3ameo
kane
)llen
A SKETCH OF
HIS LIFE
AND WORK
WITH PORTRAIT
Cbe "acmittan Company
66 fifth Rvenue, New 'fork
This page in the original text is blank.
James
Lane
Allen
A SKETCH OF
HIS LIFE AND WORK
WITH PORTRAIT
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN
COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN CO., LTD.
This page in the original text is blank.
JAMES LANE ALLEN
A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK
W X tHILE " The Choir Invisible" was primarily
a love story, the setting in which its
action moved was historical. Apart
from the masterly handling of human passion
and the harmony of thought and expression
with which he has treated the larger and deeper
movements of life, it is probably Mr. Allen's
ability to picture forth the early settlement of
Kentucky that has given his writings so solid a
foundation in the literary affections of English
speaking people.
The fascination that "T he Choir Invisible"
has had for so many thousands of readers is
assuredly due as much to the author's faith-
JAMES LANE ALLEN
ful historic treatment of the mighty stream of
migration which had begun to spread through
the jagged channels of the Alleghanies over the
then unknown illimitable West as to his power
to tell an absorbing story. When "The Choir
Invisible" appeared, this perhaps most fascina-
ting period of early American history had not
been used as a background of his story by any
great master of fiction, and it requires no very
keen literary insight to discover the sources of
the popularity which has been accorded to the
four or five recent novels, each of which has
for its setting a period in our history whose
glamour has touched our hearts and stirred our
imaginations.
Contemporary judgment is singularly unan-
imous in placing Mr. Allen in the front rank
of American novelists, and it may not be out
of place here to quote the opinions of two or
three of the leading literary critical journals.
WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE, in the Dial says
that:
4
JAMES LANE ALLEN 5
"Looking about among our younger men of letters for
the promise of some new and vital impulse, it has for
several years seemed to us that such an impulse might
be expected to come from the work of Mr. James Lane
Allen. He has published few books as yet, but the
number is sufficient to reveal a steadily increasing
mastery of his art, and the quality such as to warrant
readers of discernment in predicting for him a brilliant
career and an assured place in the front rank of Ameri-
can writers. The Choir Invisible does not disappoint
these expectations. It is not only the most ambitious
of Mr. Allen's books, considered merely as to its sale,
but it is also the one in which he has carried to the
highest pitch that fineness of perception and that dis-
tinction of manner that have from the first set his work
apart from the work of nearly all of his contemporaries.
Hardly since Hawthorne have we had such pages as
the best of these; hardly since The Scarlet Letter and
The Marble Faun have we had fictive work so spiritual
in essence and adorned with such delicate and lovely
embroiderings of the imagination. There are descrip-
tive passages so exquisitely wrought that the reader
lingers over them to make them a possession forever;
there are inner experiences so intensely realized that
they become a part of the life of his own soul." . .
And again writing in the Boston Transcript,
Bliss Carman, says:
"There are two chief reasons why Mr. Allen seems
to me one of the first of our novelists to day. He is
JAMES LANE ALLEN
most exquisitely alive to the fine spirit of comedy. He
has a prose style of wonderful beauty, conscientious-
ness and simplicity. . . . . He has the inexorable
conscience of the artist, he always gives us his best;
and that best is a style of great purity and felicity and
sweetness, a style without strain and yet with an en-
viable aptness for the sudden inevitable word. . .
And yet that care, that deliberation is never tedious."
Hamilton W. Mabie is attracted more by the
landscape beauty of Mr. Allen's work, and he
too makes an original contribution to our sub-
ject. He says in The Outlook:
"No American novelist has so imbedded his stories
in Nature as has James Lane Allen; and among English
novels one recalls only Mr. Hardy's three cl-assics of
pastoral England, and among French novelists George
Sand and Pierre Loti. Nature furnishes the back-
ground of many charming American stories, and finds
delicate or effective remembrance in the hands of
writers like Miss Jewett and Miss Murfree; but in Mr.
Allen's romances Nature is not behind the action; she
is involved in it. Her presence is everywhere; her
influence streams through the story; the deep and
prodigal beauty which she wears in rural Kentucky
shines on every page; the tremendous forces which
sweep through her disclose their potency in human
passion and impulse. There was a fine note in Mr.
Allen's earliest work; a prelusive note with the quality
of the flute. . . In Summer in Arcady a deeper note
6
JAMES LANE ALLEN
in the treatment of Nature was struck, and Mr. Allen's
style took on, not only greater freedom, but a richer
beauty. The story is a kind of incarnation of the tre-
mendous vitality of Nature, the unconscious, unmoral
sweep of the force which makes for life. So completely
enveloped is the reader in the atmosphere of the opulent
world about him, so deeply does he realize the primeval
forces rushing tumultuous through that world, that at
times the human figures seem as subordinate as those
in Corot's landscapes. And yet these human struggles
are intensely real, the human drama intensely genuine.
Whatever may be thought of the wisdom of presenting
the sex problem so frankly, Mr. Allen's sharpest critic
must confess that in no other American book is
atmosphere so pervasive, so potential, so charged with
passion and beauty.
In The Choir Invisible a still deeper note is struck;
the moral insight, always clear, is more penetrating;
the feeling for life is at once more restrained and more
passionate; the constructive skill is more marked; the
style surer and entirely moulded to its theme. This
story is so steeped in beauty, both of the world and of
the spirit, that it is not easy to write of it dispassionately.
It has a richness of texture which American fiction, as
a rule, has lacked; there are depths in it which Ameri-
can fiction has not, as rule, brought to the consciousness
of readers; depths of life below the region of observa-
tion. There is in it the unconsciousness and abandon
which are the very substance of art, and which are
so constantly missed in the fiction of extreme sophisti-
cation."
7
8 JAMES LANE ALLEN
Our final opinion, that of James McArthur
when he was editor of the Bookman carries
some weight both on account of the position of
the writer and also by reason of his keen literary
sense.
Ss Poetry, I the breath and finer spirit of
all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, the impas-
sioned expression which is in the countenance of all
science'-that poetry irrespective of rhyme and met-
rical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of
man, is distinctive in Mr. Allen's work from the first
written page. Like Minerva issuing full-formed from
the head of Jove, Mr. Allen issues from his long years
of silence and seclusion a perfect master of his art-
unfailing in its inspiration, unfaltering in its classic
accent. . . . . So that when we arrive at The Choir
Invisible we find there a ripeness of matured thought,
an insight into the moral depths of passion, and an en-
trance into the larger, deeper movements of life, a
realizing power, a broader sense of humor, as well as
humor itself, a concentrated and universal human in-
terest; all of which is not so much the result of finer art
as of a greater absorption of life, which comes not from
more knowledge, but from more wisdom. The Choir
Invisible is like an inward realization of the ' Domain
of Arnheim!' More than in his other books there rests
upon this work that unembarrassed calm, where truth
sits Jove-like 'on the quiet seat above the thunder,'
JAMF.s LANE ALLEN
8
JAMES LANE ALLEN
where the spirit is dignified, is priest-like, and inspired;
where beauty dwells in a harmony of thought and ex-
pression that subdues and haunts us. In short, in The
Choir Invisible Mr. Allen has come to that stage of
quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness
and the holiness of beauty burn as one fire, shine as one
light, which, as Sidney Lanier has demonstrated, de-
notes the great artist. The Choir Invisible undeniably
places its author among the foremost in American
letters. Indeed, we venture to say that it would be
difficult to recall any other novel since The Scarlet
Letter that has touched the same note of greatness, or
given to one section of our national life, as Hawthorne's
classic did to another, a voice far beyond singing.
A word, however, about Mr. Allen's Summer in
Arcady which precedes this, and was published
subsequent to A Kentucky Cardinal and After-
math. In these two books Nature was interwoven be-
nignantly with the human nature resting on her bosom,
leading her lover, Adam Moss, with gentle influences to
the human lover, and when bereft of human love, re-
ceiving him back into her healing arms. Not so in
Summer in Arcady; the sunlight that brooded in calm
over the forces of Nature that nursed Adam Moss's
latent powers of loving into domestic serenity, rouses
the fierce claw and tooth of Nature to drag Hilary and
Daphne down to her level. As clearly as the poet saw
that, ' all's Love, yet all's Law' so clearly is the same
truth held in these stories with their divergent ends.
The lawlessness of Nature is the lawlessness of man,
9
JAMES LANE ALLEN
untempered and ungoverned by that principle of chas-
tity which is the law of love; and again Nature, lawless
in herself, becomes beneficent, law-abiding, when con-
trolled by that higher law of instinct in man which is
the seal and sign of the Divine upon his soul. Without
moralizing, a moral principle is at work in Summer in
Arcady; it is its vital distinction that over the whole
action reigns a moral simplicity which, like sunlight,
licks up the fcetid, the exciting, sickening, uncertain
torch-flames of passion. And in order to point the way
to a full justification of the author's sincerity and moral
purpose against the charge of pandering to a decadent
taste for the I downwardtending' fiction of the hour, it
will be sufficent to show that the plea for the Divine
supremacy of goodness, and for an unfallen purity in
man and woman, has never been more strongly urged
in modern fiction than in The Choir Invisible.
If in Summer in Arcady there were readers who
were troubled by the heat lightning of passion that in-
cessantly fluttered in its bosom and threatened to bolt
from the blue, their fears will be laid to rest in the con-
templation of Mr. Allen's new work which is pervaded
by an intense summer calm-the brooding calm of the
Country of the Spirit-but which does not preclude,
rather is reached through, the fierce fightings of human
spirit for victory over the evil passions of human nature
-the fiercest struggle that can rend asunder the
human breast, that of holding fast the integrity and
purity of manhood and womanhood at any cost."
IO
JAMES LANE ALLEN
As a historical novelist then, Mr. Allen has
taken his rank with the few men of whom
Nathaniel Hawthorne is perhaps the most fa-
mous; and for the same reason. Both have
given us pictures of the lives of our forefathers,
whose faithfulness has assured them a position
as classics in American literature. True to the
instinct of his genius Mr. Allen has again
chosen a stirring period in our history as a
background for his new novel "T he Reign of
Law," which THE MACMILLAN COMPANY pub-
lish. Both the hero and heroine are products
of a Revolution, and the scene of the plot is
situated in the Kentucky hemp fields. The
Revolution on the one hand was the social
upheaval that our Civil War caused in the
South. While on the other hand it was the
moral and intellectual Revolution which fol-
lowed the great di