BRET HARTE'S BOYHOOD
After the death of Henry Hart, his widow remained with her children in New
York and Brooklyn until 1853. They were supported in part by her family,
the Ostranders, and in part by Bernard Hart. There were four children, two
sons and two daughters. Eliza, the eldest, who is still living, and to
whom the author is indebted for information about the family, was married
in 1851 to Mr. F. F. Knaufft, and her life has been passed mainly in New
York and New Jersey. Mr. Ernest Knaufft, editor of the "Art Student," and
well known as a critic and writer, is her son. Unfortunately, Mrs.
Knaufft's house was burned in 1868, and with it many letters and papers
relating to her father and his parents, and also the MSS. of various
lectures delivered by him.
The younger daughter, Margaret B., went to California with Bret Harte, and
preceded him as a contributor of stories and sketches to the "Golden Era,"
and other papers in San Francisco. She married Mr. B. H. Wyman, and is
still a resident of California. Bret Harte's sisters are women of
distinguished appearance, and remarkable for force of character.
Bret Harte's only brother, Henry, had a short but striking career, which
displayed, even more perhaps than did the career of Bret Harte himself,
that intensity which seems to have been their chief inheritance from the
Hebrew strain. The following account of him is furnished by Mrs. Knaufft:
"My brother Henry was two years and six months older than his brother
Francis Brett Harte. Henry began reading history when he was six years
old, and from that time until he was twelve years of age, he read history,
ancient and modern, daily, sometimes only one hour, at other times from
two to three hours. What interested him was the wars; he would read for
two or three hours, and then if a battle had been won by his favorite
warriors, he would spring to his feet, shouting, 'Victory is ours,'
repeatedly. He would read lying on the floor, and often we would say
ridiculous and provoking things about him, and sometimes pull his hair,
but he never paid the slightest attention to us, being perfectly oblivious
of his surroundings. His memory was phenomenal. He read Froissart's
Chronicles when he was about ten years old, and could repeat page after
page accurately. One evening an old professor was talking with my mother
about some event in ancient history, and he mentioned the date of a
decisive battle. Henry, who was listening intently, said, 'I beg pardon,
Professor, you are wrong. That battle was fought on such a date.' The
professor was astonished. 'Where did you hear about that battle?' he
asked. 'I read that history last year,' replied Henry.
"When the boy was twelve years old, he came home from school one day, and
rushing into his mother's room, shouted, 'War is declared! War is
declared!' 'What in the name of common sense has that got to do with you?'
asked my mother. 'Mother,' said Henry, 'I am going to fight for my
country; that is what I was created for.'
"After some four or five months of constant anxiety, caused by Henry's
offering himself to every captain whose ship was going to or near Mexico,
a friend of my mother's told Lieutenant Benjamin Dove of the Navy about
Henry, and he became greatly interested, and finally, through his efforts,
Henry was taken on his ship. Henry was so small that his uniform had to be
made for him. The ship went ashore on the Island of Eleuthera, to the
great delight of my brother, who wrote his mother a startling account of
the shipwreck. I cannot remember whether the ship was able to go on her
voyage, or whether the men were all transferred to Commander Tatnall's
ship the 'Spitfire.' I know that Henry was on Commander Tatnall's ship at
the Bombardment of Vera Cruz, and was in the fort or forts at Tuxpan,
where the Commander and Henry were both wounded. Commander Tatnall wrote
my mother that when Henry was wounded, he exclaimed, 'Thank God, I am shot
in the face,' and that when he inquired for Henry, he was told that he was
hiding because he did not want his wound dressed. When the Commander found
Henry, he asked him why he did not want his wound dressed. With tears in
his eyes Henry said, 'Because I'm afraid it won't show any scar if the
surgeon dresses it.'
"When my brother returned from Mexico, he became very restless. The sea
had cast its spell about him, and finally a friend, captain of a ship,
took Henry on a very long voyage, going around Cape Horn to California.
When they arrived at San Francisco, my brother, who was then just sixteen,
was taken in charge by a relative. I never heard of his doing anything
remarkable during his short life. As the irony of fate would have it, he
died suddenly from pneumonia, just before the Civil War."
Bret Harte was equally precocious, and he was precocious even in respect
to the sense of humor, which commonly requires some little experience for
its development. It is a family tradition that he burlesqued the rather
bald language of his primer at the age of five; and his sisters distinctly
remember that, a year later, he came home from a school exhibition, and
made them scream with laughter by mimicking the boy who spoke "My name is
Norval." He was naturally a very quiet, studious child; and this tendency
was increased by ill health. From his sixth to his tenth year, he was
unable to lead an active life. At the age of six he was reading Shakspere
and Froissart, and at seven he took up "Dombey and Son," and so began his
acquaintance with that author who was to influence him far more than any
other. From Dickens he proceeded to Fielding, Goldsmith, Smollett,
Cervantes, and Washington Irving. During an illness of two months, when he
was fourteen years old, he learned to read Greek sufficiently well to
astonish his mother.
If the Hart family resembled the Alcott family in the matter of
misfortunes and privations, so it did, also, in its intellectual
atmosphere. Mrs. Hart shared her husband's passion for literature; and she
had a keen, critical faculty, to which, the family think, Bret Harte was
much indebted for the perfection of his style. Henry Hart had accumulated
a library surprisingly large for a man of his small means, and the whole
household was given to the reading not simply of books, but of the best
books, and to talking about them. It was a household in which the literary
second-rate was unerringly, and somewhat scornfully, discriminated from
the first-rate.
When Bret Harte was only eleven years old he wrote a poem called _Autumnal
Musings_ which he sent surreptitiously to the "New York Sunday Atlas," and
the poem was published in the next issue. This was a wonderful feat for a
boy of that age, and he was naturally elated by seeing his verses in
print; but the family critics pointed out their defects with such
unpleasant frankness that the conceit of the youthful poet was nipped in
the bud. Many years afterward, Bret Harte said with a laugh, "I sometimes
wonder that I ever wrote a line of poetry again." But the discipline was
wholesome, and as he grew older his mother took his literary ambitions
more seriously. When he was about sixteen, he wrote a long poem called
_The Hudson River_. It was never published, but Mrs. Hart made a careful
study of it; and at her son's request, wrote out her criticisms at length.
It will thus be seen that Bret Harte, as an author, far from being an
academic, was strictly a home product. He left school at the age of
thirteen and went immediately into a lawyer's office where he remained
about a year, and thence into the counting-room of a merchant. He was
self-supporting before he reached the age of sixteen. In 1851, as has
already been mentioned, his older sister was married; and in 1853 his
mother 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 travelled by the Nicaragua route, and
after a long, tiresome, but uneventful journey, landed safely in San
Francisco.[3] No mention of their arrival was made in the newspapers; no
guns were fired; no band played; but the youth of eighteen who thus
slipped unnoticed into California was the one person, out of the many
thousands arriving in those early years, whose coming was a fact of
importance.