attack specific abuses, such as lynching, without prejudice to their feelings of national patriotism and without enmity toward the whites as a race. A very few of the best poets leave raceconsciousness out of their verse. There are, apparently, a few negro verse-writers, who like certain Irishmen, cherish their injuries as a most precious possession. Bitterness is the one commodity of which, in the words of Octavus Roy Cohen's heroes, they "ain't got nothin' else but." Others, unwilling to stimulate antagonism or to charge the white race with total responsibility for the negro's present position, are inclined to lay emphasis on the upbuilding of negro character rather than the radical reform of the white race. It is a noteworthy fact that those most capable of writing good poetry are with a very few exceptions the ones who exhibit least bitterness and most capacity for friendship with the whites and for realizing certain weaknesses in negro character. The most bitter poems are, in general, from the most ignorant pens. It is not without significance that S. A. Beadle acknowledges, superfluously, that he is an uneducated man, and complains that several educated negroes had declined to write an introduction for his volume. But the one fact that is plainly evident, whether their verses are characterized by bitterness and ignorance, or by intelligence and a sense of friendship for the white people, is that the negro poets have racial pride and sensitiveness and a conviction that their race has not been justly treated in the past and is not receiving justice today.

It might be possible to conclude too hastily that the poets express the exact sentiment of the negro race as a whole. The rank and file of negroes, like that of any other race, is inarticulate. If there is a deep-seated and really racial bitterness one might expect to find it expressed in the folk songs sung by the illiterate laborer, but these songs touch upon the race question very lightly. Such songs as,

"Ought's an ought, figger's a figger,

All for the white man, nothin' for the nigger,"

are surprisingly rare among the great volume of songs dealing with work, women, religion, and the material and trivial facts of life. The conservative and practical element of negro public opinion, represented by such men as Major Moton, cannot

be, from the nature of the case, as vociferous as the element represented by men who are filled with a sense of injury which they think can only be righted by forceful action; but it does not follow that the conservatives are less true to the sentiment of the inarticulate majority. Many of the more ignorant radicals, so far as the verse-writers are concerned, are obsessed with the subject of race because there are so few other possible subjects within their mental horizon. Tact, the quality most needed in the race problem, is no more to be expected from them than from the professional negro-haters in the white race. But the persistent strain of race-consciousness and discontent in negro verse from Wheatley to Corrothers cannot be explained away by making allowances. Pooh-poohing it on the ground that the negro, like the Irishman, dearly loves a grievance is adequate. The white race is in the position of the traveler in the fable, whose coat the wind and the sun both undertook to remove. The methods of both wind and sun are being advocated by negro poets, and the wind is undoubtedly making a considerable noise, but the sun, as in the fable, seems to represent the party of the greater intelligence.

Carlyle's Past and Present: A Prophecy

STANLEY T. WILLIAMS

Yale University

One day when Mr. Arthur Henderson was stating in no uncertain terms what would be acceptable to the British Labor Party, a member of the audience was moved to quote to his neighbor a sentence from Carlyle's Past and Present: "Some 'Chivalry of Labour,' some noble humanity and practical diveness of labor, will yet be realized on this earth." Recent strikes, then, had made the Labor Party "chivalrous," if not "divine;" the speaker's tone was that of complacence, of realized prophecy. "Chivalrous" and "divine" are not the adjectives applied by all men to the Labor Party; but every faction would admit one other epithet, that of powerful. Every history of industrialism, of socialism, or merely of political history indicates the growth of the Labor Party; its progress since 1843, the date of the appearance of Past and Present, has been almost incalculable. Curiously enough Carlyle's book ends with a section called Horoscope, a somewhat incoherent and passionate effort to read the future of labor in the light of the past and his own present-day England. Past and Present deals as much with the unknown future as with the known past. Carlyle dogmatizes on the twelfth century, but he speculates concerning the twentieth.

*

Horoscope is a protracted oracle. Carlyle was oppressed by the industrial tyranny of the forties; and he prophesied the eventual emancipation of the workingman. Nebulous, repetitive, and rhapsodical in style, even as the ancient Delphic oracles, Horoscope has, nevertheless, "blest islets of the intelligible" which are pertinent today. For example, "an actual industrial aristocracy, real not imaginary aristocracy, is indispensable and indubitable for us;" or "we shall again have * * * instead of mammon-feudalism and unsold cotton shirts and preservation of the game, noble just industrialism;" or "a question arises here: whether in some ulterior, perhaps some far distant stage of this 'Chivalry of Labour,' your masterworker may not find it possible, and needful, to grant his workers permanent interest in his enterprise and theirs?"

Past and Present abounds in such prevision. Carlyle's neology has become our terminology: "Cash-payment;" "gospel of mammonism;" "captains of industry." Though these phrases were created by Carlyle, they are now, as Mr. Frederick Harrison says, household words.

This aspect of Carlyle's genius is especially noticeable in Past and Present. It has been the cause of many references to him as a prophet, a seer, and a Jeremiah. But Mr. R. H. Hutton warns us against attributing to Carlyle a definite "message." Carlyle was, Mr. Hutton maintains, always negative; his thought centered upon the simulacra of his time; he was a specialist in the diseases of the commonwealth. This is certainly true. Carlyle was not a prophet either in the mystical sense-a Tiresias who saw truly but with "what labour oh, what pain!"-nor according to the modern notion of a prophet an inspired leader who bestows upon his people new philosophies. But Carlyle's imagination, flaming in a few fields of thought, in some ways illumined the future. Carlyle really foresaw the rise of the Labor Party, though, of course, he did not guess its extent. And Past and Present is an example of this power.

Past and Present is a piercing glance into the feudal age, and a no less acute critique upon contemporary England. The book is enriched by Carlyle's wisdom, and ennobled by his most eloquent and most untrammelled manner. Mr. John Morley, re-reading it in 1891, exclaimed: "What energy, what inexhaustible vigour, what incomparable humor, what substantial justice of insight, and what sublimity of phrase and image!" Of these qualities and of the high originality of design much has been written, yet in 1921 something yet remains to be said concerning the relation of Carlyle's present to our own.

A student of political history once told me that the social disorders of the thirties and forties had never seemed real to him until he read Past and Present. When Carlyle pushed across the table to his mother the manuscript of the French Revolution he cried: "Never has a book come more flamingly from the heart of a man." His comment might have included Past and Present. Yet, in spite of the apparently careless fervor of the book, the method used in its composition was that of the literary artist. Over the historian's account of the Manchester insur

rection we nod; over Carlyle's, even today, we instinctively clench our fists. For here "persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us." Manchester is become, derisively, "Peterloo." The riot becomes in Carlyle's pages a series of stirring images: "Woolwich grapeshot will sweep clear all the streets;" "there lie poor sallow work-worn weavers, and complain no more now." Tennyson hints mildly at some misery connected with "spirit, alum, and chalk;" Carlyle tells one unforgettable anecdote; that of the parents found guilty of poisoning three children to defraud a burial society of 38s, due upon the death of each child. This was a story likely to make some impression even upon the British Philistine; resignation to human suffering did not seem so easy; it seemed a parallel to Carlyle's relentless descriptions of the tanneries at Meudon with their human skins. Concrete, personal detail is characteristic of Carlyle's literary method in Past and Present.

Such detail is not always ghastly. To emphasize the talkiness of parliament Carlyle says much of "oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment;" to accentuate the sin of indifference he relates sardonically the history of the men of the dead sea, who "listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers." Past and Present is crammed with detail, yet the central purpose of the book is maintained; like a single strand strung with brilliant beads of allusion, of anecdote, of minute detail.

One phase of Carlyle's use of detail is imaginative allusion. As a reader Carlyle had despoiled all literature; he once boasted that while at Craigenputtock he had read everything; and Past and Present is a mosaic of allusion. Sometimes an allusionsuch as the Behemoth of Chaos-caps a sentence, and is not employed again. More often the illustration echoes through the book: "The day's wages of John Milton's day's work, named Paradise Lost and Milton's Works, were Ten Pounds, paid by installments, and a rather close escape upon the gallows." An ingenious variation is the use of a myth to point the idea of a chapter or a succession of chapters. Thus Midas and The Sphinx are chapter captions; in each case there is constructed an elaborate application to England. In the first the "baleful fiat of enchantment" prevents the conversion of the nation's wealth