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 v