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 to ennoble it, and but for his extravagant taste for sweetness he might have achieved pastorals of an imperishable sort.

Even as it is, the Kentucky Cardinal-Aftermath story has all the quaint grace of pressed flowers and remembered valentines, and Summer in Arcady, his masterpiece, has at once rich passion and spare form.  Here Mr. Allen is at his best, representing young love springing up fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the human mood.  He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands.  His later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter moments to fall flat from a lack of the true sinews of comedy.

Of a temper as different as possible from Mr. Allen’s was Edgar Saltus, just dead, who stood alone and decadent in a country which the fin de siecle scarcely touched with its graceful, graceless maladies.  He began his career, after a penetrating study of Balzac, with The Philosophy of Disenchantment and The Anatomy of Negation, erudite, witty challenges to illusion, deriving primarily from Hartmann and Schopenhauer but enriching their arguments with much inquisitive learning in current French philosophers and poets.  Erudition, however, was not Saltus’s sole equipment:  his pessimism came, in part, from his literary masters but in part also from a temperament which steadily followed its own impulses and arrived at its own destinations.  Cynical, deracinated, he turned from his speculative doubts to the positive realities of sense, becoming the historian of love and loveliness in sumptuous, perverse phases.  In Mary Magdalen he dressed up a traditional