In the beginning Miss Roberts was a poet, and a number of years ago Mr Huebsch published for her an admirable book of rhymed verses called Under the Tree. It is not merely a collection but a slight cycle exquisitely arranged—one little girl speaking in the first person from beginning to end. One might almost think it primarily intended for children; in any case, it is more like a lyric Alice in Wonderland than like A Child's Garden of Verses, containing neither any sentiments of a grown person wistfully regretting his childhood nor any morally uplifting couplets. The versification, founded throughout upon the cadences of a child's voice "speaking a piece," is graceful though monotonous. Every line has its delightful rhetorical trick; every stanza has been composed with a poet's thoroughness, even in affectation. But Miss Roberts' purpose seems to have been less to put the reader under a spell or a series of spells—the poet's purpose—than to inform him about matters too spiritual to be dealt with in plainer phrases. Conceits about nature and what are called "pathetic fallacies" serve to make clear, in miniature, mystical ideas. The delicately comical people about whom the little girl protagonist in pigtails talks to us do indeed suggest, now a sabbath of a child's witches, now a ring of rural angels; but they touch our emotions only as comical people. Roughly speaking, philosophy and character are the subjects of fiction; and in Under the Tree the powerful novelist which Miss Roberts has now shown herself to be was scarcely concealed by the accomplished poet she was then.

The Time of Man is the biography of a woman from childhood until her children begin to repeat her story. Ellen Chesser is the daughter and finally the mother of one of those families in Kentucky bred for centuries for bad luck, wandering poor-whites as unpleasantly impressive as the Wandering Jew. Through the eyes of the strange girl one sees the least leaf and mist and sparkle of a countryside which is crowded with the strangest men, women, and children, and birds and animals:

"That's Judge Gowan," she whispered. "And when he died there was marchen and white plumes on hats.… And when he was a-liven he used to ride up to town in a high buggy with a big shiny horse, a-steppen up the road and him a-sitten big, and always had a plenty to eat and a suit of clothes to wear and a nigger to shine his shoes for him of a weekday even.… He's Judge Gowan in court, a-sitten big, but I'm better'n he is. I'm aliven and he's dead. I'm better. And bells a-ringen and banners go by and people with things in pokes to sell and apples a-rollen out on the ground and butter in buckets and lard to sell and pumpkins in a wagon, and sheep a-cryen and the calves acryen for their mammies and little mules a-cryen for their mammies, and a big man comes to the courthouse door and sings out the loudest of all: O yes! O yes! The honorable judge James Bartholomew Gowan (It must 'a been) is now asitten.…"

Ellen Chesser leads a life of imaginary dignity, with the heartbreaking credo of all men and women who die a little every day until the day of their death: "I'm lovely now. It's unknowen how lovely I am. I saw some mountains standen up in a dream, a dream that went down Tennessee." A life of filth: "A quick memory of Screw, of the time he caught her behind a wagon and hugged her close.… Whiskey smells came out of him, and man smells, sweat and dirt, different from woman dirt." A life of exquisite craving: "In their kiss the froth of the high tide of summer arose and frayed. It was as if they sang a comehither-come-hither to all the summer and all the countryside." There is a suicide by hanging; there is a witch; there is a lynching with whips, when Ellen stands in her night-gown in the mud and curses the men who are lashing her husband, her husband adulterous at last. A life of hard labour and fecundity.…

So far as I can remember, no book written in English since the war gives rise to so troubling a sense of reality, miserable and adorable reality—which is hideous without being ugly, like a fine animal that has just killed someone and will do it again, which is elegant in its unhurried moderation, which is profoundly instructive but not to be theorized about, which is adorable only because it is always victorious. It makes me think of those "triumphs" of the Caesars—not their successful battles, but the processions when they got back to Rome, in which the rulers, the resources, the customs, the fruits, and the animals of a vanquished kingdom were displayed or represented in simulacrum. In it, reality is Caesar. Therefore, of course, it is a tragic work.

Many modern realists whimper, though their readers must have suffered as well as they, or demand justice, though there is, on earth at least, no judge. Miss Roberts reminds us that even the author who seems to undertake nothing but a report of experiences not his own should be asked to bring to his task a certain personal nobility. For all her lovely or painful material would have been spoiled by the least pusillanimity, and the least vulgarity of over-emphasis would have made a gross and nightmarish book. So much for character; the rest is art—artfulness, artistry, artifice.

By some mysterious transposition or distillation of poor-white speech, Miss Roberts has created one of the most remarkable dialects in literature—as remarkable as Synge's and as appropriate to the slowly flowing chronicle-novel as his was to the rowdy theatre—which gives a fantastic veracity to the conversations and, penetrating the body of the text, colours or perfumes or accompanies with monotonous and peculiar folk-music, the entire story. This prose is suave and supple even when very violent things are taking place. One is drawn on from page to page less by the anxiety of suspense or by variety of interest than by enchantment, by sheer sober pleasure—as if it were an idyll. Daphnis and Chloe in Kentucky, and in distress.… Only when one lifts one's eyes from the Kentucky of the book to the actual world full of the same pain, does one realize that there has been printed on every page a most desperate and unforgiving cry.