MORE TALES BY UNCLE REMUS.
For old sake's sake we should come to any book with Uncle Remus in it with pleasure ; but there is no disguising the fact that Mr. Joel Chandler Harris's new volume, Told by Uncle Remus (Hodder and Stoughton, 5s.), has disappointed us. Either we are older, or Uncle Remus is ; whatever the reason, we have not been able to laugh, and unless there is laughing to encourage one, the old man's clipped and distorted English is very difficult reading. "De reason," Uncle Remus says (on p. 59), that he " don't like ter tell no tale ter grown folks, speshually of dey er white folks, is dat dey'll take it an' put it by de side er some yuther tale what dey got in der min' and take on a slonchidickler grin of superiority." Well, we have no superior grin, but we have certainly put these new tales beside some other tales that we had in mind—Uncle Remus's own—and we have found them vastly inferior. The pity of it is that Uncle Remus might have been telling the old tales again. The scheme of this book shows us the old man, twenty years after, welcoming the little son of the little boy to whom he told the original stories. This little son is a modern child with a foolish mother, and the old man's great idea, working in collusion with Miss Sally, the grandmother, is to get health and an open-air sagacity into him. So far all is well. But when the little son asks for such stories as his father used to hear, Uncle Remus (with the reading public in mind) thinks it right that they should all be new ones. And oh how much better in material and better in telling the old ones were ! Our suggestion is that that generation which as yet knows not Brer Rabbit in his prime should come to him by way of this volume, working back to the "Nights with Uncle Remus," and taking this rather as primer than sequel. Then all will be well.
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