A Book About the Theater Part 9

"On they came, a band leading the way. Just behind, with glitter of lance and s.h.i.+ne of helmet, came a dozen knights and fair ladies riding spirited chargers. They all looked strange and haughty, and sneeringly indifferent to the cheers of the people. The women seemed small and firm and scornful, and the men rode with lances uplifted, looking down at the crowd with a haughty droop in their eyelids." Rose "did not laugh at the clown jigging by in a pony-cart, for there was a face between her and all that followed--the face of a bare-armed knight, with brown hair and a curling mustache, whose proud neck had a curve in it as he bent his head to speak to his rearing horse.... His face was fine, like pictures she had seen."

In the afternoon Rose attended the performance in the tent and "sat in a dream of delight as the band began to play.... Then the music struck into a splendid gallop and out from the curtained mysteries beyond, the knights and ladies darted, two by two, in glory of crimson and gold, and green and silver. At their head rode the man with the brown mustache." A little later "six men dressed in tights of blue and white and orange ran into the ring, and her hero led them. He wore blue and silver, and on his breast was a rosette. He looked a G.o.d to her. His naked limbs, his proud neck, the lofty carriage of his head, made her s.h.i.+ver with emotion. They all came to her, lit by the white radiance; they were not naked, they were beautiful.... They invested their nakedness with something which exalted them. They became objects of luminous beauty to her, tho she knew nothing of art. To see him bow and kiss his fingers to the audience was a revelation of manly grace and courtesy." When at last the show was over and Rose went out into the open air, "it seemed strange to see the same blue sky arching the earth; things seemed exactly the same, and yet Rose had grown older. She had developed immeasurably in those few hours." As they looked back at the tents, Rose knew that "something sweet and splendid and mystical was pa.s.sing out of her life after a few hours' stay there. Her feeling of loss was none the less real because it was indefinable to her."

She never saw this acrobat again, and after a little while she knew that she did not want to see him. He lingered in her memory, a vision from another world than any she had ever dreamed--a world of heroic romance and of lofty idealism. "She began to live for him, her ideal. She set him on high as a being to be wors.h.i.+ped, as a man fit to be her judge. In the days and weeks which followed she asked herself: 'Would he like me to do this?' When the sunset was very beautiful, she thought of him....

Vast ambitions began in her.... She would do something great for his sake.... In short, she consecrated herself to him as to a king, and seized upon every chance to educate herself to be worthy of him." And while her soul was thus expanding under the influence of this poetic idealization of a manly figure revealed to her only for two or three hours, all unconsciously she patterned her movements upon his. She walked with a free stride, and her body came to have the easy carriage of the athlete. Later, when Rose had matured into a beauty of her own, she confessed to an elder woman this sentimental awakening in her early girlhood; and it became evident to her friend that "the beautiful poise of the head, and supple swing of the girl's body was in part due to the suggestion of the man's perfect grace."

II

To the realistic imagination of the boy, Huck, the circus was a fleeting spectacle of beauty; and to the romantic imagination of the girl, Rose, it lingered long as a dream of poetry. Young Americans, both of them, living in these modern days when the human form, male and female, is decorously dissembled and disguised by ugly and complicated garments, they had been allowed by the exceptional freedom of the circus to recapture something of the frank and innocent delight of the Greeks in the beauty of the body, in its beauty merely as a body, and not as the habitation of the mind and the soul. Alert as the Greeks were to admire the deeds of the mind--no race ever more so--they were no less keen in their appreciation of the things of the body. They were glad to crown the poet for his lyric conquest, but they bestowed the laurel wreath also on the athlete who had won to the front in the race. The lofty n.o.bility of their tragedy testifies to the clarity of their intelligence; and the supreme power of their sculpture is evidence of their loving study of the human body, bearing itself in beauty, clad in few and flowing garments which allowed the eye to follow the free play of the muscles.

It is only in the circus or the gymnasium or the swimming-pool that we moderns are permitted to behold what was a daily spectacle to the Greeks; and it is because the circus preserves for us this occasional privilege that it deserves to survive. The jocularities of the clowns, the intricate evolutions of the trained animals, the golden glitter of the gorgeous cavalcades--all these are but the casual accompaniments of the essential privilege of the circus to present to us a succession of men and women, with their bodies in perfect condition, to exhibit to us that purely physical beauty which we are ever in danger of overlooking or even forgetting. These acrobats, slim and handsome, as Huck Finn found them, in their "s.h.i.+rts and drawers," may display their daring and their grace, standing on a circling steed or swinging from a flying trapeze, revolving on a horizontal bar or building themselves up into human pyramids on the bark of the arena; but, except for the sake of variety, the way in which they may choose to exhibit their skill and to show themselves is unimportant. What is important is that we may have the s.h.i.+fting spectacle of the human body in the highest condition of physical efficiency, delighting our eyes by obedience to the everlasting laws of beauty.

While the Greeks had far more opportunities than are vouchsafed to us moderns to behold the human body exhibiting its strength and its skill in graceful play, we have the advantage that many of the most effective exercises are latter-day inventions. It seems unlikely that the Athenians and the Spartans, even tho they were hors.e.m.e.n, had attained to the art of bareback riding; they may have bestraddled a saddleless steed, but they had not learned how to stand on his back, and to turn somersets in time with the stride of the horse. It is, of course, possible that they were familiar with this, but no sculpture and no vase-painting, no anecdote in the works of the prose-writers, and no line of the lyrists survives to authorize us to believe it. And it is fairly certain, also, that they lacked the horizontal bar, which affords limitless possibilities to the adventurous acrobat of our own times, both when it is erected singly and when it is combined in sets of three, either fixed in the arena or raised aloft in the air to produce the appearance of a remoter ethereality.

The trapeze has a name of Greek origin, and it was possibly known to the Greeks. But the Greeks did not foresee the full possibilities of the trapeze, since its most startling utilization, the feat known as the Flying Trapeze, was invented by the French acrobat, Leotard, only a little later than the middle of the nineteenth century. The Flying Trapeze is the ultimate achievement of acrobatic art, and it demands the utmost combination of skilful strength and of easy grace. It was a feat that the Greeks would have appreciated and enjoyed, since it demanded and disclosed the perfection of physical courage and of physical skill.

Of late, the Flying Trapeze has been complicated and doubled in difficulty by the introduction of a second performer, who at first makes the leap simultaneously with his partner, and afterward separates from him and springs thru the air to the trapeze which his a.s.sociate has just abandoned, the pair thus floating past each other in mid-air. In this more elaborated form the task is more perilous, no doubt, and far less easy of accomplishment; but it cannot be achieved with quite the same graceful mastery as when a single performer seems to glide ethereally from bar to bar, as tho it was impossible for him to fall or to fail to catch his almost invisible support. This graceful mastery was the most marked characteristic of Leotard, the original inventor of the Flying Trapeze; and it may be doubted whether any of those who have followed the path he traced thru the air, and who have vanquished difficulties beyond those which he conquered, have been able to outdo him in the abiding essential of grace.

III

The overcoming of difficulty is one of the elements of the pleasure which we take in any art, and part of our enjoyment of a sonnet, for example, must be ascribed to the apparent ease with which the poet is able to express his thought, amply and completely, within the rigid limitations of his fourteen lines, with their prescribed arrangement of five or six rimes. But our delight is diminished if we are made conscious of the effort it has cost the artist to attain his aim. Many a later performer on the Flying Trapeze let us see that the feats he is attempting are so difficult that they cannot be accomplished without obvious effort. That is to say, we are made aware that the acrobat is exhibiting a "stunt," and this is bad art. Difficulty overcome is worth while only when it is overcome seemingly without any strain, and when art is sufficient to conceal itself. However difficult the artist's achievement may be, its charm is doubled if he can make it appear to be easy.

It happens that I am able to bring his personal testimony to the fact that this was the principle which always governed Leotard himself. When the French gymnast paid his only visit to the United States, more than forty years ago, he used to practise in a gymnasium which I also frequented. He spoke no English, and I had a little school-boy French, so that a certain intimacy sprang up. One day Leotard asked me to swing a trapeze for him, and he sprang off and caught it with a single hand, and then as the second trapeze returned he twisted and grasped the first trapeze again with one hand. This evoked from me an immediate exclamation of astonishment and admiration at the startling conquest of difficulty, and it was followed by the natural question why so extraordinary a feat had never been exhibited in public. Leotard explained that the leaps from trapeze to trapeze with the aid of one hand only must be lopsided, since the body is inevitably more or less twisted, and he added that as there was an unavoidable and ungraceful wrenching of the person, he had determined never to exhibit this feat in public, difficult as it might be.

But altho Leotard was not willing to perform in public with only one hand, it was a most invaluable exercise in private. His ability to accomplish his leaps thus handicapped gave him a redoubled confidence when he was using both of his hands. That he was right in resisting the temptation to startle the spectators by a "stunt" of surprising difficulty is beyond question. It could not be made to seem easy, and it could not be accomplished with grace. Therefore it was not fit for exhibition, even tho Leotard might feel sure that he could do it without risk of failure. Here the French acrobat revealed himself as bound by the eternal principles which underlie all the arts, that of the acrobat no less than those of the painter and the poet. There is lack of art in the performances of many acrobats of remarkable skill, who attempt feats which they are not always certain of achieving. Indeed, they are sometimes willing to profit by this very uncertainty. They fail the first time of trying, and even the second, and these failures serve the purpose of advertising to the spectators the difficulty of the task they have undertaken. Then the third time, or the fourth, they succeed, whereupon they reap the unworthy reward of applause from the unthinking.

The artist should never let us see his failures. If he is not certain that he can perform what he promises, then he had better refrain from the attempt. It was in the same winter that Leotard was in New York, in the late sixties of the nineteenth century, that the Hanlon Brothers paid one of their welcome visits to America. The Hanlons they were then, and they were acrobats pure and simple, altho later, when they called themselves the Hanlon-Lees, they had become pantomimists. As acrobats they held fast to the same principles which governed Leotard in his performances. They insisted upon certainty of execution; they never failed to perform the feat they set out to accomplish, and to perform it successfully the first time they attempted it. And no matter how difficult the feat might be, or how novel or how effective, if they could not attain absolute certainty of execution, they refrained from setting it before the public. I was told at the time that there were two or three surprising and alluring exercises which the Hanlons had invented themselves, which they practised laboriously and faithfully all that winter, and which they wisely refrained from ever putting on their program because they were never able to a.s.sure themselves of a uniformly successful result. They could do any one of these feats four times out of five, but the fifth time there would be a miscalculation of energy, and the attempt would have to be repeated. And they were unwilling to let the public witness any performance of theirs which was not perfect in its execution.

IV

Here again the modern acrobat, who is guided by a real feeling for his art, is in accord with the principles which the Greeks obeyed. In Attic tragedy, for example, there are no exhibitions of violence, no scuffles, and no a.s.sa.s.sinations, and this is not so much because the Greeks shrank from scenes of blood, as some critics have vainly contended, but rather because the actors in the Attic drama were raised on thick boots and were topped by towering masks, which made it almost impossible for them to take part in episodes of vigorous action, in hand-to-hand struggles, in murders before the eyes of the spectators, without danger of displacing the mask, and thereby distracting the attention of the audience from the immediate purpose of the dramatic poet. What could not be done gracefully the Greeks refrained from attempting. The exhibition of difficulty for the sake of difficulty, still more the failure to accomplish a "stunt" for the sake of calling attention to its difficulty--these things the Greeks abhorred. They would as surely have disapproved of the misguided artifices of the acrobats who make a practise of failing once or twice in order to multiply the immediate effect of their ultimate success as they would reprove the exhibition of a difficulty conquered for its own sake. It is only in the best acrobatic performances that we moderns are privileged to perceive what was a constant delight to the Greeks--the beauty of the human form, in its finest physical perfection, certain of its strength and easy in its grace.

(1912.)

XIII

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF NEGRO-MINSTRELSY

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF NEGRO-MINSTRELSY

I

Of all the varied and manifold kinds of theatrical entertainment negro-minstrelsy is the only one which is absolutely native to these States, and the only one which could not have come into existence anywhere else in the civilized world. Here in America alone has the transplanted African been brought into intimate contact with the transplanted European. Other nations may have disputed our claim to the invention of the steamboat and the telegraph, but negro-minstrelsy is as indisputably due to American inventiveness as the telephone itself. Here in the United States it had its humble beginnings; here it expanded and flourished for many years; from here it was exported to Great Britain, where it established itself for many seasons; from here it has made sporadic excursions into France and into Germany; and here at last it has fallen into a decline and a degeneracy and a decay which seem to doom it to a speedy extinction. Its life was little longer than that vouchsafed to man, threescore years and ten, for it was born in the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, and in the second decade of the twentieth it lingers superfluous on the stage, with none to do it reverence.

Time was when the negro minstrels held possession of three or four theaters in the single city of New York, and when a dozen or more troops were traveling from town to town; and now they have long ago surrendered their last hall in the metropolis, and only a solitary company winds its lonely way from theater to theater thruout the United States. The few surviving pract.i.tioners of the art are reduced to the presentation of brief interludes in the all-devouring variety-shows, or to the impersonation of spa.r.s.e negro characters in occasional comedies. The Skidmore Guards, who paraded so gaily at Harrigan and Hart's, are disbanded now these many years; Johnny Wild of joyous memory is no more, and Sweatnam, bereft of his fellows in sable drollery, is seen only in a chance comedy like 'Excuse Me,' or the 'County Chairman.' George Christy and Dan Emmett and Dan Bryant have gone and left only fading memories of their breezy songs, their nimble dances, and their flippant quips. Edwin Forrest and Edwin Booth blacked up more than once, Joseph Jefferson and Barney Williams besmeared themselves with burnt cork on occasion; but it is not by these darker episodes in their artistic careers that they are now recalled, and the leading actors of to-day think scorn of negro-minstrelsy--whenever they deign to give it a thought. And yet it must be noted frankly that when The Lambs wanted to raise money for their new club-house, they did not disdain the art of the negro minstrel, and more than twoscore of them went forth to conquer, willingly disguised in the uniform blackness a.s.sumed long ago by George Christy and Dan Bryant.

It is to be hoped that some devoted historian will come forward before it is too late and tell us the history of this very special form of theatrical art, the only one indigenous to our soil. Indeed, now that our American universities are paying attention to the drama, what more alluring theme for the dissertation demanded of all candidates for the doctorate of philosophy than an inquiry into the rise and fall of negro-minstrelsy? In the late Laurence Hutton's conscientious and entertaining volume on the 'Curiosities of the American Stage,' there is a chapter in which the subject is treated historically, altho the chronicler wasted much of his precious s.p.a.ce in considering the succession of sable characters in the regular drama--Shakspere's Oth.e.l.lo, Southerne's Oroonoko, Bickerstaff's Mungo, Boucicault's Pete (in the 'Octoroon'), Uncle Tom, Topsy, Eliza, and their companions (in the undying dramatization of Mrs. Stowe's story). These were all parts in plays wherein white characters were prominent. The first performer of a song-and-dance, that is of a sketch in which the darky performer was sufficient unto himself, and was deprived of any support from persons of another complexion, seems to have been "Jim Crow" Rice--the t.i.tle of whose lively lyric survives in the name bestowed upon the cars reserved for colored folk on certain Southern railroads. Rice found his pattern in an old negro who did a peculiar step after he had sung to a tune of his own contriving:

Wheel about, turn about; Do jus' so: An' ebery time I turn about, I jump Jim Crow.

Rice carried Jim Crow to England, and he made a specialty of dandy darkies. But he was not the discoverer of negro-minstrelsy, as we know it, altho he blazed the trail for it. Indeed, it was quite probably due to the influence of Rice and his darky dandies that the negro minstrels confined their efforts to the imitation of the town negro rather than of the plantation negro, the field-hand of the Uncle Remus type. Rice first impersonated Jim Crow in the late twenties, and it was in the middle of the thirties that he went to England. And it was in the early forties that Dan Emmett, Frank Brower, Billy Whitlock, and d.i.c.k Pelham happened to meet by accident in a New York boarding-house, and amused themselves with songs accompanied by the banjo, the tambourine, and the bones.

Pleased by the result of their exercises, they appeared together at a benefit, and negro-minstrelsy was born. At first there was no differentiation into Interlocutors and End-men; they all took an equal share in the more or less improvised dialog; they sang, and they played, and they danced the 'Essence of Old Virginny.'

Probably Emmett began early to provide new tunes for them. He was the composer of 'Old Dan Tucker' and the 'Boatman's Dance,' of 'Walk Along, John,' and 'Early in the Morning,' and one walk-around which he devised in the late fifties for Bryant's Minstrels, 'Dixie,' was introduced by Mrs. John Wood into a burlesque, which she was playing in New Orleans, just before the outbreak of the Civil War. The sentiment and the tune took the fancy of the ardent Louisianans, and they carried it with them into the Confederate army, where it soon established itself as the war-song of the South. And then when Richmond had fallen at last, Lincoln ordered the bands of the victorious army to play 'Dixie,' with the wise explanation that as we had captured the Southern capital, we had also captured the Southern song. And 'Dixie,' which had begun life so humbly as a walk-around in a minstrel-show in New York, bids fair to survive indefinitely as the musical testimony to the fact that the cruel war is over, and that these States are now one nation.

II

It was only a year or two after the quartet of Emmett, Brower, Whitlock, and Pelham had shown the possibilities of the new form of amus.e.m.e.nt that troops of negro minstrels began to supply an entire evening's amus.e.m.e.nt.

The regulation First Part was devised with its curving row of vocalists, instrumentalists, and comedians. The dignified Interlocutor took his place in the middle of the semicircle, and uttered the time-honored phrase: "Gentlemen, be seated. We will commence with the overture."

Bones captured the chair at one end, and Tambo pre-empted that on the other; and they began their wordy skirmish with the Middleman, in which that pompous presiding officer always got the worst of it. This device for immediate and boisterous laughter, this putting down of the Middleman by the End-man, the negro minstrels appear to have borrowed from the circus, where the clown is also permitted always to discomfit the stiff and stately ring-master.

But altho the minstrels may have taken over this effective trick from the circus, with which some of the earlier performers had had intimate relations, the trick itself is of remote antiquity. The side-splitting colloquy of the End-man with the Middleman may be exactly like the interchange of merry jests between the clown and the ring-master, yet it is far older than the modern circus. It existed in Paris, for example, in the sixteenth century, when the quack doctor was accompanied by his jack-pudding. Many of the dialogs heard on the Pont-Neuf between Mondor and Tabarin have been preserved, and the method is precisely that of the dialogs between ring-master and clown, Interlocutor and End-man, even to the persistent repet.i.tion of the question which contains the catch.

"Master," Tabarin would begin, "can you tell me which is the more generous, a man or a woman?" And the quack doctor would solemnly reply: "Ah, Tabarin, that is a question which has been greatly debated by the philosophers of antiquity, and they have been unable to decide which is truly the more generous, a man or a woman." Then Tabarin would briskly retort: "Never mind the old philosophers. I can tell you." And with great contempt the ponderous quack doctor would return: "What, Tabarin, do you mean to say that you can tell us which is the more generous, a man or a woman." Tabarin promptly responded that he could. "Then," asked Mondor, "pray do so. Which is the more generous, a man or a woman?" And thereupon, to the great disgust of Mondor, Tabarin would proffer his ribald explanation. Unfortunately the explanation he gave is frankly too ribald to be given here, for nowadays we are more squeamish than the idlers who gathered around the quack doctor's platform in Paris three or four centuries ago. The dialogs of Mondor and Tabarin were brief enough, but they often made up for their brevity in their breadth.

This kind of catch-question was known in England, under Elizabeth, as "selling a bargain," and it is not infrequent in the plays of the time.

It will be found more than once in earlier plays of Shakspere; for example, when his "clowns" (as the low-comedy characters were then called) were allowed to run on at their own sweet will. Not a little of the dialog of the two Dromios is closely akin in its method to the interchange of question and answer between the Interlocutor and the End-man. We may be sure this method of evoking laughter was employed also by the improvising comedians of the Italian comedy-of-masks, with which negro-minstrelsy has other points of resemblance. It must have been popular with the wandering glee-men of the rude Middle Ages; and now that negro-minstrelsy is disappearing and now that our circuses have burgeoned into three rings under a tent too vast for any merely verbal repartees, it has not departed from among us, since it still survives as the staple of the so-called "sidewalk conversationalists"

who swap personalities in our superabundant variety-shows.

We do not know with historic certainty how soon the First Part crystallized into the form which has long been traditional--the opening overture, the catch-questioning of End-man and Middleman, the comic songs of Bones and Tambo in turn, the sentimental ballads by the silver-throated vocalists, and the concluding walk-around. The rest of the evening's entertainment never took on any definite framework, altho the final item on the program was likely to be a piece of some length, often a burlesque of a serious drama then popular, and this little play "enlisted the whole strength of the company." Between the stately First Part and the more pretentious terminating sketch, the minstrels presented a variety of acts in which the several members exhibited their specialities. A clog-dance was always in order--altho the mechanical precision of this form of saltatorial exercise was wholly foreign to the characteristics of the actual negroes whom the minstrels were supposed to be representing. A stump-speech was certain of a warm reception--altho this again departed from the true negro tradition, and, in fact, often degenerated into frank burlesque, wholly unrelated to the realities of life. Sketches, like those which Rice had earlier composed for his own acting, were likely to have a little closer relation to the genuine darky.

Yet here again the negro minstrel was not avid of overt originality. He was willing to find his profit in the past and to translate into negro dialect any farce, however ancient, which might contain comic situations or humorous characters that could be twisted to suit his immediate purpose. He seized upon the ingenious plots of certain of the pantomimes brought to America from France half a century ago by the Ravels. And on occasion he went, unwittingly, still further afield for his prey. There is in print, in a collection of so-called Ethiopian drama, an amusing sketch, ent.i.tled the 'Great Mutton Trial'; and the remote source of this is to be sought in the oldest and best farce which has survived in French literature. 'Maitre Pierre Pathelin' is now acted occasionally by the Comedie-Francaise in Paris, in a version which preserves its original flavor; but in the eighteenth century an adaptation, made by Brueys and Palaprat, and called the 'Avocat Pathelin,' was popular. It was this later perversion which served as the basis of an English farce, ent.i.tled the 'Village Lawyer,' and the 'Great Mutton Trial' is simply the 'Village Lawyer' transmogrified to suit the bolder and more robust methods of the negro minstrels.

III

And here we may discover the real reason why negro-minstrelsy failed to establish itself. It neglected its opportunity to devote itself primarily to its own peculiar field--the humorous reproduction of the sayings and doings of the colored man in the United States. To represent the negro in his comic aspects and in his sentimental moods was what the minstrels pretended to do; but the pretense was often only a hollow mockery. Even the musical instruments they affected, the banjo and the bones, were not as characteristic of the field-hand, or even of the town darky, as the violin. Indeed, the bones cannot be considered as in any way special to the negro; they were familiar to Shakspere's Bottom, who declared: "I have a reasonable good ear in music; let us have the tongs and the bones." And the wise recorder of the words and deeds of Uncle Remus a.s.serted that he had never listened to the staccato picking of a banjo in the negro-quarters of any plantation.

"I have seen the negro at work," so Harris once stated, "and I have seen him at play; I have attended his corn-shuckings, his dances, and his frolics; I have heard him give the wonderful melody of his songs to the winds; I have heard him give barbaric airs to the quills" (that is to say, to the Pan-pipes); "I have heard him sc.r.a.pe jubilantly on the fiddle; I have seen him blow wildly on the bugle, and beat enthusiastically on the triangle; but I have never heard him play on the banjo." Mr. George W. Cable thereupon came forward with his evidence to the effect that, altho the banjo was to be found occasionally on a plantation, it was far less frequently seen than the violin. It will be noted that Harris was speaking of the Georgian negro, and that Mr. Cable was talking about the negro in Louisiana; and perhaps the true habitat of the banjo is to be found farther north and near to the border States. At any rate, there is a footnote to one of Thomas Jefferson's 'Notes on Virginia' (published in 1784), which informs us that the instrument proper to the slaves of the Old Dominion is "the banjar, which they brought hither from Africa, and which is the origin of the guitar, its chords being precisely the four lower chords of the guitar."

Now and again some one negro minstrel did make a serious study of a negro type; such a performer was J. W. McAndrews, the "Watermelon Man."

But the most of them were content to be comic without any effort to catch the special comicality of the darky; and sometimes they strayed so completely from the path as to indulge in songs in an alleged Irish brogue or in a dislocated German dialect. Now, nothing could well be conceived more incongruously inartistic than a white man blacked up into the semblance of a negro, and then impertinently caroling an impudent Irish lyric. Yet the general neglect of the opportunities for a more accurate presentation of negro characteristics is to be seen in the strange fact that the minstrels failed to perceive the possible popularity of rag-time tunes, and failed also to put the cake-walk on the stage. Even at the height of its vogue in the mid years of the nineteenth century, negro-minstrelsy did not occupy its own field, and did not try to raise therein the varied flowers of which they had the seed.

Instead of cultivating the tempting possibilities which lay before them, and devoting themselves to a loving delineation of the colored people who make up a tenth of our population, they turned aside to devote themselves to the spectacular elaboration of their original entertainment. The clog-dances became most intricate and more mechanical--and thereby still more remote from the buck-and-wing dancing of the real negro. The First Part was presented with accompaniments of Oriental magnificence and of variegated glitter. The chorus was enlarged; the musicians were multiplied; the End-men operated in relays; and at last the ba.s.s-drum which towered aloft over Haverly's Mastodon Minstrels bore the boastful legend: "40. Count Them. 40." And when the suspicious spectator obeyed this command, he discovered to his surprise that the vaunt was more than made good since he had a full view of at least half a dozen performers in addition to the promised twoscore.

At the apex of his inflated prosperity Haverly invaded Germany with his mastodonic organization; and one result of his visit was probably still further to confuse the Teutonic misinformation about the American type, which seems often to be a curious composite photograph of the red men of Cooper, the black men of Mrs. Stowe, and the white men of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. And it was reported at the time that another and more immediate result of this rash foray beyond the boundaries of the English-speaking race was that Haverly was, for a while, in danger of arrest by the police for a fraudulent attempt to deceive the German public, because he was pretending to present a company of _negro_ minstrels, whereas his performers were actually white men!

It should be recorded that while the vogue lasted, there did come into existence sundry troops of minstrels whose members were all of them actually colored men, altho they conformed to the convention set by those whom they were imitating and conscientiously disguised themselves with burnt cork, to achieve the sable uniformity temporarily attained by the ordinary negro minstrels. Perhaps the most obvious parallel of the blacking up of veritable colored men to follow the example of the white men who pretended to imitate the negro is to be found in the original performance of 'As You Like It,' on the Elizabethan stage, when the shaven boy-actor who impersonated Rosalind disguised himself as a lad, and then had to pretend to Orlando that he was a girl.

IV

For the decline and fall of negro-minstrelsy it is easy to find more than one sufficient explanation. First of all, it may have been due to its failure to devote itself lovingly to the representation of the many peculiarities of the negro himself. Second, it is possible that negro-minstrelsy had an inherent and inevitable disqualification for enduring popularity, in that it was exclusively masculine and necessarily deprived of the potent attractiveness exerted by the members of the more fascinating s.e.x. And in the third place, its program was rather limited and monotonous, and therefore negro-minstrelsy could not long withstand the compet.i.tion of the music-hall, of the variety-show, and of the comic musical pieces, which satisfied more amply the exactly similar taste of the public for broad fun commingled with song and dance.

Whatever the precise cause may be, there is no denying that negro-minstrelsy is on the verge of extinction, however much we may bewail the fact. It failed to accomplish its true purpose, and it is disappearing, leaving behind it little that is worthy of preservation except a few of its songs. This, at least, it has to its credit--that it gave Stephen Collins Foster the chance to produce his simple melodies.

Perhaps we might even venture to a.s.sert that the existence of negro-minstrelsy is justified by a single one of these songs--by 'Old Folks at Home,' which has a wailing melancholy and an unaffected pathos, lacking in the earlier and more saccharine 'Home, Sweet Home,' which the English composer, Bishop, based on an old Sicilian tune. After Foster came Root and Work, and 'My Old Kentucky Home' was succeeded by 'Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching,' and by 'Marching thru Georgia'--which last lyric now shares its popularity only with 'Dixie'

as a musical relic of the Civil War.

It would be pleasant to know whether it was one of Foster's songs, and which one it may have been that once touched the tender heart of Thackeray. "I heard a humorous balladist not long since," the novelist recorded, "a minstrel with wool on his head, and an ultra Ethiopian complexion, who performed a negro ballad that I confess moistened these spectacles in a most unexpected manner. They have gazed at dozens of tragedy-queens dying on the stage and expiring in appropriate blank verse, and I never wanted to wipe them. They have looked up, with deep respect be it said, at many scores of clergymen without being dimmed, and behold! a vagabond with a corked face and a banjo, sings a little song, strikes a wild note, which sets the heart thrilling with happy pity."

(1912.)