KENTUCKY IN
AMERICAN LETTERS
OTHER WORKS BY MR. TOWNSEND
Richard Hickman Menefee. 1907
Kentuckians in History and Literature. 1907
The Life of James Francis Leonard. 1909
Kentucky: Mother of Governors. 1910
Lore of the Meadowland. 1911
KENTUCKY IN
AMERICAN LETTERS
1784-1912
BY
JOHN WILSON TOWNSEND
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
JAMES LANE ALLEN
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II
THE TORCH PRESS
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA
NINETEEN THIRTEEN
Of this edition one thousand sets have been printed, of which
this is number
241
Copyright 1913
By The Torch Press
Published September 1913
To
Mary Katherine Bullitt
and
Samuel Judson Roberts
and to their memories
[Pg vii]
[Pg vi]
CONTENTS
James N. Baskett 1 "I 'oves 'oo Best, 'Tause 'oo Beat 'em All" 2 James Lane Allen 4 King Solomon of Kentucky: an Address 9 The Last Christmas Tree 13 Nancy Huston Banks 17 Anvil Rock 18 The Old Fashioned Fiddlers 19 William B. Smith 20 A Southern View of the Negro Problem 22 The Merman and the Seraph 24 Anderson C. Quisenberry 27 The Death of Crittenden 27 Robert Burns Wilson 29 Lovingly to Elizabeth, My Mother 32 When Evening Cometh On 32 Daniel Henry Holmes 36 Bell Horses 39 My Lady's Garden 40 Little Blue Betty 42 The Old Woman Under the Hill 44 Margery Daw 45 William H. Woods 47 Sycamores
KENTUCKY IN AMERICAN LETTERS
JAMES NEWTON BASKETT
James Newton Baskett, novelist and scientist, was born near Carlisle, Kentucky, November 1, 1849. He was taken to Missouri in early life by his parents. He was graduated from the University of Missouri in 1872, since which time he has devoted himself almost exclusively to fiction and to comparative vertebrate anatomy, with ornithology as his particular specialty. At the world's congress of ornithologists at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, Mr. Baskett presented a paper on Some Hints at the Kinship of Birds as Shown by Their Eggs, which won him the respect of scientists from many lands. He has published three scientific works and three novels: The Story of the Birds (New York, 1896); The Story of the Fishes (New York, 1899); The Story of the Amphibians and Reptiles (New York, 1902); and his novels: At You All's House (New York, 1898); As the Light Led (New York, 1900); and his most recent book, Sweet Brier and Thistledown (Boston, 1902). Of this trio of tales the first one, At You All's House, is the best and the best known, Mr. Baskett's masterpiece hitherto. For the Texas Historical Society he wrote, in 1907, a series of papers upon the Early Spanish Expedition in the South and Southwest. With the exception of three years spent in Colorado for the benefit of his health, Mr. Baskett has resided at Mexico, Missouri, since leaving Kentucky.
Bibliography. The Athenaeum (July 28, 1900); The Book Buyer (October, 1900); Library of Southern Literature (Atlanta, 1909, v. i).
"I 'OVES 'OO BEST, 'TAUS 'OO BEAT 'EM ALL"[1]
[From As the Light Led (New York, 1900)]
They had been boy and girl together, not schoolmates nor next-farm neighbors, but their homes were in the same region. Her father's house was far enough away to make the boy's visits not so frequent as to foster the familiarity which breeds contempt, yet they gave him an occasional little journey out of the humdrum of home lanes, and away from the monotonous sweep of the prairie's flat horizon.
Hers was rather a timber farm, located on the other side of Flint Creek, where the woods began to fringe out upon the treeless plain again; but his was high out eastward upon the prairie swell, several miles from water. From his place the wooded barrier between them seemed only a brown level brush-stroke upon the sky's western margin.
Sometimes, when he was tired from his day's work afield, he watched the sun sink behind this border, which the distance made so velvety; and, if the day were clear, it looked to him as if the great glowing ball were lying down upon a cushion for its comfort. If it set in a bank of cloud or storm, it seemed to send up long streaming, reaching stripes, as if it waved a farewell to the sky, and stretched a last grasp at the day as it left it, or shot a rocket of distress as it sank.
When a child he had often sent her his good-will upon the westering messenger, and he imagined that the beams, sometimes shot suddenly out from beneath a low-hung cloudy curtain, were answers to his greetings. Long after it was dreary at his place, he fancied the light was still cuddling somewhere in the brush near her and that it was cheery yet over there.
When he was seven and she was three, he was visiting at her house one day. She was sitting on a bench in the old, long porch, shouting to him, her elder brother, and some others, as they came toward her from a romp out in the orchard. Suddenly Bent bantered the boys for a race to the baby; and, swinging their limp wool hats in their hands, they sped toward her. The child caught the jubilance of the race, and when Bent dropped first beside her, she grabbed him about the neck, laid the rose of her cheek against the tan of his, and said:
"I 'oves 'oo best, 'tause 'oo beat 'em all."
The act was an infant tribute to prowess, a bound here in babyhood of the heart which wants but does not weigh; of the body which asks but does not question. The boy felt his heart go to meet hers, so that the little girl stood ever after as his idol. As time went on, his reverence for her as a lisper grew as she became a lass; and though, out of the dawning to them of what the years might bring, there came eras of pure embarrassment, wherein their firmness and trust wavered a little, yet confiding companionship came anew and stayed, till some new revelation of each to self or other barred for a time again their ease and intimacy. They were man and woman now, with a consciousness of much that the grown-up state must finally mean to them, if this continued. There was the freedom from embarrassment which experience brings; but there came with all this a sort of proximity of hopes and aims, which, burdened sweetly with its own importance, persisted with a presage of a crisis down the line.
He could no longer ride up to her side as she left the stile at church, and, without a previous engagement or the lubricant of a commonplace, open a conversation right into the heart of things. When she responded to him now it was with a shy sort of confidence which admits so much yet defines so little. Yet never when they met did they fail to pick up the thread, which tended to bind them closer and closer, and give it a conscious snatch of greater strain, till, as either looked back at the skein of
Nothing had ever strongly tried their attachment. Yet there was creeping now into the heart of each a sort of heaviness—a wondering, at least—if the other was still holding true to the childish troth; a definite sort of mental distrust was abiding between them, along with a readiness to be equal to anything which an emergency might bring. But in their hearts they were lovers still.
JAMES LANE ALLEN
James Lane Allen, the foremost living American master of English prose, was born near Lexington, Kentucky, December 21, 1849. His home was situated some five miles from Lexington, on the old Parker's Mill road, and it was burned to the ground more than thirty years ago. He was the seventh and youngest child of Richard Allen, a Kentuckian, and his wife, Helen Foster Allen, a native of Mississippi. Lane Allen, as he was known in Kentucky until he became a distinguished figure in contemporary letters, was interested in books and Nature when a boy under his mother's tutelage. He was early at Kentucky University, now rechristened with its ancient name, Transylvania. Mr. Allen was valedictorian of the class of 1872; and five years later the degree of Master of Arts was granted him, after an amusing quibble with the faculty regarding the length of his oration, The Survival of the Fittest. He began his career as teacher of the district school at the rural village of Slickaway, which is now known as Fort Spring, about two miles from his birthplace. He taught this school but one year, when he went to Richmond, Missouri, to become instructor of Greek in the high school there. A few years later he established a school for boys at Lexington, Missouri. Mr. Allen returned to Kentucky to act as tutor in a private family near Lexington; and in 1878, he was elected principal of the Kentucky University Academy. He resigned this position, in 1880, to accept the chair of Latin and English in Bethany College, Bethany, West Virginia, which he occupied for two years, when he returned once more to Lexington, Kentucky, to open a private school for boys in the old Masonic Temple. In 1884 Mr. Allen discarded the teacher's garb for that of a man of letters, and since that time he has devoted his entire attention to literature.
While his kinsfolk and acquaintances regarded him with quiet wonder, if not alarmed astonishment, he carefully arranged his traveling bags and set his face toward the city of his dreams and thoughts—New York. Once there he shortly discovered that it was a deal easier to get into the kingdom of heaven than into the pages of the great periodicals, yet he had come to the city to make a name for himself in literature and he was not to be denied. His struggle was most severe, but his victory has been so complete that the bitterness of those days has been blown aside. The first seven or eight years of his life as a writer, Mr. Allen divided between New York, Cincinnati, and Kentucky. He finally quit Kentucky in 1893, and he has not been in the state since 1898, at which time his alma mater conferred the honorary degree of LL. D. upon him. He now resides in New York.
Mr. Allen began with short essays for The Critic, The Continent, The Independent, The Manhattan, and other periodicals; and he contributed some strong and fine poems to The Atlantic Monthly, The Interior, Harper's Monthly, Lippincott's Magazine, The Independent, and elsewhere. But none of these represented the true beginning of his work, of his career. His first short-story to attract general attention was Too Much Momentum, published in Harper's Magazine for April, 1885. It, however, was naturally rather stiff, as the author was then wielding the pen of a 'prentice. This was followed by a charming essay, The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, in Harper's for February, 1886, and which really pointed the path he was to follow so wonderfully well through the coming years.
His first noteworthy story, Two Gentlemen of Kentucky, appeared in The Century Magazine for April, 1888. Then followed fast upon each other's heels, The White Cowl; King Solomon of Kentucky, perhaps the greatest short-story he has written; Posthumous Fame; Flute and Violin; and Sister Doloroso, all of which were printed in the order named, and in The Century, save Flute and Violin, which was originally published in Harper's Magazine for December, 1890. These "Kentucky tales and romances" were issued as Mr. Allen's first book, entitled Flute and Violin (New York, 1891; Edinburgh, 1892, two volumes). Many of the author's admirers have come to regard these stories as the finest work he has done. As backgrounds for them he wrote a series of descriptive and historical papers upon Kentucky, originally published in The Century and Harper's, and collected in book form under the title of the first of them, The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky (New York, 1892). Up to this time Mr. Allen had written nothing but short-stories, verses, and sketches. While living at Cincinnati he wrote his first novelette, John Gray (Philadelphia, 1893), which first appeared in Lippincott's Magazine for June, 1892. This is one of the author's strongest pieces of prose fiction, though it has been well-nigh forgotten in its original form.
These three books fitted Mr. Allen for the writing of an American classic, A Kentucky Cardinal (New York, 1894), another novelette, which was published in two parts in Harper's Magazine for May and June, 1894, prior to its appearance in book form. This, with its sequel, Aftermath (New York, 1895), is the most exquisite tale of nature yet done by an American hand. It at once defies all praise, or adverse criticism, being wrought out as perfectly as human hands can well do. At the present time the two stories may be best read in the large paper illustrated edition done by Mr. Hugh Thomson, the celebrated English artist, to which Mr. Allen contributed a charming introduction. Summer in Arcady (New York, 1896), which passed through the Cosmopolitan Magazine as Butterflies, was a rather realistic story of love and Nature, and somewhat strongly drawn for the tastes of many people. When his complete works appear in twelve uniform volumes, in 1913 or 1914, this "tale of nature" will be entitled A Pair of Butterflies.
The Choir Invisible (New York, 1897), Mr. Allen's first really long novel, was an augmented John Gray, and it placed him in the forefront of American novelists. Mr. Orson Lowell's illustrated edition of this work is most interesting; and it was dramatized in 1899, but produced without success, as the author had prophesied. Later in the same year Two Gentlemen of Kentucky appeared as a bit of a book, and was cordially received by those of the author's admirers who continued to regard it as his masterpiece. The Reign of Law (New York, 1900), a tale of the Kentucky hemp-fields, of love, and evolution, was published in London as The Increasing Purpose, because of the Duke of Argyll's prior appropriation of that title for his scientific treatise. The prologue upon Kentucky hemp strengthened Mr. Allen's reputation as one of the greatest writers of descriptive prose ever born out of Europe. It was widely read and discussed—in at least one
The Mettle of the Pasture (New York, 1903), which was first announced as Crypts of the Heart, is a love story of great beauty, saturated with the atmosphere of Kentucky to a wonderful degree, yet it has not been sufficiently appreciated. For the five years following the publication of The Mettle, Mr. Allen was silent; but he was working harder than ever before in his life upon manuscripts which he has come to regard as his most vital contributions to prose fiction. In the autumn of 1908 his stirring speech at the unveiling of the monument to remember his hero, King Solomon of Kentucky, was read; and three months later The Last Christmas Tree, brief prelude to his Christmas trilogy, appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. The Bride of the Mistletoe (New York, 1909), part first of the trilogy, is one of the finest fragments of prose yet published in the United States. It aroused criticism of various kinds in many quarters, one declaring it to be one thing, and one another, but all agreeing that it was something new and wonderful under our literary sun. The critics of to-morrow may discover that The Bride was the foundation-stone of the now much-heralded Chunk of Life School which has of late taken London by the ears. Yet, between The Bride and The Widow of the Bye Street a great gulf is fixed. Part two of the trilogy was first announced as A Brood of the Eagle, but it was finally published as The Doctor's Christmas Eve (New York, 1910). This, one of Mr. Allen's longest novels, was met by adverse criticism based on several grounds, but upon none more pointedly than what was alleged to be the unnatural precocity of the children, who do not appear to lightly flit through the pages in a way that our old-fashioned conventions would prescribe they should, but somewhat seem to clog the unfolding of the tale. Whatever estimate one may place upon The Doctor, he can scarcely be held to possess the subtile charm of The Bride. The third and final part of this much-discussed trilogy will hardly be published before 1914, or perhaps even subsequent to that date.
The Heroine in Bronze (New York, 1912), is Mr. Allen's latest novel. It is an American love story with all of the author's exquisite mastery of language again ringing fine and true. For the first time Mr. Allen largely abandons Kentucky as a landscape for his story, the action being in New York. The phrase "my country," that recurs throughout the book, succeeds the "Shield," which, in The Bride of the Mistletoe, was the author's appellation for Kentucky. The sequel to The Heroine—the story the boy wrote for the girl—is now preparing.
Twenty years ago Mr. Allen wrote, "Kentucky has little or no literature;" and while he did not write, perhaps, with the whole horizon of its range before him, there was substantial truth in the statement. The splendid sequel to his declaration is his own magnificent works. He pointed out the lack of merit in our literature, but he did a far finer and more fitting thing: he at once set out upon his distinguished career and has produced a literature for the state. He has created Kentucky and Kentuckians as things apart from the outside world, a miniature republic within a greater republic; and no one knows the land and the people other than imperfectly if one cannot see and feel that his conception is clear and sentient. With a light but firm touch he has caught the shimmering atmosphere of his own native uplands and the idiosyncrasies of their people with all the fidelity with which the camera gives back a material outline.
Bibliography. The Stories of James Lane Allen, by L. W. Payne, Jr., in The Sewanee Review (January, 1900); James Lane Allen's Country, by Arthur Bartlett, The Bookman (October, 1900); Famous Authors, by E. F. Harkins (Boston, 1901); Authors of Our Day in Their Homes, by F. W. Halsey (New York, 1902); Social Historians, by H. A. Toulmin, Jr. (Boston, 1911).