The Spirituals are America's greatest artistic achievement. For a people so vigorous and so productive, Americans have given singularly little of sheer beauty to the world. The human spirit in that land would seem to have exhausted itself in mechanism and commerce, and it has been left to the Negro slave to provide, through his songs, not merely the only music indigenous to America, but also the most beautiful artistic expression born on that side of the seas. Our jazz and tango, indeed all our syncopated music, is derived originally from the American slaves; so that the Negro dominates the world of music to-day. But the Spirituals stand in a class alone.

In the year before the Pilgrim Fathers reached America, a Dutch ship (named the Jesus) landed 20 African slaves at Jamestown, Virginia. This was the beginning of the unspeakable slave trade in the American Colonies. In the hundred years that followed, millions of Negroes were torn away with unbelievable. barbarity from their African homes, and thrust into the plantations of the Southern States. They came from scores of different tribes, and spoke dozens of different languages; they had nothing in common save their black skins and their manifold miseries. Theirs was the task of adjusting themselves to a new civilization, of learning a new language, and of weaving together two apparently incompatible cultures-and all this under the deadening difficulties of slavery.

The conditions of life, both under African tribalism and under American slavery, were so degrading that it would be natural to suppose that the slave-songs would be filthy and disgusting to a degree. And many of them were. The miracle is that from this source sprang the Spirituals. "Dey tuck me," an old black mammy "said recently to a collector of folk-songs," from my mammy when I was a baby. My ol' marster he died, an' a ol' lady bought me. She so ugly I don't remember her name. She didn't buy my mammy. My mammy had to teck it, 'cause she couldn't he'p herself. She never sent me no papers, nor I her, and I don't know nothin' 'bout her since dat time. When I was a young girl I was sold at de block in New Orleans. Dey stood me up on de block in de slave-pen. De doctor 'zaminie me fust an' look at my teeth. I was sold for fifteen hunned dollars. . . · I study a lot 'bout my mammy. I wunner will I ever see her again.' Is it any wonder that these people sang in a minor key?

The amazement is that they sang at all. The Spirituals are the cry of the slave to an unheeding world:

Nobody knows de trouble I see,

Nobody knows but Jesus.

They are the songs of a people wrung with misery; they tell of death and suffering and of a great yearning for a juster world, where wrongs would be righted and tears wiped away. They are songs of escape, and the singing of them in the plantations afforded a temporary relief from the haunting thought of trouble and exile, of pain and the lash.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long way from home.

Can anything be more poignant than the despairing song wrung
from the breaking heart of the whole people: "Jesus is dead and
God's gone away"? The slave's life was one constant temptation
to despair. How they maintained their faith in God and His
goodness is one of the wonders of the world. It is noteworthy
that mother and child are frequent themes of song, but rarely the
father. Almost certainly this is because marriage was not per-
mitted on the plantations, and paternity was therefore not always
known; men and women were at any moment liable to be
separated; and of home sanctity there was little or none. For
this reason also there is little about wooing and wedding. Many
of the Negro folk-songs are lullabies, and into them the women
put an intensity of feeling not often found in the lullabies of other
peoples and races. The reason is to be sought in the conditions
of plantation life, where the women worked side by side with the
men. The mothers might, in some instances, return from the
cotton-fields at intervals to nurse the babies, and then leave them
to the old grannies and go back to the plantations. In many cases
mother-love was thwarted and repressed by the auction mart,
which separated parent and child. Hence the "black mammie
often poured out the whole love of her heart upon the white child
she
was paid to nurse, and some of the most touching lullabies in
all the world are those which these black nurses crooned over the
cradles of children in the white man's house.

Hard toil and white injustice are occasional themes of song. "Ain't it hard to be a nigger?" complains the singer," for you can't git yo' money when it's due."

Well, it makes no difference how you make out yo' time,
White man will sho bring nigger out behin'.

If you work all de week, and work all de time,

White man sho bring nigger out behin'.

That the Negro slaves did not sink into savage bitterness is not only a high tribute to them, but also a proof that a great future awaits such a race.

There can be no doubt that it was Christianity that saved the Negro slaves from demoralization and decay.* Torn away from their native land and customs, thrust down into slavery, and then despised for their degraded state, separated from loved ones by the auction mart, smarting under insult and lash, Christianity came to them as the religion of compensation. The inequalities of this life would be adjusted in the next. Patience and forbearance, trust and hope became the themes of their songs. Death had no terrors for them; rather was it the door of hope, the great deliverance.

Dust, dust and ashes fly over my grave,

But the Lord shall bear my spirit home.

In place of the deep dread which is always associated with death in the mind of the pagan African, these Christian slaves spoke and sang of it with easy familiarity, and even with a note of triumph.

I walk thro' the churchyard

To lay this body down;

I know moon-rise, I know star-rise ;

I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;
I'll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,
I'll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day
When I lay this body down.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a great name (perhaps the greatest) in this connection, wrote: "Never, it seems to me, since man first lived and suffered, was his infinite longing for peace uttered more plaintively. At last, after a lifetime of toil, he would be able to lie and stretch out his arms '"-at last he would be free from the endless round of slave-toil.

*See the notable preface by James Weldon Johnson to “The Book of American Negro Spirituals.'

Free at las', free at las',

Thank God I'm free at las'.

Way down yonder in de graveyard walk,
Me and my Jesus gwine ter meet and talk,
Thank God I'm free at las'.

On my knees when de light pass by,

Tho't my soul would arise and fly,

Thank God I'm free at las'.

Some o' dese mornin's bright and fair,

Gwine ter meet my Jesus in de middle of de air,
Thank God I'm free at las'.

Or again :

Mos' done toilin' here, O brethren,
Lord, I'm mos' done toilin' here,
I long to shout, I love to sing,
I long to praise my heav'nly King,
Mos' done toilin' here.

I ain't been to heav'n, but I'm tol'

De streets up dere am paved wid gold,

Mos' done toilin' here,

Mos' done toilin' here, O brethren,

Lord, I'm mos' done toilin' here.

There is confident assurance in these songs, something more than a faint hope, that one day they would meet their pilot face to face. The slaves were sure-it was the only thing about which they were sure that death would end slavery and toil; sure that heaven meant peace and rest; sure of the essential rightness of things; sure that everything would be made up in the life to be; sure that justice would be done, irrespective of colour or condition. Not only did the Spirituals express this faith, but by them it was burnt deeply into the heart of the Negro slaves. These songs, forged in sorrow and in pain, enabled a whole people to preserve its soul alive. Indeed it may be questioned whether the Negroes could have survived slavery without them.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the sustaining influence which was exerted by the stories of the trials and sufferings of the Hebrews, as given in the Old Testament. As God had delivered the children of Israel from their Egyptian bondage, so He would free them; as He had saved the three young men from the fiery furnace and Daniel from the lions, so He would grant them deliverance. By this faith, firmly held and melodiously sung, they preserved alike their souls and bodies from decay.

Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel,

An' why not every man ?

He delivered Daniel from de lion's den,

Jonah from de belly of de whale,

An' de Hebrew children from de fiery furnace,

An' why not every man ?

Didn't my God deliver Daniel,

An' why not every man ?

These songs were a safety-valve. But for them the slaves might well have either sunk into degradation or broken out into rebellion again and again, and there would have been ghastly bloodshed and ruin. It was by means of their songs that they banished resentment and bitterness from their hearts, and projected themselves beyond" this vale of tears."

'Way up in de Rock of Ages

In God's bosom gwin' be my pillah.

The songs were at once a solace and a strength. Is there any parallel instance of an oppressed race being sustained by the religious sentiment alone? The nearest approach, probably, is that of the captive Hebrews in Babylon, who fed their souls upon the songs of Zion in an alien land. The minor-keyed music and the haunting melodies tell of crushed hopes, bitter sorrow and dull, daily misery; the words, on the other hand, tell of a large faith, a child-like trust in God, and an invincible belief in the future life towards which their eyes were ever turned. The music was pagan, the words were Christian; the melodies were African, the faith was born of the love of God. These two strands the music and the words were woven together into the lovely texture of the Spirituals: they modified one another and blended into the almost perfect whole, which now the world will not willingly let die. Probably no one has expressed more adequately what these Spirituals are than Booker T. Washington:

The Negro folk-song has for the Negro soul the same value that the folk-song of any people has for that people. It reminds the race of "the rock whence it was hewn," it fosters race-pride, and in the days of slavery it furnished an outlet for the anguish of smitten hearts. The plantation song of America, although the outgrowth of oppression and bondage, contains surprisingly few references to slavery. No race ever sung so sweetly or with such perfect charity, while looking forward year of jubilee." . . . The plantation songs known as the

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