minister’s low persuasive voice urging the man to see the crime of slavery, quoting the Scriptures with a telling aptness, urging him to repent, to join the life of town and church, to “come to God”… And the quiet and inflexible answer of the master: “I must build my home.”
And nothing finally but night and dullness; the great figures of the slaves pad past in darkness, as noiseless as cats, and from the mystery of night there rises now the wailing chant of all the jungle, the lamentation of man’s life of toil and grief and bitter labour, the chant of the slave.
This was a fine scene, and should have been beautiful and moving on a stage.
From this description it will be seen how the young man’s play was made up both of good and bad, how strongly it was marked by the varied influence of his reading and idolatry—by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw, Rostand, the Bible—and how he had also already begun to use some of the materials of his own life and feeling and experience, how even in this groping and uncertain play, some of the real grandeur, beauty, terror, and unuttered loneliness of America was apparent.
Thus the play, with all its faults and imitations, really did illustrate, as few things else could do, the confused incertitude and the flashes of blind but powerful intuition, which mark the artist’s early life here in America, and for this reason chiefly the play was interesting.
And feeling this incertitude as he sat down to read the play—that feeling mixed of hope, of fear, of quivering apprehension which the artist feels when for the first time he releases his work from the lonely prison of creation and lets it go then, irrevocably, to stand upon its own feet, meet the naked eye of the great world without protection, and stand or fall upon its own merits—feeling this fatality of release, this irrevocable finality of action, he began to read the play in a halting, embarrassed, and almost inaudible tone, full of the proud and desperate hope, the trembling apprehension, the almost truculent hostility towards imaginary detractors which every young man feels at such a time.
He sensed quickly that his fears were groundless. No man ever had a more generous, enthusiastic and devoted following than he had that morning in the presence of these two fine young people—Joel Pierce and his sister Rosalind.
