kin 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
liter