James Lane Allen, the foremost living American master of English prose, was born near Lexington, Kentucky, December 21, 1849. His home was situated some five miles from Lexington, on the old Parker's Mill road, and it was burned to the ground more than thirty years ago. He was the seventh and youngest child of Richard Allen, a Kentuckian, and his wife, Helen Foster Allen, a native of Mississippi. Lane Allen, as he was known in Kentucky until he became a distinguished figure in contemporary letters, was interested in books and Nature when a boy under his mother's tutelage. He was early at Kentucky University, now rechristened with its ancient name, Transylvania. Mr. Allen was valedictorian of the class of 1872; and five years later the degree of Master of Arts was granted him, after an amusing quibble with the faculty regarding the length of his oration, The Survival of the Fittest. He began his career as teacher of the district school at the rural village of Slickaway, which is now known as Fort Spring, about two miles from his birthplace. He taught this school but one year, when he went to Richmond, Missouri, to become instructor of Greek in the high school there. A few years later he established a school for boys at Lexington, Missouri. Mr. Allen returned to Kentucky to act as tutor in a private family near Lexington; and in 1878, he was elected principal of the Kentucky University Academy. He resigned this position, in 1880, to accept the chair of Latin and English in Bethany College, Bethany, West Virginia, which he occupied for two years, when he returned once more to Lexington, Kentucky, to open a private school for boys in the old Masonic Temple. In 1884 Mr. Allen discarded the teacher's garb for that of a man of letters, and since that time he has devoted his entire attention to literature.

While his kinsfolk and acquaintances regarded him with quiet wonder, if not alarmed astonishment, he carefully arranged his traveling bags and set his face toward the city of his dreams and thoughts—New York. Once there he shortly discovered that it was a deal easier to get into the kingdom of heaven than into the pages of the great periodicals, yet he had come to the city to make a name for himself in literature and he was not to be denied. His struggle was most severe, but his victory has been so complete that the bitterness of those days has been blown aside. The first seven or eight years of his life as a writer, Mr. Allen divided between New York, Cincinnati, and Kentucky. He finally quit Kentucky in 1893, and he has not been in the state since 1898, at which time his alma mater conferred the honorary degree of LL. D. upon him. He now resides in New York.

Mr. Allen began with short essays for The Critic, The Continent, The Independent, The Manhattan, and other periodicals; and he contributed some strong and fine poems to The Atlantic Monthly, The Interior, Harper's Monthly, Lippincott's Magazine, The Independent, and elsewhere. But none of these represented the true beginning of his work, of his career. His first short-story to attract general attention was Too Much Momentum, published in Harper's Magazine for April, 1885. It, however, was naturally rather stiff, as the author was then wielding the pen of a 'prentice. This was followed by a charming essay, The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, in Harper's for February, 1886, and which really pointed the path he was to follow so wonderfully well through the coming years.

His first noteworthy story, Two Gentlemen of Kentucky, appeared in The Century Magazine for April, 1888. Then followed fast upon each other's heels, The White Cowl; King Solomon of Kentucky, perhaps the greatest short-story he has written; Posthumous Fame; Flute and Violin; and Sister Doloroso, all of which were printed in the order named, and in The Century, save Flute and Violin, which was originally published in Harper's Magazine for December, 1890. These "Kentucky tales and romances" were issued as Mr. Allen's first book, entitled Flute and Violin (New York, 1891; Edinburgh, 1892, two volumes). Many of the author's admirers have come to regard these stories as the finest work he has done. As backgrounds for them he wrote a series of descriptive and historical papers upon Kentucky, originally published in The Century and Harper's, and collected in book form under the title of the first of them, The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky (New York, 1892). Up to this time Mr. Allen had written nothing but short-stories, verses, and sketches. While living at Cincinnati he wrote his first novelette, John Gray (Philadelphia, 1893), which first appeared in Lippincott's Magazine for June, 1892. This is one of the author's strongest pieces of prose fiction, though it has been well-nigh forgotten in its original form.

These three books fitted Mr. Allen for the writing of an American classic, A Kentucky Cardinal (New York, 1894), another novelette, which was published in two parts in Harper's Magazine for May and June, 1894, prior to its appearance in book form. This, with its sequel, Aftermath (New York, 1895), is the most exquisite tale of nature yet done by an American hand. It at once defies all praise, or adverse criticism, being wrought out as perfectly as human hands can well do. At the present time the two stories may be best read in the large paper illustrated edition done by Mr. Hugh Thomson, the celebrated English artist, to which Mr. Allen contributed a charming introduction. Summer in Arcady (New York, 1896), which passed through the Cosmopolitan Magazine as Butterflies, was a rather realistic story of love and Nature, and somewhat strongly drawn for the tastes of many people. When his complete works appear in twelve uniform volumes, in 1913 or 1914, this "tale of nature" will be entitled A Pair of Butterflies.

The Choir Invisible (New York, 1897), Mr. Allen's first really long novel, was an augmented John Gray, and it placed him in the forefront of American novelists. Mr. Orson Lowell's illustrated edition of this work is most interesting; and it was dramatized in 1899, but produced without success, as the author had prophesied. Later in the same year Two Gentlemen of Kentucky appeared as a bit of a book, and was cordially received by those of the author's admirers who continued to regard it as his masterpiece. The Reign of Law (New York, 1900), a tale of the Kentucky hemp-fields, of love, and evolution, was published in London as The Increasing Purpose, because of the Duke of Argyll's prior appropriation of that title for his scientific treatise. The prologue upon Kentucky hemp strengthened Mr. Allen's reputation as one of the greatest writers of descriptive prose ever born out of Europe. It was widely read and discussed—in at least one quarter of the country—with unnecessary bitterness, if not with blind bigotry.

The Mettle of the Pasture (New York, 1903), which was first announced as Crypts of the Heart, is a love story of great beauty, saturated with the atmosphere of Kentucky to a wonderful degree, yet it has not been sufficiently appreciated. For the five years following the publication of The Mettle, Mr. Allen was silent; but he was working harder than ever before in his life upon manuscripts which he has come to regard as his most vital contributions to prose fiction. In the autumn of 1908 his stirring speech at the unveiling of the monument to remember his hero, King Solomon of Kentucky, was read; and three months later The Last Christmas Tree, brief prelude to his Christmas trilogy, appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. The Bride of the Mistletoe (New York, 1909), part first of the trilogy, is one of the finest fragments of prose yet published in the United States. It aroused criticism of various kinds in many quarters, one declaring it to be one thing, and one another, but all agreeing that it was something new and wonderful under our literary sun. The critics of to-morrow may discover that The Bride was the foundation-stone of the now much-heralded Chunk of Life School which has of late taken London by the ears. Yet, between The Bride and The Widow of the Bye Street a great gulf is fixed. Part two of the trilogy was first announced as A Brood of the Eagle, but it was finally published as The Doctor's Christmas Eve (New York, 1910). This, one of Mr. Allen's longest novels, was met by adverse criticism based on several grounds, but upon none more pointedly than what was alleged to be the unnatural precocity of the children, who do not appear to lightly flit through the pages in a way that our old-fashioned conventions would prescribe they should, but somewhat seem to clog the unfolding of the tale. Whatever estimate one may place upon The Doctor, he can scarcely be held to possess the subtile charm of The Bride. The third and final part of this much-discussed trilogy will hardly be published before 1914, or perhaps even subsequent to that date.

The Heroine in Bronze (New York, 1912), is Mr. Allen's latest novel. It is an American love story with all of the author's exquisite mastery of language again ringing fine and true. For the first time Mr. Allen largely abandons Kentucky as a landscape for his story, the action being in New York. The phrase "my country," that recurs throughout the book, succeeds the "Shield," which, in The Bride of the Mistletoe, was the author's appellation for Kentucky. The sequel to The Heroine—the story the boy wrote for the girl—is now preparing.

Twenty years ago Mr. Allen wrote, "Kentucky has little or no literature;" and while he did not write, perhaps, with the whole horizon of its range before him, there was substantial truth in the statement. The splendid sequel to his declaration is his own magnificent works. He pointed out the lack of merit in our literature, but he did a far finer and more fitting thing: he at once set out upon his distinguished career and has produced a literature for the state. He has created Kentucky and Kentuckians as things apart from the outside world, a miniature republic within a greater republic; and no one knows the land and the people other than imperfectly if one cannot see and feel that his conception is clear and sentient. With a light but firm touch he has caught the shimmering atmosphere of his own native uplands and the idiosyncrasies of their people with all the fidelity with which the camera gives back a material outline.

Bibliography. The Stories of James Lane Allen, by L. W. Payne, Jr., in The Sewanee Review (January, 1900); James Lane Allen's Country, by Arthur Bartlett, The Bookman (October, 1900); Famous Authors, by E. F. Harkins (Boston, 1901); Authors of Our Day in Their Homes, by F. W. Halsey (New York, 1902); Social Historians, by H. A. Toulmin, Jr. (Boston, 1911).

KING SOLOMON OF KENTUCKY: AN ADDRESS[2]

[From The Outlook (December 19, 1908)]

We are witnessing at present a revival of conflict between two ideas in our civilization that have already produced a colossal war; the idea of the greatness of our Nation as the welded and indissoluble greatness of the States, and the idea of the separate dignity and isolated power of each sovereign commonwealth. The spirit of the Nation reaches out more and more to absorb into itself its own parts, and each part draws back more and more into its own Attic supremacy and independence, feeling that its earlier struggles were its own struggles, that its heroes were its own heroes, and that it has memories which refuse to blend with any other memories. It will willingly yield the luster of its daily life to the National sun, but by night it must see its own lighthouses around its frontiers—beacons for its own wandering mariner sons and a warning to the Nation itself that such lights are sacred wherever they stand and burn.

But if the State more and more resists absorption into the Federal life, then less and less can it expect the Nation to do what it insists is its own peculiar work; the greater is the obligation resting upon it to make known to the Nation its own peculiar past and its own incommunicable greatness. Among the States of the Union none belongs more wholly to herself and less to the Nation than does Kentucky; none perhaps will resist more passionately the encroachments of Federal control; and upon her rests the very highest obligation to write her own history and make good her Attic aloofness.

But there is no nobler or more eloquent way in which a State can set forth its annals than by memorializing its great dead. The flag of a nation is its hope; its monuments are its memories. But it is also true that the flag of a country is its memory, and that its monuments are its hopes. And both are needed. Each calls aloud to the other. If you should go into any land and see it covered with monuments and nowhere see its flag, you would know that its flag had gone down into the dust and that its hope was ended. If you should travel in a land and everywhere see its flag and nowhere its monuments, you would ask yourself, Has this people no past that it cares to speak of? and if it has, why does it not speak of it? But when you visit a country where you see the flag proudly flying and proud monuments standing everywhere, then you say, Here is a people who are great in both their hopes and in their memories, and who live doubly through the deeds of their dead.

Where are Kentucky's monuments for her battlefields? There are some; where are the others? Where are her monuments for her heroes that she insists were hers alone? Over her waves the flag of her hopes; where are the monuments that are her memories?

This man whom you memorialize to-day was not, in station or habiliment, one of Kentucky's higher heroes; his battlefield was the battlefield of his own character; but the honor rightly heaped upon him at last makes one remember how many a battlefield and how many a hero remain forgotten. Not alone the fields and heroes of actual war, but of civic and moral and scientific and artistic leadership. These ceremonies—whom will they incite to kindred action elsewhere? What other monuments will they build?

There is a second movement broader than any question of State or National patriotism, in which these ceremonies also have their place. It is the essential movement of our time in the direction of a new philanthropy.

No line of Shakespeare has ever been perhaps more quoted than this: "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." It is true that he put the words into the mouth of a Roman of old; but they were true of the England of his time and they remained true for centuries after his death. But within the last one hundred years or less an entirely new spirit has been developed; a radically new way of looking at human history and at human character has superseded the old. The spirit and genius of our day calls for the recasting of Shakespeare's lines: Let the evil that men do be buried with them; let the good they did be found out and kept alive.

I wish to take one illustration of the truth of this from the history of English literature.

Do you know when and where it was that satire virtually ceased to exist in English literature? It was at the birthplace and with the birth of Charles Darwin. From Darwin's time, from the peak on which he stood, a long slope of English literature sinks backward and downward toward the past; and on that shadowy slope stand somewhere the fierce satirists of English letters. Last of them all, and standing near where Darwin stood, is the great form of Thackeray. All his life he sought for perfection in human character and never found it. He searched England from the throne down for the gentleman and never found the gentleman. The life-long quest sometimes left him bitter, always left him sad. For all of Thackeray's work was done under the influence of the older point of view, that the frailties of men should be scourged out of them and could be. Over his imagination brooded the shadow of a vast myth—that man had thrown away his own perfection, that he was a fallen angel, who wantonly refused to regain his own paradise.

And now from the peak of the world's thought on which Darwin stood, the other slope of English literature comes down to us and will pass on into the future. And as marking the beginning of the modern spirit working in literature, there on this side of Darwin, near to him as Thackeray stood near to him on the other side, is the great form of George Eliot. George Eliot saw the frailties of human nature as clearly as Thackeray saw them; she loved perfection as greatly as he loved perfection; but on her lips satire died and sympathy was born. She was the first of England's great imaginative writers to breathe in the spirit of modern life and of modern knowledge—that man himself is a developing animal—a creature crawling slowly out of utter darkness toward the light. You can satirize a fallen angel who willfully refuses to regain his paradise; but you cannot satirize an animal who is developing through millions of years his own will to be used against his own instincts.

And this new spirit of charity not only pervades the new literature of the world, but has made itself felt in every branch of human action.

It has affected the theatre and well-nigh driven the drama of satire from the stage. Every judge knows that it goes with him to the bench; every physician knows that it accompanies him into the sick-room; every teacher knows that he must reckon with it as he tries to govern and direct the young; every minister knows that it ascends with him into his pulpit and takes wing with his prayer.

And thus we come back around a great circle of the world's endeavor to the simple ceremony of this hour and place. There is but one thing to be said; it is all that need be said; it is an attempt to burnish one corner of a hero's dimmed shield.

It is autumn now, the season of scythe and sickle. Time, the Reaper, long ago reaped from the field of this man's life its heroic deed; and now after so many years it has come back to his grave and thrown down the natural increase. On the day when King Solomon was laid here the grass began to weave its seamless mantle across his frailties; but out of his dust sprang what has since been growing—what no hostile hand can pluck away, nor any wind blow down—the red flower of a man's passionate service to his fellow-men when they were in direst need of him.

And so, long honor to his name! A new peace to his ashes!

THE LAST CHRISTMAS TREE[3]

[From The Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia, December 5, 1908)]

The stars burn out one by one like candles in too long a night.

Children, you love the snow. You play in it, you hunt in it; it brings the tinkling of sleighbells, it gives white wings to the trees and new robes to the world. Whenever it falls in your country, sooner or later it vanishes: forever falling and rising, forming and falling and melting and rising again—on and on through the ages.

If you should start from your homes and travel northward, after a while you would find that everything is steadily changing: the air grows colder, living things begin to be left behind, those that remain begin to look white, the music of the earth begins to die out; you think no more of color and joy and song. On you journey, and always you are traveling toward the silent, the white, the dead. And at last you come to the land of sunlessness and silence—the reign of snow.

If you should start from your homes and travel southward, as you crossed land after land, in the same way you would begin to see that life was failing, colors fading, the earth's harmonies being replaced by the discords of Nature's lifeless forces, storming, crushing, grinding. And at last you would reach the threshold of another world that you dared not enter and that nothing alive ever faces—the home of the frost.

If you should rise straight into the air above your housetops, as though you were climbing the side of an unseen mountain, you would find at last that you had ascended to a height where the mountain would be capped with snow. All round the earth, wherever its mountains are high enough, their summits are capped with the one same snow; for above us, everywhere, lies the upper land of eternal cold.

Some time in the future, we do not know when, but some time in the future, the Spirit of the Cold at the north will move southward; the Spirit of the Cold at the south will move northward; the Spirit of the Cold in the upper air will move downward to meet the other two. When the three meet there will be for the earth one whiteness and silence—rest.

A great time had passed—how great no one knew; there was none to measure it.

It was twilight and it was snowing. On a steep mountainside, near its bald summit, thousands of feet above the line that any other living thing had ever crossed, stood two glorious fir trees, strongest and last of their race. They had climbed out of the valley below to this lone height, and there had so rooted themselves in rock and soil that the sturdiest gale had never been able to dislodge them; and now the twain occupied that beetling rock as the final sentinels of mortal things.

They looked out toward the land on one side of the mountain; at the foot of it lay a valley, and there, in old human times, a village had thriven, church spires had risen, bridal candles had twinkled at twilight. On the opposite side they looked toward the ocean—once the rolling, blue ocean, singing its great song, but level now and white and still at last—its voice hushed with all other voices—the roar of its battleships ended long ago. One fir tree grew lower down than the other, its head barely reached up to its comrade's breast. They had long shared with each other the wordless wisdom of their race; and now, as a slow, bitter wind wandered across the delicate green harps of their leaves, they began to chant—harping like harpers of old who never tired of the past.

The fir below, as the snowflakes fell on its locks and sifted closely in about its throat, shook itself bravely and sang:

"Comrade, the end for us draws nigh; the snow is creeping up. To-night it will place its cap upon my head. I shall close my eyes and follow all things into their sleep."

"Yes," thrummed the fir above, "follow all things into their sleep. If they were thus to sleep at last, why were they ever awakened? It is a mystery."

The whirling wind caught the words and bore them to the right and to the left over land and over sea:

"Mystery—mystery—mystery."

Twilight deepened. The snow scarcely fell; the clouds trailed through the trees so close and low that the flakes were formed amid the boughs and rested where they were created. At intervals out of the clouds and darkness the low musings went on:

"Where now is the Little Brother of the Trees—him of the long thoughts and the brief shadow?"

"He thought that he alone of earthly things was immortal."

"Our people, the Evergreens, were thrust forth on the earth a million ages before he appeared; and we are still here, a million ages since he left, leaving not a trace of himself behind."

"The most fragile moss was born before he was born; and the moss outlasted him."

"The frailest fern was not so perishable."

"Yet he believed he should have eternal youth."

"That his race would return to some Power who had sent it forth."

"That he was ever being borne onward to some far-off, divine event, where there was justice."

"Yes, where there was justice."

"Of old it was their custom to heap white flowers above their dead."

"Now white flowers cover them—the frozen white flowers of the sky."

It was night now about the mountaintop—deep night above it. At intervals the communing of the firs started up afresh:

"Had they known how alone in the universe they were, would they not have turned to each other for happiness?"

"Would not all have helped each?"

"Would not each have helped all?"

"Would they have so mingled their wars with their prayers?"

"Would they not have thrown away their weapons and thrown their arms around one another? It was all a mystery."

"Mystery—mystery."

Once in the night they sounded in unison:

"And all the gods of earth—its many gods in many lands with many faces—they sleep now in their ancient temples; on them has fallen at last their unending dusk."

"And the shepherds who avowed that they were appointed by the Creator of the universe to lead other men as their sheep—what difference is there now between the sheep and the shepherds?"

"The shepherds lie with the sheep in the same white pastures."

"Still, what think you became of all that men did?"

"Whither did Science go? How could it come to naught?"

"And that seven-branched golden candlestick of inner light that was his Art—was there no other sphere to which it could be transferred, lovely and eternal?"

"And what became of Love?"

"What became of the woman who asked for nothing in life but love and youth?"

"What became of the man who was true?"

"Think you that all of them are not gathered elsewhere—strangely changed, yet the same? Is some other quenchless star their safe habitation?"

"What do we know; what did he know on earth? It was a mystery."

"It was all a mystery."

If there had been a clock to measure the hour it must now have been near midnight. Suddenly the fir below harped most tenderly:

"The children! What became of the children? Where did the myriads of them march to? What was the end of the march of the earth's children?"

"Be still!" whispered the fir above. "At that moment I felt the soft fingers of a child searching my boughs. Was not this what in human times they called Christmas Eve?"

"Hearken!" whispered the fir below. "Down in the valley elfin horns are blowing and elfin drums are beating. Did you hear that—faint and far away? It was the bells of the reindeer! It passed: it was the wandering soul of Christmas."

Not long after this the fir below struck its green harp for the last time:

"Comrade, it is the end for me. Good-night!"

Silently the snow closed over it.

The other fir now stood alone. The snow crept higher and higher. It bravely shook itself loose. Late in the long night it communed once more, solitary:

"I, then, close the train of earthly things. And I was the emblem of immortality; let the highest be the last to perish! Power, that put forth all things for a purpose, you have fulfilled, without explaining it, that purpose. I follow all things into their sleep."

In the morning there was no trace of it.

The sun rose clear on the mountaintops, white and cold and at peace.

The earth was dead.