[In the following essay, Manning argues that the “southernness” of Byrd's prose in his History of the Dividing Line is deliberate and self-conscious.]

The inception of American regionalism is routinely identified by scholars in either Robert Beverley or William Byrd II, both native Virginians who wrote intensely local works (The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705; The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728) which are amongst the enduring literary products of colonial America. The regional base of both works is immediately apparent in their subjects and setting; but to stop here is to leave critical questions unanswered, questions which have in recent years begun to be addressed by ethnographers and historians such as David Bertelson, Michael Zuckerman and Kenneth Lockridge.¹ In particular, Lockridge's study, meshing biography, history and social psychology, has proposed an illuminating “reconstruction of Byrd's personality” from his writings, an account which stresses Byrd's cultural predicament as a provincial Virginian who strove to be an English gentleman.² My purpose in this paper is not to challenge such an interpretation, nor to propose an alternative historical viewpoint, but rather to add the perspective of literary criticism to our reading of Byrd's prose itself. I shall argue that the “southernness” of Byrd's writing is a characteristic less of his subject matter—his Virginian material—or of his biographical limitations, than of his style, and that the History of the Dividing Line charts enduring preoccupations of Byrd's writing career which reached perfectly self-conscious apotheosis in this, his most carefully composed and corrected work. Like every colonial American writer in the eighteenth century, Byrd's literary models were European at the point when his concerns were beginning to separate themselves from those of Europe. More of a cosmopolite than many, he was also a meticulous, witty stylist; it is in his choice of model and the use he made of them that we may begin to define his particular qualities as a “southern” writer. The imaginative transformation of current eighteenth-century debates amounts in Byrd's writing to a strong regional self-definition fifty years before the Declaration of Independence.

Byrd's prose leaps into a focus distinct from that of contemporary New England writing partly by virtue of what it adopts from contemporary British debate (what I shall call the “Addisonian” strand of Southern culture), but more particularly in the tolerant breadth of consciousness which plays over these concerns—and here the voice of Montaigne makes itself crucially felt in Byrd's writing. The story of “Montaigne in the South” has not, as far as I know, yet been told; but it will be an interesting and perhaps significant one in terms of American regionalism. The Essays of Montaigne provided a Renaissance model of civility which was, by and large, not available to New England writers, for reasons which are not my subject here. My reading of Byrd may be regarded as tentative notes towards the literary definition of “Southernness,” by way of Montaigne.³

One of the first Essays in Montaigne's collection is a meditation on the activities of a mind in retirement, “On Idlenesse:”

As we see some idle-fallow grounds, if they be fat and fertile, to bring forth store and sundry rootes of wilde & unprofitable weedes, & that to keep them in ure we must subject and imploy them with certaine seedes for our use and service. And as wee see some women, though single and alone, often to bring forth lumps of shapelesse flesh, whereas to produce a perfect and naturall generation, they must be manured with another kinde of seed: So is it of minds, which except they be busied about some subject, that may bridle and keepe them under, they will here and there wildely scatter themselves through the vaste field of imaginations … It is not long since I retired my selfe unto mine owne house, with full purpose, as much as lay in me, not to trouble my selfe with any businesse, but solitarily and quietly to weare out the remainder of my well-nigh-spent life; where me-thought I could doe my spirite no greater favour, then to give him the full scope of idlenesse, and entertaine him as he best pleased, and withall, to settle him-selfe as he best liked: which I hoped he might now, being by time become more setled and ripe, accomplish very easily: but I finde,

Variam semper dant otia mentem.
Evermore idlenesse
Doth wavering mindes addresse.

That contrariwise playing the skittish and loose-broken jade, he takes a hundred times more cariere and libertie unto himselfe, then he did for others, and begets in me so many extravagant Chimeraes, and fantasticall monsters, so orderlesse, and without any reason, one hudling upon another, that at-leasure to view the foolishnesse and monstrous strangenesse of them, I have begun to keepe a register of them, hoping, if I live, one day to make him ashamed, and blush at himselfe.⁴

This tone of self-tolerant civility could be accommodated in Southern writing as it never was in that of New England; but in historical terms only briefly—the period in which the “Southern Gentleman” has particular interest in literary terms, rather than (as subsequently became the case) as a sociological and psychological concept defended by special interests.⁵

William Byrd II was a native Virginian who divided his seventy-year span almost exactly between America and England. Successful businessman, indefatigable expansionist in land and innovator in farming, gardening and mining technologies, he inherited a small plantation from his father William Byrd I, and systematically improved it to nearly 180,000 acres. He designed and built Westover, a house whose 3,600-volume library was perhaps the finest in the Colonies for its range and breadth of interest. Its wealth included three sets of Montaigne's Essays (one in French and two in English) and multiple copies of the works of Addison. A member of the Royal Society from the age of 22, Byrd corresponded with fellow members over specimens of scientific interest, and published a monograph on the plague. He was an indefatigable student of medicine and a lifelong practitioner on himself and others; he founded the two Virginian cities of Richmond and Petersburg, and made a fine collection of paintings. He was Councilor, Receiver-General and Colonial Agent for Virginia, and (in his final year) held the highest colonial office, President of the Council. And he wrote, studied and investigated his world assiduously throughout his life. An industrious life which might have served as the very pattern of Weberian Puritanism.⁶

And yet Byrd's writing is preoccupied with images of idleness, located sometimes elsewhere, sometimes within himself. Idleness is inherently ambiguous: leisured cultivation or indolent torpor, ease or inactivity; this ambivalence structures the historical and literary myth of the Southern Gentleman, from the effete, enervated but perfectly civilised Augustine St. Clare in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to the atavistic heirs of Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor. The “South” would of course become a passive, resistant region in the cultural imagination, the domain of idleness on the margins of Yankee industry, the Cockaigne of natural abundance and natural indolence and the antitype of the Puritan myth of toil and struggle in a hostile environment. But for the eighteenth-century Virginia planters whose lives were the model for this myth, the ambiguity of idleness had a sharp existential reality which was fed and complicated in various ways by contemporary moral debate.⁷ Both personal and regional self-definition in the South came to expression in this tension between industry and idleness. In Byrd's writing alone, though, there exists the possibility of an imaginative register of idleness, a mind not frightened by but engaging with “the foolishnesse and monstrous strangenesse” of its own activities, and (at its best) a prose which can operate a Montaigne-esque amplitude and openness over its Addisonian formulations.

Educated and formed in England, Byrd looked to London for his model of culture and literature even in his most “American” enterprises. His sensibility was necessarily double, poised on the dividing line between the Old and New Worlds. Reading backwards (as almost all commentators do) from the later myth, Richard Gray, the most recent historian of southern literature, suggests that Byrd and his peers suffered the mental alienation consequent on attempting “to apply an inherited model of belief and behaviour to a new set of historical circumstances.”⁸ Lockridge, too, makes much of the Virginia gentry's provincial anxiety for “correctness,” especially with regard to William Byrd I and the consequent educational decisions made for his son. The kind of provincialism (or perhaps “non-centrality”) I want to discuss depends more directly on a more strictly local reading of his prose, and therefore comes to a different kind of conclusion. Evidence of alienation is thin on the urbane surface of Byrd's prose. As businessman and entrepreneur, it appears that he (like other planters) used his distance from London positively to capitalise on a freedom of activity much greater than that available to his English counterparts, while availing himself of the full privileges of British citizenship. As far as one can tell from his Diaries, which span periods in London and in the colony, Byrd felt himself equally at home in the metropolis, working his Virginia plantation, and at the frontier, running the Dividing Line between Virginia and North Carolina.⁹ All his writing suggests that the relationship between inherited, European models and American conditions is not simply one of dislocation, inappropriateness or inadequacy.

On 5 July 1726, shortly after his final return to Virginia, accompanied by his new wife from England, Byrd wrote to his English friend Lord Orrery.¹⁰ The letter illustrates the literary characteristics I have suggested; it is a fascinating digest of “southern” gestures. Here is a voice speaking like Montaigne's self-consciously from the retirement of “mine owne house,” poised between satisfaction and regret at this final translation from the centre to the margins, out of the world of society to that of solitude and reflection:

There was nothing frightfull in the whole Voyage but a suddain Puff that carried away our Topmast, which in the Falling gave a very bad crack, but we received no other Damage, neither were our Women terrified at It. The beautifullest Bloom of our Spring when we came Ashore, gave Mrs Byrd a good impression of the Country … there are not 10 days in the whole summer that Yr Ldshp would complain of, and they happen when the Breazes fail us and it is a dead Calme. But then the other nine Months are most charmingly delightfull, with a fine Air and a Serene Sky that keeps us in Good Health and Good Humour. Spleen and Vapours are as absolute Rarities here as a Winter's Sun or a Publick Spirit in England. A man may eat Beef, be as lazy as Captain Hardy, or even marry in this Clymate, without having the least Inclination to hang himself. It would cure all Mr. Hutchinson's distempers if the Ministry would transport him hither unless they sent Lady G[?] along with him. Your Ldsp will allow it to be a fair Commendation of a Country that it reconciles a Man to himself, and makes him suffer the weight of his misfortunes with the same tranquility that he bears with his own Frailtys. After your September is over, I shall wish your Ldsp a little of our Sunshine to disperse that Fogg and Smoake with which your Atmosphere is loaded. 'Tis miraculous that any Lungs can breathe in an Air compounded of so many different Vapours and exhalations like that of dirty London. For my part mine were never of a texture to bear it in winter without great convulsions, so that nothing could make me amends for that uneasiness but the pleasure of being near your Lordship. Besides the advantages of a pure Air, we abound in all kinds of Provisions without expence (I mean we have Plantations). I have a large Family of my own, and my Doors are open to Every Body, yet I have no Bills to pay, and half-a-Crown will rest undisturbed in my Pocket for many Moons together. Like one of the Patriarchs, I have my Flocks and my Herds, my Bond-men and Bond-women, and every Soart of Trade amongst my own Servants, so that I live in a kind of Independence on every one but Providence. However tho' this Soart of Life is without expence, yet it is attended with a great deal of trouble. I must take care to keep all my People to their Duty, to set all the Springs in motion and to make every one draw his equal share to carry the Machine forward. But then 'tis an amusement in this silent Country and a continual exercise of our Patience and Economy …

Thus My Lord we are very happy in our Canaans if we could but forget the Onions and Fleshpots of Egypt. There are so many Temptations in England to inflame the Appetite and charm the Senses, that we are content to run all Risques to enjoy them. They always had I must own too strong an Influence upon me, as Your Ldsp will belive when they could keep me so long from the more solid pleasures of Innocence and Retirement.¹¹

In her recent book on the Puritan conversion narrative, Patricia Caldwell suggests that the writing of the early Puritan emigrants to New England figured the Atlantic voyage as a kind of sea-change, an image of the irrevocable dislocation of before and after which at once corresponded to the universal and necessary nature of the conversion experience as they understood it and provided them with a metaphor for the “special providence” which carried them, the new Israelites, out of bondage and into the Promised Land.¹² Caldwell's book is subtitled “The Beginnings of American Expression;” here, in Byrd's letter, is a different form of “American expression,” equally prototypical, which emphasises continuity rather than dislocation, smoothness and harmony not a world and a way of seeing turned irrevocably upside down. A “suddain Puff” which carries away the topmast has no traumatic import when even the ladies are not frightened by it. The transition from England to America is a natural and benign one; Spring is there to greet the travellers at the end of their voyage, and even unaccustomed Mrs Byrd is immediately beguiled by its welcoming aspect. The Earl himself, Byrd implies, might be pleased to make the trip for the benefits he would experience there. It is not a one-way ticket to a different world.

More importantly, Byrd's conversible prose itself testifies to continuity and normality, to the ordinariness and reciprocity of experience. His letter takes some trouble to re-assert the connection between himself and his noble friend. There is just a hint of strain here: coterie references to Captain Hardy, Mr Hutchinson and Lady G, are as though Byrd needs to remind Orrery—and perhaps himself—that despite the physical distance between Virginia and London, he still inhabits the same world of cultivated wit, easy familiarity and charming frivolity. But the beginnings of self-conscious differentiation are there too, as the letter moves into a series of clauses organised around an opposition between “we” and “you,” a structure which has its distant descendant in his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: “We have no Vagrant Mendicants to seize and deaften [sic] us wherever we go, as in your Island of Beggars.”

Virginia is a different land, if not an alien one, and Byrd reaches for a series of comparisons which will at once define its exotic appeal, its otherness, and re-familiarise it within a known framework both for himself and his reader. These concern the dividing lines between a world of labour and one of sanctioned pleasure. A cluster of typological anticipations places Virginia life in an ancient and respectable framework of culture and ease: the patriarchs, Canaan, the Horatian idyll of virtuous retirement are all called up to witness both the stability and the acceptability of this other life, “the more solid pleasures of Innocence and Retirement.” It is a truly Augustan model of content, one so powerful amongst the Virginia planters that Colonel Landon Carter named his home Sabine Hall.

Byrd's evocation of the plantation retreat is self-consciously Addisonian—“English”—and contemporary, too:

There are … but very few who know how to be idle and innocent, or have a Relish of any Pleasures that are not Criminal; every Diversion they take is at the Expence of some one Virtue or another, and their very first Step out of Business is into Vice or Folly. A Man should endeavour, therefore, to make the Sphere of his innocent Pleasures as wide as possible, that he may retire into them with Safety, and find in them such a Satisfaction as a wise Man would not blush to take. Of this Nature are those of the Imagination, which do not require such a Bent of Thought as is necessary to our more serious Employments, nor, at the same time, suffer the Mind to sink into that Negligence and Remissness, which are apt to accompany our more sensual Delights, but, like a gentle Exercise to the Faculties, awaken them from Sloth and Idleness, without putting them upon any Labour or Difficulty.¹³

Addison's Spectator papers offered the eighteenth-century gentleman a middle way, a line of ease and propriety, between hard toil and inglorious sloth. They also begin to define such gentlemanly leisure in terms of the imagination. Retirement loosens the bonds of attention and finds breathing space for the imagination. So far, so orthodox: both Montaigne and Addison seem to be in agreement here. It was perhaps inevitable for Byrd to describe his Virginia plantation as cultivated nature, “worked” not unimproved, the locus of pleasurable leisure, when Addison had been before him:

why may not a whole Estate be thrown into a kind of Garden by frequent Plantations, that may turn as much to the Profit, as the Pleasure of the Owner? A Marsh overgrown with Willows, or a Mountain shaded with Oaks, are not only more beautiful, but more beneficial, than when they lie bare and unadorned. Fields of Corn make a pleasant Prospect, and if the Walks were a little taken care of that lie between them … a Man might make a pretty Landskip of his own Possessions.¹⁴

But ambivalence is bedded deep in this ease. Byrd, defining his Virginian world, created a verbal picture of life without the necessity for toil, and then painted himself into it as “attended with a great deal of trouble:”

I must take care to keep all my People to their Duty, to set all the Springs in motion and to make every one draw his equal share to carry the Machine forward.

At the same time, too much involvement with business sullies his civility; gentlemanly poise is restored in a lightly insouciant phrase which rebalances the equation of pleasure: “then 'tis an amusement in this silent Country and a continual exercise of our Patience and Economy.” The tonal capaciousness affirms that the same mind experiences both industry and idleness, and can admit both, equally, to be of the self. The prose of Cotton Mather or of Jonathan Edwards can scarcely ever be as evenhanded. It is quite a different thing even from Franklin's ability to be light and serious at the same time.

In one sense, Byrd's letter to Orrery does encapsulate the moral problems associated with idleness in a protestant world, and which preoccupied his New England contemporaries. The very concept of leisure was unacceptable to Puritans, of course, as uselessness in a world dedicated to usefulness and condemned to labour. The life, and the myth, of the Southern Gentleman, on the other hand, begins in Byrd's letter positively to embody this questionable concept on the margins of the useful. The problem for Virginian writers was how the leisure which provided an antitype to the ungentlemanly tirelessness of simple acquisitiveness might be recaptured for “virtue,” how the physically and spiritually enervating seductions of the land of plenty might be resisted while its bounty was enjoyed. Writing oneself as a Virginian gives a spatial dimension, a geographical location and extension, to a moral dilemma.

Virtuous rural retreat (the Sabine farm idea of the plantation) too easily slips into sybaritic indolence, in image if not in actuality. The value, and the danger, as Robert Beverley had put it in 1705, lay in “the exceeding plenty of good things;” he had described how persimmons, “like most other Fruit there, grow as thick upon the Trees, as Ropes on Onions; the Branches very often break down by the mighty Weight of the Fruit.”¹⁵ In Virginia, Montaigne's metaphor of the “fat and fertile” land has a visible, literal reality, an allurement stressed from the early vindications of the colony to a hostile world.¹⁶ Beverley detailed lovingly the numerous varieties, large size and abundance of American natural produce; documentary becomes indistinguishable from eulogy as his enumeration shades into a cornucopia of kinds:

As for Fish, both of Fresh and Salt-Water, of Shell-Fish, and others, no Country can boast of more Variety, greater Plenty, or of better in their several Kinds.¹⁷

Merely to name, in America, is to magnify or extol. In Beverley's writing, Virginia offers what Addison calls “the Primary Pleasure of Imagination:” that which draws directly on observation and “proceed[s] from such Objects as are before our Eyes.”¹⁸

A new Promised Land or a new Eden had been the characteristic description of Virginia's unparalleled fecundity and promise since Hakluyt and Captain John Smith; the warm, humid climate of the South gave the trope of American plenty a peculiar appropriateness for the region's self-definition in the hands of propagandists.

The Country is in a very happy Situation, between the extreams of Heat and Cold, but inclining rather to the First. Certainly it must be a happy Climate, since it is very near of the same Latitude of the Land of Promise. Besides, as Judaea was full of Rivers, and Branches of Rivers; So is Virginia: As that was seated upon a great Bay and Sea, wherein were all the conveniences for Shipping and Trade; so is Virginia. Had that fertility of Soil? So has Virginia, equal to any Land in the known World. In fine, if any one impartially considers all the Advantages of this Country, as Nature made it; he must allow it to be as fine a Place, as any in the Universe.¹⁹

Here are Addison's “secondary pleasures of the imagination,” which “flow from the Ideas of visible Objects, when the Objects are not actually before the Eye … agreeable Visions of Things that are either Absent or Fictitious.”²⁰

But Byrd, though he may like Beverley be alluding to a familiar image of Virginia within an Addisonian landscape of imagination, is not being simply formulaic in his letter to Orrery. His is a self-consciously witty, self-referentially knowing—and contemporary—version of the Edenic idyll of the early colonial boosters: no bills to pay, no winter smog, no spleen or vapours. The extravagance of Byrd's account of colonial profusion and virtue is a joke between himself and his reader in the very act of its assertion. Comic perspective is not negation, however; if the letter suggests crucial areas of doubt about the possibility of whole-heartedly embracing the alternative, it nowhere disowns it: “Thus My Lord we are very happy in our Canaans if we could but forget the Onions and Fleshpots of Egypt.” The poignancy of this double awareness is very far from alienation, or even dislocation: Byrd's writing at its taut best manages a high-wire balancing act on the dividing line of his perceptions as cultivated Englishman and wayward native of America. It is a balancing act which pivots on a celebration of the imagination as itself the repository of the cornucopia of kinds on the boundaries of rational, categorising and enumerating control. And its complex tone belongs rather with Montaigne than with Addison.

This ease was hard-won, however. Byrd's sense of himself as a man of the world was not that of “the world's” opinion of the colonial state. His suit for the hand of Miss Smith was fatally hampered in her father's eyes by the fact that Byrd's wealth was Virginian rather than English: “He says an Estate out of this Island appears to him little better than an Estate in the moon, and for his part he wou'd not give a Bermingham groat for it.”²¹ All Byrd's writing, and much of that of his Virginia contemporaries, protests against such relegation to the lunar sphere. Insisting on normality and continuity (as against the definitive sea-change which structures the New England self-consciousness) southern writing works to define its particularity in positive—rather than antagonistic—relationship to the English centre.

But living in a land without cities or indigenous traditions meant that culture became largely an inner experience. Byrd's morning readings in Greek, Latin and Hebrew were jealously guarded across years of his life; his diary registers annoyance when this was occasionally interrupted or prevented by affairs or visitors. If the literary image of the land of Virginia is that of plenitude, even to the point of spiritual danger, the writings of the planters constantly point to a different kind of deprivation. In the midst of natural bounty, they are starved of a community of civility. “Society that is good and ingenious,” William Fitzhugh lamented, “is very scarce, and seldom to be come at except in books.”²² Addison had said the “Conversation with Men of a Polite Genius is another Method for improving our Natural Taste.”²³ Without this, there lay the fear, which lurks just beneath the surface of Byrd's prose, that the southern gentleman may be a lone voice speaking in a wilderness.

In this context, we can see how Byrd's correspondence is an art to order perception: his diaries record him spending five hours on the composition of a single letter, writing the complex fate of the southern gentleman into existence. Like Wallace Stevens's jar in Tennessee, the artefact is there, at least in part, to portion out, to shape, a culturally empty and formless landscape:

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.(24)

Attempting to integrate particular local experience into “universal” European norms, Byrd's letters employ classical sanctions to shape and bound his American awareness; but if such comparisons assimilate, they also, in their self-conscious incongruity, begin to define the particularity of Southern experience. An undated letter in the Huntingdon Library to Mrs Armiger in London slides self-pitying exile into pastoral idyll, again with an edge of tonal uncertainty to complicate its currency:

We that are banish't from these polite pleasures are forc'd to take up with rural entertainments. A library, a garden, a grove, and a purling stream are the innocent scenes that divert our leisure.²⁵

But from London, on the other hand, Byrd could write to Custis that “my heart is in Virginia.” Inhabiting two worlds at once, there is always nostalgia and regret for the other lying beneath the immediate surface of the immanent one, whichever it is. Each must be defined in terms of the other.

The implicitly self-contradictory self-portraits of Byrd's letters crystallise into the “character” he gives of himself, in Theophrastan style, as “Inamorato l'Oiseaux:” “He knows the World perfectly well, and thinks himself a citizen of it without the … distinctions of kindred sect or Country … By Reading he's acquainted with ages past, and with the present by voyaging and conversation.”²⁶ “Inamorato” reminds its reader that the margins or boundaries between two states can be areas of conflict, disputed territory. Boundaries structure; but they may also be blurred. This man of the world is also two inner men, locked in issueless war:

The struggle between the Senate and the Plebeans in the Roman Commonwealth, or betweext the King and the Parliament in England, was never half so violent as the Civil war between this Hero's Principles and his Inclinations. Sometimes Grace wou'd be uppermost and sometimes Love, neither wou'd yeild and neither cou'd conquer. Like Cesar and Pompey one cou'd not bear an Equal nor t'other a superior.²⁷

While Byrd displaces the focus of attention from the self's perceptions, he nonetheless manages to allow these to structure his imaginative concerns. The “Inamorato” self-portrait exudes gentlemanly tact in keeping the personal in a public framework, here rhetorical and classical rather than topographically descriptive. It eschews the inelegance of Puritan self-exposure, without therefore becoming superficial.²⁸ On the contrary, Byrd's self-assessment takes on crucial significance in the light of the idle Lubberlanders of North Carolina in his later History of the Dividing Line: here is the inhabitant of a realm of disorder and inactivity on the underside of the industrious Virginian:

Nature gave him all the Talents in the World for business except Industry, which of all others is the most necessary. This is the spring and life and spirit of all preferment, and makes a man bustle thro all difficulty, and foil all opposition. Laziness mires a man in the degree in which he was born, and clogs the wheels of the finest qualifications. Fortune may make a Lazy Fellow great: but he will never make himself so. Diligence gives Wings to Ambition by which it soars up to to [sic] the highest pitch of advancement. These Wings Inamorato wanted …²⁹

Idleness could be an internal state, as well as obvious lack of industry. Indolence, as Montaigne had said, breeds inconstancy in pursuing an aim to its successful conclusion. “Inamorato” is beset by just such failures of purpose:

His Brain was too hot to jogg on eternally in the same dull road. He liv'd more by the lively movement of his Passions, than by the cold and unromantick dictates of Reason. This made him wavering in his Resolutions, and inconstant after he had taken them. He wou'd follow a scent with great eagerness for a little while, but then a fresh scent wou'd cross it and carry him as violently another way.³⁰

“So is it of minds, which except they be busied about some subject, that may bridle and keepe them under, they will here and there wildely scatter themselves through the vaste field of imagination,” as Montaigne had put it. An entry in Byrd's Diary for October 1718 indicates something of the desultory nature of his “unbridled” life of leisure in London:

I rose about 8 o'clock and read two chapters in Hebrew and some Greek. I said my prayers and had boiled milk for breakfast. The weather was cold and clear, the wind northwest. I read some of my old letters to my uncle and then I wrote a love letter for Daniel. About 2 o'clock I ate some stewed beef. After dinner we took a walk all about the fields and in the evening drank some tea. Then we played at commerce and I lost six shillings. Then I ate some boiled milk for supper. After supper we romped till 11 o'clock and then we retired, and I said my prayers. I slept very ill.³¹

How easily a life of perfect, cultured leisure shades into indolence, or virtuous resolves dissolve in rampant promiscuity (as other London Diary entries notoriously reveal). There is no “imagination” here—that was to be the product, and the spur, of the writings which span the Dividing Line. Absence of purpose or direction blurs the distinction between one day and another; the entries become monotonously similar in their hardly varying record of indulgence.

But it is also important to remember that during this time in London Byrd conducted affairs in the Colony's, and his own, interest; he was presented to the King, and conferred with ministers of state. What is interesting is that it was not this purposeful business but his idle and wayward activities which Byrd recorded so faithfully over these years. The Secret Diaries reveal “Inamorato” on the underside of Industry.

In 1728 Byrd was appointed leader of a Commission to settle once and for all the disputed boundary between the colony and its southern neighbour North Carolina. From a rough journal which he kept during the expedition Byrd constructed his most extensive and complex prose work, The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728. From the difficult and sometimes dangerous business of establishing the boundary between two colonies through the uncharted territory of the Dismal Swamp, Byrd wove a story which is at once a mirror of his own continuing literary preoccupations and an early image of representative southern experience. Here is Montaigne's metaphor realised in the landscape: a Land of Plenty, its natural bounty wasting under the profligacy and indolence of settlers who “detested work more than famine.”³²

The History opens with an account of the generation of colonial America which places Virginia at its founding centre: as new territories bud from the nucleus, Virginia redefines its margins ever more tightly as the location of civility in the American wilderness. It is worth recalling that striking phrase in the Orrery letter, “living like the Patriarchs:” the Virginia planters assume a kind of Mosaic structuring authority in relation to their upstart neighbours.

But the patriarchal pose is wittily self-knowing; the civility of the prose marries intense relish for local observation. The book revels in local customs, Indian lore, sociable gossip, plant and animal curiosities. Byrd is botanist, anthropologist, shrewd analyst of character, satiric raconteur and reflective observer. Here is all the flesh that is so frustratingly pared away from the bones of the Diaries, in a work which is itself a prototypical embodiment of America's plenty. The Histories represent the possibilities of Enlightenment Man in America. Through all Byrd's enumerating empiricism runs the concern for discrimination, for the boundary or dividing line between one kind of experience and another; beyond this again, an imaginative voice begins to emerge from its Addisonian confinement within the virtuous pleasure of leisure, to find expression for the plenty on the underside of conscious control.

Byrd's Dividing Line marks, geographically but also culturally, the boundary between the civilised Virginians and the boorish Lubberland of North Carolina. Running the Dividing Line was the perfect symbolic activity for Byrd, giving as it did a spatial, “American” dimension to inner division. The topographical transposition avoids the constriction and potential self-devouring of New England introspection, without falling into the conscious externality which mars Byrd's diary keeping. The planters of colonial Virginia were in a real sense living at the boundary between civilization and the wilderness, their lives a constant process of self-definition at the margins. Realms of order need dis-order to keep them defined; this is the dilemma to which Byrd's History addresses itself. His solution is to find an expression of southern experience which is at once heroic, mythological, and comic, which maintains Montaigne's tolerant freedom over the “extravagant Chimaraes, and fantasticall monsters, so orderlesse,” which he images on the far side of Reason's Dividing Line.

As Byrd revised his Secret History for publication, the Dividing Line itself developed as metaphor and symbol of a zone of demarcation between industry and idleness, culture and sloth, portioning out the culturally empty landscape. To borrow an image from another Wallace Stevens poem, the writer becomes, for the moment, “the single artificer of the world / In which [he] sang,” his words ordering an otherwise formless, silent limbo of Stygian gloom.³³ Through this the Dividing Line must run; traversing it and sectioning it, the surveyors create it as mappable space:

Since the surveyors had entered the Dismal, they had laid eyes on no living creature: neither bird nor beast, insect nor reptile came in view. Doubtless the eternal shade that broods over this mighty bog and hinders the sunbeams from blessing the ground makes it an uncomfortable habitation for anything that has life. Not so much as a Zeeland frog could endure so aguish a situation. It had one beauty, however, that delighted the eye, though at the expense of all the other senses: the moisture of the soil preserves a continual verdure and makes every plant an evergreen; but at the same time the foul damps ascend without ceasing, corrupt the air, and render it unfit for respiration. Not even a turkey buzzard will venture to fly over it, no more than the Italian vultures will over the filthy Lake Avernus, or the birds in the Holy Land over the Salt Sea where Sodom and Gomorrah formerly stood.

(History, 194)

Byrd's journey takes him to a torpid land recalling the “Lubber Power” in James Thomson's “Autumn” who, presiding over a scene of disorder, “in filthy triumph sits, / Slumbrous, inclining still from side to side, / And steeps them drenched in potent sleep till morn.”³⁴ “Surely,” writes the Commissioner, “there is no place in the world where the inhabitants live with less labor than in North Carolina. It approaches nearer to the description of Lubberland than any other, by the great felicity of the climate, the easiness of raising provisions, and the slothfulness of the people” (History, 204). Because this is mock-epic not epic, the nepenthe of North Carolina is not the mysterious lotus of Odysseus's island of sirens but blubberish pork, and it induces not romantic dreams of other lives but total cessation of all mental activity:

these people live so much upon swine's flesh that it don't only incline them to the yaws and consequently to the downfall of their noses, but makes them likewise extremely hoggish in their temper, and many of them seem to grunt rather than speak in their ordinary conversation.

(Secret History, 59-60)

Here is a land of plenty, where the inhabitants have not been roused by desire to activity. The lubberland of South Carolina is a world without distinction between days or occupations; it is crucially unstructured, and as such ungodly. There are no “dividing lines” between suitable and unsuitable behaviour, because there are no “occasions;” like a more extreme version of Byrd's life in London, this life is an undivided continuum of idleness:

One thing may be said for the inhabitants of that province, that they are not troubled with any religious fumes and have the least superstition of any people living. They do not know Sunday from any other day, any more than Robinson Crusoe did, which would give them a great advantage were they given to be industrious. But they keep so many Sabbaths every week that their disregard of the seventh day has no manner of cruelty in it, either to servants or cattle.

(History, 195)

The line between being at ease and being idle was a narrow one to tread; the southern gentleman grounded the distinctiveness, and the tension, of his life upon it. The failure to “improve” one's leisure was something of a cardinal sin to a whig eye. Bernard Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714) discussed “what things are requisite to aggrandize and enrich a Nation,” declared “The first desirable Blessings for any Society of Men” to be “a fertile Soil and a happy Climate, a mild Government, and more Land than People.” These the South had to perfection. “But,” continued Mandeville, “in this Condition,”

they shall have no Arts or Sciences, or be quiet longer than their Neighbours will let them; they must be poor, ignorant, and almost wholly destitute of what we call the Comforts of Life, and all the Cardinal Virtues together won't so much as procure a tolerable Coat or Porridge-Pot among them: for in this State of slothful Ease and stupid Innocence, as you need not fear great Vices, so you must not expect any considerable Virtues.

This—which Byrd would project onto South Carolina—is what the South has to fear. Mandeville's solution to the torpor of natural plenty is suggestive:

Would you render a Society of Men strong and powerful, you must touch their Passions. Divide the Land, tho' there be never so much to spare, and their Possessions will make them Covetous: Rouse them, tho' but in jest, from their Idleness with Praises, and Pride will set them to work in earnest.³⁵

A pagan myth of pastoral plenty moves into the realm of providential sanctions. Byrd's narrative “divides the land” in an attempt to “rouse” the settlers from their torpor by touching their pride and praising their possibilities.³⁶ Natural bounty unimproved encourages not only idleness but excess in human behaviour. According to Beverley, the early colonists complained of the unhealthiness of the Virginia climate because they gorged themselves immoderately on the fruit they found offered for free. For most of his adult life Byrd observed a “rule” never to eat of more than one or two dishes at any meal. His diary records his almost unvarying practice, and notes his few lapses precisely and severely. The constantly soluble divisions between excess, moderation, and abstinence underlined the importance of keeping to the middle way for the southern gentleman; more than for most men, luxury was apparently available to him for the taking. “Inamorato”

abhors all excesses of strong drink because it wholly removes those Guards that can defend a man from doing and suffering Harm. He's a great friend to temperance, because tis the security of all the other virtues.³⁷

We can only speculate as to whether it was Byrd's own tendency to excess which led him, like that other inveterate self-recorder James Boswell, to resolutions of abstinence.³⁸ “We often reproach others with Laziness,” Mandeville had said shrewdly, “because we are guilty of it our selves.”³⁹ It begins to look as though there may be a large amount of displaced Byrd in Lubberland, carefully banished to the other side of the Dividing Line, where it flourishes in imaginative excess.⁴⁰ Montaigne's comment on “Idleness,” which Byrd seems to have had in mind in his self-portrait of “Inamorato l'Oiseaux,” makes explicit the analogy with the unimproved soil of Lubberland, and with the imaginative potential of the indolent state when viewed apart from the improvement that may control it:

As we see some idle-fallow grounds, if they be fat and fertile, to bring forth store and sundry rootes of wilde & unprofitable weeds, & that to keep them in ure we must subject and imploy them with certaine seedes for our use and service … So is it of minds, which except they be busied about some subject, that may bridle and keepe them under, they will here and there wildely scatter themselves through the vaste field of imagination.⁴¹

The imaginative release of excess is crucial to the literary conception of The Dividing Line, not merely as something to be written out of the realm of order. The lubbers and their excessive ways loom large, both as physical and imaginative presences in the narrative. They literally occupy a lot of space in a narrative pre-occupied by an avowed devotion to structure and order. Observation and invention combine freely to shape Byrd's History; he includes anecdotes of wanton mendacity to run a fine line between fact and fantasy. In a country where information is hard to come by, it must be invented. “Like French historians,” as he wrote to Mrs Tayler in 1735, “where we don't meet with pretty incidents, we must e'en make them, and lard a little truth with a great deal of fiction.”⁴²

Addison had at once allowed and subscribed the poet's licence in going “beyond” nature in descriptive writing: “In a word, he has the modelling of Nature in his own Hands, and may give her what Charms he pleases, provided he does not reform her too much, and run into Absurdities, by endeavouring to excell.”⁴³ The characteristic of the tall tale is to cross the line, deliberately, into excess, and run willingly into the territory of the absurd. Byrd's “southern” imagination will not be circumscribed by the terms of Addisonian gentlemanly moderation, but (like Montaigne's mind in idleness) “scatters” itself “through the vaste field of imagination.” Empirical observation slides into satirical comment and thence to comic fantasy with a smoothness which begins to shape the deadpan voice of the American humorist. The Carolinians' pork eating becomes associated with their indolence, merging into a fantasia on the theme of excess and idleness:

The only business here is raising of hogs, which is managed with the least trouble and affords the diet they are most fond of. The truth of it is, the inhabitants of North Carolina devour so much swine's flesh that it fills them full of gross humors. For want, too, of a constant supply of salt, they are commonly obliged to eat it fresh, and that begets the highest taint of scurvy. Thus, whenever a severe cold happens to constitutions thus vitiated, 'tis apt to improve into the yaws, called there very justly the country distemper … First it seizes the throat, next the palate, and lastly shows its spite to the poor nose, of which 'tis apt in a small time treacherously to undermine the foundation. This calamity is so common and familiar here that it ceases to be a scandal, and in the disputes that happen about beauty the noses have in some company much ado to carry it. Nay, 'tis said that once, after three good pork years, a motion had like to have been made in the House of Burgesses that a man with a nose should be incapable of holding any place of profit in the province; which extraordinary motion could never have been intended without some hopes of a majority.

(History, 184-5)⁴⁴

This is not simply (to recall Richard Gray's term) a “retreat into fantasy;” it is also a release of the fantastic from the boundaries of empiricism, which Mark Twain, in his own deadpan voice, would later call the “innocently unaware … string[ing] together of incongruities and absurdities.”⁴⁵ Here are the pleasures of the imagination operating from and within the “grossness of sense” from which Addison's definition had carefully fenced them off. The outraged tones of the industrious husbandman faced by scandalous farming practice, the professional briskness of the doctor diagnosing consequential diseases, and the delighted raconteur of a good yarn makes indolence a “fat and fertile” subject indeed. This Lubberland-set is at once the opposite and the mirror-image of Yankee energy and hyperactivity; but—like that—if it is a travesty, it is one of real moment. The “idle-fallow” land of Virginia has become the breeding-ground of the southern imagination.

Byrd records an amusing, but also disturbing, encounter which drives home the incongruity of living the myth of prelapsarian bliss in a postlapsarian world:

on the south shore not far from the inlet dwelt a marooner that modestly called himself a hermit, though he forfeited that name by suffering a wanton female to cohabit with him … Like the ravens, he neither plowed nor sowed but subsisted chiefly upon oysters, which his handmaid made a shift to gather from the adjacent rocks … But as for raiment, he depended mostly upon his length of beard and she upon her length of hair, part of which she brought decently forward and the rest dangled behind quite down to her rump, like one of Herodotus' East Indian Pigmies. Thus did these wretches live in a dirty state of nature and were mere Adamites, innocence only excepted.

(History, 179-80)

Attempting to live on in Eden after the Fall, these sybarites become merely laughable, their innocence a travesty. Without the poised post-lapsarian consciousness of innocence held within the burden of experience which sustains Montaigne's meditations and (in its own rather different way) Byrd's letter to Orrery, disorder becomes distasteful, just dirt. The expulsion from Eden is inevitable, and repeated again in America. The muted subjunctive of Byrd's festive voice takes on a new poignancy: “Thus my Lord we are very happy in our Canaans if we could but forget the Onions and Fleshpots of Egypt” [my emphasis]. Pastoral is not a state which can be lived, but a state of mind.

Like Odysseus in the island of sirens the South must and does resist the blandishments of easy bounty, and strive instead by industry to improve Nature with Art. But the moral resolve to reject the torpid domain is keenly balanced by the loss involved in doing so. Idleness retains its ambiguous hold on the imagination. Where Beverley records sloth and lack of improvement in Virginia, Byrd translates it to North Carolina, thereby clearing a space, as it were, in Virginia for improvement and his sense of Enlightenment possibility. His imagination, like Montaigne's, inhabits both regions.

For all its studied elegance and moderation, Byrd's wit in the Histories has become quite distinct from its Addisonian model, as it has from its Puritan-descended Yankee counterpart. Robust, wayward and potentially anarchic, a tone of muted astringency manages to contain at once nostalgic desire for the forever lost moment of innocent leisure, comic delight at its absurdity, and sharp criticism of its inexpediency. It was a balancing act which could not be sustained in later southern writing, for reasons historical, political and—perhaps above all—literary. Rhetorical instability is inherent in a dividing line which is also a tightrope. Exhilarating but fragile, it was perhaps inevitable that its tension should slacken into the nineteenth-century antebellum myth in the hands of romantic idealisers like William Gilmore Simms and Thomas Nelson Page, who glorified the idleness of the Southern Gentleman's way of life without at the same time living, as Byrd did, its industry. Following the dissipated and dissipating career of his son William Byrd III, Byrd's carefully gathered library was (ironically at about the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence) sold and dispersed. Montaigne and Addison went their separate ways. It marks the end of this particular literary possibility of leisured civility in Southern—and American—literature. Even Thomas Jefferson, avid reader of Montaigne and in some sense Renaissance man though he was, found it impossible to re-visit the free realm of imaginative leisure available to Byrd. The Dividing Line had already ossified into an opposition between virtuous industry and unpatriotic indolence in a way which left no space for imaginative commerce between the two regions.

Notes

1. See, for example, Bertelson, The Lazy South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Zuckerman, “William Byrd's Family,” Perspectives in American History, 12 (1979), 255-311; Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674-1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

2. Lockridge, 12.

3. Byrd's library contained multiple copies of Montaigne's Essays, in the original and in translation. (See the catalogue reprinted by John Spencer Bassett in his The Writings of Colonel William Byrd, New York, 1901: Volume IV, Appendix A.) It should be noted, however, that here and throughout this paper my design is not to document direct influences on, or of, Byrd's writing, but rather by comparative critical analysis to suggest the characteristic ways in which the issues of industry and idleness are taken up, developed and transformed in his prose to articulate a recognisably new, “non-English” literary voice.

4. The Essayes, or Morall, Politike and Militaries Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne, Knight. transl. John Florio (1603: Scolar Press Facsimile, Menston, England: The Scolar Press, 1969), Book I, 14-15.

5. In The Lazy South, Bertelson analyses the development of the trope of Southern “laziness” from the writings of the first colonial settlers to the post-Civil War period, to show how the burden of the accusation changed according to the cultural needs of the society's self-definition.

6. My summary of Byrd's career here stresses its external features of activity and achievement; for a different, psycho-biographical, interpretation based on Byrd's consciousness of failure to be an English gentleman and his need to rise to his father's expectations, see Lockridge, 21, 30 and passim. Zuckerman emphasises the “aimlessness” of Byrd's Virginia peregrinations in “William Byrd's Family,” 306-7.

7. See Bertelson, especially Chapter 4, and his discussion of Rev. James Blair's Our Saviour's Divine Sermon on the Mount, pp. 111-113.

8. Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 18.

9. Lockridge describes “the very crypticity” of the diaries as “expressive” (p. 12). I hesitate to make as much as he does of writing that is simply “not there.”

10. Between 1715 and 1725 Byrd was twice in London, on typically double business as Virginia's representative to the English and on his own behalf (to sell his office as Receiver General of Virginia and to uphold his own political and pecuniary interests with the Crown against opposition from Governor Spotswood). Equally typically, though what took him to London was colonial politics and private business, what kept him there was personal pleasure and (following the death of his first wife in 1716) the search for a second Mrs Byrd.

11. Countess of Orrery (ed.), The Orrery Papers, 2 volumes (1903). Reprinted in R. B. Davis, C. Hugh Holman and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., (eds.) Southern Writing 1585-1920 (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1970), 111-13.

12. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

13. The Spectator, (ed.) Donald F. Bond, 5 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), III, 538-9 (no. 411).

14. The Spectator, III, 551-2 (no. 414).

15. The History and Present State of Virginia, (ed.) Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 130.

16. See, for example, Bertelson, 67ff.

17. History and Present State of Virginia, 146.

18. The Spectator, III, 537 (no. 409).

19. The History and Present State of Virginia, 296-7.

20. The Spectator, III, 537 (no. 409).

21. Maude H. Woodfin and Marion Tinling, (eds.) Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739-1741 (Richmond, Va., 1942), 318.

22. Quoted by Louis B. Wright in The First Gentlemen of Virginia (1940; rpt. Charlottesville, Va.: Dominion Books, 1964), 165.

23. The Spectator, III, 529 (no. 409).

24. “Anecdote of the Jar,” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 76.

25. The London Diary (1717-1721) and Other Writings, (eds.) Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 38.

26. Another Secret Diary, 280.

27. Another Secret Diary, 276.

28. My assessment again differs from Lockridge, who is inclined to see “Inamorato” as a painful, if stilted, exercise in self-exposure. I prefer to concentrate on the effects and implications of its careful literary poise.

29. Another Secret Diary, 277.

30. Another Secret Diary, 277.

31. London Diary, 185.

32. The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover, (ed.) Louis B. Wright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 159. Subsequent references to the Histories are referred to by page numbers in this edition.

33. “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Collected Poems, 129.

34. “Autumn” The Seasons, (ed.) James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 174 (ll. 562-4).

35. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, (ed.) F. B. Kaye, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924; rpt. 1957), I, 183-4.

36. Beverley's literary motive was similarly to act as a stimulant to industry: “the extream fruitfulness of that Country is not exceeded by any other. No Seed is Sowed there, but it thrives, and most Plants are improved, by being Transplanted thither. And yet there's very little Improvement made among them, nor any thing us'd in Traffique, but Tobacco … Thus they [the inhabitants of Virginia] depend altogether upon the liberality of Nature, without endeavouring to improve its Gifts, by Art or Industry. They spunge upon the Blessings of a warm Sun, and a fruitful Soil, and almost grutch the Pains of gathering in the Bounties of the Earth. I should be asham'd to publish this slothful Indolence of my Countrymen, but that I hope it will rouse them out of their Lethargy, and excite them to make the most of all those happy Advantages which Nature has given them; and if it does this, I am sure they will have the Goodness to forgive me” (History and Present State of Virginia, 314, 319).

37. Another Secret Diary, 280.

38. With the ever-present seductions of indolence, Byrd staked out that line in every area of his life and writing. In his Discourse Concerning the Plague (1721), he recommends (with an incalculable degree of seriousness) moderation as a prophylactic against the plague. Excess in food and drink, and lack of activity, he writes, weaken a man and make him susceptible: “… an exact temperance, sobriety, and moderation in all our enjoyments … will abate the vicious humours of the body, and make us less dispos'd to receive the sickness.” In Britain, however, the author argues, people “suffer dreadfully by this disease, having commonly too great a complaisance for our dear bellies.” The English, here, take on the characteristics Byrd later ascribed to North Carolina's lubber-like population. As in the Dividing Line narrative, the moral message of moderation seems clear, but the uncertain tone renders it at best equivocal: Another Secret Diary, 437, 427.

39. The Fable of the Bees, I, 239.

40. Although Byrd died before the appearance of Thomson's The Castle of Indolence in 1748, there are striking similarities between the two works, not least in the ambivalent but potent compound of charm and danger which the idea of indolence held for both writers themselves. A possible common influence is Joseph Mitchell's poem “The Charms of Indolence,” published in 1722 (while Byrd was in London) and reprinted in Poems on Several Occasions (1729) at the time Byrd was beginning his revision of the journal following the conclusion of his commission. Lockridge, like other commentators, makes clear Byrd's fear and rejection of this “‘lazy’ society where gentlemen such as himself were neither needed nor respected,” (The Diary, and Life …, 139). My concern here is with the way in which this rejection co-exists in the prose with desire, and delight in, the realm of sloth and disorder.

41. Montaigne, Essays, 14.

42. London Diary, 44.

43. The Spectator, III, 570 (no. 418).

44. Ben Jonson had associated Lubberland and pork-eating explicitly in Bartholemew Fair: “Good mother, how shall we find a pigge, if we doe not look about for't? will it run off o' the spit, into our mouths, thinke you? as in Lubberland?” (Bartholemew Fair, III, (ii)). Byrd may also have had Spenser's indictment of the ungodly as a herd of swine in mind:

    Said Guyon, See the mind of beastly man,
    That hath so soone forgot the excellence
    Of his creation, when he life began,
    That now he chooseth, with vile difference,
    To be a beast, and lacke intelligence.
    To whom the Palmer thus, The donghill kind
    Delights in filth and foule incontinence:
    Let Grill be Grill, and haue his hoggish mind,
    But let vs hence depart, whilest wether serues and wind.

    (The Faery Queene, Book II, Canto xii, 87)

45. “How to Tell a Story,” Selected Shorter Writings of Mark Twain, (ed.) Walter Blair (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 241.