I wish that I could at all times praise as much the literature of an
author who speaks for another colored race, not so far from us as the
Japanese, but of as much claim upon our conscience, if not our
interest. Mr. Chesnutt, it seems to me, has lost literary quality in
acquiring literary quantity, and though his book, "The Marrow of
Tradition," is of the same strong material as his earlier books, it is
less simple throughout, and therefore less excellent in manner. At his
worst, he is no worse than the higher average of the ordinary novelist,
but he ought always to be very much better, for he began better, and he
is of that race which has, first of all, to get rid of the cakewalk, if
it will not suffer from a smile far more blighting than any frown. He
is fighting a battle, and it is not for him to pick up the cheap graces
and poses of the jouster. He does, indeed, cast them all from him when
he gets down to his work, and in the dramatic climaxes and closes of
his story he shortens his weapons and deals his blows so absolutely
without flourish that I have nothing but admiration for him. "The
Marrow of Tradition," like everything else he has written, has to do
with the relations of the blacks and whites, and in that republic of
letters where all men are free and equal he stands up for his own
people with a courage which has more justice than mercy in it. The
book is, in fact, bitter, bitter. There is no reason in history why it
should not be so, if wrong is to be repaid with hate, and yet it would
be better if it was not so bitter. I am not saying that he is so
inartistic as to play the advocate; whatever his minor foibles may be,
he is an artist whom his stepbrother Americans may well be proud of;
but while he recognizes pretty well all the facts in the case, he is
too clearly of a judgment that is made up. One cannot blame him for
that; what would one be one's self? If the tables could once be
turned, and it could be that it was the black race which violently and
lastingly triumphed in the bloody revolution at Wilmington, North
Carolina, a few years ago, what would not we excuse to the white man
who made the atrocity the argument of his fiction?
Mr. Chesnutt goes far back of the historic event in his novel, and
shows us the sources of the cataclysm which swept away a legal
government and perpetuated an insurrection, but he does not paint the
blacks all good, or the whites all bad. He paints them as slavery made
them on both sides, and if in the very end he gives the moral victory
to the blacks--if he suffers the daughter of the black wife to have
pity on her father's daughter by his white wife, and while her own
child lies dead from a shot fired in the revolt, gives her husband's
skill to save the life of her sister's child--it cannot be said that
either his aesthetics or ethics are false. Those who would question
either must allow, at least, that the negroes have had the greater
practice in forgiveness, and that there are many probabilities to favor
his interpretation of the fact. No one who reads the book can deny
that the case is presented with great power, or fail to recognize in
the writer a portent of the sort of negro equality against which no
series of hangings and burnings will finally avail.