CRITICAL COMMENT
THE ADVENTURES OF SIMON AND SUSANNA
By JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS
No one knows when story telling began. It is as old as the human race. It goes beyond history into the unknown darkness of the past. Some of the stories we still read originated far back in primitive life. Such stories, that have been told for many years, and are common to the race, we call “Folk-Lore” stories.
Every Folk-Lore story probably began in the simplest form. Something happened,—and someone tried to tell about the event. If the story was interesting enough to repeat, it gradually became exaggerated. Thus the germ of The Adventures of Simon and Susanna is the common-enough story of a successful elopement in which the cleverness of the young people,—of the girl in particular,—eluded the pursuing father. Their means of making their escape must have been quite ordinary, but when the story was told again and again,—if this really is a Folk-Lore story, the cleverness was exaggerated and gradually turned into magic.
In reading this story we come into close touch with the origin of all story telling. We see one man, a common, ignorant man, telling a story to an interested listener, and undoubtedly “putting in a few extra touches” to make the story more wonderful. The primitive stories must always have been presented orally, and at first to few listeners. Then came the days of story tellers for the crowd, and finally the written story.
The author of The Adventures of Simon and Susanna, Joel Chandler Harris, retold many folk-lore stories. He was born in Georgia in 1848, and died there in 1908. He devoted all his mature life to journalism and literature. His many books about Uncle Remus presented that person so clearly that the good-natured negro story teller has almost ceased to be merely a book-character, and has become a living reality.
Every story that Mr. Harris wrote has plot interest, but it also has pith and wisdom.
THE CROW-CHILD
By MARY MAPES DODGE
The ordinary “Fairy Story” is a developed form of the “Folk-Lore” story. Instead of having the roughness, and naïve simplicity characteristic of primitive ways of story telling it has polish, and definite literary or moral purpose. It is not a mere wonder story told in the first person by some definite individual, and made by the exaggeration of an actual event. It is a written rather than a spoken story, based, in the remote past, on some actual event, but now told in the third person, and directed strongly to an artistic, literary purpose,—frequently to a moral purpose. In every way the best type of “Fairy Story” is a distinct advance towards developed story telling.