Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally BelletriJtic .
To flesh out "The History" Byrd used several devices in style and content,
including added political and natural history, and commentary on
events recorded in "The Secret History" without elucidation. The prose of
"The Secret History" may be poignant, as the early "I often cast a longing
eye towards England, & sigh'd"; or piquant, as the "Commissioners of
Carolina . .. (were) much better provided for the Belly than the Business."
Perhaps "The History" suffers in liveliness as the author sacrifices his
terseness for more explicit explanations of Carolina uncouthness or ineptitude.
But the pervasive ironic tone of "The History," which displaces
the shorter work's forthright satire, makes for an equality, or balance, between
the two accounts. As more than one critic has observed, the histories
complement each other.
The two shorter pieces from the Westover Manuscripts, "A Journey to
the Land of Eden" and "A Progress to the Mines in the Year 1732, " retain
the slight tinge of irony of "The History" but the characterizations are less
vivid. Both histories are more conscious works of art. In the end, "The
Secret History" remains a remarkably lively comic satire, extremely personal,
half London wit and half New W orId situation. "The History" is
something more, a superior work in both intention and accomplishment.
Here is the southern planter of the golden age showing his native Virginia
world through the eyes of European experience and education. He ornaments
his picture with his learning and his knowledge of the world of man.
Above all, he sees it as he should, as an actual journey which was also the
symbolic progress of the American experience. As in Huck Finn's voyage
down the Mississippi, the epic significance is largely implicit. But the epic
quality, however shadowy, is definitely in the consciousness of the man who
describes playfully (in both histories) the founding of the noble order
of Ma-ooty, with wild turkey beards as cockades, a spread-winged turkey
in gold suspended from a ribbon-collar about the neck, and a Latin motto
signifying that through this bird these chosen ones were supported in the
wilderness; and who (perhaps more seriously? ) records in his last diurnal
entry in "The History" his sense of the heroic or mock-heroic quality of his
undertaking in the simile: "Thus ended our second expedition, in which we
extended the line within the shadow of the Cherokee mountains, when we
were obliged to set up our pillars, like Hercules, and return home."
Byrd wrote for a variety of reasons in a variety of forms, but he is essentially
the gentle satirist. He lived in an age when the comic spirit reigned,
and much of his work is marked by "an indulgent irony" which on rare
occasions sharpens into somewhat disdainful but never cruel satire. Like
other great planters of his own and the succeeding age, he lived by the
golden mean, which meant that he wished to see the world in balance.
Other Virginians employed the yardstick of the middle way without humor,
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