Chapter I

James Lane Allen

A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK

WITH PORTRAIT

The Macmillan Company 66 Fifth Avenue, New York

NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.

JAMES LANE ALLEN

A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK

While "_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 "_The Choir Invisible_" has had for so many thousands of readers is assuredly due as much to the author's faithful 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 fascinating 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 unanimous 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:

"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 American 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 distinction 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 descriptive 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 most exquisitely alive to the
fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty,
conscientiousness 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 enviable 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 subject. 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 classics of pastoral England, and among French
novelists George Sand and Pierre Loti. Nature furnishes the
background 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 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
tremendous 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 American fiction has not, as
rule, brought to the consciousness of readers; depths of life below
the region of observation. 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 sophistication."

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.

"... Poetry, 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,'
according to Wordsworth, the impassioned expression which is in the
countenance of all science'--that poetry irrespective of rhyme and
metrical 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 entrance 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 interest;
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,' where the spirit is
dignified, is priest-like, and inspired; where beauty dwells in a
harmony of thought and expression 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, denotes 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 _Aftermath_. In these two books Nature was interwoven
benignantly 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, receiving 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, untempered and ungoverned by that principle of chastity which
is the law of love; and again Nature, lawless in herself, becomes
beneficent, law-abiding, when controlled 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
foetid, 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 'downwardtending' fiction of
the hour, it will be sufficient 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 incessantly fluttered in its
bosom and threatened to bolt from the blue, their fears will be
laid to rest in the contemplation 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."

As a historical novelist then, Mr. Allen has taken his rank with the few men of whom Nathaniel Hawthorne is perhaps the most famous; 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 "_The Reign of Law_" which THE MACMILLAN COMPANY publish. 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 followed the great discoveries in physical and social science in the middle of this Century.

The two chief characters of the story are a young man and a young woman. The young man sprung from the lowest stratum of Southern society, and the young woman from the highest. The story of the intermingling of their lives must be left for the reader to discover.

As was so often the case during the political reconstruction of the South, the heroine passed from the sphere of the high social organization which existed at her birth to the humblest and most obscure hard manual work, while the hero rose from the lowest social condition to the highest intellectual plane, finding his development along the lines of religious and scientific thought. When they finally meet, the latter half of the story shows their influences on each other.

The involved social and political conditions, the play and interaction of phases of life, so utterly different as those which form the experiences of these two people, have allowed Mr. Allen a wide scope for the subtle analysis of character of which in his exquisitely delicate art he is such a master.

The trend of the book, and the religious crisis through which its hero passes, give the story its title; while an important part in the development of the hero's character is played by his passionate love story.

A well known critic affirms that the story contains by far the finest and noblest work Mr. Allen has yet done, both in respect of that human passion and interest which characterizes his former work, and also in the tender reverential feeling with which he dwells on the simple rural life of the Kentucky which he loves so well. In spite of the reserve which characterizes the author, a few of the leading facts of his life have found their way into print, and may be of interest to many who read his books.

He comes from Virginia ancestry and a pioneer Kentucky family. His mother's maiden name was Helen Foster, whose parents settled in Mississippi and were of Revolutionary Scotch-Irish stock of Pennsylvania. He was born on a farm in Fayette County seven miles from Lexington, Kentucky, where he spent his early childhood. He was educated in Kentucky (Transylvania) University, and graduated in 1872. For several years afterward he taught in District schools, at first near his home and then in Missouri. He afterward became a private tutor, and finally accepted a Professorship at his Alma Mater which he exchanged for a similar position at Bethany College, West Virginia. He gave up this latter profession in 1884 and began his career as a writer in the city of New York.

The chief literary and critical Magazines and papers of those years contain many of his essays, while all his short stories saw the light in "Harper's Magazine" and the "Century." These short stories were collected and published under the title of "_Flute and Violin_." His other books are "_The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky_," "_A Kentucky Cardinal_," and its sequel, "_Aftermath_," "_A Summer in Arcady_," and lastly "_The Choir Invisible_," some two hundred and fifty thousand copies of which have found their way into the hands of readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

A new and complete edition of Mr. Allen's works is now being issued by THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. It will contain seven volumes; including _The Reign of Law, A Story of the Kentucky Hemp Fields_, an account of which has been given in the preceding pages.

* * * * *

JAMES LANE ALLEN'S

NEW NOVEL

The Reign of Law

A TALE OF THE KENTUCKY HEMP FIELDS

Cloth, 8vo. Illustrated $1.50

OTHER WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

FLUTE AND VIOLIN Cloth, 12mo, $1.50

BLUE GRASS REGION OF KENTUCKY Cloth, 12mo, $1.50

A KENTUCKY CARDINAL Cloth, 16mo, $1.00

AFTERMATH Cloth, 16mo, $1.00

TWO GENTLEMEN OF KENTUCKY Cloth, 18mo, $2.00

A SUMMER IN ARCADY Cloth, 12mo, $2.00

THE CHOIR INVISIBLE Cloth, 12mo, $1.50

The same Illustrated with Photogravures and Line Drawings, by ORSON LOWELL. Sateen. $2.50

PUBLISHED BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 66 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK