Famous Authors (Men)

by E. F. Harkins

"And while I am watching the birds, they are watching me. Not a little fop among them, having proposed and been accepted, but perches on a limb, and has the air of putting his hands mannishly under his coat-tails and crying out to me, 'Hello! Adam, what were you made for?' 'You attend to your business, and I'll attend to mine,' I answer, 'You have one May; I have twenty-five!' He didn't wait to hear. He caught sight of a pair of clear brown eyes peeping at him out of a near tuft of leaves, and sprang thither with open arms and the sound of a kiss."

What charming sport! What uncommon perception! And here is one of his choice, frank, bucolic sentiments:

"The longer I live here the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town—to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal. That way nearly everything is prose. I can feel the prose rising in me as I step along, like hair on the back of a dog, long before any other dogs are in sight. And, indeed, the case is much that of a country dog come to town, so that growls are in order at every corner. The only being in the universe at which I have ever snarled, or with which I have rolled over in the mud and fought like a common cur, is Man."

"Summer in Arcady" shocked many who had fallen in love with the pastoral simplicity and spiritual delicacy of the two preceding books; but it was generally admitted that the book showed an advance in the author's powers, particularly in his power of vivid dialogue. In his first novel Mr. Allen had written that "The simple, rural, key-note of life is still the sweetest," and a change to another key-note, tremulous with pathos and tragedy, surprised the reading public; but the opinion that it was likely to prove a stepping-stone to higher things found general favor. Nor was this opinion unsound, for "The Choir Invisible" lifted its author for the time above the heads of all his contemporaries.

Both here and in England the book fairly leaped to success; both here and in England it was praised almost unqualifiedly. An American critic, writing of it, said: "Mr. Allen stands to-day in the front rank of American novelists. 'The Choir Invisible' will solidify a reputation already established and bring into clear light his rare gifts as an artist. For this latest story is as genuine a work of art as has come from an American hand." An English critic noted that it was "highly praised, and with reason." "It is written," he said, "with singular delicacy, and has an old-world fragrance which seems to come from the classics we keep in lavender."

The book succeeded so immensely that an attempt was made to dramatize it, but the attempt failed. The atmosphere of the book proved to be too ethereal, too spiritual, for dramatization.

That "The Choir Invisible" solidified Mr. Allen's reputation was demonstrated by the eagerness of the demand for "The Reign of Law." In some respects this is Mr. Allen's greatest work: it reveals even a deeper knowledge of nature than he ever revealed before, and it deals more intimately with things which have revolved around his own career.

Fame has little to do with the sale of books. If "The Kentucky Cardinal," "The Choir Invisible," and "The Reign of Law" had not been sold by the thousands, Mr. Allen's fame would still be of more than transient quality. There is nothing ephemeral about these stories: they are, strictly speaking, a part of our classical literature. The vividness of the pictures will always be fresh and interesting.

Taking too literally Mr. Allen's remark in "The Reign of Law" that Kentucky University is a ruin and will always remain a ruin, the reading public has generally decided, we have found, that the university, the author's alma mater, does not exist. It does exist, but, apparently, not in the condition in which the author would have it. Before "The Reign of Law" had been long on the market, he and the president of Kentucky University fell into a controversy which makes an interesting chapter in the academic side of the history of the Blue Grass State.