III
Of a type the direct opposite was James Lane Allen, who was not inspired and who was not an improvisatore. To Allen fiction was an art learned with infinite patience. He was years in the mastering of it, years in which he studied literature with the abandonment of a Maupassant. He approached it deliberately; he made himself the most scholarly of the novelists of the period—graduate and graduate student of Transylvania University, first applicant for the degree of doctor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins, though he never found opportunity for residence, teacher for years of languages, and then professor of Latin and higher English at Bethany College, West Virginia.
The circumstances of his early life made a literary career difficult. He had been born on a small Kentucky plantation a few miles out of Lexington, miles that he walked daily while gaining his education. A college course for him meant toil and sacrifice. The war had brought poverty, and the death of the father imposed new burdens. Like Lanier, he was forced to teach schools when he would have studied at German universities, but, like Lanier, he somehow had caught a vision of literature that dominated him even through decades of seeming hopelessness. Few have had to fight longer for recognition and few have ever worked harder to master the art with which they were to make their appeal. Like Howells, he studied masters and read interminably, pursuing his work into the German and the French, writing constantly and rewriting and destroying. And the result, as with Howells, was no immaturities. His first book, Flute and Violin, published when he was forty-two, is by many regarded as his best work. To his earliest readers it seemed as if a new young writer had arrived to whom art was a spontaneous thing mastered without effort.
A study of the available fragments of Allen's work written earlier than the stories in this first volume reveals much. He began as a critic. In Northern journals after 1883 one may find many articles signed with his name: sharp criticisms of Henry James, appreciations of Heine and Keats, studies of the art of Balzac and his circle, letters on timely subjects which show the wideness of his reading and the gradual shaping of his art. He evolved his method deliberately after consideration of all that had been done in England and America and France. By no other writer of the period was the short story worked out with more care or with more knowledge of requirements.
Especially significant is an article entitled "Local Color" in the Critic of 1886. The time has come, he contended, when the writer of fiction must broaden the old conceptions of art. Now the novelist must be "in some measure a scientist; he must comprehend the natural pictorial environment of humanity in its manifold effects upon humanity, and he must make this knowledge available for literary presentation." Other requirements had become imperative:
From an artistic point of view, the aim of local color should be to make the picture of human life natural and beautiful, or dreary, or somber, or terrific, as the special character of the theme may demand; from a scientific point of view, the aim of local color is to make the picture of human life natural and—intelligible, by portraying those picturable potencies in nature that made it what it was and must go along with it to explain what it is. The novelist must encompass both aims.
He must also be a stylist. "The happiest use of local color," he declares, "will test to the uttermost one's taste and attainments as a language colorist." And again, "The utmost in the use of local color should result, when the writer chooses the most suitable of all colors that are characteristic; when he makes these available in the highest degree for artistic presentation; and when he attains and uses the perfection of coloring in style."
One makes another discovery as one works among these earlier fragments: Allen, like Howells, was a poet. His first contributions to the larger magazines—Harper's and the Atlantic—were poems, beautiful, serious, colorful.
After these preliminaries one is prepared to find work done with excess of care, with precision and balance, and, moreover, to find color in its literal sense, poetic atmosphere and poetic phrasing, scientific truth too, nature studied as Thoreau studied it, and Burroughs. The six stories in Flute and Violin stand by themselves in American literature. They are not perfect examples of the short story judged by the latest canons. They make often too much of the natural background, they lack in swiftness, and they do not culminate with dramatic force. They are poetic, at times almost lyrical. Open, for instance, A Kentucky Cardinal:
March has gone like its winds. The other night as I lay awake with that yearning which often beats within, there fell from the upper air the notes of the wild gander as he wedged his way onward by faith, not by sight, towards his distant bourn. I rose and, throwing open the shutters, strained eyes toward the unseen and unseeing explorer, startled, as a half-asleep soldier might be startled by the faint bugle-call of his commander, blown to him from the clouds. What far-off lands, streaked with mortal dawn, does he believe in? In what soft sylvan waters will he bury his tired breast? Always when I hear his voice, often when not, I too desire to be up and gone out of these earthly marshes where hunts the dark Fowler—gone to some vast, pure, open sea, where, one by one, my scattered kind, those whom I love and those who love me, will arrive in safety, there to be together.
One thinks of Thoreau—one thinks of him often as one reads Allen. Everywhere Nature, and Nature with the metaphysical light upon it. And connected with Nature always the tragedy of human life—beauty of landscape expressed in perfect beauty of language, but under it and behind it struggle and passion and pain. Nowhere else in the period such distinction of expression, such charm of literary atmosphere, combined with such deep soundings into the heart of human life. "The White Cowl" which appeared in the Century of 1888 and later "Sister Dolorosa" may be compared with no other American work later than "Ethan Brand."
In his first period Allen was distinctively a writer of short stories and sketches. His canvas was small, his plots single and uncomplicated, his backgrounds over-elaborate, impeding the movement of the plot and overshadowing the characters. His art began with landscape—his second book, much of the matter of which was written before the contents of the first, was wholly landscape, landscape idealized and made lyric. Then came John Gray, a preliminary sketch, and A Kentucky Cardinal and its sequel Aftermath, long and short stories, parables, humanity beginning to emerge from the vast cosmic nature spectacle and to dominate. Over everything beauty, yet through it all a strain of sadness, the sadness of youth repressed, of tragedy too soon.
The second period began in 1896 with the publication of Summer in Arcady. The novelist had moved permanently to New York City. He had gained a broader outlook; he had felt the new forces that were moving Thomas Hardy and the French novelists. His early work seemed to him now narrow and weak, mere exercises of a prentice hand. He would work with the novel now rather than with the short story; he would deal with broad canvas, with the great fundamental problems that complicate human life. His essay in the Atlantic of October, 1897, explains the new period in his work. Literature even into the mid-nineties had been feminine rather than masculine, he averred. The American novelists had aimed too much at refinement.
They sought the coverts where some of the more delicate elements of our national life escaped the lidless eye of publicity, and paid their delicate tributes to these; on the clumsy canvases of our tumultuous democracy they watched to see where some solitary being or group of beings described lines of living grace, and with grace they detached these and transferred them to the enduring canvases of letters; they found themselves impelled to look for the minute things of our humanity, and having gathered these, to polish them, carve them, compose them into minute structures with minutest elaboration ... polishing and adornment of the little things of life—little ideas, little emotions, little states of mind and shades of feeling, climaxes and dénouements, little comedies and tragedies played quite through or not quite played through by little men and women on the little stage of little playhouses.
So much for the past, for the feminine age to which his own earlier work had belonged. A new age had arisen; a masculine age, less delicate, less refined, less heedful of little things, a strenuous age, more passionate and virile, less shrinking and squeamish.
It is striking out boldly for larger things—larger areas of adventure, larger spaces of history, with freer movements through both: it would have the wings of a bird in the air, and not the wings of a bird on a woman's hat. It reveals a disposition to place its scenery, its companies of players, and the logic of its dramas, not in rare, pale, half-lighted, dimly beheld backgrounds, but nearer to the footlights of the obvious. And if, finally, it has any one characteristic more discernible than another, it is the movement away from the summits of life downward towards the bases of life; from the heights of civilization to the primitive springs of action; from the thin-aired regions of consciousness which are ruled over by Tact to the underworld of consciousness where are situated the mighty workshops, and where toils on forever the cyclopean youth, Instinct.
It was more than the analysis of a far-seeing critic: it was the call of a novelist to himself to abandon the small ideals and narrow field of his early art, and strike out into the main currents of the age.
Let us try for a while the literary virtues and the literary materials of less self-consciousness, of larger self-abandonment, and thus impart to our fiction the free, the uncaring, the tremendous fling and swing that are the very genius of our time and spirit.
Following this declaration came the three major novels, The Choir Invisible, which was his old short story John Gray enlarged and given "fling and swing," The Reign of Law, and The Mettle of the Pasture, novels of the type which he had denominated masculine, American, yet to be grouped with nothing else in American literature, their only analogues being found in England or France.
In all his work he had been, as he had promised in his essay on "Local Color," essentially scientific in spirit, but now he became direct, fearless, fundamental. Nature he made central now. The older art had made of it a background, a thing apart from humanity, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes indifferent, but Allen, like Hardy and his school, made of it now a ruling force, a dominating personality in the tragedy. The first title of Summer in Arcady as it ran serially in the Cosmopolitan was Butterflies: a Tale of Nature. Its theme was the compelling laws within human life: instincts, inheritances, physical forces that bind beyond power to escape. Man is not to be treated as apart from Nature but as inseparably a part of Nature, hurled on by forces that he does not understand, ruled all unknowingly by heredity, fighting senseless battles that, could he but know all, would reduce life to a succession of ironies: "If Daphne had but known, hidden away on one of those yellow sheets [on which her own runaway marriage had just been recorded, the last of a long series of such marriages] were the names of her own father and mother."
In these later novels one finds now fully developed an element that had been latent in all of his early work—a mystic symbolism that in many ways is peculiar to Allen. Summer in Arcady is built up around a parallelism that extends into every part of the story:
Can you consider a field of butterflies and not think of the blindly wandering, blindly loving, quickly passing human race? Can you observe two young people at play on the meadows of Life and Love without seeing in them a pair of these brief moths of the sun?
And The Reign of Law is a parable from beginning to end, a linking of man to Nature, a parallelism between human life and the life of the hemp of the Kentucky fields:
Ah! type, too, of our life, which also is earth-sown, earth-rooted; which must struggle upward, be cut down, rooted and broken, ere the separation take place between our dross and our worth—poor perishable shard and immortal fiber. Oh, the mystery, the mystery of that growth from the casting of the soul as a seed into the dark earth, until the time when, led through all natural changes and cleansed of weakness, it is borne from the field of its nativity for the long service.
All of his work is essentially timeless and placeless. He had had from the first little in common with the other short story writers of locality. Of dialect he has almost none; of the negro who so dominates Southern literature he shows only a glimpse in one or two of his earlier sketches. His background, to be sure, is always Kentucky and this background he describes with minuteness, but there is no attempt to portray personalities or types peculiar to the State. He is working rather in the realm of human life. Always is he tremendously serious. A lambent humor may play here and there over the tales, but everywhere is there the feeling of coming tragedy. Too much concerned he is, perhaps, with the conception of sex as the central problem of life—Summer in Arcady and The Mettle of the Pasture were greeted with storms of disapproval—but one feels that he is sincere, that he stands always on scientific grounds, and that he is telling what he conceives to be the undiminished truth about modern life.
And his solution, so far as he offers a solution, is free from bitterness or pessimism. He is superior to Hardy inasmuch as he is able to rise above the pagan standpoint and see the end of the suffering and the irony crowned with ultimate good. John Gray in The Choir Invisible summed up the philosophy of the author in sentences like these: "To lose faith in men, not in humanity; to see justice go down and not to believe in the triumph of injustice; for every wrong that you weakly deal another or another deals you to love more and more the fairness and beauty of what is right, and so to turn the ever-increasing love from the imperfection that is in us all to the Perfection that is above us all—the perfection that is God: this is one of the ideals of actual duty that you once said were to be as candles in my hand. Many a time this candle has gone out; but as quickly as I could snatch any torch—with your sacred name on my lips—it has been relighted."
The volume of his writings is small. He has worked always slowly, revising, rewriting, never satisfied. His earlier short stories are perhaps his most perfect work; his longer short stories, like A Kentucky Cardinal, his most charming; and his later novels like The Mettle of the Pasture, his most enduring, inasmuch as they contain the chief substance of what he had to say to his generation. His weakness has been a fondness for elaboration: in The Reign of Law a chapter is given to the life history of the hemp plant and to a parallelism between it and human life. The movement of his stories is constantly impeded by what is really extraneous material, endless descriptions of landscape, beautiful in itself but needless, and unnecessary episodes: a cougar "gaunt with famine and come for its kill" is creeping up to John Gray, who is weaponless, but before the final spring four pages about the habits of the animal—a chapter altogether for the adventure, and after it is all told it is "lumber" so far as the needs of the novel are concerned.
But there is a more fundamental weakness: his work on the whole is the product of a follower rather than a leader. He learned his art deliberately impelled not by a voice within which demanded expression but by a love for beautiful things and a dogged determination to win in the field that he had chosen for his life work. By interminable toil and patience, and by alertness to seize upon every new development in his art, he made himself at last a craftsman of marvelous skill, even of brilliancy. He was not a voice in the period; rather was he an artisan with a sure hand, a craftsman with exquisite skill.