Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/203

Amerind Folk-Tales 615 given us a body of folk-tale and fable not surpassed by any country in the world, folk-tale and fable which would illustrate our common American life with far more point than the things we derive from Europe. Unfortunately, writers who have undertaken to utilize this material have missed its native quality, and attempted to crowd it into the mould of European fairy-tales, though in fact both the mood and the method of Amerind folk-tales are as distinctively American as the work of Mark Twain. In some respects Mark Twain in his shorter anecdotes, and Edgar Lee Masters in the Spoon River Anthology, have come nearer the mark of Amerind humour than any direct translation or inter- pretation. The one really notable success at transcription of the Amerind mode seems to have been accident, that sort of divine accident that one wishes might happen oftener. It appears that Joel Chandler Harris did not himself know, when he wrote them, that his Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox were origi- nal Cherokee inventions. In the reports of the Bureau of Eth- nology, where you will find their Amerind forebears, the tales have a grim quality, a Spoon River quality, which to our under- standing misses the humouresque which they had to the Indian. Coming to Harris as they did through the modified primitive- ness of the negro, their essential frolicsomeness is transmitted with surprisingly few African interpolations. Undoubtedly there were exchanges between Indian and Negro slaves and assimilations took place at all their points of contact. But for the Americanness of the Uncle Remus stories, one has only to point to that other so popular folk hero, Get-Rich-Quick Wal- lingford, the Br'er Fox of the current hour. One other supreme achievement in the adaptation of Amerind folk-tales is Frank Hamilton Cushing's Zurli Folk Tales, almost the only convincing rendition of the non-sacred stories of the South-west. Particularly illuminating of the Amerind story method is the Zuni version of the story of the Cock and the Mouse, and the adventure of the Twins of War and Chance among the Unborn Men of the Underworld, one of the few ex- amples of pure Amerind prose. All our conclusions about aboriginal prose style are more or less conjectural. Because of the necessity of canying it wholly in mind, sacred matter was committed almost wholly to song