NIGGER MINSTRELSY.

Colonist, Volume IV, Issue 405, 10 September 1861, Page 3

NIGGER MINSTRELSY.

About a quarter of a century since, a large proportion of the people of London gave themselves up to one of those fits of idolatry which seem so strangely at variance with the generally phlegmatic character of our race. For the first time they were made

familiar with the sort of negro who forms an element of modem American life: and the hideous laugh, the wild gestures, and strange dialect with which they were regaled by the then celebrated ' Jim Crow Rice,' produced in them such a novel mixture of wonder and delight that they could not do less than fall down and worship their ecGtntric instructor. So ' Jim Crow ' became a fixed idea with the Cockneys, referred to in countless ways and manifested in countless shapes. To the chimney-pieces of the middle classes, where Tom, Jerry, and Logic, Madame Vesjris as Giovanni, and Liston as Paul Pry, had previously been placed as household ' gods,' the effigy of the shabby negro was elevated with all honor, and aspiring youths who were famed for 'a good song,' regarded a successful imitation of Mr. Rice's vocal performances as an object worthy of the most soaring ambition. Then the burden of Jim Crow's song, * Turn about, wheel about,' illustrated by a rotatory movement on the part of the singer, was caught with avidity by the small satirists of the day, who, when they wished to stigmatize statesmen or journals with an habitual readiness to change their political principles, found an apt and universally intelligible illustration of their meaning in the revolving figure of Jim Crow.

There is no doubt that Mr. Rice'a performance was of a kind entirely novel to Europe, and that his representation of the negro of modern life must be set down as an important item in that course of ethnological instruction which at long intervals is given to the body of people at places of public amusement. The comic black, who had become a familiar figure to the Londoners prior to the arrival of Mr. Rice, was a fanciful personage, whose neatly striped dress, red slippers, bare legs, and huge earrings separated him completely irom the actual world, and he was accepted as a convention, like the ordinary figures ofpantommes. The learned, we believe, have decided that the old stage black borrowed his dress from the negroes of the Spanish colonies; but that was a point which playgoers never thought to investigate thirty years ago. when they were perfectly content to behold a citizen of their own day attired after the fashion immortalized by Hogarth, and found nothing exceptional in a Falstaff who appeared as a sort of military Punchinello, with obvious leanings towards the costume of William 111. The black man with the blue and white stripes was the black whom everybody went to see, without asking any questions as to his origin; and a very funny fellow he was. From the stage he has now passed away, but his literary monument may be found in the old musical comedy the Padlock, to the perusual of which those of our readers who care about the stage may not unprofitable devote a spare hour. Mungo in the Padlock is the best specimen of the old conventional black.

No contrast could be more complete than that between the exceedingly, neat negro to whom we have just referred and the ragged, uncouth vagabond who was introduced to the Londoners by • Jim Crow Rice.' But in his very shabbiness there was an attraction, • Le laid, voila It beau,' is said to have been the sesthetical maxim adopted by Mr. Victor Hugo when he composed the story of Quasimodo, and there is no doubt that the shabby—not in character, but in costume —is greatly relished by play-goers of every grade. The charm of the ' Wandering Minstrel,' represented by Mr. Robson to the delight of the most aristocratic audience, lies not only in his song and in his dialect, but in his tatters; and an Irishman who fasten his coat with a skewer, and substitutes a hayband for a stocking, is welcomed not only as a man and a brother, but as a peculiarly interesting member of the species. In song, dance, rags, dialect, and gesticulation, Mr. Rice was alike acceptable, and the world was surprised to find that a black face could be associated with attributes once monopolized by the inhabitants of St. Giles's and Whitechapel. Billy Waters, the one-legged black fiddler, copied (if not literally taken) from the streets to embellish Tom and Jerry, and Agamemnon, the attendant negro of the elder Mr. Charles Mathews's Jonathan in England, had indeed preceded Jim Crow, and had earned their share of notoriety, but they were too much in the background to become the leading idols of a period; and although the respect paid to Billy Waters amounted to a sort of hero-worship, heightened by the circumstance that he was a fact as well as a figure, he had a formidable rival in Dusty Bob, who still lives in memory as the type of the old London Dustman.

The worship of Jim Crow was as shortlived as it was ardent; for though his per-

formance was hovel, it could be very easily mitated, an English ,a.ctor named Dunn, who simply copied Mr. Rice, was soon considered his successful rival by the lower class of playgoers, whose opinion with respect to Certain branches of art is by no means to be despised, What with the original, and his imitators, and the repetitions of the 'Turn about' song in every nook and corner, people began to think the comic negro a bore, just as about eight years since a decided distaste for the pious negro succeeded the rage for Uncle Tom. Jim Crow had been forgotten for something less than ten years when negro humor appeared before the public in an entirely new shape. Instead of donning the tattered coat and hat which Mr. Rice had made popular, or bringing into fashion the discarded blue and white suit of his predecessors, the new artistic negroes accoutred themselves in evening suits of black—perfect English gentlemen in every particular save the face. Mr. Rice had displayed his talent in broad Adelphi farces; but Messrs. Pell and Co. eschewed stageplays, and got up an entertainment which even the Evangelical classes might patronize without inward misgiving. Their maxim was Odi profanum vulgus et arceo, and instead of inviting a roar from the assemblage pf an ordinary gallery, they settled themselves in the most western theatre, and courted the smiles and the tears of the aristocratic. They sang about the joys and sorrows incident to negro life; and though some of their comic ditties were absurdities compared to which • Hot Codlins' is a work of high literaiy art, there was a freshness in their tone that gratified the most fastidious ears, while the more pathetic melodies were not only pleasing in themselves, but frequently accompanied words that, rather in sorrow than in anger, hinted at the miseries of slavery, and therefore accorded with the serious convictions of many of the audience. The form of the entertainment, too, was entirely novel. The minstrels sat in a row of which the two extremities were respectively occupied by the artists on the * bones' and the tambourine. These, who were somewhat more in the foreground than the players on the banjo and violin, were the humorists of the party, throwing themselves into grotesque attitudes during the performance of the music, and filling up the intervals of*song with verbal jokes of the kind in which the clowns of the equestrian ring are wont to indulge. Mr. Pell, who himself was • bones' — for the word at last came to denote the player as well as the instrument—had really favored London with a new sensation. With the castanet, as an accompaniment to the elegant Spanish dances of Taglioni and Duvernay, everybody had become familiar; but this primitive rattle, played wiih the most frantic contortions, was something entirely without precedent.

At first a few unreasonable grumblers endeavored to stem the popularity of Mr. Pell's company by declaring that the artists were not real blacks, but only white musicians with blackened faces. This pretended discovery was no discovery at all. Far from wishing to pass themselves off for veritable niggers, Pell and Co., as free-born American citizens, would have bitterly resented the suspicion that they had the least drop of black blood in their veins; so they loet no time in publishing portraits of themselves, with the faces bestowed upon them by nature, in addition to others in which they wore the sable hue of their profession. Moreover, they styled themselves * Ethiopian Serenaders,' thus selecting the name of an African country totally disconnected with negro slavery.

The popularity of • Jim Crow' was a rage among the middle and lower classes; but the * Ethiopians' set a fashion in the strictest sense of the word. The highest personages in the land patronized their performances. An ingenious young gentleman who could play on the banjo and sing •Lucy Neale' or 'Buffalo gals' was a welcome guest in the most aristocratic drawing-rooms; andiffouramateursclubbed together and imitated the entire performance of the professors, they were regarded as benefactors to their species. Let the music-books of. the year 1846 and thereabouts be turned over, and it will be found what an enormous influence the Pell company had over the social pianoforte performances of their day. But though the Ethiopians started under aristocratic patronage, there was nothing in the nature of their entertainment to favor a continuance of exclusivenets. Italian operas and French plays will always repel the masses, from the simple circumstance that the words employed are in a foreign language, but there was nothing, either in the humor or in the music of Pell's company that could not be as readily appreciated in St. Giles's as in St. James's. Consequently the people rushed into the participation of an enjoyment so keenly relished by the upper classes, and not only did imitators of the Ethiopians spring up in the cheepest concert-rooms, but a band of itinerant black musicians became as necessary an appurtenence of the London streets as Punch's show or a barrel-organ, much to the discomfiture of lovers of quiet in general^ and of Dr. Babbage in particular.

Among the higher classes, the predilection for Ethiopian ministrelsy apparently died out, but in the lower stratum of society the tradition of Pell was faithfully preserved; and recent events show that even in the fashionable world the love of banjoes and black faces was rather in abeyance than utterly extinct. Though negro melody and negro wit had been so done to death in every shape and in every quarter, that they seemed on the point of descending into a mere street nuisance, important only to the police, the arrival of the 'Christy's Minstrels,' about four years since, revived the dormant flame. A host of well-dressed folks were again heard to declare that Ethiopian ministrelsy was the most amusing thing in London, and the pianoforte books

were once more filled with songs testifying to the popularity of the new favorites among the most select classes of the metropolis. And the Christy's Minstrels have kept their ground. Pell and Co. founded the taste, which long survived its originators; but the Christy's have secured a permanent existence to their own corporate body. Their principal comic artist died, their manager retired with a fortune in his pocket; but they appointed a new humorist and subjected themselves to a new chief, and their corporate existence has been no more affected by the ordinary casualitiea of life than that of the Merchant Tailors' Company. They have likewise established a regular form of entertainment which is universally recognised; and to this form their competitors, the 'Buckley's' and the • Campbell's,' generally adhere, The first part of the exhibition consists of a-concert, in which the performers appear in black evening suits, and play, sing, and joke after the model set by Pell and his associates. There is, however, this difference, that the sentimental songs are commonly without reference to the peculiarities of negro life, and are not unfrequently composed by leading musicians, such as Balfe and Wallace. The second part is miscellaneous, and contains a great deal of grostesque dancing, together with a comic scene or two, in which the shabby vagabond negro of •Jim Crow Rice' once more makes his appearance. A burlesque of some wellknown Italian Opera concludes the whole. If we consider that all this is done, and exceedingly well done, by a company not above twelve strong, we shall have just cause to wonder at the concentration of talent, musical, histrionic, and gymnastic, that has been accomplished in the formation of the troop, and still more, to marvei at its viality. When the Arlecchino of an old Italian.company died, his loss was regarded as a terrible calamity, the extemporaneous character of the • Commedie dell' arte' requiring accomplishments of no ordinary kind; and it would seem that only a rare combination of muscular, vocal, and mimetic powers would enable a man to be chief comedian of the Christy's. So firmly is nigger minstrelsy now established as one of the leading amusements of the metropolis, that London without its regular black band would seem shorn of a necessary appurtenance. The banjo is thrummed all the year round; for when the * Christy's' retire to swallow a mouthful of fresh air and to pick up a pocketful of money in the provinces, the Buckley's or the Campbell's are quick to relieve guard, and make a very respectable figure.

Those who look on everything with a serious face will find in the popularity of nigger minstrelsy among the educated classes a singular illustration of the close connexion that exists between Puritanism and extreme frivolity. Scores of persons who would think it wicked to see the highest work of dramatic art performed by the finest company in the world, will, with the utmost complacency, spend a long evening in listening to trivial jokes, provided they cannot be convicted of • going to the play.' It is not that these persons object to the theatre as an edifice, for they will unscrupulously enter any playhouse in London to witness the tricks of a conjurer; neither are they particularly averselno the dramatic form of entertainment, for this is constantly employed in their presence by the artists they delight to patronize. But they must not' go to the play 'on any consideration, and the distinction they draw is sufficiently practical to prevent the patronage of all that is elevating in the drama, and to promote the encouragement of all that is trivial.

There is something melancholy in the fact that a form of religion has widely spread which manifestly tends to lower the civilization of the educated classes; but those who are content to take things as they find them may agreeably pass an evening with the ' Christy's Minstrels,' and respect them as a clever set of artists, who have thoroughly understood how to make the best of the circumstances in which they are placed, and deport themselves ably and conscientiously in their singular vocation.— Satvrday Review.