It needed still, from its own contemporaries, the pen of a student of literature who could weigh and interpret and express the meaning of its performance to its own generation. For a coming generation will think as it will. This movement in Southern thought and Southern letters found this pen, this student, this interpreter, this voice, in William Malone Baskervill. And for this reason he too will have a place among those who found in him such full sympathy-his own generation of SOUTHERN WRITERS. JOHN BELL HENNEMAN.

THE STORIES OF JAMES LANE ALLEN.

If we recognize the generally accepted dictum that a man writes best what he has most keenly felt in life, we are led to believe that Mr. Allen must surely have drunk deeply of the sorrows of this earthly pilgrimage. He looks at life through glasses tinted with the dark hue of melancholy. He revels in the sorrowful tale, in the moroseness of the monastery, in the gloom of asceticism, in the poignant suffering of repentant devotees, in the pall of tragedy. I say this because I consider Mr. Allen's first book, "Flute and Violin," the best that has come from his pen. The stories are sad, but they are in a new vein of short-story writing, and the style belongs peculiarly to this author.

Again, if these stories are to be accounted in any sense representative of Kentucky life, there must surely walk a ghost of gloom and melancholy over the blue grass regions. One might expect to pass from the lively to the severe in the range of six Kentucky stories; but if one sits down to the perusal of this volume with such an idea and reads on to the end, growing more and more morose with each story, yet hoping to find one ray of the sunshine of joy and happiness ere he close the book, he will rise at last a sadder and a wiser man. The tone of the book from one end to the other is but a wail of sadness. The flute and the violin become the silent emblems of repentance for a sin of omission committed by the dreamy, saintlike parson in the one moment of elation which came into his mournful existence; we remove the white cowl but to uncover a story of a passionate outbreak against the unnatural law of restraint put upon man's natural tendencies by the monastic life; we must weep with "Sister Dolorosa" in the agony of her violated conscience, and weep for her when her frail form lies on the bleak shore of the Hawaiian Island where lived the lepers; we must contemplate the dreary prospect of consigning ourselves to forgetfulness in "Posthumous Fame;" we must associate with the direst misery in the person of

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King Solomon of Kentucky;" we must walk a desolate way with the "Two Gentlemen of Kentucky," who are but the brown and sere relics of a past order clinging to the branch where a new and vigorous foliage is bursting

around.

Of these stories, "Flute and Violin" is the best. There is something of a quiet humor in the first part which is contagious. The two old maids, one of whom enlarged the hole through which the latchstring passed in order to increase the ventilation of the parson's room; and the other one, who was of the opinion that the window curtains of red calico should be taken down in order to increase the light in the same apartment are quite amusing. Who could repress a smile as he stands by these two, when they sit so solemnly with their heads together at the window of the room opposite the parson's, and watch the old fellow in his one moment of foolish happiness, dressed in the ballroom costume of a Virginia gentleman of an earlier period, prancing up and down his room through the mazes of the minuet to the music of his own flute? The artistic touch of the poor little cripple's hobbling up to the door of the house just at this point is excellent. He knocks and waits. He listens to the merry flute above, and presently he knocks again, though he is almost overcome with mortification at his own presumption.

"Hist!' said the widow to him, in a half-tone, opening a narrow slit in the curtain. 'What do you want, David?'

"The boy wheeled and looked up, his face at once crimson with shame. I want to see the parson,' he said, in a voice scarcely audible.

"The parson's not at home,' replied the widow sharply. He's out, studying up a sermon.' And she closed the curtain.

"An expression of despair came into the boy's face, and for a moment in physical weakness he sat down on the doorstep. He heard the notes of the flute in the room above; he knew that the parson was at home; but presently he got up and moved away.”

The pathos of this story would touch the coarsest heart. One thinks of the death of little Nell and of Paul Dombey when the end comes, and it were hard to say which of these scenes moves us most. This story made Mr. Allen's reputation, and it places him, beyond a doubt, high among our modern writers of short stories,

The one thing which lends a lasting charm to "A Kentucky Cardinal" is the intimate friendship of Adam Moss for his plants, his birds, and his dumb companions. His garden, with its strawberries and grapes and lilies and roses, with its background of cedars, the home and haunt of all his birds the cardinals, the sparrows, the thrushes-is a delightful spot. The scenic arrangement of Georgiana's window just over his strawberry bed adds a picturesque romanticism to the love-making. It is not the love story, for at times this grows noisome-a fact which indicates the author's tendency to realism-but, as I have said, it is the intimate appreciation of nature which pleases us most in this little book. I quote a passage from Adam's diary:

March is a month when the needle of my nature dips toward the country. I am away greeting everything as it awakes out of winter's sleep, stretches arms upward and legs downward, and drinks goblet after goblet of young sunshine. But most I love to see Nature do her spring house cleaning in Kentucky, with the rain clouds for her water buckets and the winds for her brooms. What an amount of cleaning she can do in a day! How she dashes pailful after pailful into every corner, till the whole earth is as clean as a new floor! Another day she attacks the piles of dead leaves, where they have lain since last October, and scatters them in a trice, so that every cranny may be sunned and aired. Or, grasping her long brooms by the handles, she will go into the woods and beat the icicles off the big trees as a housewife would brush down the cobwebs; so that the released limbs straighten up like a man who has gotten out of debt, and almost say to you joyfully: "Now, then, we are all right again!" This done, she begins to hang up soft new curtains at the forest windows, and to spread over her floor a new carpet of an emerald loveliness such as no mortal looms could ever have woven. And then, at last, she sends out her invitations through the South, and even to some tropical lands, for the birds to come and spend the summer in Kentucky. The invitations are sent out in March, and accepted in April and May, and by June her house is full of visitors.

It seems that our author could not be satisfied with the success attained by "A Kentucky Cardinal," both as a se

rial in Harper's Monthly and as a holiday booklet, until he had explained how Adam and Georgiana "lived happy ever after.” Perhaps he intended for them to live happy ever after, but when he dipped his pen to tell about it in "Aftermath," somehow the "Dark Fowler" came up from the marshes and got in his work. The story was not complete until death and sorrow had come.

Some years ago "John Gray" appeared as a complete novel in Lippincott's Magazine. The author was James Lane Allen, and the story no other than "The Choir Invisible." The first half of this book is almost identical with “John Gray; in fact, almost the only difference between the two books is that "The Choir Invisible" is expanded to about double the length of the other volume. I do not think that the author has treated the public fairly in changing the name of the revised work. While the conceit of the new title has caught the public ear-though perhaps not one in ten knows why it is called "The Choir Invisible"the method of gaining popularity strikes one as cheap and unworthy of an author who has respect for his reputation and love for his art. Another provoking instance of this imposition is the changing of "Butterflies," as it appeared in The Cosmopolitan, into "Summer in Arcady," a title which one who had read the serial would not have suspected to cover the same story.

"John Gray" is drawn for a strong character. Mr. Allen has put his best efforts here and has given us just as much of virility and firmness and determination as he can conceive. He has painted him a young man with high ideals and with the determination to realize them, with high moral standards and the tenacity of purpose to uphold them; yet there are moments when even John Gray wavers, when he is a weakling, when he is not so sure that "he shall go on rearing the structure of his life, to the last detail, just as he has planned it." In my opinion this is true to life; for the strong man is not always strong and the weak man is not always weak. The best of us have at times played the fool and were perfectly conscious of it, and the weakest of us, in