The Fable of the Southern Writer

III: History and the Will of the Artist: Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Ill History and the Will of the Artist Elizabeth Madox Roberts feel myself to be a Kentuckian," Elizabeth Madox Roberts said, "and all my work . . . centers around Kentucky objects ."1 Just as her younger contemporary William Faulkner took as his subject the history of the Deep South state of Mississippi, Roberts took as her subject the history of the border state of Kentucky. As with Faulkner, this choice was dictated by the discovery that her imaginative reaction to life in her native state defined the encompassing experience of the modern literary artist: the experience of a constant tension between the self and history. Roberts' historical sensibility was formed by a singular circumstance of her education: her early acquaintance with an eighteenthcentury philosophical treatise, Bishop Berkeley's The Principles of Human Knowledge. She was introduced to this book by her father, Simpson Roberts, a Confederate veteran who had a penchant for philosophical speculation. Having early in his education developed an obsessive devotion to Berkeley, he made a strong effort to mold his sensitive, precocious daughter in the image of his discipleship. How seriously the child took her father is indicated by the way her entire career as a novelist suggests a struggle to repudiate Berkeley and, one supposes, not less her father. The major motive of Elizabeth Madox Roberts' fiction, to be sure, may be taken as her sense, seldom overt but constantly implied, of the pathos of the effort to trani . In commenting on the motives that propel the work of Elizabeth Madox Roberts I have made a limited use of certain working notes and observations on her own work in the author's papers on deposit at the Library of Congress. For a careful, authoritativedescription of the Roberts papers, see William H. Slavick, "Taken with a Long-Handled Spoon: The Roberts Papers and Letters," Southern Review, n.s., XX (1984), 752-73. I 55 History and the Will of the Artist scend the constraint the modern subjectivity of history imposes on the imagination of the literary artist. I do not mean to imply that as she developed the matter of Kentucky the novelist Elizabeth Madox Roberts came to question a formal commitment to Berkeleian idealism. Her struggle against Berkeley arose from her realization of what the Berkeleian idealism her father had attempted to indoctrinate her with fundamentally represents : the registration—more directly so in Berkeley than in any other post-Baconian philosopher—of a profound internalization of being. Bacon, advising that nature be referred to mind, said mind must put nature on the torture rack and extract all her secrets. Locke, referring mind to mind, said mind must look "into mind and see how it works." Berkeley said mind must "consult" itself; then, conceiving a stronger imperative than either Bacon or Locke, added that mind must "ransack" itself. It is interesting that Berkeley tried his hand at poetry only once, when—under pressure of the strongest desire that ever gripped him, to establish a university in the New World—he set down his vision in the famous poem "On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America." Originally called "America, or the Muse's Refuge: A Prophecy," Berkeley's poem is conventional in its treatment of the paired themes of the transfer of empire and the transfer of letters and learning from East to West. There shall be sung another Golden Age, The rise of Empire and of Arts, The good and great inspiring epic rage, The wisest heads and noblest hearts. Not such as Europe breeds in her decay; Such as she bred when fresh and young, When heavenly flames did animate her clay, By future poets shall be sung. Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time's noblest offspring is the last.2 2. George Berkeley, "On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America," in Works of George Berkeley, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (Oxford, 1901), IV, 366. 56 The Fable of the S o u t h e r n W r i t e r What moves Berkeley's poem is not its treatment of an ancient commonplace, as compelling as this may be. The force of Berkeley's idea derives from the vision Bacon had a century earlier of the direct equation in the new age between knowledge and power. When he said...