slavery element
in Uncle Tom and Dred stood in the way of a full appreciation, at least
in her own country, of the remarkable genius of Mrs. Stowe. Writing in
1859, he said, "From my habits and the tendency of my studies I cannot
help looking at things purely from an aesthetic point of view, and what
I valued in Uncle Tom was the genius, and not the moral." This had been
his impression when he read the book in Paris, long after the whirl of
excitement produced by its publication had subsided, and far removed by
distance from local influences. Subsequently, in a review, he wrote, "We
felt then, and we believe now, that the secret of Mrs. Stowe's power lay
in that same genius by which the great successes in creative literature
have always been achieved,--the genius that instinctively goes to the
organic elements of human nature, whether under a white skin or a black,
and which disregards as trivial the conventions and fictitious notions
which make so large a part both of our thinking and feeling.... The
creative faculty of Mrs. Stowe, like that of Cervantes in Don Quixote
and of Fielding in Joseph Andrews, overpowered the narrow specialty
of her design, and expanded a local and temporary theme with the
cosmopolitanism of genius."

A half-century is not much in the life of a people; it is in time an
inadequate test of the staying power of a book. Nothing is more futile
than prophecy on contemporary literary work. It is safe, however, to say
that Uncle Tom's Cabin has the fundamental qualities, the sure insight
into human nature, and the fidelity to the facts of its own time which
have from age to age preserved works of genius.

STRIVINGS OF THE NEGRO PEOPLE by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois

Berween me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:
unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the
difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or
compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel
to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town;
or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages
make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the
boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question,
How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,--pec