glossed over in the old way. In neither
era, consequently, could an honest novelist freely follow his
observations upon Southern life in general. The mind of the herd bore
down upon him and crushed him into the accepted molds. It seems a
curious irony that the Negroes who thus innocently limited the
literature of their section should have been the subjects of a little
body of narrative which bids fair to outlast all that local color hit
upon in the South. Joel Chandler Harris is not, strictly speaking, a
contemporary, but Uncle Remus is contemporary and perennial. His stories
are grounded in the universal traits of simple souls; they are also the
whimsical, incidental mirror of a particular race during a
significant--though now extinct--phase of its career. They are at once
as ancient and as fresh as folk-lore.

Besides the rich planters and their slaves one other class of human
beings in the South especially attracted the attention of the local
colorists--the mountaineers. Certain distant cousins of this backwoods
stock had come into literature as "Pikes" or poor whites in the Far
West with Bret Harte and in the Middle West with John Hay and Edward
Eggleston; it remained for Charles Egbert Craddock in Tennessee and John
Fox in Kentucky to discover the heroic and sentimental qualities of the
breed among its highland fastnesses of the Great Smoky and Cumberland
Mountains. Here again formulas sprang up and so stifled the free growth
of observation that, though a multitude of stories has been written
about the mountains, almost all of them may be resolved into themes as
few in number as those which succeeded nearer Tidewater: how a stranger
man comes into the mountains, loves the flower of all the native
maidens, and clashes with the suspicions or jealousies of her
neighborhood; how two clans have been worn away by a long vendetta until
only one representative of each clan remains and the two forgive and
forget among the ruins; how a band of highlanders defend themselves
against the invading minions of a law made for the nation at large but
hardly applicable to highland circumstances; how the mountain virtues in
some way or other prove superior to the softer virtues--almost vices by
comparison--of the world of plains and cities. These formulas, however,
resulted from another cause than the popular complacency which hated to
be disturbed in Virginia and Louisiana. The mountain people,
inarticulate themselves, have uniformly