Johnston owed his introduction to Northern readers almost wholly to Lanier, who also was an exile in Baltimore. His influence it was that induced Gilder to accept for Scribner's Monthly the first of the Dukesborough Tales to be published in the North. He did far more than this: he gave him constructive criticism; he pointed out to him weaknesses which might be tolerated in a pioneer like Longstreet, but not in the work of a later artist. Certain phases of his sketches he found exceedingly strong: "The story strikes me as exquisitely funny, and your reproduction of the modes of thought and of speech among the rural Georgians is really wonderful."[137] There were, however, frequent "verbal lapses" which were almost fatal, "the action of the story does not move fast enough," and the catastrophe is clumsily handled. "I will try to see you in a day or two and do this" [read the manuscript aloud to him with running criticisms]. It was an opportunity that few authors ever get; and Johnston was wise enough to make the fullest use of it. Through Lanier it was that Alden became acquainted with his work and that the enlarged Dukesborough Tales was taken over by the Harpers, and it was only after the Northern issue of this book in 1883 that its author took a place among the writers of the period. During the following fifteen years he wrote voluminously.

Lanier's criticism touches with skill the strength and the weakness of Johnston as a writer of fiction. Like Longstreet, he was preëminently a maker of sketches. In his novels like Old Mark Langston and Widow Guthrie he failed dismally. Local color there is and humor and characterization, but in all that pertains to plot management the novels are feeble. The center and soul of his art was the Georgia environment. "As long as the people in my stories have no fixed surroundings, they are nowhere to me; I cannot get along with them at all." There is little of story, little of action, little consideration of the deeper passions and motives of life: there is rather an artless presentation of the archaic provincial types and surroundings that he had known in his boyhood. Even within this restricted area his range was narrow. He seemed to be attracted, as was Longstreet, by the eccentric and the exceptional. As he looked back into his earlier years it was only the highly individualized characters and surroundings that stood out in his memory, and he peopled his stories largely with these. Like Lincoln he had traveled a primitive legal circuit in primitive days and he had had unique experiences highly laughable. His range of characters also is small. There is little of the negro in his work: he deals almost wholly with the class of middle Georgia common people that are but one step removed from the mountain cracker of Harris and Harbin.

Johnston was to the Southern movement what Eggleston was to the Western. The two have many points of resemblance. Both were humorists, both worked in the crude materials of early American life, and both seem to have evolved their methods and their literary ideals very largely from themselves. Neither was an artist. They will live largely because of their fidelity to a vanished area of American life.

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: