cers
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 hand