Mr. James Lane Allen

MR. JAMES LANE ALLEN, in all his work, — whether its purpose has been chiefly local or of larger inspiration, — has taken the Kentucky landscape, the Kentucky character, the Kentucky institutions, for his material. Surely, when he started out on his literary career with a series of careful studies in the Blue Grass Region, which were also to be illustrated by succeeding stories on the same subjects, he regarded himself somewhat as the prophet of a locality which up to that time had had no voice of its own in literature. But of more importance than the fact that Mr. Allen takes Kentucky for his subject is the fact that he is himself a Blue Grass Kentuckian. What this means he has himself told us in his book of studies: —

“ They, the blue grass Kentuckians, are the descendants of those hardy, high-spirited, picked Englishmen, largely of the squire and yeoman class, whose absorbing passion was not religious disputation nor the intellectual purpose of founding a State, but the ownership of land and the pursuit and pleasures of rural life, close to the rich soil, and full of its strength and sunlight. They have to this day, in a degree perhaps equaled by no others living, the race qualities of their English ancestry, and the tastes and habitudes of their forefathers. If one knows the Saxon nature, and has been a close student of Kentucky life and character, stripped bare of the accidental circumstances of local environment, he may amuse himself with laying the two side by side, and comparing the points of essential likeness.”

Mr. Allen was brought up as a country boy, spending much of his boyhood apart, in familiar intercourse with the shy tenantry of the woods and fields, and finding his companionship, outside of these, in the books that his mother led him to read, and which she selected with a sound taste for literature. His work was not born of cities. It too is of the soil, and “ full of its strength and sunlight.” It has a rich masculine endowment. We may notice this, and its kinship to the English genius, without denying its author an intellectual légèreté, a fine touch that Mr. Howells would put down as his American birthright.

Mr. Allen’s academic life began with his entrance to the Kentucky University, once the Transylvania University, where he was graduated with the honors of his class. His first professional aim, he tells us, was comparative philology; and as preparatory to the study of it in Germany, he was accepted as a nonresident student for the doctor’s degree by the academic council at Johns Hopkins, the first candidate to apply. “ But this ended with the mere plan.” It concerns us, however, as a plan, because it shows Mr. Allen’s interest in language, which is always that of the scholar as well as of the enamored artist.

The year that saw him through college also placed him at the head of a family of three, whom his father’s death, succeeding the wreck of the family fortunes in the war, had left without support. He was forced to find immediate employment in teaching. As teacher he filled one position or another, until, “ liking college work always less, and literature always more,” he went to New York about ten years ago, forsworn to authorship. During these teaching years he had served on the faculty of Kentucky University, and later had filled the chair of Latin and higher English in Bethany College, West Virginia.

All this goes to show that our author began his literary career equipped on the conventional lines, yet hardly in the conventional way. The account of the obstacles that stood between him and a university education, his perseverance in surmounting them, his later scholarly ambitions, shows that the academic was with him a chosen way. His genius may very well prove conservative of literary tradition.

Mr. Allen’s literary career began with the publication of certain magazine articles on the Blue Grass Region, since published in book form, and some illustrative stories that in 1891 were brought together in a single volume under the title of Flute and Violin. These stories were avowedly Kentuckian studies, with a local ambition to perpetuate types, especially those of the past, which the New Kentucky is dropping out of memory. Indeed, it is very characteristic of their author’s genius that many of them owe their pathos to a certain memorial quality. Taken in the order of their appearance, we have first the Two Gentlemen of Kentucky, which sets forth with quaint, sad humor the friendship between master and slave, that survival of Old Kentucky which lived on in an alien world. The White Cowl represents the young Kentuckian transplanted to the life of the monastery. It shows us the stranger civilization on the native soil ; and its tragedy is the tragedy of incompatible instincts and ideals. King Solomon of Kentucky is the outcast white, lower than the negroes, sold like them in the public square of Lexington for vagabondism, yet finally redeeming his manhood by an act that was beyond the virtue of the virtuous. We have in it, again, the profoundly touching relation between master and slave ; for it is a free negro woman who buys the friend of her old master to save him from disgrace, and be his servant. Posthumous Fame is not a local study; it is a little experiment in the Hawthorne allegory. But Sister Dolorosa is a story of the convent as The White Cowl is a story of the monastery. Flute and Violin, the last of the series to appear, the initial story of the volume, grew out of an old memorial tablet in a church in Kentucky. The parson is an historical resuscitation. Mr. Allen says of all these stories that he wrote them “ to train his eye to see, and his hand to report things as they were.” Yet, strangely enough, it is not as local studies that we chiefly value them.

When they first appeared in the contemporaneous pages of the monthly magazines they must have made a singular impression; for reading them is like stepping from the street of modernism into some quiet precinct. One has only to look over their subjects to see how few bids they make for popular attention. There is little that is strictly novel in their inspiration. If the author sets out to reproduce the Kentucky type, after all, his studies have some of the familiarity of an older civilization. The Two Gentlemen of Kentucky, master and slave, so far as they furnish forth a motive, are just the master and faithful servant of the old English drama. As for the monastery and the convent, they are the traditional settings for a world-old tragedy in literature; and we come upon the stories of The White Cowl and Sister Dolorosa as on things not unfamiliar, however fresh their power over the imagination. Mr. Allen’s literary method has not the least strain after novelty. A full classic outline, both in style and in narrative, sends us back fifty years for its literary prototype. And here we pause ; here we are near our secret; for when, since the days of Hawthorne and Thoreau, has fallen such an accent in American letters ? It is from the story of the saintly parson (Washington Irving might have owned him), who pays a long penalty for his one innocent indulgence in the melodies of life, that we quote : —

“ At first the parson blew low, peculiar notes, such as a kind and faithful shepherd might blow at nightfall as an invitation for his scattered wandering sheep to gather home about him. Perhaps it was a way he had of calling in the disordered flock of his faculties, — some weary, some wounded, some torn by thorns, some with their fleeces, which had been washed white in the morning prayer, now bearing many a stain. But when they had all answered, as it were, to this musical roll-call, and had taken their due places within the fold of his brain, obedient, attentive, however weary, however suffering, then the flute was laid aside, and once more there fell upon the room intense stillness ; the poor student had entered upon his long nightly labors.”

Here is a pathos that may well win, independent of any artistry ; but we speak for the lover of letters. Surely, not since Hawthorne in American prose, or Thackeray in English classics, have words flown so straight, yet on so light and effortless a wing ! And beside the unhurrying and perfect quality of Mr. Allen’s prose, there is also another way in which his art, as shown in these first stories, looks back to fashions now somewhat in disuse. His work has a harmony that is the result of an ideal bent in taste, which chooses its material with a very delicate selection, and always with beauty as an end. The tradition of Beauty, — it is that which Sainte-Beuve calls the classic heritance ; and it is only when the tradition is so faithfully preserved as it is in Mr. Allen’s work that we realize how it has been dimmed by the other ideals that art has proposed to itself of late. Take the story of Sister Dolorosa. Here there is so much regard for harmony in the strict classic way that, despite the local pretensions, the very landscape of the story becomes a symbolism of the human problem rather than a local background; and in all the art of the story one cannot help seeing Pater’s resolute “ tact of omission,” which is never tempted from its purpose by an effect of the realistic sort.

One finds it very easy to speak of these first stories simply as artistic successes. Not that they are wanting in more personal characteristics, but that the man is so much more in evidence as his art takes a new turn. It would, however, be untrue to say that a very marked personality did not make its appearance in literature at the time when Flute and Violin was published ; or that much of the charm of the stories is not a certain virile yet delicate quality that belongs as much to the man as to his art. No one can read Flute and Violin, Two Gentlemen of Kentucky, and chiefly Sister Dolorosa, without being touched by an understanding and a sweetness in them which are like a woman’s ; but with Mr. Allen these are traits in a humanism that has the man’s heart wherever it is found. These stories are stories of Kentucky life. Of more importance to us, they are stories by a Kentuckian ; and in all of them we find the Kentuckian sympathies at work in the artist. Love of the soil and a nearness to the natural earth, — these have bred a people richly endowed with manhood. Counting home-making the chief virtue, and the home the typical institution of the State, it is no wonder that the one of their number who turns to literature should be a humanist in the old and beautiful sense. He will not distrust human nature with its natural face, but will see it at once ever beautiful as it is ever old. Sister Dolorosa and The White Cowl are already prophetic. They oppose in an intense way the ascetic to the human ideal, with something in the passion of their treatment that foretells the author’s later position in art.

We have now come to Mr. Allen’s next stories, A Kentucky Cardinal and Aftermath, both published within the last two years. With them we step into the personal country. These two books are unlike the stories of the first volume in one marked way,—they are familiar; they have a sort of wayward freedom that one would hardly expect from the almost schoolmasterly strictness of Mr. Allen’s first work. But the author has not forgotten his art; only some of the reserve of new authorship has worn off, and he is now entirely himself in a new and characteristic way. One really hesitates to deal with A Kentucky Cardinal and Aftermath as a critic, lest, like Wordsworth’s little sister, to catch the butterfly will be to brush the dust from its wings. However these stories impress other readers, to the present writer they have an autobiographic reality, as if the author were writing out a memory for its own sake ; so that, after listening to it, one closes the book almost with the feeling of closing it upon another’s secret. But this simply explains the popular success of A Kentucky Cardinal and Aftermath. As Mr. Allen’s first book arrested only the clique of letters, it is a tribute to the art that has grown in intimacy.

There is one passion of his that Mr. Allen could not fail to declare in showing more of his personality to the reader. On the title-page of Summer in Arcady there are these lines from Thereat! : —

“ O Nature. . . . Some still work give me to do — Only — be it near to you ! ”

Most characteristic ! For in the stories of which we speak the author first shows himself a Nature-lover as intimate as Thoreau. One can hardly choose out of the delicate observations of her which are recorded in these little books, and which are so large apart of their charm. It is enough to show how Nature is interwoven in their motive. Their dedication runs thus : “ This is to her from one who, in childhood, used to stand at the windows of her room and watch for the Cardinal among the snow-buried cedars. “ And Mr. Allen is at home in this world of Nature as one is at home in the place of childhood affection.

A Kentucky Cardinal shows first how Nature turns the heart to love, and then becomes the meeting-ground and touchstone of affection. Last, in a quaint way, it makes the tragedy of misunderstanding, which of course precedes betrothal, turn on an act of untenderness to one of Nature’s creatures. This is the Kentucky cardinal, the shyest and rarest of birds. One cannot miss the full intention of his place in the story, where the bird not only plays a delicate part in the dénouement, but becomes typical of the woman’s rare and beautiful personality which is the inspiration of the whole.

Aftermath carries out a hint that has run through A Kentucky Cardinal. Will Nature, which is in the first place a single passion, be sacrificed to the humaner and intenser instinct of the man and the lover ? In Aftermath the human passion wins as it has won in A Kentucky Cardinal. Yet here is the beautiful part that Nature plays. When Death has closed the gate through which human affection reaches out to its desire, then Nature stands ready with her old healing friendship. "Aftermath,” to use the author’s own words, “ is the second spring, which puts forth between summer gone and winter nearing.” “It is Nature’s refusal to be once reaped, and so to end.” “ The Harvester passed over my fields, leaving them bare; they are green again up to the winter’s edge.” Mr. Allen’s Nature is something more than a setting for the human story. It begins to take on the character of an analogy by which he reaches his interpretation of life. And always here, as in the earlier stories, there is the same exquisite fitness of incident and detail to the main motive. In this story, where the love of Nature touches at every point on its human destinies, the young mother dies from the chill of a blossom that her husband brings her in memory of their opening acquaintance in the garden, — a beautiful and poignant touch. It is characteristic of Mr. Allen’s art, which has always in it something as seizing and as still as memory.

Yet we must do justice to the sunshiny quality of its humor. We had already recognized its quaint and delightful turn in Flute and Violin, where our parson prayed every morning that “ during the day his logical faculty might discharge its function morally, and his moral faculty might discharge its function logically, and that over all the operations of all his other faculties he might find heavenly grace to exercise both a logical and a moral control.” Humor runs like a note of laughter through almost every page of A Kentucky Cardinal and its sequel. It is always fanciful and characteristic, and how much it is in harmony with the intention of the story the pretty incident of the wren’s nest, which the engaged lovers use for their private post-office, will show. It is something like Mr. Stockton’s humor touched with poetry ; that is, so far as it shares Mr. Stockton’s naïveté. And this smiling and sweet manner which rarely fails him seems part of the breath of Nature in which the story lives. This is a marked quality of his work. In spite of a searching pathos which is almost inseparable from its inspiration, it is centred in peace and self-control. It is in the end a sane and cheery art.

Summer in Arcady completes our study of Mr. Allen’s work. It is a story of a Kentuckian summer, warm with the sun of that fertile land, and reproducing for us country customs and country types with the homeliness of modern realism. Looking at the story on this side, we can see how the author’s art has been modified by current modes since he wrote Sister Dolorosa. But more deeply felt, it convinces us how continuous has been his artistic ideal, how strong his art has grown around the principle that first shaped it. One cannot read the Prelude of this story, with the unfaltering accent of its style, delicate, resolute, and touched with imperishable poetry, and not be sure of the succession. One cannot feel the moving harmony of this pastoral, when Nature is ever playing her part in the heightening passion of the story, and not see the art of Sister Dolorosa and the Kentucky Cardinal in fuller evidence. As a sustained piece of work, far more ambitious than its predecessors in point of form, and successfully so, Mr. Allen’s Summer in Arcady makes an epoch in his artistic career.

It has a further interest. It takes issue in a grave contention. There are in Aftermath some lines which, coupled with certain other passages in the story where the writer speaks of the married life with a directness that is matched by its delicacy, show what will be the final place of Nature in his interpretation of life : —

“ And the other day you told me that I am not perfectly natural with anything but Nature. Nature is the only thing that is perfectly natural with me. When I study Nature there are no delicate or dangerous or forbidden subjects. The trees have no evasions. The weeds are honest. . . . Everything stands forth in the sincerity of its being, and Nature invites me to exercise the absolute liberty of my mind upon all life. . . . But after you have grown used to study Nature with absolute freedom and absolute peace, think how human life repels you. You may not investigate, you may not speak out, you may not even think, you may not even feel.”

Summer in Arcady is a study of passion on its Nature side. It is a book which no woman could have written. Intensely masculine in conception, it also needs a man to interpret it with full justice. Mr. Allen has given us his own criticism in the Preface, and we may touch the moral aspect of the story briefly, as he touches it here. He speaks of it as a “ protest ” against the “ downwardmoving tendencies ” of one class of European fiction ; and he says that, in order to make this protest more forcible, he has met the enemy on its own grounds, the grounds of naturalism. But he uses the frankness of naturalism only that he may invest it with a forgotten reverence.

His protest, however, is not merely a protest of taste. He has meant it as a protest in morals ; and to this end he has enlisted our sympathies in the struggle and victory of two young people, impelled alike by their inheritance and by their nearness to nature to sin against the civilized order of society, yet escaping through some warning of conscience and some self-control which was the birth of a better love. By such a story the author has attempted to do what seems a paradoxical thing : “ wrest a moral victory for each of the characters, a victory for the old established order of civilized societies, and a victory for those forces of life that hold within themselves the only hope of the perpetuity of the race and the beauty of the world.”

This victory has certainly not been won by the way of proof. Mr. Allen has wisely said that his story cannot “ carry the weight and measure of an opposing argument.” An argument it is not in any logical sense ; for its consummation in the act of state marriage is not traced in its results, neither is it brought into any contrast with a tragedy that comes from following the natural instinct. But perhaps the story is truer to art in that it is an appeal, and not an argument, — an appeal away from what is merely natural to what is a higher impulse in the direction of human passion. We suppose there will always be some question about the wisdom of using a story like Summer in Arcady as a moral weapon. Its sincerity is its danger. It is a book so forcible that it is made to create experience. As for its “ morality,”it enters into this book, as into all fine art, through the principle of chastity in its soul to keep it pure. We can say this of Mr. Allen’s book, and it is its exquisite distinction: he lays such delicate hands on the central mystery of life that he never offends us by one irreverent touch, or by one unveiling which, though honest in intention, might err to the side of grossness.

But to return to the place of Mr. Allen’s last book in art. Referring to American fiction, in his Preface, as a “ wholesome, altogether peaceful, and rather unambitious world of books,” he sufficiently characterizes it as it stands apart in ideal from the English school, especially by this word “ unambitious.” The American school, remarkable for its sincerity in observation and its finesse, has yet been shy of dealing with some of those vital problems to which the Old World fiction has committed itself. It has perhaps lacked the volume of great emotional literature. For one, the present writer has not cared to see the effects of the latest imported fashion in contemporary writing—the novel of passion — as it has affected more than one native author. It has proved incompatible with their genius, which was of slenderer if no less true a quality than that of the fertile motherland. Mr. Allen’s book is an exception, with one other that could not be more different in point of art, at times in point of refinement, yet has that which brings it under the same description, — Rose of Dutcher’s Cooley. Both Mr. Garland and Mr. Allen had the endowment for their task. They were children of a strong and fertile land, with the virile genius that was not born of cities. But more than this common strength of temperament, as artists they were moved by a common poetry in their subject. It is the poetry of the generating earth, and of all Nature as it obeys one impulse to renew its life, — that poetry which allies itself so mysteriously with the promptings of human passion. The early and really beautiful parts of Rose of Dutcher’s Cooley have some of the exquisite idyllism which makes Summer in Arcady a poem from first to last, and keeps it wholesome as with the fresh air of the sky and of the field. But further than this, Mr. Garland’s book serves to illustrate Mr. Allen’s only by contrast.

The two books, when brought together, illustrate one of those central divergences in the conception of art which will always make schools and contentions, but which we must accept so long as there are vital differences of temperament. Here are two books, which, with equal sincerity to Nature, rank as art on the different sides of realism and idealism. Mr. Garland has aimed at a complete contemporary picture; Mr. Allen has cared only for the poetry of his single subject; and we have as a result Mr. Garland’s story, forcible, yet lacking in modulation and with a scarcely informing motive, and Mr. Allen’s, answering part to part with the uplifting harmony of artistic perfection. However we may talk of schools, the highest art is the purest elation; and there is an elation of form as well as of subject.

But after all, the idealist temper is likely to go deeper than form. It is perhaps rather unkind to pit Mr. Allen against Mr. Garland in this way ; but as they are typical and characteristic writers, one cannot help being interested in the contrast of their motives. In Rose of Dutcher’s Cooley, Mr. Garland keeps throughout the indifference of the naturalist in his point of view ; in Summer in Arcady, Mr. Allen (who, it must be remembered, brings to Nature the heart of a scientist as well as a poet) follows the lead of the ethical imagination. There is something in the character of our late realism to make us feel that it is the literature of disillusion. If this is so, then all the more have the idealists an artistic justification in seizing upon the quickening instinct of human nature to idealize its necessities by giving them better than an earth-born name.

In reviewing Mr. Allen’s work, one characteristic grows more clear : we have in it the unusual blending of realism and poetry ; of a sincerity which is the foe of sentimentalism with a passion for beauty that brings it to the service of ideal ends. This is its significance for the realistic art of the hour, which too often forgets the purity of the artistic pretension. There is another way in which, as was said, it has an almost unique place in American fiction: it dares the vital word. A critic has said that Pembroke, of all American novels since The Scarlet Letter, has struck the deep chord of master literature. If Summer in Arcady moves us with some such essential power, there is a coincidence to record. This book and Pembroke are the products of perhaps the two most indigenous civilizations of the New World. That, as literature, they have drawn from deep sources proves that the more enduring art is of older birth than yesterday. Me cannot raise art on an unsettled civilization any more than on an iconoclasm that would dispense with the past standards of enduring beauty.

Edith Baker Brown.