III
Joel Chandler Harris also continued the tradition of Longstreet and worked in the materials of Georgia life with little suggestion from without. There are few instances of a more spontaneous lapsing into literary expression. He had been reared in an environment as unliterary as Mark Twain's. Longstreet and Johnston, Russell and Lanier, were all college men, but Harris's school education ended when he was twelve, and the episode that ended it, a most unusual one, he has described thus:
One day while Joe Maxwell was sitting in the post-office looking over the Milledgeville papers, his eye fell on an advertisement that interested him greatly. It seemed to bring the whole world nearer to him. The advertisement set forth the fact that on next Tuesday the first number of the Countryman, a weekly paper, would be published. It would be modeled after Mr. Addison's little paper, the Spectator, Mr. Goldsmith's little paper, the Bee, and Mr. Johnson's little paper, the Ram-bler. It would be edited by J. A. Turner, and it would be issued on the plantation of the editor, nine miles from Hillsborough. Joe read this advertisement over a dozen times, and it was with a great deal of impatience that he waited for the next Tuesday to come.
But the day did come, and with it came the first issue of the Countryman. Joe read it from beginning to end, advertisements and all, and he thought it the most entertaining little paper he had ever seen. Among the interesting things was an announcement by the editor that he wanted a boy to learn the printing business. Joe borrowed pen and ink and some paper from the friendly postmaster, and wrote a letter to the editor, saying that he would be glad to learn the printing business. The letter was no doubt an awkward one, but it served its purpose, for when the editor of the Countryman came to Hillsborough he hunted Joe up, and told him to get ready to go to the plantation....
[The office] was a very small affair; the type was old and worn, and the hand-press—a Washington No. 2—had seen considerable service.... He quickly mastered the boxes of the printer's case, and before many days was able to set type swiftly enough to be of considerable help to Mr. Snelson, who was foreman, compositor, and pressman. The one queer feature about the Countryman was the fact that it was the only plantation newspaper that has ever been published, the nearest post-office being nine miles away. It might be supposed that such a newspaper would be a failure; but the Countryman was a success from the start, and at one time it reached a circulation of nearly two thousand copies. The editor was a very original writer.
On the Plantation: a Story of a Georgia Boy's Adventures during the War is the record, slightly disguised—Joe Maxwell is Joe Harris, and Hillsborough is Eatonton—of the four years in the boy's life that made of him the Joel Chandler Harris that we know to-day. It was his college course, and it was a marvelously complete one. He became a part of the great plantation; he shared its rude festivities; he came closely in contact with the old-time type of plantation negro; and, more important still, he discovered his employer's great library and was directed in his reading by Mrs. Turner, who took pains with the diffident young lad. In time he became himself a contributor to the paper, secretly at first, then openly with the editor's approval. The end of the war and with it the end of the old plantation régime, ended also the Countryman and sent Harris into wider fields.
For a time he worked at Macon, home of Lanier, then at New Orleans, where Cable in the intervals of office work was dreaming over the old French and Spanish records, then for a time he was editor of the Forsyth, Georgia, Advertiser. The force and originality of his editorials attracted at length the attention of W. T. Thompson, author of the Georgia classic, Major Jones's Courtship, and in 1871 he secured him for his own paper, the Savannah News. Five years later, Harris went over to the Atlanta Constitution and during the twenty-five years that followed his life was a vital part of that journal's history.
One must approach the literary work of Harris always with full realization that he was first of all a journalist. During the greater part of his life he gave the best of every day unreservedly to the making of his paper. Literary fame came to him almost by accident. To fill the inexorable columns of his paper he threw in what came easiest for him to write and he thought no more about it. Then one day he looked up from his desk to find himself hailed as a rising man of letters. It amazed him; he never half believed it; he never got accustomed to it. Years later in the full noon of his success he could say: "People insist on considering me a literary man when I am a journalist and nothing else. I have no literary training and know nothing at all of what is termed literary art. I have had no opportunity to nourish any serious literary ambition, and the probability is that if such an opportunity had presented itself I would have refused to take advantage of it." Never once did he seek for publication; never once did he send a manuscript to any publisher or magazine that had not earnestly begged for it; never once did he write a line with merely literary intent.
His first recognition by the literary world came through a bit of mere journalism. The story is told best in the words of Harry Stillwell Edwards:
About 1880, Sam Small of Atlanta, Georgia, on the local staff of the Constitution, began writing negro sketches, using "Old Si" or "Uncle Si" as his vehicle, and soon made the character famous. Small, however, was very dissipated, and frequently the Sunday morning Old Si contribution failed to appear. Joel Chandler Harris, the paragrapher for the Constitution as he had been for the Savannah News, was called on to supply something in place of the missing Si sketches and began with "Uncle Remus." His first contributions were not folk lore, but local. He soon drifted into the folk lore, however, and recognizing the beauty and perfection of his work, people generally who remembered the stories of their childhood, wrote out for him the main points and sent them. I, myself, contributed probably a dozen of the adventures of Brer Rabbit as I had heard them. This service he afterwards acknowledged in a graceful card of thanks. Uncle Remus became, soon, the mouthpiece of the generation, so far as animal legends are concerned.
The stories at once attracted attention in the North. The New York Evening Post and the Springfield Republican in particular made much of them. As a direct result, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings; The Folk-lore of the old Plantation, appeared in 1880 and its author quickly found himself a national and indeed an international personage.
The really vital work of Harris lies in two fields: sketches of the old-time negro and sketches of the mountain cracker of the later period. It is upon the first that his permanence as a writer must depend. He worked in negro folk lore, in that vast field of animal stories which seems to be a part of the childhood of races, but it is not his folk lore, valuable as it may be, that gives him distinction. Ethnological and philological societies have done the work more scientifically. Many of the animal legends in common use among the slaves of the South were already in print before he began to write.[138] What he did was to paint a picture, minutely accurate, of the negro whom he had known intimately on the plantation of Mr. Turner at the transition moment when the old was passing into the new. With a thousand almost imperceptible touches he has made a picture that is complete and that is alive. The childish ignorance of the race and yet its subtle cunning, its quaint humor, its pathos, its philosophy, its conceit, its mendacity and yet its depth of character, its quickness at repartee—nothing has been omitted. The story teller is more valuable than his story: he is recording unconsciously to himself his own soul and the soul of his race. Brer Rabbit after all is but a negro in thinnest disguise, one does not have to see Frost's marvelous drawings to realize that. The rabbit's helplessness typifies the helplessness of the negro, and yet Brer Rabbit always wins. Suavity and duplicity and shifty tricks are the only defense the weak may have. His ruses are the ruses of a childlike mind. Clumsy in the extreme and founded on what seems like the absolute stupidity of Brer Fox and Brer Wolf and the others who are beguiled, these ruses always succeed. The helpless little creature is surrounded on all sides by brutality and superior force; they seemingly overcome him, but in the end they are defeated and always by force of superior cunning and skilful mendacity at the supreme moment. It is the very essence of the child story—the giant killed by Jack, the wolf powerless to overcome Little Red Riding Hood, and all the others—for the negro himself was but a child.
Page uses the negro as an accessory. The pathos of the black race adds pathos to the story of the destroyed white régime. Harris rose superior to Page in that he made the negro not the background for a white aristocracy, but a living creature valuable for himself alone; and he rose superior to Russell inasmuch as he embodied the result of his studies not in a type but in a single negro personality to which he gave the breath of life. Harris's negro is the type plus the personal equation of an individual—Uncle Remus, one of the few original characters which America has added to the world's gallery.
It is worthy of note too that he interpreted with the same patience and thoroughness the music and the poetry of the negro. Russell was a lyrist with the gift of intuition and improvisation; Harris was a deliberate recorder. The songs he wrote are not literary adaptations, nor are they framed after the conventional minstrel pattern. They are reproductions. In his first introduction to Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings he wrote:
As to the songs, the reader is warned that it will be found difficult to make them conform to the ordinary rules of versification, nor is it intended that they should so conform. They are written, and are intended to be read, solely in reference to the regular invariable recurrence of the cæsura, as, for instance, the first stanza of the Revival Hymn:
Oh, whar | shill we go | w'en de great | day comes |
Wid de blow | in' er de trumpits | en de bang | in' er de drums |
Hoy man | y po' sin | ers 'll be kotch'd | out late |
En fine | no latch | ter de gold | en gate |In other words, the songs depend for their melody and rhythm upon the musical quality of time, and not upon long or short, accented or unaccented, syllables. I am persuaded that this fact led Mr. Sidney Lanier, who is thoroughly familiar with the metrical peculiarities of negro songs, into the exhaustive investigation which has resulted in the publication of his scholarly treatise on The Science of English Verse.
Nowhere else does one come so completely into the feeling of negro music as in Harris. In "The Night Before Christmas," in Nights with Uncle Remus, a latter-day "Sir Roger de Coverley Paper," we feel the tone of it:
His voice was strong and powerful, and sweet, and its range was as astonishing as its volume. More than this, the melody to which he tuned it, and which was caught up by a hundred voices almost as sweet and as powerful as his own, was charged with a mysterious and pathetic tenderness. The fine company of men and women at the big house—men and women who had made the tour of all the capitals of Europe—listened with swelling hearts and with tears in their eyes as the song rose and fell upon the air—at one moment a tempest of melody, at another a heart-breaking strain breathed softly and sweetly to the gentle winds. The song that the little boy and the fine company heard was something like this—ridiculous enough when put in cold type, but powerful and thrilling when joined to the melody with which the negroes had invested it:
De big Owl holler en cry fer his mate,
My honey, my love!
Oh, don't stay long! oh, don't stay late!
My honey, my love!
Hit ain't so mighty fur ter de good-by gate,
My honey, my love!
Whar we all got ter go w'en we sing out de night,
My honey, my love!
My honey, my love, my heart's delight—
My honey, my love!