(1850-)
he literary work of James Lane Allen was begun with maturer powers and wider culture than most writers exhibit in their first publications. His mastery of English was acquired with difficulty, and his knowledge of Latin he obtained through years of instruction as well as of study. The wholesome open-air atmosphere which pervades his stories, their pastoral character and love of nature, come from the tastes bequeathed to him by three generations of paternal ancestors, easy-going gentlemen farmers of the blue-grass region of Kentucky. On a farm near Lexington, in this beautiful country of stately homes, fine herds, and great flocks, the author was born, and there he spent his childhood and youth.
About 1885 he came to New York to devote himself to literature; for though he had contributed poems, essays, and criticisms to leading periodicals, his first important work was a series of articles descriptive of the "Blue-Grass Region," published in Harper's Magazine. The field was new, the work was fresh, and the author's ability was at once recognized. Inevitably he chose Kentucky for the scene of his stories, knowing and loving, as he did, her characteristics and her history. While preparing his articles on 'The Blue-Grass Region,' he had studied the Trappist Monastery and the Convent of Loretto, as well as the records of the Catholic Church in Kentucky; and his first stories, 'The White Cowl' and 'Sister Dolorosa,' which appeared in the Century Magazine, were the first fruits of this labor. A controversy arose as to the fairness of these portraitures; but however opinions may differ as to his characterization, there can be no question of the truthfulness of the exposition of the mediaeval spirit of those retreats.
This tendency to use a historic background marks most of Mr. Allen's stories. In 'The Choir Invisible,' a tale of the last century, pioneer Kentucky once more exists. The old clergyman of 'Flute and Violin' lived and died in Lexington, and had been long forgotten when his story "touched the vanishing halo of a hard and saintly life." The old negro preacher, with texts embroidered on his coat-tails, was another figure of reality, unnoticed until he became one of the 'Two Gentlemen of Kentucky.' In Lexington lived and died "King Solomon," who had almost faded from memory when his historian found the record of the poor vagabond's heroism during the plague, and made it memorable in a story that touches the heart and fills the eyes. 'A Kentucky Cardinal,' with 'Aftermath,' its second part, is full of history and of historic personages. 'Summer in Arcady: A Tale of Nature,' the latest of Mr. Allen's stories, is no less based on local history and no less full of local color than his other tales, notwithstanding its general unlikeness.
This book sounds a deeper note than the earlier tales, although the truth which Mr. Allen sees is not mere fidelity to local types, but the essential truth of human nature. His realism has always a poetic aspect. Quiet, reserved, out of the common, his books deal with moods rather than with actions; their problems are spiritual rather than physical; their thought tends toward the higher and more difficult way of life.
A COURTSHIP
From 'Summer in Arcady'
The sunlight grew pale the following morning; a shadow crept rapidly over the blue; bolts darted about the skies like maddened redbirds; the thunder, ploughing its way down the dome as along zigzag cracks in the stony street, filled the caverns of the horizon with reverberations that shook the earth; and the rain was whirled across the landscape in long, white, wavering sheets. Then all day quiet and silence throughout Nature except for the drops, tapping high and low the twinkling leaves; except for the new melody of woodland and meadow brooks, late silvery and with a voice only for their pebbles and moss and mint, but now yellow and brawling and leaping-back into the grassy channels that were their old-time beds; except for the indoor music of dripping eaves and rushing gutters and overflowing rain-barrels. And when at last in the gold of the cool west the sun broke from the edge of the gray, over what a green, soaked, fragrant world he reared the arch of Nature's peace!