A Book About the Theater

by Brander Matthews

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 amusement that troops of negro minstrels began to supply an entire evening's amusement. 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 repetition 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, entitled 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. 'Maître Pierre Pathelin' is now acted occasionally by the Comédie-Française 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, entitled 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 asserted 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 scrape 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.