BRET HARTE IN THE EAST
Before Bret Harte left California he had been in correspondence with some
persons in Chicago who proposed to make him Editor and part proprietor of
a magazine called the "Lakeside Monthly." A dinner was arranged to take
place soon after his arrival in Chicago at which Mr. Harte might meet the
men who were to furnish the capital for this purpose. But the guest of the
evening did not appear. Many stories were told in explanation of his
absence; and Bret Harte's own account is thus stated by Mr. Noah
Brooks:--"When I met Harte in New York I asked him about the incident, and
he said: 'In Chicago I stayed with relations of my wife's, who lived on
the North Side, or the East Side, or the Northeast Side, or the Lord knows
where, and when I accepted an invitation to dinner in a hotel in the
centre of the city, I expected that a guide would be sent me. I was a
stranger in a strange city; a carriage was not easily to be obtained in
the neighborhood where I was, and, in utter ignorance of the way I should
take to reach the hotel, I waited for a guide until the hour for dinner
had passed, and then sat down, as your friend S. P. D. said to you in
California "_en famille_, with my family." That's all there was to it.'"
Mr. Pemberton, commenting on this explanation says, "I can readily picture
Bret Harte, as the unwelcome dinner hour approached, making excuses to
himself for himself and conjuring up that hitherto unsuggested 'guide.'"
That Mr. Pemberton was right as to the "guide" being an afterthought, is
proved by the following account, for which the author of this book is
indebted to Mr. Francis F. Browne, at that time editor of the "Lakeside
Monthly": "I remember quite clearly Mr. Harte's visit to my office,--a
small,[84] rather youthful looking but alert young man of pleasing manners
and conversation. We talked of the literary situation, and he seemed
impressed with the opportunity offered by Chicago for a high-class
literary enterprise. A day or two after his arrival here Mr. Harte was
invited to a dinner at the house of a prominent citizen, to meet the
gentlemen who were expected to become interested in the magazine project
with him. Mr. Harte accepted the invitation. There is no doubt that he
intended going, for he was in my office the afternoon of the dinner, and
left about five o'clock, saying he was going home to dress for the
occasion. But he did not appear at the dinner; nor did he send any
explanation whatever. There being then no telephones, no explanation was
given until the next day, and it was then to the effect that he had
supposed a carriage would be sent for him, and had waited for it until too
late to start. A friend of the author tells me that he had previously
asked Mr. Harte whether he should call for him and take him to the dinner;
but Harte assured him that this was not at all necessary, that he knew
perfectly well how to find the place. The other members of the party,
however, were on hand, and after waiting, with no little surprise, for the
chief guest to appear, they proceeded to eat their dinner and disperse;
but Mr. Harte and the project of a literary connection with him in Chicago
no longer interested them."
It is evident that for some reason, unknown outside of his own family,
Bret Harte could not or would not attend the dinner, and simply remained
away. The result was thus stated by the author himself in a letter to a
friend in California: "I presume you have heard through the public press
how nearly I became editor and part owner of the 'Lakeside,' and how the
childishness and provincial character of a few of the principal citizens
of Chicago spoiled the project."
Bret Harte, therefore, continued Eastward, leaving Chicago on February 11,
"stopping over" a few days in Syracuse, and reaching New York on February
20. His stories and poems--especially the _Heathen Chinee_--had lifted him
to such a pinnacle of renown that his progress from the Pacific to the
Atlantic was detailed by the newspapers with almost as much particularity
as were the movements of Admiral Dewey upon his return to the United
States after the capture of Manilla. The commotion thus caused extended
even to England, and a London paper spoke humorously, but kindly, of the
"Bret Harte circular," which recorded the daily events of the author's
life.
"The fame of Bret Harte," remarked the "New York Tribune," as the railroad
bore him toward that city, "has so brilliantly shot to the zenith as to
render any comments on his poems a superfluous task. The verdict of the
popular mind has only anticipated the voice of sound criticism."
In New York Mr. Harte and his family went immediately to the house of his
sister, Mrs. F. F. Knaufft, at number 16 Fifth Avenue; and with her they
spent the greater part of the next two years. Three days after their
arrival in New York the whole family went to Boston, Mr. Harte being
engaged to dine with the famous Saturday Club, and being desirous of
seeing his publishers. He arrived in Boston February 25, his coming having
duly been announced by telegrams published in all the papers. Upon the
morning of his arrival the "Boston Advertiser" had the following pleasant
notice of the event. "He will have a hearty welcome from many warm friends
to whom his face is yet strange; and after a journey across the continent,
in which his modesty must have been tried almost as severely as his
endurance by the praises showered upon him, we hope that he will find
Boston so pleasant, even in the soberest dress which she wears during the
year, that he may tarry long among us."
In Boston, or rather at Cambridge, just across Charles River, Bret Harte
was to be the guest of Mr. Howells, then the assistant Editor of the
"Atlantic Monthly," James Russell Lowell being the Editor-in-Chief. Mr.
Howells' account[85] of this visit is so interesting, and throws so much
light upon Bret Harte's character, that it is impossible to refrain from
quoting it here:--
"When the adventurous young Editor who had proposed being his host for
Boston, while Harte was still in San Francisco, and had not yet begun his
princely progress Eastward, read of the honors that attended his coming
from point to point, his courage fell, as if he perhaps had committed
himself in too great an enterprise. Who was he, indeed, that he should
think of making this dear son of memory, great heir of fame, his guest,
especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of attending a
banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a carriage to fetch
him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco? Whether true or not,
and it was probably not true in just that form, it must have been this
rumor which determined his host to drive into Boston for him with the
handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded, and not trust to
the horse-car and the express to get him and his baggage out, as he would
have done with a less portentous guest.
"However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the station,
and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he were not
even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were surely the
most winning in the world. The drive out from Boston was not too long for
getting on terms of personal friendship with the family which just filled
the hack, the two boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New
England city and suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging
admiration of such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the
leafless sidewalk trees, and patches of park and lawn. They found
everything so fine, so refined, after the gigantic coarseness of
California, where the natural forms were so vast that one could not get on
companionable terms with them. Their host heard them with misgiving for
the world of romance which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and
with a subtle perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East,
but a lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they
must always have felt California to be. It is different now, when people
are every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home
from the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of
that great early day have gone back to live amidst the scenes which
inspired and prospered them.
"Before they came in sight of the Editor's humble roof he had mocked
himself to his guest at his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque
magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less
formidable than he had loomed afar. He accepted with joy the theory of
passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as
delightfully as it went on. From first to last Cambridge amused him as
much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was
stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass. It has already been
told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to him,
he said, 'Why, you couldn't stand on your front porch and fire off your
revolver without bringing down a two-volumer,' and no doubt the pleasure
he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild California he
had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known it, had invented.
"Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he
could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the
curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or
fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in the tie-backs of
the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous poverty,
hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or incomings
might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than with the
incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final result of his
constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the homing pigeon's
flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest eye.
"It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly always
late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out to, and
it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him into his
clothes, and then into the carriage, where a good deal of final buttoning
must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very late. He
was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his patience with
his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived smiling, serenely jovial,
radiating a bland gayety from his whole person, and ready to ignore any
discomfort he might have occasioned.
"Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be
said that it was worth while to have him on any terms. There was never a
more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest. It was not
from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost nothing of
a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest word, and with
a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the appreciation of
another's word which goes far to establish for a man the character of born
humorist.
"It must be said of him that if he took the honors easily that were paid
him, he took them modestly, and never by word or look invited them, or
implied that he expected them. It was fine to see him humorously accepting
the humorous attribution of scientific sympathies from Agassiz, in
compliment of his famous epic describing the incidents that 'broke up the
Society upon the Stanislaus.'"
Of his personal appearance at this time Mr. Howells says: "He was then, as
always, a child of extreme fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his
beard, which he wore in a mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the
day, and his jovial physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its
straight nose and fascinating forward thrust of the under-lip, its fine
eyes and good forehead, then thickly covered with black hair which grew
early white, while his mustache remained dark, the most enviable and
consoling effect possible in the universal mortal necessity of either
aging or dyeing."
It can easily be imagined, although Mr. Howells does not say so, that the
atmosphere of Cambridge was far from being congenial to Bret Harte.
University towns are notorious for taking narrow, academic views of life;
and in Cambridge, at least during the period in question, the college
circle was complicated by some remnants of colonial aristocracy that
looked with suspicion upon any person or idea originating outside of
England--Old or New. Bret Harte, as may be imagined, was not awed by his
new and highly respectable surroundings. "It was a little fearsome,"
writes Mr. Howells, "to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for
something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of 'The
Cathedral.' But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who could
say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious line
picturing the bobolink as he
Runs down a brook of laughter in the air.
That, Bret Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines,
and Lowell smoked, well content with the phrase. Yet they were not men to
get on well together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte
had none. Afterward, in London, they did not meet often or willingly."
Bret Harte was taken to see Emerson at Concord, but probably without much
profit on either side, though with some entertainment for the younger man.
"Emerson's smoking," Mr. Howells relates, "amused Bret Harte as a Jovian
self-indulgence divinely out of character with so supreme a god, and he
shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how Emerson proposed having a 'wet
night' with him, over a glass of sherry, and urged the wine upon his young
friend with a hospitable gesture of his cigar."
"Longfellow, alone," Mr. Howells adds, "escaped the corrosive touch of his
subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of his
reverence. That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity of Longfellow's he
honored with as much veneration as it was in him to bestow, and he had
that sense of Longfellow's beautiful and perfected art which is almost a
test of a critic's own fineness."
Bret Harte and Longfellow met at an evening party in Cambridge, and walked
home together afterward; and when Longfellow died, in 1882, Bret Harte
wrote down at some length his impressions of the poet.[86] It had been a
characteristic New England day in early Spring, with rain followed by
snow, and finally clearing off cold and still.
"I like to recall him at that moment, as he stood in the sharp moonlight
of the snow-covered road; a dark mantle-like cloak hiding his evening
dress, and a slouched felt hat covering his full silver-like locks. The
conventional gibus or chimney-pot would have been as intolerable on that
wonderful brow as it would be on a Greek statue, and I was thankful there
was nothing to interrupt the artistic harmony of the most impressive
vignette I ever beheld.... I think I was at first moved by his voice. It
was a very deep baritone without a trace of harshness, but veiled and
reserved as if he never parted entirely from it, and with the abstraction
of a soliloquy even in his most earnest moments. It was not melancholy,
yet it suggested one of his own fancies as it fell from his silver-fringed
lips
'Like the water's flow
Under December's snow.'
Yet no one had a quicker appreciation of humour, and his wonderful skill
as a _raconteur_, and his opulence of memory, justified the saying of his
friends that 'no one ever heard him tell an old story or repeat a new
one.'... Speaking of the spiritual suggestions in material things, I
remember saying that I thought there must first be some actual
resemblance, which unimaginative people must see before the poet could
successfully use them. I instanced the case of his own description of a
camel as being 'weary' and 'baring his teeth,' and added that I had seen
them throw such infinite weariness into that action after a day's journey
as to set spectators yawning. He seemed surprised, so much so that I asked
him if he had seen many--fully believing he had travelled in the desert.
He replied simply, 'No,' that he had 'only seen one once in the _Jardin
des Plantes_.' Yet in that brief moment he had noticed a distinctive
fact, which the larger experience of others fully corroborated."
Mr. Pemberton also contributes this interesting reminiscence: "With his
intimate friends Bret Harte ever delighted to talk enthusiastically of
Longfellow, and would declare that his poems had greatly influenced his
thoughts and life. Hiawatha he declared to be 'not only a wonderful poem,
but a marvellously true descriptive narrative of Indian life and lore.' I
think he knew it all by heart."
Bret Harte and his family stayed a week with Mr. Howells, and one event
was the Saturday Club dinner which Mr. Howells has described. "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."
One of the guests, unused to the society of literary men, Mr. Howells
says, had looked forward with some awe to the occasion, and Bret Harte was
amused at the result. "'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." The "commensal," as appears from a
subsequent essay by Mr. Howells, was Mark Twain, who, like Bret Harte, had
recently arrived from the West. Somehow, the account of this dinner as
given by Mr. Howells leaves an unpleasant impression.
The atmosphere of Boston was hardly more congenial to Bret Harte than that
of Cambridge. Boston was almost as provincial as San Francisco, though in
a different way. The leaders of society were men and women who had grown
up with the bourgeois traditions of a rich, isolated commercial and
colonial town; and they had the same feeling of horror for a man from the
West that they had for a Methodist. The best part of Boston was the
serious, well-educated, conscientious element, typified by the Garrison
family; but this element was much less conspicuous in 1871 than it had
been earlier. The feeling for art and literature, also, was neither so
widespread nor so deep as it had been in the thirty-five years preceding
the Civil War. Moreover, the peculiar faults of the Boston man, his
worship of respectability, his self-satisfied narrowness, his want of
charity and sympathy,--these were the very faults that especially jarred
upon Bret Harte, and it is no wonder that the man from Boston makes a poor
appearance in his stories.
"It was a certain Boston lawyer, replete with principle, honesty,
self-discipline, statistics, authorities, and a perfect consciousness of
possessing all these virtues, and a full recognition of their market
values. I think he tolerated me as a kind of foreigner, gently waiving all
argument on any topic, frequently distrusting my facts, generally my
deductions, and always my ideas. In conversation he always appeared to
descend only halfway down a long moral and intellectual staircase, and
always delivered his conclusions over the balusters."[87]
And yet, with characteristic fairness, Bret Harte does not fail to portray
the good qualities of the Boston man. The Reader will remember the sense
of honor, the courage and energy, and even--under peculiar
circumstances--the capacity to receive new ideas, shown by John Hale, the
Boston man who figures in _Snow-Bound at Eagle's_, and who was of the same
type as the lawyer just described.
Henry Hart and his family spent a year in Boston when Bret Harte was about
the age of four, but, contrary to the general impression, Bret Harte never
lived there afterward, although he once spent a few weeks in the city as
the guest of the publisher, Mr. J. R. Osgood, then living on Pinckney
Street, in the old West End. A small section of the north side of Pinckney
Street forms the northern end of Louisburg Square; and this square, as it
happens, is the only place in Boston which Bret Harte depicts. Here lived
Mr. Adams Rightbody, as appears from the brief but unmistakable
description of the place in _The Great Deadwood Mystery_. A telegram to
Mr. Rightbody had been sent at night from Tuolumne County, California; and
its progress and delivery are thus related: "The message lagged a little
at San Francisco, laid over half an hour at Chicago, and fought longitude
the whole way, so that it was past midnight when the 'all-night' operator
took it from the wires at Boston. But it was freighted with a mandate from
the San Francisco office; and a messenger was procured, who sped with it
through dark, snow-bound streets, between the high walls of
close-shuttered, rayless houses to a certain formal square, ghostly with
snow-covered statues. Here he ascended the broad steps of a reserved and
solid-looking mansion, and pulled a bronze bell-knob that, somewhere
within those chaste recesses, after an apparent reflective pause, coldly
communicated the fact that a stranger was waiting without--as he ought."
That Bret Harte made no mistake in selecting Louisburg Square as the
residence of that intense Bostonian, Mr. Rightbody, will be seen from Mr.
Lindsay Swift's description in his "Literary Landmarks of Boston." "This
retired spot is the quintessence of the older Boston. Without positive
beauty, its dignity and repose save it from any suggestion of ugliness.
Here once bubbled up, it is fondly believed, in the centre of the
iron-railed enclosure, that spring of water with which First Settler
William Blackstone helped to coax Winthrop and his followers over the
river from Charlestown. There is no monument to Blackstone, here or
anywhere, but in this significant spot stand two statues, one to Columbus
and one to Aristides the Just, both of Italian make, and presented to the
city by a Greek merchant of Boston."
After the week's stay in Cambridge, with, of course, frequent excursions
to Boston, Bret Harte and his family returned to New York. The proposals
made to him by publishing houses in that city were, Mr. Howells reports,
"either mortifyingly mean or insultingly vague"; and a few days later Bret
Harte accepted the offer of James R. Osgood and Company, then publishers
of "The Atlantic," to pay him ten thousand dollars during the ensuing year
for whatever he might write in the twelve months, be it much or little.
This offer, a munificent one for the time, was made despite the
astonishing fact that of the first volume of Bret Harte's stories, issued
by the same publishers six months before, only thirty-five hundred copies
had then been sold. The arrangement did not, of course, require Mr.
Harte's residence in Boston, and for the next two Winters he remained with
his sister in New York, spending the first Summer at Newport.
It has often been stated that the rather indefinite contract which the
publishers made with Bret Harte turned out badly for them, and that he
wrote but a single story, as it is sometimes put, during the whole year.
But the slightest investigation will show that these statements do our
author great injustice. The year of the contract began with July, 1871,
and ended with June, 1872; and the two volumes of the "Atlantic" covering
that period, No. 28 and No. 29, contain the following stories by Bret
Harte:--
_The Poet of Sierra Flat, Princess Bob and Her Friends, The Romance of
Madrono Hollow, How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar_;
And the following poems: _A Greyport Legend, A Newport Romance, Concepcion
de Arguello, Grandmother Tenterden, The Idyl of Battle Hollow_.
Surely, this was giving full measure, and it represents a year of very
hard work, unless indeed it was partly done in California. One of the
stories, _How Santa Clans Came to Simpson's Bar_, is, as every reader of
Bret Harte will admit, among the best of his tales, inferior only to
_Tennessee's Partner_, _The Luck_, and _The Outcasts_.
It is noticeable that all these "Atlantic Monthly" stories deal with
California; and an amusing illustration of Bret Harte's literary habits
may be gathered from the fact that in every case his story brings up the
rear of the magazine, although it would naturally have been given the
place of honor. Evidently the manuscript was received by the printers at
the last possible moment. One of the poems, the _Newport Romance_, seems
to lack those patient, finishing touches which it was his custom to
bestow.
For the next seven years of Bret Harte's life there is not much to record.
During the greater part of the time New York was his winter home. From his
Summer at Newport resulted the poems already mentioned, _A Greyport
Legend_ and _A Newport Romance_. Hence also a scene or two in _Mrs.
Skaggs's Husbands_, published in 1872. But the poems deal with the past,
and neither in them nor in any story did the author attempt to describe
that luxurious, exotic life, grafted upon the Atlantic Coast, over which
other romancers have fondly lingered.
Two or three Summers were spent by Bret Harte and his family in
Morristown, New Jersey. Here he wrote _Thankful Blossom_, a pretty story
of Revolutionary times, describing events which occurred at the very spot
where he was living, but lacking the strength and originality of his
California tales. "Thankful Blossom" was not an imaginary name, but the
real name of one of his mother's ancestors, a member of the Truesdale
family; and it should be mentioned that before writing this story Bret
Harte, with characteristic thoroughness, made a careful study of the
place where Washington had his headquarters at Morristown, and of the
surrounding country.
One other Summer the Harte family spent at New London, in Connecticut, and
still another at Cohasset, a seashore town about twenty miles south of
Boston. Here he became the neighbor and friend of the actors, Lawrence
Barrett and Stuart Robson, for the latter of whom he wrote the play called
_Two Men of Sandy Bar_. This was produced in September, 1876, at the Union
Square Theatre in New York, but, although not a failure, it did not attain
permanent success. The principal characters were Sandy Morton, played by
Charles R. Thorne, and Colonel Starbottle, taken by Stuart Robson. John
Oakhurst, the Yankee Schoolmistress (from _The Idyl of Red Gulch_), a
Chinaman, an Australian convict, and other figures taken from Bret Harte's
stories, also appeared in the piece. The part of Hop Sing, the Chinaman,
was played by Mr. C. T. Parsloe, and with so much success that afterward,
in collaboration with Mark Twain, Bret Harte wrote a melodrama for Mr.
Parsloe called _Ah Sin_; but this, too, failed to keep the boards for
long.
Mr. Pemberton speaks of another play in respect to which Bret Harte sought
the advice of Dion Boucicault; but this appears never to have been
finished. It was a cause of annoyance and disgust to Bret Harte after he
had left this country, that a version of _M'liss_ converting that
beautiful story into a vulgar "song and dance" entertainment was produced
on the stage and in its way became a great success. Bret Harte was unable
to prevent these performances in the United States, but he did succeed, by
means of a suit, threatened if not actually begun, in preventing their
repetition in England. A very inferior theatrical version of _Gabriel
Conroy_, also, was brought out in New York without the author's consent,
and much against his will.
Bret Harte had a lifelong desire to write a notable play, and made many
attempts in that direction. One of them succeeded. With the help of his
friend and biographer, Mr. Pemberton, he dramatized his story, _The
Judgment of Bolinas Plain_; and the result, a melodrama in three acts,
called _Sue_, was produced in New York in 1896, and was well received both
by the critics and the audience. Afterward the play was successfully
performed on a tour of the United States; and in 1898 it was brought out
in London, and was equally successful there. The heroine's part was taken
by Miss Annie Russell, of whom Mr. Pemberton gracefully says, "How much
the writers owed to her charming personality and her deft handling of a
difficult part they freely and gratefully acknowledged." But even this
play has not become a classic.
Of his experience as a fellow-worker with Bret Harte, Mr. Pemberton gives
this interesting account. "Infinite painstaking, I soon learned, was the
essence of his system. Of altering and re-altering he was never tired, and
though it was sometimes a little disappointing to find that what we had
considered as finished over-night, had, at his desire, to be reconsidered
in the morning, the humorous way in which he would point out how serious
situations might, by a twist of the pen, or by incompetent acting, create
derisive laughter, compensated for double or even treble work. No one
realized more keenly than he did that to most things there is a comic as
well as a serious side, and it seemed to make him vastly happy to put his
finger on his own vulnerable spots."
Mr. Pemberton speaks of several other plays written by Bret Harte and
himself, and of one written by Bret Harte alone for Mr. J. L. Toole. But
none of these was ever acted. It is needless to say that Bret Harte loved
the theatre and had a keen appreciation of good acting. In a letter to Mr.
Pemberton, he spoke of John Hare's "wonderful portrayal of the Duke of St.
Olpherts in 'The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.' He is gallantly attempting to
relieve Mrs. Thorpe of the tray she is carrying, but of course lacks the
quickness, the alertness, and even the actual energy to do it, and so
follows her with delightful simulation of assistance all over the stage,
while she carries it herself, he pursuing the form and ignoring the
performance. It is a wonderful study."
Bret Harte had not been long in the East, probably he had not been there a
month, before he began to feel the pressure of those money difficulties
from which neither he, nor his father before him, was ever free. Doubtless
he would often have been at a loss for ready money, even if he had
possessed the wealth of all the Indies. He left debts in California, and
very soon had acquired others in New York and Boston.
Mr. Noah Brooks, who was intimate with Bret Harte in New York as well as
in San Francisco, wrote, after his death: "I had not been long in the city
before I found that Harte had already incurred many debts, chiefly for
money borrowed. When I said to Bowles[88] that I was anxious on Harte's
account that a scandal should not come from this condition of things,
Bowles said, with his good-natured cynicism, 'Well, it does seem to me
that there ought to be enough rich men in New York to keep Harte a-going.'
"One rich man, a banker and broker, with an ambition to be considered a
patron of the arts and literature, made much of the new literary lion, and
from him Harte obtained a considerable sum, $500 perhaps, in small amounts
varying from $5 to $50 at a time. One New Year's day Harte, in as much
wrath as he was ever capable of showing, spread before me a note from our
friend Dives in which the writer, who, by the way, was not reckoned a
generous giver, reminded Harte that this was the season of the year when
business men endeavored to enter a new era with a clean page in the
ledger; and, in order to enable his friend H. to do that, he took the
liberty of returning to him sundry I. O. U.'s which his friend H. had
given him from time to time. 'Damn his impudence!' exclaimed the angry
artist.
"'What are you going to do about it?' I asked, with some amusement. 'Going
to do about it!' he answered with much emphasis on the first word. 'Going!
I have made a new note for the full amount of these and have sent it to
him with an intimation that I never allow pecuniary matters to trespass on
the sacred domain of friendship.' Poor Dives was denied the satisfaction
of giving away a bad debt."
"Once, while we were waiting on Broadway for a stage to take him down
town, he said, as the lumbering vehicle hove in sight, 'Lend me a quarter;
I haven't money enough to pay my stage fare.' Two or three weeks later,
when I had forgotten the incident, we stood in the same place waiting for
the same stage, and Harte, putting a quarter of a dollar in my hand, said:
'I owe you a quarter and there it is. You hear men say that I never pay my
debts, but [this with a chuckle] you can deny the slander.' While he lived
in Morristown, N. J., it was said that he pocketed postage stamps sent to
him for his autographs, and these applications were so numerous that with
them he paid his butcher's bill. A bright lady to whom this story was told
declared that the tale had been denied, 'on the authority of the butcher.'
Nobody laughed more heartily at this sally than Harte did when it came to
his ears."
"Never," says Mr. Howells, to the same effect, "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." And then Mr. Howells relates
the following incident: "In the course of events which in his case were
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 ante-room 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 cried out: 'Yes; that's it; we can see it all
now,--the Fleet Prison with Goldsmith, Johnson, and all the rest of the
old masters in a bunch!'"
It is highly probable that in his own mind, though perhaps half
unconsciously, Bret Harte excused himself by the "old literary tradition"
for his remissness in paying his debts. And for such a feeling on his part
there would be, the present writer makes bold to say, some justification.
It is a crude method of collecting from the community a small part of the
compensation due to the author for the pleasure which he has conferred
upon the world in general. The method, it must be admitted, is imperfectly
just. The particular butcher or grocer to whom a particular poet is
indebted may have a positive distaste for polite literature, and might
naturally object to paying for books which other people read. Nevertheless
there is an element of wild justice in the attitude of the poet. The world
owes him a living, and if the world does not pay its debt, why, then, the
debt may fairly be levied upon the world in such manner as is possible.
This at least is to be said: the extravagance or improvidence of a man
like Bret Harte stands upon a very different footing from that of an
ordinary person. We should be ashamed not to show some consideration,
even in money matters, for the soldier who has served his country in time
of war; and the romancer who has contributed to the entertainment of the
race is entitled to a similar indulgence.
Soon after Bret Harte's arrival in the East his friends urged him to give
public lectures on the subject of life in California. The project was
extremely distasteful to him, for he had an inborn horror of
notoriety,--even of publicity; and this feeling, it may be added, is fully
shared by the other members of his family. But his money difficulties were
so great, and the prospect held out to him was so flattering that he
finally consented. He prepared two lectures; the first, entitled _The
Argonauts_, is now printed, with some changes, as the Introduction to the
second volume of his collected works. This lecture was delivered at
Albany, New York, on December 3, 1872, at Tremont Temple in Boston on the
thirteenth of the same month, on December 16 at Steinway Hall in New York,
and at Washington on January 7, 1873.
From Washington the lecturer wrote to his wife: "The audience was almost
as quick and responsive as the Boston folk, and the committee-men, to my
great delight, told me they made money by me.... I called on Charlton at
the British Minister's, and had some talk with Sir Edward Thornton, which
I have no doubt will materially affect the foreign policy of England. If I
have said anything to promote a better feeling between the two countries I
am willing he should get the credit of it. I took a carriage and went
alone to the Capitol of my country. I had expected to be disappointed, but
not agreeably. It is really a noble building,--worthy of the
republic,--vast, magnificent, sometimes a little weak in detail, but in
intent always high-toned, grand and large principled."[89]
The same lecture was delivered at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on January 9,
1873, and at Ottawa and Montreal in March of that year.
From Montreal he wrote to Mrs. Harte as follows:[90]--
"In Ottawa I lectured twice, but the whole thing was a pecuniary
failure. There was scarcely enough money to pay expenses, and of
course nothing to pay me with. ---- has no money of his own, and
although he is blamable for not thoroughly examining the ground
before bringing me to Ottawa, he was evidently so completely
disappointed and miserable that I could not find it in my heart to
upbraid him. So I simply told him that unless the Montreal receipts
were sufficient to pay me for my lecture there, and a reasonable part
of the money due me from Ottawa, I should throw the whole thing up.
To-night will in all probability settle the question. Of course there
are those who tell me privately that he is no manager, but I really
do not see but that he has done all that he could, and that his only
fault is in his sanguine and hopeful nature.
"I did not want to write of this disappointment to you so long as
there was some prospect of better things. You can imagine, however,
how I feel at this cruel loss of time and money--to say nothing of my
health, which is still so poor. I had almost recovered from my cold,
but in lecturing at Ottawa at the Skating Rink, a hideous, dismal
damp barn, the only available place in town, I caught a fresh cold
and have been coughing badly ever since. And you can well imagine
that my business annoyances do not add greatly to my sleep or
appetite.
"Apart from this, the people of Ottawa have received me very kindly.
They have vied with each other in social attention, and if I had been
like John Gilpin, 'on pleasure bent,' they would have made my visit a
success. The Governor-General of Canada invited me to stay with him
at his seat, Rideau Hall, and I spent Sunday and Monday there. Sir
John and Lady Macdonald were also most polite and courteous.
"I shall telegraph you to-morrow if I intend to return at once. Don't
let this worry you, but kiss the children for me and hope for the
best. I would send you some money but _there isn't any to send_, and
maybe I shall only bring back myself.--Your affectionate
"FRANK.
"P. S.--26th.
"DEAR NAN,--I did not send this yesterday, waiting to find the result
of last night's lecture. It was a _fair_ house and ---- this morning
paid me one hundred and fifty dollars, of which I send you the
greater part. I lecture again to-night, with fair prospects, and he
is to pay something on account of the Ottawa engagement besides the
fee for that night. I will write again from Ogdensburg.--Always
yours,
"FRANK."
This lecture trip in the Spring of 1873 was followed in the Autumn by a
similar trip in the West, with lectures at St. Louis, Topeka, Atchison,
Lawrence, and Kansas City. From St. Louis he wrote to his wife as
follows:--
"MY DEAR ANNA,--As my engagement is not until the 21st at Topeka,
Kansas, I lie over here until to-morrow morning, in preference to
spending the extra day in Kansas. I've accepted the invitation of Mr.
Hodges, one of the managers of the lecture course, to stay at his
house. He is a good fellow, with the usual American small family and
experimental housekeeping, and the quiet and change from the hotel
are very refreshing to me. They let me stay in my own room--which by
the way is hung with the chintz of our 49th Street house--and don't
bother me with company. So I was very good to-day and went to
church. There was fine singing. The contralto sang your best
sentences from the _Te Deum_, 'We believe that Thou shalt come,' &c.,
&c., to the same minor chant that I used to admire.
"The style of criticism that my lecture--or rather myself as a
lecturer--has received, of which I send you a specimen, culminated
this morning in an editorial in the 'Republic,' which I shall send
you, but have not with me at present. I certainly never expected to
be mainly criticised for being _what I am not_, a handsome fop; but
this assertion is at the bottom of all the criticism. They may be
right--I dare say they are--in asserting that I am no orator, have no
special faculty for speaking, no fire, no dramatic earnestness or
expression, but when they intimate that I am running on my good
looks--save the mark! I confess I get hopelessly furious. You will be
amused to hear that my gold studs have again become 'diamonds,' my
worn-out shirts 'faultless linen,' my haggard face that of a
'Spanish-looking exquisite,' my habitual quiet and 'used-up' way,
'gentle and eloquent languor.' But you will be a little astonished to
know that the hall I spoke in was worse than Springfield, and
_notoriously_ so--that the people seemed genuinely pleased, that the
lecture inaugurated the 'Star' course very handsomely, and that it
was the first of the first series of lectures ever delivered in St.
Louis."
In a letter dated Lawrence, Kansas, October 23, 1873, he relates an
interesting experience.
"MY DEAR ANNA,--I left Topeka--which sounds like a name Franky might
have invented--early yesterday morning, but did not reach Atchison,
only sixty miles distant, until seven o'clock at night--an hour
before the lecture. The engine as usual had broken down, and left me
at four o'clock fifteen miles from Atchison, on the edge of a bleak
prairie with only one house in sight. But I got a saddle-horse--there
was no vehicle to be had--and strapping my lecture and blanket to my
back I gave my valise to a little yellow boy--who looked like a dirty
terra-cotta figure--with orders to follow me on another horse, and so
tore off towards Atchison. I got there in time; the boy reached there
two hours after.
"I make no comment; you can imagine the half-sick, utterly disgusted
man who glared at that audience over his desk that night, and d----d
them inwardly in his heart. And yet it was a good audience,
thoroughly refined and appreciative, and very glad to see me. I was
very anxious about this lecture, for it was a venture of my own, and
I had been told that Atchison was a rough place--energetic but
coarse. I think I wrote you from St. Louis that I had found there
were only three actual engagements in Kansas, and that my list which
gave Kansas City twice was a mistake. So I decided to take Atchison.
I made a hundred dollars by the lecture, and it is yours, for
yourself, Nan, to buy 'Minxes' with, if you want, for it is over and
above the amount Eliza and I footed up on my lecture list. I shall
send it to you as soon as the bulk of the pressing claims are
settled.
"Everything thus far has gone well; besides my lecture of to-night I
have one more to close Kansas, and then I go on to St. Joseph. I've
been greatly touched with the very honest and sincere liking which
these Western people seem to have for me. They seem to have read
everything I have written--and appear to appreciate the best. Think
of a rough fellow in a bearskin coat and blue shirt repeating to me
_Conception de Arguello_! Their strange good taste and refinement
under that rough exterior--even their tact--are wonderful to me. They
are 'Kentucks' and 'Dick Bullens' with twice the refinement and
tenderness of their California brethren....
"I've seen but one [woman] that interested me--an old negro wench.
She was talking and laughing outside my door the other evening, but
her laugh was so sweet and unctuous and musical--so full of breadth
and goodness that I went outside and talked to her while she was
scrubbing the stones. She laughed as a canary bird sings--because she
couldn't help it. It did me a world of good, for it was before the
lecture, at twilight, when I am very blue and low-tuned. She had been
a slave.
"I expected to have heard from you here. I've nothing from you or
Eliza since last Friday, when I got yours of the 12th. I shall direct
this to Eliza's care, as I do not even know where you are. Your
affectionate
"FRANK."[91]
The same lecture was delivered in London, England, in January, 1879, and
in June, 1880. Bret Harte's only other lecture had for its subject
_American Humor_, and was delivered in Chicago on October 10, 1874, and in
New York on January 26, 1875.[92] The money return from these lectures was
slight, and the fatigue and exposure of the long journeys in the West had,
his relatives think, a permanently bad effect upon Bret Harte's health.
In the Autumn of 1875 we find him at Lenox, in the Berkshire Hills of
Western Massachusetts. Lenox has its place in literature, for Hawthorne
spent a year there, and in adjoining towns once lived O. W. Holmes,
Catherine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, and G. P. R. James.
_Gabriel Conroy_, Bret Harte's only novel, and on the whole, it must be
admitted, a failure, though containing many exquisite passages, was
published in "Scribner's Magazine" in 1876.
The poems and stories which Bret Harte wrote during his seven years'
residence in the Eastern part of the United States did not deal with the
human life of that time and place. They either concerned the past, like
_Thankful Blossom_ and the Newport poems, or they harked back to
California, like _Gabriel Conroy_ and the stories published in the
"Atlantic." The only exceptions are the short and pathetic tale called
_The Office-Seeker_, and the opening chapter of that powerful story, _The
Argonauts of North Liberty_. North Liberty is a small town in Connecticut,
and the scene is quickly transferred from there to California; but Joan,
the Connecticut woman, remains the chief figure in the story.
It is seldom that Bret Harte fails to show some sympathy with the men and
women whom he describes, or at least some relenting consciousness that
they could not help being what they were. But it is otherwise with Joan.
She and her surroundings had a fascination for Bret Harte that was almost
morbid. The man or woman whom we hate becomes an object of interest to us
nearly as much as the person whom we love. An acute critic declares that
Thackeray's wonderful insight into the characters and feelings of servants
is due to the fact that he had almost a horror of them, and was abnormally
sensitive to their criticisms,--the more felt for being unspoken. So Joan
represents what Bret Harte hated more than anything else in the world,
namely, a narrow, censorious, hypocritical, cold-blooded Puritanism. Her
character is not that of a typical New England woman; its counterpart
would much more easily be found among the men; but it is a perfectly
consistent character, most accurately worked out. Joan combines a prim,
provincial, horsehair-sofa respectability with a lawless and sensual
nature,--an odd combination, and yet not an impossible one. She might,
perhaps, be called the female of that species which Hawthorne immortalized
under the name of Judge Pyncheon.
Joan is a puzzle to the reader, but so she was to those who knew her. Was
she a conscious hypocrite, deliberately playing a false part in the world,
or was she a monstrous egotist, one in whom the soul of truth had so died
out that she thought herself justified in everything that she did, and
committed the worst acts from what she supposed to be the most excusable
motives? Her intimates did not know. One of the finest strokes in the
story is the dawning of suspicion upon the mind of her second husband.
"For with all his deep affection for his wife, Richard Demorest
unconsciously feared her. The strong man whose dominance over men and
women alike had been his salient characteristic, had begun to feel an
indefinable sense of some unrecognized quality in the woman he loved. He
had once or twice detected it in a tone of her voice, in a remembered and
perhaps even once idolized gesture, or in the accidental lapse of some
bewildering word."
New England people at their best did not attract Bret Harte. That Miltonic
conception of the universe upon which New England was built seemed to him
simply ridiculous, and he did not appreciate the strength of character in
which it resulted. Moreover, the crudity of New England offended his
aesthetic taste as much as its theology offended his reason and his
charity. North Liberty on a cold, stormy Sunday night in March is
described with that _gusto_, with that minuteness of detail which could be
shown only by one who loved it or by one who hated it.
And yet it would be unjust to say that Bret Harte had no conception of the
better type of New England women. The schoolmistress in _The Idyl of Red
Gulch_, one of his earliest and best stories, is as pure and noble a
maiden, and as characteristic of the soil, as Hilda herself. The Reader
will remember the description of Miss Mary as she appeared playing with
her pupils in the woods. "The color came faintly into her pale cheeks....
Felinely fastidious and entrenched as she was in the purity of spotless
skirts, collars and cuffs, she forgot all else, and ran like a crested
quail at the head of her brood, until romping, laughing and panting, with
a loosened braid of brown hair, a hat hanging by a knotted ribbon from her
throat, she came ..." upon Sandy, the unheroic hero of the tale.
In the culminating scene of this story, the interview between Miss Mary
and the mother of Sandy's illegitimate boy, when the teacher consents to
take the child with her to her home in the East, although she is still
under the shock of the discovery that Sandy is the boy's father,--in this
scene the schoolmistress exhibits true New England restraint, and a
beautiful absence of heroics. It was just at sunset. "The last red beam
crept higher, suffused Miss Mary's eyes with something of its glory,
nickered and faded and went out. The sun had set in Red Gulch. In the
twilight and silence Miss Mary's voice sounded pleasantly, 'I will take
the boy. Send him to me to-night.'"
One can hardly help speculating about Bret Harte's personal taste and
preferences in regard to women. Cressy and the Rose of Tuolumne were both
blondes; and yet on the whole he certainly preferred brunettes. Even his
blue-eyed girls usually have black hair. The Treasure of the Redwoods
disclosed from the recesses of her sunbonnet "a pale blue eye and a thin
black arch of eyebrow." One associates a contralto voice with a brunette,
and Bret Harte's heroines, so far as the subject is mentioned, have
contralto voices. Not one is spoken of as having a soprano voice. Even the
slight and blue-eyed Tinka Gallinger "sang in a youthful, rather nasal
contralto." Bret Harte's wife had a contralto voice and was a good singer.
As to eyes, he seems to have preferred them gray or brown, a "tender
gray" and a "reddish brown." Ailsa Callender's hair was "dark with a
burnished copper tint at its roots, and her eyes had the same burnished
metallic lustre in their brown pupils." Mrs. MacGlowrie was "a fair-faced
woman with eyes the color of pale sherry."
A small foot with an arched instep was a _sine qua non_ with Bret Harte,
and he speaks particularly of the small, well-shod foot of the
Southwestern girl. He believed in breeding, and all his heroines were
well-bred,--not well-bred in the conventional sense, but in the sense of
coming from sound, courageous, self-respecting, self-improving stock.
Within these limits his range of heroines is exceedingly wide, including
some that are often excluded from that category. He is rather partial to
widows, for example, and always looks upon their innocent gayeties with an
indulgent eye. Can a woman be a widow and untidy in her dress, and still
retain her preeminence as heroine? Yes, Bret Harte's genius is equal even
to that. "Mrs. MacGlowrie was looking wearily over some accounts on the
desk before her, and absently putting back some tumbled sheaves from the
shock of her heavy hair. For the widow had a certain indolent Southern
negligence, which in a less pretty woman would have been untidiness, and a
characteristic hook-and-eye-less freedom of attire, which on less graceful
limbs would have been slovenly. One sleeve-cuff was unbuttoned, but it
showed the vein of her delicate wrist; the neck of her dress had lost a
hook, but the glimpse of a bit of edging round the white throat made
amends. Of all which, however, it should be said that the widow, in her
limp abstraction, was really unconscious."
[Illustration: I THOUGHT YOU WERE THAT HORSE-THIEF
From "Lanty Foster's Mistake"
Denman Fink, del.]
Red-haired women have been so popular in fiction during recent years that
it was perhaps no great feat for Bret Harte in the _Buckeye Hollow
Inheritance_ to make a heroine out of a red-haired girl, and a
bad-tempered one too; but what other romancer has ever dared to
represent a young and lovely woman as "hard of hearing"! There can be
no question that The Youngest Miss Piper was not quite normal in this
respect, although, for purposes of coquetry and sarcasm no doubt, she
magnified the defect. In her memorable interview with the clever young
grocery clerk (whom she afterward married) she begins by failing to hear
distinctly the title of the book which he was reading when she entered the
store; and we have this picture: "Miss Delaware, leaning sideways and
curling her little fingers around her pink ear: 'Did you say the first
principles of geology or politeness? You know I am so deaf; but of course
it couldn't be that.'"
The one kind of woman that did not attract Bret Harte as a subject for
literature was the conventional woman of the world. He could draw her
fairly well, for we have Amy Forester in _A Night on the Divide_, Jessie
Mayfield in _Jeff Briggs's Love Story_, Grace Nevil in _A Maecenas of the
Pacific Slope_, Mrs. Ashwood in _A First Family of Tasajara_, and Mrs.
Horncastle in _Three Partners_. But these women do not bear the stamp of
Bret Harte's genius.
His Army and Navy girls are better, because they are redeemed from
commonplaceness by their patriotism. Miss Portfire in _The Princess Bob
and her Friends_, and Julia Cantire in _Dick Boyle's Business Card_,
represent those American families, more numerous than might be supposed,
in which it is almost an hereditary custom for the men to serve in the
Army or Navy, and for the women to become the wives and mothers of
soldiers and sailors. In such families patriotism is a constant
inspiration, to a degree seldom felt except by those who represent their
country at home or abroad.
Bret Harte was patriotic, as many of his poems and stories attest, and his
long residence in England did not lessen his Americanism. "Apostates" was
his name for those American girls who marry titled foreigners, and he
often speaks of the susceptibility of American women to considerations of
rank and position. In _A Rose of Glenbogie_, after describing the male
guests at a Scotch country house, he continues: "There were the usual
half-dozen smartly-frocked women who, far from being the females of the
foregoing species, were quite indistinctive, with the single exception of
an American wife, who was infinitely more Scotch than her Scotch husband."
And in _The Heir of the McHulishes_ the American Consul is represented as
being less chagrined by the bumptiousness of his male compatriots than by
"the snobbishness and almost servile adaptability of the women. Or was it
possible that it was only a weakness of the sex which no Republican
nativity or education could eliminate?"