist recommended for your complaint by your medical director, you will see that he reckons the value of his casual conversation at something like twenty-five shillings the minute. If you desire to buy a water-colour picture by an obscure member of the Institute or a young exhibitor at the New Gallery, you will have to pay some thirty pounds down for a square of paper twelve inches by twenty. But when you begin to inquire into the income of writers whose works we read, to borrow the famous phrase of a sister in the craft, 'from Tobolsk to Tangier,' or whose books may be bought in paper covers (probably pirated) at Valparaiso and Petropaulovsky, you discover to your astonishment the strange and seemingly inconsistent anomaly, that the man known to half the world in a dozen countries is earning about one-twentieth of the income earned by the man known only to the skilled in a particular profession in the city of London. The American enthusiast, on a pilgrimage to the shrine of his most admired and worshipped English author, has been heard to express his keen surprise when he lighted at last on the object of his ardent devotion in an eight-roomed cottage among the remotest recesses of suburban Middlesex, or ran him to earth in a dingy stucco-fronted family residence of the eligible order of architecture, lost among the monotonous and dreary desert of a London back street. How does it come, then, that these things are so? Why in this one particular trade should comparative fame and considerable reputation bring with it so very, very little in the way of substantial and solid reward as pounds sterling?

 

II.

 

In the net, viewed as a mere abstract problem of political economy (for I wish to be impartial), the question is this: Why should authors earn so much less than the average wages of like intelligent labour? Why is literature the very worst market now known to humanity into which any man can bring for sale a given finite quantity of brains and industry?

 

To these questions, familiar at least to the trade itself, authors as a rule have given a large number of assorted and equally foolish answers. The rapacity of the publisher — the harmless, necessary publisher, that most indispensable of go-betweens, that most justifiable of middlemen — has oftenest been made the innocent scapegoat of literary economics. American copyright laws, Mr. Mudie, and the penny newspapers, have also borne their fair share of literary objurgation. To me, however, it seems quite evident that the real reason for the low rate of literary wages is a very different one. Authorship is, in fact, the only trade in which men suffer from the Competition of the Dead. And what is more, and more fatal in its effect, the dead are always at the head of the profession.

 

This fact implies at once a broad and very painful difference between the position of the author and the position of any other member of an educated profession. The author can hardly, by any possibility, hope to reach the top of the tree or anything like it in his own calling, during his own lifetime. The dead for ever block the way against him. If you want to entrust a difficult probate case to competent hands, you can no longer call in the aid of Lord St. Leonards. If you want the best advice on the state of your health, you must consult, not the recently deceased authority, but some living Gull or Jenner. As the elders drop off in each other profession, the younger men necessarily and naturally come to the front and take their places — everywhere but in literature. It doesn't much matter that the public often doesn't know the new men's names: the members of the profession and the people most interested in securing their services know them very well, or get to know them. People must needs rely upon the best of its kind then and there actually forthcoming. In all trades, in short, except literature, a living dog is better than a dead lion.

 

But in literature alone, owing to the peculiarly permanent and special nature of the work done, and the ease with which it can be copied and diffused ad infinitum, the living dog — nay, even for the most part the living lion — is hardly in it. To be sure, there are fortunes made in literature, by a lucky few, especially towards the end of their life; but these fortunes are in most cases comparatively small, and they are confined in almost every instance (save those of charlatans) to the very princes and leaders of the profession. I could name if I chose, did not the modesty of English prose forbid, barristers, doctors, architects, painters, hardly known at all outside a narrow professional or critical circle, who are earning three and four times the incomes earned by distinguished men of letters of world-wide reputation. Were a comparative list made of three or four such classes, and reputation pitted against reputation, outsiders would indeed be surprised to learn for what beggarly wages well-known thinkers, poets, or romancers were pouring forth essays, verses, and novels. I know one case, indeed, of a writer almost universally praised and admired over two hemispheres, who told me, long after his best work was done, that he had never yet made in a single year more than L300, all told, by all his writings.

 

The key to this seeming paradox is not far to seek. By the very nature of the case, the men who write books — books which the printing-press scatters broadcast at once over land and sea; books which are read by hundreds of thousands who never see the author's face — get widely known over every continent. Nobody at San Francisco, probably, is acquainted with the name of a single leading London barrister or architect. But thousands of people, I will venture to lay a modest bet, in the remotest parts of Montana or South Africa, know fairly well the name of almost every literary contributor to the last twelve numbers of this Review. Yet even so, the diffusion is not necessarily very effective, from the author's point of view, at least. It means nothing. A surprisingly small number of copies of a book — in the case of a serious or scientific work how surprisingly few would be almost incredible — suffices to bring it well within the reach of pretty nearly everybody who cares to read it. Circulating libraries, the British Museum, Tauchnitz editions, American piracy, do the rest, and the author, poor soul, laudator et alget.

 

With law, medicine, practical arts, it is all the other way. The names, to be sure, are not known; there is little to diffuse them; but when the particular piece of work wants doing, they get hunted up, and the purchaser must pay the market price for the very best workman then and there in the market obtainable.

 

In literature, however, in spite of all this wide diffusibility, effective reputations grow very slowly; and there is no special incentive of private interest to make the general public seek out and employ rising talent. Men read and buy for the most part the books of the people whose names they know, and have long known best; and they know best the names of those who have been the longest before the public. Hence it very rarely happens that an author earns a decent income during his own lifetime; and when he begins to earn after his death, it is the publisher — that far-sighted mortgagee of his brains — who reaps in the long-run all the benefit.

 

III.

 

Art, you say, is in the same category, surely; for there, too, are not the dead always at the head of the profession?

 

Not quite; the cases are by no means exactly parallel.

 

It is true that Raphaels, Michelangelos, Leonardos sell to-day at higher prices (though not at very much higher prices) than Leightons, Watts, or Alma Tademas. But there is not anywhere any large stock of Raphaels and Michelangelos now on sale; and the demand for such things far exceeds the effective supply at any given moment. Once more, there's nothing in art which answers at all to the power possessed by the printing-press of indefinitely multiplying in exact fac-simile the masterpieces of literature. ''How about engraving?'' asks the cheap objector. But engraving doesn't go in the least on all fours with the case of printing. If you buy a Hamlet, a Paradise Lost, a Vanity Fair, a Pickwick, you buy the very identical play, or poem or novel which Shakespeare, or Milton, or Thackeray, or Dickens originally composed. If you buy an engraving of any of the pictures in the Tribuna at the Uffizi, you buy, not a Raphael or a Fra Angelico, but merely a colourless and inferior copy.

 

The fact is, the artist has two strings to his bow; the author only one. The artist has both original and copyright; while the author has copyright itself alone. And in the artist's case the original is far the more important of the two, while in the author's case the original manuscript is for all practical purposes mere waste paper.

 

And here again the difference is fundamental. Art always commands a high price in the market because the artist plays (unwittingly and unwillingly, but still perforce plays) upon one of the meanest and smallest of all human feelings. (I'm not blaming him for it: I merely note the fact as a fact of nature.) He appeals to the hateful monopolist instinct of humanity, especially of rich and ostentatious humanity. He indirectly and unconsciously pampers the vulgar tastes of such people as dukes, and brewers, and cotton-spinners. What these men mainly want when they buy a picture is a means of displaying their own wealth and their own munificence to the remainder of their species. If they could buy the monopoly of a play of Shakespeare's or a novel of Scott's, frame it and glaze it in a handsome style, and hang it up as a decoration in their own drawing-rooms — with the right to say to all their acquaintances, in a pompous whisper, ''This is the masterpiece of the great So-and-so; I picked it up, dirt cheap, for a hundred thousand pounds in Fleet Street'' — then literature, too, would profit by their odious foible. But unfortunately the manuscript of a new novel by Besant is not decorative; and nobody would care to read the book (however neatly written) in the author's handwriting. A picture, on the other hand, has immediate interest; and when you buy it and hang it on your wall, you know you have got what nobody else on earth can duplicate. The stock of old masters being necessarily limited, new masters also have their chance of favour. But who will care to buy a new book by a rising author when he can get the pick of Thackeray, and Dickens, and Carlyle, and Macaulay any day for a shilling?

 

Hence the first great disadvantage under which the trade of writer lies is simply this, that the competition of the dead, here and here only, is overwhelming.

 

I might add if I liked that this natural tendency to feed the mind mainly upon the literary work of past ages is as bad for the reader as it is fatal for the writer; that the best literature for any generation to nourish itself upon is the living, breathing, actual literature of its own contemporaries; that the cheapening of old books helps not only to stifle new ones, but to retard the intellectual development of the whole community; that men read old and worn-out thought, thought that has had its day and done its work in the world, when they ought to be taking in the fresh, new ideas, the living leaven of future progress and future evolution. But I refrain from such folly. The wise man never utters one-half of what he really thinks. Most of us who scribble have suffered severely enough already in all conscience for expressing a far more modest fraction of our true opinion. So I say no more. Let us not cast our pearls any longer before the faces of the gentlemen who review Reviews in the weekly papers.

 

IV.

 

The first great reason, then, why the author should be so badly paid for his toil is the competition of the dead, and the consequent comparatively small demand for living literature. The second, which operates even where a specific piece of work is wanted to order at a fixed price, depends upon the fact that literature is least of all trades a closed profession.

 

The lawyer, be he barrister or solicitor, has to pass many years, and many examinations, in preparation for his future work in life. The physician, the surgeon, the parson, the engineer, all require a special training and special credentials for their particular functions. But any man (or woman) who can hold a pen and spell decently (I am credibly informed even the latter qualification is politely waived in the case of ladies) can become an author at his (or her) own sweet will. It must be so, of course; a competitive examination for the post of novelist would be too grotesque; but the inevitable result of this open career upon the wages of the trade, viewed as a trade, is simply that the price of literary labour goes down on the average to the minimum price of unskilled labour of the clerkly kind in the general market.

 

A trade so open to all the world as this is naturally exposed to the incursions of the amateur; and what is oddest, the amateur in this trade alone stands at no possible disadvantage. Quite the contrary: he carries into the trade his outside reputation. Nobody would entrust the management of his case in the Queen's Bench to the Archbishop of Canterbury. But if a great doctor, a well-known soldier, a popular painter, a familiar singer or actor or beauty writes a book, it sells, not only as well as the average book of the professional author, but a great deal better. The name of a lord, or a Cabinet Minister, or a fashionable preacher, or a momentary lion, the comet of a season, or the cover of this Review itself, draws far more, I venture to guess, than the name of the ablest essayist or the deepest thinker now working regularly on English letters. And apart even from these occasional intrusions of the outside public into the professional preserves, there is the further fact that a vast deal of journeyman literary work is turned out by unprofessional hands, or by people who eke out small incomes, fixed or otherwise, by writing for pleasure in their leisure moments. Such writers can naturally afford to take a smaller price for their occasional services than the professional author; and their competition tends still further to depress the wages of a trade already more than sufficiently depressed by the unique and abnormal competition of the dead.

 

Under these circumstances it is easy to understand why no man outside the walls of Colney Hatch ever voluntarily and deliberately devotes himself to the trade of authorship. Of course there are people who write books for the love of it — that is quite another thing. Most authors, if they came into ten thousand a year, would doubtless go on writing books themselves — the books they want to write, not the books the public asks of them. But no man, probably, ever became by choice a professional writer, a ''bookseller's hack,'' as our ancestors bluntly but forcibly phrased it. A trade so ill-paid and so overworked would gain no recruits, except for dire necessity. Men are driven into literature, as they are driven into crime, by hunger alone. The most hateful of professions (as a profession, I mean), it becomes tolerable only from a sense of duty to wife and family, or the primary instinct of self-preservation. The wages are low; the prizes few and often fallacious; the work is so hard that it kills or disables most men who undertake it before they arrive at middle life; while above all, to the sensitive mind — and most authors are constitutionally sensitive — there is the annoying liability to censure and criticism which meets your most honest and careful work at every street corner with blunt obtrusiveness.

 

In most other walks of life men only hear what is said for good about them. People are polite, or at least are reticent. In literature, as in politics, the most modest and thinking of men must perpetually submit to hear his intelligence, his taste, and his personality discussed in public with charming frankness, in plain print, and in every journal. If men think him a fool, they don't disguise the fact; they tell him so plainly. If they think him a snob, they inform him to his face of that pleasing belief with brutal sincerity. Probably most professional men of letters, if they told the truth, would admit at once they would give their right hands never to be compelled any longer to submit themselves to this painful ordeal of public quizzing.

 

Why, then, do men write for pay at all? Well, because they must live somehow. The profession is recruited almost entirely, I believe, from the actual or potential failures of other callings. The man who has knocked in vain at all other doors, or the man who has not capital enough even to approach any other door with the silver key which alone admits to the outer vestibule, takes as a last resource to literature. Some of us are schoolmasters or college tutors; some of us are doctors who failed to draw patients; some of us are ''stickit ministers'' or disfrocked parsons; a vast proportion are briefless barristers. When a man who knows how to put an English sentence grammatically together has no other resource left in life, he sells himself, body and soul, in the last resort to the public press, and produces the fabric they call literature.

 

Novelists in particular are probably always made, not born; being in this respect the antipodes of the poet. Divine bards sing because they must; but I suppose no man ever took by choice to the pursuit of fiction. Fellows drift into it under stress of circumstances, because that is the particular ware most specially required by the market at the moment. Women, it is true, often ardently desire to write a novel; but that is because they mainly read little else, and literary aspiration in their case, therefore, naturally betakes itself in that particular direction. To be an author and to be a novelist are them identical. But the literary aspirations of an educated man generally lead quite elsewhere. It is only the stern laws of supply and demand that compel him in the end to turn aside from the Lord's work to serve tables for his daily sustenance.