Work forces Essay, Research Paper

MR. CHARLES W. CHESNUTT & # 8217 ; S STORIES.THE critical reader of the narrative called The Wife of his Youth, which appeared in these pages two old ages ago, must hold noticed uncommon traits in what was wholly a singular piece of work. The first was the freshness of the stuff ; for the author dealt non merely with people who were non white, but with people who were non black plenty to contrast monstrously with white people, & # 8212 ; who in fact were of that close attack to the ordinary American in race and colour which leaves, at the last grade, every one but the cognoscente in uncertainty whether they are Anglo-saxon or Anglo-African. Quite every bit dramatic as this freshness of the stuff was the writer & # 8217 ; s thorough command of it, and his inerrable cognition of the life he had chosen in its curious racial features. But above all, the narrative was noteworthy for the passionless handling of a stage of our common life which is tense with possible calamity ; for the attitude, about ironical, in which the creative person observes the drama of contending emotions in the play under his eyes ; and for his seemingly loath, seemingly incapacitated consent to allow the witness know his existent feeling in the affair. Any one accustomed to analyze methods in fiction, to separate between good and bad art, to experience the joy which the delicate accomplishment possible merely from a love of truth can give, must hold known a high pleasance in the quiet temperateness of the public presentation ; and such a reader would likely hold decided that the societal state of affairs in the piece was studied entirely from the exterior, by an perceiver with particular chances for cognizing it, who was, as it were, surprised into concluding understanding. Now, nevertheless, it is known that the writer of this narrative is of negro blood, & # 8212 ; diluted, so, in such step that if he did non acknowledge this descent few would conceive of it, but still rather of that in-between Page 700world which lies following, though entirely outside, our ain. Since his first narrative appeared he has contributed several others to these pages, and he now makes a demoing tangible to unfavorable judgment in a volume called The Wife of his Young person, and Other Narratives of the Color Line ; a volume of Southern studies called The Conjure Woman ; and a short life of Frederick Douglass, in the Beacon Series of lifes. The last is a simple, solid, consecutive piece of work, non singular above many other biographical surveies by people wholly white, and yet of import as the work of a adult male non wholly white treating of a great adult male of his unalienable race. But the volumes of fiction are singular above many, above most short narratives by people wholly white, and would be worthy of unusual notice if they were non the work of a adult male non wholly white. It is non from their racial involvement that we could foremost wish to talk of them, though that must hold a really great and really merely claim upon the critic. It is much more merely and straight, as plants of art, that they make their entreaty, and we must let the force of this quite independently of the other involvement. Yet it can non ever be allowed. There are times in each of the narratives of the first volume when the simpleness oversights, and the consequence is as of a weak and unenlightened touch. There are other times when the attitude, badly impartial and studiously distant, accuses itself of a small ostentation. There are still other times when the literature is a small excessively flowery for beauty, and the enunciation is journalistic, reporteristic. But it is right to add that these are the exceeding times, and that for far the greatest portion Mr. Chesnutt seems to cognize rather every bit good what he wants to make in a given instance as Maupassant, or Tourguenief, or Mr. James, or Miss Jewett, or Miss Wilkins, in other given instances, and has done it with an art of kindred quiet and force. He belongs, in other words, to the good school, the lone school, all aberrances from nature being so much hooky and lawlessness. He sees his people really clearly, really rightly, and he shows them as he sees them, go forthing the reader to divine the deepness of his feeling for them. He touches all the Michigans, and with equal daintiness in narratives of existent calamity and comedy and way

os, so that it would be difficult to state which is the finest in such laudably rendered effects as The Web of Circumstance, The Bouquet, and Uncle Wellington’s Wives. In some others the comedy degenerates into sarcasm, with a expression in the reader’s way which the author’s friend must deplore.

As these narratives are of our ain clip and state, and as there is non a daredevil of the 17th century, or a romanticist of this, or a princess of an fanciful land, in any of them, they will perchance non make half a million readers in six months, but in 12 months perchance more readers will retrieve them than if they had reached the half million. They are new and fresh and strong, as life ever is, and fable ne’er is ; and the narratives of The Conjure Woman have a wild, autochthonal poesy, the creative activity of sincere and original imaginativeness, which is imparted with a stamp jocoseness and a really artistic reserve. Equally far as his race is concerned, or his 16th portion of a race, it does non greatly matter whether Mr. Chesnutt invented their motivations, or found them, as he feigns, among his distant cousins of the Southern cabins. In either instance, the admiration of their beauty is the same ; and whatever is crude and silvan or campestral in the reader & # 8217 ; s bosom is touched by the enchantments thrown on the simple black lives in these enrapturing narratives. Character, the most cherished thing in fiction, is as dependably portrayed against the poetic background as in the scene of the Stories of the Color Line. Yet these narratives, after all, are Mr. Chesnutt & # 8217 ; s most of import work, whether we consider them simply as realistic fiction, apart from their writer, or as Page 701studies of that in-between universe of which he is of course and voluntarily a citizen. We had known the bottommost universe of the grotesque and amusing Black and the awful and tragic Black through the white perceiver on the exterior, and black character in its lyrical tempers we had known from such an inside informant as Mr. Paul Dunbar ; but it had remained for Mr. Chesnutt to introduce us with those parts where the paler shades dwell as hopelessly, with relation to ourselves, as the blackest Black. He has non shown the inhabitants at that place as really different from ourselves. They have within their ain circles the same societal aspirations and biass ; they intrigue and trundle bed and crawl, and are snobs, like ourselves, both of the prig that rebuff and the prig that are snubbed. We may take to believe them droll in their lampoon of pure white society, but possibly it would be wiser to acknowledge that they are like us because they are of our blood by more than a half, or three quarters, or nine ten percents. It is non, in such instances, their negro blood that characterizes them ; but it is their negro blood that excludes them, and that will imaginably strengthen them and laud them. Jump in that sad solidarity from which there is no hope of entryway into polite white society for them, they may make a civilisation of their ain, which need non miss the highest quality. They need non be ashamed of the race from which they have sprung, and whose expatriate they portion ; for in many of the humanistic disciplines it has already shown, during a individual coevals of freedom, gifts which slavery seemingly merely obscured. With Mr. Booker Washington the first American speechmaker of our clip, fresh upon the clip of Frederick Douglass ; with Mr. Dunbar among the truest of our poets ; with Mr. Tanner, a black American, among the lone three Americans from whom the Gallic authorities of all time bought a image, Mr. Chesnutt may good be willing to have his colour. But that is his personal matter. Our ain more cosmopolitan involvement in him arises from the more than promise he has given in a section of literature where Americans hold the first topographic point. In this there is, merrily, no colour line ; and if he has it in him to travel frontward on the manner which he has traced for himself, to be true to life as he has known it, to deny himself the glorifications of the cheap success which awaits the mountebank in fiction, one of the topographic points at the top is unfastened to him. He has sounded a fresh note, boldly, non blatantly, and he has won the ear of the more intelligent populace.