Alain Locke: Youth SpeaksYouth SpeaksBy [ALAIN LOCKE]Click on an icon to view a full-size image.      NOTE: The poetry has not been reproduced in this transcription dueto potential copyright restrictions. Readers are advised to consult the digital facsimiles above.WE might know the future but for our chronic tendency to turn to age rather than toyouth for the forecast. And when youth speaks, the future listens, however thepresent may shut its ears. Here we have Negro youth, foretelling in the mirror of artwhat we must see and recognize in the streets of reality tomorrow.Primarily, of course, it is youth that speaks in the voice of Negro youth, but theovertones are distinctive; Negro youth speaks out of an unique experience and witha particular representativeness. All classes of a people under social pressure arepermeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannotbe. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, theirmaterial handicap, is their spiritual advantage. So, in a day when art has run toclasses, cliques and coteries, and life lacks more and more a vital common back-ground, the Negro artist, out of the depths of his group and personal experience, hasto his hand almost the conditions of a classical art.Negro genius today relies upon the race-gift as a vast spiritual endowment fromwhich our best developments have come and must come. Racial expression as aconscious motive, it is true, is fading out of our latest art, but just as surely the ageof truer, finer group expression is coming in for race expression does not need tobe deliberate to be vital. Indeed at its best it never is. This was the case with ourinstinctive and quite matchless folk-art, and begins to be the same again as weapproach cultural maturity in a phase of art that promises now to be fullyrepresentative. The interval between has been an awkward age, where from theanxious desire and attempt to be representative much that was reallyunrepresentative has come; we have lately had an art that was stiltedlyself-conscious, and racially rhetorical rather than racially expressive. Our poets havenow stopped speaking for the Negro they speak as Negroes. Where formerly theyspoke to others and tried to interpret, they now speak to their own and try toexpress. They have stopped posing, being nearer to the attainment of poise.The younger generation has thus achieved an objective attitude toward life. Race forthem is but an idiom of experiencc, a sort of added enriching adventure anddiscipline, giving subtler overtones to life, making it more beautiful and interesting,even if more poignantly so. So experienced, it affords a deepening rather than anarrowing of social Young Negro has not outer mastery of form and technique asthat of achieving an inner mastery of mood and spirit. That accomplished, there hascome the happy release from self-consciousness, rhetoric, bombast, and thehampering habit of setting artistic values with primary regard for moral effect allthose pathetic over-compensations of a group inferiority complex which our socialdilemnas inflicted upon several unhappy generations. Our poets no longer have thehard choice between an over-assertive and and appealing attitude. By the sameeffort, they have shaken themselves free from the minstrel tradition and the fowling-nets of dialect, and through acquiring ease and simplicity in serious expression, havecarried the folk-gift to the altitudes of art. There they seek and find art's intrinsicvalues and satisfactions and if America were deaf, they would still sing.But America listens perhaps in curiosity at first; later, we may be sure, inunderstanding. But a moment of patience. The generation now in the artisticvanguard inherits the fine and clearly bought achievement of another generation ofcreative workmen who have been pioneers and path-breakers in the culturaldevelopment and recognition of the Negro in the arts. Though still in their prime, asveterans of a hard struggle, they must have the praise and gratitude that is due them.We have had, in fiction, Chestnutt and Burghardt Du Bois; in drama, Du Bois againand Angelina Grimke; in poetry Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Fenton andCharles Bertram Johnson, Everett Hawkins, Lucien Watkins, Cotter, Jameson, andin another file of poets, Miss Grimke, Anne Spencer, and Georgia Douglas Johnson;in criticism and belles lettres, Braithwaite and Dr. Du Bois; in painting,Tanner and Scott; in sculpture Meta Warrick and May Jackson; in acting Gilpin andRobeson; in music, Burleigh. Nor must the fine collaboration of white Americanartists be omitted; the work of Ridgeley Torrence and Eugene O'Neill in drama, ofStribling, and Shands and Clement Wood in fiction, all of which has helped in thebringing of the materials of Negro life out of the shambles of conventional polemics,cheap romance and journalism into the domain of pure and unbiassed art. Then, richin this legacy, but richer still, I think, in their own endowment of talent, comes theyoungest generation of our Afro-American culture: in music, Diton, Dett, Grant Still,and Roland Hayes; in fiction, Jessie Fauset, Walter White, Claude McKay (aforthcoming book.); in drama Willis Richardson, in the field of the short story, JeanToomer, Eric Walrond, Rudolf Fisher; and finally a vivid galaxy of young Negropoets, McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes and Count‚e Cullen.These constitute a new generation not because of years only, but because of a newaesthetic and a new philosophy of life. They have all swung above the horizon in thelast three years, and we can say without disparagement of the past that in that shortspace of time they have gained collectively from publishers, editors, critics and thegeneral public more recognition than has ever before come to Negro creative artistsin an entire working lifetime. First novels of unquestioned distinction, firstacceptances by premier journals whose pages are the ambition of veteran craftsmen,international acclaim, the conquest for us of new provinces of art, the developmentof the first time among us of literary coteries and channels for the contact of creativeminds, and most important of all, a spiritual quickening and racial leavening such asno generation has yet felt and known. It has been their achievement also to bring theartistic advance of the Negro sharply into stepping alignment with contemporaryartistic thought, mood and style. They are thoroughly modern, some of themultra-modern, and Negro thoughts now whear the uniform of the age.But for all that, the heart beats a little differently. Toomer gives a folk-lilt andecstasy to the prose of the American modernists. McKay adds Aesop and irony tothe social novel and a peasant clarity and naivet‚ to lyric thought, Fisher adds UncleRemus to the art of Maupassant ;and O. Henry. Hughes puts Biblical ferver into freeverse, Hayes carries the gush and depth of folk-song to the old masters, Cullenblends the simple with the sophisticated and puts the vineyards themselves into hiscrystal goblets. There is in all the marriage of a fresh emotional endowment with thefinest niceties of art. Here for the enrichment of American and modern art, amongour contemporaries, in a people who still have the ancient key, are some of thethings we thought culture had forever lost. Art cannot disdain the gift of a naturalirony, of a transfiguring imagination, of rhapsodic Biblical speech, of dynamicmusical swing, of cosmic emotion such as only the gifted pagans knew, of a returnto nature, not by way of the forced and worn formula of Romanticism, but throughthe closeness of an imagination that has never broken kinship with nature. Art mustaccept such gifts, and revaluate the giver.Not all the new art is in the field of pure art values. There is poetry of sturdy socialprotest, and fiction of calm dispassionate social analysis. But reason and realismhave cured us of sentimentality: instead of the wail and appeal, there is challengeand indictment. Satire is just beneath the surface of our latest prose, and tonic ironyhas come into our poetic wells. These are good medicines for the common mind, forus they are necessary antidotes against social poison. Their intiuence means that atleast for us the worst symptoms of the social distemper are passing. And so thesocial promise of our recent art is as great as the artistic. It has brought with it, firstof all, that wholesome, elcome virtue of finding beauty in oneself; the youngergeneration can no longer be twitted as "cultural nondescripts" or accused of "beingout of love with their own nativity." They have instinctive love and pride of race,and, spiritually compensating for the present lacks of America, ardent respect andlove for Africa, the motherland. Gradually too under some spiritualizing reaction,the brands and wounds of social persecution are becoming the proud stigmata ofspiritual immunity and moral victory. Already enough progress has been made inthis direction so that it is no longer true that the Negro mind is too engulfed in itsown social dilemmas for control of the necessary perspective of art, or toodepressed to attain the full horizons of self and social criticism. Indeed, by theevidence and promise of the cultured few, we are at last spiritually free, and offerthrough art an emancipating vision to America. But it is a presumption to speakfurther for those who have spoken and can sneak so adequately for themselves. A.L.The Survey Graphic Harlem Number (March 1925)Return to Contents |
|
