icapped
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 fine materials. Movement
with him never leaps nor flows; in fact, it seems to dawdle when, too
often, he forgets to be vigilant in the interests of simplicity; it is
languid with scrupulous hesitations and accumulations. As to his
pictures, they come from a Kentucky glorified. When he says that in June
there "the warm-eyed, bronzed, foot-stamping young bucks forsake their
plowshares in the green rows, their reapers among the yellow beards; and
the bouncing, laughing, round-breasted girls arrange their ribbons and
their vows," Mr. Allen is remembering Theocritus, the _Pervigilium
Veneris_, and the silver ages of literature no less than his own state
and his own day. He uses local color habitually