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.
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 bass-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.