Never did pioneers carry into a new country a finer blending of
the daring which moves the frontier farther from the old centers,
and the chivalry of romance for women and idealization of emotion
and experience, than went into the fertile and beautiful Kentucky
country in the days which followed Boone’s adventurous career,
and produced the types of character which appear in James Lane
Allen’s “The Choir Invisible.” The Blue Grass country found in
him a lover who was also an artist, and the background of his
stories is sketched with exquisite skill. “The Kentucky Cardinal,”
“Aftermath,” and the stories in “Flute and Violin” have not been
surpassed in beauty of diction in our fiction. If one might venture
to predict long life for any contemporary writing, he would not
hesitate to put the short stories of these two Southern writers
among American classics.
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF JAMES LANE ALLEN, NEAR LEXINGTON, KY.]
Mr. Page and Mr. Allen have written long stories as well; in
several instances dealing with contemporary life and manners. Mr.
Allen has kept in the field of character study with increasing
emphasis on the influence of environment. The title of one of his
later stories, “The Mettle of the Pasture,” suggests the relation
of the actors in the drama to the soil on which they live, while
the lifelike study of the horse-breeder in “The Doctor’s Christmas
Eve” is a portrait which could not have been drawn outside the
boundaries of Kentucky. Mr. Page in his later stories has dealt
with the spread of the commercial spirit, the conditions in which
women work, political corruption, and social changes.