A reader of any novel by Elizabeth Madox Roberts is certain sooner or later to remark the presence of a style. Her style, say those who do not like it, is more than present; it is obtrusive. But even those who like it very much have it uppermost in their minds as they proceed, and when they have finished it is the language, or the way of writing, which they are most likely to mention in favor of the artist they have discovered. The Time of Man struck attention largely because of the novelty of its accent. It had other qualities, of course, since it is impossible for a piece of fiction to go far without substance of some sort. But it had an individual voice; and it is this voice which is the most interesting thing about Miss Roberts.

It is truly interesting, indeed, only because it expresses a character in the speaker. There is probably no such thing as a voice which is "beautiful" in itself; our perception of its beauty is a perception of something human behind it. So with styles, which are merely tiresome when they do not reveal a mental or moral character of greater or less distinction. The style of Miss Roberts is worth discussing because it in itself is a sort of substance. It is more than a way of saying things; it is something said, something which would not otherwise have been said at all, something, we suspect, which could not be said unless it were said in this way. So an interesting person is a person who not merely does things interestingly; his doing them is almost the most interesting thing about him.

The clearest feature of Miss Roberts's style is, strangely enough, its monotony. Her books murmur. And there are those who do not like this. They say she puts them to sleep, that she sends out a cloud through which they walk with groping difficulty, that they find themselves reading on, page after page, with very little notion of what is happening or being said. They complain of a lack of emphasis, a failure ever to be quite sharp or plain enough. They admit that it is all very skillful and nice; but they deny that it gets them anywhere, and they assert that after the book is closed they remember only that it was well written: not what the story was, or what the persons were named, or what they did. To show what they mean they might open The Time of Man at almost any page and read:

When he was gone she went into the house, moving dreamily through the moonlit rooms. To marry and go away, the idea came into her mind slowly, spreading unevenly through her sense of the half-lit kitchen and her own room which was bright with a square of white light on the floor. She fell asleep with no formed wish in her mind and no decision, but when Nellie called her out of sleep soon after dawn, while she dressed quickly in the faded blue garment, she heard a catbird singing clear fine phrases on a post near her window, clear phrases that were high and thin, decisive and final, and she knew at the instant that she would marry Jasper and go with him wherever he went, and her happiness made a mist that floated about her body as she carried the feedings to the hogs and opened the chicken boxes.

The lack of emphasis, of course, is deliberate. Not only do these sentences flow into one another with a studied sweetness; they make an endeavor at the same time to conceal the importance of the things they are saying. Imbedded in the third sentence, for instance, is the crucial clause of the entire novel: the clause conveying the information that Ellen, the heroine, has decided to marry Jasper, the hero. But it hides there, it almost defies the reader to note its significance. And a reader whose attention has been lulled by the pages that have gone before is indeed very likely to miss this significance. He is likely to say to himself: This is a paragraph which the author for some reason or other has seen fit to fill with pleasant little details; I shall skim through it and get the general impression she wants me to have. The decision to marry Jasper seems to the outer ear no more important than the color of Ellen's dress, or the patch of white light on the floor, or the necessity of going out to feed the hogs. And over all runs the ripple of a style which has not modified its pace in more than two hundred pages.

A reading of the second novel, however, My Heart and My Flesh, will accustom one to this quality; and a reading of Jingling in the Wind, The Great Meadow, and A Buried Treasure will bring one to the realization that it is a necessary quality in anything Miss Roberts would write. Or at any rate to the realization that it is involuntarily achieved. For Miss Roberts's work is very much of a piece. Every page of it has been strained through the same mind. And her mind is her character.

She has been called philosophical, even metaphysical. And there is no question that she is somehow disposed in the direction of philosophy. But "metaphysical" is hardly the word. I should call her an epistemologist, because there is no other word which will precisely describe the habits of her mind or fully account for her style. An epistemologist is less interested in what we know than in how we know it, if we do. The "i f is usually a big word with him. The epistemologist is likely to be a skeptic also. Not that he doubts the truth of this or that; he simply doubts its knowability. In his most familiar form he is one who challenges us to prove that the mind within the body has any satisfactory way of being certain that anything besides itself exists. Objects are phantoms; truths are impressions; and the perceiving brain may be only a machine that plays with itself, pretending that it perceives.

My conception of Miss Roberts—not necessarily of the woman herself, but of the novelist within her—is that she finds very fascinating the game of observing, comparing, criticizing, measuring, explaining, and doubting her impressions of the external world. The world for her is not the simple thing, with hard outlines and knowable surfaces, which it is for the average person, the average reader. It exists somehow at a series of removes from her, so that she must make an effort to reach it and see or feel it. She has that most curious equipment for a novelist, a doubt that the world exists. Or if she does not really doubt this, she finds the world composed on a fluid principle, so that objects melt and flow into each other even while they are being experienced. Every thing, every person, is perceived and understood with difficulty, as through a veil. And this veil, furthermore, is of such a weave that it has the special property of rendering the sounds and sights which come through it strangely uniform in pitch and vividness. No sound is louder than any other; no outline is clearer than its neighbor. It is a beautiful world behind that screen, since it is a world imagined in the mind; but it is relatively dim.

This might easily account for the monotony in Miss Roberts's pages. They murmur in the same way that the world they deal with does, and they pass in the same way a procession of ghostly images. Not that the writing itself, if examined word by word, is anything but precise. But the impression of the whole is not precise. Who is more eager to be definite than the groper after something which he fears is not there? And who is less able to be vivid than he who never can be quite convinced?

Miss Roberts cannot be really interested in a character who is unlike herself. So we find her heroes and heroines epistemologists too. They are deeply involved in the problem of knowledge, inveterately concerned with their personal mental processes. It is not without significance, surely, that the heroine of The Great Meadow, Diony Hall, grows up in the shadow of a father who reads aloud to her from Bishop Berkeley.

Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, namely, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies that compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any substance without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known … , that, consequently, as long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit.

This is Diony's Bible; these are the words which control her every movement throughout the book, and for the simple reason that they fit her. She has always been concerned with the problem of her own identity. The novel begins:

1774, and Diony, in the spring, hearing Sam, her brother, scratching at a tune on the fiddle, hearing him break a song over the taut wires and fling out with his voice to supply all that the tune lacked, placed herself momentarily in life, calling mentally her name, Diony Hall. "I, Diony Hall," her thought said, gathering herself close, subtracting herself from the diffused life of the house that closed about her.

"Her thought said." A characteristic phrase, not only for Diony Hall but for her creator, who has made her so perfectly in her own image. The Great Meadow is only superficially about the settlement of Kentucky and the marriage of Diony to Berk, and later on the necessity Diony is under of choosing between the two husbands she finds she has: Muir and the Berk who has returned from Indian captivity. It is really about the thoughts which Diony has. Her decisions are intellectual. The dark and bloody ground into which she goes with Berk is dramatic ground for her because her entry into it is an entry into a world which hitherto has not existed for her because she has not been able to perceive it. Away from it she has not been able to experience it because it has not been part of herself. Yet there is the desire to experience it. "Her whole body swayed toward the wilderness, toward some further part of the world which was not yet known or sensed in any human mind, swayed outward toward whatever was kept apart in some eternal repository, so that she leaped within to meet this force halfway and share with it entirely." When she arrives there and begins her life of hardship she is not like the other women of the settlement. She is introspective; she is always learning the new world; she is forever thinking about it and watching the way it comes into her mind. Her reason for admiring Daniel Boone is a reason which no other woman could have understood: no woman, shall we say, except Miss Roberts. The simple fact about Boone was that he was never lost. No part of this world was strange to him; anything seen became at once, and without any effort, a part of himself; or if it did not he was not worried. "It's curious," she said to herself. "I'm not the Boone kind. I never was.… I'd be more at home somewheres else.… I don't know where.…"

Of course such a person is never at home anywhere. If effort is necessary before this consummation can be reached, then it can never be reached at all. Much thinking and feeling may enrich the person within; they will never, however, bring the outside world any closer—rather, perhaps, they will thicken the wall between. Miss Roberts's best people are on the other side of a thick wall which shuts them away from the things most people see satisfactorily and simply. Her heroines, for instance, lack that directness of attack which makes for success in encounters with men. Ellen in The Time of Man, Theodosia Bell in My Heart and My Flesh, and even the simple-minded Philly of A Buried Treasure can do nothing save stand back and watch certain women of the world throw nets around their husbands and lovers. They themselves have not the art, for they have not that knowledge of the world which would tell them that there is no such art. Speaking to themselves while the conquest goes on, they say strained, melodramatic things about their successful rivals—flatter them by attributing powers to them which perhaps no person ever had. As for themselves, they can only wait and hope that their men will return to them. Hoping may bring them and it may not; sometimes, as a matter of fact, it does. But this is only one of those accidents of life which are intended not to be understood. It has nothing to do with the laws of the mind.

Diony and Ellen have this characteristic in common, namely, that they require a great deal of time to absorb and so after their fashion understand the universe about them. This is why the novels in which they appear move slowly, as if through a viscous atmosphere, a resisting current of life. This universe of course does not exist for them until they see it. But even then it comes only gradually into being, like mist taking shape. Meanwhile they feel the face of life as a blind person feels surfaces which he wants not only to identify but to penetrate and remember; feeling this face monotonously, stroking it over and over with a fine, silent solemnity, and, although coming upon many things there, coming never with sudden discovery upon the One Thing, whatever it is. Ellen has met a strange woman on the road several times, and has talked with her. But she does not know her yet. "The woman had been seen now a half-dozen times and had become a mass of characteristic motions and friendly staring eyes. Ellen longed to fix her into a thought, to know what she would say now that she knew how she would look saying it." Such a mind does not make swift headway in the world. Yet it is capable of intense experiences, once it can experience anything at all; and so the second half of The Time of Man is powerfully charged with emotion—though the reader and Miss Roberts are the only ones who are conscious of the fact. To her husband and children and to all her neighbors Ellen remains to the end an incommunicable mystery.

Philly, feeling with her fingers in A Buried Treasure for the little sack of pearls which Andy has secreted under his clothing, might be taken as a symbol of all the searching which goes on in Miss Roberts's books.

In the night Philly fingered again for the sack of pearls, wanting comfort. Her hand went lightly to Andy's side and moved up and down over his hip to find the little tape that would lead to the small treasure. She thought that she must have fallen asleep in the search, for her hand had found nothing. Then she stirred lightly to assure herself that she was awake, and she set upon the task more carefully.… . When she was still and light again she went swiftly over the whole of Andy's middle, over his trunk and legs, but there was no tape and no little sack of pearls. She felt then at his neck and his breast, his arms and his ankles, but there was nothing.

Even in other respects Andy has his mysteries for Philly. There could scarcely be a simpler man in all fiction, yet his wife finds herself admitting that "when he said nothing there was a curious thing, as if it would be a mystery about him or near him." She might have remembered a neighbor woman saying earlier in the book:

Sometimes you hardly seem acquainted with the man you're married to twenty years, and all the time you know every thought inside his head and every act his body can do or is likely ever to do. And there he is, strange. So strange you wonder sometimes if it's a man or a horse or a hay-baler or what kind anyway you're wedded with all your life.

The humor in that last sentence is a reminder of qualities which Miss Roberts richly has in addition to the one quality which has so far been spoken of. Her language, it should be said at once, is in itself a thing of perpetual delight, tart with wit as well as languorous with longing for certitude. It is the mixture of these elements in it that accounts for its pre-eminence over the language of other southern novelists today who try perhaps to do the same thing Miss Roberts is doing. They fail because they lack her complexity of mind—which, after everything else is said, is the thing we come back to when we are explaining the excellence of a novelist or artist of any kind. Her language is the language of her own mind; and so is everything in her novels typical of her own character.

Jingling in the Wind will be puzzling, for instance, to one who expects it to be a satire on contemporary civilization such as anyone else would write. It is the satire that Miss Roberts alone would write: fantastic yet shrewd, fragile yet funny, stylized yet recognizable. And even its hero, by the way, is in the habit of watching his mind. "As he sang," we hear of Jeremy the rain-maker, "he ruminated. It was often his custom and his very great pleasure to arrange his thoughts, or some of them, in decent and orderly periods." So My Heart and My Flesh can be contrasted with any of those novels in which another southerner, William Faulkner, has dealt with the decay of his section. The difference between Mr. Faulkner as a Mississippian and Miss Roberts as a Kentuckian is not the chief difference between them; there is the larger difference which results in the fact that the horrors of My Heart and My Flesh take their due place, and only their due place, in the procession of Theodosia Bell's thoughts. They are not painful because they are shrouded in intellect; they arrive through layer upon layer of impression.

It is of course not surprising that the chief personage in He Sent Forth a Raven should be represented as confined to his house and condemned to know the rest of life by hearsay. Stoner Drake, vowing at his wife's death never to set foot on the green earth again, keeps his vow; and keeps it under the handicaps which Miss Roberts would of course set up. For the women, Martha and Jocelle, through whom Drake sees and hears the world are anything but a transparent medium. When Jocelle was a little girl "a faint haze of things known and unknown spread around her. Those things which she could never bring together into a pattern of thought were left unrelated, floating in a fog." Well, Miss Roberts brings her up that way, too; and so all goes on as it should go on, through mists and veils.

Yet here an attempt is made to record the large, the indubitably solid world. This time it is the world of the great war, and it comes to the fine ears of Miss Roberts's people with such a ruthless crash of sound that the recording instrument can scarcely endure the strain. It is as if lightning had struck some child's receiving set. Miss Roberts's only resort, in the absence of any ability to indicate the sheer volume of this catastrophe, is to set her people talking wildly; not loudly, but wildly. A mad chorus of three men—Drake himself, the carpenter Dickon, and the preacher Briggs—philosophizes and mythologizes in broken sentences of weird power while Martha plays Cassandra in an upstairs chamber. The novel all but goes to pieces in the eloquence of these men, as it had gone to pieces, incidentally, for Martha in her prime; when the hearing of too much from Stoner Drake had rendered her deaf. It seems a question, therefore, whether Miss Roberts should attempt such subjects as world wars, since they obviously are too much for her. Yet the answer is not easy. Perhaps she should. For in making the attempt, and failing, she reminds us of her own best work and of how well it is done; and she does after all say something about the world we live in, if it is only that the truth concerning it cannot possibly be spoken.