The Saturday Evening Post 1904-01-02: Vol 176 Iss 27

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Copyright.1903,by THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY, in the United States and Great Britain. THE SATURDAY EVENING POST Founded A’D' 1728 Sy Benj.Franklin Published Weekly at 425 Arch Street by THE CurTIs PUBLISHING London: Hastings House, 10,Norfolk Street, Strand,W.C. Entered at the Philadelphia Post-Office as Second-Class Matter. COMPANY Volume 170 PHILADELPHIA, JANUARY 2, 1904 Nymber 27 IME has been sadly T misrepresented by those who have felt called upon to paint his portrait forth as a senile He is pictured old crea- ture, scantily clothed, and carrying about with him an unwieldy scythe and an impossible hour-glass. Moreover, he is referred to Father Time, to make good the picture of his senility; whereas, he is as old as young now as he was in the beginning, and capers about under and over the stars and about the earth as nimbly as the most frol- icsome youth; and he is the gayest humorist the world has ever seen. He cracks a joke in one century and the point thereof appears in the next, where it is often misunderstood by the serious-minded brethren who are responsible for such partisan history as be- comes current in the different ages. There may bea grimness about these jokes, but the pith of them is unmistakable. Time is no respecter of persons or theories, or opinions that are set upas principles; and he has done a good part by the South during the past forty years. He has poured a healing balm into wounds that were deemed incurable, and he has even shed a halo of the brightest romance over a past that was not without its serious and fatiguing problems. He has brought consolation to those who imagined they should never be consoled, and has showered on them conipensations that they never so much as dreamed of. And he has so ordered our day dreams that memories of the old plantation, its shifting scenes and properties, have become the brightest and the pleasantest of all the dreams we have, and has changed the old days that we thought so dull and prosy, and charged them with the spirit of poetry and romance. The change has been so real that a body of song and fiction has budded and blossomed around it. In this matter, indeed, Time has been somewhat fore- handed, for the romance that has taken shape in poetry and fiction was a quality to be reckoned with long before the system that made the old plantation possible had disappeared in the thunderous storm of war. A lady of the North, who was, fortunately for all concerned, a genius, so far fell under its influence that an anti-slavery tract she was writing — giving it the shape of a novel — is a defense of the system that she intended to attack. She had hardly put pen to paper before her genius took possession of her and compelled her, in spite of her avowed purpose, to give a very fair picture of the institu- tion she had intended to condemn. She declaimed, indeed, against the possibilities of slavery, but something or other she found in it attracted her sympathy, so that the spirit and purpose of her book is almost entirely dif- ferent from what it was intended to be. There has been some recent controversy with respect to this particular feature of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but it seems to me to be impossible for any unprejudiced person to read Mrs. Stowe’s book and fail to see in it a defense of American slavery as she found it in Kentucky. Editor’s Note —This is the first of three papers by Mr. Harris. The second will appear in an early issue. By Joel Chandler Harris I-THE OLD-TIME DARAY This defense will, of course, not be found in the text of the book, and it is useless to look for it there. It far, from the lady’s intention to pay atribute to slavery, even was far, very inflamed but, as I she had among her other possessions the spark of genius that as she found it; her moral nature was against it, and her purpose was all the other way ; have said, is necessary to make the creations of fiction live and move each in its place, and to that genius she surrendered herself in such a way that the whole spirit of her book is sharply set against her moral purpose; and it was so far superior to her prepossessions and prejudices that it would not permit her to smother or ignore the tender and romantic situation that she found in the home of her Kentucky friends. She pelled by the demands of her art to set forth the facts as she found And out, all the beautiful characters in her book — Uncle Tom, little Eva, the was Im- them. so, as it turns worthy and beloved Master, and the rest—are the products of the system The trast is heightened and made more effective by the fact that the and -the character whose villainy is most fruitful—is a Northerner, the text of the book is all the time condemning. con cruelest most brutal character she depicts - the product of a State from which slavery had long been ban ished; and the reader is left to wonder if a representative of New England civilization could be as brutal as Legree. The Real Moral of Uncle Tom’s Cabin HE real moral that Mrs. Stowe’s book teaches is that the and shocking to the imagination, while the realities, under the possibilities of slavery anywhere everywhere are best and happiest conditions, possess a romantic beauty and a tenderness all their own; and it has so happened in the that this brought out in a volume that was for a long time taboo in course of time romantic feature, so beautifully the South, has become the essence, and almost the substance, of the old plantation as we remember it We live and move ina harsh and an unfeeling world; it is so hard and cold and practical that we dare not give an 83GR24 outla inkling of our real thoughts and feelings to our next door neigh bor, lest we become vic f his but hard that lies all about tims o derision this world us is ready to turn aside fromthe busi ness of the moment, and melt and grow warm with tender- ness, when it is confronted And if there were ever human relations that were romantic and pi human relations based on with romance that is turesque they were to be found on the old plantation in the days of slavery The flight of time has mellowed and hal lowed the memory of those days, and all that was beautiful in the life then existing has become a part of the pleasant dreams of those who came in contact with the old order that passed away more than a generation ago. This romantic and picturesque element which ihe memory furnishes ready-made to thuse who are interested in the past has not only given rise to a body of very effective literature, but has gathered about it the associations that cling to the names of old friends for whom we mourn. It is far from de pending on literature for its preservation, for it has become a part of the oral traditions of the South, and is faithfully the old to the that never came in contact with the old plantation and the old- transmitted from young; so those who time darky, who was its central figure, have come to have an intimate acquaintance with both through the reports of their elders. It is a common saying in the South that we have very few of the old-time negroes left with us; that the places that once knew them will soon know them no more for- ever; and we shake our heads sadly and lament the con ditions that are so soon to deprive us of one of our most cherished and picturesque relics. But there is good rea son for saying that the situation is not so bad as that The the course, passing away very rapidly, and it is reasonable to oldest and most venerable of negroes are, of suppose that very few of them are left; but we must take into account those who, at the close of the war, belonged to the younger generation of negroes, and had not only come in direct contact with the discipline of the planta but had fallen under the their forebears. tion, immediate influence of When we speak of the old-time negro we have in our minds a picture of a venerable darky, with white hair and trembling limbs, and his body bending under the weight of years. But at this point the imagination out runs itself, for we are bound, as I have already said, to take into consideration those who were comparatively young when the war came to an end, but who were not too young to fall under the influence of the older negroes and to be impressed by their example, as well as by their affability and gentility. In the nature of things, therefore. I