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.
V
To the Georgia group belongs in reality Mary Noailles Murfree, better known as Charles Egbert Craddock. Tennessee, her native State—she was born at Murfreesboro in 1850—was of Georgia settlement. On one side of the border as on the other one found a certain wild independence and originality and crude democracy, the same that voiced itself in Longstreet and Thompson, and later in Johnston and Harris. Moreover, the mountains of the Craddock tales lie along the Georgia border and their inhabitants are the same people who figured in Longstreet's "Gander Pulling" and furnished Gorm Smallin and Teague Poteet for Lanier and Harris.
During the seventeen years of her later childhood and youth, or from 1856 to 1873, Miss Murfree lived at Nashville, Tennessee, where her father had an extensive legal practice, and then until 1882 she made her home at St. Louis, Missouri. She was, therefore, unlike Johnston and Harris, metropolitan in training and in point of view. Lameness and a certain frailness of physique caused by a fever debarred her from the activities of childhood and drove her in upon herself for entertainment. She was precocious and she read enormously, pursuing her studies even into the French and the Italian. Later she attended the academy at Nashville and then a seminary at Philadelphia, and, on her return home, even began the study of law in her father's library.
For such a woman, especially in the seventies, literature as a profession was inevitable. She began to write early and some of her apprentice papers, signed even then with the pen name Charles E. Craddock, found publication, notably a few sketches and tales in the weekly Appleton's Journal. It was conventional work and it promised little. Between a sketch like "Taking the Blue Ribbon at the Fair" and "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove," which appeared in the May issue of the Atlantic, 1878, there is a gulf that even yet has not been fully explained. Undoubtedly the early models that influenced her were George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Bret Harte, but she has preserved little of her transition work. She came unheralded with her art fully matured. Whoever may have been her early masters, she was from the first autochthonic in style and material and in the atmosphere that she threw over all that she wrote. There was a newness to her work, a tang of the wild and elemental in the dialect, a convincing quality to the backgrounds painted in sentences like "An early moon was riding, clear and full, over this wild spur of the Alleghanies," that excited wide comment. It was not until 1884, however, that the new author may be said definitely to have arrived, for it was not until then that her stories were given the dignity of book form.