The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar | Page 2

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.
W. D. HOWELLS.
INDEX OF TITLES
ABSENCE