Excerpt from Toussaint L'ouverture: A Dramatic History

It is important that the readers of this story should under stand at the outset that this is not a drama intended for the modern stage. I have had in mind rather the production of a work that might set forth dramatically something more than a decade of Negro achievement under the leadership of Negro genius. I have deliberately chosen to tell the story amply for those who care to preserve a precious record rather than to follow the limitations and prohibitions of a present-day cinema audience. I have also, in full view of all the risks, deliberately chosen blank verse as the only vehicle worthy of the dignity and elevation of my theme. We seem, as Mr. Trevelyan says, to have lost both the taste and tradition for this high medium. Serious and sensitive writers must undertake to restore both. I can only hope that patient hospitality may be accorded to that measure and rhythm most expressive of the power and cadence of our tongue.

Hayti has come to be a sort of challenge to the democratic sentiments and pretentions of our time. The little island sug gests to the average American certain vexations which it pre sented to our marines during the period of our late paternal investment. Nevertheless, it was in Hayti that the greatest of Negroes rose up to strike the shackles of slavery from the limbs and minds of his race forever, and thus to serve mightily the'cause of American independence. The conflict between Toussaint and Napoleon not only hastened the destruction of the emperor; it was a determining factor in making possible for Thomas Jefferson and Robert Livingstone the Louisiana Purchase. America therefore owes to this black Chieftain the ending of all Napoleon's dreams of empire in the western hemisphere. But for him we might now be reading a very different American history; and the problems left unsolved by him still amaze and blight the world.

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