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Updated: August 27, 2024
I dimly recall through these years a room in cozy disorder, strewn with music music on the floor and music on the chairs, music in the air as the master rushed to the piano now and again to make some memory melodious some allusion real. And then at last, for it was the last, I saw Coleridge-Taylor in a mighty throng of people crowding the Crystal Palace.
It is now nineteen years since I first saw Coleridge-Taylor. We were in London in some somber hall where there were many meeting, men and women called chiefly to the beautiful World's Fair at Paris; and then a few slipping over to London to meet Pan-Africa. We were there from Cape Colony and Liberia, from Haiti and the States, and from the Islands of the Sea.
I mind me how once he told of the bishop, the well-groomed English bishop, who eyed the artist gravely, with his eye-glass hair and color and figure, and said quite audibly to his friends, "Quite interesting looks intelligent, yes yes!" Fortunate was Coleridge-Taylor to be born in Europe and to speak a universal tongue. In America he could hardly have had his career.
For we know that as the world grows better there will be realized in our children's lives that for which we fight unfalteringly, but vainly now. So much for the problem of the home and our own dark children. Now let us look beyond the pale upon the children of the wide world. What is the real lesson of the life of Coleridge-Taylor?
I remember the stiff, young officer who came with credentials from Menelik of Abyssinia; I remember the bitter, black American who whispered how an army of the Soudan might some day cross the Alps; I remember Englishmen, like the Colensos, who sat and counseled with us; but above all, I remember Coleridge-Taylor.
In music and art we recall Bridgewater, the friend of Beethoven, and the unexplained complexion of Beethoven's own father; Coleridge-Taylor in England, Tanner in America, Gomez in Spain; Ira Aldridge, the actor, and Johnson, Cook, and Burleigh, who are making the new American syncopated music.
Georges's Episcopal Church, New York, and just a few years later he was to be employed also at Temple Emanu-El, the Fifth Avenue Jewish synagogue. From abroad also came word of a brilliant musician, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who by his "Hiawatha's Wedding-Feast" in 1898 leaped into the rank of the foremost living English composers.
Dumas, holding his own among the French; Browning and S. Coleridge-Taylor among the English, and Douglass, among the Americans, to their minds belie that assertion. Nor yet do they hold that the races must needs depend upon this infusion for its greatness. The unmixed Toussaint L'Ouverture, Paul Laurence Dunbar and J. C. Price speak up for the innate powers of the race.
Deep as was the primal tragedy in the life of Coleridge-Taylor, there lay another still deeper. He smiled at it lightly, as we all do, we who live within the veil, to hide the deeper hurt. He had, with us, that divine and African gift of laughter, that echo of a thousand centuries of suns.
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