Early in 1905, Locke submitted two essays for that year’s Bowdoin Prize competition, “The Romantic Movement as Expressed by John Keats” and “The Prometheus Myth: A Study in Literary Tradition.” The Bowdoin was Harvard’s most prestigious prize for literary criticism, with an outside committee of distinguished critics who read the essays and generally awarded only one first prize to an undergraduate each year. Winning such a prize would not only enhance Locke’s reputation as a literary figure on Harvard’s campus but also ease his financial situation. The prize brought a cash award of $250, which he needed to pay his expenses that first year at Harvard when, without a scholarship, he barely scraped by. To improve his chances of success, Locke submitted two essays, perhaps hoping that if he did not win, he would at least catch the attention of the committee. But his written note to himself on the first one, “The Romantic Movement as Expressed by John Keats,” dated January 1905, suggests who he was becoming as a person.
I know and say now before I know definitely the Committee’s decision that I am confident no more thoughtful or literary essay has been entered in this contest. It is my best work and should rank with other best work, without apologizing for the comparison. Believe in yourself—in greek “That above all to thine own self be true” I have resolved not to worry or be discouraged over the outcome of this; and to go on proud and determined as ever. Correct and turn this in again next year. Good Luck: Alain Le Roy Locke. Student of Romanticism.1
Locke was becoming an intellectual, with a precocious but confident sense that he had something to say worth saying and that he was already an intellectual voice to be reckoned with. “The Romantic Movement as Expressed by John Keats,” an essay he had first written for Mr. Mearns, shows clearly that Locke already is thinking of himself as a cultural leader who someday would foment an American Renaissance.
Even at this very early period in his intellectual development, Locke’s key metaphor was that of renaissance. Romanticism, he argued, was a spiritual renaissance, and to fulfill its destiny, it had to react against the classical constraints of the eighteenth century and find its inspiration in an ancient golden age. For Locke that golden age is represented by classical Greek art as distilled through Keats’s poetry. “Keats was also consistently Grecian in his aesthetic doctrines. Beauty he regarded as the all-pervading spirit of the universe, and it was the true function of art, by substituting sympathy for analysis, to reveal the presence of this ideal of Beauty.” Keats represented the kind of poet Locke would later long for in the Harlem Renaissance, one who was “an example of a spiritual Renaissance taking place before our very eyes!”2 Locke’s essay on Keats suggests that his vision of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s found inspiration in his early reading of nineteenth-century Romanticism, whose golden age, he noted, was in fifth-century-b.c. Greece. Writing later about the Harlem Renaissance, he recalled the golden age of ninth-century West Africa.
But even as a mature critic, Locke’s model for a golden age in Africa was fundamentally “Grecian.” Having studied Greek literature and drama throughout his undergraduate years at Harvard, he clung to ancient Greece as a model of the perfect society, as a site of freedom, rather than the discipline that Irving Babbitt and other classicists located in Greece. He was also attracted to things Greek, because Greek love was a period metaphor for male homosexuality. In Locke’s vision of classical Greece men were enthralled with the pursuit of art and culture and with the pursuit of the love and affection of other men. He hinted at the double meaning of being “consistently Grecian” in his life when, in the following year, he wrote in his English 46 class notes that “Wendell says the lyric form of poetry is bound to vanish in translation. Wendell is a fool—(When I came to things Greek I met them as friends).”3 Not only were Greek poems his friends but also his friends were “Greek,” that is, men who shared in the pursuit of Greek love. Keats’s holistic approach to sentiment and passion reflected the entire range of human emotions, and Locke may have found his voice congenial. Locke’s affection for Keats and for the Romantic movement signaled that he wanted an African American renaissance that would be sufficiently creative and androgynous for both his aesthetic sense and his sexual orientation to be nurtured within it.
His second essay for the 1905 Bowdoin Prize competition revealed even more of the social role he was destined to perform. He had written “The Prometheus Myth: A Study in Literary Tradition” that spring (based on a one-page statement from his senior year at the School of Pedagogy), and it was an impressive study of why the myth had persisted throughout European history, because poets found Prometheus to be a powerful metaphor of cultural renewal. Prometheus, or the forethinker, was the supreme trickster of Greek mythology, who stole fire from the gods and delivered it (along with the knowledge and the art of how to use it) to mankind against Zeus’s will. In some versions of the myth, Prometheus is also the creator of mankind who tricks Zeus into giving humans the larger portion of meat sacrifices. Zeus punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock and sent an eagle to eat his liver, which grew back each evening. Prometheus remained chained and tormented for ages until Heracles released him. Aeschylus’s play Prometheus Bound made Prometheus a symbol of defiant humanity, especially meaningful for Romantics such as Percy Shelley, who wrote Prometheus Unbound in 1818, and Goethe, who began but never finished his play, Prometheus. Locke argued that the recurring popularity of this myth was because of the allegorical power of its narrative.
It was a story which in the course of time became explanatory for generations that had forgotten the actual origin of fire. [And] when it takes its place in the literature that is born of civilization, when under that universalized conception fire becomes a utility, a means to a higher end of organic life, what was an explanatory narrative becomes interpretive of a universal truth, becomes, in a word, symbolic. Out of a folk-tale, a myth is born, the Prometheus that was the cunning, successful thief or the chance discoverer is now a demi-god. Not as the product of centuries of idealizing hero-worship, however, but rather [he is] deified by his own symbolic significance when once his race has reached that state and ideal of civilization which makes literature possible.4
Locke is drawn to this myth because it symbolized a powerful interpretation of his emerging role—to be the thief who stole the tools of European culture to liberate a darker humanity. He noted that Aeschylus had assigned “civilization making” to Prometheus and thus the “chaining of Prometheus, is the crucifixion of civilization.” Perhaps Locke could be the modern Black Prometheus who brought “civilization” to the Black population. The play “Prometheus Bound … [was] … the dramatic self-conscious moment of Greek civilization.” His emergence as the modern Black Prometheus might be the “dramatic self-conscious moment” of African American civilization of the early twentieth century. But the punishment meted out to Prometheus also symbolized the sacrifice such a culture hero would have to make. In 1905, he was not ready to make it, to be “bound” to Black civilization and sacrifice his individual freedom, even though his essay showed he was toying with the possibility.
If Locke became a modern-day Promethean, one of the first things he would do would be to liberate Black thought from the twin myths of accommodationist economics or protest politics with a focus on the transformative effects of aesthetic knowledge. Like Shelley, Locke saw art as a subtle and more powerful source of reform that could begin a revolution by changing the hearts of the enlightened few. Shelley, Locke acknowledged in his essay, had brought the “political ideal of freedom into the play,” for Shelley had conceived of the story of Prometheus as a modern story of resistance to oppression and had made Prometheus’s rebellion the beginning of a chain of events that resulted in freedom and the fall of tyranny. By making the case for the role of myth in a people’s renewal, Locke wished to substitute literature, narrative, and myth for the sociological bias and the propensity to protest that dominated Black rhetoric of the early twentieth century. In the Prometheus myth, Locke seized upon a symbol of revolutionary freedom with a double message—one had to rebel against the gods, in this case perhaps White hegemony, but also bring a deeper knowledge to the oppressed, a knowledge based on spiritual transcendence that only art could reveal.
The Prometheus myth also attracted Locke because it symbolized his dilemma. On one hand, Prometheus was just what Locke was not—not the Christlike giver of knowledge to other men, who was bereft of all personal ambition and motivated by the noblest of motives. But on the other hand, Locke was drawn to the vocation of leadership and also sophisticated enough to realize he needed devotion to a larger cause to give his life spiritual meaning. How would he balance these conflicting moral duties—the duty to one’s people and the duty to oneself? The myth of Prometheus, and narratives of contemporary race service, provided such an idealized narrative of self-sacrifice and selflessness that Locke could live up to it. Yet Locke could not dismiss completely the argument of W. E. B. Du Bois that the raison d’être of the modern Black intellectual was to be an enlightening Talented Tenth, who used university knowledge to uplift the other nine-tenths. Could he accept such a role while preserving his individuality? Art advocacy might allow him to do that. But would he be accepted as a Black leader given his gay identity? What would his life mean if he completely abandoned such a responsibility? He did not know.
Locke may have been attracted to the Prometheus myth, finally, because Shelley’s version held out the possibility of a resolution of his dilemma. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound held out the possibility of forgiveness of one’s oppressors, for it was Prometheus’s forgiveness of Zeus that ultimately freed him. Perhaps Locke could forgive all those who seemed to impose their expectations of the Talented Tenth on him and others. Forgiveness might also have a larger work to do, for by advocating literature over politics as a race strategy, Locke continued in Shelley’s footsteps of suggesting that if one put aside one’s hate for one’s enemy and began to love oneself through aesthetic appreciation, that new consciousness could change the situation of Black people in America. But as Shelley’s preface to Prometheus Unbound states clearly, such forgiveness must involve no accommodation to absolute power. Here was Locke’s task—to create a basis for rapprochement between the races that avoided the accommodationism but allowed for forgiveness with dignity. Locke would have to learn to accept the rebelliousness of the Black community toward White hegemony while at the same time outlining a largely Christian—or later Baha’i—path of reconciliation. The Prometheus myth empowered Locke to believe that he could be the modern-day Prometheus if he could use aestheticism to create a new synthesis out of Black and White conflict in America.
Unfortunately for Locke, neither essay submitted in 1905 won the Bowdoin Prize. “The Romantic Movement as Expressed by John Keats” remained, in spite of Locke’s confident inscription, a rather youthful piece of literary criticism. His stilted language more often obfuscated than revealed his insights. “Prometheus” was much more sophisticated, but its abstract and complex argument about the function of myth in widely divergent societies was not well integrated with Locke’s rather cursory examination of the texts themselves. Of course, Locke was undaunted. He continued to submit essays for the Bowdoin competition, even revising “The Romantic Movement” and submitting it along with another essay in 1907. While the ostensible reason for such submissions was to win a prize, a more subtle kind of work was underway—to work out in his writings about European culture his relationship to the burning issues of his society.
The appeal of the myth of Prometheus led Locke to return to it in another essay, “Art as a Catharsis,” probably written in 1905 for Dr. Maynadier’s course on English Literature. Here, Locke defined the function of art in purely aesthetic terms and alluded to the personal considerations that underlay his reluctance to engage directly in the world of experience:
It is a very strange thing, I think, that the Aristotelian doctrine of Art as a catharsis of passion has not come into general acceptance until of late. It is passing strange that such a doctrine should have been forced upon us by the much-despised “decadents.” With what tragic and convincing irony do we hear it from those very men whose mistake it was to use their lives as a palette for mixing and experimenting with the color-combinations of literature and art. It is Oscar Wilde of all persons who seems fated to tell us “Don’t let us go to life for our fulfillment, for our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament.” It [Life] makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.5
That had certainly been true for Wilde, who was convicted of indecency and sodomy in 1895 and spent two years doing hard labor in prison. Yet even before this Wilde had preferred art to life, because of its “fine correspondence of form and spirit.” Locke interpreted Wilde’s legal and public censure as further confirmation of his mentor’s basic philosophy:
We must go to Art for everything because Art does not hurt us. The sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates, if I may quote once more from the great art-critic of the Greeks. It is through Art and through Art only, that we can realize our perfection; through Art, and through Art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.6
Only in the protected realm of art could the gay man be safe.
Yet as Wilde’s case suggested, even in art one must be careful. Here, Locke invoked the magic of art to communicate by transforming emotion—not its outpouring, but its “catharsis,” for such a cure “has been the immemorial custom of all artists, from the love-sick youth who cures himself with a sonnet-sequence to the genius who, possessed with the frenzy of inspiration, conquers the passion by imposing upon it the conventional forms of art-expression, and possesses that by which he was, a little while ago, possessed.”7 Since the romantic could not fulfill himself or herself in contemporary life, the cure was art that purified the soul. Goethe did it best, according to Locke, by healing himself so effectively that he never tired of calling art the sphere of man’s divinity. “In art man usurps the divine prerogative of creation, and Prometheus sits in his workshop, fashioning men and bidding defiance to life and its god.”8
Something of the loneliness and poignancy of Locke’s life comes through in that last line. At Harvard, he had models in Charles Eliot Norton, Barrett Wendell, and George Herbert Palmer of sympathetic fashioners of creative men. But the gay man of the early twentieth century had few safe alternatives to a career in art: the church had been one of the oldest institutions where gay men could feel a degree of safety and community, and Locke emphasized one of the most positive results of its enforcement of sexual sublimation in the Middle Ages when he noted that “the celibacy of the Catholic clergy and the monastic regime were largely responsible for medieval mysticism, with the incorruptible yet sensuous constructions of Paradise, and the sterile love for the Bride of Christ.”9 Here Locke hinted at a gay theory of art’s relationship to the emotions. Wilde, though himself married and the father of two children, had ventured something similar when he stated that the best works of art had been created by unmarried men. Prevented from finding true sexual fulfillment with the opposite sex (the theory went) homosexuals were more creative, the better artists for the sexual sacrifice abstinence imposed. The “catharsis of passion” had a specific meaning, therefore, for the cloistered gay artist: he became the artistic superior of the heterosexual because of the required suppression of sexuality. Art from such a perspective was a form of almost genetic compensation.
Locke outlined a gay tradition of “cathartic” expression whose long history stretched from the time of Aristotle through the Middle Ages to the modern Oscar Wilde. By commenting on Wilde’s “mistake,” Locke also acknowledged that such “catharsis” was sometimes a difficult act to pull off. Obviously, Wilde had not been satisfied with artistic sublimation, but had practically lived openly as a gay man. Here then was a warning for Locke: stay in the cathartic tradition or hazard the consequences of “mixing and experimenting with the color-combinations of literature and art.” Art was a way to cloak his homosexuality and to absorb his sexual feelings, or else there was the real possibility of censure, arrest, and persecution.
Being gay, therefore, meant that Locke not only possessed a “second sight” on the hypocrisies of a heterosexual bourgeois society but also that his outsider position left him vulnerable. There were limits to how much he felt he could rebel against such a society without being exposed. Wilde had been targeted as much for his scathing criticisms of bourgeois British society as for his sexual orientation. While art was one of the realms in advanced industrial societies where criticism of the society was tolerated, even encouraged, one could go too far. Such British aesthetes as Ruskin and Pater had gotten away with criticizing English industrialism for its increasing division of labor and oppression of workers, but Wilde’s sweeping criticisms of the essential bankruptcy of English bourgeois life had cost him his freedom. The closeted dandy critic was much more vulnerable than the aesthete. Why not then, Locke seemed to argue, keep things on the level of art—and disguise one’s homosexuality and critique with a cloak of art, and live to write another day.
Spiritual values—Locke’s “ideal of spiritual beauty”—was much safer as a pivot of critique of advanced industrial societies than its moral hypocrisies. After all, even the English bourgeoisie bemoaned the way industrialization had pushed spirituality out of everyday life. Yet Locke remained tempted to go beyond such timid indictments to wrestle with the larger threats to modern humanity. At the School of Pedagogy, Locke had already begun to write criticism of the millionaires who dominated the Gilded Age and to suggest, as he did in one essay, that philanthropy was little more than raking out the money rapacious capitalists had raked in. But Locke knew that being Black and gay, plus a public critic, would be too much: his downfall would be almost certain in early twentieth-century America if he cast himself as the Black Oscar Wilde. Better to be timid in public criticism than to skewer American hypocrisies and be locked up for it.
To avoid outing himself as a critic, Locke tended to wrap himself in the protective blanket of tradition whenever possible. Art was his way to transform the particularities of his Black or gay experience into a form that would have universal appeal. He liked that strategy too because it contained a creative challenge—to bond the individual with the tradition in such a way that new forms and new configurations emerged. That was what an artist did, as the Prometheus essay had shown, for the tradition ultimately judged the rebel in terms of whether the tradition advanced or retrogressed due to the quality of the contribution an artist made. Even rebellion signaled that the artist, no less than the revolutionary, was devoted to something outside of the self, to a tradition of expression or activism that was enhanced by the rebellion. The archive of these many separate acts of rebellion and genius was the tradition—Culture, as Matthew Arnold had put it, “the best that has been thought and known.” Although Locke may have learned this specific definition of culture from Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, he had actually imbibed the essence of Arnold’s notion from a Philadelphia upbringing that taught educated bourgeois Negroes that Culture was universal, the antidote to nationalism and, by extension, racism.10
In the fall of 1906, Locke would be challenged to think differently about this universal notion of culture and its relevance to subjectivity in Barrett Wendell’s course “Literary Origins of English Literature.” Before Wendell, Locke had adhered to a notion of culture that was close to that expressed later by T. S. Eliot, his Harvard classmate, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: cultural tradition was that “ideal order of monuments,” against which, and among which, any new work of art must be judged. Although that tradition was largely the canon of Western culture, Eliot claimed it was a universal tradition and Locke agreed. But in his second year at Harvard, at age twenty, he was challenged to place his universal notion in a historical context by Wendell. Wendell argued that all culture was national, that universalism was a myth, and that cultures were most vital when they remained on their native grounds, and works of art, written by native authors, remained in their native language and were read by their own people. This nationalism both challenged and disturbed Locke, and he struggled with it throughout this year-long course. But at the end of the course under Wendell’s influence, Locke began to synthesize his universal notions and Wendell’s more nationalistic conceptions of cultural production and see the potential of artists being both representatives of a transnational movement, such as Romanticism, and a national Zeitgeist such as Negro American culture.
The intellectual process would not be easy. Fortunately for Locke, his close friend Dickerman took the course with him, and they debated Wendell’s lectures and theories in the hallways, at dinner in Memorial Hall, and on their long Sunday walks in the countryside. Dickerman, already enthusiastic about Celtic literature, the Irish Renaissance, and literary nationalism, sympathized more with Wendell’s ideas than Locke. Plus, Wendell’s mystical view of literature was congenial to Dickerman’s, infatuated as he was with gypsies and transcendental meditation. Locke, on the other hand, seems to have had difficulty completely embracing Wendell’s nationalism. While writing his thesis for Wendell in the spring of 1906, Locke had to get his deadline for submitting his paper extended twice. He also got help from Dickerman while writing it. But Locke’s struggle with the paper and the two notions of tradition were not in vain: when he finally turned in the essay in May 1906, he had produced a lucidly written essay on the representative poet in dialogue with tradition, titled “Tennyson and His Literary Heritage.” His achievement was recognized. Locke received an A for the paper and an A in the course, scoring higher than Dickerman. Wendell even acknowledged Locke’s paper before the class. One year later the revised, forty-two-page version of this critical essay won him the Bowdoin Prize. When examined by an outside committee of Edwin H. Abbot, Albert Matthews, and Paul E. More, the editor of the Nation, it was judged the outstanding essay out of the nine submitted. “We all agree in awarding the full First Prize to ‘Tennyson and his Literary Heritage,’ signed ‘Arthur King.’ ” The committee went on to declare that “we are surprised by the maturity of mind shown in the three critical [winning] papers,” but found “that each of the Committee, before consultation, had marked the piece on Tennyson for the First Prize.”11
“Tennyson and His Literary Heritage” was the intellectual tour de force of Locke’s undergraduate years at Harvard. Unlike his earlier submissions, this essay combined a sustained and comprehensive mastery of several of the poet’s major works with an eloquent argument for the importance of tradition to any understanding of Tennyson’s significance. Locke mounted a masterful defense of Tennyson by arguing that he had to be seen as an eclectic poet of the tradition, who excavated the entire European tradition of metaphors, allusions, and tropes to create poetry representative of the eclectic late Victorian age. “Of all the English poets, [Tennyson] was most conscious of his literary heritage as a craft tradition” and the most “complete exponent in recent English poetry of the conscious use of literary tradition.”12 This was important, because “Renaissance and decadence in literature are essentially the results of the revival and decay of literary tradition.” Locke followed up this introduction with a detailed examination of all of the traditions, from the Greek to the English Romantic, which Tennyson had mined to create his most memorable poems. In doing so, Locke showed that Tennyson operated as the poetic mouthpiece not only of the British heritage but also the Western tradition, a synthesis of both his and Wendell’s views.
For a Victorian like Tennyson, Locke realized, no conflict existed between the Wendellian notion of tradition as national loyalty and Arnold’s more universal conception of tradition as the “best that has been thought and known.” In the nineteenth century, from the English point of view, the best that had been produced was English, and the racial and nationalist character of that literary sensibility was evident in Tennyson. For Tennyson, “literary tradition … was an expression of a race-experience, of permanent value in itself as a contribution to art.” But that loyalty to a “race-experience” did not prevent Tennyson from appropriating European poetry that had been created by other national groups:
The Emersonian doctrine of history was literally true for him; for he too was “owner of the sphere, of the seven stars, and the polar year.” Not only would he have subscribed to Emerson[’]s dictum that “he who is admitted to the right of reason, is a freeman of the whole estate” of the tradition of civilization, but would no doubt have claimed that he who is of the apostolic succession of the poets is lord and master, custodian of it all. Tennyson, then, was a true eclectic: truth, for him, was not relative and progressive as it was with Browning, but absolute and accumulative.13
Like many Victorians, Tennyson saw English culture as the culmination of all European history and himself as the “custodian of it all.” That sense of entitlement was buttressed by Tennyson’s belief in Darwinism: he saw his poetry as the result of thousands of years of cultural evolution that culminated in contemporary British poetry. That evolutionary view was so widespread in nineteenth-century British culture that even Oscar Wilde echoed it in his essay “The Critic as Artist.” “It seems to me,” Locke quoted Wilde as stating, “that with the development of the critical spirit, we shall be able to realize not merely our own lives, but the collective life of the race, and so make ourselves absolutely modern in the true meaning of the word modernity. To realize the 19th Century, one must realize every century that has preceded it, and that has contributed to its making.” Locke observed that “this is Darwinism in literature: and Tennyson and Browning are its prophets.” Even such modernists as Eliot reflected this English approach to universalism when he described the “ideal order” of artistic “monuments” as “the form of European, of English literature.”14 Even more for Victorians like Tennyson, who wrote in the heyday of British imperialism, English values were the best and most universal of values. That tradition, needless to say, rated non-English traditions inferior; but Locke did not seem concerned with that in this essay.
For Locke’s essay was completely free of any criticism of Tennyson, his poetry, or his Darwinian conception of literary tradition. Perhaps that is because Locke was less interested in Tennyson as a poet than in Tennyson as a translator of tradition for a modern audience. Perhaps Locke felt that once that was established as a right of the poet, other traditions could find poets that would follow suit. For what Locke finds interesting in Tennyson is a model for what follows later in the Harlem Renaissance—that by being racial or national, a poet does not necessarily forfeit the right to be universal. Locke seems already to be laying the intellectual groundwork for a Black approach to tradition that would be as catholic and as universal as Tennyson’s, yet represent alternatives to the European tradition. Indeed, Locke may have liked that the English could assert their national culture as a universal tradition, something he would urge Black poets to do in the 1920s, even as it served as a mouthpiece for the Negro American. The essay on Tennyson tended to resolve what was a psychological dilemma for Locke—how to be both a Negro and a Euro-American into a racially loyal cosmopolitan. One did it by being both loyal to one’s own tradition, Tennyson seemed to be saying, and yet also seeing oneself as “the freeman of the entire estate.”
Of course, from another point of view, Tennyson’s eclecticism could be seen as a form of cultural colonialism, selectively raiding non-English traditions for the emotional sources it needed to create modern poetry. In a section of his essay obviously indebted to Dickerman, Locke argued that Tennyson’s inspiration for his Idylls of the King came from the romantic Celtic tradition. Locke, however, welcomed such developments, because although Tennyson used the material solely for its poetic possibilities, he also legitimated the Celtic heritage as worthy of serious poetic treatment, thus lending credence to the Irish Renaissance movement of W. B. Yeats and others, who wished to create a modernist poetry out of Celtic origins.
Suddenly, the whole praxis of late nineteenth-century English literary culture opened up for Locke and revealed it could be turned on its head. In his notebook for Wendell’s class, Locke wrote that “Europe and Asia [have interacted] 3 great times in Greece & Persia & Christianity versus Islamism. (Modify our civilization again (Yes-let it come) Japanese have undone Marathon.” And then later, “Buddhistic conception of literature and religion (Dick and I).” Japanese and Irish traditions had been raided by the English, but also they had subtly influenced English and universal culture as a consequence. Eclecticism, really theft, contained the possibility of transforming the Grand Tradition. Eliot would also seek to expand the European sensibility through the modernistic inclusion of Eastern influences. But whereas Eliot’s (and Pound’s) notion of modernism remained European, with only a spattering of Eastern elements that fit the ascetic modernist temperament, Locke had something else in mind—the transformation of the Grand Narrative by the raided traditions. Indeed, Locke’s modernist reading of Tennyson suggested the attraction of alternative cultural imaginations for the West: European poets had turned to peoples bypassed or ignored by European modernization—the Irish, Japanese, and later the African American—as sources of inspiration because rapacious imperialism and materialism had left the West spiritually bankrupt.
If the Black tradition could generate a Tennyson who could make visible the universal nature of the Black tradition, something like the Irish Renaissance that Dickerman talked of incessantly might come to Black America. It is not surprising, therefore, that at the same time that Locke was working out his ideas about tradition in his Tennyson essay, he completed another essay on Paul Laurence Dunbar, dashed off initially just after his death on February 9, 1906, that explored these issues in terms of a Black American poet. After learning of Dunbar’s death, Locke wrote and asked his mother to clip all of the obituaries of Dunbar she could find, dashed off his essay on Dunbar, and then quickly sent it off to a national literary magazine. Unfortunately, it was not accepted for publication. Nevertheless, Locke delivered a revised version of the Dunbar essay as a lecture on February 9, 1907, on the first anniversary of the poet’s death, to the African American audience of the Cambridge Lyceum, organized at the Rush Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Cambridgeport. The 1907 version of the essay has survived and shows that Locke adapted the essay to his audience: it is definitely a “preacherly text,” as literary historian Marcellus Blount would put it, with all of the rhetorical conventions—such as repetition of key phrases, pauses for emphasis—of the canonical African American sermon.15 Locke knew that an African American sermon form was the most appropriate for addressing the African American masses who assembled at the church. It is worth hearing briefly what Locke wrote to his mother about how it came to pass that he spoke to a Black church given his social distance from Blacks on campus.
I told you Xmas I think that Barber Rhoan had been anxious for me to come down and give them a little talk—I said yes expecting not to be bothered with it—but the other day the waiter at the table asked me if I was the Mr. Locke who was announced to speak next Wednesday. I went down to see the President of the concern—a pompous, ignorant black shyster lawyer and real estate man here in Cambridge. He walked up here he tells me from South Carolina you know the breed—I daresay—without further description. Well he would like to suggest my topic—I listened patiently while he got it out—I was to speak on Adversity or What makes a Race successful. Not if I can help it, thinks I to myself—you don’t make a fool of me. Of course he only suggested it but I could see he had made up his mind. I flattered and praised it, said I would take it, a wonderful subject and all that—but said perhaps it required some one of more commercial experience than I. Then I hit on the capital stroke of hinting that he was the only proper person to treat that subject adequately, and while the Nigger was unsuspiciously distending himself I suggested my subject and got it accepted—Well, what do you think my subject is? Its a shamefaced trick of making most out of what’s already at hand—the ministers’ trick of reading old sermons—I made up my mind to use poor Dunbar again. I almost said [it] to abuse him again. I shall have to doctor it up a bit. I took the subject purposely for if you take any controversial subject, the deacons and the parsons, and the ex deacons and sub deacons too get up, I hear, and challenge you to a debate, and haul you over the coals of their overheated imaginations. [James] Harley got into hot water—but I don’t think they’ll get me into any: for I don’t want to precipitate a riot at my first public appearance.16
This letter shows Locke’s movement in curves in the face of powerful people he dislikes but cannot chance to dismiss. Locke had met Mr. Rhoan, a Cambridge barber, shortly after arriving in Cambridge. Only later did he learn that Rhoan was one of the organizers of a lyceum, which like the Boston lyceums begun by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists, had the mission of being a forum for moral and intellectual uplift of the community. It also provided an arena for political debates on how to solve the “race problem,” a contentious issue in these days in Boston, as William Monroe Trotter, also a Harvard graduate, was challenging Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist approach to race relations in Trotter’s newspaper, The Guardian. Trotter and “his gang,” as the more conservative Locke called them, had already disrupted a 1903 public lecture by Booker T. Washington in Boston, and Locke’s audience at the Lyceum probably contained both Trotterites and Bookerites who would respond vigorously and publicly to any expressed preference for either leader’s philosophy of social change.
I think I’ll have an audience for the barber has been talking it for a week and the waiter says, “Oh, we’ll be dere.” I guess they will—and if I don’t succumb to the heat and the odor I guess I will be able to get through all right. … If I’m criticized I don’t care—and I think my barber will take it as a personal insult if anyone does criticize me, and as he is known as one who speaks his mind, I’ll leave it to him to defend my reputation. I’m not over afraid of my reputation anyhow, but I refuse to sell it outright by speaking of the “Uses of Adversity,” “Sweet are the uses of adversity” is the only sensible thing ever said on the subject and that’s quite poetical and indefinite enough to be non committal.17
Although Locke’s speech was adapted to his 1907 audience, the surviving core of the essay reflects his concern over the artist’s relation to tradition grappled with in his Tennyson essay written in the spring of 1906. In Locke’s opinion Dunbar, like Tennyson, was mainly valued because of his ability to make his tradition speak. Dunbar was a cultural hero because he refused to “sell his birthright” in order to be a successful man of literature. Unlike such other writers of African descent such as Alexandre Dumas, Alexander Pushkin, Jose Maria de Heredia, and reputedly Robert Browning, Dunbar had revealed his Negro identity in his verse and expressed the Negro mind in both dialect and standard verse. Dunbar had mined the rich “folk” lore of the masses and preserved a tradition in danger of being lost because the younger generation had all but abandoned it in its effort to distance itself from slavery. By contrast, Dunbar had embraced his race tradition and contributed something in the distinctive Negro tongue to the English language. For Locke, Dunbar was the first true “representative of the Afro-American” experience in literature.18
Here was the first public expression of an argument that Locke would reiterate dozens of times later—that the function of the Black artist was to mine the Black folk tradition and express it in literary form. The argument appears in something of a culturally accommodationist form—Blacks should develop the distinctive folk resources of their literature to pay back the civilization from which they have borrowed, proof that Locke was a conservative in thinking about the relations of minority to dominant discourses. But he was also already transposing the race question into one of cultural exchange: Blacks could pay back, because they had something of unquestioned value. Although he was refreshing an argument W. E. B. Du Bois had made in 1903 about the spirituals in Souls of Black Folk, Locke was expanding it into new territory by saying Black folk had a literacy that was a “permanent endowment of literature.” Locke was also adding another element: identity. It was important for the Negro writer to identify himself or herself as a “representative of the Afro-American experience,” because “the Negro must reveal himself if the true instincts and characteristics of the race are ever to find a place in literature.” To strengthen his case, Locke reached for the Irish analogy:
In Ireland now some of the greatest literary men of our time are hard at work, visiting the humble cabins of the Irish peasants collecting their folk tales, their stories, and writing them into literature. They realize nowadays that all literature, especially lyric and ballad poetry[,] is a nation or race product. And in the primitive emotions and traditions of the humble people men are today finding new material and new inspiration for literature.19
One can imagine more than a few eyebrows being raised in Locke’s audience in that Black church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at his comparison of the Negro literary situation to that of the Irish, the bane of the Black community’s existence in urban America, since the early nineteenth century in the many pogrom-like attacks on Black communities by Irish gangs and youths. But Locke was introducing something unique in “Afro-American” Studies, if you will, of the early twentieth century, a transnational perspective on the Negro in relation to the Irish in Ireland, and most important, suggesting that the Negro’s relation to American literary hegemony was analogous to the colonial relationship of the Irish to their oppressor, the English in England. Locke was suggesting that what would later be called the colonial relationship of Irish literacy—its indigenous language, its songs, and its stories—to the dominant English tradition of literature was akin to that of the Negro’s relationship to that same tradition. The Irish, he implied, were also looked down upon and dismissed by the English in England, but the Irish had used their native literacy to make an intervention in that discourse and make some of the finest literature in the English language. By doing so, they had vindicated themselves through literature, outside of the realm of political agitation, and made a glorious name for themselves. The Irish had been fighting for their freedom from English control for years, but of late had made a literary turn to vindicate themselves in literature. It had worked. And it would work for the Negro, Locke declared to his audience, and Dunbar was the first proof that it was working.
Perhaps the most striking notion in the lecture was his conception of race. By listing Browning, Pushkin, and Dumas as poets of African descent, Locke initially came dangerously close to the “one drop rule” of racial identity—that Europeans with minuscule amounts of African blood should be considered Negroes. But Locke’s speech ended on a much more advanced notion of Black identity—that Blackness or being “Afro-American” hinged more on identification with the people, by embodying their language in formal poetry, than on bloodlines or genealogical tracings. Blackness was, again, an act, a performative pragmatism—one was “Afro-American” by behaving, acknowledging oneself, as one.
If we are a race we must have a race tradition, and if we are to have a race tradition we must keep and cherish it as a priceless—yes as a holy thing—and above all not be ashamed to wear the badge of our tribe. And I do not refer so much to any outward manifestation or aggressiveness. I do not think we are Negroes because we are of varying degrees of black, brown and yellow, nor do I think it is because we do or should all act alike. We are a race because we have a common race tradition, and each man of us becomes such just in proportion as he recognizes, knows[,] and reverences that tradition.20
Despite the fact that Locke had not taken courses directly from William James, Locke displayed in his lecture on Dunbar a pragmatist conception of race, such that being a Negro was not based on color but on “reverencing,” “knowing,” and “recognizing” that he or she belongs to a tradition. In that sense, Locke had layered Royce’s notion of “loyalty” onto James’s pragmatism, such that to be Negro meant to not desert one’s “birthright,” a kind of cultural inheritance or history. Here was the first public statement of Locke’s mature conception of race, worked out in detail some eight years later before another audience of predominantly Black people at Howard, that race was in essence a historical phenomenon, not a biological or color-based one.
Just as striking was Locke’s conception of the Negro artist. In the first statement of a position he would maintain throughout his life, Locke argued here that what made Dunbar a Negro artist was not that he was of a certain skin tone, but that he embodied the Negro worldview in his art. The Negro artist, Locke argued, must “reveal himself” in literature and identify with the “Afro-American” tradition. As would become more important later, a tension or perhaps an irony existed in Locke declaring this, not only because his social praxis at Harvard involved so much running away from contact with other Black students but also because in his essay “Art as Catharsis,” he had seemed to argue that dissemination of one’s emotional connections in art was what made art great. Art was also a form of hiding, a translaton of something powerful, like love, into something subtle, like poetry. And from his reflections on Oscar Wilde, Locke seemed to imply that the survival of the gay artist required concealment through catharsis in art. But the Dunbar essay was a counter-statement delivered by one who was very much conflicted about practicing that in his own life racially and sexually. Locke praised Dunbar for his courage to do what other Black poets had not been able to do—“come out” as a Negro in the English language and express the mind of the Negro in the language of the Black masses.
In making the case for an “Afro-American” (a term he used in his essay) tradition in literature, Locke was actually articulating a new theory of literature. Locke argued that Dunbar had broken with the canonical Western tradition of the artist as individual genius to enable the experience, literacy, and mentalite of the Negro masses to “speak” in literature.
Now when Dunbar takes the crude thoughts of a negro farm and, and refines and expresses them so that they may in certain instances take their place in English literature, and take that place not only as a contribution but as a representation of the Negro, he has been of some service. … Dunbar is our first contribution, and however small in intrinsic worth he may be, however far down in the scale of literary values he may stand (and you must remember that that scale is set by such standards as Shakespeare and Milton) he is significant—very significant to us—for surely it is more blessed to give than to receive.21
That Locke could appreciate Dunbar as a “representative Negro poet” derived from the influence of his friend Dickerman, who had introduced Locke to the Irish literary revival and no doubt to W. B. Yeats, its transcendent poet and theorist. Yeats and other Irish intellectuals of the Irish League were planting libraries in reading communities across Ireland with books by Irish writers who expressed their love for the Irish people, the Irish landscape, the Irish way of life, in imaginative literature. Quite analogous to what Locke suggested at the Cambridge Lyceum, Yeats argued the people needed “imaginative” literature, not sociological or political treatises, to incite them to dream a new future for themselves based on their glorious past. Locke was speaking as the “Afro-American” Yeats when he suggested that the Negro artist who mattered embodied the Negro soul in his or her work, and Dunbar was the first to do that. It was better to give than receive, because in giving, contributing, innovating, the Negro changed the larger culture for everyone.22
In saying that Dunbar’s life’s work had meaning because he identified with the Black experience in his writing, Locke was also saying something in his first public lecture about his own future significance. Like Locke, Dunbar had been something of a conservative who had been labeled by some radicals as an accommodationist, partly because he recommended that Negroes remain in the South and partly because his dialect poems appeared to perpetuate the stereotypical “plantation” image of the American Negro. But Dunbar had also written poems that showed that he wore a racial mask and presented to White people only what he wanted Whites to see of the Negro. Those poems must have resonated with Locke, who must have known that Dunbar was a bitter man. In spite of the praise he had received for his dialect poetry from Boston Brahmin William Dean Howells, Dunbar harbored resentment that the only poetry of his that received extensive praise was his dialect poetry. Locke faced a similar predicament, despite his efforts to escape it: he would be valued in the future because of his identification of his intelligence with the Black culture cause. Like Dunbar, Locke was a reluctant representative of his people; but by identifying with the “Afro-American” experience, both were able to shape American culture in profound ways. But like Dunbar, Locke would have to will himself to be a Negro to secure his place in history, in spite of his persistent abhorrence and ambivalence about that road to power.
Unfortunately, at the first delivery of his Dunbar lecture, Locke had no real opportunity to judge its impact or reception. After walking from his room in Holyoke House to the Rush Memorial AME Zion Church in Cambridgeport in a blinding snowstorm that February evening, he was told by a sheepish lyceum chairman that few would be present at his lecture: a lantern slide lecture on the “Colored Man in Cambridge” had been scheduled at the church at the same time. To Locke’s chagrin, he was now robbed of an audience for his maiden voyage as a lecturer. He wrote his mother:
Humph thought I—I see where I come out at the small end of the hour. I can’t compete against moving pictures—Finally a baker’s dozen did arrive, and I read my paper, was thanked, and then tactfully suggested to avoid a debate which I suspicioned would follow that we all adjourn upstairs for the lecture. I had talked with the lecturer—a certain Virginia silver tongue, and knew what I must do to get rid of him. Says I, I will go right down and get mine over quickly so that people can come up to hear you. I was just slipping out the door folding up my manuscript and buttoning my coat when Heah yo brother—you surely aren’t going to leave us—Come up—so I came up. What else could I do[?] Well I sat it out—a horrible succession of negro pictures—you can imagine what they looked like—poor pictures made into poorer lantern slides—the lecturer asked me for my photo—of course I got out of it [—] be damned if Ill stand for that insult to my countenance—he intends to travel from church to church of course, etc.—you know the whole thing.23
After the lantern lecture, the director made Locke promise to return again in April when there would be no lack of audience for his lecture. Although Locke agreed to return, his mother advised otherwise: “I should not bother any more with those negroes,” she wrote back: “it is casting your pearls etc—you had better be in bed—than wasting your time with them.”24
But Locke honored his promise and on April 10, 1907, delivered the lecture again, this time to an overflowing audience.
By the way—I clean forgot to tell you about my speaking in meeting—I nearly forgot the appointment—but got out Dunbar Manuscript No. II and put it in my big coat pocket and went to dinner. Dap Pfromm asked where I was going, and when I told him he said he wanted to go along if he might—said he was going to be my biographer anyway—and he might as well be my manager too—So I took him along—and together we slopsed [sic] down to Cambridgeport—(the weather was terrible—slush, rain and snow combined) With difficulty we found the church—no lights lit and not a soul about. Just as we had made up our minds to beat it back home, de chairman came—Oh says he its only twenty minutes past eight—come right on up—We went up—he lit up the church and we sat down—”de audience be here all right—you just wait.” He had forgotten his gavel so made his apologies and went home for it—giving Dap and I a chance to let off steam in a good laugh and chat while he was gone. Well would you believe it—by 5 minutes to nine I had all the audience I wanted—75 or 80 people I guess—de meeting opened with hymns—during which Dap and I sang to keep from laughing, sang with might and main—then there was a “soprano solo”—killing—perfectly killing—and then the speaker of the evening was introduced—I read from the pulpit—and Dap swears I read very well—anyhow I galloped through in about 25 minutes—for Dap and I planned to get back to Cambridge in time for 10 o’clock tea. … After I had finished, the discussion followed—which was a combined eulogy of Dunbar and the speaker of the evening—First the chairman, then the minister, then a Cambridge school teacher Miss Lane—then Mr. Roan, my old barber, then the audience indiscriminately—it kept me getting up bowing and thanking them—adding a remark or two between the speeches till 11 o’clock when the meeting adjourned … they just uncorked the champayne [sic] of oratory, and I was soaked with all sorts of mixed metaphors, just anointed with the oil of flattery till the grease ran into my eyes.25
Of course, by April 1907, Locke had won the Rhodes Scholarship and become a celebrity. But he attributed the outpouring of sentiment to what he said: “The whole thing was I set them thinking and am very glad I said what I meant frankly—for instead of thinking it heretical they hailed it as a new revelation.” They were also intrigued by his White companion.
Dap was a great card for me—they were tickled to pieces to have me bring him and he was very cordial to them—but was as you might expect dazed and bewildered. Of course I took pains to tell him what type they represented. I am particularly glad to find that I could meet that class of people and handle them as a public audience without having to tody [sic] to them: and if this is typical of what I shall be able to do in the future I think I could handle the masses quite as effectively as Father—I was very surprised to hear them say to my face that they were proud I had condescended to come speak to them: it simply meant this—that you can come to them if you are tactful enough and yet not have to come as one of them. Educated colored men queer themselves with the masses by being condescending so that they resent the difference, or too familiar so that they forget it. I think I have discovered one great help in the matter of public speaking—I shall always have a white friend to accompany me—or if I ever lecture extensively I would have a white manager—it[’]s a capital stunt.26
Locke had brought Pfromm to the lecture, but it was Dickerman, likely Locke’s lover, by now, who was the unseen inspiration for Locke’s maiden public speech. Dickerman, along with Wendell, had supplied Locke with the conceptual frame to see Dunbar in a new way, especially Dickerman, for in introducing Locke to the Irish literary awakening, he enabled Locke to break with the Black Victorian dismissal of the crude lyrics of the people and Dunbar’s dialect poems, and see their larger significance. Locke’s literary awakening at Harvard had been fueled by twin forces that would continue to shape his intellectual growth in the future—transnationalism, the need to go away from his homeland in order to come back and appreciate it more deeply, and romantic attachment, often with superlative individuals, whose love and insight helped move him to higher states of understanding of himself.
Locke could become the Promethean Black leader who could “handle the masses quite as effectively as Father”—if he wanted to. Having spent his Harvard years immersed in the tradition of his mother, of art, literature, and the pursuit of cultivation, he seemed surprised in his last year at Harvard that he could be received cordially by the Black masses. Of course, so brief a foray into “the community” did not resolve his racial ambivalence. He still privately distanced himself from other Blacks while publicly embracing them on this occasion. But what was significant is that he had embraced them socially and intellectually by presenting a lecture that made demands on Black identity but also expressed a barely articulated love for them. They had loved in return, because, despite becoming a Rhodes Scholar, he had not forgotten where he came from.