There were many who regretted to see him leave "Abraham Lincoln," and some indeed who wondered if he did the wise thing. To Charles Gilpin, however, came the decision that sooner or later must be faced by every artist, and indeed by every man in any field of endeavor—either to rest on safe and assumed achievement, or to believe in one's own self, take the great risk, and launch out into the unknown. He choose to believe in himself. His work was one of the features of the New York theatrical season of 1920-21, and at the annual dinner of the Drama League in 1921 he was one of the ten guests who were honored as having contributed most to the American theatre within the year.
The play on which this success has been based is a highly original and dramatic study of panic and fear. The Emperor Jones is a Negro who has broken out of jail in the United States and escaped to what is termed a "West Indian Island not yet self-determined by white marines." Here he is sufficiently bold and ingenious to make himself ruler within two years. He moves unharmed among his sullen subjects by virtue of a legend of his invention that only a silver bullet can harm him, but at length when he has reaped all the riches in sight, he deems it advisable to flee. As the play begins, the measured sound of a beating tom-tom in the hills gives warning that the natives are in conclave, using all kinds of incantations to work themselves up to the point of rebellion. Nightfall finds the Emperor at the edge of a forest where he has food hidden and through whose trackless waste he knows a way to safety and freedom. His revolver carries five bullets for his pursuers and a silver one for himself in case of need. Bold and adventurous, he plunges into the jungle at sunset; but at dawn, half-crazed, naked, and broken, he stumbles back to the starting-place only to find the natives quietly waiting for him there. Now follows a vivid portrayal of strange sounds and shadows, with terrible visions from the past. As the Emperor's fear quickens, the forest seems filled with threatening people who stare at and bid for him. Finally, shrieking at the worst vision of all, he is driven back to the clearing and to his death, the tom-tom beating ever nearer and faster according as his panic grows.
To the work of this remarkable part—which is so dominating in the play that it has been called a dramatic monologue—Mr. Gilpin brings the resources of a matured and thoroughly competent actor. His performance is powerful and richly imaginative, and only other similarly strong plays are now needed for the further enlargement of the art of an actor who has already shown himself capable of the hardest work and the highest things.
For once the critics were agreed. Said Alexander Woolcott in the New York Times with reference to those who produced the play: "They have acquired an actor, one who has it in him to invoke the pity and the terror and the indescribable foreboding which are part of the secret of 'The Emperor Jones.'" Kenneth MacGowan wrote in the Globe; "Gilpin's is a sustained and splendid piece of acting. The moment when he raises his naked body against the moonlit sky, beyond the edge of the jungle, and prays, is such a dark lyric of the flesh, such a cry of the primitive being, as I have never seen in the theatre"; and in the Tribune Heywood Broun said of the actor: "He sustains the succession of scenes in monologue not only because his voice is one of a gorgeous natural quality, but because he knows just what to do with it. All the notes are there and he has also an extraordinary facility for being in the right place at the right time." Such comments have been re-echoed by the thousands who have witnessed Mr. Gilpin's thrilling work, and in such a record as this he deserves further credit as one who has finally bridged the chasm between popular comedy and the legitimate drama, and who thus by sheer right of merit steps into his own as the foremost actor that the Negro race has produced within recent years.
APPENDIX
1. THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN FICTION
EVER since Sydney Smith sneered at American books a hundred years ago, honest critics have asked themselves if the literature of the United States was not really open to the charge of provincialism. Within the last year or two the argument has been very much revived; and an English critic, Mr. Edward Garnett, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, has pointed out that with our predigested ideas and made-to-order fiction we not only discourage individual genius, but make it possible for the multitude to think only such thoughts as have passed through a sieve. Our most popular novelists, and sometimes our most respectable writers, see only the sensation that is uppermost for the moment in the mind of the crowd—divorce, graft, tainted meat or money—and they proceed to cut the cloth of their fiction accordingly. Mr. Owen Wister, a "regular practitioner" of the novelist's art, in substance admitting the weight of these charges, lays the blame on our crass democracy which utterly refuses to do its own thinking and which is satisfied only with the tinsel and gewgaws and hobbyhorses of literature. And no theme has suffered so much from the coarseness of the mob-spirit in literature as that of the Negro.
As a matter of fact, the Negro in his problems and strivings offers to American writers the greatest opportunity that could possibly be given to them to-day. It is commonly agreed that only one other large question, that of the relations of capital and labor, is of as much interest to the American public; and even this great issue fails to possess quite the appeal offered by the Negro from the social standpoint. One can only imagine what a Victor Hugo, detached and philosophical, would have done with such a theme in a novel. When we see what actually has been done—how often in the guise of fiction a writer has preached a sermon or shouted a political creed, or vented his spleen—we are not exactly proud of the art of novel-writing as it has been developed in the United States of America. Here was opportunity for tragedy, for comedy, for the subtle portrayal of all the relations of man with his fellow man, for faith and hope and love and sorrow. And yet, with the Civil War fifty years in the distance, not one novel or one short story of the first rank has found its inspiration in this great theme. Instead of such work we have consistently had traditional tales, political tracts, and lurid melodramas.