K I FT Y-FOURT H YEAR. ORGAN OF THE NORTH CAROLINA CONFERENCE. NUMBER
RALEIGH, N. C, THURSDAY, JULY 30, 1908.
"Uncle Remus" (Joel Chandler Harris).
(A sermon preached in Trinity Church, Atlanta, Ga., Sunday
evening, July 5th.)
By the Rev. John W. Lee, 1KB.
"The Lord opened the eyes of the young
man; and he saw; and behold the mountain
was full of horses and chariots of lire."
2 Kings 6:17.
This text is connected with a scene in Dothan,
which took place between Elijah and the hosts of
Iho king of Syria. The servant of Elijah was
deeply concerned for the safety of his master, un
til his eyes were opened, and then he saw that
they who were with Elijah were far more than
they who were against him. I shall take the
text from the events and the persons directly re
lated to it, and use it as containing a very import
ant, universal lesson on the subject of seeing.
The difference in men in all ages is largely a
question of vision. The lower animals have only
one pair of eyes, but human beings have two sets
of eyes. By the first they see material, outside
things; by the second they see interior realities.
God opens our outward eyes naturally, without
our consent, as He opens the eyes of the bird.
But in the opening of our inside eyes, by which
we see interior realities, He must have our co
operation. Our outside eyes God opens for us.
Our inside eyes are self-opened, yet with God's
help.
John Addington Symonds said it was easy,
from a first visit, to feel and say something ob
vious about Venice; that the influence of that
sea city, when first seen, is unique, immediate,
and unmistakable; but that to express the sober
truth of those impressions, after the first aston
ishment of the Venetian vision had subsided, af
ter the spirit of the place had been harmonized
through familiarity with one's habitual mood,
was difficult. I was in Venice last year just long
enough to feel the rapture of a primal view. So
I brought away the picture formed by a glimpse
from a gondola, gliding noiselessly through her
network of canals, of the most picturesque spot
of earth and brine on the planet. I find it easy,
therefore, to call up in memory the picture of
that center of art and wonder. Symonds paints
sunsets emblazoned in gold and crimson upon
cloud and water; of violet domes and bell-towers
etched against the orange of a western sky; of
moonlight silvering breeze-rippled breadths of
liquid blue; of distant islands shimmering in
sunlit haze; of music and black, gliding boats;
of labyrinthine darkness, made for mysteries of
love and crime; of statue-fretted palace fronts;
of brazen clangor and a moving crowd; of pic
tures by earth's proudest painters, cased in gold
on walls of council chambers where Venice sat
enthroned, a queen, and where nobles swept the
floors with robes of Tyrian brocade. But to the
People who make Venice their home, the pathos
f this marble city, crumbling to its grave in
mud and sea, is not felt. The best description we
have, therefore, of the city of St. Mark's and the
Doge's palace are from persons who had barely
time to look at this wondrous pile of magnificence
before turning away from it.
Measured From Distance.
All this I feel when I undertake to speak of
'y dear friend, Joel Chandler Harris. The best
"presentations of his life will come from those
who have seen him and measured him from a
distance, from those who have lived far enough
away from him to get a completer idea of the
great world of imagery, of beauty, and of inno
cent and wholesome illusion he haR created. If
we had been brought up in the sun, we could not
form such an idea of its vast oceans of light as
do those who are bathed in its waves from some
of the outlying planets millions of miles from it.
The feelings of those brought up with Mr. Har
ris, and living all their lives in close proximity
to his simple, beautiful life, may be defined as
those of love and complete admiration. It has
never occurred to them to engage in the critical
business of forming dry and intellectual esti
mates of his mysterious mental powers. They
have felt them and rejoiced in them, and with
that they have been content. The people of
Georgia feel very much toward Mr. Harris as the
citizens of Venice feel toward their city they
love him too much to describe him. Outsiders
may take intellectual interest in him; the inter
est we take in him is emotional and affectional.
We have regarded him as the property of our
hearts ,and not of our heads. He has moved in
and out among us, the genial.palpitating form of
a time that has gone. He has made to live over
again, in a new age, the days of our fathers and
mothers. He has shown us the kindly faces and
the warm hearts of the old-time negro mammies
who nursed us. He has caught in the chambers
of his imagery, and transmuted into eternal form,
life as it was lived on the Southern plantation.
He has arrested and given ideal, everlasting set
ting to a period about to pass forever on the
downward stream of time. He has thrown the
color of his genius into our fields and woods'. He
has idealized our region and given it a permanent
place in the world's literature. He has taken the
raw material of myth, and legend, and folk-lore
lying about in a disorganized way in the minds of
our population, pulverized it, sublimated it, and
converted it into current coin for circulation
throughout the world of letters. As the poet
Burns, by lifting his Bonnie Doon from the realm
of matter to that of thought, caused it to flow
through all lands, so Mr. Harris took the common
rabbit of the Georgia brier patch and gave it ideal
form, so that now it triumphed over its enemies
everywhere in the universal mind of childhood.
Transplanted Into Spirit.
No country becomes really and perennially at
tractive until through the genius of its chosen
sons it is transferred from the region of time and
space into that of spirit. Thousands of people go
to Italy every year, not to see its mountains of
earth and rock, not to see its patches of vineyard
clinging to all its hills, but to see these as they
have been lifted up and made to glow through
the thought of Michael Angelo, Dante, and Ra
phael. People care little for houses, and lands,
and railroads, and great cities, until they become
significant and beautiful through association with
great thought. We love Mr. Harris, therefore,
not simply because he was genuinely true, and
kindly, and good, but because, in addition to all
these traits of personal worth, he was a creator,
and helped to give our State mental being. By
his work he enhanced not only our belongings,
but ourselves. He enriched us all by a process
of artistic work by which he at the same time
enriched himself. The wealth he created was of
the high sort that breaks through the limitations
and confines of fee simple, exclusive titles. It can
not be en bined. or cornered, or confined. It is
of the kind which when once produced increases
in proportion to the number of persons who share
in It. It is tha kind tint belong-; to the universal
spirit of man. I mention some of the lessons
from his life.
Mr. Harris illustrates for us what one may find
in the depths of his being, when he seriously sets
about exploring the interior domain of his own
soul for hidden treasure. All the wealth of beauty
he has turned into the modern mind is simply
what he discovered packed away in the recesses of
his own personality. By earnestly, and industri
ously, and persistently searching in the mines of
his consciousness, he came upon layers of vast
value, more precious than gold. No prospector in
the mountains of California or Colorado ever
gloated in completer glee over rich finds discov
ered than did this unworldly son of Georgia
chuckle in hilarious delight over images, ideas,
figures he saw lying in heaps in the unseen world
of his spirit. Those who were intimate with Mr.
Harris will call to mind his habit of shaking with
merriment always just before giving expression to
some quaint or exquisite sentiment, as if he saw
the striking quality of the thought he was about
to utter before it completely took form in speech.
By living constantly with the fancies and beauti
ful scenery he had accustomed himself to look
lor in his own mind, he kept himself at a per
petual level of good humor. He always impress
ed me as one who was being constantly sustained
by unseen resources of good cheer. He radiated
as naturally as a candle shines. He never had to
leave home to find pleasure. He was rarely ever
at banquets given by his fellow-citizens, all of
whom he loved. He had such a happy lot of
sports and innocent revelers banqueting day by
day in the halls of his imagination that he was
hardly ever able to see his way clear to leave
these inside guests for those he might find out
side. By command of the President of the United
States he was forced on one occasion to go out
and sit down with the great, as the world meas
ures greatness, and Mr. Roosevelt had the insight
that enabled him to know that he was causing
acute discomfort to a man of whom he was very
fond. Herbert Spencer abandoned the outside
life of London that he might give himself up en
tirely to working out his synthetic scheme of phil
osophy. So we can well forgive Mr. Harris for
not seeing his way clear to dine with us often,
inasmuch as he was giving his whole attention to
preparing feasts which the whole world can share
in him forever. His aim was simple, and his con
secration to his ideal was complete.
He was so sweet and unpretentious about it all,
however, that to a stranger he seemed to have no
aims at all. He never referred to himself, he
never asserted himself, he never advertised him
self. No man ever wore the honors that unbid
den came to him with less seeming self-gratuln-tion.
If he had received notice that he had been
elected president of the whole world of letters, I
believe he would have responded that he preferred
to stay in West End and look after his garden.
What he had done in giving the world his ideals,
he felt that anybody could do, if he would only
practice the industry he had. He told me one
day that every young person had a head full of
dreams and fancies, and that the only difference
in persons was found in the fact that some peo
ple, by hard effort, corralled their fancies and
dreams, as ranchmen do their cattle, and others
did not. He said any person could write an in
teresting book if he would only make up his mind
to be himself, and get at it and stick to it until
the task was finished.
Mr. Harris has taught us the pure luxury of
just living in the completest simplicity of one's
own life. He never sought honors, or money, or
official distinction. The idea of maintaining a po
sition for the mere show of it, the idea of keeping
up a social impressiveness equal to that of his
neighbors, was utterly foreign to him. Life it
self, without anv of the accomplishments and sur
roundings which usuallv go with it, ws to him
the center of his whole philoonhv of content
(Continued on Page 5.)