THE ERA OF SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS
Just as the West of Mark Twain, Harte, Miller, Eggleston, and others
had been central in the literature, especially in the fiction, of
the seventies, so the South became central in the eighties. Southern
writers like Cable, Lanier, and Russell began their distinctive
work not long after the opening of the Bret Harte period, yet it
was not until after _Old Creole Days_, 1879, the death of Russell
in the same year and of Lanier in 1881, and the publication of Miss
Woolson's _Rodman the Keeper_ and the first Uncle Remus book in 1880,
Johnston's _Dukesborough Tales_, 1883, and Craddock's _In the Tennessee
Mountains_, 1884, that what we may call the era of Southern themes and
Southern writers may be said fully to have taken possession of American
literature. By 1888 Albion W. Tourgee could write in the _Forum_, "It
cannot be denied that American fiction of to-day, whatever may be
its origin, is predominatingly Southern in type and character.... A
foreigner studying our current literature, without knowledge of our
history, and judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly
conclude that the South was the seat of intellectual empire in America
and the African the chief romantic element of our population."
The real cause of this outburst has not often been touched upon. The
sudden vogue of Southern themes and Southern writers came not, as some
have explained, from the fact that a distinctive Southern literature
had arisen, or that a peculiar school had sprung up in one section of
the country, just as, for instance, we may speak of the New England
school earlier in the century. Nor is it explained by the theory
that the close of the war brought a new feeling of individuality
to the South, a consciousness of its own self which was to find
expression in a group of writers, as England after the wars with
Spain found expression in the Elizabethans. It was not a merely local
manifestation. The term "Southern Literature," as now found in the
titles of an increasing number of books and studies, is misleading. If
the South, or any other section, is to produce a distinct literature
of its own, that section must possess not alone themes and writers,
but publishers as well, and widely circulated magazines of the type
of the _Atlantic_ and the _Century_ and _Harper's_. It must have also
critics and adequate critical standards, and, most important of all, it
must have a clientele, readers enough to dispose of its own literary
product. The South has had practically none of these save the literary
themes and the writers. The turn of the tide from Western material and
Western workers to material and workers from the South was a national
phenomenon. It was in reality more a thing of the North than it was of
the South. Without Northern publishers and magazines and criticism and
readers there would have been no Southern literature.
To illustrate with a concrete example: Richard Malcolm Johnston
published at Augusta, Georgia, in 1864, _Georgia Sketches by an Old
Man_. In 1871 he added more tales to the collection, published them
in the _Southern Magazine_ of Baltimore, issued them in book form
in the same city, with the title _Dukesborough Tales_, and a little
later put forth a second and enlarged edition. Yet Edward Eggleston
could say when Johnston as late as 1879 published his first story in
a Northern magazine, "Mr. Neelus Peeler's Conditions," in _Scribner's
Monthly_, that the reading public everywhere hailed his advent as that
of a new and promising young man who had sent in his first story.
It was not until the Harpers in 1883 issued a Northern edition of
the much-published _Dukesborough Tales_ that Johnston ceased to be a
producer of merely Southern literature.
The cause of the Southern tone which American literature took on during
the eighties lies in the single fact that the South had the literary
material. The California gold, rich as it was when first discovered
by the East, was quickly exhausted. There were no deep mines; it was
surface gold, pockets and startling nuggets. Suddenly it was discovered
that the South was a field infinitely richer, and the tide turned.
Nowhere else were to be found such a variety of picturesque types
of humanity: negroes, crackers, creoles, mountaineers, moonshiners,
and all those incongruous elements that had resulted from the great
social upheaval of 1861-1865. Behind it in an increasingly romantic
perspective lay the old regime destroyed by the war; nearer was the
war itself, most heroic of struggles; and still nearer was the tragedy
of reconstruction with its carpet-bagger, its freed slaves, and its
Klu-Klux terror. Never before in America, even in California, had there
been such richness of literary material. That a group of Southern-born
writers should have arisen to deal with it was inevitable. Who else
_could_ have dealt with it, especially in the new era that demanded
reality and absolute genuineness? No Northerner could have revealed,
for instance, the heart of the old plantation negro. Miss Woolson's
stories of the South, brilliant as they are, are in a different world
from those of Joel Chandler Harris.
The writers themselves made no claim that they were producing a
Southern literature. They had, all of them, been touched by the new
after-the-war spirit, and their outlook was nation wide. Cable in
an address at Oxford, Mississippi, in June, 1882, pleaded for home
subjects as a basis for literature, but for home subjects treated in
a spirit of the broadest nationality: "Only let them be written," he
urged, "to and for the whole nation and you shall put your own State
not the less but the more in your debt."[133] He declared himself to
be not at all in favor of the popular new phrase "the new South"; he
would change it, he said, to "the _no_ South." Lanier, as we have seen,
was American in the broadest sense, and Joel Chandler Harris could say:
"What does it matter whether I am a Northerner or Southerner if I am
true to truth and true to that larger truth, my own true self? My idea
is that truth is more important than sectionalism and that literature
that can be labeled Northern, Southern, Western, Eastern, is not worth
labeling."[134]
It was the voice of the new spirit of the new age.
I
That the enormous vogue of the Bret Harte and the _Pike County Ballads_
literature of the early seventies could have passed unnoticed even in
the remotest sections of America seems improbable, but to attempt to
trace the influence it exerted on the group of Southern writers that
sprang up shortly after it had made its appearance is useless and
worse than useless. Not for a moment must it be forgotten that this
earlier Western outburst was not a local evolution that succeeded in
attracting the attention of the nation; it was rather the first result
of a condition which was general and nation wide. It was the new
after-the-war demand for life and reality and democracy, and it broke
out first in the West because the West at that moment had material
which was peculiarly fitted to make an appeal. Had the West at that
crisis had no writers ready to exploit this material, the outburst
undoubtedly would have come from the South. Cable and Lanier and
Johnston and Russell would have written very much as they did write had
Bret Harte and Mark Twain and Edward Eggleston never lived.
There were influences and conditions in the South that were peculiarly
favorable to the production of the type of literature demanded by
the time. Georgia in particular offered congenial soil. The middle
region of the State was the most democratic part of the South. It
had been settled by a sturdy race which separation from the more
aristocratic areas had rendered peculiarly individual. At one extreme
was the mountain cracker, a type which had been made peculiar only
by isolation, at the other were such remarkable men as Alexander H.
Stephens, Atticus G. Haygood, Benjamin H. Hill, John B. Gordon, and
Henry W. Grady. The social system was peculiar. Relations between
master and slave were far different from those found on the larger
plantations where overseers were employed. The negroes were known
personally; they were a part of the family. Relations like those
described so delightfully by Joel Chandler Harris were common. "There
was no selling," as Johnston expressed it; "black and white children
grew up together. Servants descended from father to son." The result
of this democracy was a natural tendency toward the new realistic type
of localized literature. While the rest of the South had been romantic
and little inclined to use its own backgrounds and its own local types
of character, Georgia had been producing since the mid years of the
century studies of its own peculiar types and institutions.
As early as 1835 had appeared _Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents,
etc., in the First Half Century of the Republic. By a Native Georgian_,
from the pen of Augustus B. Longstreet, graduate of Yale, lawyer,
preacher, college president. It was republished in New York in 1840
and from that day it has never been out of print. A realistic, brutal
series of sketches it is, full of ear-chewing fights, cruel gougings,
horse-racings, horse-swaps, coarse practical jokes, and all the
barbarous diversions of a primitive people in a primitive time. Its
author apologizes in his preface for the ephemeral character of the
book: the stories and sketches, he explains, are "nothing more than
fanciful combinations of real incidents and characters." Yet few books
of its decade have had more vitality. The author worked first hand
in the materials of the life that he himself had seen about him. It
is true at every point. Its author, a generation ahead of his times,
summed up in one phrase the new realism that was to come: "real people
and real incidents in fanciful combinations."
Associated with Longstreet in this earlier realistic period of Georgia
were Oliver Hillhouse Prince (1787-1837), who contributed to _Georgia
Scenes_ "The Militia Drill," a sketch read perhaps by Thomas Hardy
before he wrote his _Trumpet-Major_, and William Tappan Thompson
(1812-1882), whose _Major Jones's Chronicles_ appeared in book form in
Philadelphia in 1840.
There was another element in Georgia during the earlier period which
had strong influence upon the later group of writers, and allowed it to
produce not only Richard Malcolm Johnston and Joel Chandler Harris and
"Bill Arp," but poets like Ticknor and Lanier as well. In the cities
and larger towns of the State there was an atmosphere of culture unique
in the South. Harry Stillwell Edwards would account for it by calling
attention to an element usually overlooked:
In the late thirties--1839 to be exact--Wesleyan Female College
came into being at Macon--the first chartered college for
women in the world, and soon began to turn out large classes
of highly educated and accomplished graduates. The majority of
these came from Georgia, but the whole South has always been
represented in Wesleyan. Without going into this subject, I
wish to state as my personal opinion that Georgia's literary
development, which is undoubtedly more extensive than that of
other Southern States, is due to the intellectual and spiritual
soil or environment produced by this College in the fifty
years of its existence previous to 1890. You will understand
how this can be true though the mothers of the State's best
known writers may not have been graduates. In my youth, every
girl associate I had was of this college. Its atmosphere was
everywhere apparent. To-day its graduates lead all over the
State.[135]
One may trace these elements--the Longstreet realism at the one
extreme and the Macon College influence at the other--in all the
later Georgia writers. We have found how Lanier in his earlier work
alternated between broad cracker sketches and dialect ballads and the
more elegant forms of prose and poetry. Even a poem as rhapsodic as his
"Corn" contains within it a realistic picture of the thriftless Georgia
planter. It was from the blending of these two streams of influence
that there came some of the strongest literature of the new period.
II
The link between Longstreet and the younger Georgia writers is to be
found in Richard Malcolm Johnston. Chronologically--he was born in
1822--he belongs to the earlier group, the generation of Lowell and
Story, Boker and Read and Edward Everett Hale, and he seems to have
been touched not at all by the literary influences that had so strongly
exerted themselves upon the writers of the seventies. He was reared
on a central Georgia plantation with all the surroundings of the old
regime; he had been educated in the type of rural school so graphically
described in his earlier sketches and then later at Mercer College,
from which he was graduated in 1841; he gave the vigorous years of his
life to the law and then to teaching; and after he was sixty years of
age began seriously to devote himself to the profession of literature.
As early as 1857 he had begun writing sketches of provincial life
after the Longstreet pattern. His first piece, "The Goose Pond School"
was followed at long intervals by others in the same vein, written,
the greater part of them, after his removal to Baltimore partly to
assist his friend Turnbull, the editor of the _Southern Magazine_,
who had asked for his help, and partly "to subdue as far as possible
the feeling of homesickness for my native region. It never occurred
to me that they were of any sort of value. Yet when a collection of
them, nine in all, was printed by Mr. Turnbull, who about that time
ended publication of his magazine, and when a copy of this collection
fell into the hands of Henry M. Alden, of _Harper's Magazine_, whose
acquaintance I had lately made, he expressed much surprise that I had
not received any pecuniary compensation, and added that he would have
readily accepted them if they had been offered to him. Several things
he said about them that surprised and gratified me much. I then set
into the pursuit of that kind of work."[136]
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 preeminently
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 regime, 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:
About 1880, Sam Small of Atlanta, Georgia, on the local staff
of the _Constitution_, began writing negro sketches, using "Old
Si" or "Uncle Si" as his vehicle, and soon made the character
famous. Small, however, was very dissipated, and frequently
the Sunday morning Old Si contribution failed to appear. Joel
Chandler Harris, the paragrapher for the _Constitution_ as
he had been for the _Savannah News_, was called on to supply
something in place of the missing Si sketches and began with
"Uncle Remus." His first contributions were not folk lore,
but local. He soon drifted into the folk lore, however, and
recognizing the beauty and perfection of his work, people
generally who remembered the stories of their childhood,
wrote out for him the main points and sent them. I, myself,
contributed probably a dozen of the adventures of Brer Rabbit
as I had heard them. This service he afterwards acknowledged
in a graceful card of thanks. Uncle Remus became, soon, the
mouthpiece of the generation, so far as animal legends are
concerned.
The stories at once attracted attention in the North. The _New York
Evening Post_ and the _Springfield Republican_ in particular made much
of them. As a direct result, _Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings; The
Folk-lore of the old Plantation_, appeared in 1880 and its author
quickly found himself a national and indeed an international personage.
The really vital work of Harris lies in two fields: sketches of
the old-time negro and sketches of the mountain cracker of the
later period. It is upon the first that his permanence as a writer
must depend. He worked in negro folk lore, in that vast field of
animal stories which seems to be a part of the childhood of races,
but it is not his folk lore, valuable as it may be, that gives him
distinction. Ethnological and philological societies have done the
work more scientifically. Many of the animal legends in common use
among the slaves of the South were already in print before he began to
write.[138] What he did was to paint a picture, minutely accurate, of
the negro whom he had known intimately on the plantation of Mr. Turner
at the transition moment when the old was passing into the new. With
a thousand almost imperceptible touches he has made a picture that is
complete and that is alive. The childish ignorance of the race and yet
its subtle cunning, its quaint humor, its pathos, its philosophy, its
conceit, its mendacity and yet its depth of character, its quickness at
repartee--nothing has been omitted. The story teller is more valuable
than his story: he is recording unconsciously to himself his own soul
and the soul of his race. Brer Rabbit after all is but a negro in
thinnest disguise, one does not have to see Frost's marvelous drawings
to realize that. The rabbit's helplessness typifies the helplessness
of the negro, and yet Brer Rabbit always wins. Suavity and duplicity
and shifty tricks are the only defense the weak may have. His ruses are
the ruses of a childlike mind. Clumsy in the extreme and founded on
what seems like the absolute stupidity of Brer Fox and Brer Wolf and
the others who are beguiled, these ruses always succeed. The helpless
little creature is surrounded on all sides by brutality and superior
force; they seemingly overcome him, but in the end they are defeated
and always by force of superior cunning and skilful mendacity at the
supreme moment. It is the very essence of the child story--the giant
killed by Jack, the wolf powerless to overcome Little Red Riding Hood,
and all the others--for the negro himself was but a child.
Page uses the negro as an accessory. The pathos of the black race
adds pathos to the story of the destroyed white regime. Harris rose
superior to Page in that he made the negro not the background for a
white aristocracy, but a living creature valuable for himself alone;
and he rose superior to Russell inasmuch as he embodied the result of
his studies not in a type but in a single negro personality to which he
gave the breath of life. Harris's negro is the type plus the personal
equation of an individual--Uncle Remus, one of the few original
characters which America has added to the world's gallery.
It is worthy of note too that he interpreted with the same patience
and thoroughness the music and the poetry of the negro. Russell was
a lyrist with the gift of intuition and improvisation; Harris was a
deliberate recorder. The songs he wrote are not literary adaptations,
nor are they framed after the conventional minstrel pattern. They are
reproductions. In his first introduction to _Uncle Remus, His Songs and
His Sayings_ he wrote:
As to the songs, the reader is warned that it will be found
difficult to make them conform to the ordinary rules of
versification, nor is it intended that they should so conform.
They are written, and are intended to be read, solely in
reference to the regular invariable recurrence of the caesura,
as, for instance, the first stanza of the Revival Hymn:
Oh, whar | shill we go | w'en de great | day comes |
Wid de blow | in' er de trumpits | en de bang | in' er de drums |
Hoy man | y po' sin | ers 'll be kotch'd | out late |
En fine | no latch | ter de gold | en gate |
In other words, the songs depend for their melody and rhythm
upon the musical quality of _time_, and not upon long or short,
accented or unaccented, syllables. I am persuaded that this
fact led Mr. Sidney Lanier, who is thoroughly familiar with
the metrical peculiarities of negro songs, into the exhaustive
investigation which has resulted in the publication of his
scholarly treatise on The Science of English Verse.
Nowhere else does one come so completely into the feeling of negro
music as in Harris. In "The Night Before Christmas," in _Nights with
Uncle Remus_, a latter-day "Sir Roger de Coverley Paper," we feel the
tone of it:
His voice was strong and powerful, and sweet, and its range
was as astonishing as its volume. More than this, the melody
to which he tuned it, and which was caught up by a hundred
voices almost as sweet and as powerful as his own, was charged
with a mysterious and pathetic tenderness. The fine company
of men and women at the big house--men and women who had made
the tour of all the capitals of Europe--listened with swelling
hearts and with tears in their eyes as the song rose and fell
upon the air--at one moment a tempest of melody, at another a
heart-breaking strain breathed softly and sweetly to the gentle
winds. The song that the little boy and the fine company heard
was something like this--ridiculous enough when put in cold
type, but powerful and thrilling when joined to the melody with
which the negroes had invested it:
De big Owl holler en cry fer his mate,
My honey, my love!
Oh, don't stay long! oh, don't stay late!
My honey, my love!
Hit ain't so mighty fur ter de good-by gate,
My honey, my love!
Whar we all got ter go w'en we sing out de night,
My honey, my love!
My honey, my love, my heart's delight--
My honey, my love!
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.
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.
With the publication of _In the Tennessee Mountains_ came one of the
most dramatic happenings that ever gave wings to a new book. Charles
Egbert Craddock visited the _Atlantic_ office and, to the amazement
of Aldrich and Howells and Dr. Holmes, he was a woman. The sensation,
coming as it did from the center of the old New England tradition, gave
the book at once an international fame and made Charles Egbert Craddock
a name as widely known as Dr. Holmes. She followed her early success
with a long series of Tennessee mountain novels. Six of them--_The
Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains_, _In the Clouds_, _The Despot
of Broomsedge Cove_, _His Vanished Star_, _The Mystery of Witchface
Mountain_, and _The Juggler_--first appeared serially in the Atlantic,
and, for a time at least, it seemed as if her work had taken its place
among the American classics.
VI
Criticism of the Craddock novels must begin always with the statement
that their author was not a native of the region with which she
dealt. She had been born into an old Southern family with wealth
and traditions, and she had been reared in a city amid culture and
a Southern social regime. The Tennessee mountains she knew only as
a summer visitor may know them. For fifteen summers she went to the
little mountain town of Beersheba, prototype undoubtedly of the "New
Helvetia Springs" of her novels, and from there made excursions into
the wilder regions. She saw the mountains with the eyes of the city
vacationist: she was impressed with their wildness, their summer moods
with light and shadow, their loneliness and their remote spurs and
coves and ragged gaps. She saw them with the picture sense of the
artist and she described them with a wealth of coloring that reminds
one of Ruskin. In every chapter, often many times repeated, gorgeous
paintings like these:
A subtle amethystine mist had gradually overlaid the slopes
of the T'other Mounting, mellowing the brilliant tints of the
variegated foliage to a delicious hazy sheen of mosaics; but
about the base the air seemed dun-colored, though transparent;
seen through it, even the red of the crowded trees was but
a somber sort of magnificence, and the great masses of gray
rocks, jutting out among them here and there, wore a darkly
frowning aspect. Along the summit there was a blaze of scarlet
and gold in the full glory of the sunshine; the topmost cliffs
caught its rays, and gave them back in unexpected gleams of
green or grayish-yellow, as of mosses, or vines, or huckleberry
bushes, nourished in the heart of the deep fissures.
Mink, trotting along the red clay road, came suddenly upon the
banks of the Scolacutta River, riotous with the late floods,
fringed with the papaw and the ivy bush. Beyond its steely
glint he could see the sun-flooded summit of Chilhowee, a
bronze green, above the intermediate ranges: behind him was
the Great Smoky, all unfamiliar viewed from an unaccustomed
standpoint, massive, solemn, of dusky hue; white and amber
clouds were slowly settling on the bald. There had been a
shower among the mountains, and a great rainbow, showing now
only green and rose and yellow, threw a splendid slant of
translucent color on the purple slope. In such an environment
the little rickety wooden mill--with its dilapidated leaking
race, with its motionless wheel moss-grown, with its tottering
supports throbbing in the rush of the water which rose around
them, with a loitering dozen or more mountaineers about the
door--might seem a feeble expression of humanity. To Mink the
scene was the acme of excitement and interest.
A picture of summer it is for the most part painted lavishly with
adjectives, and presented with impressionistic rather than realistic
effect. Every detail is intensified. The mountains of eastern Tennessee
are only moderate ridges, yet in the Craddock tales they take on
the proportions of the Canadian Rockies or the Alps. The peak that
dominates _In the Clouds_ seems to soar like a Mont Blanc:
In the semblance of the cumulus-cloud from which it takes
its name, charged with the portent of the storm, the massive
peak of Thunderhead towers preeminent among the summits of
the Great Smoky Mountains, unique, impressive, most subtly
significant. What strange attraction of the earth laid hold
on this vagrant cloud-form? What unexplained permanence of
destiny solidified it and fixed it forever in the foundations
of the range? Kindred thunderheads of the air lift above the
horizon, lure, loiter, lean on its shoulder with similitudes
and contrasts. Then with all the buoyant liberties of cloudage
they rise--rise!... Sometimes it was purple against the azure
heavens; or gray and sharp of outline on faint green spaces of
the sky; or misty, immaterial, beset with clouds, as if the
clans had gathered to claim the changeling.
Always the scenery dominates the book. It is significant that all of
her early titles have in them the name of a locality,--the setting
is the chief thing: Lost Creek, Big Injun Mounting, Harrison's Cove,
Chilhowee, the Great Smoky Mountains, Broomsedge Cove, Keedon Bluffs.
In stories like _The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain_ the background
becomes supreme: the human element seems to have been added afterwards
by a sort of necessity; the central character is the great witch-face
on the mountain.
It reminds one of Hardy, and then one remembers that when "The Dancin'
Party at Harrison's Cove" appeared in the _Atlantic_, _The Return of
the Native_ had for three months been running as a serial in _Harper's
Monthly_, and that, somewhat later, _In the "Stranger-People's"
Country_ and _Wessex Folk_ ran for months parallel in the same
magazine. It is impossible not to think of Hardy as one reads _Where
the Battle Was Fought_, 1884. The battle-field dominates the book as
completely as does Egdon Heath _The Return of the Native_, and it
dominates it in the same symbolic way:
By wintry daylight the battle-field is still more ghastly. Gray
with the pallid crab-grass which so eagerly usurps the place of
the last summer's crops, it stretches out on every side to meet
the bending sky. The armies that successively encamped upon it
did not leave a tree for miles, but here and there thickets
have sprung up since the war, and bare and black they intensify
the gloom of the landscape. The turf in these segregated spots
is never turned. Beneath the branches are rows of empty,
yawning graves, where the bodies of soldiers were temporarily
buried. Here, most often, their spirits walk, and no hire can
induce the hardiest plowman to break the ground. Thus the owner
of the land is fain to concede these acres to his ghostly
tenants, who pay no rent. A great brick house, dismantled and
desolate, rises starkly above the dismantled desolation of the
plain.
The title of the book--_Where the Battle Was Fought_--makes the
battle-field central in the tragedy, and so it is with the short
stories "'Way Down in Lonesome Cove" and "Drifting Down Lost Creek."
Nature is always cognizant of the human tragedy enacted before it and
always makes itself felt. In _The Juggler_, Tubal Cain Sims believes
that murder has been done:
"He sighed an' groaned like suthin' in agony. An' then he says,
so painful, 'But the one who lives--oh, what can I do--the
one who lives!'" He paused abruptly to mark the petrified
astonishment on the group of faces growing white in the closing
dusk.
An owl began to hoot in the bosky recesses far up the slope.
At the sound, carrying far in the twilight stillness, a hound
bayed from the door of the little cabin in the Cove, by the
river. A light, stellular in the gloom that hung about the
lower levels, suddenly sprung up in the window. A tremulous
elongated reflection shimmered in the shallows.
But such effects in her work are fitful: one feels them strongly at
times, then forgets them in the long stretches of dialect conversation
and description seemingly introduced for its own sake. Of the art that
could make of Egdon Heath a constantly felt, implacable, malignant
presence that harried and compelled its dwellers until the reader at
last must shake himself awake as from a nightmare, of this she knew
little. She worked by means of brilliant sketches; she relied upon
her picturing power to carry the story, and as a result the effect is
scattered.
In her characterization she had all the defects of Scott: she worked
largely with externals. She had an eye for groups posed artistically
against a picturesque background as in that marvelous opening picture
in "'Way Down on Lonesome Cove." She expended the greatest of care
on costume, features, habits of carriage and posture, tricks of
expression, individual oddities, but she seldom went deeper. We see
her characters distinctly; not often do we feel them. In her major
personages, like the Prophet, the Despot, the Juggler, we have little
sympathetic interest, and it is impossible to believe that they were
much more than picturesque specimens even to the author herself. To
get upon the heart of the reader a character must first have been upon
the heart of his creator. Here and there undoubtedly she did feel the
thrill of comprehension as she created, a few times so keenly indeed
that she could forget her art, her note book, and her audience. The one
thing that seems to have touched her heart as she journeyed through the
summer valleys and into the remote coves seems to have been the pitiful
loneliness and heart-hunger of the women. Could she have done for all
of her characters what she did for Celia Shaw and Madeline and Dorinda
and a few other feminine souls, the final verdict upon her work might
have been far different from what it must be now.
Her stories necessarily are woven from scanty materials. In the tale
of a scattered and primitive mountain community there can be little
complication of plot. The movement of the story must be slow, as slow
indeed as the round of life in the coves and the lonesome valleys.
But in her long-drawn narratives often there is no movement at all.
She elaborates details with tediousness and records interminable
conversations, and breaks the thread to insert whole chapters of
description, as in Chapter VI of _The Juggler_, which records the
doings at a mountain revival meeting seemingly for the mere sake of
the local color. Nearly all of her longer novels lack in constructive
power. Like Harte, whom in so many ways she resembled, she could deal
strongly with picturesque moments and people, but she lacked the
ability to trace the growth of character or the slow transforming power
of a passion or an ideal or a sin.
Her style was peculiarly her own; in this she was strong. It is worthy
of note that in an age rendered styleless by the newspaper and the
public school she was able to be individual to the extent that one may
identify any page of her writings by the style alone. It is not always
admirable: there is a Southern floridness about it, a fondness for
stately epithet that one does not find in Harris or in others of the
Georgia group. She can write that the search light made "a rayonnant
halo in the dim glooms of the riparian midnight," and she can follow
the jocose observation of a woman washing dishes with this tremendous
sentence: "'What fur?' demanded the lord of the house, whose sense of
humor was too blunted by his speculations, and a haunting anxiety,
and a troublous eagerness to discuss the question of his discovery,
to perceive aught of the ludicrous in the lightsome metaphor with
which his weighty spouse had characterized her dissatisfaction with
the ordering of events." It may be interesting to know that the
woman vouchsafed no reply. Rather, "she wheezed one more line of her
matutinal hymn in a dolorous cadence and with breathy interstices
between the spondees."
She is at her best when describing some lonely valley among the ridges,
or the moonlight as it plays fitfully over some scene of mountain
lawlessness, or some remote cabin "deep among the wooded spurs." In
such work she creates an atmosphere all her own. Few other writers have
so made landscape felt. One may choose illustrations almost at random:
On a certain steep and savage slope of the Great Smoky
Mountains, the primeval wilderness for many miles is unbroken
save for one meager clearing.
Deep among the wooded spurs Lonesome Cove nestles, sequestered
from the world. Naught emigrates from thence except an
importunate stream that forces its way through a rocky gap, and
so to freedom beyond. No stranger intrudes; only the moon looks
in once in a while. The roaring wind may explore its solitudes;
and it is but the vertical sun that strikes to the heart of the
little basin, because of the massive mountains that wall it
round and serve to isolate it.
The night wind rose. The stars all seemed to have burst from
their moorings and were wildly adrift in the sky. There was a
broken tumult of billowy clouds, and the moon tossed hopelessly
among them, a lunar wreck, sometimes on her beam ends,
sometimes half submerged, once more gallantly struggling to
the surface, and again sunk. The bare boughs of the trees beat
together in a dirgelike monotone.
Nowhere is she commonplace; nowhere does she come down from the
stately plane that she reaches always with her opening paragraph. Even
her dialect is individual. Doubtless other writers have handled the
mountain speech more correctly, doubtless there is as much of Charles
Egbert Craddock in the curious forms and perversions as there is of
the Tennessee mountaineers, yet no one has ever used dialect more
convincingly than she or more effectively. She has made it a part of
her style.
The story of Charles Egbert Craddock is a story of gradual decline. _In
the Tennessee Mountains_ was received with a universality of approval
comparable only with that accorded to _The Luck of Roaring Camp_.
In her second venture, _Where the Battle Was Fought_, she attempted
to break from the narrow limits of her first success and to write a
Hardy-like novel of the section of Southern life in which she herself
belonged, but it failed. From all sides came the demand that she return
again to her own peculiar domain. And she returned with _The Prophet of
the Great Smoky Mountains_. It was praised, but with the praise came
a note of dissatisfaction, a note that became more and more dominant
with every novel that followed. Her first short stories had appealed
because of their freshness and the strangeness of their setting.
Moreover, since they were the first work of a young writer they were a
promise of better things to come. But the promise was not fulfilled.
After _The Juggler_, her last attempt on a large scale to create a
great Tennessee-mountains novel, she took the advice of many of her
critics and left the narrow field that she had cultivated so carefully.
She wrote historical romances and novels of contemporary life, but the
freshness of her early work was gone. After 1897 she produced nothing
that had not been done better by other writers.
Her failure came not, as many have believed, from the poverty of her
materials and the narrowness of her field. Thomas Hardy deliberately
had chosen for his novels a region and a people just as primitive.
A great novel should concern itself with the common fundamentals of
humanity, and these fundamentals, he believed, may be studied with more
of accuracy in the isolated places where the conventions of polite
society have not prevented natural expression. Or, to quote Hardy's own
words:
Social environment operates upon character in a way that is
oftener than not prejudicial to vigorous portraiture by making
the exteriors of men their screen rather than their index, as
with untutored mankind. Contrasts are disguised by the crust of
conventionality, picturesqueness obliterated, and a subjective
system of description necessitated for the differentiation of
character. In the one case the author's word has to be taken as
to the nerves and muscles of his figures; in the other they can
be seen as in an ecorche.[139]
The failure of Charles Egbert Craddock came rather from her inability
to work with large masses of material and coordinate it and shape it
into a culminating force. She was picturesque rather than penetrating,
melodramatic rather than simple, a showman rather than a discerning
interpreter of the inner meanings of life. She could make vivid
sketches of a moment or of a group or a landscape, but she could not
build up touch by touch a consistent and compelling human character.
Her genius was fitted to express itself in the short story and the
sketch, and she devoted the golden years of her productive life to the
making of elaborate novels. A little story like "'Way Down on Lonesome
Cove" is worth the whole of the _The Juggler_ or _In the Clouds_. The
short stories with which she won her first fame must stand as her
highest achievement.
VII
Later members of the Georgia group, Sarah Barnwell Elliott, Harry
Stillwell Edwards, and William Nathaniel Harben, have continued the
tradition of Longstreet and have dealt more or less realistically with
the humbler life of their region. Miss Elliott with her _The Durket
Sperrit_ entered the domain of Charles Egbert Craddock and gave a
new version of the mountain dialect. A comparison of this novel with
_The Juggler_, which appeared the same year, is illuminating. The two
writers seem to be complements of each other, the one strong where the
other is weak. The story lacks the atmosphere, the poetic dignity,
the sense of mystery and of mountain majesty so notable in the elder
novelist, but it surpasses her in characterization and in sympathy.
The people are tremendously alive. The tyrannical old woman about
whom the tale centers, with her narrow ideals and her haughty "Durket
sperrit," dominates every page as Egdon Heath dominates _The Return
of the Native_. She is felt during every moment of the story and so is
the pathetic little mountain waif in the earlier chapters of _Jerry_.
Miss Elliott's distinctive work is limited to these two books. Had she
had the courage to work out with clearness the central tragedy of _The
Durket Sperrit_, the deliberate disgracing of Hannah by her discarded
lover, the book might take its place among the few great novels of the
period.
Edwards inclined more toward the old Georgia type of human-nature
sketch. His best work is to be found in his short studies in black
and white after the Johnston pattern. Indeed, his first story, "Elder
Brown's Backslide," _Harper's Monthly_, 1885, without his name would
have been regarded as a Dukesborough Tale. He has written two novels,
one of which, _Sons and Fathers_, was awarded the $10,000 prize offered
by the _Chicago Record_ for a mystery story, but he is not a novelist.
He is humorous and picturesque and often he is for a moment the master
of pathos, but he has added nothing new and nothing commandingly
distinctive.
VIII
Constance Fenimore Woolson's _Rodman the Keeper_, 1880, undoubtedly
was a strong force in the new Southern revival. During the eighties
Miss Woolson was regarded as the most promising of the younger writers.
She was a grand niece of Cooper, a fact made much of, and she had
written short stories of unusual brilliance, her collection, _Castle
Nowhere_, indeed, ranking as a pioneer book in a new field. Again was
she destined to be a pioneer. In 1873 the frail health of her mother
sent her into the South and for six years she made her home in Florida,
spending her summers in the mountains of North Carolina, Virginia,
South Carolina, and Georgia. During the rest of her life her stories
were studies of Southern life and Southern conditions. Only _Anne_ of
her novels and two late collections of Italian tales may be noted as
exceptions.
It was in _Rodman the Keeper_, a collection of her magazine stories of
the late seventies, that the North found its first adequate picture of
the territory over which had been fought the Civil War. The Tourgee
novels, which had created a real sensation, were political documents,
but here were studies carefully wrought by one who did not take sides.
It showed the desolation wrought by the armies during the four years,
the pathos of broken homes and ruined plantations, the rankling
bitterness, especially in the hearts of women, the helpless pride of
the survivors, and the curious differences between the Northern and
the Southern temperaments. It was careful work. Contemporary opinion
seemed to be voiced by the Boston _Literary World_: The stories "more
thoroughly represent the South than anything of the kind that has been
written since the war."
Necessarily the standpoint was that of an observer from without. There
was no dialect in the tales, there were no revealings of the heart of
Southern life as in Harris and Page and the others who had arisen from
the material they used, but there was beauty and pathos and a careful
realism that carried conviction. A sketch like "Felipe," for example,
is a prose idyl, "Up the Blue Ridge" is the Craddock region seen with
Northern eyes, and the story that gives the title to the book catches
the spirit of the defeated South as few writers not Southern born have
ever done.
For a time Miss Woolson held a commanding place among the novelists
of the period. After her untimely death in 1894 Stedman wrote that
she "was one of the leading women in the American literature of the
century," and again, "No woman of rarer personal qualities, or with
more decided gifts as a novelist, figured in her own generation of
American writers." But time has not sustained this contemporary
verdict. Her ambitious novel _Anne_, over which she toiled for three
years, brilliant as it may be in parts, has not held its place. And
her short stories, rare though they may have been in the day of their
newness, are not to be compared with the perfect art of such later
writers as Miss King and Mrs. Chopin. She must take her place as one
of the pioneers of the period who discovered a field and prepared an
audience for writers who were to follow.
IX
The appearance of Page's _In Ole Virginia_, 1887, marks the culmination
of the period of Southern themes. The sensation caused by _The Quick
or the Dead?_ by Amelie Rives (later Princess Troubetzkoy) in 1888
need only be referred to. It had little significance either local or
otherwise. The younger writers, born for the most part at a later date,
like John Fox, Jr., Mary Johnston, and Ellen Glasgow, belong to another
period.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. (1822-1898.) _The English Classics_,
1860; _Georgia Sketches, by an Old Man_, 1864; _Dukesborough
Tales_, 1871, 1874, 1883, 1892; _English Literature_ (with
William Hand Browne), 1872; _Life of Alexander H. Stephens_ (with
William Hand Browne), 1878; _Old Mark Langston, a Tale of Duke's
Creek_, 1883; _Mr. Absalom Billingslea and Other Georgia Folk_,
1888; _Ogeechee Cross Firings_, 1889; _The Primes and Their
Neighbors_, 1891; _Studies Literary and Scientific_, 1891; _Mr.
Billy Downs and His Likes_, 1892; _Mr. Fortner's Marital Claims
and Other Stories_, 1892; _Two Gray Tourists_, 1893; _Widow
Guthrie_, 1893; _Little Ike Templin and Other Stories_, 1894;
_Old Times in Middle Georgia_, 1897; _Pearce Amerson's Will_,
1898.
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS. (1848-1908.) _Uncle Remus, His Songs and
His Sayings_, 1880; _Nights with Uncle Remus, Myths and Legends
of the Old Plantation_, 1883; _Mingo and Other Sketches in Black
and White_, 1884; _Story of Aaron_, 1885; _Free Joe and Other
Georgian Sketches_, 1887; _Daddy Jake the Runaway, and Short
Stories Told After Dark_, 1889; _Balaam and His Master, and Other
Sketches and Stories_, 1891; _On the Plantation, a Story of a
Georgia Boy's Adventures During the War_, 1892; _Uncle Remus
and His Friends_, 1892; _Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer
Country_, 1894; _Mr. Rabbit at Home_, 1895; _Sister Jane, Her
Friends and Acquaintances_, 1896; _Georgia from the Invasion
of De Soto to Recent Times_, 1896; _Stories of Georgia_, 1896;
_Aaron in the Wildwoods_, 1897; _Tales of the Home Folks in
Peace and War_, 1898; _Chronicles of Aunt Minerva Ann_, 1899;
_Plantation Pageants_, 1899; _On the Wing of Occasions_, 1900;
_Gabriel Tolliver, a Story of Reconstruction_, 1902; _Making
of a Statesman, and Other Stories_, 1902; _Wally Wanderoon_,
1903; _Little Union Scout_, 1904; _Tar Baby and Other Rimes of
Uncle Remus_, 1904; _Told by Uncle Remus; New Stories of the Old
Plantation_, 1905.
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON. (1840-1894.) _The Old Stone House_,
1873; _Castle Nowhere_, 1875; _Lake-Country Sketches_, 1875;
_Rodman the Keeper_, 1880; _Anne_, 1882; _East Angels_, 1886;
_Jupiter Lights_, 1889; _Horace Chase, a Novel_, 1894; _The
Front Yard and Other Italian Stories_, 1895; _Dorothy, and Other
Italian Stories_, 1896; _Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu_, 1896.
CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK. (1850-----.) _In the Tennessee
Mountains_, 1884; _Where the Battle Was Fought_, 1885; _Down the
Ravine_, 1885; _The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains_, 1885;
_In the Clouds_, 1886; _The Story of Keedon Bluffs_, 1887; _The
Despot of Broomsedge Cove_, 1888; _In the "Stranger People's"
Country_, 1891; _His Vanished Star_, 1894; _The Phantoms of the
Footbridge_, 1895; _The Mystery of Witchface Mountain_, 1895;
_The Juggler_, 1897; _The Young Mountaineers_, 1897; _The Story
of Old Fort Louden_, 1899; _The Bushwhackers and Other Stories_,
1899; _The Champion_, 1902; _A Specter of Power_, 1903; _Storm
Center_, 1905; _The Frontiersman_, 1905; _The Amulet_, 1906;
_The Windfall_, 1907; _The Fair Mississippian_, 1908; _Ordeal--A
Mountain Story of Tennessee_, 1912; _Raid of the Guerrilla_,
1912; _The Story of Duciehurst_, 1914.
SARAH BARNWELL ELLIOTT. _The Felmeres_, 1880; _A Simple Heart_,
1886; _Jerry_, 1890; _John Paget_, 1893; _The Durket Sperret_,
1897; _An Incident and Other Happenings_, 1899; _Sam Houston_,
1900; _The Making of Jane_, 1901; _His Majesty's Service and
Other Plays_.
HARRY STILLWELL EDWARDS. (1855-----.) _Two Runaways and Other
Stories_, 1889; _Sons and Fathers_, 1896; _The Marbeau Cousins_,
1898; _His Defense, and Other Stories_, 1898.