Samuel Coleridge-Taylor—­Musician.  His Life and Letters.  By W. C. Berwick Sayers.  Cassell and Company, London, 1915.  Pp. 328.

In this work we have the first extensive account of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.  The author of this volume has succeeded in producing a sympathetic and interesting narrative of the life of one of the greatest musicians of his time.  Taking up his birth and childhood and then his college days, ending in the romance which attached him to a young Croydon girl, the author does not delay in bringing the reader to a consideration of those fundamentals which made Samuel Coleridge-Taylor famous ...

Much space is devoted to Coleridge-Taylor’s achievement of success with his “Ballade in A Minor.”  How Sir Edward Elgar extended the promising composer a welcoming hand and arranged for him to write for a concert a short orchestral piece which turned out to be the artist’s first great success is well described.  The author emphasizes the barbaric strain and orchestral coloring, the prominently marked features which made the composer great.

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.