Viewing page 18 of 27

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

138    THE CRISIS

an innovation, the extra help required no doubt will be forthcoming. In this regard the South is greatly favored and the southern laundry industry enjoys a rare advantage.

PICTURES

AN interesting exhibition of pictures by Negro children has been held by the Circle of Negro War Relief at the Coady Gallery, Fifth Avenue, New York. Twenty-nine pictures were exhibited, done by untrained colored children varying from seven to thirteen years of age, and living in one of the poorest quarters in Brooklyn. Mr. Coady says in a circular:

This exhibition of pictures by Negro children is held for the purpose of calling attention to the Negro, to his contributions to the culture of the past and present, to his service to the nation in all our wars and to the needs of Negro families whose men are now serving in the United States Army and Navy.

There was a Negroid element in most art epochs up to that of Greece and Rome. It was as much the Negro influence as any other in Spain which El Greco found helpful in his development from a Venecian to the father of the Spanish school. The whole of modern art has been strongly influenced by the Negro. Cezanne had Negro blood in his veins. Picasso and Gris, both from Afro-Celtiberian Spain, have based their work primarily on the Congo. More than any others it was Johnson, McVey, and Langford who opened the eyes of France, which first saw Poe, to the aesthetic possibilities of boxing, and elevated "The Manly Art" to the same plane of appreciation as grand opera, over there.

The Negro has been a vital element in our young culture and has already given us the Minstrels, the Cake Walk, the Buck and Wing, Syncopation- in fact all of our musical developments. What are you going to give him?

E. W. Powell writes in the New York Evening Mail:

That there are vast undeveloped artistic reserves in the Negro cannot be doubted. He has already given us the only distinctive American music, the old plantation melodies, and a notable member of French writers and artists have had the Negro ancestral strain, the Dumas and Gaugin coming to mind at once. He certainly has a rich emotional quality lacking- and perhaps needed- in the northern temperament, and amid fostering influences will produce, it is predicted by his champions, great regenerative poets, musicians and artists.

Whatever his future, the presence of the Negro is America's great internal fact, a sign of which is the anthropological investigation, which has an inevitable sociological bearing, begun this fall at the Museum of Natural History.

MISCEGENATION

THE "Listener" says in the Boston Transcript:

it is a curious and suggestive fact that 1917, the year of the Russian revolution, is the centenary of the graduation from college and beginning of the phenomenal productivity of the phenomenal Pushkin, the founder of Russian literature- poet, dramatist, novelist, historian. Before Pushkin, Russian literature was not; and the remarkable thing is that with all its splendid evolution in innovating styles, Russian literary art has never outgrown or aged Pushkin. "He is the first," says Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale, "and still the most generally beloved of all Russian poets. The wild enthusiasm that greeted his verse has never passed away." The great five Russians, whose place in the world's literature is pronounced absolutely secure, are Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoi. Pushkin's glory is that he took Russia out of the artificiality of the eighteenth century and showed the possibilities of native material in the native tongue. There is not one of the great stars of the Russian constellation who did not fervently insist that Pushkin was his inspiration. Indeed, he had a fostering hand in the work of all of them, from Gogol to Tolstoi. For the other remarkable thing about the Russian literature which has captivated the world is that it is all comprised in this hundred years from Pushkin's entrance upon the field. In the same time, American literature has had its noble exemplars, but it has not produced a single name that the world pronounces with the same respect it does any one of Russia's "great five."

Now Pushkin- it is interesting to remember just now, while America is horrified and humiliated by the anti-Negro "pogrom" in East St. Louis- was what would have been called in that part of the State of Abraham Lincoln, a "nigger,"- that is to say, while he had "white" blood, his father having been of an old and noble Russian family, figuring much in history, his mother was a granddaughter of Peter the Great's favorite Negro- obviously much more than the necessary quantum of that magic fluid, which Booker Washington used to point out had such potency that a single drop outweighed, in this country, a whole skinful of the other kind. Whatever the blood was in Pushkin, he was a prodigy from his youth. At the age of twelve, he had mastered four or five languages and was conversant with the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Moliere. But facility in acquiring languages is quite universal in Russia and this almost uncanny gift is what makes the cosmopolitanism a striking feature of the Russian character.

The Horizon

MUSIC AND ART.

MR. ROLAND W. HAYES, tenor, gave a song recital at Symphony Hall, Boston, Mass., on November 15, before an overflow audience. Mr. Harry T. Burleigh, the composer, came from New York to accompany Mr. Hayes in the singing of a group of "Negro Spirituals." Mr. William Lawrence, the accompanist for the evening, gave much pleasure by his beautiful accompaniments, sympathetically played. The press gave splendid reviews of the concert in which emphasis was laid upon the singer's gift of interpretation.

The Boston Transcript says: "Although Mr. Hayes never forced his voice, it was always equal to the auditorium. It is of great lyrical beauty, warm and mellifluous of tone, supple of inflection. The softer tone quality is finer and more stirring than the full and dramatic; the pitch of the highest notes is not infallible, but such limitations are not grievous. Not only is his voice remarkable, but his interpretative power is still more important."

Mr. Clarence Cameron White, violinist, was heard lately in a number of concerts that included a visit to Virginia Seminary and College at Lynchburg, Va., on October 29. A very successful recital was given on November 2, at Baltimore, Md., for the benefit of Morgan College. Mr. White was assisted by Miss Cleota J. Collins, soprano, who sang numbers by Gounod, Saint Saens, Sanderson, J. Rosamond Johnson, H. T. Burleigh, and Coleridge-Taylor. Mr. White's offerings included Coleridge-Taylor's Ballade in C Minor, and numbers by Saint Saens, Burleigh, Filipucci-Hartmann, Lederer, Dvorak-Kreisler, Cui, and a composition of his own "A Negro Dance." Mr. Henry Lee Grant was the accompanist.

Twenty-five hundred public school children gave a community concert on November 5, at the Athletic Field of Central High School, Louisville, Ky. The singing was under the direction of Miss Mildred Bryant, Assistant Supervisor of Public School Music. The program, a diversified one, was attractively arranged.

Mr. Kemper Harreld, violinist, of Atlanta, Ga., gave a concert at Morehouse College on November 23. He was assisted by Miss Eleanor Stevenson, soprano, Miss Margaret Scureman, reader, and the College Orchestra.

Under auspices of the Urban League of Savannah, Ga., a Community Music Festival was held on November 20, at the Savannah Theatre. A chorus of one hundred voices sang Negro melodies under the direction of Professor R. W. Gadsen. Mme. Anita Patti Brown, soprano, sang the "Jewel Song" from Faust, and the "Mad Scene" from Lucia di Lammermoor, as well as a group of modern songs.

The December number of the Musical Observer, a New York magazine, contains an article on "Creole Music of America," contributed by Maud Cuney Hare.

Mme. E. Azalia Hackley presented the Harlem Chorus of two hundred voices in a folk song festival at the Washington Irving High School in New York City, November 27. Compositions of colored composers only were rendered.

Emilio de Gorgoza, a baritone, sang at Aeolian Hall, New York City, recently. His program included many of the great composers. The New York World says: "But the audience liked bet the five songs forming the third and last group, but one, especially, J. Rosamond Johnson's 'I Told My Love to the Roses,' which Mr. de Gorgoza was obliged to repeat. In this song, which like those surrounding it was given in English, the singer excelled in the variety of his tone color and in a genuinely expressed feeling. The closing phrase, with its beautifully sung pianissimo high note, was beyond reproach."

THE WAR.

MRS. Lottie B. Jones of Tenleytown, D. C., has five sons serving in the United States Army. Two were formerly on the detective force of Washington, D.C., and are now Captain and Lieutenant, J. W. and Paul W. Jones, respectively; C. A. and T. L. Jones are chief petty officers in the Navy; W. W. Jones is on an Army transport. Dr. William Jones, formerly in the Navy, and John Jones, a graduate of Harvard, now a railroad engineer in Brazil, are "two more who are willing to go anytime they receive

139