SOURCE: "The New Beginning," in Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1963, pp. 85-106.

I "A HALF-MYTHICAL LAND"

The spectacle of the pioneer surge westward had long played about the edges of Miss Roberts' mind; she once wrote that this subject had in fact fascinated her "almost … since first I began to think at all." In notes to the article written for the Literary Guild in 1930 when The Great Meadow was a selection, she told of the spell which the exploits of the Kentucky pioneers had cast over her imagination:

In 1921, in the spring, walking back across the Midway, behind me the square gray towers of Harper Memorial Library and before me the brave new wind that swept up from the south, that swayed the dainty elms and bent the vivid grass, my mind filled with the patterns of Giovanni Beeline who lived forever in Venice, who was learning fresh ways to paint and fresh ways to see the world, even after he was seventy—and I said, speaking inwardly, "Will it be done with ballad? … Or will it be some other kind which I cannot now think?"

Or farther back, in 1919, perched in my little birdcage of a room high above Fifty-Eighth Street, in an old stone ruin where there was a grand opera stairway which induced song whenever it was mounted, seeing over the trees and towers of the campus, far down in the east, seeing the dome of the old Field Museum, a wreck and a relic of the Columbian Exposition, where it floated as a bubble against the blue mist over the lake—and I said, speaking within, "Will it be narrative poetry, or ballad that will fuse the old matter I have in mind into tangible form?"

Or back, going farther again, in Colorado, walking over strange mountain sand, coming home from a lonely summit where I had climbed all afternoon among alien stones that had become some near part of myself through much familiarity, and the tohee cried out lovely repetitious song among the scrub oaks. I set my feet down among sand lilies and larkspur and mountain lupin, I brushed cactus thorns and soap-weed on the sunny slopes, and I said, not needing then to speak in inner whispers, shouting aloud to the dear familiar peaks and the fraternal mesas. "But that other country is mine … we came there … thus … and will I ever be able to say, to tell, to state, our coming with some sufficient words … what words? … how can it be done?"

Since the westward movement of her ancestors seemed to be for her a saga, it was inevitable, once she had written successful fiction, that she should amplify this subject in a novel which she once described as "the most simple, direct, elementary, national, and local of all my books." Figures like Daniel Boone, Simon Kenton, Benjamin Logan, and James Harrod, with their strength and their gentleness, she said, "entice the mind to make heroic patterns." Or as one of the nameless pioneers declares in the novel, "In each fort [Boonesborough, Fort Logan, and Harrods Fort], all three, is a man you could take for a pattern to make men by." Immersing her mind in these materials, a "heroic" pattern emerged in the completed organism of The Great Meadow: "the design mounted and swayed, flowed and receded to its own consummation." The design for The Great Meadow, in accordance with the large contours of its subject, was to unfold slowly; the book, as originally conceived, was to serve between My Heart and My Flesh and He Sent Forth a Raven as an "adagio" or slow movement in the Luce cycle.

The spaciousness of sparsely settled eighteenth-century America is reflected not only in the descriptions of the wilderness, as others report it and as Diony Jarvis (Miss Roberts' protagonist) at last sees it, but in the delineation of the chief characters. Even Diony's parents, ending their tranquil days on Five Oaks plantation at Albemarle, Virginia, have large outlines, which suggest the heroic. The Halls are fit descendants of heroic progenitors and are not far removed, in temper and moral strength, from the settlers of the wilderness which continually encroaches upon the plantation.

To Diony the farm is at the parting of the ways, on the divide between Tidewater amenities and frontier rawness, where "the tilled land and the unbroken forests touched their parts" about her. Thus Diony—even before the stranger startles her imagination by painting the land beyond the mountains—not only projects herself backward into the gracious routines of her Tidewater relatives but outward into the expeditions of her brothers as they hunt in the wild Blue Ledge region in the western distance. Her ancestry reflects a divided heritage which sometimes frustrates her but which gives her in the end increased power over herself and her surroundings and increased knowledge of reality. Her mother's people are Methodist mountain folk, having come to the Virginia frontier from Pennsylvania. From her mother, Polly Hall, Diony derives her vigor of constitution and a complete knowledge of domestic life and crafts. On the other hand, her father's people go back many generations in the Tidewater. From Thomas Hall, Diony acquires her respect for knowledge and mental culture and her speculative turn of mind.

Diony is a representative and symbolic figure, since she embodies these contrasting strains, and since she takes this heritage with her into a new country and allows it to govern her actions there. In her article for the Literary Guild Miss Roberts accordingly dwelt upon Diony's rich endowment:

The elements back of this Diony were carefully chosen. Tidewater gentry, scholarship, pagan lore, English communicants and Catholics, wealth and ease, family pride, these are met by sturdy races of tradesmen and farmers, Methodists—most despised sect of the century—Puritanic, Quaker, provident, holy and aggressive, of great bodily vigor and a sturdy beauty. They were on fire with their own flame. These elements gathered into the parents of this woman Diony.

Polly Hall, Diony's mother, is of imposing presence and regal beauty; her faith is vibrant and her orthodox ideas are expressed with vigor and determination. Her objection on moral grounds to the white man's pre-empting Kentucky from the heathen Indians disturbs the company, and even Thomas Hall's rationalization that the new land should be reserved for the most enterprising race fails to dispel completely the doubts which she has implanted. She is an embodiment of piety mixed with common sense and creative domesticity. Under her direction is woven the intricate footmantle which protects Diony in the wilderness; and Diony has from her the gourd seeds which flourish and grow into a fine crop in Kentucky. Polly, coming from "a strong race of women," acknowledges Diony as her fit successor; she perceives her other daughter Betty to be small and fragile. The implication is that Betty would be destroyed by the dangers and challenges which Diony eagerly confronts:

… Betty was somehow fashioned for great love and … there was nothing at hand which was sufficient to share her need. On the instant the air seemed split apart and the day severed, the sunshine slashed open, she and Betty standing apart in the rent, alike but hostile, and she saw that she herself was fashioned likewise in some curious way, and that there was nothing between the hills of Albemarle which was enough to use all her strength, until it seemed that the whole of the wilderness beyond the mountains, the whole of Kentuck, would not appease her, that she would love it all and still have love to spare.

Betsy Dodd, whose frail and charming femininity at Harrods Fort recalls Betty to Diony's mind, is killed in an Indian raid; her force, like Betty's, would have been unequal in any event to the demands of the frontier.

About Diony's father gather overtones not only of the heroic but of the mythic. His limp and his activity about the forge, most intense while he protests Diony's emigration to Kentucky with her lover Berk Jarvis, recall Vulcan or Hephaestos, the old god of fire and of the arts deriving from the smithy's craft. As a tender of the fire, he is also a Promethean figure; thus Thomas Hall respects the uses of civilization and is their proponent, and he is the source of intellectual light in the novel, with his fervent idealism and advocacy of Berkeley. He is both submerged in the life of the plantation and with-drawn, by his lameness, from it; he is vitally identified with the members of his family and also removed from them, as he raises his hand to comment aloud upon Berkeley's "The Principles of Human Knowledge," for example, and then thinks better of it. He is an oracle, much of whose wisdom is self-contained except when he can talk to his temperamental equals like Diony. When he finally gives his consent to her going west, he talks of Rhea (who is sometimes to be identified with the earth or Gaea) as an aboriginal deity who signifies "succession" and who is apparently synonymous with the Divine Mind or "the great Mover and Author of Nature" of Berkeley. He also implies that Rhea's children—Jupiter, Vesta, Neptune, Ceres, Juno, and Pluto, and by extension all creatures—reveal in their several ways the traits of the goddess Earth, their mother. As a Vulcan figure, Thomas Hall takes a place among this divine company.

So does his daughter whose name derives from that of a Titan, Dione. Dione was coexistent in time with Rhea; she was the mother by Jupiter of Venus, who of course embodies the elemental force of sex and love which Diony also exemplifies in a new country. As a dynamic feminine presence Diony ministers to the sick during the hard winter of 1778; her own children arouse strong protectiveness in her; and in a moment of deep revelation she feels herself to be the "common mother" rather than the enemy of all the people in the Ojibway Indian lodge with whom her husband Berk dwelt in the North. As a Titan, she regards herself as a descendant of Uranus and Terra, of Heaven and Earth and, like them, as a supplanter of Chaos.

In Kentucky, as if illustrating this mythic ancestry, Diony feels herself to be "the beginning before the beginning," the well-spring of all future developments in the land. She holds in "a chaotic sense of grandeur" these truths concerning her putative descent from the old gods and is "grateful for a name of such dignity" as Dione. As a symbolic source of later abundance and harmony, she has, before Berk's departure from Harrods Fort on his mission of vengeance, an apocalyptic vision in which all promises that had led the settlers westward are fulfilled. This vision is epical, for it represents the common aspirations of a whole people as they begin their civil activities in the wilderness. Diony's vision of the future, in fact, has something of the scope of the archangel Michael's in Paradise Lost when he foretells the future of the human race or of Anchises' in the Sixth Book of the Aeneid when he prophesies to Aeneas the glories of the Roman state.

If the other characters are not explicitly identified with actual gods, they are imposing—"half-mythical heroes walking the earth as gods walk." Their deeds soon became legendary and the foundation for an indigenous mythology. Boone, the most electrifying of these figures, is a kind of benevolent God walking among men and a power behind the scenes as he goes through the wilderness, alone and powerful, self-sufficient and large-minded. Accordingly, he became for Miss Roberts "a symbol of man leaping apart from men, thrusting forward to a lonely and hazardous freedom among the natural and chaotic things of the unmapped earth."

Truly "a wonder among men," he commands his environment by rising superior to it, towering "without hate above the beasts and above savage men" In his freedom from rancor he is superior to Berk Jarvis who for a time loses himself in his hate. Boone's commanding presence seems to Diony the essence of this land; and she feels, as he talks casually to her, "the breadth of the out-reaching land as she had had report of it from one and another, as if it had been there beside her at the gate, as if it had come in the flesh to breathe and smile, to speak to her". He does miraculous feats; for example, he escapes from the Shawnees, when all had thought him lost, in time to help his people at Boonesborough during the Indian and British siege of 1778.

"There were giants in the earth in those days," or so it seems, with Harrod "a big man that never tires, and a heart in him like pure gold" and with Logan "his body made big to hold his big heart". If these men are humble, they are capable of heroic deeds as Logan was when he traveled for a week through the wilderness to secure ammunition for his beleagured fort: "a great man, a giant, a hero, walked out of a half-mythical land, striding down through an unbroken way to get ammunition for his people". Early in the novel the listeners at Five Oaks to Nathan Jones's report of a surveyer's description of Kentucky express as a conjecture what was in fact to happen: "Such a country would breed up a race of heroes, men built and knitted together to endure … a new race for the earth".

Since the purpose of these pioneers was as selfless as it was absorbing, their virtues suggest the transcendent: "their fineness was superior to time and their departure a sure token that they had been but caught in it in ephemeral bondage.…" "The people had not the faith in commerce now prevailing.… They were fundamental, moving among the fundamentals. The substitute is heroic solitude, trees, faith."

Berk and his mother Elvira partake of this heroic mold. Both are large-framed, and both have quiet confidence. The glancing smile which crosses the lips of both mother and son is emblematic of power held in reserve and of a tacitly acknowledged competence. The first time Diony sees Elvira she is impressed by her height, her dignity, and the large "planes" in her face. The two women meet when the Halls play host to a Methodist revival meeting and Elvira comes to help Polly. Symbolically, Diony goes back and forth between her mother and her future mother-in-law, the two women who mean most in her life. At present, she fetches for both of them, but she will later go from her mother and cleave to Elvira. Elvira's moral qualities are exceptional: she takes her place immediately with "the strong women of the fort," and her "superhuman goodness"—in sacrificing herself that she may rescue her pregnant daughter-in-law from the Indian marauders—ends by oppressing Diony. Elvira in her death becomes a legend with the Indians as the "fighting squaw" with strength enough to kill a buffalo.

In his repeated farewells to Diony, Thomas Hall often quotes from the opening lines of the Aeneid, discoursing "of arms and the man," as if to identify Berk Jarvis with the Aeneas who in ancient times, according to legend, founded the new nation of Italy. Thomas Hall thus recognizes that the wilderness will be the scene of feats performed by epic heroes—a land which will see, as he had previously declared, "brave men, a brave race." Before Berk takes Diony to the wilderness, he had done great deeds in fighting the British and the Indians at the Watauga forts on the Holston River. His military exploits have been scarifying rather than exhilarating. Diony feels more keenly identified with Berk and his dangers than does her father who is too willing, she thinks, to philosophize about war and to disregard its cruelties. Berk's ventures give him a remote, abstracted gaze; it is as if the reality he had been through makes all other experience pallid; and he attains, perhaps without realizing it, some of his mother's remoteness from the ordinary.

Just as Desdemona fell in love with Othello, so Diony does with Berk: "she would love him with a rush of passion that almost stilled her heart in its beat, would love him for the dangers he had passed and the cruel images that were pictured on his mind …" Their understanding is perfected on an autumn morning at Albemarle when, under the early sun, frost and mist become a golden cloud to include the lovers and when Berk appears to Diony, as Jupiter did to Danae, in a shower of golden light and falling golden leaves.

On the journey to Kentucky Berk is the epitome of a masculine strength so fundamental as only to be described in sexual terms, "in the thrust, the drive, in action"; and old Bethel, at the frontier clearing, fashions for him a powder horn, which seems to be in part a phallic emblem, an image of his virility. Berk is always the head of the party, strong-limbed, never showing fatigue, his slow elusive smile "outrunning fatigue and despair." In the forward position, pushing always further into the wilderness, he is thus elemental as well as civilized man. In her subordinate place, Diony is elemental as well as civilized woman; her strength is the woman's in a sexual embrace, "lateral, in the plane, enduring, inactive but constant". Utilizing the contrasting strengths of the sexes, Berk and Diony are typical of those who find themselves masters of a new world, "possessing themselves of it by the power of their courage, their order, and their endurance".

They regard the Kentucky frontier as a land of marvels, an earthly paradise, and are fascinated by the prospect of "the great wash of grass and life over the rolling plains, mountains, and valleys of the vast meadow." The stranger whom Berk brings with him to Five Oaks discusses the wonders he has known and fires the imaginations of those who hear him. He is a figure of mystery himself, an aloof and dignified man, but one compelled, like the Ancient Mariner, to repeat to those who will listen the great things he has known. He seems overawed by the strangeness of his experience, he conducts himself with tranquil dignity, and he is so conversant with the elemental realities of nature that civilized ways sit upon him awkwardly: "He weighed each speech with care, making each phrase with pains, as is the way with men who have lived alone and have made decisions without the use of words or speeches". He describes, for example, the bones of mammoths and vast caves, the ghosts of the Alleghwi which frighten the red men away from the region, the fabulous richness of the cane-lands, and the primeval beauty of the woodlands in the region.

Stirred by these reports and by the legend of an ivory-billed woodcock to be found in Kentucky, Berk and Diony exchange looks which mean that they want to go to this land of beauty, "to paradise, so beautiful and good, attaining something beyond themselves." The actuality does not disappoint, although as Miss Roberts said in her journal, it was less a fruition for the pioneers than "the new beginning." The land is rich, animal life is abundant, the woodlands are imposing, the beauty of the land is enthralling, so that Diony is "shaken with delight and wonder," at "the delirium of a fine land, level expanses delicately tilted to fine curves, here and there cane patches of rich fat growth, here and there noble trees". This is truly God's original Eden, or the land of Canaan lying on the other side of the wilderness. That sinful man corrupts a veritable Eden is, however, the all too disquieting truth. White men have debased the Indians, as Diony learns when Blackfox and his companion push at the door of the cabin to get at her and Elvira and utter the vile oaths they have been taught.

II "OVER THE TRACE": STRUCTURE OF THE GREAT MEADOW

The Great Meadow is organized by chronology and spans the years 1774 to 1781, roughly the era of the Revolutionary War which hovers in the background always as a sinister accompaniment to the central drama of reclaiming the wilderness. The war reaches west to the new region and is more savage there since the British arm and lead the Indians, often reluctant to fight, in campaigns against the settlers. The progression of this novel is forward since the actual moment is all-important in the pioneer struggle for survival. There are few flashbacks, for a rigorous life in the present dims even the memory of the past.

The structure of The Great Meadow is firmly balanced among three main masses of material, each comprising three chapters of the novel. The first group of three chapters, covering the years 1774-77, presents Diony's life at Albemarle, her qualities of character, and the personalities of those to whom she reacts and adjusts. Except for Berk's absence at the Watauga forts and his return, there is little direct action. Three years pass, but little transpires that involves Diony's direct participation until she must choose between Berk's pioneer daring and her sister Betty's civilized amenity.

The next three chapters cover the years 1777-78 and describe Diony's journey over the Trace to the Kentucky wilderness and her life at Harrods Fort. This middle section has two centers of interest: the daily lives and adjustments of die pioneers to a primitive existence, and the scalping of Elvira by two predatory Indians. Chapter VI records the struggle between Diony and Berk over his mission of vengeance against the Indians and his abandonment of Diony.

The concluding three chapters treat Diony's life in Kentucky during the years 1778-81, when she is placed on her own after Berk leaves. In Chapter VII (1778-79) Diony concludes that Berk must be dead, for if he were alive his indomitable spirit would not let him stay away from her. With some reluctance but with increasing tenderness she attends to Evan Muir, Berk's friend, and marries him. Her own need for male protection in a wild land and Evan's steadiness and "life-furthering goodness" are, in the end, stronger than her faith in Berk's superhuman powers. Perhaps also that "apathy which comes when the emotions or possibilities of emotion are exhausted" overpowers Diony at this point—apathy which, as Miss Roberts writes in her journal, "surpasses our powers to endure." Chapter VIII (1779-81) is some-what huddled; it covers in short compass two years of Diony's life with Evan Muir in the house which Berk had built for her.

Because Diony's relations with Evan are not fully developed, the scene in Chapter IX when the rival husbands confront each other lacks complete urgency, relevance, and force. Chapter IX begins with Diony's sense of material well-being with Evan; Berk disrupts this harmony by his return after a three-year span of captivity among the Shawnees. Diony's neighbors, the Harmons, suggest the only possible course of action in a new land: the woman will choose the man she will live with. Though this scene has been much admired by Miss Roberts' critics, I agree with Rovit that it is much less effective than other parts of the book. He alleges that the differences between the men are not so clearly drawn in the novel as Miss Roberts had summed them up in her notes: Berk "the forward darting, hazardous spirit"; Muir "domestic, quiet, easily predicted."

But I feel this scene lacks impact for still another reason. Miss Roberts had so well realized Diony's sense of isolation and frustration at Berk's departure, had so consummately analyzed Diony's despair during the night she spends in the hostile forest, and had so completely conveyed the truth that those like Berk who take up the sword in vengeance perish by it, that his reappearance is, to say the least, anticlimactic. There is also something specious in his accounts of his hardships and travels. He has, of course, some of Diony's own sense of the spirit's sanctity when he discloses that the Indians could not have benefited by his "thinking part" if they had killed and eaten him. On his return, however, he is uncomprehending and unremorseful as to the consequences of his desertion of Diony for what was, after all, a fool's errand. If Berk possesses force, he still lacks, after his travels and sufferings, judgment and insight; and there is much to be said for Muir's industry and dependability. The image of Berk is not completely blurred, but his heroism is much less imposing at the end of the novel than it had been on the outward move into the wilderness and in the building of his spacious house. The image of Muir, moreover, is never quite in focus; as a main character he does not become a force until Chapter VII, and his individualizing qualities are not sharply defined even then. The worth of the book depends upon Diony's consistent psychology, a sustained seriousness until this last chapter, and a combination of the clear realism and the stirring poetry that had also been remarkable in The Time of Man.

The chronological method is straightforward rather than devious and indirect; and it records, besides Diony's pilgrimage to the wilderness, the journey of a whole people. Thomas Hall had consented to Diony's going with Berk mainly because the Divine plan, as he perceives it, dictates that "historic man" must give men who have no history the benefits and order of those who do: "Civilized Man is forever spreading more widely over the earth, historic Man bringing such men as have no history to humble themselves and learn their lesson". In such a light, Berk and Diony are archetypal pioneers and explorers. In Miss Roberts' design Diony especially sums up in her personal life the larger experience of the race:

I saw these people coming over the Trace, some of them coming early when there were hundreds of miles of scarcely broken forests to be passed. The drama was brief, but it was full and picturesque. I thought it would be an excellent labor if one might gather all these threads, these elements, into one strand, if one might draw these strains into one person and bring this person over the Trace and through the Gateway in one symbolic journey.

Diony's complex origin in different cultural strands increases her awareness of her unique destiny. She perceives that these inherited tendencies dictate her passion for Berk, causing her to regard him as the person who will help her "move all the past outward now" into the wilderness. It was Miss Roberts' intent, according to her journal, to have Diony perceive the related truth that her own character, woven from different strands, would provide her with her sole resource in a new land. Her parents "found forms into which they fitted themselves—courts, trials, wills, worship, property, family, amenities. But in the wilderness I found nothing of this but what I brought. I found, but look what I found. Simple and elemental life, sensation, danger."

Though Diony lacks the main strength of Berk and Boone, she has a more sophisticated sense of her historic role than they do. Although these men of action set up the framework for civil order, they prize, for the most part, an institutional law, important enough in its place, but less significant than the intuitive harmony men may achieve with one another. Legal justice is a necessity, but more urgent still is the modulation of institutions by the spirit within, with the aim of securing a more flexible, altruistic, ideal kind of polity. One time, making soap in Berk's absence, Diony thinks of justice and pursues the inquiry, ever more deeply, to some diminishing point of knowledge. Before she abandons this inward search, however, she catches sight of "a little harmony which men are able to make with one another or with a few kinds".

This is the ultimate civilizing influence, represented by Diony more than by Berk, by Thomas Hall more than by Boone. Father and daughter espouse an ineffable law that is superior to but comprehends the written law by which the majority of men—including even Berk and Boone, pioneers in the world's work—are governed: "Diony represents ordered life and the processes of the mind, the mind life. She is not of the Boone kind. She feels lost in an indefinite universe. She wants ordered ways. She wants beauty and dignity and ceremony and the reasons of all things." Symbolically both Berk and Diony are needed to conquer a wilderness; Berk's strength in the long run would count for little were it not to be supplemented by Diony's insight and influence, of the "tame" rather than the "wild" sort.

III DIONY'S SYMBOLIC JOURNEY, "MOVING ALWAYS MORE INWARDLY"

Externally, The Great Meadow records events in their actual sequence. In actuality, as we saw in discussing the first three chapters, structure is a matter principally of Diony's consciousness. Or put another way, the true measure for time is internal. For the sensitive individual the great moment is the only significant one, and the psychological impression made by an event is the only lasting one. Because in Chapter IX Diony is so much affected by what happens after Berk's return, it seems that many years, instead of one evening, have passed since she lit the candles before his arrival. If the outer organization of The Great Meadow features the geographical journey of the pioneers in which Diony takes part, the more subtle organization of the novel records Diony's spiritual journey. The inner "line" of the novel is psychological; it is also ethical and philosophical. As in Miss Roberts' other novels, the psychological aspect of The Great Meadow is basic to its rhythm and also provides the groundwork for the development of Diony's moral and speculative ideas.

In a phrase about a minor character—a hunter James Ray, who bravely goes through the Indian lines to get game—Miss Roberts revealed her primary bias in this novel, as in her others. Ray's physique is lank and light, his bones "gracefully notched and fitted together," and at the service of his mind, "the sovereign part of any man". For Diony also the mind is "sovereign" and the mental assimilation of a fact all-important. The "garment of sense" is the outward integument of reality; to get to its core, one must go "within again and yet again, a hushed voice farther within saying some mute word as 'come,' or 'here you will find me.'" So Diony's journey westward becomes an ever more intense realization of the self, a broadening of spiritual perspectives, a deepening of the inner consciousness, a struggle "to isolate the conscious part." For Miss Roberts "Diony is a creature of the mind, moving always more inwardly."

On the journey westward, Diony feels herself restored each morning after the hardships of the day before—"renewed life welling up in her vital part". After the tragedy in which Elvira is killed and Diony is severely wounded, Diony's spirit once again lifts up in affirmation the following spring—at that time the spring winds are "bathing all her flesh with a quick desire for more life and a delight in all that she had". From one point of view, Diony sees the individual as finite, almost insignificant in the cosmic scheme of things: "Men seemed of little account, measured by the breath of a throat which was lightly taken and lightly quenched. Light breath huddled within the stockade, desiring life, but when some sudden crack-of-doom snuffed light out it went without protest". Contrary to this is Diony's more characteristic sense of herself as "eternal, as if all that she did now were of a kind older than kings, older than beliefs and governments". Although nature sometimes seems the only great reality, at other times it is a changeful and fluctuating force; and then the human gives the only fixed principle. In any event the human consciousness interprets and illuminates experience.

Like Miss Roberts' other heroines, Diony has a sensibility so acute as to approach at times the neurasthenic. So intense are her reactions to the world that she seems always at the point of exhaustion, except that her inner resources are endless. Even before she knows that she will go to Kentucky, "her whole body swayed toward the wilderness" in answer to the deepest aspirations of her being. On the actual trip much strain accompanies new vistas as they appear to her and as she projects herself forward into each perspective with a nervous, eager spirit: "She entered each view, thrust forward from within, as if the mind of the Spirit beyond herself were unfolding itself to her continually, as if she went forward eagerly to meet each disclosure".

Her imagination is excessively active when she strains to reach the truth; as a result, one element of her experience, regarded obessively, frequently distorts her total vision, though new discriminations may thereby result. When Berk comes home from the Watauga forts and describes the brutal realities of war, Diony is disturbed almost to the point of hysteria by the fascination of his audience with his tale—an interest that ignores, she senses, some of the grosser aspects of battle:

Thomas was talking now and Diony glanced from mouth to mouth and saw these instruments distorted, mouths become some strange flutes or horns, shaped cunningly to play out war, to cry out battles. Thomas Hall's mouth bent and twisted now as a clattering bugle blowing the science of war, making philosophy out of stories of death.

Mouths were hungry instruments that bent about reports of killed men.

Diony's mind broods, even to morbid excess. When she is convinced of Berk's death, she is unable to accept this knowledge until it has entered deep into her psyche, "her inner part feeding forever on what it lacked".

For Diony, as for the other Roberts' heroines, a charged significance also invests the perceptions of the senses, the ultimate source of our inner knowledge. In Kentucky Diony knows her tools by the kinesthetic impress they have made upon her nerves, "each one intimately sensed at the ends of her fingers and in the lifting parts of her arms and shoulders". Similarly, she feels that, in order to understand another's soul, one must work inward from the individual's outward aspect. Thus Diony feels that, in order to know Berk's spirit, she must know more of him as a person: "A deep wish arose within her on the instant, a wish to know more of the structure of his being, to know all that he remembered and all that he saw as he looked outward, and to touch all with her own knowledge, and to know what it would be to him to go".

In an opposite sense, one's life in the imagination can only be discerned exactly when it is translated into the impression of sense. When Diony at the beginning of the novel thinks of herself as living in cultured ease in the Tidewater, she realizes the experience only after she imagines herself at the spinet as "the tunes tingled in her arms and in her shoulders, wanting an outlet by way of her hands …" The re-creation of emotional experience is also incisive. When Berk is fitting a new handle to his knife and fashioning his axe for the journey of revenge, Diony gives in to fear, to helplessness, and to a sense of the irrationality of what is taking place; she feels with startling effect "a sudden chill spread through her to stiffen her bones and put minute bristling fine hairs of pain over her skin".

Diony's mind tends to express emotional and intellectual experience in terms of sense impressions. The Roberts heroines are all of them, in essence, poets. The image, as in poetry, often exerts a spell in Miss Roberts' books that the abstract idea or the naked emotion would lack. Accordingly, the Revolutionary War becomes a reality to Diony only when she pictures it as a great bird overspreading the land, with one wing representing the eastern battlefields and the other the frontier skirmishes. This same image of a gigantic fowl with outstretched wings sums up for Diony the opposition expressed at Five Oaks to her going with Berk after Thomas Hall gives his consent: one wing represents the silent Sallie Tolliver, whose frontier life has been traumatic; the other, Betty, who rejects the wilderness as something too stark for her comprehension.

Diony's pilgrimage to the West results not only in her psychological enlargement but in her moral development. The journey to the wilderness tests her spirit, and she is adequate to most crises though she often feels unequal to some of the other women. She is not one of those who hang back, however, from going past the Wall to the wilderness road beyond. Through Elvira's death Diony grows to her greatest stature; the dying woman, as it were, transferred her own great strength to her.

The difficulties the individual encounters in attaining command over nature and the self are all the more terrifying for being subjectively felt. The struggle for survival is acute. To the terror and loneliness and weariness of the long passage other hardships succeed which further test the strength of the pioneers. Children cry for milk in the winter of 1777-78, when little food of any kind exists; in the second year clothing becomes rags, and nothing is available to weave new cloth from. Even animal skins for moccasins are lacking so that Diony's feet are continually bare. Certain external aspects of "the promise land" reflect the hard struggles of human beings to survive. When Berk describes the Lick where the rock has been worn thin by the tongues of animals through centuries and where the bones of the slain animals lie strewn about, Diony immediately envisions herself crushing the innumerable skulls underfoot as she walks there. The skulls are not only a sign of nature's profuseness but of the failure of innumerable animals to survive in a cruel struggle for existence. Diony's scattering the remains with her feet is, in essence, as casual as nature's attitude toward the fate of her creatures.

Not only beasts but men must struggle for survival as hostile forces continually close in upon the stockade from without. The Indians commanded by British officers besiege all the forts except Harrods, skirmishes with the Indians are routine, the much-prized cane becomes a place of ambush for the red men, and even a man of peace like Muir cries out in his sleep when the memories of war leap up from deep within. The menace to security is greatest during the fall season when life in the wilderness is outwardly the most peaceful and beautiful. The autumn of 1778 had been, however, a time of drought; and a smokelike haze had hung over the wilderness as if "the known world" were smoldering away, to be followed by a new mode of life, suitable for only the hardiest of the settlers: "A new way of being was required to meet the burnt-out lifeless hills".

Miss Roberts uses the vivid image, often at widely separated points in the novel, to express the harshness of frontier existence. The references to wolves sum up the savagery the pioneers must withstand and conquer. Hearing them the first night of her marriage, Diony knows her way would be "toward the way of the wolves"; and she only feels secure from the "danger and blood-hunger and hate" which they signify when she nestles close to Berk. Berk, to qualify as leader, must have animal shrewdness and cunning; sometimes he actually seems vulpine in aspect: "lean as the wolf—man assuming the wolf to overcome the wolf. Wolves cry in the distance by Elvira's grave when Diony has her vision of a civilized future for Kentucky, and their cries add to her terror the night she is locked out from the fort and spends the time in the forest.

Similarly, the supposed owl cries (in reality, two Indians signalling one another) reveal all that is sinister, ominous, and mysterious about the wilderness. They awaken Diony at the pass before the Great Wall; and she hears them again when she is locked out of the fort. The Tory Tree with the three swaying bodies which Muir had seen in the spring of 1777, the scalps triumphantly hanging over the Watauga forts as mementos of the bloody fights of the year before, Elvira's scalp with its one silver lock which becomes Blackfox's prize, the three scalps which Berk sends home to Diony and which she hangs over the fire-board, and the burning of these scalps as a sign of the uselessness of Berk's errand when Diony accounts him lost—all keep before us the nearness of death in the everyday life of these people. Over the forest, when Berk's absence is prolonged, there is for Diony no star of hope, but "a great star … , a bright token of loneliness and cold and danger" to convey the actualities of pioneer life.

The wall image is used at many points in the novel to indicate the great obstacles which the pioneers must surmount in their journey westward and as a sign of these obstacles overcome by their courage, resourcefulness, and strength. The great cliff Wall to the West, barring the entrance to Kentucky, is present early in the novel when the stranger mentions it. As Diony and the pioneers go forward, the Wall stands up in front of them, "a wonder to dread"; it makes "the heart leap and lie down still in the breast", inspiring awe and dread at the same time. The cliffs become an overhanging presence, causing night to come quickly and bringing out the travelers' latent fears and insecurity: "Hardness settled over the camp, hate and despair and fright".

Whereas the rock wall signifies that the wilderness keeps people at a distance, other types of wall keep the encroaching forest out of settled areas. The high stockade walls provide a barricade against the wilderness, and viewed from outside, they seem "unyielding and secure." Powerful as they are, their strength is of little moment compared to the power of what lies outside. This Diony realizes on the night she spends in the forest thinking of Berk's undoubted death: "The stockade stood, straight and stark, as of little account in the night, but shut within itself, involuted to secure its way of being from what lay outside". After her marriage to Evan, Diony is glad to be living in the house which Berk built with its high protective walls, and she is relieved to be free from the boundaries of the stockade. The sides of the house are equal to the pressures placed upon them by the wall of trees behind, the van-guard of the wilderness which stretches beyond the cleared farm.

The most significant sign of Diony's increased maturity in Kentucky, as she analyzes her own mind, is a greater understanding of her father's thought. So the inner journey in the novel is not only psychological and moral but philosophical and spiritual as well; it is a journey toward the realization of "grand thoughts … from some power beyond the world". Without the enlargement of her perspectives which then takes place, she would not have been able to bring her experiences into relation with what she gleaned from her father's books. She had learned that, until they are perceived by the mind, objects do not properly exist: "For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence, out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them." Mind, at both the human and divine levels, is creative. We as human beings create by actually perceiving and thinking.

Thus as new scenes unroll to Diony's view on the way westward, she in essence creates that toward which she rides; a new world comes into existence for her gradually, "like mist taking shape." The eternal spirit, "the great Mover and Author of Nature," creates also by an active process, by bringing to actuality what has been latent within its vast body, where "all unimagined and unwilled and unremembered acts" or objects reside until someone calls them into being. The wilderness is a kind of vast repository of unknown experience—unknown because it has not been experienced by the receptive and sensitive mind; known only as yet to "the Great Author of Nature." By going to the wilderness one may come at some aspects of the Divine Mind he could not find else-where. Partly, this is why Diony is fascinated with the West and why Thomas lets her go with Berk.

Diony's metaphysical desire to make a world out of chaos also finds actual expression in her westward journey. In Thomas Hall's philosophy the tendency of Creation is toward order, "the eternal aptitude of matter [revealing] the wholesomeness of the necessities inherent in things". Like the Great Author of Nature, Diony would also evolve pattern from disorder; she learns from her father that "the kept law" is greater than "the deflected law"; she sees in Berk and Boone—and herself—"the power of reason over the wild life of the earth" and she feels that with war's end, discord has lessened and that a new, more disciplined age is about to come into being.

Diony finds the irresistible connection between the outer and inner worlds by subjecting the most imposing outer reality—nature—to the workings of her mind. She had, in fact, learned from her father that the Author of Nature both speaks through men and reveals himself to them in their perceptions of the universe: "Men … were the mouths of the earth, and through them the earth spoke in general; but a man, in the particular instance, might understand and interpret and might see the signs put forth by the Author and Designer to reveal what lay under the outer show of properties and kinds". Diony, as one such sensitive individual, is in deep accord with the wonders she finds in the new world; an example is her vibrant reaction to the beauty of spring in the wilderness, when Berk comes back from salt-making to find his newborn son.

Nature is almost lavish in her bounty to the pioneers, flaunting for them the resources of a rich land. Diony is impressed by the bounty of nature and by the possibilities of the future here; the land seems fair to her as she contemplates it from the stockade walls. The men are making homes and security is coming to the wilderness; so Diony's vision of farms with stone walls and rail fences and lush crops is partly realized by the end of the novel. The flourishing corn, described in sexual terms, symbolically defines the great fertility of the land. The identification of the settlers with the growing plants as representing their own flesh "held in abeyance" is a notable example of Miss Roberts' habitual uniting in her fiction of the psychological with the concrete:

There were delicate shoots at the side of the stalk growing out of the sappy stem, the female element having come now, taking form on the surface of the everlasting mother, the corn itself. Within the sheath were the delicate beginnings of husks, as yet pale and green and tender, scarcely unlike the buds prepared to hold the pollen above on the top of the strand. Within the pale, tender, female husks would flow the fine white milk of the corn which would congeal to be their food.

There is division from, as well as identity with, the land. When Diony is convinced that Berk is dead, she has her dark night of the soul at a time when "the new life in the earth leaped and quivered with the throbbing leaves and the swaying herbs". This is also a season of death as of promise: "The night was full of spring and death, birth coming forth by compulsion to meet death on the way". Ordinarily receptive to nature's beauty and bounty, Diony is oppressed now by a sense of the impersonal, incessant energies in nature, which operate according to law but to a law rigorous and often inexplicable. She does not reject her Berkeleyan idealism, but she has doubts as to the beneficence of Nature's great Author. For a time, she loses her accustomed sense of rapport with the power behind nature and feels herself alone in the world, as she is now physically alone in the wilderness with her boy Tom:

She continually remembered on her side that the whole mighty frame of the world had no being without a mind to know it, but over this lay another way of knowing, and she saw clearly how little she could comprehend of those powers on the other side, beyond the growth of the herbs and the trees, and to sense the hostility of the forest life to her life, and to feel herself as a minute point, conscious, in a world that derived its being from some other sort. The indefiniteness of the outside earth, beyond herself, became a terror.

Her abstract fears are given concrete form in the sequence which follows when she awakes in terror and senses the promiscuous life surrounding her in the forest. Diony's sense of pattern and order return when she hurries back to the fort, but she knows, more certainly than before, that chaos lies at the outer fringes of civilization to undermine it upon slight provocation.

Nature is not the only means through which Miss Roberts bridges the inner and outer worlds. She also makes use of a cluster of images based upon weaving and spinning. Throughout the novel, clothmaking is symbolic of the civilized crafts through which the pioneers make an ordered life in the wilderness. The degree to which, on the outside, the land is mastered is to be measured by the progress of clothmaking within the home. The footmantle, woven at Albemarle by Polly and Diony Hall, stands for the arts of civilization; and it survives hard usages which take the lives of some settlers. Order finally comes to Harrods Fort when, after abortive attempts at clothmaking through the use of buffalo wool and of fibers from nettles, flax is cultivated, Elvira's wheel is put to use, and sheep become a part of the pioneer farm.

The weaving of cloth not only measures the visible progress of civilization; the process is also used metaphorically to describe Diony's efforts to reach spiritual reality. As Rovit says, weaving in Miss Roberts' work connotes the expansive aspects of the experiential process itself. The intricate manipulating of the threads and the emergence of a design represent for Diony her incremental endeavors to possess a continually elusive truth. In fact, her mental responses to external stimuli parallel the process of the textile craft: her thought rides on the currents set in motion by the rhythms of weaving, and the news that Berk will some day go to Kentucky (she is spinning while his brother Jack delivers a message from him) "spread outward through the threads of her nerves to the last fine web of sense".

Characteristically while she works, words like "I Diony," where-by she affirms the reality of her being, are interwoven into the threads as she forms her web, and the finished web becomes part of an attained inner harmony. The recurrent rhythms when she is spinning wool cause her also to think of her father's volumes of Berkeley and their meaningful phrases. The words and the wool are merged to form a composite fabric in her mind. All this is prelude to a still more arresting revelation. Spinning flax in Betty's company, Diony has a profound sense of spiritual illumination when, after thinking of her father's books, she holds with firmness for a moment "the inner thought, the inmost realization" and then falls into a dreaming trance, "her senses a web of unknowing fibers that reached into and among the fibers of flax".

Considering, then, the extent to which Miss Roberts brings in the psychological and the metaphysical, we might be justified in viewing The Great Meadow as only incidentally an historical novel. That history serves mainly as setting for the drama of the inner life Miss Roberts herself acknowledged. While she respected factual accuracy, she also intended to use "as little history as I required to make my motive run. But I have been obliged to keep much in mind to fit these fictitious happenings between authentic reports in a life-like way."