Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
began, and whatever it lacked of physical adventure in the conventional
round of a modern world-city, it more than gained in the almost
tempestuous outpouring of his spiritual nature. Life to him was neither
meat nor drink,--it was creative flame; ideas, plans, melodies glowed
within him. To create, to do, to accomplish; to know the white glory of
mighty midnights and the pale Amen of dawns was his day of days. Songs,
pianoforte and violin pieces, trios and quintets for strings, incidental
music, symphony, orchestral, and choral works rushed from his fingers.
Nor were they laboriously contrived or light, thin things made to meet
sudden popularity. Rather they were the flaming bits that must be said
and sung,--that could not wait the slower birth of years, so hurried to
the world as though their young creator knew that God gave him but a
day. His whole active life was scarcely more than a decade and a half,
and yet in that time, without wealth, friends, or influence, in the face
of perhaps the most critical and skeptical and least imaginative
civilization of the modern world, he wrote his name so high as a
creative artist that it cannot soon be forgotten.
And this was but one side of the man. On the other was the
sweet-tempered, sympathetic comrade, always willing to help, never
knowing how to refuse, generous with every nerve and fiber of his being.
Think of a young musician, father of a family, who at the time of his
death held positions as Associate of the Royal College of Music,
Professor in Trinity College and Crystal Palace, Conductor of the Handel
Choral Society and the Rochester Choral Society, Principal of the
Guildhall School of Music, where he had charge of the choral choir, the
orchestra, and the opera. He was repeatedly the leader of music
festivals all over Great Britain and a judge of contests. And with all
this his house was open in cheering hospitality to friends and his hand
ever ready with sympathy and help.
When such a man dies, it must bring pause to a reasoning world. We may
call his death-sickness pneumonia, but we all know that it was sheer
overwork,--the using of a delicately-tuned instrument too commonly and
continuously and carelessly to let it last its normal life. We may well
talk of the waste of wood and water, of food and fire, but the real and
unforgivable waste of modern civilization is the waste of ability and
genius,--the killing of useful, indispensable men who have no right to
die; who deserve, not for themselves, but for the world, leisure,
freedom from distraction, expert medical advice, and intelligent
sympathy.
Coleridge-Taylor's life work was not finished,--it was but well begun.
He lived only his first period of creative genius, when melody and
harmony flashed and fluttered in subtle, compelling, and more than
promising profusion. He did not live to do the organized, constructive
work in the full, calm power of noonday,--the reflective finishing of
evening. In the annals of the future his name must always stand high,
but with the priceless gift of years, who can say where it might not
have stood.
Why should he have worked so breathlessly, almost furiously? It was, we
may be sure, because with unflinching determination and with no thought
of surrender he faced the great alternative,--the choice which the
cynical, thoughtless, busy, modern world spreads grimly before its
greater souls--food or beauty, bread and butter, or ideals. And
continually we see worthier men turning to the pettier, cheaper
thing--the popular portrait, the sensational novel, the jingling song.
The choice is not always between the least and the greatest, the high
and the empty, but only too often it is between starvation and
something. When, therefore, we see a man, working desperately to earn a
living and still stooping to no paltry dickering and to no unworthy
work, handing away a "Hiawatha" for less than a song, pausing for
glimpses of the stars when a world full of charcoal glowed far more
warmly and comfortably, we know that such a man is a hero in a sense
never approached by the swashbuckling soldier or the lying patriot.
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. 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. His
genius was, to be sure, recognized (with some palpitation and
consternation) when it came full-grown across the seas with an English
imprint; but born here, it might never have been permitted to grow. We
know in America how to discourage, choke, and murder ability when it so
far forgets itself as to choose a dark skin. England, thank God, is
slightly more civilized than her colonies; but even there the path of
this young man was no way of roses and just a shade thornier than that
of whiter men. He did not complain at it,--he did not
"Wince and cry aloud."
Rather the hint here and there of color discrimination in England
aroused in him deeper and more poignant sympathy with his people
throughout the world. He was one with that great company of
mixed-blooded men: Pushkin and Dumas, Hamilton and Douglass, Browning
and many others; but he more than most of these men knew the call of the
blood when it came and listened and answered. He came to America with
strange enthusiasm. He took with quite simple and unconscious grace the
conventional congratulations of the musical world. He was used to that.
But to his own people--to the sad sweetness of their voices, their
inborn sense of music, their broken, half-articulate voices,--he leapt
with new enthusiasm. From the fainter shadowings of his own life, he
sensed instinctively the vaster tragedy of theirs. His soul yearned to
give voice and being to this human thing. He early turned to the sorrow
songs. He sat at the faltering feet of Paul Laurence Dunbar and he asked
(as we sadly shook our heads) for some masterpiece of this world-tragedy
that his soul could set to music. And then, so characteristically, he
rushed back to England, composed a half-dozen exquisite harmonies
haunted by slave-songs, led the Welsh in their singing, listened to the
Scotch, ordered great music festivals in all England, wrote for Beerbohm
Tree, took on another music professorship, promised a trip to Germany,
and at last, staggering home one night, on his way to his wife and
little boy and girl, fell in his tracks and in four days was dead, at
the age of thirty-seven. They say that in his death-throe he arose and
facing some great, ghostly choir raised his last baton, while all around
the massive silence rang with the last mist-music of his dying ears.
He was buried from St. Michael's on September 5, 1912, with the acclaim
of kings and music masters and little children and to the majestic
melody of his own music. The tributes that followed him to his grave
were unusually hearty and sincere. The head of the Royal College calls
the first production of "Hiawatha" one of the most remarkable events in
modern English musical history and the trilogy one of the most
universally-beloved works of modern English music. One critic calls
Taylor's a name "which with that of Elgar represented the nation's most
individual output" and calls his "Atonement" "perhaps the finest passion
music of modern times." Another critic speaks of his originality:
"Though surrounded by the influences that are at work in Europe today,
he retained his individuality to the end, developing his style, however,
and evincing new ideas in each succeeding work. His untimely death at
the age of thirty-seven, a short life--like those of Schubert,
Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Hugo Wolf--has robbed the world of one of its
noblest singers, one of those few men of modern times who found
expression in the language of musical song, a lyricist of power and
worth."
But the tributes did not rest with the artist; with peculiar unanimity
they sought his "sterling character," "the good husband and father," the
"staunch and loyal friend." And perhaps I cannot better end these
hesitating words than with that tribute from one who called this master,
friend, and whose lament cried in the night with more of depth and
passion than Alfred Noyes is wont in his self-repression to voice:
"Through him, his race, a moment, lifted up
Forests of hands to beauty, as in prayer,
Touched through his lips the sacramental cup
And then sank back, benumbed in our bleak air."
Yet, consider: to many millions of people this man was all wrong.
_First_, he ought never to have been born, for he was the mulatto son of
a white woman. _Secondly_, he should never have been educated as a
musician,--he should have been trained, for his "place" in the world and
to make him satisfied therewith. _Thirdly_, he should not have married
the woman he loved and who loved him, for she was white and the niece of
an Oxford professor. _Fourthly_, the children of such a union--but why
proceed? You know it all by heart.
If he had been black, like Paul Laurence Dunbar, would the argument have
been different? No. He should never have been born, for he is a
"problem." He should never be educated, for he cannot be educated. He
should never marry, for that means children and there is no place for
black children in this world.
* * * * *
In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future and
faith. All words and all thinking lead to the child,--to that vast
immortality and the wide sweep of infinite possibility which the child
represents. Such thought as this it was that made the Master say of old
as He saw baby faces:
"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones, it is better for
him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into
the sea."
And yet the mothers and fathers and the men and women of my race must
often pause and ask: Is it worth while? Ought children be born to us?
Have we any right to make human souls face what we face today? The
answer is clear: If the great battle of human right against poverty,
against disease, against color prejudice is to be won, it must be won,
not in our day, but in the day of our children's children. Ours is the
blood and dust of battle; theirs the rewards of victory. If, then, they
are not there because we have not brought them into the world, we have
been the guiltiest factor in conquering ourselves. It is our duty, then,
to accomplish the immortality of black blood, in order that the day may
come in this dark world when poverty shall be abolished, privilege be
based on individual desert, and the color of a man's skin be no bar to
the outlook of his soul.
If it is our duty as honest colored men and women, battling for a great
principle, to bring not aimless rafts of children to the world, but as
many as, with reasonable sacrifice, we can train to largest manhood,
what in its inner essence shall that training be, particularly in its
beginning?
The first temptation is to shield the child,--to hedge it about that it
may not know and will not dream of the color line. Then when we can no
longer wholly shield, to indulge and pamper and coddle, as though in
this dumb way to compensate. From this attitude comes the multitude of
our spoiled, wayward, disappointed children. And must we not blame