GRANT ALLEN.
Grant Alien: a Memoir. By Edward Clodd. (Grant Richards. 6s.)—In some respects this is an ideal biography, and com- pares favourably with the huge tomes which it pleases many biographers nowadays to impose on a patient public! It is so short that it may be read at a sitting, so well written as to be a pleasure to read, and so suggestive withal that he must be indeed stupid who can read it without profit. Grant Allen may not have been a genius, for it cannot be said of him that he achieved anything really great, yet he was unquestionably a man of many parts and highly cultured, wonderfully versatile and phenomenally industrious. Had he been less hampered with bad health and scanty means he would have risen to greater eminence. His ambition was to give himself wholly to philosophy and science, but these are poor paymistresses, and having to live by his pen, he was constrained to turn it to snore pecuniarily remunerative uses. In other words, he took to story writing, for which he discovered an aptitude that surprised nobody more than himself; though it need not have done, for Allen had most of the qualifications that go to the making of a novelist,—a mind well stored with know- ledge, travel, imagination, insight, sympathy, inventiveness, and the pen of a ready writer. Yet though he produced novels that found a public, they are probably all doomed to an early oblivion. Money, owing to stress of circumstances, being an object, he had to write with a view to serial publica tion, and the conductors of most serials not only demand sensa- tion, but insist on every instalment, however short, ending with what they call a "curtain," conditions that are incompatible with good work. Indeed, it is no uncommon thing for the 34itor of a paper that "makes fiction a feature" to refuse a novel on the ground that it is "too good" for him, and presumably, therefore, not bad enough for his readers. Hence, if a novelist would put money in his purse, it behoveir,him to " go one worse," from a literary point of view, than his rivals in sensational romance. The work for which Mr. Great Allen hoped to be remembered was his "Force and Energy," and his contribu- tions to science are probably more important than is generally supposed. They were highly thought of by Darwin, Huxley, and Mr. Herbert Spencer. Grant Allen had an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and a passionate love for Nature. A country walk with him was an education in itself. He had also lofty ideas and a charming personality. All who knew him loved him, and than that no better of a man can be said.
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