The South, however, did not restrict itself wholly to its plantation cycle.  In New Orleans Mr. Cable daintily worked the lode which had been deposited there by a French and Spanish past and by the presence still of Creole elements in the population.  Yet he too was elegiac, sentimental, pretty, even when his style was most deft and his representations most engaging.  Quaintness was his second nature; romance was in his blood.  Bras-Coupe, the great, proud, rebellious slave in The Grandissimes, belongs to the ancient lineage of those African princes who in many tales have been sold to chain and lash and have escaped from them by dying.  The postures and graces and contrivances of Mr. Cable’s Creoles are traditional to all the little aristocracies surviving, in fiction, from some more substantial day.  Yet in spite of these conventions his better novels have a texture of genuine vividness and beauty.  In their portrayal of the manners of New Orleans they have many points of quiet satire and censure that betray a critical intelligence working seriously behind them.  That critical disposition in Mr. Cable led him to disagree with the majority of Southerners regarding the justice due the Negroes; and it helped persuade him to spend the remainder of his life in a distant region.

The incident is symptomatic.  While slavery still existed, public opinion in the South had demanded that literature should exhibit the institution only under a rosy light; public opinion now demanded that the problem in its new guise should still be 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