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sometimes approached doggedness, a devotion to one pursuit that withdrew him as far from active navigation as an inventor of nautical instruments, and a courage which was saved from grimness by the humor which made him quaintly speculative on the supposed duties of the heretic.

Finally, in Mr. Mumford's estimate Emerson's philosophy was no less of a philosophy because he did not codify it into a system. For he was keenly alive to the contributions of empirical science and not unaware of the facts of contemporary life. But he was not inhibited thereby from the recognition of spiritual truth, perceiving that "matter passed into spirit and became a symbol, and that spirit passed into matter and gave it form," a perception more complete than that of any Nineteenth Century contemporary in America or elsewhere. In the vigor of his challenge, and in the happy degree to which Thoreau and Whitman met and fulfilled it, lies Emerson's significance for this new expositor.

TO Mr. Mumford Emerson marks high noon in the golden day. To Mr. Parrington in his wide study of the currents of American thought the Concord sage is not quite so important, though he seems dominant figure in the romantic revolution, a 'hinker loose in the America of Daniel Webster.'

Mumford, being philosophically minded, rehim as preëminently a philosopher. Mr. Parrington, who is politically minded, estimates him philosopher too little recognized for his trenchis a critic. They disagree in no essential though liffer in emphasis.

Mr. Parrington Emerson is interesting for his anticipations — from the Puritanism which gotten him, from the bookishness into which up, from a contentment with transcendental as to an inclination to apply these aphorisms life of his own day, setting the ideal on of the scale and his native New England her and bidding his neighbors see how the need.

political theory, like his philosophy, formulated in set statements, though aligned against coercive government he feared an energetic government as a potential tyranny; he rejected an economic of the state which set property above y with human life. For these reasons he an agrarian to an industrial order, and in the reduction of state powers to lowest d the recognitions of the rights of man, Jeffersonian heir to the romantic politics 'seventh Century.

Is a matter of pertinent inquiry, is
portant than what Mr. Parrington
d what many never knew, that, in
saw in the light of what he be-
s capable of plain speaking,

asperity, scorn, scathing vehemence. A re-reading of his occasional addresses — more significant than the "Journals" because the latter include only the residuum that he did not care to utter aloud — affords an abundance of observations that might be indiscriminately blackguarded as BShevistic in the present *post-bellum* hysteria of conservatism. In the "Journals" he wrote, "The State is a poor, good beast who means the best; it means friendly. A poor cow who does well by you, — do not grudge it its hay. . . . Take this handful of clover and welcome. But if you go to hook me when I walk in the fields, then, poor cow, I will cut your throat." But in his speech on affairs in Kansas he said hardly less: "I own I have little esteem for governments. . . . In this country for the last years the government has been the chief obstruction to the common weal. . . . I do not know any story so gloomy as the politics of this country for the last twenty years, centralizing ever more manifestly around one spring, and that a vast crime."

So though he tried to keep his head in solitude, his hands were often drawing him into society when he could not help grappling with issues. He freed himself from the meanness and crabbedness of the Yankee and the harsh illiberalism of the Puritan, but he was still subject to the Puritan's righteous indignation and was unwilling on occasion to keep it to himself.

Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, in his "Emerson and Others," abandons the psychoanalysis to which he submitted Mark Twain and Henry James to adopt, at the farthest extreme from this, the method of the portrait painter. He presents his subject in six poses: at the club, projecting and working for the *Dial*, among the reformers, at his desk, on the lecture rostrum, and in Concord. There is no exposition of Emerson, no legends under the pictures. Out of the "Journals," 5,600 pages of them, the contour of the man has been drawn. And the sketches portray everything that belongs to Emerson except his repose. They have Emerson's energy, but they are like moving pictures that have been so speeded up by an inexpert operator that a normal walk is converted into an ambulatory agitation across the screen.

YET the essential man is there, more human
and informal than in the critical analysis of
Mumford and Parrington, and lending distinction
to his time and place because all the objects of the
universe converge on him as he passes along be-
tween the eternities; not so indomitable — for that
suggests spectacular heroism — as incorrigible, in
his own homely dignity. "He would listen to no
more reproofs, but steadily persist in his own native
choices against all argument and example — defend
them against the multitude, defend them against
the wise. Defend them against his disciples. By no

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man's distaste was he to be chidden out of his most
trivial natural habit. Even pie for breakfast!"

I must confess that the recent shower of scorn
that has fallen on James Gates Percival and Ralph
Waldo Emerson alike has brought its measure of
consolation with it, if only for the degree in which
it has dampened the ardor of the Emersoniacs who
can never talk for five minutes without allusions to
the song in the scum, or the wagon and the star, or
self-excusing beauty, or the elusive mousetrap and
the beaten path — people who are the most perfect
confirmation of his stricture in the essay on "Quota-
tion and Originality" on the innumerable parasites
who "take an extreme content in suction, which
constitutes the main business of their life."

But showers cannot storm down sober judgment.

Emerson is a sane modern. He is quite abreast of the
scientific movement of the day. He would find in
its latest revelations fresh ground for reverential
wonder at the prevalence of universal law and
fresh justification for his faith in universal order.
In a world which has been rearoused to the honest
doubt that leads toward truth it is inevitable that
there should be a fresh resorting to the man who
said, "No facts to me are sacred; none are profane;
I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past
at my back. . . . Nothing is secure but life, transi-
tion, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by
oath or covenant against a higher love. No truth so
sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light
of new thoughts. People wish to be setested; only so
far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."

Nephews of Uncle Remus

By Wallace Thurman

It is too bad that negro literature and literary
material have had to be exploited by fad finders
and sentimentalists. Too bad that the ballyhoo
brigade which fostered the so-called negro art
"renaissance" has chosen to cheer and encourage
indiscriminately anything which claims a negroid
ancestry or kinship. For as the overfed child gags
when forced to swallow an extra spoonful of half-
sour milk, so will the gullible American public gag
when too much of this fervid fetish known as negro
art is shôveled into its gaping minds and mouths,
and the Afro-American artist will find himself as
unchampioned and as unimpressive as he was before
Carl Van Vechten commenced caroling of his
charms in *Vanity Fair*, and the *Survey Graphic* dis-
covered the "new negro" in 1924. Less so; for even
in the prerenissance days any negro who achieved
something in literature was regarded with wonder-
ment even by the emancipated white intellectuals.
But now so many negroes have written a book or a
story or a poem that the pale-faced public is no
longer astonished by such phenomena.

There has, of course, been some compensation.
Negroes have become more articulate and more
coherent in their cries for social justice, and they
have also begun to appreciate the advantages
of racial solidarity and
individual achievement.
But speaking purely of
the arts, the results of the
renaissance have been sad
rather than satisfactory,
in that critical standards
have been ignored, and the
measure of achievement

has been racial rather than literary. This is supposed
to be valuable in a social way, for it is now current
that the works produced by negro artists will for
the clauses in a second emancipation proclamation
and that because of the negro artists and
works, the Afro-American will reap new fruit
freedom. But this will be true only inasmuch as
negro artist produces dignified and worth-
work. Quick, tricky, atmospheric bits will
ephemeral as they are sensational, and sentin
propaganda, unless presented in a style both
ous and new, will have the effect of bird shot
than that of shrapnel. Which is to say t'
negro will not be benefited by medioc
ephemeral works, even if they are hailed by
meaning, but for the moment, simple-minded
critics as works of genius.

There is a constant controversy being v
whether or not there can be in America
specifically known as negro literature
says yes, pointing out the fact that
herent differences between whites and
will cause the artistic works of the
to be distinctly different. The other
 tends that there can be no such thing as
an individual negro literature; that
American is d
from the white
can in only one
namely, skin
that when I
will obser
stylistic
literar*
Tt

A "dash of color" is so much the literary fad that
critics have become enthusiastic over negro writers out of
all proportion to their worth. Wallace Thurman, editor
of "Fire," a magazine devoted to negro art and litera-
ture, largely debunks this cult of the primitive spirit
introduced into American writing by colored authors,
and judges the negro's contribution by sober critical
standards and common sense

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seems to have the better of the argument. It is true that anthropologically the American negro is really no negro at all. He retains such an ethnological classification only because there seems to be nothing else to call him. There are probably no pure-blooded negroes in America. The present-day American colored man is, as the Anthropological Department of Columbia University has advanced, neither negro, Caucasian, nor Indian, but a combination of all three with the negroid characteristics tending to dominate. Furthermore, the American negro has absorbed all of the American white man's culture and cultural purtenances. He uses the same language, attends the same schools, reads the same newspapers and books, lives in the same kind of houses, wears the same kind of clothes, and is no more keenly attuned to the African jungle or any of its æsthetic traditions than the average American white man.

It is hard to see, then, that the negro in America can produce an individual literature. What he produces in the field of letters must be listed as American literature, just as the works of the Scotchman Burns or the Irishman Synge are listed as English literature. The negro author can, by writing of certain race characteristics and institutions, introduce a negro note into American literature, just as Yeats, Colum, A. E., Lady Gregory, and others introduced a Celtic note in English literature, but in America this can be done by a white writer as well as by a black one, and there is a possibility of its being done much better by the former, in that he may approach his material with a greater degree of objectivity. For example, no negro has written about his own people as beautifully or as sympathetically as has Du Bose Heyward, the author of "Porgy," purely because the negro writer, for the most part, has seen fit to view his own people as sociological problems rather than as human beings, and has written of little else save the constant racial struggle between whites and blacks. Consequently, he has limited himself and left a great deal of fresh vital material untouched.

IT was to be hoped that the renaissance would make the negro writer more aware of the value of the literary material provided by his own people. During this time, Du Bose Heyward wrote "Porgy," Julia Peterkin wrote "Green Thursday," and "Black April," but as yet no negro novelist has taken a hint from these white writers, let alone tried to surpass them.

The question arises: Must the negro author write entirely of his own people? So many of the young negro writers have asked this and then wailed that they did not wish to be known as negro artists, but as artists. They seemed to think that by writing of white people they could produce better work and have a less restricted field of endeavor. In trying

to escape from a condition their own mental attitude makes more harrowing they forget that every facet of life can be found among negroes, who, being human beings, have all the natural emotional and psychological reactions of other human beings. They live, die, hate, love, and procreate. They dance and sing, play and fight. And if art is the universal expressed in terms of the particular, there is, if he has the talent, just as much chance for the negro author to produce great literature by writing of his own people as if he were to write of Chinese or Laplanders. He will be labeled a negro artist, with the emphasis on the negro rather than on the artist, only as he fails to rise above the province of petty propaganda, or fails to find a means of escape from both himself and his environment.

THE pioneer work done by Jean Toomer in freeing himself from restrictive racial bonds and letting the artist in him take flight where it will, and the determination with which Langston Hughes went about depicting his people, their rhythms and institutions, make these two appear to be the most important literary figures the renaissance has produced. They, of all the young negro writers, have seemed to be the most objective and the most aware of the æsthetic value of literary material in their race. Their work is distinctive because it contains vestiges of that negro note which will characterize the literature produced by truly talented, sincere negro writers. Neither of them is worried by an inferiority complex which makes him wish to escape his race by not writing of it and at the same time binds him more tightly to the whipping post he would escape. The trouble with Mr. Toomer is that he has written too little. The trouble with Mr. Hughes is that he has written too much, in that he seems to lack, where his own work is concerned, that discriminating sense of selection which makes the complete artist as critical as he is creative. Urged on by a faddistic interest in the unusual, Mr. Hughes has been excessively prolific, and has exercised little restraint. The result is that his work is uneven to an alarming degree, and makes one fear that soon he will expend all of his spiritual energy in bubbling over in his adolescence rather than conserving himself until he matures. He needs to learn the use of the blue pencil and the waste-paper basket.

Eric Walrond can be classed with Mr. Toomer in that when writing of his own people he treats them objectively and as human beings. His "Tropic Death" was marred only by the writer's inability to master completely his style. He was attempting to forge a new method of expression, to escape, as Jean Toomer escaped, from the staid conventionality of stereotyped prose; and he succeeded to a degree that almost made one overlook those passages which were incoherent or tiresome. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that had his style been less esoteric or

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Vol. 119, No. 4034

more controlled, the subject matter would have been more effective; a large order when one remembers such stories as "The Vampire Bat" and "The Black Pin."

Rudolph Fisher has written one very good short story of negro life in Harlem, and a few more which, while vivid with local color, are weak in other respects. "The City of Refuge," which appeared in the *Atlantic Monthly* almost three years ago, and was later incorporated in "The New Negro," that handbook of the renaissance edited by Alain Locke, was one of the first short stories written by a negro about negroes which did not follow the conventional formula. It told the story of a Southern negro's coming to Harlem, the city of refuge, and of his struggles to adapt himself to a strange and complex environment. Here was drama of a new order, drama and color and life, a story as good as it was unusual. One waits expectantly for Mr. Fisher's first novel.

There are many more negro writers who could be discussed in detail if the space allowed. Zora Neale Hurston is a good story-teller, but an indifferent craftsman. Walter White and Jessie Fauset have produced nothing out of the ordinary, or very good. James Weldon Johnson belongs to the elder generation of negro writers, as his "Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man," recently reissued by Knopf, will prove. Despite Carl Van Vechten's enthusiastic introduction, there seems to be no real reason for reprinting this volume in the Blue Jade Library. It is well written, yes, and the author predicts the popularity of ragtime, but its content seems uninspired and stereotyped. Fifteen years ago it might have been a little more than just a well-written book; today it merely makes one wonder why the author didn't call it the autobiography of a colored man rather than that of an ex-colored man. Mr. Johnson's "God's Trombones" is of a different species. The majesty and eloquence of the sermon poems included therein, especially "Go Down Death," are searing and unforgettable. In these poems Mr. Johnson has been the artist rather than the propagandist, and "God's Trombones" will be remembered long after the "Autobiography" has been forgotten, even by sentimental white folk and Jeremiah-like negroes.

COUNTEE CULLEN has published three volumes, "Color," "Copper Sun," and "The Ballad of the Brown Girl," all of which tend to convince the critical investigator that although Mr. Cullen can say things beautifully and impressively, he really has nothing new to say, nor no new way in which to say it. He follows the tradition of a literary poet. His lyrics of love and death are reminiscent of Keats, Housman, and Edna Millay, and one gets the impression that Mr. Cullen writes not from his own experience, but from vicarious literary experiences which are not intense enough to be real and vital. His poetry is not an escape from life in the big sense,

but from the narrow world in which he has been caged, and from which he seems to have made no great effort to escape.

Undoubtedly Mr. Cullen has more talent than any of his colored contemporaries. What he lacks is originality of theme and treatment, and the contact with life necessary to have had actual, rather than vicarious, emotional experiences. He is still young, and perhaps when some of the fanfare aroused when it was discovered that a negro could write beautiful conventional verse has died down, he will be able to work out his own destiny. He has far to go if only he is given the chance and stimulation.

IN a recent issue of *Opportunity*, journal of negro life, there are reviews of two recent books. Both of the reviewers were white poets, both books were by negro poets. The first was of Countee Cullen's "Copper Sun," and in dithyrambic prose the reviewer went to every possible verbal excess in praising the volume. According to him Countee Cullen is *the* thing in American poetry—he equals Housman and surpasses Edna Millay. There is more such lyric nonsense, all done in good faith, no doubt, but of no value whatsoever either to Mr. Cullen or to the race to which he belongs. The second review, while less turgid and more restrained, was excessive in its praise of "God's Trombones," and in neither piece was there any constructive criticism or intelligent evaluation.

These two reviews are typical of the attitude of a certain class of white critics toward negro writers. Urged on by their desire to do what in their opinion is a "service," they dispense with all intelligence and let their sentimentality run riot. Fortunately, most of the younger negro writers realize this and, as most negroes have always done, are laughing up their sleeves at the antics of their nordic patronizers. It is almost a certainty that Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes know full well that there are perhaps a half dozen young white poets in these United States doing just as good if not better work than they, and who are not being acclaimed by the public or pursued by publishers purely because a dash of color is the style in literary circles today.

If the negro writer is to make any appreciable contribution to American literature it is necessary that he be considered as a sincere artist trying to do dignified work rather than as a highly trained dog doing trick dances in a public square. He is, after all, motivated and controlled by the same forces which motivate and control a white writer, and like him he will be mediocre or good, succeed or fail as his ability deserves. A man's complexion has little to do with his talent. He either has it or has it not, and despite the dictates of spiritually starved white sophisticates genius does not automatically descend upon one because one's grandmother happened to be sold down the river "befo' de wah."