BRET HARTE AT CREFELD
The sums that Bret Harte received for his stories and lectures did not
suffice to free him from debt, and he suffered much anxiety and distress
from present difficulties, with no brighter prospects ahead. An additional
misfortune was the failure of a new paper called "The Capital," which had
been started in Washington by John J. Piatt.
There is an allusion to this in a letter written by Bret Harte to his wife
from Washington.[93] "Thank you, dear Nan, for your kind, hopeful letter.
I have been very sick, very much disappointed; but I'm better now, and am
only waiting for some money to return. I should have, for the work that I
have done, more than would help us out of our difficulties. But it doesn't
come, and even the money I've expected from the 'Capital' for my story is
seized by its creditors. That hope and the expectations I had from the
paper and Piatt in the future amount to nothing. I have found that it is
bankrupt.
"Can you wonder, Nan, that I have kept this from you? You have so
hard a time of it there, and I cannot bear to have you worried if
there is the least hope of a change in my affairs as they look, day
by day. Piatt has been gone nearly a month, was expected to return
every day, and only yesterday did I know positively of his inability
to fulfil his promises. ---- came here three days ago, and in a very
few moments I learned from him that I need expect nothing for the
particular service I had done him. I've been vilified and abused in
the papers for having received compensation for my services, when
really and truly I have only received less than I should have got
from any magazine or newspaper for my story. I sent you the fifty
dollars by Mr. D----, because I knew you would be in immediate need,
and there is no telegraph transfer office on Long Island. It was the
only fifty I have made since I've been here.
"I am waiting to hear from Osgood regarding an advance on that
wretched story. He writes me he does not quite like it. I shall
probably hear from him to-night. When the money comes I shall come
with it. God bless you and keep you and the children safe for the
sake of
"FRANK."
Bret Harte's friends, however, were aware of his situation, and they
procured for him an appointment by President Hayes as United States
Commercial Agent at Crefeld in Prussia. The late Charles A. Dana was
especially active in this behalf. Bret Harte, much as he dreaded the
sojourn in a strange country, gladly accepted the appointment, and leaving
his family for the present at Sea Cliff, Long Island, he sailed for
England in June, 1878, little thinking that he was never to return.
Crefeld is near the river Rhine, about thirty miles north of Cologne. Its
chief industry is the manufacture of silks and velvets, in respect to
which it is the leading city in Germany, and is surpassed by no other
place in Europe except Lyons. This industry was introduced in Crefeld by
Protestant refugees who fled thither from Cologne in the seventeenth
century in order to obtain the protection of the Prince of Orange. A small
suburb of Philadelphia was settled mainly by emigrants from Crefeld, and
bears the same name.
The Prussian Crefeld is a clean, spacious place, with wide streets,
substantial houses, and all the appearance of a Dutch town. At this time
it contained about seventy-five thousand inhabitants. Bret Harte arrived
at Crefeld on the morning of July 17, 1878, after a sleepless journey of
twelve hours from Paris, and on the same day he wrote to his wife a very
homesick letter.
"I have audaciously travelled alone nearly four hundred miles through an
utterly foreign country on one or two little French and German phrases,
and a very small stock of assurance, and have delivered my letters to my
predecessor, and shall take possession of the Consulate to-morrow. Mr.
----, the present incumbent, appears to me--I do not know how I shall
modify my impression hereafter--as a very narrow, mean, ill-bred, and not
over-bright Puritanical German. It was my intention to appoint him my
vice-Consul--an act of courtesy suggested both by my own sense of right
and Mr. Leonard's advice, but he does not seem to deserve it, and has even
received my suggestion of it with the suspicion of a mean nature. But at
present I fear I may have to do it, for I know no one else here. I am to
all appearance utterly friendless; I have not received the first act of
kindness or courtesy from any one, and I suppose this man sees it. I shall
go to Bavaria to-morrow to see the Consul there, who held this place as
one of his dependencies, and try to make matters straight."[94]
This letter shows that the craving for sympathy and companionship, which
is associated with artistic natures, was intensely felt by Bret Harte,
more so, perhaps, than would have been expected in a man of his
self-reliant character. His despondent tone is almost child-like. The
letter goes on: "It's been up-hill work ever since I left New York, but I
shall try to see it through, please God! I don't allow myself to think
over it at all, or I should go crazy. I shut my eyes to it, and in doing
so perhaps I shut out what is often so pleasant to a traveller's first
impressions; but thus far London has only seemed to me a sluggish
nightmare through which I have waked, and Paris a confused sort of
hysterical experience. I had hoped for a little kindness and rest here....
At least, Nan, be sure I've written now the worst; I think things must be
better soon. I shall, please God, make some friends in good time, and will
try and be patient. But I shall not think of sending for you until I see
clearly that I can stay myself. If the worst comes to the worst I shall
try to stand it for a year, and save enough to come home and begin anew
there. But I could not stand it to see you break your heart here through
disappointment, as I mayhap may do."
The tone of this letter is so exaggerated that it might seem as if Bret
Harte had been a little theatrical and insincere,--that he had endeavored
to create an impression which was partly false. But such a conjecture
would be erroneous, for under the same date, with the addition of the word
"midnight," we find him writing a second letter to correct the effect of
the first, as follows:--
"MY DEAR NAN,--I wrote and mailed you a letter this afternoon that I
fear was rather disconsolate, so I sit down to-night to send another,
which I hope will take a little of the blues out of the first. Since
I wrote I have had some further conversation with my predecessor, Mr.
----, and I think I can manage matters with him. He has hauled in his
horns considerably since I told him that the position I offered
him--so far as the honor of it went--was better than the one he held.
For the one thing pleasant about my office is that the dignity of it
has been raised on my account. It was only a dependence--a Consular
Agency--before it was offered to me.[95]
"I feel a little more hopeful, too, for I have been taken out to a
'fest'--or a festival--of one of the vintners, and one or two of the
people were a little kind. I forced myself to go; these German
festivals are distasteful to me, and I did not care to show my
ignorance of their language quite so prominently, but I thought it
was the proper thing for me to do. It was a very queer sight. About
five hundred people were in an artificial garden beside an artificial
lake, looking at artificial fireworks, and yet as thoroughly enjoying
it as if they were children. Of course there were beer and wine. Here
as in Paris everybody drinks, and all the time, and nobody gets
drunk. Beer, beer, beer; and meals, meals, meals. Everywhere the body
is worshipped. Beside them we are but unsubstantial spirits. I write
this in my hotel, having had to pass through a mysterious gate and so
into a side courtyard and up a pair of labyrinthine stairs, to my dim
'Zimmer' or chamber. The whole scene, as I returned to-night, looked
as it does on the stage,--the lantern over the iron gate, the inn
strutting out into the street with a sidewalk not a foot wide. I know
now from my own observation, both here and in Paris and London, where
the scene-painters at the theatres get their subjects. Those
impossible houses--those unreal silent streets all exist in Europe."
On one of those first, melancholy days at Crefeld, the new Consul, walking
listlessly along the main street of the town, happened to throw a passing
glance at the window of a bookseller's shop, and there he saw on the back
of a neat little volume the familiar words "Bret Harte." It was a German
translation of his stories, and it is easy to imagine how the sight
refreshed and comforted the homesick exile. After that, he felt that to
some extent, at least, he was living among friends. Translations of Bret
Harte's poems and stories had appeared before this in German magazines,
and later his stories were reproduced in Germany, in book form, as fast as
they were published in England. In fact, his books have been printed in
every language of Europe, and translations of his stories have appeared in
the "Revue des Deux Mondes," in the "Moscow Gazette," and in periodicals
of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Sweden. In 1878 a translation of
six of Bret Harte's tales was published in the Servian language, with an
enthusiastic preface in German, by the translator, Ivan B. Popovitch.
The impression that Bret Harte received from Europe,--and it is the one
that every uncontaminated American must receive,--may be gathered from a
letter written by him to his younger son, then a small boy: "We drove out
the other day through a lovely road, bordered with fine poplar trees, and
more like a garden walk than a country road, to the Rhine, which is but
two miles and a half from this place. The road had been built by Napoleon
the First when he was victorious everywhere, and went straight on through
everybody's property, and even over their dead bones. Suddenly to the
right we saw the ruins of an old castle, vine-clad and crumbling, exactly
like a scene on the stage. It was all very wonderful. But Papa thought,
after all, he was glad his boys live in a country that is as yet quite
_pure_, and _sweet_ and _good_; not in one where every field seems to cry
out with the remembrance of bloodshed and wrong, and where so many people
have lived and suffered, that to-night, under this clear moon, their very
ghosts seemed to throng the road and dispute our right of way. Be
thankful, my dear boy, that you are an American. Papa was never so fond of
his country before, as in this land that has been so great, so powerful,
and so very, very hard and wicked."[96]
Bret Harte, though disclaiming any knowledge of music, had a real
appreciation of it, and wrote as follows to his wife who was a
connoisseur: "I have been several times to the opera at Dusseldorf, and I
have been hesitating whether I should slowly prepare you for a great shock
or tell you at once that musical Germany is a humbug. My first operatic
experience was 'Tannhaeuser.' I can see your superior smile, Anna, at this;
and I know how you will take my criticism of Wagner, so I don't mind
saying plainly, that it was the most diabolically hideous and stupidly
monotonous performance I ever heard. I shall say nothing about the
orchestral harmonies, for there wasn't anything going on of that kind,
unless you call something that seemed like a boiler factory at work in the
next street, and the wind whistling through the rigging of a channel
steamer, harmony.... But what I wanted to say was that even my poor
uneducated ear detected bad instrumentation and worse singing in the
choruses. I confided this much to a friend, and he said very frankly that
I was probably right, that the best musicians and choruses went to
America....
"Then I was awfully disappointed in 'Faust,' or, as it is known here in
the playbills, 'Marguerite.' You know how I love that delicious idyl of
Gounod's, and I was in my seat that night long before the curtain went up.
Before the first act was over I felt like leaving, and yet I was glad I
stayed. For although the chorus of villagers was frightful, and Faust and
Mephistopheles spouted and declaimed blank verse at each other--whole
pages of Goethe, yet the acting was superb. I have never seen such a
Marguerite. But think of my coming to Germany to hear opera badly sung,
and magnificently acted!"[97]
Having put the affairs of the Consular office upon a proper footing, Bret
Harte returned to England about the middle of August for a short vacation,
which proved, however, to be a rather long one. His particular object was
a visit to James Anthony Froude at his house in Devonshire. Bret Harte
had a great admiration for Froude's writings; and when the two men met
they formed a friendship which was severed only by death.
From Froude's home Bret Harte wrote to his wife as follows: "Imagine, if
you can, something between 'Locksley Hall,' and the High Walled Garden,
where Maud used to walk, and you have some idea of this graceful English
home. I look from my windows down upon exquisite lawns and terraces, all
sloping toward the sea wall, and then down upon the blue sea below.... I
walk out in the long, high garden, past walls hanging with netted peaches
and apricots, past terraces looking over the ruins of an old feudal
castle, and I can scarcely believe I am not reading an English novel or
that I am not myself a wandering ghost. To heighten the absurdity, when I
return to my room I am confronted by the inscription on the door, 'Lord
Devon' (for this is the property of the Earl of Devon, and I occupy his
favourite room), and I seem to have died and to be resting under a gilded
mausoleum that lies even more than the average tombstone does. Froude is a
connection of the Earl's, and has hired the house for the Summer.
"But Froude--dear old noble fellow--is splendid. I love him more than I
ever did in America. He is great, broad, manly,--democratic in the best
sense of the word, scorning all sycophancy and meanness, accepting all
that is around him, yet more proud of his literary profession than of his
kinship with these people whom he quietly controls. There are only a few
literary men like him here, but they are kings. So far I've avoided seeing
any company here; but Froude and I walk and walk, and talk and talk. They
let me do as I want, and I have not been well enough yet to do aught but
lounge. The doctor is coming to see me to-day, and if I am no better I
shall return in a day or two to London, and then to Crefeld."[98]
Bret Harte's health seems at all times to have been easily upset, and he
was particularly subject to colds and sore throats. This letter was
written in August, but it was the first week in November before he was on
his way back to Crefeld. While in London he had arranged for a lecture
tour in England during the next January (1879), and in that month a volume
of his stories and poems was published in England with the following
Introduction by the author:--
"In offering this collection of sketches to the English public, the author
is conscious of attaching an importance to them that may not be shared by
the general reader, but which he, as an American writer on English soil,
cannot fail to feel very sensibly. The collection is made by himself, the
letter-press revised by his own hand, and he feels for the first time that
these fugitive children of his brain are no longer friendless in a strange
land, entrusted to the care of a foster-mother, however discreet, but are
his own creations, for whose presentation to the public in this fashion he
is alone responsible. Three or four having been born upon English soil may
claim the rights of citizenship, but the others he must leave to prove
their identity with English literature on their own merits."
The lecture on the Argonauts, delivered the first time at the Crystal
Palace, was very well received both by the hearers and the press; but
financially it was a disappointment. Bret Harte was in England three
weeks, lectured five times, and made only two hundred dollars over and
above his expenses.
A second lecture tour, however, carried out in March of the same year, was
successful in every way. The audiences were enthusiastic, and the payment
was liberal.
It was during this visit to England that Bret Harte became involved in a
characteristic tangle. He had received the compliment of being asked to
respond for Literature at the Royal Academy banquet in 1879, and, with
his constitutional unwillingness to give a point-blank refusal, had
promised or half-promised to be present. Meanwhile, he had returned to
Crefeld, and the prospect of speaking at the dinner loomed more and more
horrific in his imagination, while the uncertainty in which he left the
matter was a source of vexation in London. Letters and telegrams from his
friends remained unanswered, until finally, Sir Frederic Leighton, the
President of the Academy, sent him a message, the reply to which was
prepaid, saying, "In despair; cannot do without you. Please telegraph at
once if quite impossible."
This at last drew from Bret Harte a telegram stating that the pressure of
official business would render it impossible for him to leave Crefeld. But
the matter was not quite ended yet. In a day or two Bret Harte received a
letter from Froude, good-naturedly reminding him that a note as well as a
telegram was due to Sir Frederic Leighton. "The President of the Royal
Academy," he wrote, "is a sacred person with the state and honors of a
sovereign on these occasions." And after some further delay Bret Harte did
write to Sir Frederic, and received in reply the following polite but
possibly somewhat ironical note: "Dear Mr. Bret Harte,--It was most kind
of you to write to me after your telegram. I fully understand the
impossibility of your leaving your post, and sincerely regret my loss."
A year later, however, in 1880, Bret Harte answered the toast to
Literature at the Royal Academy dinner, and his brief speech on that
occasion is included in the volume of lectures by him recently
published.[99]
In October of this year, 1879, Bret Harte wrote to Washington stating that
his health had suffered at Crefeld, and requesting leave of absence for
sixty days in order that he might follow the advice of his physician, and
seek a more favorable climate. He also asked for a reply by telegraph;
and in the same letter he made application for a better Consular position,
mentioning, as one reason for the exchange, that the business of the
Agency at Crefeld had greatly increased during his tenure. His request for
leave of absence was immediately granted, and in November he wrote to the
State Department acknowledging the receipt of its telegram and letter, but
adding, "Neither my affairs nor my health have enabled me yet to avail
myself of the courtesy extended to me by the Department. When I shall be
able to do so, I shall, agreeably to your instructions, promptly inform
you." He took this leave of absence in the following January and April.
So far as can be judged from his communications to the State Department,
Bret Harte discharged the duties of the Agency in a very business-like
manner. For one thing, he reduced the time consumed in passing upon
invoices of goods intended for exportation to the United States from
twenty-four hours to three hours, greatly to the convenience of the
Crefeld manufacturers. The increase in the value of the silks and velvets
shipped to this country during Bret Harte's term amounted to about two
hundred thousand dollars quarterly; but perhaps the demands of trade had
something to do with this.
Two of the reports to the State Department from our Agent at Crefeld
deserve to be rescued from their official oblivion. The first is dated,
October 8, 1879, and it accompanies a table showing the rainfall,
snowfall, and thunderstorms occurring in the district from July 1, 1878,
to June 30, 1879. The Agent states:--
"The table is compiled from the observations of a competent local
meteorologist. In mitigation of the fact that it has rained in this
district in the ratio of every other day in the year, it may be stated
that the general gloom has been diversified and monotony relieved by
twenty-nine thunderstorms and one earthquake."
The second communication, dated October 10, 1879, is in response to an
official inquiry. "In reference to the Department Circular dated August
27, 1879, I have the honor to report that upon careful inquiry of the
local authorities of this district I find that there is not now and never
has been any avowed Mormon emigration from Crefeld, nor any emigration of
people likely to become converts to that faith. Its name as well as its
tenets are unknown to the inhabitants, and only to officials through the
Department Circular.
"The artisans and peasants of this district--that class from which the
Mormon ranks are supposed to be recruited--are hard-working, thrifty, and
home-loving. They are averse to emigration for any purpose, and as
Catholics to any new revealed religion. A prolific household with _one_
wife seems to exclude any polygamous instinct in the manly breast, while
the woman, who works equally with her husband, evinces no desire to share
any division of the affections or the profits. The like may be predicated
of the manufacturers, with the added suggestion that a duty of 60 per cent
_ad valorem_ by engaging the fullest powers of the intellect in its
evasion, leaves little room for the play of the lower passions. In these
circumstances I did not find it necessary to report to the Legation at
Berlin."
The literary product of Bret Harte's two years at Crefeld was _A Legend of
Sammtstadt_, in which there is a pleasant blending of the romantic and the
humorous, _The Indiscretion of Elsbeth_, the _Views from a German Spion_,
and _Unser Karl_. _Unser Karl_, however, was not written, or at least was
not published, until several years later.
Perhaps the most valuable impression which Bret Harte carried away from
Crefeld was that of the German children. Children always interested him,
and in Prussia he found a new variety, which he described in the _Views
from a German Spion_: "The picturesqueness of Spanish and Italian
childhood has a faint suspicion of the pantomime and the conscious
attitudinizing of the Latin races. German children are not exuberant or
volatile; they are serious,--a seriousness, however, not to be confounded
with the grave reflectiveness of age, but only the abstract wonderment of
childhood. These little creatures I meet upon the street--whether in
quaint wooden shoes and short woollen petticoats, or neatly booted and
furred, with school knapsacks jauntily borne on little square
shoulders--all carry likewise in their round chubby faces their profound
wonderment and astonishment at the big busy world into which they have so
lately strayed. If I stop to speak with this little maid, who scarcely
reaches to the top-boots of yonder cavalry officer, there is less of
bashful self-consciousness in her sweet little face than of grave wonder
at the foreign accent and strange ways of this new figure obtruded upon
her limited horizon. She answers honestly, frankly, prettily, but gravely.
There is a remote possibility that I might bite; and with this suspicion
plainly indicated in her round blue eyes, she quietly slips her little red
hand from mine, and moves solemnly away."
The Continental practice of making the dog a beast of burden shocked Bret
Harte, as it must shock any lover of the animal. "Perhaps it is because I
have the barbarian's fondness for dogs, and for their lawless, gentle,
loving uselessness that I rebel against this unnatural servitude. It seems
as monstrous as if a child were put between the shafts and made to carry
burdens; and I have come to regard those men and women, who in the
weakest, perfunctory way affect to aid the poor brute by laying idle hands
on the barrow behind, as I would unnatural parents.... I fancy the dog
seems to feel the monstrosity of the performance, and, in sheer shame for
his master, forgivingly tries to assume it is _play_; and I have seen a
little collie running along, barking and endeavoring to leap and gambol in
the shafts, before a load that any one out of this locality would have
thought the direst cruelty. Nor do the older or more powerful dogs seem to
become accustomed to it."
And then comes an example of that extraordinary keenness of observation
with which Bret Harte was gifted:--"I have said that the dog was generally
sincere in his efforts. I recall but one instance to the contrary. I
remember a young collie who first attracted my attention by his persistent
barking. Whether he did this, as the plough-boy whistled, 'for want of
thought,' or whether it was a running protest against his occupation, I
could not determine, until one day I noticed that, in barking, he slightly
threw up his neck and shoulders, and that the two-wheeled barrow-like
vehicle behind him, having its weight evenly poised on the wheels by the
trucks in the hands of its driver, enabled him by this movement to
cunningly throw the centre of gravity and the greater weight on the
man,--a fact which the less sagacious brute never discerned.... I cannot
help thinking that the people who have lost this gentle, sympathetic,
characteristic figure from their domestic life and surroundings have not
acquired an equal gain through his harsh labors."
Of his Consular experiences at Crefeld the following is the only one which
found its way into literature: "The Consul's chief duty was to uphold the
flag of his own country by the examination and certification of divers
invoices sent to his office by the manufacturers. But, oddly enough, these
messengers were chiefly women,--not clerks, but ordinary household
servants, and on busy days the Consulate might have been mistaken for a
female registry office, so filled and possessed it was by waiting Maedchen.
Here it was that Gretchen, Liebchen, and Clarchen, in the cleanest of
gowns, and stoutly but smartly shod, brought their invoices in a piece of
clean paper, or folded in a blue handkerchief, and laid them, with fingers
more or less worn and stubby from hard service, before the Consul for his
signature. Once, in the case of a very young Maedchen, that signature was
blotted by the sweep of a flaxen braid upon it as the child turned to go;
but generally there was a grave, serious business instinct and sense of
responsibility in these girls of ordinary peasant origin, which, equally
with their sisters of France, were unknown to the English or American
woman of any class."
Bret Harte remained nearly two years at Crefeld, but his wife did not join
him there, and, so far as the world knows, they never met again. In May,
1880, he was transferred to the much more lucrative and more desirable
Consulship at Glasgow. It was one of the last cases in which government
bestowed public office as a reward for literary excellence,--a custom so
hallowed by age and association that every lover of literature will look
back upon it with fond regret.