IV
With the success of the first Uncle Remus book there came the greatest flood of dialect literature that America has ever known. The years 1883 and 1884 mark the high tide of this peculiar outbreak, and to Georgia more than to any other locality may be traced the primal cause. In 1883 came what may be called the resurgence of the cracker, that Southeastern variety of the Pike which now came to the North as a new discovery. The leading characteristics of the type were thus set forth by Harris in his story of "Mingo":
Slow in manner and speech, shiftless in appearance, hospitable but suspicious toward strangers, unprogressive, toughly enduring the poor, hard conditions of their lives, and oppressed with the melancholy silences of the vast, shaggy mountain solitudes among which they dwell. The women are lank, sallow, dirty. They rub snuff, smoke pipes—even the young girls—and are great at the frying pan; full of a complaining patience and a sullen fidelity.
Again America became excited over a new Pike County type. Johnston's Dukesborough Tales were issued for the first time in the North; Harris's "At Teague Poteet's, a Sketch of the Hog Mountain Range," appeared in the June Century, and Charles Egbert Craddock's story of the same mountains, "The Harnt that Walks Chilhowee," came out the same month in the Atlantic. That was in 1883. The next year appeared Harris's Mingo, and Craddock's In the Tennessee Mountains. Then the flood gates of dialect were loosened. The Century published Page's story "Mars Chan," which it had been holding for four years, a story told entirely in the negro dialect. The new and mysterious Craddock, who was found now to be Miss Mary N. Murfree, created a widespread sensation. In 1883 appeared James Whitcomb Riley's first book The Old Swimmin'-Hole and 'Leven More Poems and Mary Hallock Foote's The Led-Horse Claim; in 1887 came Octave Thanet's Knitters in the Sun, dialect tales of the Arkansas canebrakes, and shortly afterwards Hamlin Garland's studies of farm life in the middle West. The eighties stand for the complete triumph of dialect and of local color.
Henry James, viewing the phenomenon from his English standpoint, offered an explanation that is worthy of note: "Nothing is more striking," he wrote, "than the invasive part played by the element of dialect in the subject-matter of the American fictions of the day. Nothing like it, probably—nothing like any such predominance—exists in English, in French, in German work of the same order. It is a part, in its way, to all appearance, of the great general wave of curiosity on the subject of the soul aboundingly not civilized that has lately begun to well over the Anglo-Saxon globe and that has borne Mr. Rudyard Kipling, say, so supremely high on its crest."
Harris's work with the Georgia cracker, though small in quantity, is of permanent value. Unlike Craddock, he was upon his native ground and he worked with sympathy. He had not the artistic distinction and the ideality of Page, but he was able to bring his reader nearer to the material in which he worked. Page was romantic and his standpoint was essentially aristocratic; Harris was realistic and democratic. He worked close always to the fundamentals of human life and his creations have always the seeming spontaneousness of nature itself.
As a writer Harris must be summed up as being essentially fragmentary. His literary output was the work of a man who could write only in the odd moments stolen from an exacting profession. It is work done by snatches. He left no long masterpiece; his novels like Gabriel Tolliver and the rest are full of delightful fragments, but they are rambling and incoherent. Of Plantation Pageants its author himself could say, "Glancing back over its pages, it seems to be but a patchwork of memories and fancies, a confused dream of old times." With his Brer Rabbit sketches, however, this criticism does not hold. By their very nature they are fragmentary; there was no call for continued effort or for constructive power; the only demand was for a consistent personality that should emerge from the final collection and dominate it, and this demand he met to the full.
No summary of Harris's work can be better than his own comment once uttered upon Huckleberry Finn: "It is history, it is romance, it is life. Here we behold a human character stripped of all tiresome details; we see people growing and living; we laugh at their humor, share their griefs, and, in the midst of it all, behold we are taught the lesson of honesty, justice, and mercy." To no one could this verdict apply more conspicuously than to the creator of Uncle Remus and of Teague Poteet.