The next task of the author is to show how the "essential beauty, naive simplicity, unaffected expression and unforced idealism," of Longfellow's "Hiawatha" stirred the artist and set him composing an unambitious cantata which resulted in "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast," and the "Song of Hiawatha." The expressions of enthusiasm and the euologies which crowned the musician as one of the greatest artists that Great Britain has produced justly constitute a large portion of the work.
His "Visit to America" is an important chapter of the volume. The manner in which the oppressed of his race received him in their troubled land is treated in detail, and the names of the persons and organizations that arose to welcome him are given honorable mention. The author brings out too that so impressed was Coleridge-Taylor with the frank recognition of pure music in America that he once "contemplated the desirability of emigrating to this land."
The book abounds with letters and extracts from publications, which enable the reader to learn for himself how the artist's work was appreciated. The volume is well illustrated. In it appear the early portraits of Coleridge-Taylor's mother, of himself, and family, and home, and of the Coleridge-Taylor Society in Washington, D.C. Not only persons who appreciate music but all who have an intelligent interest in the achievements of the Negro should read this work.
J. R. Davis
Race Orthodoxy in the South and other Aspects of the Negro Problem. By Thomas Pearce Bailey, Ph.D. The Neale Publishing Company, New York, 1914.
The author of this volume has a long intellectual pedigree. Pedigrees are important in authors who write on the race problem. This is particularly true when they attempt to tell us what the orthodox opinion of the South is regarding the Negro. Much that passes for Southern opinion on the Negro is too violent to be taken at its face value. Other interpretations of the South have too frequently been the individual views of eminent men of Southern origin who no longer hold orthodox views.
The author discusses some of these interpretations and criticises them. There are four principal types. There is the philosophical view, represented by Edgar Gardiner Murphy's "The Basis of Ascendancy." Mr. Murphy "is one of the choicest specimens of noble character that the South has produced," but he came under Northern influences and his book represents a struggle between Northern and Southern points of view. "The first part of his book seems to be, in the main, pro-Southern and defensive of the South, while the latter part becomes largely Northern and critical of the South." He does not succeed, in the opinion of the author, in synthesizing these two divergent views.
The second type is sociological, represented by "The Southerner," a novel written in the form of an autobiography or, perhaps, rather an autobiography written in the form of a novel. The author is supposed to be Walter Hines Page, at present American ambassador to Great Britain. Of this book Mr. Bailey says: "The author is not a Southerner of the spirit, whatever he may be of the flesh. There is something of North Carolina and something of Massachusetts in his attitude, but none of the all-inclusive Americanism that alone is able to write about the South with sympathy of the heart yet with balanced discrimination."
To understand the South one must have lived in South Carolina, and understand the "apparent violence" of Ben Tilman, or in Mississippi, the home of Senator Vardaman. The South, the orthodox South, is today as it was before the war, the "far South"; but the sentiments which dominate it are not now, as in slavery days, the sentiments of the "master class" but rather those of the "poor white man."
The third type of interpretation is represented here by "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The criticsm of this book is so subtle that it is difficult to indicate the outlines of it in a single paragraph. The difficulty with Mrs. Stowe's interpretation of the South and the Negro is that she, just as certain Southern humanitarians of the present day, is inclined to treat the Negroes as a class. She does not regard them as a race, a different breed, whose blood is a contamination. "No one," says the writer, "has come within shouting distance of the real Negro problem who does not appreciate this distinction. Indeed, almost everything critical that can be alleged against 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' springs from the failure of its humanitarian author to sympathize with race consciousness as such."