Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) | Page 9

which attended and
succeeded the Spanish War. History was suddenly discovered to be
wonderful no less than humble life; and so was adventure in the
difficult quarters of the earth. That curious, that lush episode of fiction
endowed American literature with a phalanx of "best sellers" some of
which still continue to be sold, in diminished numbers; and it endowed
the national tradition with a host of gallant personages and heroic
incidents dug up out of old books or brought back from far quests by
land or water. It remains, however, an episode; the rococo romancers
did not last. Almost without exception they turned to other methods as
the romantic mood faded out of the populace. Of those who had
employed history for their substance only James Branch Cabell
remained absolutely faithful, revising, strengthening, deepening his art
with irony and beauty until it became an art exquisitely peculiar to
himself.
Mary Johnston was as faithful, but her fidelity had less growth in it.
Originally attracted to the heroic legend of colonial Virginia, she has
since so far departed from it as to produce in the Long Roll and Cease
Firing a wide panorama of the Civil War, in other books to study the
historic plight and current unrest of women, and here and there to show
an observant consciousness of the changing world; but her imagination
long ago sank its deepest roots into the traditions of the Old Dominion.

She brings to them, however, no fresh interpretations, as satisfied as
any medieval romancer to ring harmonious changes on ancient themes,
enlarging them, perhaps, with something spacious in her language and
liberal in her sentiments, yet transmitting her material rather as a singer
than as a poet, agreeably rather than creatively.
As Miss Johnston leans upon history for her favorite staff, so James
Lane Allen leans upon "Nature." He is not, indeed, innocent of history.
His Kentucky is always conscious of its chivalric past, and his most
popular romance, The Choir Invisible, has its scene laid in and near the
Lexington of the eighteenth century. Nor is he innocent of the devices
of local color. His earliest collection of tales--Flute and Violin--and his
ingratiating comment upon it--The Blue-Grass Region of
Kentucky--once for all established the character which his chosen
district has in the world of the imagination. But from the first he held
principles of art which would not allow him to consider either history
or local color as ends in themselves. He believed they must be
employed, when employed, as elements contributory to some general
effect of beauty or of meaning. He has built up beauty with the most
deliberate hands, and he has sought to express the highest meanings in
his art, seeking to look through the "thin-aired regions of consciousness
which are ruled over by Tact to the underworld of consciousness where
are situated the mighty workshops, and where toils on forever the
cyclopean youth, Instinct."
In this important program, however, he has constantly been
handicapped by his orthodoxies. John Gray, in The Choir Invisible,
loving a woman who though in love with him is bound in marriage to
another, engages himself to a young girl, shortly afterward to find that
his real love is free again; yet with a high gesture of sacrifice he holds
to his engagement and enters upon a union of duty which is sure to
make two, and possibly three, persons unhappy instead of one, though
all of them are equally guiltless. Mr. Allen approves of this immoral
arithmetic with a sentimentalism which has drawn rains of tears down
thoughtless cheeks. So in The Reign of Law he exhibits a youth
extricating himself from an obsolete theology with sufferings which
can be explained only on the ground that the theology was too strong

ever to have been escaped or the youth too weak ever to have rebelled.
And in Aftermath, sequel to A Kentucky Cardinal, the author
sentimentally and quite needlessly stacks the cards against his hero and
lets his heroine die, to bring, as he might say, "the eternal note of
sadness in." All this to show how "Nature" holds men in her powerful
hands and tortures them when they struggle to follow the mind to
liberty! To prove a thesis so profoundly true and tragic Mr. Allen can
do no more than borrow the tricks of melodrama.
Just how melodramatic his sentimentalism forces him to be has often
been overlooked because of his diction and his pictures. Though he
tends to the mellifluous and the saccharine he has in his better pages a
dewy, luminous style, with words choicely picked out and cadences
delicately manipulated. By comparison most of the local colorists of his
period seem homespun and most of the romancers a little tawdry. His
method is the mosaicist's, working self-consciously in