Dear ---, I have been to the races: not to bet, nor to see the
horses run: not even to see the fair ladies on the Grand Stand, in
all the newest fashions of Paris via New York: but to wander en
mufti among the crowd outside, and behold the humours of men. And I
must say that their humours were very good humours; far better, it
seemed to me, than those of an English race-ground. Not that I have
set foot on one for thirty years; but at railway stations, and
elsewhere, one cannot help seeing what manner of folk, beside mere
holiday folk, rich or poor, affect English races; or help
pronouncing them, if physiognomy be any test of character, the most
degraded beings, even some of those smart-dressed men who carry bags
with their names on them, which our pseudo-civilisation has yet done
itself the dishonour of producing. Now, of that class I saw
absolutely none. I do not suppose that the brown fellows who hung
about the horses, whether Barbadians or Trinidad men, were of very
angelic morals: but they looked like heroes compared with the
bloated hangdog roughs and quasi-grooms of English races. As for
the sporting gentlemen, not having the honour to know them, I can
only say that they looked like gentlemen, and that I wish, in all
courtesy, that they had been more wisely employed.
But the Negro, or the coloured man of the lower class, was in his
glory. He was smart, clean, shiny, happy, according to his light.
He got up into trees, and clustered there, grinning from ear to ear.
He bawled about island horses and Barbadian horses--for the
Barbadians mustered strong, and a fight was expected, which,
however, never came off; he sang songs, possibly some of them
extempore, like that which amused one's childhood concerning a once
notable event in a certain island--
'I went to da Place
To see da horse-race,
I see Mr. Barton
A-wipin' ob his face.
'Run Allright,
Run for your life;
See Mr Barton
A comin wid a knife.
'Oh, Mr Barton,
I sarry for your loss;
If you no believe me,
I tie my head across.'
That is--go into mourning. But no one seemed inclined to tie their
heads, across that day. The Coolies seemed as merry as the Negroes,
even about the face of the Chinese there flickered, at times, a
feeble ray of interest.
The coloured women wandered about, in showy prints, great
crinolines, and gorgeous turbans. The Coolie women sat in groups on
the glass--ah! Isle of the Blest, where people can sit on the grass
in January--like live flower beds of the most splendid and yet
harmonious hues. As for jewels, of gold as well as silver, there
were many there, on arms, ankles, necks, and noses, which made white
ladies fresh from England break the tenth commandment.
I wandered about, looking at the live flower beds, and giving
passing glances into booths, which I longed to enter, and hear what
sort of human speech might be going on therein but I was deterred,
first by the thought that much of the speech might not be over
edifying, and next by the smells, especially by that most hideous of
all smells--new rum.
At last I came to a crowd, and in the midst of it, one of those
great French merry-go-rounds turned by machinery, with pictures of
languishing ladies round the central column. All the way from the
Champs Elysees the huge piece of fool's tackle had lumbered and
creaked hither across the sea to Martinique, and was now making the
round of the islands, and a very profitable round, to judge from the
number of its customers. The hobby-horses swarmed with Negresses
and Hindoos of the lower order. The Negresses, I am sorry to say,
forgot themselves, kicked up their legs, shouted to the bystanders,
and were altogether incondite. The Hindoo women, though showing
much more of their limbs than the Negresses, kept them gracefully
together, drew their veils round their heads, and sat coyly, half
frightened, half amused, to the delight of their papas, or husbands,
who had in some cases to urge them to get up and ride, while they
stood by, as on guard, with the long hardwood quarter staff in hand.
As I looked on, considered what a strange creature man is, and
wondered what possible pleasure these women could derive from being
whirled round till they were giddy and stupid, I saw an old
gentleman seemingly absorbed in the very same reflection. He was
dressed in dark blue, with a straw hat. He stood with his hands
behind his back, his knees a little bent, and a sort of wise, half-
sad, half-humorous smile upon his aquiline high-cheek-boned
features. I took him for an old Scot; a canny, austere man--a man,
too, who had known sorrow, and profited thereby; and I drew near to
him. But as he turned his head deliberately round to me, I beheld
to my astonishment the unmistakable features of a Chinese. He and I
looked each other full in the face, without a word; and I fancied
that we understood each other about the merry-go-round, and many
things besides. And then we both walked off different ways, as
having seen enough, and more than enough. Was he, after all, an
honest man and true? Or had he, like Ah Sin, in Mr. Bret Harte's
delectable ballad, with 'the smile that was child-like and bland'--
'In his sleeves, which were large,
Twenty-four packs of cards,
And--On his nails, which were taper,
What's common in tapers--that's wax'?
I know not; for the Chinese visage is unfathomable. But I incline
to this day to the more charitable judgment; for the man's face
haunted me, and haunts me still; and I am weak enough to believe
that I should know the man and like him, if I met him in another
planet, a thousand years hence.
Then I walked back under the blazing sun across the Savanna, over
the sensitive plants and the mole-crickets' nests, while the great
locusts whirred up before me at every step; toward the archway
between the bamboo-clumps, and the red sentry shining like a spark
of fire beneath its deep shadow; and found on my way a dying
racehorse, with a group of coloured men round him, whom I advised in
vain to do the one thing needful--put a blanket over him to keep off
the sun, for the poor thing had fallen from sunstroke; so I left
them to jabber and do nothing: asking myself--Is the human race, in
the matter of amusements, as civilised as it was--say three thousand
years ago? People have, certainly--quite of late years--given up
going to see cocks fight, or heretics burnt: but that is mainly
because the heretics just now make the laws--in favour of themselves
and the cocks. But are our amusements to be compared with those of
the old Greeks, with the one exception of liking to hear really good
music? Yet that fruit of civilisation is barely twenty years old;
and we owe its introduction, be it always remembered, to the
Germans. French civilisation signifies practically, certainly in
the New World, little save ballet-girls, billiard-tables, and thin
boots: English civilisation, little save horse-racing and cricket.
The latter sport is certainly blameless; nay, in the West Indies,
laudable and even heroic, when played, as on the Savanna here, under
a noonday sun which feels hot enough to cook a mutton-chop. But
with all respect for cricket, one cannot help looking back at the
old games of Greece, and questioning whether man has advanced much
in the art of amusing himself rationally and wholesomely.
I had reason to ask the same question that evening, as we sat in the
cool verandah, watching the fireflies flicker about the tree-tops,
and listening to the weary din of the tom-toms which came from all
sides of the Savanna save our own, drowning the screeching and
snoring of the toads, and even, at times, the screams of an European
band, which was playing a 'combination tune,' near the Grand Stand,
half a mile off.
To the music of tom-tom and chac-chac, the coloured folk would dance
perpetually till ten o'clock, after which time the rites of Mylitta
are silenced by the policeman, for the sake of quiet folk in bed.
They are but too apt, however, to break out again with fresh din
about one in the morning, under the excuse--'Dis am not last night,
Policeman. Dis am 'nother day.'
Well: but is the nightly tom-tom dance so much more absurd than the
nightly ball, which is now considered an integral element of white
civilisation? A few centuries hence may not both of them be looked
back on as equally sheer barbarisms?
These tom-tom dances are not easily seen. The only glance I ever
had of them was from the steep slope of once beautiful Belmont.
'Sitting on a hill apart,' my host and I were discoursing, not 'of
fate, free-will, free-knowledge absolute,' but of a question almost
as mysterious--the doings of the Parasol-ants who marched up and
down their trackways past us, and whether these doings were guided
by an intellect differing from ours, only in degree, but not in
kind. A hundred yards below we espied a dance in a negro garden; a
few couples, mostly of women, pousetting to each other with violent
and ungainly stampings, to the music of tom-tom and chac-chac, if
music it can be called. Some power over the emotions it must have;
for the Negroes are said to be gradually maddened by it; and white
people have told me that its very monotony, if listened to long, is
strangely exciting, like the monotony of a bagpipe drone, or of a
drum. What more went on at the dance we could not see; and if we
had tried, we should probably not have been allowed to see. The
Negro is chary of admitting white men to his amusements; and no
wonder. If a London ballroom were suddenly invaded by Phoebus,
Ares, and Hermes, such as Homer drew them, they would probably be
unwelcome guests; at least in the eyes of the gentlemen. The latter
would, I suspect, thoroughly sympathise with the Negro in the old
story, intelligible enough to those who know what is the favourite
food of a West Indian chicken.
'Well, John, so they gave a dignity ball on the estate last night?'
'Yes, massa, very nice ball. Plenty of pretty ladies, massa.'
'Why did you not ask me, John? I like to look at pretty ladies as
well as you.'
'Ah, massa: when cockroach give a ball, him no ask da fowls.'
Great and worthy exertions are made, every London Season, for the
conversion of the Negro and the Heathen, and the abolition of their
barbarous customs and dances. It is to be hoped that the Negro and
the Heathen will some day show their gratitude to us, by sending
missionaries hither to convert the London Season itself, dances and
all; and assist it to take the beam out of its own eye, in return
for having taken the mote out of theirs.