You can easily imagine that such a figure could not be moved from its native surroundings. The dialect of Old Tom, the tirades of King Lear, would not please any audience, except in the United Kingdom. Some other work must be found for foreign engagements.
The jester, therefore, looked round to see if he could not gather some useful hints from his stage companions, that might help to fill his travelling bag, and naturally he studied the coloured minstrels. It is impossible to write a serious history of the clown without making some allusion to these negro singers. The modern clown, acrobat, magician, and pantomimist was produced by the union of the jester and the minstrel.
Lovers of old books, who strolled round the Quai Voltaire last winter may have noticed in the window of a dealer in curious prints, a collection of bad chromolithographs from New York which attracted and amused the passers by. They depicted the misfortunes of “coloured men,” caricatured by their old masters; ridiculous falls into buckets of water; a horse kicking a negro in the jaw; a gun exploding, blows a negro into a thousand pieces like Captain Castagnette. The mouths with their gleaming teeth are always split by a foot placed across them, the legs are thrown above the woolly heads in grotesque dances, which seem performed in rhythm to the blows of a whip. These coarse pictures were not signed [p281] by the artist, they bore the names of the publishers only, Currier and Ives of New York.
English pantomime, the extraordinary pantomime of the Hanlons, Pinauds, Renards, Leovils, Ramys, and Leopolds, is considerably influenced by these slave gaieties, by the monkey-like tricks of the negroes capering for the amusement of their cruel masters.
Freedom has been granted, the whip no longer inspires the [p282] epileptic dances of the blacks, but their jerky gambols so greatly diverted the “massa,” that they have survived slavery itself in an essentially American and English institution: the Christy Minstrels.
Visit music halls you will find on occasional stages a curious chorus of men in evening dress, sitting in a semicircle, their faces blackened with soot. In St. James’s Hall the effect is particularly curious, for it is here that Messrs. Moore and Burgess, who have carried negro minstrelsy to the highest perfection, exhibit their company of coloured minstrels. The back of the stage is occupied by the orchestra. From an artistic point, no pains is spared to seek out and engage the best musicians who come before the public both vocal and instrumental. Among the vocalists may be reckoned some of the finest voices obtainable in England or in America. The singers are seated in a semi-circle, the comic men are placed at either end of the row, and these furnish the life and humour of the entertainment; they are the comic vocalists, the propounders of quips and tellers of droll stories; their instruments are the bones and tambourines.
They play, sing, dance a jig and make jokes. This is the duty of the two leaders of the band, the jester and his butt.
Messrs. Moore and Burgess confine their well-recognised original Christy Minstrel Entertainments to the St. James’s Hall. It is the key-note of their programme that they “never perform out of London.” On the other hand, their commonplace imitators become out of the London season itinerant humourists.
In the summer you will find them on the sands [p283] of every sea side town. Banjo in hand, arrayed in the cotton trousers worn by the old slaves, always accompanied by the black dress coat, an eyeglass in one eye, straw hats on their blackened heads, they call themselves the Ethiopian serenaders. They travel in bands and perform in the open air.