Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 130

There can be few more notorious instances of the flaw at the heart of Enlightenment universalism than Jefferson’s notes on the constitution for the state of Virginia. To twenty‐first century eyes the gulf between the embrace of liberty and equality as the foundation stones of the new nation and the outright racism of Jefferson’s discussion of African Americans is unbridgeable; indeed the latter is widely interpreted as testifying to the hypocrisy of the former. Some aspects may however be mitigated by attention to context. Thus Jefferson’s proposal to repatriate former slaves to Africa was not alone at the time. At the same period, Olaudah Equiano was ‘commissary’ of a London‐based committee for the resettlement of former slaves in Sierra Leone. Later, in the nineteenth century Abraham Lincoln supported a similar scheme and in the twentieth, Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line did likewise. Also, Jefferson was writing against entrenched Planter interests and inclusion of even qualified emancipation in his text risked a backlash destructive of the rest of his proposals. To some extent the Civil War bore him out. It is worth underlining that Jefferson himself referred to the ‘settlement’ of the constitution and ‘the emancipation of the slaves’ as ‘the two great objects I have in view’.¹ Nonetheless, by modern standards Jefferson’s Notes remain profoundly racist. Most of his argument will be clear enough to a contemporary reader, but in the context of the present anthology the following points merit emphasis: in general, the claim that Africans are deficient in both reason and imagination and incapable of painting, sculpture and poetry; in particular his criticism of both Phillis Wheatley (here ‘Phyllis Whately’) and Ignatius Sancho. Jefferson’s remarks were first composed during 1781 and 1782 in response to questions addressed by the French government to the states of the new Union. They were first printed in a private limited edition in Paris in 1784. They were then again revised and printed in their present form in 1787. The extracts begin with a statement of the basis of Jefferson’s ‘revisals’ in English law and go on to state proposals for laws of inheritance, progressive taxation and religious freedom before moving on to the questions of slavery and racial difference. They are taken from Notes on the State of Virginia, London, 1787, pp. 227–35 and 239–40.

The plan of the revisal was this. The common law of England, by which is meant, that part of the English law which was anterior to the date of the oldest statutes extant, is made the basis of the work. […] The following are the most remarkable alterations proposed:

To change the rules of descent, so as that the lands of any person dying intestate shall be divisible equally among all his children, or other representatives, in equal degree.

To make slaves distributable among the next of kin, as other moveables. […]

To define with precision the rules whereby aliens should become citizens, and citizens make themselves aliens.

To establish religious freedom on the broadest bottom.

To emancipate all slaves born after passing the act … that they should continue with their parents to a certain age, then be brought up, at the public expence, to tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniuses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty‐one years of age, when they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper. […] It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. – To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. The first difference which strikes us is that of colour … And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? … The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? […]

They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of fore‐thought. […] They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient … In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection … Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous. […] [N]ever yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry – Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar centrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism … Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition; yet his letters do more honour to the heart than the head. They breathe the purest effusions of friendship and general philanthropy, and shew how great a degree of the latter may be compounded with strong religious zeal. He is often happy in the turn of his compliments, and his stile is easy and familiar, except when he affects a Shandean fabrication of words. But his imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric as is the course of a meteor through the sky. His subjects should often have led him to a process of sober reasoning: yet we find him always substituting sentiment for demonstration.

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I advance it … as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people … Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.