260
STEPHEN SPENDER
wrong when they robbed white people. In spite of the Puritan–
Yankee equation of virtue with well-being, Negroes had ex–
cellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by
any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it certainly
did not work that way for black Christians. In any case, white
people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and
who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no
moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the
juries, the shot-guns, the law-in a word, power. But it was
a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to
be
outwitted in any way whatever. And those virtues preached but
not practiced by the white world were merely another means of
holding Negroes in subjection.
Substitute "worker" for Negro, and "capitalist" or "imperialist" for
"white people," and this reads like a Marxist writing in 1860 about the
German or the British working class.
So-called capitalists have on the whole learned to legislate away
the social problems which logically seemed
to
lead to irreconcileable
positions ending in revolution. The color problem is the twentieth–
century version of what in the nineteenth century was the problem of
the proletariat. In theory at least it should today be soluble without
revolution. What Mr. Baldwin calls "love"-at any rate all generow
feeling-is required to support the legislation and anticipate the
very
dangerous situation which will arise unless a great deal is done
very
quickly. The great contribution of Mr. Baldwin is that he finds words
to express what one knows to be true: how it feels to be an American
Negro. Within his own works he has solved the problem of integration:
not by love, but by imagination using words which know no class nor
color bars.
Stephen Spender
IS THE READER NECESSARY?
THE AGE OF SUSPICION. By Nathalie Sarraute. Translated
by
Morie
Jolas. George Braziller.
$4.
A new mode of didacticism has conquered the arts, is indeed
the "modern" element in art. Its central dogma is the idea that
art
must evolve. Its result is the work whose main intention is to advance
