As for Harte’s talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of
satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he
admired. He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he
could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in
others. He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not,
apparently. Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of
his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and
lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly
shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante’s
noticing how the dog’s skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the
exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.
But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that
Sandy drunkenly slept under in ‘The Idyl of Iced Gulch’, he asked, “Why,
is that an azalea?” To be sure, this might have been less from his
ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent
Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an
azalea in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea
of Californian size could easily lend itself to.
You never could be sure of Harte; he could only by chance be caught in
earnest about anything or anybody. Except for those slight recognitions
of literary, traits in his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from his
conversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliant
fellow-Hebrew Heine, as “rather scorbutic.” He preferred to talk about
the little matters of common incident and experience. He amused himself
with such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked his
way to Phillips Avenue, where he adventurously supposed his host to be
living. “Why,” the postman said, “there is no Phillips Avenue in
Cambridge. There’s Phillips Place.” “Well,” Harte assented, “Phillips
Place will do; but there is a Phillips Avenue.” He entered eagerly into
the canvass of the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at the
reception made for him, but he had even a greater pleasure in
compassionating his host for the vast disparity between the caterer’s
china and plated ware and the simplicities and humilities of the home of
virtuous poverty; and he spluttered with delight at the sight of the
lofty ‘epergnes’ set up and down the supper-table when he was brought in
to note the preparations made in his honor. Those monumental structures
were an inexhaustible joy to him; he walked round and round the room, and
viewed them in different perspectives, so as to get the full effect of
the towering forms that dwarfed it so.
He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be, but his
teasing was of the quality of a caress, so much kindness went with it. He
lamented as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night an
absent-minded brother in literature, who came in rubber shoes, and
forgetfully wore them throughout the evening. That hospitable soul of
Ralph Keeler, who had known him in California, but had trembled for their
acquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiled
Harte for the friends of his simpler days, rejoiced in the unchanged
cordiality of his nature when they met, and presently gave him one of
those restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was always sumptuously
providing out of his destitution. Harte was the life of a time which was
perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul. The truth is, there
was nothing but careless stories carelessly told, and jokes and laughing,
and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike
the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be; but there was present
one who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time, and to
whom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized
then and there. “Look at him,” he said, from time to time. “This is the
dream of his life,” and then shouted and choked with fun at the
difference between the occasion and the expectation he would have
imagined in his commensal’s mind. At a dinner long after in London,
where several of the commensals of that time met again, with other
literary friends of a like age and stature, Harte laid his arms well
along their shoulders as they formed in a half-circle before him, and
screamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slim
shapes of the earlier date had come. The sight was not less a rapture to
him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the
passing years. The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of
those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, “or few or
none,” to “shake against the cold,” had whitened to a wintry snow on his,
while his mustache had kept its youthful black. “He looks,” one of his
friends said to another as they walked home together, “like a French
marquis of the ancien regime.” “Yes,” the other assented, thoughtfully,
“or like an American actor made up for the part.”
The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injustice
in its implication of anything histrionic in Harte’s nature. Never was
any man less a ‘poseur’; he made simply and helplessly known what he was
at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in
enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself. In the
course of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about on
a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to
right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given,
and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where
Harte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on the
platform, where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and
untroubled charm. He was indeed the only one privy to the law’s presence
who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier
time ventured to suggest, “Well, Harte, this is the old literary
tradition; this is the Fleet business over again,” he joyously smote his
thigh and crowed out, “Yes, the Fleet!” No doubt he tasted all the
delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quite
unaffected.
If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder
American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not
altogether in the wrong. If it disabled him for certain experiences of
life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality,
and perhaps most beautiful in his talent. It enabled him to do such
things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not
do, and indeed could not. His talent was not a facile gift; he owned
that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that
yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in
that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a
line. It may be owned for him that though he came to the East at
thirty-four, which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, he
seemed to have arrived after the age of observation was past for him. He
saw nothing aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in New
York, where he sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took him
about the whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report it
aright, or would not. After repeated and almost invariable failures to
deal with the novel characters and circumstances which he encountered he
left off trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical California he
had half discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as
long as he lived. This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason,
was the best thing he could do, and it went as nearly as might be to
satisfy the insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer to be
found on our map.
It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any
bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple
American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and
everything of him in fiction and drama. The long breath was not his; he
could not write a novel, though he produced the like of one or two, and
his plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it. At any
rate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and they denoted the
fatigue or the indifference of their author in being dramatizations of
his longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts. The
direction in which his originality lasted longest, and most strikingly
affirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse.
Whatever minds there may be about Harte’s fiction finally, there can
hardly be more than one mind about his poetry. He was indeed a poet;
whether he wrote what drolly called itself “dialect,” or wrote language,
he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch. It must be allowed him that in
prose as well he had the inventive gift, but he had it in verse far more
importantly. There are lines, phrases, turns in his poems,
characterizations, and pictures which will remain as enduringly as
anything American, if that is not saying altogether too little for them.
In poetry he rose to all the occasions he made for himself, though he
could not rise to the occasions made for him, and so far failed in the
demands he acceded to for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, as to come to that
august Harvard occasion with a jingle so trivial, so out of keeping, so
inadequate that his enemies, if he ever truly had any, must have suffered
from it almost as much as his friends. He himself did not suffer from
his failure, from having read before the most elect assembly of the
country a poem which would hardly have served the careless needs of an
informal dinner after the speaking had begun; he took the whole
disastrous business lightly, gayly, leniently, kindly, as that golden
temperament of his enabled him to take all the good or bad of life.
The first year of his Eastern sojourn was salaried in a sum which took
the souls of all his young contemporaries with wonder, if no baser
passion, in the days when dollars were of so much farther flight than
now, but its net result in a literary return to his publishers was one
story and two or three poems. They had not profited much by his book,
which, it will doubtless amaze a time of fifty thousand editions selling
before their publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hundred in
the sixth month of its career, as Harte himself,
“With sick and scornful looks averse,”
confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview with the Boston
counting-room. It was the volume which contained “The Luck of Roaring
Camp,” and the other early tales which made him a continental, and then
an all but a world-wide fame. Stories that had been talked over, and
laughed over, and cried over all up and down the land, that had been
received with acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as their
popularity, and recognized as the promise of greater things than any done
before in their kind, came to no more than this pitiful figure over the
booksellers’ counters. It argued much for the publishers that in spite
of this stupefying result they were willing, they were eager, to pay him
ten thousand dollars for whatever, however much or little, he chose to
write in a year: Their offer was made in Boston, after some offers
mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in New
York.
It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return in
literary material. Harte was in the midst of new and alien
conditions,--[See a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U.S. for a few
months and then published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and its
people. Twain’s rebuttal (Mr. Froude’s Progress) would have been ‘a
propos’ for Harte in Cambridge. D.W.]--and he had always his temperament
against him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his
muse. He would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did
for the money, but actually if not literally he could not do more. When
it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and
he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself
nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order
of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in
his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner
world he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens. There was
nothing of his easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of a
Puritanic severity, and of a conscience that forgave him no pang. Other
California writers have testified to the fidelity with which he did his
work as editor. He made himself not merely the arbiter but the
inspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature had
hardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made
the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a
literary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization.
It is useless to wonder now what would have been his future if the
publisher of the Overland Monthly had been of imagination or capital
enough to meet the demand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridge
host as the condition of his remaining in California. Publishers, men
with sufficient capital, are of a greatly varying gift in the regions of
prophecy, and he of the Overland Monthly was not to be blamed if he could
not foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand a year to continue
editing the magazine. He did according to his lights, and Harte came to
the East, and then went to England, where his last twenty-five years were
passed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific Slope discovery. It
was always the same plant, leaf and flower and fruit, but it perennially
pleased the constant English world, and thence the European world, though
it presently failed of much delighting these fastidious States. Probably
he would have done something else if he could; he did not keep on doing
the wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but because it was
for him the only possible thing. Very likely he might have preferred not
doing anything.