The critical reader of the story called The Wife of his Youth, which
appeared in these pages two years ago, must have noticed uncommon traits
in what was altogether a remarkable piece of work. The first was the
novelty of the material; for the writer dealt not only with people who
were not white, but with people who were not black enough to contrast
grotesquely with white people,--who in fact were of that near approach
to the ordinary American in race and color which leaves, at the
last degree, every one but the connoisseur in doubt whether they are
Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-African. Quite as striking as this novelty of
the material was the author's thorough mastery of it, and his
unerring knowledge of the life he had chosen in its peculiar racial
characteristics. But above all, the story was notable for the
passionless handling of a phase of our common life which is tense with
potential tragedy; for the attitude, almost ironical, in which the
artist observes the play of contesting emotions in the drama under his
eyes; and for his apparently reluctant, apparently helpless consent
to let the spectator know his real feeling in the matter. Any one
accustomed to study methods in fiction, to distinguish between good and
bad art, to feel the joy which the delicate skill possible only from
a love of truth can give, must have known a high pleasure in the quiet
self-restraint of the performance; and such a reader would probably have
decided that the social situation in the piece was studied wholly from
the outside, by an observer with special opportunities for knowing it,
who was, as it were, surprised into final sympathy.
Now, however, it is known that the author of this story is of negro
blood,--diluted, indeed, in such measure that if he did not admit this
descent few would imagine it, but still quite of that middle world
which lies next, though wholly outside, our own. Since his first story
appeared he has contributed several others to these pages, and he now
makes a showing palpable to criticism in a volume called The Wife of
his Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line; a volume of Southern
sketches called The Conjure Woman; and a short life of Frederick
Douglass, in the Beacon Series of biographies. The last is a simple,
solid, straight piece of work, not remarkable above many other
biographical studies by people entirely white, and yet important as
the work of a man not entirely white treating of a great man of his
inalienable race. But the volumes of fiction ARE remarkable above many,
above most short stories by people entirely white, and would be worthy
of unusual notice if they were not the work of a man not entirely white.
It is not from their racial interest that we could first wish to speak
of them, though that must have a very great and very just claim upon the
critic. It is much more simply and directly, as works of art, that
they make their appeal, and we must allow the force of this quite
independently of the other interest. Yet it cannot always be allowed.
There are times in each of the stories of the first volume when the
simplicity lapses, and the effect is as of a weak and uninstructed
touch. There are other times when the attitude, severely impartial and
studiously aloof, accuses itself of a little pompousness. There are
still other times when the literature is a little too ornate for beauty,
and the diction is journalistic, reporteristic. But it is right to add
that these are the exceptional times, and that for far the greatest part
Mr. Chesnutt seems to know quite as well what he wants to do in a given
case as Maupassant, or Tourguenief, or Mr. James, or Miss Jewett, or
Miss Wilkins, in other given cases, and has done it with an art of
kindred quiet and force. He belongs, in other words, to the good school,
the only school, all aberrations from nature being so much truancy and
anarchy. He sees his people very clearly, very justly, and he shows them
as he sees them, leaving the reader to divine the depth of his feeling
for them. He touches all the stops, and with equal delicacy in stories
of real tragedy and comedy and pathos, so that it would be hard to say
which is the finest in such admirably rendered effects as The Web of
Circumstance, The Bouquet, and Uncle Wellington's Wives. In some
others the comedy degenerates into satire, with a look in the reader's
direction which the author's friend must deplore.
As these stories are of our own time and country, and as there is not a
swashbuckler of the seventeenth century, or a sentimentalist of this, or
a princess of an imaginary kingdom, in any of them, they will possibly
not reach half a million readers in six months, but in twelve months
possibly more readers will remember them than if they had reached the
half million. They are new and fresh and strong, as life always is,
and fable never is; and the stories of The Conjure Woman have a wild,
indigenous poetry, the creation of sincere and original imagination,
which is imparted with a tender humorousness and a very artistic
reticence. As far as his race is concerned, or his sixteenth part of
a race, it does not greatly matter whether Mr. Chesnutt invented their
motives, or found them, as he feigns, among his distant cousins of the
Southern cabins. In either case, the wonder of their beauty is the same;
and whatever is primitive and sylvan or campestral in the reader's
heart is touched by the spells thrown on the simple black lives in these
enchanting tales. Character, the most precious thing in fiction, is as
faithfully portrayed against the poetic background as in the setting of
the Stories of the Color Line.
Yet these stories, after all, are Mr. Chesnutt's most important work,
whether we consider them merely as realistic fiction, apart from their
author, or as studies of that middle world of which he is naturally
and voluntarily a citizen. We had known the nethermost world of the
grotesque and comical negro and the terrible and tragic negro through
the white observer on the outside, and black character in its lyrical
moods we had known from such an inside witness as Mr. Paul Dunbar; but
it had remained for Mr. Chesnutt to acquaint us with those regions where
the paler shades dwell as hopelessly, with relation to ourselves, as the
blackest negro. He has not shown the dwellers there as very different
from ourselves. They have within their own circles the same social
ambitions and prejudices; they intrigue and truckle and crawl, and are
snobs, like ourselves, both of the snobs that snub and the snobs that
are snubbed. We may choose to think them droll in their parody of pure
white society, but perhaps it would be wiser to recognize that they
are like us because they are of our blood by more than a half, or three
quarters, or nine tenths. It is not, in such cases, their negro blood
that characterizes them; but it is their negro blood that excludes them,
and that will imaginably fortify them and exalt them. Bound in that sad
solidarity from which there is no hope of entrance into polite white
society for them, they may create a civilization of their own, which
need not lack the highest quality. They need not be ashamed of the race
from which they have sprung, and whose exile they share; for in many of
the arts it has already shown, during a single generation of freedom,
gifts which slavery apparently only obscured. With Mr. Booker Washington
the first American orator of our time, fresh upon the time of Frederick
Douglass; with Mr. Dunbar among the truest of our poets; with Mr.
Tanner, a black American, among the only three Americans from whom
the French government ever bought a picture, Mr. Chesnutt may well be
willing to own his color.
But that is his personal affair. Our own more universal interest in
him arises from the more than promise he has given in a department of
literature where Americans hold the foremost place. In this there is,
happily, no color line; and if he has it in him to go forward on the way
which he has traced for himself, to be true to life as he has known
it, to deny himself the glories of the cheap success which awaits the
charlatan in fiction, one of the places at the top is open to him. He
has sounded a fresh note, boldly, not blatantly, and he has won the ear
of the more intelligent public.