BRET HARTE
In his _Chronological Outlines of American Literature_, Whitcomb
mentions only thirteen American novels published during the seven
years before 1870: Taylor's _Hannah Thurston_, _John Godfrey's
Fortunes_, and _Story of Kennett_; Trowbridge's _The Three Scouts_;
Donald G. Mitchell's _Doctor Johns_; Holmes's _The Guardian Angel_;
Lanier's _Tiger-Lilies_, the transition novel of the decade as we
shall see later in our study of Lanier; Louisa M. Alcott's _Little
Women_; Beecher's _Norwood_; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's _The Gates
Ajar_; Higginson's _Malbone_; Aldrich's _Story of a Bad Boy_; and Mrs.
Stowe's _Oldtown Folks_. To study the list is to realize the condition
of American fiction during the sixties. It lacked incisiveness and
construction and definite color; it droned and it preached.
Before pronouncing the decade the feeblest period in American fiction
since the early twenties of the century, let us examine the most lauded
novel written in America between 1860 and 1870, _Elsie Venner_ (1861).
Strictly speaking, it is not a novel at all: it is another Autocrat
volume, chatty, discursive, brilliant. The Brahmins, sons and grandsons
of ministers, might enter the law, medicine, teaching, literature, the
lyceum lecture field--they never ceased to preach. New England for two
centuries was a vast pulpit and American literature during a whole
period was written on sermon paper. "The real aim of the story," the
Autocrat naively observes in his preface, "was to test the doctrine of
'original sin' and human responsibility." He is in no hurry, however.
We read four chapters before we learn even the heroine's name. A novel
can reasonably be expected to center about its title character: Elsie
Venner speaks seventeen times during the story, and eleven of these
utterances are delivered from her death-bed at the close of the book.
There is no growth in character, no gradual moving of events to a
culmination, no clear picture even of the central figure. Elsie is a
mere case: the book, so far as she is concerned, is the record of a
clinic. But even the clinic is not suffered to move uninterruptedly.
Digressions are as frequent as even in the Autocrat papers. A widow
is introduced for no apparent reason, studied for a chapter, and then
dropped from the narrative. We never feel like one who has lost himself
for a time in the life of another in a new world under new skies; we
feel rather like one who is being personally conducted through New
England by a skilful guide. Note this partial prospectus of what he has
to show: Newburyport, Portsmouth, Portland, caste in New England, rural
schools, Northampton and Mt. Holyoke, mountain vegetation, rattlesnakes
in Massachusetts, the New England mansion house, school compositions,
the old type of meeting house, varieties of school girls, the old-time
India merchant, oysters in New England, hired help, colonial chimneys,
young ladies' seminaries, the hemlock tree. The topics are interesting
ones and they are brilliantly treated, often at length, but in a
novel, even one written by Dr. Holmes, such things are "lumber." The
novel is typical of the fiction of the era. It is discursive, loosely
constructed, vague in its characterization, and lacking in cumulative
force.
It is significant that the magazines of the period had very little use
for the native product. Between 1864 and 1870, _Harper's Magazine_
alone published no fewer than ten long serials by English novelists:
_Denis Duval_ by Thackeray; _The Small House at Allington_ by Trollope;
_Our Mutual Friend_ by Dickens; _The Unkind Word_, _Woman's Kingdom_,
and _A Brave Lady_ by Dinah Mulock Craik; _Armadale_ by Wilkie Collins;
_My Enemy's Daughter_ by Justin M'Carthy; _Anteros_ by the Author of
_Guy Livingstone_ [G. A. Lawrence]; and _Anne Furness_ by the Author of
_Mabel's Progress_ [Mrs. T. A. Trollope]. Even the _Atlantic Monthly_
left its New England group of producers to publish Charles Reade's
_Griffith Gaunt_ in twelve instalments. In 1871 _Scribner's Monthly_
began the prospectus of its second volume with this announcement:
Our contributors are among the best who write in the
English language. George MacDonald--"the best of living
story-writers"--will continue his beautiful story, entitled
_Wilfred Cumbermede_, throughout the volume. We have the
refusal of all Hans Christian Andersen's stories at the
hand of his best translator, Mr. Horace E. Scudder. We have
engaged the pen of Miss Thackeray, now regarded as the finest
story-writer among the gifted women of Great Britain--not even
excepting George Eliot. Mrs. Oliphant has written especially
for us an exquisitely characteristic story, etc.
The feebleness of the period was understood even at the time. Charles
Eliot Norton wrote Lowell in 1874: "There is not much in the magazine
[_Atlantic_] that is likely to be read twice save by its writers, and
this is what the great public likes. There must be a revival of letters
in America, if literature as an art is not to become extinct. You
should hear Godkin express himself in private on this topic."[37]
No wonder that the book-reviewer of _Harper's Magazine_ for May, 1870,
with nothing better before him than _Miss Van Kortland_, Anonymous;
_Hedged In_, by Miss Phelps; and _Askaros Kassis_, by DeLeon, should
have begun his review, "We are so weary of depending on England,
France, and Germany for fiction, and so hungry for some genuine
American romance, that we are not inclined to read very critically
the three characteristic American novels which lie on our table." No
wonder that when Harte's _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ in the _Overland
Monthly_ was read in the _Atlantic_ office, Fields sent by return mail
a request "upon the most flattering terms" for another story like it,
and that the same mail brought also papers and reviews "welcoming the
little foundling of California literature with an enthusiasm that half
frightened its author."[38]
The new American fiction began with Bret Harte.
I
To turn from Mark Twain to Bret Harte is like turning from the great
river on a summer night, fragrant and star-lit, to the glamour and
unreality of the city theater. No contrast could be more striking.
Francis Brett Harte, born August 25, 1839, was preeminently a man
of the East and preeminently also a man of the city. He was born
at Albany, New York, he spent his childhood in Providence, Rhode
Island, in Philadelphia, in Lowell, Massachusetts, in Boston and other
places, and the formative years between nine and eighteen he passed
in Brooklyn and New York City. He lived all his young life in an
atmosphere of culture. His father, a Union College man, a scholar, and
a teacher who knew French and Spanish and Italian, Latin and Greek,
had accumulated a large and well-selected library in which the boy,
frail and sensitive, too frail in his early years to attend school,
spent much of his childhood, reading Shakespeare and Froissart at six
and Charles Dickens at seven. His mother, a woman of culture, directed
his reading, and criticized with discernment his earliest attempts
at poetry. It was the training school for a poet, a Bryant or a
Longfellow, who should look to the older art for models and be inspired
with the dream that had sent Irving and Willis and Taylor as pilgrims
to the holy lands of literature across the sea.
The turning point in Harte's life came in 1854, when he was in his
fifteenth year. His biographer, Merwin, tells the story:
In 1853 his mother [who had been a widow for nine years] went
to California with a party of relatives and friends, in order
to make her home there with her elder son, Henry. She had
intended to take with her the other two children, Margaret
and Francis Brett; but as the daughter was in school, she
left the two behind for a few months, and they followed in
February, 1854. They traveled by the Nicaragua route, and after
a long, tiresome, but uneventful journey, landed safely in San
Francisco.[39]
The mother must have remarried shortly after her arrival in California,
for two sentences later on the biographer records that "They went the
next morning to Oakland across the Bay, where their mother and her
second husband, Colonel Andrew Williams, were living."
The young poet had been transplanted into new and strange soil and
he took root slowly. During the next year, making his home with his
mother at Oakland, he attempted to teach school and then to serve
as an apothecary's assistant, but he made little headway in either
profession. His heart was far away from the rough, new land that he had
entered. He wrote poems and stories and sketches and sent them to the
Eastern magazines; he read interminably, and dreamed of literature just
as Aldrich and Timrod and Hayne and Stedman and Stoddard were even then
dreaming of it on the other side of the continent.
The next two years of his life, despite the efforts of his biographers,
are vague and conjectural. It was his wander period. He began as tutor
in a private family in Humboldt County, then, according to Charles
Warren Stoddard, "he was an express messenger in the mountains when the
office was the target of every lawless rifle in the territory; he was
glutted with adventurous experiences."[40] Not for long, however. He
seems to have spent the rest of the two years--prosaic anticlimax!--as
a type-setter on the _Humboldt Times_ and the _Northern California_, as
a teacher in the town of Union, and as a drug clerk. That he ever was a
miner is gravely to be doubted. He had small taste for roughing it and
little sympathy with the typical California life of the times. He was
a poet, rather, a man of the city, a reader of romance, how wide and
attentive a reader we may judge from _Condensed Novels_ which he soon
after began to contribute to the San Francisco press.
The events in his life during the next fourteen years in San Francisco
are quickly summarized. For the greater part of it he was connected
with the _Golden Era_, first as a type-setter and later as an editor
and contributor. In 1862 he was married. Two years later he was
appointed Secretary of the California Mint, an office that allowed
him abundant time for literary work. He was connected with Webb's
brilliant and short-lived _Californian_, first as contributor and
later as editor, and in 1868, when the _Overland Monthly_, which was
to be the _Atlantic_ of Western America, was founded, he was made the
editor. _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ in the second number and _Plain
Language from Truthful James_ in the September, 1870, number, brought
him a popularity that in suddenness and extent had had no precedent in
America, save in the case of Mrs. Stowe and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. The
enormous applause intoxicated him; California became too narrow and
provincial; and in 1871 he left it, joyous as one who is returning home
after long exile.
II
If we may trust Harte's own statement, made, it must be remembered, in
the retrospect of later years, he set out deliberately to add a new
province to American literature. During the period between 1862 and
1867, he wrote, according to his own statement, "_The Society upon the
Stanislaus_ and _The Story of M'liss_--the first a dialectical poem,
the second a California romance--his first efforts toward indicating a
peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like
to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish, but
very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility--a belief which never
deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better known pages
of the _Overland Monthly_, he was able to demonstrate to a larger and
more cosmopolitan audience in the story of _The Luck of Roaring Camp_,
and the poem of _The Heathen Chinee_."[41]
But the poem and the romance were not his first efforts toward a
peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. His first
vision of the literary possibilities of the region had been inspired
by Irving, and he wrote in the _Sketch Book_ manner during the
greater part of his seventeen years upon the Pacific Coast. Behind
the California of the gold and the excitement lay three hundred years
of an old Spanish civilization. What Irving had done for the Hudson
why could he not do for the Mission lands and the Spanish occupation,
"that glorious Indian summer of California history, around which so
much poetical haze still lingers--that bland, indolent autumn of
Spanish rule, so soon to be followed by the wintry storms of Mexican
independence and the reviving springs of American conquest"?[42] It was
a vision worthy of a Hawthorne. That it possessed him for years and was
abandoned with reluctance is evident to one who examines his early work.
He voiced it in _The Angelus, Heard at the Mission Dolores, 1868_, in
the same volume of the _Overland Monthly_ that contained _The Luck of
Roaring Camp_:
Borne on the swell of your long waves receding,
I touch the further Past--
I see the dying glow of Spanish glory,
The sunset dream and last.
Before me rise the dome-shaped Mission towers;
The white Presidio;
The swart commander in his leathern jerkin,
The priest in stole of snow.
Once more I see Portata's cross uplifting
Above the setting sun;
And past the headland, northward, slowly drifting
The freighted galleon.
It must not be forgotten that his _Legend of Monte del Diablo_, a
careful Irvingesque romance, appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ as
early as 1863. During the same period he wrote _The Right Eye of the
Commander_, _The Legend of Devil's Point_, _The Adventure of Padre
Viventio_, and many short pieces, enough, indeed, to make up a volume
the size of _The Sketch Book_.
Despite its echoes of Irving, it is significant work. Harte was the
first to catch sight of a whole vast field of American romance. Again
and again he recurs to it in his later poetry and prose; notably in
_Concepcion de Arguello_ and its prose version on page 191 of the first
volume of the _Overland Monthly_, _A Convert of the Mission_, _The
Story of a Mine_, _In the Carquinez Woods_, and in _Gabriel Conroy_,
that chaotic book which has in it the materials for the greatest of
American romances. Whenever he touches this old Spanish land he throws
over it the mellow Washington Irving glow that had so thrilled him
in his earlier years, and he writes with power. The Spanish part of
_Gabriel Conroy_ is exquisite; its atmosphere is faultless:
If there was a spot on earth of which the usual dead monotony
of the California seasons seemed a perfectly consistent
and natural expression, that spot was the ancient and
time-honored _pueblo_ and Mission of the blessed St. Anthony.
The changeless, cloudless, expressionless skies of the summer
seemed to symbolize that aristocratic conservatism which
expelled all innovation and was its distinguishing mark....
As he drew rein in the court-yard of the first large _adobe_
dwelling, and received the grave welcome of a strange but
kindly face, he saw around him everywhere the past unchanged.
The sun shone as brightly and fiercely on the long red tiles
of the low roofs, that looked as if they had been thatched
with longitudinal slips of cinnamon, even as it had shone for
the last hundred years; the gaunt wolf-like dogs ran out and
barked at him as their fathers and mothers had barked at the
preceding stranger of twenty years before. There were the few
wild, half-broken mustangs tethered by strong riatas before the
veranda of the long low _Fonda_, with the sunlight glittering
on their silver trappings; there were the broad, blank expanses
of whitewashed _adobe_ wall, as barren and guiltless of record
as the uneventful days, as monotonous and expressionless as the
staring sky above; there were the white, dome-shaped towers of
the Mission rising above the green of olives and pear trees,
twisted, gnarled and knotted with the rheumatism of age. ...
The steamers that crept slowly up the darkening coast line were
something remote, unreal, and phantasmal; since the Philippine
galleon had left its bleached and broken ribs in the sand in
1640, no vessel had, in the memory of man, dropped anchor in
the open roadstead below the curving Point of Pines.
Meager and fragmentary as these Spanish sketches are, they nevertheless
opened the way for a new school of American romance.
III
Harte's first story with other than a legendary theme was _M'liss_,
written for the _Golden Era_ sometime before 1867. For the student
of his literary art it is the most important of all his writings,
especially important because of the revision which he made of it later
after he had evolved his final manner. It is transition work. The
backgrounds are traced in with Irving-like care; the character of the
schoolmaster is done with artistic restraint and certainty of touch.
M'liss is exquisitely handled. There is nothing better in all his work
than this study of the fiery, jealous little heart of the neglected
child. It is not necessarily a California story; it could have
happened as well even in New England. It is not _genre_ work, not mere
exploiting of local oddities; it is worked out in life itself, and it
strikes the universal human chord that brings it into the realm of true
art.
But even in the earlier version of the story there are false notes.
The names of the characters strike us as unusual: M'liss, McSnagley,
Morpher, Clytemnestra, Kerg, Aristides, Cellerstina. We feel that the
author is straining for the unusual; and we feel it more when the Rev.
Joshua McSnagley comes upon the scene:
The reverend gentleman was glad to see him. Moreover, he
observed that the master was looking "peartish," and hoped he
had got over the "neuralgy" and "rheumatiz." He himself had
been troubled with the dumb "ager" since last conference. But
he had learned to "rastle and pray." Pausing a moment to enable
the master to write his certain method of curing the dumb
"ager" upon the book and volume of his brain, Mr. McSnagley
proceeded to inquire after Sister Morpher. "She is an adornment
to Christewanity, and has a likely growin' young family," added
Mr. McSnagley.
Somehow it does not ring true. The author is thinking of the effect
he hopes to produce. He must fill his reader with wonder. "A saintly
Raphael-face, with blond beard and soft blue eyes, belonging to the
biggest scamp in the diggings, turned toward the child and whispered,
'Stick to it, M'liss.'" That sentence is the key to the author's later
manner. "Life in California is a paradox," he seems everywhere to say,
"just look at this."
The transition from F. B. Harte the poet and romancer to Bret Harte the
paradox maker and showman came through Dickens. It was the Dickens era
in America. The great novelist had made his second tour of the country
between November, 1867, and April, 1868, and his journeyings had been
a triumphal progress. All classes everywhere were reading his books,
and great numbers knew them literally by heart. Dickens wrote home from
Washington, "Mr. Secretary Staunton (War Minister) was here.... He is
acquainted with the minutest details of my books. Give him a passage
anywhere and he will instantly cap it and go on with the context....
Never went to sleep at night without first reading something from my
books which were always with him."[43] The same could have been said
of Harte himself. Says Pemberton, "His knowledge of his [Dickens's]
books was unrivaled.... He could have passed Charles Calverley's
famous Pickwick Examination Paper with honors."[44] Everybody knew
his Dickens; for a generation men could not speak of the man with
moderation. Even a critic like Moncure D. Conway could say of _Oliver
Twist_ and _The Old Curiosity Shop_: "To this day I cannot help
suspecting the sanity of any one who does not concede that they are the
two best novels ever written."[45] The death of Dickens in 1870 let
loose all over America a flood of eulogy and increased enormously the
already great sales of his books.
The art of Dickens was peculiar. He had found in the lower strata of
the population of London, that vast settling pool of Great Britain,
a society made up of many sharply individualized personalities,
abnormalities in body and soul, results of the peculiar inflexible
characteristics of the English race and their hard and fast social
distinctions. From fragments of this lower London Dickens built him a
world of his own and peopled it with composite creations such as one
finds nowhere save in the folklore of a primitive people--creatures as
strange as their names, Quilp, Scrooge, Cratchit, Squeers, Snagsby. So
tremendously did he believe in them, that we believe in them ourselves.
So overflowing was he with high spirits and boisterous laughter that
before we realize it we have surrendered completely and are living
hilariously not in a land of actual men and women, but in the world
that never was and never can be save in the books of Dickens. He never
analyzed, he never sought the heart of things, or got at all below
the surface of his characters; he was content simply to exhibit his
marvelous creations with all their ludicrous incongruities, and the
show is so entertaining and the showman exhibits it with such zest,
such joyous abandon, that we stand like children and lose ourselves in
wonder and enjoyment.
We can see now that the time was ripe for a California Dickens. There
was a prepared audience--the whole nation was reading the great
novelist of the people. California, moreover, was in the fierce
light of the gold excitement--anything that came from it would find
eager readers. It was a veritable Dickens land, more full of strange
types than even the slums of London: Pikes, Greasers, Yankees,
Chinese, gamblers, adventurers from all the wild places of the world,
desperadoes, soldiers of fortune, restless seekers for excitement and
gold. Everything was ready. Harte doubtless blundered into his success;
doubtless he did not reason about the matter at all, yet the result
remains the same: he came at the precise moment with the precise form
of literature that the world was most sure to accept. It came about as
the most natural thing in the world. Saturated with Dickens as he had
been from his childhood, it is not strange that this motley society and
its amazing surroundings should have appealed to him from the objective
and the picturesque side; it is not strange that, even as did Dickens,
he should have selected types and heightened them and peopled a new
world with them; it is not strange that he should have given these
types Dickens-like names: Miggles, McCorkle, Culpepper Starbottle,
Calhoun Bungstarter, Fagg, Twinkler, Rattler, Mixer, Stubbs, Nibbles.
His work is redolent of Dickens. Sometimes we seem to be reading a
clever parody after the fashion of the _Condensed Novels_, as for
instance this from _The Romance of Madrono Hollow_:
There was not much to hear. The hat was saying to the ribbons
that it was a fine night, and remarking generally upon the
clear outline of the Sierras against the blue-black sky. The
ribbons, it so appeared, had admired this all the way home,
and asked the hat if it had ever seen anything half so lovely
as the moonlight on the summit? The hat never had; it recalled
some lovely nights in the South in Alabama ("in the South in
Ahlabahm" was the way the old man had heard it), but then
there were other things that made the night seem so pleasant.
The ribbons could not possibly conceive what the hat could be
thinking about. At this point there was a pause, of which Mr.
Folinsbee availed himself to walk very grimly and craunchingly
down the gravel walk toward the gate. Then the hat was lifted,
and disappeared in the shadow, and Mr. Folinsbee confronted
only the half-foolish, half-mischievous, but wholly pretty face
of his daughter.
_M'liss_ is full of such echoes. A little later than _M'liss_, when he
was required to furnish the _Overland_ with a distinctly Californian
story, he set about examining his field precisely as Dickens would
have done. "What are some of the most unusual phases of this unique
epoch?" he asked himself. During a short period women and children
were rare in the remote mining districts. What would result if a baby
were born in one of the roughest and most masculine of the camps? It
is not hard to conjecture how Dickens would have handled the problem;
_The Luck of Roaring Camp_ is Harte's solution. The situation and the
characters are both unique. They would have been impossible in any
other place or at any other moment in the world's history. So with all
of Harte's later stories: undoubtedly there may have been a Roaring
Camp and undoubtedly there were Cherokee Sals and Kentucks, undoubtedly
the gold rush developed here and there Jack Hamlins and Tennessees and
Uncle Billys and Yuba Bills. The weakness of Harte is that he takes
these and peoples California with them. Like Dickens, he selects a few
picturesque and grotesque exceptions and makes of them a whole social
system.
Harte had nothing of the earnestness and the sincerity of the older
master; after a time he outgrew his manner, and evolved a style of
his own--compressed, rapid, picturesque; but this early point of view
he never changed. He sought ever for the startling and the dramatic
and he elaborated the outside of it with care. He studied the map of
California for picturesque names, just as Dickens studied the street
signs of London. He passed by the common materials of human life to
exhibit the strange phenomena of one single accidental moment in a
corner of America.
Once he had begun, however, there was no possibility of stopping.
The people demanded work like _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ and would
accept nothing else. It is pathetic to see him during the early years
of his great fame, trying to impress upon the reading public that he
is a poet after the old definition of the word. The _Atlantic_ had
paid him $10,000 to write for a year work like _The Luck of Roaring
Camp_. He gave four stories, and he gave also five careful poems of
the Longfellow-Whittier type. By 1873 he had put forth no fewer than
fourteen books, nine of them being poems or collections of his poetry.
In vain. The public ordered him back to the mines and camps that even
then were as obsolete as the pony express across the Plains.
Despite his biographers, the latter part of his life is full of
mystery. After seven years of literary work in New York City, he
went in 1878 as consul to Crefeld, Germany. Two years later he was
transferred to Glasgow, Scotland, where he remained for five years. The
rest of his life he spent in London, writing year after year new books
of California stories. He never returned to America; he was estranged
from his family; he seemed to wish to sever himself entirely from all
that had to do with his earlier life. He died May 5, 1902, and was
buried in Frimby churchyard, in Surrey.
IV
A novelist must rise or fall with his characters. What of Harte?
First of all we must observe that he makes no attempts at character
development. Each personage introduced is the same at the close of
the story as at the opening. He has no fully studied character: we
have a burning moment, a flashlight glimpse--intense, paradoxical,
startling, then no more. We never see the person again. The name may
appear in later sketches, but it never designates the same man. Colonel
Starbottle is consistent from story to story only in make-up, in stage
"business," and the well known "gags"--as, for instance, a succession
of phrases qualified by the adjective "blank." "Yuba Bill" is Harte's
synonym for stage driver, "Jack Hamlin" for gambler. We have a feeling
constantly that the characters are brought in simply to excite wonder.
Gabriel Conroy devotes his life for years to the finding of his sister
Grace. He leaves his wife to search for her; he can think of nothing
else; yet when at length he does find her among the witnesses in a
courtroom he takes it as a mere commonplace. A moment later, however,
when told that his wife, for whom we know he cares nothing at all, has
given birth to a son, he falls headlong in a swoon.
His characters may perhaps be true to facts; he may be able to give the
prototype in every case; and yet we are not convinced. The stories told
by the college freshman at home during his first Christmas vacation
may all be true, and yet they may give a very false idea of college
life in its entirety. So it is with Harte. The very year that he landed
in California a procession of one thousand children, each child with
a flower in his hand, marched one day in San Francisco. _The Luck of
Roaring Camp_ gives no such impression. In all save the remotest camps
there were churches and worshipers, yet who would suspect it from
Harte's tales? California has never accepted Harte's picture of its
life, just as the South has never accepted _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. It is
not fair to picture an era simply by dwelling on its exceptions and its
grotesque possibilities. Art must rest upon the whole truth, not upon
half truths.
The truth is that the man had no deep and abiding philosophy of life;
he had indeed no philosophy at all. In the words of his discerning
biographer, Merwin,
There was a want of background, both intellectual and moral,
in his nature. He was an observer, not a thinker, and his
genius was shown only as he lived in the life of others. Even
his poetry is dramatic, not lyric. It was very seldom that
Bret Harte, in his tales or elsewhere, advanced any abstract
sentiment or idea; he was concerned only with the concrete;
and it is noticeable that when he does venture to lay down
a general principle, it fails to bear the impress of real
conviction. The note of sincerity is wanting.[46]
The fact that his rascals in a crisis often do deeds of sublime heroism
must not deceive us, despite the author's protestations of a great
moral purpose underlying his work.
Without claiming to be a religious man or a moralist, but
simply as an artist, he shall reverently and humbly conform to
the rules laid down by a Great Poet who created the parables
of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, whose works have
lasted eighteen hundred years, and will remain when the
present writer and his generation are forgotten. And he is
conscious of uttering no original doctrine in this, but of only
voicing the beliefs of a few of his literary brethren happily
living, and one gloriously dead, who never made proclamation of
this from the housetops.[47]
This is insincere to the point of bathos. We feel like saying, "Bah!"
Harte makes his villains heroes at the crisis simply to add _finesse_
to his tale. He is dealing with paradoxes; he is working for his
reader's wonder. If in a moment where pity is expected, woman is harsh
and man tender; if the reputed good man is a rascal at the supreme
test, and the reputed rascal proves suddenly to be a saint, it adds to
the effectiveness of the tale.
Everywhere there is the atmosphere of the theater. The painted
backgrounds are marvels of skill. There are vast color effects, and
picturesque tableaux. There is a theatric quality about the heroines;
we can see the make-up upon their faces. Too often they talk the
stagiest of stage talk as in the first parting scene between Grace
Conroy and Arthur Poinset. The end is always a drop-curtain effect.
Even _Tennessee's Partner_ must have its appropriate curtain. We
can imagine a double curtain for _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_: the
first tableau showing the two dead women in the snow, the second the
inscription over the body of Oakhurst, the gambler. Instead of closing
the book with a long breath as after looking at a quivering section of
human life, we say, "How strange! What brilliant work!" and we feel
like clapping our hands for a tableau of all the cast, the spot light,
and the quick curtain.
Bret Harte had no real affection for the West; he never again visited
it; he never even wrote to the friends he had left there. With Mark
Twain it was greatly different. The West to him was home; he loved it;
he recorded its deepest life with sympathy. To Harte it was simply a
source of literary material. He skimmed its surface and found only the
melodramatic and the sensational.
V
And yet after all the real strength of Bret Harte came from his contact
with this Western soil. Irving and Dickens and the early models that
had so molded him served only to teach him his trade; the breath of
life in his works all came from the new life of the West. It would be
impossible for one to live during seventeen years of his early life in
an atmosphere like that of the west coast and not be transformed by it.
Taking his work altogether there is in it far more of California than
there is of Dickens or of all the others of the older writers. Only a
few things of the life of the West seem to have impressed him. He lived
fifteen years in San Francisco yet we see almost nothing of that city
in his work; the dramatic career of the Vigilantes he touched upon
almost not at all. He selected the remote mining camps for his field
and yet he seems to have been impressed by very few of the types that
were found in them. Only a few of them ring true at every point, Yuba
Bill the stage driver is one. We feel that he was drawn by a master who
has actually lived with his model. Yuba Bill is the typical man of the
region and the period--masterful, self-reliant, full of a humor that is
elemental. There is no prolonged study of him. We see him for a tense
moment as the stage swings up to the station, and then he is gone. He
is as devoid of sentimentality as even Horace Bixby. The company have
been shouting "Miggles!" at the dark cabin but have got no reply save
from what proves later to have been a parrot:
"Extraordinary echo," said the Judge.
"Extraordinary d--d skunk!" roared the driver contemptuously.
"Come out of that, Miggles, and show yourself. Be a man."
Miggles, however, did not appear.
Yuba Bill hesitated no longer. Taking a heavy stone from the
road, he battered down the gate, and with the expressman
entered the enclosure....
"Do you know this Miggles?" asked the Judge of Yuba Bill.
"No, nor don't want to," said Bill shortly.
"But, my dear sir," expostulated the Judge, as he thought of
the barred gate.
"Lookee here," said Yuba Bill, with fine irony, "hadn't you
better go back and sit in the coach till yer introduced? I'm
going in," and he pushed open the door of the building.
That rings true. If one were obliged to ride at night over a wild,
road-agent-infested trail there is no character in all fiction whom we
would more gladly have for driver than Yuba Bill. We would like to see
more of him than the brief glimpses allowed us by his creator.
The humor in Harte is largely Western humor. There is the true
California ring in such conversations, for instance, as those in the
earlier pages of _Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy_. It is an atmosphere
rather than a series of hits. One finds it in _The Outcasts of Poker
Flat_:
A few of the committee had urged hanging him [Oakhurst] as a
possible example, and a sure method of reimbursing themselves
from his pockets of the sums he had won from them. "It's agin
justice," said Jim Wheeler, "to let this yer young man from
Roaring Camp--an entire stranger--carry away our money." But a
crude sentiment of equity residing in the breasts of those who
had been fortunate enough to win from Mr. Oakhurst overruled
this narrower local prejudice.
This atmosphere of humor shimmers through all of the stories. There is
never uproarious merriment, but there is constant humor. The conjugal
troubles of the "old man" in _How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar_
are thus touched upon:
His first wife, a delicate, pretty little woman, had suffered
keenly and secretly from the jealous suspicions of her husband,
until one day he invited the whole Bar to his house to expose
her infidelity. On arriving, the party found the shy, _petite_
creature quietly engaged in her household duties and retired
abashed and discomfited. But the sensitive woman did not easily
recover from her shock of this extraordinary outrage. It was
with difficulty she regained her equanimity sufficiently to
release her lover from the closet in which he was concealed and
escape with him. She left a boy of three years to comfort her
bereaved husband. The old man's present wife had been his cook.
She was large, loyal, and aggressive.
His characters are exceptions and his situations are theatric, yet for
all that he cannot be ignored. He caught the spirit of the early mining
camps and with it the romantic atmosphere of the old Spanish Colonial
civilization that was swept away by the Anglo-Saxon rush for gold. His
name cannot fail to go down with the era he recorded, and to identify
oneself forever with an era, even though that era be a brief and
restricted one, is no small achievement. He is the writer of the epic
of the gold rush of the middle century in America, and whatever the
quality of that epic may be, it can never be forgotten. He said in 1868:
It may not have been an heroic era; it may have been a
hard, ugly, unworked, vulgar and lawless era; but of such
are heroes and aristocracies born. Three hundred years, and
what a glamor shall hang about it!... A thousand years, and
a new Virgil sings the American Aeneid with the episode of
Jason and the California golden fleece, and the historians
tell us it is a myth! Laugh, my pioneer friends, but your
great-great-great-great-grandchildren shall weep reverential
tears. History, as was said of martyrdom, is "mean in the
making" but how heroic it becomes in the perspective of five
centuries![48]
And in many ways his work is really of epic strength. He dealt with
elemental men, often with veritable demigods, as Yuba Bill. His
canvases are as broad as those even of Mark Twain. His human drama is
played before a truly Western background. While Tennessee is being
tried for his life, "Above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose
the Sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter passionless
stars." At moments of crisis the narrative always moves with power. The
wolves and the fire in the story _In the Carquinez Woods_ are intensely
vivid and lurid in their presentation. The ride from Simpson's Bar is
told with the graphic thrill of an eye-witness, and the description of
the snow-storm at the opening of _Gabriel Conroy_ reminds one of Thomas
Hardy.
VI
Finally, Harte was the parent of the modern form of the short story.
It was he who started Kipling and Cable and Thomas Nelson Page. Few
indeed have surpassed him in the mechanics of this most difficult of
arts. According to his own belief, the form is an American product. We
can do no better than to quote from his essay on _The Rise of the Short
Story_. It traces the evolution of a peculiarly American addition to
literature.
But while the American literary imagination was still under
the influence of English tradition, an unexpected factor was
developing to diminish its power. It was _humor_, of a quality
as distinct and original as the country and civilization
in which it was developed. It was first noticeable in the
anecdote or "story," and, after the fashion of such beginnings,
was orally transmitted. It was common in the bar-rooms, the
gatherings in the "country store," and finally at public
meetings in the mouths of "stump orators." Arguments were
clinched and political principles illustrated by "a funny
story." It invaded even the camp meeting and pulpit. It at
last received the currency of the public press. But wherever
met it was so distinctly original and novel, so individual
and characteristic, that it was at once known and appreciated
abroad as "an American story." Crude at first, it received
a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality
remained. It was concise and condense, yet suggestive. It was
delightfully extravagant, or a miracle of under-statement.
It voiced not only the dialect, but the habits of thought of
a people or locality. It gave a new interest to slang. From
a paragraph of a dozen lines it grew into half a column, but
always retaining its conciseness and felicity of statement. It
was a foe to prolixity of any kind; it admitted no fine writing
nor affectation of style. It went directly to the point. It was
burdened by no conscientiousness; it was often irreverent; it
was devoid of all moral responsibility, but it was original!
By degrees it developed character with its incident, often,
in a few lines, gave a striking photograph of a community
or a section, but always reached its conclusion without an
unnecessary word. It became--and still exists as--an essential
feature of newspaper literature. It was the parent of the
American "short story."[49]
Harte has described the genesis of his own art. It sprang from the
Western humor and was developed by the circumstances that surrounded
him. Many of his short stories are models. They contain not a
superfluous word; they handle a single incident with graphic power;
they close without moral or comment. The form came as a natural
evolution from his limitations and powers. With him the story must of
necessity be brief. He who depicts the one good deed in a wicked life
must of necessity use a small canvas. At one moment in his career Jack
Hamlin or Mother Shipton or Sandy does a truly heroic deed, but the
author must not extend his inquiries too far. To make a novel with
Mother Shipton as heroine would be intolerable.
Harte was unable to hold himself long to any one effort. Like Byron, he
must bring down his quarry at a single spring; he had no patience to
pursue it at length. _Gabriel Conroy_ is at the same time the best and
the worst American novel of the century. It is the best in its wealth
of truly American material and in the brilliant passages that strew its
pages; it is the worse in that it utterly fails in its construction,
and that it builds up its characters wholly from the outside. Its
hero, moreover, changes his personality completely three times during
the story, and its heroine is first an uneducated Pike maiden of the
Southwest, then a Spanish senorita:
Features small, and perfectly modeled; the outline of the small
face was a perfect oval, but the complection was of burnished
copper.... The imperious habit of command; an almost despotic
control of a hundred servants; a certain barbaric contempt
for the unlimited revenues at her disposal that prompted the
act, became her wonderfully. In her impatience the quick blood
glanced through her bronzed cheek, her little slipper tapped
the floor imperiously and her eyes flashed in the darkness.
Later we learn that she had been adopted into this Spanish family
after her lover had abandoned her in the earlier chapters, and had
been given her complexion by means of a vegetable stain. But there is
still another lightning change. At the end of the book she becomes a
Pike again and weakly marries the unrepentant rascal who earlier had
betrayed her. In the words of Artemus Ward, "it is too much." It is not
even good melodrama, for in melodrama the villain is punished at the
end.
Bret Harte was the artist of impulse, the painter of single burning
moments, the flashlight photographer who caught in lurid detail one
dramatic episode in the life of a man or a community and left the rest
in darkness.
VII
In his later years Harte's backgrounds became less sharp in outline.
His methods grew more romantic; his atmospheres more mellow and golden.
The old Spanish dream of the days of his early art possessed him again,
and he added to his gallery of real creations--M'liss, Yuba Bill, Jack
Hamlin, Tennessee's Partner--one that perhaps is the strongest of
them all, Enriquez Saltillo, the last of a fading race. Nothing Harte
ever did will surpass that creation of his old age. In _Chu Chu_,
_The Devotion of Enriquez_, and _The Passing of Enriquez_ we have the
fitting close of the work of the romancer of the west coast. For once
at least he saw into the heart of a man. Listen to Enriquez as he makes
his defense:
Then they say, "Dry up, and sell out"; and the great bankers
say, "Name your own price for your stock, and resign." And
I say, "There is not gold enough in your bank, in your San
Francisco, in the mines of California, that shall buy a Spanish
gentleman. When I leave, I leave the stock at my back; I shall
take it, nevarre!" Then the banker he say, "And you will go
and blab, I suppose?" And then, Pancho, I smile, I pick up my
mustache--so! and I say: "Pardon, senor, you haf mistake. The
Saltillo haf for three hundred year no stain, no blot upon him.
Eet is not now--the last of the race--who shall confess that
he haf sit at a board of disgrace and dishonor!" And then it
is that the band begin to play, and the animals stand on their
hind legs and waltz, and behold, the row he haf begin.
It is the atmosphere of romance, for the mine which had caused all the
trouble had been in the family three hundred years and it had become
a part of the family itself. When it passed into the hands of the new
regime, when his wife, who also was of the new regime, deserted him,
then passed Enriquez. The earth that for three hundred years had borne
his fathers opened at the earthquake and took him to herself. It was
the conception of a true romancer. The work of Bret Harte opened and
closed with a vision of romance, a vision worthy even of a Hawthorne.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BRET HARTE. (1839-1902.) _The Lost Galleon and Other Tales_
[Poems], 1867; _Condensed Novels and Other Papers_, 1867; _The
Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches_, 1870; _Plain Language
from Truthful James_, 1870; _The Pliocene Skull_, 1871; _Poems_,
1871; _East and West Poems_, 1871; _The Heathen Chinee and Other
Poems_, 1871; _Poetical Works_, 1872; _Mrs. Skagg's Husbands_,
1873; _M'liss: An Idyl of Red Mountain_, 1873; _Echoes of the
Foot-Hills_ [Poems], 1875; _Tales of the Argonauts_, 1875;
_Gabriel Conroy_, 1876; _Two Men of Sandy Bar_, 1876; _Thankful
Blossom_, 1877; _The Story of a Mine_, 1878; _Drift from Two
Shores_, 1878; _The Twins of Table Mountain_, 1879; Works in
five volumes, 1882; _Flip, and Found at Blazing Star_, 1882; _In
the Carquinez Woods_, 1884; _On the Frontier_, 1884; _Maruja_,
1885; _By Shore and Sedge_, 1885; _Snow Bound at Eagle's_, 1885;
_A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready_, 1887; _The Crusade of the
Excelsior_, 1887; _The Argonauts of North Liberty_, 1888; _A
Phyllis of the Sierras_, 1888; _Cressy_, 1889; _The Heritage of
Dedlow Marsh_, 1889; _A Waif of the Plains_, 1890; _A Ward of the
Golden Gate_, 1890; _A Sappho of Green Springs_, 1891; _Colonel
Starbottle's Client_, 1892; _A First Family of Tasajara_,
1892; _Susy: a Story of the Plains_, 1893; _Sally Dows and
Other Stories_, 1893; _A Protege of Jack Hamlin's_, 1894; _The
Bell-Ringer of Angel's_, 1894; _In a Hollow of the Hills_, 1895;
_Clarence_, 1895; _Barker's Luck_, 1896; _Three Partners_, 1897;
_Tales of Trail and Town_, 1898; _Stories in Light and Shadow_,
1898; _Mr. Jack Hamlin's Meditation_, 1899; _From Sandhill to
Pine_, 1900; _Under the Redwoods_, 1901; _Openings in the Old
Trail_, 1902; _Life of Bret Harte_, by T. Edgar Pemberton, 1903;
_Bret Harte_, by Henry W. Boynton, 1905; _The Life of Bret Harte
with Some Account of the California Pioneers_, by Henry Childs
Merwin, 1911.