Like a fresh boring through the rock and sand of racial misunderstanding and controversy, modern American art has tapped a living well-spring of beauty, and the gush of it opens up an immediate question as to the possible contribution of the soil and substance of Negro life and experience to American culture and the native materials of art. Are we ever to have more than the simple first products and ground flow of this well-spring, and the fitful spurt of its released natural energies, or is the wellhead to be drummed over and its resources conserved and refined to give us a sustained output of more mature products and by-products?
To produce these second-process products is the particular raison d’être of a school of Negro poets and artists, and what most of our younger school really mean by an “acceptance of race in art” is the consciousness of this as an artistic task and program. Its group momentum behind the individual talent is largely responsible, I think, for the sudden and brilliant results of our contemporary artistic revival. The art movement in this case happens to coincide with a social one—a period of new stirrings in the Negro mind and the dawning of new social objectives. Yet most Negro artists would repudiate their own art program if it were presented as a reformer’s duty or a prophet’s mission, and to the extent that they were true artists be quite justified. But there is an ethics of beauty itself; an urgency of the right creative moment. Race materials come to the Negro artist today as much through his being the child of his age as through his being the child of his race; it is primarily because Negro life is creatively flowing in American art at present that it is the business of the Negro artist to capitalize it in his work. The proof of this is the marked and unusually successful interest of the white writer and artist in Negro themes and materials, not to mention the vogue of Negro music and the conquest of the popular mind through the dance and the vaudeville stage. Indeed in work like that of Eugene O’Neill, Ridgely Torrence, and Paul Green in drama, that of Vachel Lindsay and a whole school of “jazz poets,” and that of Du Bose Heyward, Julia Peterkin, Carl Van Vechten, and others in fiction, the turbulent warm substance of Negro life seems to be broadening out in the main course of American literature like some distinctive literary Gulf Stream. From the Negro himself naturally we expect, however, the most complete and sustained effort and activity. But just as we are not to restrict the Negro artist to Negro themes except by his own artistic choice and preference, so we are glad that Negro life is an artistic province free to everyone.
The opening up and artistic development of Negro life has come about not only through collaboration but through a noteworthy, though unconscious, division of labor. White artists have taken, as might be expected, the descriptive approach and have opened up first the channels of drama and fiction. Negro artists, not merely because of their more intimate emotional touch but also because of temporary incapacity for the objective approach so requisite for successful drama and fiction, have been more effective in expressing Negro life in the more subjective terms of poetry and music. In both cases it has been the distinctive and novel appeal of the folk life and folk temperament that has first gained general acceptance and attention; so that we may warrantably say that there was a third factor in the equation most important of all—this folk tradition and temperament. Wherever Negro life colors art distinctively with its folk values we ought, I think, to credit it as a cultural influence, and as in the case of Uncle Remus, without discrediting the interpreter, emphasize nevertheless the racial contribution. Only as we do this can we see how constant and important a literary and artistic influence Negro life has exerted, and see that the recent developments are only the sudden deepening of an interest which has long been superficial. After generations of comic, sentimental, and genre interest in Negro life, American letters have at last dug down to richer treasure in social-document studies like “Birthright” and “Nigger,” to problem analysis like “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” to a studied but brilliant novel of manners like “Nigger Heaven,” and finally to pure tragedy like “Porgy” and “Abraham’s Bosom.” Negro intellectuals and reformers generally have complained of this artistically important development—some on the score of the defeatist trend of most of the themes, others because of a “peasant, low-life portrayal that misrepresents by omission the better elements of Negro life.” They mistake for color prejudice the contemporary love for strong local color, and for condescension the current interest in folk life. The younger Negro artists as modernists have the same slant and interest, as is unmistakably shown by Jean Toomer’s “Cane,” Eric Walrond’s “Tropic Death,” Rudolph Fisher’s and Claude McKay’s pungent stories of Harlem, and the group trend of Fire, a quarterly recently brought out to be “devoted to younger Negro artists.”
These critics further forget how protectively closed the upper levels of Negro society have been, and how stiffly posed they still are before the sociologist’s camera. Any artist would turn his back. But in the present fiction of the easily accessible life of the many, the few will eventually find that power of objective approach and self-criticism without which a future school of urbane fiction of Negro life cannot arise. Under these circumstances the life of our middle and upper classes is reserved for later self-expression, toward which Jessie Fauset’s “There Is Confusion,” Walter White’s “Flight,” and James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” are tentative thrusts. Meantime, to develop the technique of objective control, the younger Negro school has almost consciously emphasized three things: realistic fiction, the folk play, and type analysis, and their maturing power in the folk play, the short story, and the genre novel promises much for the future.
Though Negro genius does not yet move with full power and freedom in the domain of the novel and the drama, in the emotional mediums of poetry and music it has already attained self-mastery and distinguished expression. It is the popular opinion that Negro expression has always flowed freely in these channels. On the contrary, only recently have our serious artists accepted the folk music and poetry as an artistic heritage to be used for further development, and it is not quite a decade since James Weldon Johnson’s “Creation” closed the feud between the “dialect” and the “academic” poets with the brilliant formula of emancipation from dialect plus the cultivation of racial idiom in imagery and symbolism. Since then a marvelous succession of poets, in a poetry of ever deepening lyric swing and power, have carried our expression in this form far beyond the mid ranks of minor poetry. In less than half a generation we have passed from poetized propaganda and didactic sentiment to truly spontaneous and relaxed lyricism. Fifteen years ago a Negro poet wrote:
The golden lyre’s delights bring little grace,
To bless the singer of a lowly race,
But I shall dig me deeper to the gold—
So men shall know me, and remember long
Nor my dark face dishonor any song.
It was a day of apostrophes and rhetorical assertions; Africa and the race were lauded in collective singulars of “thee’s” and “thou’s.” Contrast the emotional self-assurance of contemporary Negro moods in Cullen’s
Her walk is like the replica
Of some barbaric dance,
Wherewith the soul of Africa
Is winged with arrogance
and the quiet espousal of race in these lines of Hughes
Dream singers,
Story tellers,
Dancers,
Loud laughers in the hands of Fate,
My people.
It is a curious thing—it is also a fortunate thing—that the movement of Negro art toward racialism has been so similar to that of American art at large in search of its national soul. Padraic Colum’s brilliant description of the national situation runs thus: “Her nationality has been a political one, it is now becoming an intellectual one.” We might paraphrase this for the Negro and say: His racialism used to be rhetorical, now it is emotional; formerly he sang about his race, now we hear race in his singing.
Happily out of this parallelism much intuitive understanding has come, for the cultural rapprochement of the races in and through art has not been founded on sentiment but upon common interests. The modern recoil from the machine has deepened the appreciation of hitherto despised qualities in the Negro temperament, its hedonism, its nonchalance, its spontaneity; the reaction against over-sophistication has opened our eyes to the values of the primitive and the importance of the man of emotions and untarnished instincts; and finally the revolt against conventionality, against Puritanism, has fought a strong ally in the half-submerged paganism of the Negro. With this established reciprocity, there is every reason for the Negro artist to be more of a modernist than, on the average, he yet is, but with each younger artistic generation the alignment with modernism becomes closer. The Negro schools have as yet no formulated aesthetic, but they will more and more profess the new realism, the new paganism, and the new vitalism of contemporary art. Especially in the rediscovery of the senses and the instincts, and in the equally important movement for re-rooting art in the soil of everyday life and emotion, Negro elements, culturally transplanted, have, I think, an important contribution to make to the working out of our national culture.
For the present, Negro art advance has one foot on its own original soil and one foot on borrowed ground. If it is allowed to make its national contribution, as it should, there is no anomaly in the situation but instead an advantage. It holds for the moment its racialism in solution, ready to pour it into the mainstream if the cultural forces gravitate that way. Eventually, either as a stream or as a separate body, it must find free outlet for its increasing creative energy. By virtue of the concentration of its elements, it seems to me to have greater potentialities than almost any other single contemporary group expression. Negro artists have made a creditable showing, but after all it is the artistic resources of Negro life and experience that give this statement force.
It was once thought that the Negro was a fine minstrel and could be a fair troubadour, but certainly no poet or finished artist. Now that he is, another reservation is supposed to be made. Can he be the commentator, the analyst, the critic? The answer is in process, as we may have shown. The younger Negro expects to attain that mastery of all the estates of art, especially the provinces of social description and criticism, that admittedly mark seasoned cultural maturity rather than flashy adolescence. Self-criticism will put the Negro artist in a position to make a unique contribution in the portrayal of American life, for his own life situations penetrate to the deepest complications possible in our society. Comedy, tragedy, satire of the first order are wrapped up in the race problem, if we can only untie the psychological knot and take off the somber Sociological wrappings.
Always I think, or rather hope, the later art of the Negro will be true to original qualities of the folk temperament, though it may not perpetuate them in readily recognizable form. For the folk temperament raised to the levels of conscious art promises more originality and beauty than any assumed or imitated class or national or clique psychology available. Already our writers have renewed the race temperament (to the extent there is such a thing) by finding a new pride in it, by stripping it of caricaturish stereotypes, and by partially compensating its acquired inferiority complexes. It stands today, one would say, in the position of the German temperament in Herder’s day. There is only one way for it to get any further—to find genius of the first order to give it final definiteness of outline and animate it with creative universality. A few very precious spiritual gifts await this releasing touch, gifts of which we are barely aware—a technique of mass emotion in the arts, a mysticism that is not ascetic and of the cloister, a realism that is not sordid but shot through with homely, appropriate poetry. One wonders if in these sublimated and precious things anyone but the critic with a half-century’s focus will recognize the folk temperament that is familiar today for its irresistibly sensuous, spontaneously emotional, affably democratic and naive spirit. Scarcely. But that is the full promise of Negro art as inner vision sees it. That inner vision cannot be doubted or denied for a group temperament that, instead of souring under oppression and becoming materialistic and sordid under poverty, has almost invariably been able to give America honey for gall and create beauty out of the ashes.