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."
The Bookman says of Mr. Dunbar:
"It is safe to assert that accepted as an Anglo-Saxon poet, he would
have received little or no consideration in a hurried weighing of the
mass of contemporary verse."
"But Mr. Dunbar, as his pleasing, manly, and not unrefined face shows,
is a poet of the African race; and this novel and suggestive fact at
once placed his work upon a peculiar footing of interest, of study,
and of appreciative welcome.
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