I think I should scarcely trouble the reader with a special appeal in
behalf of this book, if it had not specially appealed to me for reasons
apart from the author's race, origin, and condition. The world is too
old now, and I find myself too much of its mood, to care for the work of
a poet because he is black, because his father and mother were slaves,
because he was, before and after he began to write poems, an
elevator-boy. These facts would certainly attract me to him as a man, if
I knew him to have a literary ambition, but when it came to his literary
art, I must judge it irrespective of these facts, and enjoy or endure it
for what it was in itself.
It seems to me that this was my experience with the poetry of Paul
Laurence Dunbar when I found it in another form, and in justice to him I
cannot wish that it should be otherwise with his readers here. Still, it
will legitimately interest those who like to know the causes, or, if
these may not be known, the sources, of things, to learn that the father
and mother of the first poet of his race in our language were negroes
without admixture of white blood. The father escaped from slavery in
Kentucky to freedom in Canada, while there was still no hope of freedom
otherwise; but the mother was freed by the events of the civil war, and
came North to Ohio, where their son was born at Dayton, and grew up with
such chances and mischances for mental training as everywhere befall the
children of the poor. He has told me that his father picked up the trade
of a plasterer, and when he had taught himself to read, loved chiefly to
read history. The boy's mother shared his passion for literature, with a
special love of poetry, and after the father died she struggled on in
more than the poverty she had shared with him. She could value the
faculty which her son showed first in prose sketches and attempts at
fiction, and she was proud of the praise and kindness they won him among
the people of the town, where he has never been without the warmest and
kindest friends.
In fact from every part of Ohio and from several cities of the adjoining
States, there came letters in cordial appreciation of the critical
recognition which it was my pleasure no less than my duty to offer Paul
Dunbar's work in another place. It seemed to me a happy omen for him
that so many people who had known him, or known of him, were glad of a
stranger's good word; and it was gratifying to see that at home he was
esteemed for the things he had done rather than because as the son of
negro slaves he had done them. If a prophet is often without honor in
his own country, it surely is nothing against him when he has it. In
this case it deprived me of the glory of a discoverer; but that is
sometimes a barren joy, and I am always willing to forego it.
What struck me in reading Mr. Dunbar's poetry was what had already
struck his friends in Ohio and Indiana, in Kentucky and Illinois. They
had felt, as I felt, that however gifted his race had proven itself in
music, in oratory, in several of the other arts, here was the first
instance of an American negro who had evinced innate distinction in
literature. In my criticism of his book I had alleged Dumas in France,
and I had forgetfully failed to allege the far greater Pushkin in
Russia; but these were both mulattoes, who might have been supposed to
derive their qualities from white blood vastly more artistic than ours,
and who were the creatures of an environment more favorable to their
literary development. So far as I could remember, Paul Dunbar was the
only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the
negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically. It seemed to me that
this had come to its most modern consciousness in him, and that his
brilliant and unique achievement was to have studied the American negro
objectively, and to have represented him as he found him to be, with
humor, with sympathy, and yet with what the reader must instinctively
feel to be entire truthfulness. I said that a race which had come to
this effect in any member of it, had attained civilization in him, and I
permitted myself the imaginative prophecy that the hostilities and the
prejudices which had so long constrained his race were destined to
vanish in the arts; that these were to be the final proof that God had
made of one blood all nations of men. I thought his merits positive and
not comparative; and I held that if his black poems had been written by
a white man, I should not have found them less admirable. I accepted
them as an evidence of the essential unity of the human race, which does
not think or feel, black in one and white in another, but humanly in
all.
Yet it appeared to me then, and it appears to me now, that there is a
precious difference of temperament between the races which it would be a
great pity ever to lose, and that this is best preserved and most
charmingly suggested by Mr. Dunbar in those pieces of his where he
studies the moods and traits of his race in its own accent of our
English. We call such pieces dialect pieces for want of some closer
phrase, but they are really not dialect so much as delightful personal
attempts and failures for the written and spoken language. In nothing is
his essentially refined and delicate art so well shown as in these
pieces, which, as I ventured to say, described the range between
appetite and emotion, with certain lifts far beyond and above it, which
is the range of the race. He reveals in these a finely ironical
perception of the negro's limitations, with a tenderness for them which
I think so very rare as to be almost quite new. I should say, perhaps,
that it was this humorous quality which Mr. Dunbar had added to our
literature, and it would be this which would most distinguish him, now
and hereafter. It is something that one feels in nearly all the dialect
pieces; and I hope that in the present collection he has kept all of
these in his earlier volume, and added others to them. But the contents
of this book are wholly of his own choosing, and I do not know how much
or little he may have preferred the poems in literary English. Some of
these I thought very good, and even more than very good, but not
distinctively his contribution to the body of American poetry. What I
mean is that several people might have written them; but I do not know
any one else at present who could quite have written the dialect pieces.
These are divinations and reports of what passes in the hearts and minds
of a lowly people whose poetry had hitherto been inarticulately
expressed in music, but now finds, for the first time in our tongue,
literary interpretation of a very artistic completeness.
I say the event is interesting, but how important it shall be can be
determined only by Mr. Dunbar's future performance. I cannot undertake
to prophesy concerning this; but if he should do nothing more than he
has done, I should feel that he had made the strongest claim for the
negro in English literature that the negro has yet made. He has at
least produced something that, however we may critically disagree about
it, we cannot well refuse to enjoy; in more than one piece he has
produced a work of art.