be very much better, for he began better, and he is of that race
which has, first of all, to get rid of the cakewalk, if it will
not suffer from a smile far more blighting than any frown. He is
fighting a battle, and it is not for him to pick up the cheap
graces and poses of the jouster. He does, indeed, cast them all
from him when he gets down to his work, and in the dramatic
climaxes and closes of his story he shortens his weapons and
deals his blows so absolutely without flourish that I have
nothing but admiration for him. "The Marrow of Tradition," like
everything else he has written, has to do with the relations of
the blacks and whites, and in that republic of letters where all
men are free and equal he stands up for his own people with a
courage which has more justice than mercy in it. The book is, in
fact, bitter, bitter. There is no reason in history why it
should not be so, if wrong is to be repaid with hate, and yet it
would be better if it was not so bitter. I am not saying that he
is so inartistic as to play the advocate; whatever his minor
foibles may be, he is an artist whom his stepbrother Americans
may well be proud of; but while he recognizes pretty well all the
facts in the case, he is too clearly of a judgment that is made
up. One cannot blame him for that; what would one be one's self?
If the tables could once be turned, and it could be that it was
the black race which violently and lastingly triumphed in the
bloody revolution at Wilmington, North Carolina, a few years ago,
what would not we excuse to the white man who made the atrocity
the argument of his fiction?

Mr. Chesnutt goes far back of the historic event in his novel,
and shows us the sources of the cataclysm which swept away a
legal government and perpetuated an insurrection, but he does not