w and fresh and strong, as life always is,
and fable never is; and the stories of The Conjure Woman have a wild,
indigenous poetry, the creation of sincere and original imagination,
which is imparted with a tender humorousness and a very artistic
reticence. As far as his race is concerned, or his sixteenth part of
a race, it does not greatly matter whether Mr. Chesnutt invented their
motives, or found them, as he feigns, among his distant cousins of the
Southern cabins. In either case, the wonder of their beauty is the same;
and whatever is primitive and sylvan or campestral in the reader's
heart is touched by the spells thrown on the simple black lives in these
enchanting tales. Character, the most precious thing in fiction, is as
faithfully portrayed against the poetic background as in the setting of
the Stories of the Color Line.

Yet these stories, after all, are Mr. Chesnutt's most important work,
whether we consider them merely as realistic fiction, apart from their
author, or as studies of that middle world of which he is naturally
and voluntarily a citizen. We had known the nethermost world of the
grotesque and comical negro and the terrible and tragic negro through
the white observer on the outside, and black character in its lyrical
moods we had known from such an inside witness as Mr. Paul Dunbar; but
it had remained for Mr. Chesnutt to acquaint us with those regions where
the paler shades dwell as hopelessly, with relation to ourselves, as the
blackest negro. He has not shown the dwellers there as very different
from ourselves. They have within their own circles the same social
ambitions and prejudices; they intrigue and truckle and crawl, and are
snobs, like ourselves, both of the snobs that snub and the snobs that
are snubbed. We may choose to think them droll in their parody of pure
white society, but perhaps it would be wiser to recognize that they
are like us because they are of our blood by more than a half, or three
quarters, or nine tenths. It is not, in such cases, their negro blood
that characterizes them; but it is their negro blood that excludes them,
and that will imaginably fortify them and exalt them. Bound in that sad
solidarity from which there is no hope of entrance into polite white
society for them, they may create a civilization of their own, which
need not lack the highest quality. They need not be ashamed of the race
from which they have sprung, and whose exile they share; for in many o