The Tragic Idealism of Double Consciousness: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk and Friedrich Schiller’s Naive and Sentimental Poetry

Appropriately enough, the term “double-consciousness” appears exactly twice in all the many decades of W.E.B. Du Bois’s published writings. This sparsity is surprising considering the huge influence the concept has had for African American studies and theories of race in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Before its singular appearance in the famous collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois had first launched double consciousness in 1897 in The Atlantic.1 This monthly magazine, named for the great ocean that connects the United States with—and divides it from—Europe and Africa, had been founded in 1857 with a dedication to “the American Idea.” That vision was not elaborated in detail in the journal’s opening manifesto, which declared its aim always “to keep in view that moral element which transcends all persons and parties.”2 Although the New England periodical explicitly christens its mission after its home continent, the trans-atlantic constitution of this American idea is evident both in its original signatories (which include such prominent British and European writers as Elizabeth Gaskill, Wilkie Collins, and Giovanni Ruffini) and its major concern for the abolitionist cause. Though the manifesto itself does not mention slavery, its clarion call for “Freedom” along with the preponderance of outspoken abolitionists among its authors (such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child) leave little doubt that emancipation is integral to the journal’s mission. The “American Idea” cannot be a nativist concept, but is always already an intercontinental creation, born simultaneously with the original sin of the transatlantic slave trade for which it strives to atone.3

Double consciousness, as Du Bois presents it, is a direct consequence of the history of slavery and its aftermath, and hence shares the same transatlantic origin story as the American Idea.4 Yet this essay will not recount that history, a necessary task begun by Du Bois himself and continued by many others.5 Instead, it attends to one particular transatlantic crossing: the resonances between the structure of double consciousness as elucidated by Du Bois and the contours of poetological concepts articulated by Friedrich Schiller over a century earlier. The argument unfolds in two steps. First, the essay establishes the parallels between these two very disparate writers that justify thinking them through together. Then it shows how productive this comparison can be with interpretive approaches to the essays in Du Bois’s collection, both singly and as a whole. It turns out that Schiller’s seemingly bizarre generic classifications help reveal a new way of understanding the architecture of The Souls of Black Folk: the volume has a rainbow structure, in which each essay in the first half is paired with its mirroring counterpart in the second. The arrangement of nested symmetric correspondences between the text’s fourteen chapters illuminates important features of the logic of double consciousness in Du Bois’s text, which in turn offer insights for the intractable aporias of Schiller’s categories. Double consciousness, in its essential structure, is simultaneously idealist and tragic.

Double Consciousness and the Sentimental

The extent and precise lineage of German influence on Du Bois’s ideas has been the subject of lively scholarly debate. Many have recognized his debts to the professors with whom he worked in Berlin during his studies there (1892–4), and Du Bois himself penned vivid descriptions of their classroom antics (Autobiography 162–66). Especially the sociologists Gustav von Schmoller and Adolph Wagner offered methodological models for Du Bois’s groundbreaking ethnographic and sociological studies of the following decades (Appiah 25–44). Stephanie Shaw shows how the structure of The Souls of Black Folk invites detailed comparison with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Smith 101–113). Michael Saman explores Du Bois’s developing engagement with the thought of Karl Marx over his long career. Kwame Anthony Appiah sees the cosmopolitan spirit of J. G. Herder fundamentally at work in the evolution of Du Bois’s thinking on race and cultural difference. Appiah further identifies the influence of J. G. Fichte in Du Bois’s valuation of striving (Streben), of Wilhelm Humboldt in his ideal of education (Bildung), and of Wilhelm Dilthey in his emphasis on psychological understanding (Verstehen) (45–82). Appiah’s poignant reconstruction of Du Bois’s intellectual heritage is a testimony to the liberating potential of the ideas of some deeply problematic thinkers in German history.6

The genealogy of Du Bois’s far-reaching concept of double consciousness has also attracted much conjecture. Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. points out the roots of the term in the discourses of American transcendentalists, such as Emerson, and psychologists, such as William James (237, 241). Paul Gilroy goes so far as to christen his seminal work of transatlantic scholarship, The Black Atlantic, with the subtitle: Modernity and Double Consciousness. For him, Du Bois’s concept helps diagnose a necessary by-product of the hybridity engendered by the diasporic experience that constitutes modernity itself (111–45). Other scholars identify the important elements of Du Bois’s own political experiences advocating for Black rights in the concept’s composition (Gooding-Williams 66–95). Frank Kirkland offers a Rousseauian reading of the “feeling” of double consciousness, relating it to Rousseau’s distinction of amour-propre from amour de soi (139–40). Others again find German pre-figurations of the concept. Sandra Adell and Joel Williamson point out the many Hegelian resonances in the idea of a doubled consciousness, alienated from itself (Adell 19). Hamilton Beck traces double consciousness back even further to the “two souls warring in one dark body” from Goethe’s Faust (59). All these writers certainly made their mark on Du Bois’s thinking, though the use to which he put them was uniquely progressive and entirely novel.7

Surprisingly little has been written, however, about Du Bois’s relation to another imposing figure of German literature: Friedrich Schiller. While taking German as an undergrad at Fisk University, Du Bois read Schiller’s drama of Swiss liberty, Wilhelm Tell (Beck 46). He studied the poet’s plays and essays further during his sojourn in Germany (Lewis 139). Schiller is the only non-Anglophone European writer to rate one of the epitaphs to the fourteen chapters of The Souls of Black Folk. The haunting, sentimental tale of Josie and Du Bois’s experience as an itinerant teacher in the American South, “Of the Meaning of Progress,” is preceded by a stanza from Schiller’s tragedy about Joan of Arc, The Maid of Orleans (46). In fact, the claim here is that, even more foundationally than any debt to Herder, Goethe, Fichte, or Hegel, Du Bois’s double consciousness shares a basic structural similarity with Schiller’s articulation of two modes of human psychology in his essay on “Naive and Sentimental Poetry.” This is not to deny the very real parallels that others have traced between these other thinkers and Du Bois. But as will become clear below, the dynamics between Schiller’s terms reveals several key aspects of double consciousness that Hegel’s Phenomenology, for instance, leaves obscure.

In 1794, after a dramatic rapprochement with Goethe, his former rival, Schiller wrote the famous ‘birthday letter’ in which he attempted to compare the poetic sensibilities of the two new friends. The next year Schiller began publishing an expanded version of this reflection in a series of three installments in his journal, Die Horen. The result was Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, 1795–6), which Thomas Mann would later dub the “most beautiful essay in the German language” (Pamuk 14). Schiller divides poets, and by extension all people, into two basic types: either they “are nature, or [they] seek it. The former makes for the naive poet; the latter for the sentimental poet” (200).8 Clearly, Schiller is not working with the common usage of these two terms in contemporary English. Like children, “naive” personalities are unselfconscious. They are at one with the natural world and their community. In contrast, “sentimental” persons are marked by difference: they are all too aware of their alienation from nature and their separation from communal cohesion. “Nature makes a human being one with himself, art separates and divides him” (202).9 The verb translated as “divide” here, ent-zwei-en, is literally to rend in two. The key distinction between the modes is that of simplicity vs. doubleness: the feeling of the naïve “proceed[s] completely from a single element,” arising from the “pure unity of its origin”; whereas the sentimental “always has to deal with two conflicting images and feelings” due to its “twofold (doppelt) source” in reflection (204).10 The sentimental is quite literally a doubled consciousness of which the naive is blissfully unaware.

The parallels with Du Bois’s description of being Black in a white world are hard to miss. In a much-cited passage from “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” which surely is a contender for the most beautiful essay in the English language, Du Bois writes that a Black American is “born with a veil” in “a world […] that only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” He goes on:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (11)

Like those of the sentimental person, the Black American’s “sense and reason, receptive and self-activating faculties […] have been divided […] and contradict one another” (Schiller 200).11 This conflicted twoness is Du Bois’s elaboration of what it feels like to be a “problem.”

Du Bois’s remarks on a state without double consciousness likewise evoke Schiller’s construction of the naive. He has “never been anything else [than a problem], save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe” (10). The reference to childhood corresponds easily to Schiller’s comparison of the naive to the natural innocence of young children, who have not yet gained an alienating self-awareness that divides them from the world (709–16/182–6). The mention of Europe in this context remains mysterious in the pages of Souls, but the Schillerian parallels become clearer if one reads Du Bois’s autobiographical account of his studies in Germany.

The America that Du Bois had left in the 1890s was approaching a nadir of racial injustice after the end of Reconstruction. Brutal lynchings of Black people were on the rise, as Ida B. Wells courageously documented in the year of Du Bois’s departure in Southern Horrors (1892). The systematic disenfranchisement and segregation of Black Americans in Jim Crow Laws across the South were on their way to being legitimated by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy vs. Fergusson (1895). Du Bois’s personal experience as a Black man in higher education in America first forged a deep sense of community among other members of his race—over and against the majority whites—at Fisk University in Tennessee (Autobiography 101–31). Then, at the elite institution of Harvard, Du Bois lived and studied in almost complete social isolation from his fellow (white) students (Autobiography 132–53). When he arrived in Europe, Du Bois was shocked to discover white people who treated him with respect. “… I met men and women as I had never met them before. Slowly they became, not white folks, but folks. The unity beneath all life clutched me” (Autobiography 157). For once, he did not feel like a problem.

This sense of belonging in a single, unified world, which Du Bois had not experienced since early childhood matches Schiller’s description of the naive sensibility. It is the wholeness and simplicity that the sentimental person has lost through reflective judgment. The European interlude is different from the ‘lost innocence’ of childhood, which Du Bois briefly narrates as a result of schoolroom rejection in “Strivings”: “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil” (10). Beforehand, the little Black boy was just as ignorant of the veil and its consequences as his fellow whites, while thereafter it becomes impossible to unlearn. In Europe, however, while Du Bois is able to experience unselfconscious acceptance without overt racialization, he remains acutely aware of the color line back home. This surprising discovery of “a childlikeness where it was no longer expected” (184) is precisely Schiller’s definition of the naive,12 and it can only be recognized from the reflective perspective of the sentimental.

Surprisingly, Du Bois does not even consider remaining in Europe to keep hold of this easier, harmonious existence. Life in Germany—the common courtesy of being seen without open condescension—led Du Bois to a richer and more hopeful vision of humanity. This experience simultaneously made him reevaluate his assumptions about his homeland: “In Germany in 1892, I found myself on the outside of the American world, looking in” (Autobiography 157). He learned to see that American racism was not an inevitable condition of human nature, but a historically contingent and ultimately changeable phenomenon. Similarly, though Schiller’s sentimental poet seeks lost nature, she does not indulge in Rousseau-like longing to return to the condition of ignorant innocence. Instead, she yearns for a unity that nevertheless does not sacrifice her reflective consciousness, an infinitely unattainable goal that Schiller names with a third term, the “Ideal.”

Die Natur macht ihn mit sich eins, die Kunst trennt und entzweiet ihn, durch das Ideal kehrt er zur Einheit zurück. Weil aber das Ideal ein Unendliches ist, das er niemals erreicht, so kann der kultivierte Mensch in seiner Art niemals vollkommen werden, wie doch der natürliche Mensch es in der seinigen zu werden vermag. (735, original emphasis)

Nature makes a human being one with himself, art separates and divides him; by means of the ideal he returns to the unity. Yet because the ideal is an infinite one that he never reaches, the cultured human being in his way can never become complete as the natural human being can be in his way. (202)

This formulation is echoed in Du Bois’s reaction to the trouble of his two-ness. He never yearns for a white skin to wipe away the problem of double consciousness, nor to forget the pains and degradations inflicted by racial prejudice.13 Instead, he articulates his desire as a Schiller-like synthesis:

—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.

Later on, Du Bois uses even more remarkably Schillerian language to name the endless striving toward the never fully realizable goal of restoring unity without effacing plurality: “To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one” (15). Emancipation, enfranchisement, and education all boil down to a vision of “Freedom” and an articulation of ideals that would warm the heart of Germany’s Dichter der Freiheit:

all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. (16)

This unifying vision bears all the hallmarks of Schiller’s hopes for an eternally deferred but morally superior aspiration toward a higher harmony: “[the sentimental human] can only express himself as a moral unity, i.e., as one striving toward unity. The agreement between his feeling and thinking, something that actually took place in the original condition, now exists only ideally” (201, original emphasis, translation modified).14

Thus the opening essay in Souls works through all three of Schiller’s modes: naive, sentimental, and ideal. But I do not marshal all these resonances in order to insist on a direct or intentional reference to Schiller’s essay, even though David Levering Lewis explicitly claims that Du Bois “would have been familiar” with Schiller’s “essay on the poetic imagination, ‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’” (139). Du Bois studied in Berlin at a time when Schiller’s ideas—even if filtered through Hegel, Marx, Dilthey, and others—were everywhere: not just in the arts, but in sociology, anthropology, and political history (Appiah 25–118). Instead of pointing out influences or sources, however, it is more striking to think through Du Bois’s claims about the color line in terms of Schiller’s categories structurally. Whites are usually oblivious to the burden that their “natural” normalcy imposes on minorities: in this unconsciousness, they are naive. Black subjects, however, cannot be unaware of their doubled identity: they enter the public sphere already with the sentimental mode of perception. They cannot revert to the carefree, unified existence which whites don’t even realize they have the privilege to enjoy. As Peter Szondi points out, the naive is the sentimental.15 Only from a sentimental perspective does the naive become cognizable; hence there is no unselfconscious naive without its reflective counterpart.

Here a key difference between Hegel’s dialectic and those of Schiller and Du Bois becomes visible. In Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, in which some scholars have justifiably seen analogies to Du Bois (Adell 16–18; Shaw 92–3), both sides are knowingly involved in a struggle for supremacy and recognition.16 A chief characteristic of Schiller’s naive poets and Du Bois’s whites, in contrast, is their obliviousness to their own status. Sentimental poets and Black subjects, meanwhile, do not achieve reflective consciousness through a failed attempt to subjugate others, but rather through the enforced realization of their own alienation and lack of freedom. Reading Souls in this constellation reveals that double consciousness involves the same structural logic of co-emergence that applies to the original dichotomy of Same/Other in Plato’s Sophist, and to many dualistic pairs proposed in the wake of Schiller’s essay, from Nietzsche to Deleuze.17 The naive cannot know itself as such: the naive becomes an object of knowledge only with the advent of the sentimental. Similarly, Black Americans clearly recognize the ease and security that their white compatriots have at their command. But unless whites take a lesson in alienation from persons of color, whiteness remains invisible to the white majority.

I personally could not help but think of Schiller while learning from Du Bois as I read The Souls of Black Folk.18 For me, as a white American, coming to recognize the assumed and imposing normalcy of white culture was structurally similar to a naive person becoming aware of the (now suddenly lost) unity of nature. To translate Du Bois into Schiller’s categories, Black subjects are always already in the position of the sentimental worldview. Wouldn’t it be nice not always to have to think about being different? Wouldn’t it be grand just to assume unconsciously that you’ll be seen as a human like any other? But Black persons in American culture cannot escape their double consciousness. Nor should anyone who becomes aware of its injustice desire to return behind the “Veil” of ignorance, to use Du Bois’s favorite—and decidedly Schillerian—metaphor.19

Only the sentimental are fully conscious of their condition and hence they alone can make a free choice and strive for true morality. The Schillerian schema thus highlights the irony of liberty in Du Bois’s account. Despite their yearning for freedoms which the majority culture denies them, Black subjects are able to act out of a true Freedom afforded only by self-conscious knowledge to which the whites in their ignorance have no access. This moral high ground is not lost on Du Bois: “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes” (16). In Schiller’s system, the sentimental condition means that African Americans and other minorities start off with a higher moral potential—and an accompanying burdensome struggle—that the majority whites lack. Naive persons can do good, but have no conscious choice in their virtue. Because of their self-awareness, sentimental persons have a freedom of action that the naive miss out on: “a moral rigor that insists on something unconditioned in actions of the will” (250).20 This liberty gives their actions a moral stature to which the naive can never aspire. This innate ethical position resonates with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s account of how Black people have been the moral conscience of America, constantly confronting us with our failure to live up to the ideals of our founding (452–76). Most progress toward those ideals over the centuries has been in response to Black struggles and efforts. As Appiah also notes, “One of the barely articulated themes of [Du Bois’s] Souls is that the experience of Black people in the Americas, with all its horrors, may be part of what has prepared them for their contribution to the human task” (115). In Schiller’s markedly Kantian view of morality, minority Americans ineluctably have the knowledge to act freely in accord with the moral law, if they choose to take up the challenge. Fortunately for the rest of us, people like Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Octavia Butler have taken on the onerous task of teaching whites, too, to become aware of their unseen chains of privilege so that we might strive together toward the Ideal of natural but self-conscious justice.

Admittedly, there is no strict one-to-one correspondence between Schiller’s and Du Bois’s categories. There is a tension in Schiller’s account between its historicizing and universalizing tendencies. Sometimes the naive and sentimental seem to function as epochal categories, and sometimes as psychological character traits. There are also interpretive difficulties in Du Bois’s account of double consciousness,21 but these problems do not always readily align with the contradictions in Schiller. For Schiller, there can be no “return” to the naive mode after the alienating emergence of self-consciousness. But it is too easy for whites like me to slip back into habits that belie a naive oblivion to our privilege, and nearly impossible for a Black person to do so, at least while inhabiting the dominant culture. Certainly no one would impute any special prodigy to the systemic advantage of majority whites, whereas Schiller limits true genius to the naive (718/189). To insist on an identity between whiteness and the naive would lead to offensive and utter falsities. But the comparison can be informative, even where the parallels break down.

Genres of Double Consciousness and the Rainbow Structure of Souls

The bulk of the central installment of Schiller’s essay consists of descriptive and prescriptive analyses of the genres of sentimental poetry.22 The resulting taxonomy is odd, to say the least, and bears little resemblance either to conventional categories of poetics from before Schiller or to genres of literary scholars that follow him. After the first major partition of poetry into the naive and sentimental, Schiller makes a series of two-fold divisions of the latter, sometimes splitting only one of each resulting pair again into two, until he has created a rather lopsided tree diagram. He begins by dividing all sentimental literature into two basic types: satire and elegy. Poetry in the sentimental condition of alienation must either present the contradiction between reality and the ideal (satire) or show nature as an imagined whole (elegy). Satirical poetry can either work seriously on the emotions in the realm of the will, in which case it is “pathetic” (pathetisch) or it can use wit and mockery in the realm of understanding, in which case it is “mocking” (spottend). Elegaic poetry, meanwhile, can either represent the wholeness of nature as a lost object of mourning, in which case it is an elegy proper, or it can display the nature or the ideal as an existing object of pleasure, rendering it an idyll. Idylls, in turn, can be “arcadian” by representing the unity of nature in the past, or they can be “elysian” by projecting the ideal into the future. I make a point of outlining these seemingly tedious distinctions here not out of any deference to Schiller’s poetological authority, but rather because Du Bois’s book offers striking examples of each of the sentimental modes that Schiller distinguishes.

The Souls of Black Folk consists of fourteen essays bookended by a Forethought and Afterthought. Scholars commonly divide these essays under three headings based on their subject matter and methodology. Paul Gilroy, for instance, identifies the first three essays as historical, the next six as sociological, and the final five as cultural. Robert Stepto makes the same tripartite division, but offers a more dynamic rubric for understanding their relation: stasis, immersion, assent (Gilroy 125, 240). These schematics for the work’s organization make good sense, but I would propose a different, though complementary structure. Schiller’s generic classifications suggest a way to pair each essay with a counterpart, forming a dyad in which the pieces reflect productively on each other.

As shown above, the first essay, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” (I), works its way through Schiller’s dialectical construction of the naive, sentimental, and ideal. The final essay, “Of the Sorrow Songs” (XIV), follows a similar trajectory, as it offers nuanced readings of what would seem to be prime examples of primitive, “naive” art: the Negro spirituals passed down by generations of African American slaves. Over the course of the essay, readers learn to appreciate the reflective consciousness and sophisticated musical artistry—in short, the sentimentality—of the deceptively simple “folk” songs. The essay closes with a vision of the ideal bestowed as a promising “gift” by this rich cultural legacy: “Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things” (162). This musical artform is able to proffer a beacon of true “progress” that “sociological knowledge” (162), despite all the advancements in that science to which Du Bois himself was a major contributor,23 is impotent to produce. The Sorrow Songs point toward an America that “shall rend the Veil” and in which “the prisoned shall go free” (163). Again it is the enslaved and their oppressed descendants who show the way toward an ideal Freedom.

The first and last essays are hence linked by a mirroring arc encompassing the three terms in Schiller’s triadic dialectic. The initial piece traces this ascent for the individual Black American, while the final essay echoes the same development for Black people’s cultural contributions. Both upend dominant assumptions of the majority white culture. The naive/sentimental dichotomy that the essays evoke seems to coincide directly with the savage/civilized categories employed by racist thinkers from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries to distinguish the “natural” darker races from the “cultured” Europeans. Reading these two essays together reveals how Souls has subtly but dramatically turned the tables on this dominant narrative. Now it is the benighted whites who are ignorant and simple, while Black people are marked by reflective judgement to strive toward sophisticated ideals: both as individuals in society and as a collective in their rich cultural achievements.

Other striking parallels connect the second and penultimate essays, the third and twelfth, the fourth and eleventh, and so on in ever tightening concentric rings until you reach the seventh and eighth essays at the very heart of Souls. If one draws lines in the table of contents joining the fourteen essays into related pairs, one ends up with a rainbow of seven arcs—resonant not only with the number of colors traditionally found in the spectrum signifying God’s promise after the flood, but also with the “seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight” (10), as Du Bois dubs the Negro among the races of the world. The remainder of the present essay will attend to the harmonious echoes and informative dissonances that these arching chords reveal between the essays of Souls, starting from the center and working back toward the rim.

If the outermost arc connects the first and last essays that both exemplify the great potential of Black culture, running the gamut from the naive through the sentimental to the ideal, the two essays at the innermost ring explore the direst oppressions to which millions of Black people are subjected. “Of the Black Belt” (VII) and “Of the Quest for the Golden Fleece” (VIII) detail the hardships of life for rural Black people in the agricultural South, from backbreaking toil to the constant threat of lynching. These essays take the pastoral subject matter that many white authors romanticize in idyllic nostalgia (think of Stephen Foster’s 1851 minstrel song, “Old Folks at Home”—surely the antithesis of an African American spiritual if there ever was one) and eloquently present reality’s far cry from the imagined paradise. They thus perfectly exemplify the general task of the entire Satirical class of sentimental literature in Schiller’s schema.24

If these two essays present the bleakest portrait of a Black America held in abject poverty and ignorance, the pieces moving out from this blighted center treat increasingly complex movements to accelerate—or social currents retarding—the advancement of African Americans. The two essays on either side of the core dyad are marked by opposing trajectories. “Of the Training of Black Men” (VI) offers a historical account of African American education from the arrival of the first slaves in Jamestown to the Historically Black Colleges of Du Bois’s time, pointing toward its potential achievements in the future. When read in parallel, “Of the Sons of Master and Man” (IX) depicts the greatest threat to African American education: the domineering, paternalistic relationship of whites to Black people in the South. Under a pretense of caring wardship, whites keep Black subjects in an exploited servitude that is hardly better than slavery.

The third arc, connecting essays five and nine, deals with two forms of social interaction: commerce and religion, respectively. “Of the Wings of Atalanta” (V) vividly paints the bustling prosperity and crass materialism of Black Atlanta; “Of the Faith of Our Fathers” (X) portrays the rich culture of African American Protestantism. Both cultural forces exhibit strengths and pitfalls for Black America, and their linkage through the arcing structure invites readers to compare the church and the market as systems of social connectivity. Du Bois’s frank but nuanced depiction of these two institutions, moreover, shows that neither the church nor the market—alone or together—is sufficient for Black people to fulfill their potential without the humanistic education advocated in the previous arc.

The Schillerian overtones of these expanding rings becomes clear in the next arc. The fourth and eleventh essays are both autobiographical reflections. “Of the Meaning of Progress” (IV) narrates Du Bois’s experiences as an itinerant teacher in the rural South. “Of the Passing of the First-Born” (XI) is a moving meditation upon the death of Du Bois’s infant son. As the personal account of an instructor in impoverished Black communities, “Progress” is an illustration of the complex movement from the book’s center in rural poverty (VII/VIII) outward toward culture through precarious education (VI/VI). As the description of a funeral in Atlanta, “Passing” brings together the commercial city and the Black church (V/X). “Progress” is structured as a move from Schiller’s idyll to elegy proper, while “Passing” tacks the opposite course from elegy back to idyll. Together they comprise a thorough and critical parsing of the elegiac mode of sentimental poetry.

“Progress” recounts two journeys: Du Bois’s stints as a teacher in “the hills of Tennessee” (46) in the 1880s and his return to the same place a decade later. The first journey represents the lives of rural Black people in a holistic and hopeful union with nature; when Du Bois returns, he finds that harmony lost and broken. The former fits perfectly with Schiller’s definition of idyll; the latter, that of elegy.

Entweder ist die Natur und das Ideal ein Gegenstand der Trauer, wenn jene als verloren, dieses als unerreicht dargestellt wird. Oder beide sind ein Gegenstand der Freude, indem sie als wirklich vorgestellt werden. Das erste gibt die Elegie in engerer, das andere die Idylle in weitester Bedeutung (748)

Either nature and the ideal are objects of mourning, when the former is presented as something lost, the latter as something unattained, or both are objects of joy, because they are represented as something actual. The first class yields the elegy in the narrow sense, the second class the idyll in the broadest sense. (211)

The idyllic nature of the text’s representation of the rural Black community complicates Du Bois’s claims in the initial essay about the inevitable double consciousness of African Americans. After days of searching on foot for a community in need of a schoolteacher, Du Bois discovers Josie, “a thin, homely girl of twenty, with a dark-brown face and thick, hard hair” (47). Like Nausikaa in the Odyssey, she introduces the stranger to her family and sets him up as an honored guest in their bucolic community.

She had about her a certain fineness, the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that would willingly give all of life to make life broader, deeper, and fuller for her and hers. I saw much of this family afterwards, and grew to love them for their honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for their knowledge of their own ignorance. There was with them no affectation. (47)

Unlike the tortured self-reflective figure of double consciousness, whose higher morality is forged in an enforced freedom of self-awareness, Josie’s “unconscious moral heroism” and lack of affectation resemble the childlike morality of Schiller’s “naiveté of character” (184; “das Naive der Gesinnung,” 712) a species of the naive. Yet her desire for schooling indicates a hopeful trust in the possibility of a better world. “The longing to know […] hovered like a star above this child-woman amid her work and worry, and she studied doggedly” (48). Others in the community have to be persuaded over and over about the value of “book-learning” (49), but Josie, even in her naive faith, is already a liminal figure on the verge of the sentimental.

I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity. (50)

The language of this passage is reminiscent of the ekphrastic description of the scenes of communal life depicted on Achilles’ shield in the Iliad, a prime example of naive poetry (Schiller 724/194). The principal tone of the first half of this essay is one of joy in the homely quirks and foibles of simple but endearing rustics, as Schiller prescribes for the idyll. Yet this bucolic world that lives in full harmony with itself and nature teeters on the edge of self-estrangement. Josie’s original “unconscious moral heroism” (47) is here adumbrated by a “half-awakened common consciousness” (50) that threatens to rupture under the shadow of racism into the self-reflective alienation of double consciousness. For the masses of rural Black people, this was a “paradox they could not understand, and they sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado” (50)—these are the naive characters of sentimental idylls. But some, such as Josie, “whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakened thought,” see the hazy possibility of a world beyond, and “their weak wings beat against their barriers” (51). Yet they cannot break out.

When Du Bois returns to his old teaching haunts ten years later—now a Harvard graduate, respected author, and Professor at Atlanta University—this idyllic haven has been shattered. The tone of the second half of the essay is one of loss and mourning, as befits Schiller’s elegy proper. Josie, overworked and unable to break free, has died. Others have moved away, leaving empty cottages, overgrown yards, and tales of near-lynchings. Even the debris from his old school lies “mournfully” (52) under the new building.

My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly. The crazy foundation stones still marked the former site of my poor little cabin, and not far away, on six weary boulders, perched a jaunty board house, perhaps twenty by thirty feet, with three windows and a door that locked. (52)

The formerly cozy and welcoming, if ramshackle, place of learning has been replaced with a brand-new building with locked doors. This modern structure stands as an allegory for Progress, which is “necessarily ugly.”25 Progress itself is the force that has turned idyll to elegy in Du Bois’s text, which is powerfully ambivalent in its attitude toward improvement and betterment. The impoverished and oppressed condition of Black people demands reform and education, both strongly advocated by Du Bois in this and other essays. Yet the casualties of progress in the real world include hope, happiness, life—and beauty.

In the words of the essay’s final passage:

My journey was done, and behind me lay hill and dale, and Life and Death. How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies? […]

Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car. (53–4)

The elegiac mode of this account of progress not only reveals necessary contradictions in Du Bois’s conception of historical advancement,26 but also speaks to the ambivalence of history in Schiller’s essay, which swivels back and forth between philosophy of history and a system of timeless human psychology.27 On the one hand, progress itself brings about the loss of wholeness that must be mourned in sentimental elegy; on the other hand, double consciousness is an ineluctable condition of certain groups of people.

If “Progress” (IV) moves from idyll to elegy and ends in the death of Josie, its structural counterpart, “Passing” (XI) begins as a classic elegy, mourning the death of Du Bois’s son, and morphs into an idyll of a different type than the first. As an elegy, the essay laments the naive wholeness of his son’s short life: “He knew no color-line, poor dear,—and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun” (133). But the color-line of which the infant was innocent while alive erupts into his solemn funeral procession with the offhand comment of white bystanders in a vile racial slur. This jarring reminder of the casual (naive) thoughtlessness of white hegemony threatens to cast the elegiac tone of the narrator into abject despair: “In vain, in vain!—for where, O God! beneath thy broad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in peace,—where […] dwells […] a Freedom that is free?” (133). But the same sentiment leads to a new perspective on the child’s death: “[…] there sat an awful gladness in my heart […] and my soul whispers ever to me, saying, ‘Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.’ No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood” (133). But miraculously, this distinctly elegiac gratitude for preserving his son’s naive nature from the sorrow of double consciousness transforms into a vision of future potential:

Idle words; he might have borne his burden more bravely than we,—aye, and found it lighter too, some day; for surely, surely this is not the end. Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free. Not for me,—I shall die in my bonds,—but for fresh young souls who have not known the night and waken to the morning; a morning when men ask of the workman, not “Is he white?” but “Can he work?” When men ask artists, not “Are they black?” but “Do they know?” Some morning this may be, long, long years to come. (133–34)

With this vision of an ideal future, the elegy for loss has turned into an idyll. But it is not the kind of idyll with which “Progress” begins. There, the holistic world is represented as existing in the past, which Schiller labels an “arcadian idyll.” Here, the overcoming of contradiction between reality and the ideal is projected into a time to come, which perfectly fits Schiller’s definition of the “elysian idyll” (775/232). As if in obeisance to Schiller’s further claims about the healing “serenity” (Ruhe, 776/232) afforded by Elysium, Du Bois closes this essay with the injunction: “Sleep, then, child,—sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby voice and the ceaseless patter of little feet—above the Veil” (134).

Thus by this fourth arc from its center, Souls has supplied informative examples of half the species of sentimental poetry elaborated by Schiller: elegy. The next two rings complete the inventory of the other half: satire. The third and twelfth essays (the fifth arc) are clearly linked because both present biographical sketches of important Black Americans. The famous excoriation of Booker T. Washington and his advocacy for vocational training as opposed to humanistic education is a clear example of “mocking” (spottende) satire, which addresses the intellect; the poignant “history of a human heart” (134) with which the twelfth essay recounts the life of Alexander Crummal, meanwhile, is a “pathetic” (pathetisch) satire, which moves the passions (740/205). Together, these two poles of biographical writing supply examples for the only remaining generic branches in Schiller’s taxonomy of sentimental literature. Now our catalogue of genres is technically complete, but the second and third essays that make up the sixth arc in Souls offer an important commentary on the pathetic satire of the Crummal sketch.

Both “Of the Dawn of Freedom” (II) and “Of the Coming of John” (XIII) share a classical tragic structure. The former is the tragedy of an entire people; the latter, an allegory of the same history in the figure of a single individual. “Dawn” recounts the tragic ironies of the failure of the Freedman’s Bureau during Reconstruction, in which the pursuit of liberty resulted in new forms of subjugation for the emancipated slaves. I will focus on its counterpart below, however, because it offers the clearest exposition of the difference between racialized double consciousness and sentimental self-awareness in the entire volume.

“Coming” is the only fictional piece in Souls. The story is incredibly rich, and a close reading of it with Schiller’s dialectic of freedom would merit an entire article of its own. The present essay will have to limit itself to two final observations in closing, first on the light it sheds on double consciousness, then on its generic classification. “Coming” tells the parallel stories of two Johns from rural Georgia, one black, one white, who both go out into the world and return home. Leaving and returning is a classic trope of Romanticism and pattern for the dawning of self-consciousness in a Fichtean (or Hegelian) construction of the Self through engagement with the Other. In fact, there are three Johns who undergo this process in the story: there’s the white John, who comes home from years of college and commerce not a jot the wiser or changed. He’s a romantic failure who is boorishly ‘naive’ to the end. But there are really two Black Johns.28 There’s the potential John who begins to undergo the process from naive to sentimental as if in a world where there is no color line. Then there is the actual John who must additionally contend with the enforced difference of being Black in a white world. The text clearly marks these divergent paths of development.

These two Johns begin as one, characterized by the hallmarks of Schiller’s naive: “that broad, good-natured smile in which lay no bit of art or artifice, but seemed just bubbling good-nature and genuine satisfaction with the world” (143). Only slowly with much difficulty and effort, after moving for a northern education, does he begin to outgrow this easy union with the outer world. When finally he does so, the self-awareness brings independence:

all the world toward which he strove was of his own building, and he builded slow and hard. As the light dawned lingeringly on his new creations, he sat rapt and silent before the vision, or wandered alone over the green campus peering through and beyond the world of men into a world of thought. (145)

This language of self-consciousness could come straight out of Schiller’s exposition of the sentimental. With the estrangement from his old world comes “a new dignity” (145) and we can imagine a Bildungsroman that would continue in this vein, leading John through various adventures, and though he may never quite feel at home after his return, he would continue to strive toward an idealized nostos. (The transformative aesthetic experience in the music hall later on offers a taste of this possible trajectory.) But this self-conscious John is not allowed to develop whither he may:

He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh. (145–6)

Here we see the emergence of double consciousness. The language here too echoes Schiller’s description of the sentimental: what he had taken for granted as “natural” now appears alienated and in contradiction to the way things should be. This newly seen world is an unjust social construct at irreconcilable odds with the ideal world of his own striving. But this second dawning of consciousness only comes about on the heels of the first.

In the juxtaposition of these two scenes, readers can finally return to a mysterious aporia from the opening essay in Souls. In the sentence immediately preceding the initial mention of double consciousness, Du Bois writes of “this American world,—a world which yields [a Black person] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (10–11). Above, the double consciousness of Black Americans was contrasted directly with the obliviousness of whiteness, in analogy with the sentimental to the naive. Now it seems like that contrast is breaking down, since self-consciousness, which Black subjects are denied, is also analogous to the sentimental in contrast to the natural unselfconsciousness of people in general. In fact, however, this seeming discrepancy corresponds directly to a slippage in Schiller’s own treatise between naive/sentimental dualism and two different sets of dialectical triads: naive/reflective judgment/sentimental and naive/sentimental/ideal.29 At times, it seems that the sentimental is itself the dialectical result of the unselfconscious naive becoming reflective. More often, Schiller explicitly sets the ideal as the unattainable third term towards which the sentimental strives to regain naive unity, but with self-conscious awareness. In fact, all three alternatives are at work in different, sometimes contradictory ways in both Schiller and Du Bois.

It is precisely these conflicts that make the story of John end in tragedy: John kills white John to save his sister from rape, then freely submits to the lynching mob, sacrificing himself in a Christ-like apotheosis. This generic classification brings me to my final point. It often escapes notice that ‘tragedy’ in Schiller’s taxonomy is a species of satire.30 It is shocking that the august, serious genre of tragedy should be classed as satire, with its roots in the satyr play, a farcical form of drama in which mythic material is recast with a chorus of irreverent satyrs. In fact, tragedy and comedy, respectively, provide the basic forms of both classes of Schiller’s satirical poetry: pathetic and mocking. This is a remarkable departure from the taxonomies of genre in any previous classical or eighteenth-century poetics. It is as if, in sentimental literature, the two major forms of Ancient Greek theater—the serious and the sarcastic—both come under the rule of the satyr play! But this generic grotesque speaks directly to the fate of idealism in Du Bois. The double consciousness and second sight of Black Americans force them to see how far we are from the “more perfect union” evoked in our founding document. Displaying this discrepancy is precisely the remit of the sentimental, satirical poet, who, for Schiller, does so in the service of grasping beyond this gap towards a future wholeness and freedom. Yet striving toward the ideal often leads to a despair that verges on absurdity. It comes as no surprise that words related to “tragedy” appear often in Souls (15 times); but it may be unexpected to learn that forms of “laughter” beat it out (24 instances). The uneasy proximity of trauma and humor is a hallmark of Souls. Returning back to the essay at the very heart of the book, “Of the Black Belt,” the two modes sing together in a duet:

How curious a land is this,—how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise! (81)

In the midst of a stark sociological account of the bleakest poverty and oppression comes this dual vision of tragicomedy that casts its shadow on the present, but hints at a future that beckons with promise. This is a perfect encapsulation of the tragic ideal implicit in both Schiller and Du Bois.

***

The transatlantic concept of double consciousness was first floated on the pages of the Atlantic in 1897. In 2022, the same journal featured another article by a Black American trying to apply experiences in Germany to his homeland’s racist legacy: “How Germany Remembers the Holocaust, And what America can learn about atonement.” Clint Smith’s essay is another transatlantic instantiation of the American Idea. Like Du Bois, Smith crafts a unique lesson for the New World out of the failures and struggles of the Old. The photo on the cover shows the close-up of a Stolperstein, a stumbling stone embedded in a Berlin sidewalk meant to remind passersby of the fate of a victim of Nazi crimes. If the small memorial does its job, it will trip people out of their comfort with the world around them and force them to become conscious of their complicity in its estrangement from any kind of ideal. They will see that at-one-ment, a reconciling return to harmonious unity, is in fact impossible. But they will strive towards reparation nonetheless.