Authors, Writers, Poets and the Fine Arts
An investment in brains has always been regarded as the most productive in profitable returns. It is becoming the fixed opinion, based upon ages of experience, that the uplift of the world, the advancement of people and their progress can be accomplished by brains only.
War and its desolations, its ravages, rapine, and cruelties, have for a time swayed and dominated various parts of the earth, but, it must be considered that violence is the mere handmaid to an uplift by intellectual effort. War prepares the way for intellect and secures it an opportunity to be made manifest without molestation.
If we refer to the “Catalogue des manuscripts Ethiopiens,” already mentioned, we shall find a most amazing condition of intellectual development among the ancient Ethiopians. It was this intellectual condition that made its impress upon Egypt, and the other nations of Europe and Asia, because the Ethiopians were not a conquering race by force of arms, except so far as it was necessary to protect themselves against attack.
If we turn to their descendants—our Colored Americans—we find the same intellectual efforts resumed and progress going on in a marked degree under favorable circumstances and highly civilized and free conditions and environments. The same talent and genius that sculptured the exquisite Ethiopian bronze statuary recently discovered in The Soudan, carved the beautiful designs on Egyptian monuments, traced the architecture of noble palaces and immortal buildings, still traceable in ruins more than three thousand years old, and other evidences of art, is manifesting itself at the present day among our Colored Americans and other descendants in foreign countries.
Consider Lethierre, once president of the School of Fine Arts at Rome, within our present generation, and view his paintings that now adorn the walls of the Louvre in Paris.
We should not omit Edmonia Lewis, the sculptress, whose admirable works required a residence in Rome, nor Henry Owassa Tanner, the eminent artist, whose gems of art are represented in the fine art museums of the world. There are numerous others but these are given to emphasize the point of present Ethiopian intellectual ability.
Among writers were Alexander Poushkin, the celebrated Russian poet. He was a Negro with curly hair and a black complexion, but a man of extraordinary talent and versatility, in prose fiction, and history as well as poetry.
Jose Maria Heredia, the greatest of Spanish-American poets, was a Colored man, likewise the poet Placidio.
We can not forget Paul de Cassagnac, of France, editor, author and poet, who was also a Colored man.
Dumas, the noted dramatic author and novelist, was a colored man, and a most prolific popular author, poet, dramatist, novelist and essayist. That great production “Camille” is familiar to all theater-goers in the world, and when a man rises and says: “The world is mine,” he uses the language of Dumas’ Monte Christo, a world-wide novel that has been translated in all languages and performed on every stage.
We might go on for pages and refer to the Ethiopian intellect as something almost dominant in the world of letters in foreign countries, but must refer to our own Colored Americans as this work concerns them particularly.
We can claim as our own Williams, the historian, the first Colored American ever elected to the Ohio legislature, and at one time judge advocate of the G. A. R. of Ohio.
Phillis Wheatley, the girl who translated the Latin “Metamorphoses of Ovid” in Boston, which were republished in England as standard. Under the most distressing and adverse circumstances Phillis Wheatley became a scholar and a poetess of distinction and the associate of culture and refinement in Boston.
Paul Laurence Dunbar may be held up to all as an example worth following as a man, a poet, a novelist, and a journalist. At the age of twenty-one years he published his first book, “Oak and Ivy,” and followed it with others that commanded the attention and received the encomiums of the literary world in the United States. His poetry appeals to the heart and the hearth, and the intensity of thought displayed in his numerous writings is relieved by humor and quaint philosophy. Dunbar is a triumphant and unerring demonstration of Ethiopian intellect.
James B. Corrothers, the poet and prose writer, is another illustration of the power of applied intellect. Corrothers will be always known for the high order as well as humor of his writings, in the United States and in England where his “Jim Crow” idea of Negro fun is still supreme. Of his “The Black Cat Club,” a prominent literary and critical magazine, says: “The Black Cat Club should be commemorated by cultivated people of color as a second Emancipation Day.”
Charles W. Chesnutt, lawyer, writer, editor, historian and novelist, easily stands as a standard to be looked up to by the members of his race.
Miss Inez C. Parker, whose flights of fancy evolved from the higher realms of thought, betray the poetic gift of her race to a singular degree of beauty. As a poetess and writer, her destiny in aiding the uplift of humanity and helping it toward the universal goal, is manifest in every outpouring of her genius.
These are only a few of many, the most prominent now before the world. There are many others coming on and they will soon appear to the astonished eyes and ears of the people who have no thought of the great future and destiny of the Colored Americans.