Part 5 (1/2)
Collins, and ”Little Mac.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: EPH. HORN.]
Nothing like a personal history of any of these men, who have been so prominent upon the negro minstrel stage during the half-century of its existence, can be given here. They have all done much to make the world happier and brighter for a time by their public careers, and they have left a pleasant and a cheerful memory behind them. Their gibes, their gambols, their songs, their flashes of merriment, still linger in our eyes and in our ears; and before many readers scores of quaint figures with blackened faces will no doubt dance to half-forgotten tunes all over these pages, which are too crowded to contain more than the mere mention of their names.
[Ill.u.s.tration: JERRY BRYANT.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: NELSE SEYMOUR.]
How much of the wonderful success and popularity of the negro minstrel is due to the minstrel, how much to the negro melody he introduced, and how much to the characteristic bones, banjo, and tambourine upon which he accompanied himself, is an open question. It was certainly the song, not the singer, which moved Thackeray to write years ago: ”I heard a humorous balladist not long since, 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. I have gazed at thousands of tragedy queens dying on the stage and expiring in appropriate blank-verse, and I never wanted to wipe them. They have looked up, 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.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: DAN. BRYANT.]
This ballad perhaps was ”Nelly Bly,” or ”Nelly was a Lady,” or ”Lucy Long,” or ”Oh, Susanna,” or ”Nancy Till,” or, better than any of these, Stephen Foster's ”Way Down upon the Swanee River,” a song that has touched more hearts than ”Annie Laurie” itself; for, after all, ”The Girl We Left Behind Us” is not more precious in our eyes than ”The Old Folks at Home;”
and the American has sunk very low indeed of whom it cannot be said that ”he never shook his mother.” Foster is utterly unappreciated by his fellow-countrymen, who erect all their monuments to the men who make their laws. He was the author of ”Ma.s.sa's in the Cold, Cold Ground,” ”Old Dog Tray,” ”Old Uncle Ned,” ”Old Folks at Home,” ”Old Kentucky Home,” ”Willie, We have Missed You,” and ”Come where My Love lies Dreaming.” He died as he had lived, in 1864, when he was but thirty-seven years of age, and his ”Hard Times Will Come Again No More.”
Joel Chandler Harris, who is one of the best friends the plantation negro ever had, and who certainly knows him thoroughly, startled the whole community by writing to the _Critic_, in the autumn of 1883, that he had never seen a banjo or a tambourine or a pair of bones in the hands of the negroes on any of the plantations of middle Georgia with which he is familiar; that they made sweet music with the quills, as Pan did; that they played pa.s.sably well on the fiddle, the fife, the flute, and the bugle; that they beat enthusiastically on the triangle; but that they knew not at all the instruments tradition had given them. That Uncle Remus, cannot ”pick” the banjo, and never even heard it ”picked,” seems hardly credible; but Mr. Harris knows. Uncle Remus, however, is not a travelled darky, and the existence of the banjo in other parts of the South has been clearly proved. Mr. Cable quotes a creole negro ditty of before the war in which ”Musieu Bainjo” is mentioned on every line. Maurice Thompson says the banjo is a common instrument among the field hands in North Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee; and he describes a rude banjo manufactured by its dusky performer out of a flat gourd, strung with horse-hair; while we find in Thomas Jefferson's _Notes on Virginia_, printed in 1784, the following statement: ”In music they [the blacks] are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch.” In a foot-note Jefferson adds, ”The instrument proper to them is the banjar, which they brought hither from Africa.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: STEPHEN C. FOSTER.]
The negro minstrel will give up his tambourine, for it is as old as the days of the Exodus, when Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances; and he will give up the bones, for Miss Olive Logan, in _Harper's Magazine_ for April, 1879, traces them back to the reign of Fou Hi, Emperor of China, 3468 B.C., while Shakspere's King of the Fairies, who made an a.s.s of the hard-handed man of Athens, also treated Bottom to the melody of the bones. He will hang up his fiddle and his bow when the time comes, cheerfully enough, for Nero, according to tradition, fiddled for the dancing of the flames that consumed Rome nineteen hundred years ago. None of these are exclusively his own; but it would be very cruel to take from him his banjo, which he evolved if he did not invent, and without which he can be and can do nothing.
ACT III.
THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE.
THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE.
”The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.”
_A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, Act v. Sc. 1.
The burlesque among serious writers has a bad reputation. George Eliot, in _Theophrastus Such_, says that it debases the moral currency; and George Crabb, in his _English Synonymes_, thus dismisses it: ”Satire and irony are the most ill-natured kinds of wit; burlesque stands in the lowest rank.”
Burlesque, from the Italian _burlare_, ”to joke,” ”to banter,” ”to play,”
has been defined as ”an expression of language, a display of gesture, an impression of countenance, the intention being to excite laughter.” In art caricature is burlesque, in literature parody is burlesque, in the drama comic pantomime, comic opera, travesty, and extravaganza are burlesque.
All dramatic burlesque ranges under the head of farce, although all farce is not burlesque. Burlesque is the farce of portraiture on the stage; farce on the stage is the burlesque of events. Bret Harte's _Condensed Novels_ and George Arnold's _McArone Papers_ are representative specimens of burlesque in American letters; Arthur B. Frost's famous domestic cat, who supped inadvertently upon rat poison, is an excellent example of burlesque in American art. What America has done for burlesque on the stage it is the aim of the following pages to show.
Hipponax, of Ephesus, who lived in the latter half of the sixth century before Christ, is credited with having been ”The Father of Burlesque Poetry.” He was small and ill-favored physically, and his natural personal defects were the indirect cause of the development of his satirical powers and of his posthumous fame. Two sculptors of Chios caricatured him grossly in a statue publicly exhibited, and he, in return, fired his muse with the torch of hatred, and burned them in effigy with terrible but clever ridicule. He parodied the _Iliad_, in which he made Achilles an Ionian glutton; he did not spare his own parents; he poked fun at the G.o.ds themselves; he impaled Mrs. Hipponax with a couplet upon which she is still exhibited to the scoffers, and he is only to be distinguished from his long line of successors by the curious fact that he does not seem to have spoken with derision of his mother-in-law! His tribute to matrimony is still preserved in choice iambics, roughly translated as follows: ”There are but two happy days in the life of a married man--the day of his marriage, and the day of the burial of his wife.” From this it will be seen that twenty-five centuries or more look down upon the Benedict of the modern burlesque, who leaves his wife at home when he travels for pleasure!
Aristophanes, the comic poet of Athens, who wrote fifty-four comedies between the years 427 and 388 B.C., may be termed ”The Father of the Burlesque Play.” He satirized people more than things, or than other men's tragedies, and to his school belong Brougham's _Pocahontas_ and _Columbus_, rather than the same author's _Dan Keyser de Ba.s.soon_, or _Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice_. The plots of Aristophanes are as original as his wit. In _The Wasps_ he caricatured the fondness of the Athenians for litigation; in _The Birds_ his object was to convince the Athenians of the advantages of a clean political sweep; in _The Female Orators_ he satirized the Sorosis and the women suffragists of his time; in _The Feast of Ceres_ he pointed out how useful and ornamental woman is in her own sphere; and in _Peace_, written to urge the close of the Peloponnesian war, he reached the sublimity of burlesque in creating a stage heroine who never utters a word. The argument of _The Knights_ will give a very fair idea of the plots of his plays. Athens is represented as a private house, whose master, Demos (the people), has more servants and more servants' relations than he can comfortably wait upon or decently support. Nicias and Demosthenes are his slaves, and Cleon, a political boss of the period, is his butler and confidential valet. Demos is irritable, superst.i.tious, inconstant in his pursuits, and dull in character. Agoracritus, a sausage-seller, subverts the plots and the plans of the demagogue Cleon--originally played by Aristophanes himself--shows the householder that his favorite servant is utterly unworthy of the public trust, and brings the entertainment to a close with the discomfiture of the Ring and the relief of the taxpayers. Demos is said to have been the prototype of ”John Bull,” the personification of the Englishman, as he was first exhibited by Dr. Arbuthnot in the early part of the eighteenth century, and _The Knights_ is regarded as ”an historical piece of great value, because it furnishes a faithful picture of the nation and of its customs.” What curious ideas of American life and manners will posterity gather from _Adonis_ and _Evangeline_!
Cla.s.sical critics credit Aristophanes with being distinguished for the exuberance of his wit, for his inexhaustible fund of comic humor, and for the Attic purity and great simplicity of his language; while at the same time he is accused of introducing, when it suits his purpose, every variety of dialect, of coining new words and expressions as occasion offers, and of making bad puns, whether occasion offers or not; in all of which his disciples persistently and consistently follow him.
Samuel Foote, who lived in an age of epithets, was called ”The British Aristophanes.” He respected no person and no thing. He satirized every subject, sacred or profane, which struck his fancy, from Chesterfield's Letters to the Stratford Jubilee; and he caricatured everybody, from Whitfield to the d.u.c.h.ess of Kingston. His serious attempt at Oth.e.l.lo, in the beginning of his career as an actor, was considered a master-piece of unconscious burlesque, only inferior, in its extravagance and nonsense, to his Hamlet, and he failed in every legitimate part he undertook to play.
As a mimic, however, in dramatic productions of his own writing, he met with immense success; and as a writer of stage burlesque he ranks very high. He made Italian opera ridiculous in his _Cat Concert_; he gave serious offence to a hard-working, respectable trade in _The Tailors, a Tragedy for Warm Weather_; he attacked the medical profession in _The Devil on Two Sticks_; he parodied sentimental romance of the _Pamela_ school in his _Piety in Pattens_; and he offended all right-thinking persons, heterodox as well as orthodox, in _The Minor_, a travesty upon the methods of Wesley and his Church.
_The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruell Death of Pyramus and Thisbie_, originally published in the year 1600, if not the earliest burlesque in the English language, is certainly the model upon which are based all subsequent productions of the same cla.s.s which have been written for the British or American theatre. Stevens believes the t.i.tle to have been suggested to Shakspere by Dr. Thomas Preston's _Lamentable Tragedy Mixed Ful of Pleasant Mirth--Conteyning the Life of Cambises, King of Percia_.