Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/341

 Booker T. Washington 325 hood and rise to fame, with its mingled pathos and humour, its etching of the past, its modest story of a quiet but heart-stirring achievement, has already become- one of the classics of its type. Of his other voluminous writings, dealing almost exclusively with the colored race, weighty is The Future of the American Negro, which contains his views on the enigma which ever con- fronts the South. Not founding his argument on those lofty conceptions of right and justice which aroused such fanatical zeal before the war, but with a sanity of outlook upon the in- dustrial situation in the South and an unclouded vision of the progress of his race in the past and of the necessary steps in future advance, he discusses the various aspects of the problem with a dispassionate but illuminating calm. Though his contact with the more steadfast and aspiring kind of negro may have filled him with undue hope, yet no reader can fail to admire his self-forgetfvd devotion to his race, or refuse to ac- cord him a high place among the prose writers of the New South. The poets, also, represent the effects of Reconstruction on literature in the South. They belonged to a younger genera- tion. They felt in their own persons the wreck of their section. Their outlook upon life and their practice of their art were formed or deeply changed by the hopeless struggles of recon- struction and restoration. Their more sensitive souls felt and recorded the underlying attitudes of their generation. Both their lives and their writings merit close attention. The first voices were proud and defiant. They echoed in more poignant phrases the Berserker rage of the Southern editorial columns. Most notable of these myriad voices of the press was Carlyle McKinley (i 847-1 904), of the Charleston News and Courier. At fifteen he forsook the quiet campus of the University of Georgia and distinguished himself by bravery in the trenches before Sherman at Atlanta. Like most South- em youths after the war, he drifted about for a time between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be bom. In 1875 he joined the staff of the News and Courier, and after a brief excursion into commercial life in New York he retumed in 1 88 1 as associate editor, where in failing health he remained the rest of his days. His prose was greatly admired, especially his An Appeal to Pharaoh (1889), an argimient for deportation, a solution of the