se and the purely natural utterance of one’s own.  Of course, every one writes always in his folk-tones.  On the other hand, one may explore one’s own special treasures of native themes, as Dvorak himself did so splendidly in his Slavic Dances and in his Legends.  So one must, after all, take this grateful, fragrant work as an idea of what American composers might do in full earnest.  Dvorak is of all later masters the most eminent folk-musician.  He shows greatest sympathy, freedom and delight in revelling among the simple tones and rhythms of popular utterance, rearing on them, all in poetic spontaneity, a structure of high art.  Without strain or show, Dvorak stood perhaps the most genuine of late composers, with a firm foot on the soil of native melody, yet with the balance and restraint and the clear vision of the trained master.[A]

[Footnote A:  The whole subject of American and negro folk-song is new and unexplored.  There are races of the blacks living on the outer reefs and islands of the Carolinas, with not more than thirty whites in a population of six thousand, where “spirituals” and other musical rites are held which none but negroes may attend.  The truest African mode and rhythm would seem to be preserved here; to tell the truth, there is great danger of their loss unless they are soon recorded.]

In a certain view, it would seem that by the fate of servitude the American negro has become the element in our own national life that alone produces true folk-song,—­that corresponds to the peasant and serf of Europe, the class that must find in song the refuge and solace for its loss of material joys.  So Dvorak perhaps is right, with a far seeing eye, when he singles the song of the despised race as the national type.

Another consideration fits here.  It has been suggested that the imitative sense of the negro has led him to absorb elements of other song.  It is very difficult to separate original African elements of song from those that may thus have been borrowed.  At any rate, there is no disparagement of the negro’s musical genius in this theory.  On the contrary, it would be almost impossible to imagine a musical people that would resist the softer tones of surrounding and intermingling races.  We know, to be sure, that Stephen Foster, the author of “The Old Folks at Home,” “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground,” and other famous ballads, was a Northerner, though his mother came from the South.  We hear, too, that he studied negro music eagerly.  It is not at all inconceivable, however, Foster’s song may have been devoid of negro elements, that the colored race absorbed, wittingly or unwittingly, something of the vein into their plaints or lullabies,—­that, indeed, Foster’s songs may have been a true type that stirred their own imitation.  From all points of view,—­the condition of slavery, the trait of assimilation and the strong gift of musical expression may have conspired to give the negro a position and equipment which would entitle his tunes to stand as the real folk-song of America.