Life on the Mississippi eBook

A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by ‘Don Quixote’ and those wrought by ‘Ivanhoe.’  The first swept the world’s admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it.  As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott’s pernicious work undermined it.

Chapter 47 Uncle Remus and Mr. Cable

Mr. Joel Chandler Harris (’Uncle Remus’) was to arrive from Atlanta at seven o’clock Sunday morning; so we got up and received him.  We were able to detect him among the crowd of arrivals at the hotel-counter by his correspondence with a description of him which had been furnished us from a trustworthy source.  He was said to be undersized, red-haired, and somewhat freckled.  He was the only man in the party whose outside tallied with this bill of particulars.  He was said to be very shy.  He is a shy man.  Of this there is no doubt.  It may not show on the surface, but the shyness is there.  After days of intimacy one wonders to see that it is still in about as strong force as ever.  There is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind it, as all know who have read the Uncle Remus book; and a fine genius, too, as all know by the same sign.  I seem to be talking quite freely about this neighbor; but in talking to the public I am but talking to his personal friends, and these things are permissible among friends.

He deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked eagerly to Mr. Cable’s house to get a glimpse of the illustrious sage and oracle of the nation’s nurseries.  They said—­

’Why, he ‘s white!’

They were grieved about it.  So, to console them, the book was brought, that they might hear Uncle Remus’s Tar-Baby story from the lips of Uncle Remus himself—­or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him.  But it turned out that he had never read aloud to people, and was too shy to venture the attempt now.  Mr. Cable and I read from books of ours, to show him what an easy trick it was; but his immortal shyness was proof against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read about Brer Rabbit ourselves.

Mr. Harris ought to be able to read the negro dialect better than anybody else, for in the matter of writing it he is the only master the country has produced.  Mr. Cable is the only master in the writing of French dialects that the country has produced; and he reads them in perfection.  It was a great treat to hear him read about Jean-ah Poquelin, and about Innerarity and his famous ‘pigshoo’ representing ‘Louisihanna RIF-fusing to Hanter the Union,’ along with passages of nicely-shaded German dialect from a novel which was still in manuscript.

It came out in conversation, that in two different instances Mr. Cable got into grotesque trouble by using, in his books, next-to-impossible French names which nevertheless happened to be borne by living and sensitive citizens of New Orleans.  His names were either inventions or were borrowed from the ancient and obsolete past, I do not now remember which; but at any rate living bearers of them turned up, and were a good deal hurt at having attention directed to themselves and their affairs in so excessively public a manner.