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.