UNCLE REMUS.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 282, 22 August 1908, Page 12

UNCLE REMUS.

•Brer Fos, perhaps, might bo ablo to explain why the great classics of the world's light literature should have been produced by men of serious interest, on the whole. Defoe's ardent pamphleteering soul could scarcely have been aware of what "Ilobinson Crusoe" would become to all of tho future of En<»v lish-speaking boyhood. That Lewis Carroll, mathematician and author of "Symbolic , Logic" and "Principles of Parliamentary Representation," should also have' written the history of Alice j that men of such a seeming incomparably serious occupation as Germanic philology should have been the authors of those delightful Grimms' "Fairy Tales" which hold their own with the tales of that other grave person, 'Hans Christian Andersen; that a secretary of the French Academy should have given to tho world Mother Goose, Cinderella, and tho Sleeping Beauty, is argument in favour of the amateur as against - the professional when it comes to the' fashioning of elemental but lasting literature; Such perpetual delights for. tho world's simpler .appetite in reading, lure: some of tho greatest achievements m the art of cookery, have been stumbled Upon •almost by accident, and most often not by the professional chef. It was a sporting English lord at the gaming table-that de- , vised the sandwich. It was not a professional student ' of.' folklore, but a Southern journalist, that first gave to the world the adventure of Brer Rabbit with tho Tar Baby. The " fielc} which Joel Chandler' Harris opened has since been industriously ploughed by the folklorist and tho shorfc-story writer, to the greater glory of both. Wo have had reams of negro fable and tradition that come probably nearer , to tho scientific standard of anthropologic truth than the earliest narrative of Uncle. Rbmtiß, and we have had Active tales of _negro belief that are, at first hand, cleverer in plot and dialoguj, and more • startling in orthography, than tho oolloquies . of Brer'Fox'tad Brer 'Rabbit. . But whether 1 Uncle Remus's combination of just that measure of truth,with just that, measure of art which makes pormanoht literature, has been equalled by others, is quite a different qucs- ■ tion. As a matter of fact, Mr. Harris, in his own later histories of Uncle Remus, showed a' falling away from tho perfect balance he striick-in the first; stories. He was deflected, sadly' enough, too much towards the truth; began to gather negro"loro with - professional ardour, and let the formal side suffer. Tho decline, of course, was from the high standard which he himself had set. Compared with most of tho grist that has • como from the negro dialect fiction mill, what Uncle, Remus had to say always carried witli it something of the earth's freshness which it is' not given to the clever magazine writor to put into his pages.' • ■■ How near to a real folklore, in the sense of & native storo of crude belief, Undo Remus has brought us, will remain for years, we suppose, a mooted question with those interested in negro anthropology. The negro in tho South is ; in moro ways than one a source of vexation to tho student of ethnic evolution. It Will not do to bind tho mind of the negro too closely to his African ancestry. What tho plantation hand believe,'! now that is to us primitive, what he often says, what he often sings—is it an inheritance brought over from the Dark Continent, or is it the. perversion of what ho ' learned in this country from tho white man long ago, and what the white man ha 3 forgotten? When Anton Dvorak declared that a national American school of music would : be developed on the basis of our negro melodies, evidence was brought forward to show, we believe, that this supposed nativo negro music had its, origin in old Methodist revival hymns set to European tunes. Into voodoo, bo far as our knowledge of that dark realm goes, not all that enters is African; Indian and European superstitions aro mixed in tho hodge-podge. The attempt has been made to trace tho history of meaningless words in negro song and dialect back to an African vernacular; but with no apparent success. How much of Uncle Remus tnat is not Joel Chandler Harris comes from the banks of tho Congo, and' how much was ■ born on tho banks of tho Rappahannook and;the Chattahoochee, has not yet been shown. The elements are common, of course, to all peoples. Brer-Rabbit and Brer Fox and Jedgo B'ar do the samo things, more or less, ns Coyote, Fox, and Bear among the Plains Indians- But as our children know them they aro thrico removed from tho tales tho original mind of Africa must have evolved regarding them, or their entrancisg beasts' counterparts. Extra-African legend has imposed itself, on the atavistic belief to < make op the creed of the American negro, and'the white man who tells tho story for his whiter ■ brethren introduces his own modifications. Perhaps we shall not get to tho real kernel of tho African's soul until one of his. own

race, following in the steps of a Paul Laurence. Dunbar, shall act as interpreter. Until that problematic day, Uncle Remus may rest safely on his laurels. That they will ever be in serious danger we greatly doubt. —New York "fyst."