The author of “Uncle Remus” apparently succeeded because he did
not try. The literary world and the publishers came to him;
he did not go to them. Here was a young, unknown, untraveled
printer, of narrow school advantages, tho profitably educated
in the best classics, and possessing, besides, much curious
knowledge of negroes, of dogs, of horses, of the way of the red
stream in the swamp, and of the folk of the woods. He had some
familiar old stories to tell--so old and so familiar that no one
had thought them worth while writing down--and he told them as
quietly and as simply as he talked. But good work, tho hidden
away in an obscure newspaper, gets itself recognized sooner or
later, and one day Harris received an invitation to write some
of his tales for one of the foremost of American magazines. He
couldn’t understand it at all, but he wrote the stories, among
them an account of the amusing adventures of Br’er Rabbit, Br’er
Fox, and the Tar Baby, which clinched his literary fame. His
tales succeeded far beyond his expectations, and for the same
reason that made “Æsop’s Fables” an imperishable classic. For
they were the slow fruitage of the wonder, the humor, and the
pathos of a race of primitive storytellers. They were instinct
with those primal passions which appeal to human nature,
savage and civilized, the world over. (Text.) RAY STANNARD
BAKER, _The Outlook_.
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