BRET HARTE AT GLASGOW
After a month in London, Bret Harte took possession of the Consulate at
Glasgow in July, 1880, and remained there five years. His annual salary
was three thousand dollars.
In September he wrote to a friend: "As I am trying to get up a good
reputation here, I stay at my post pretty regularly, occasionally making a
cheap excursion. This is a country for them. The other day I went to
Staffa. It was really the only 'sight' in Europe that quite filled all my
expectations. But alas! that magnificent, cathedral-like cave was
presently filled with a howling party of sandwich-eating tourists,
splashing in the water and climbing up the rocks. One should only go there
alone, or with some sympathetic spirit."[100]
How far the Consul's good intentions were fulfilled it is difficult to
say. London attracted Bret Harte as it attracts everybody of Anglo-Saxon
descent. That vast and sombre metropolis may weary the body and vex the
soul of the visitor, but, after all, it remains the headquarters of the
English-speaking race, and the American, as well as the Canadian or the
Australian, returns to it again and again with a vague longing, never
satisfied, but never lost.
Another reason for the absenteeism of the Consul was that he lectured now
and again in different parts of England, and that he paid frequent visits
to country houses. Mr. Pemberton quotes a letter from him which contains
an amusing illustration of the English boy's sporting spirit:--
"MY DEAR PEMBERTON,--Don't be alarmed if you should hear of my nearly
having blown the top of my head off. Last Monday I had my face badly cut
by the recoil of an overloaded gun. I do not know yet beneath these
bandages whether I shall be permanently marked. At present I am invisible,
and have tried to keep the accident a secret. When the surgeon was
stitching me together, the son of the house, a boy of twelve, came timidly
to the door of my room. 'Tell Mr. Bret Harte it's all right,' he said,
'_he killed the hare_.'"
However, the reports made by the Consul to the State Department seem to
indicate more attention to his duties than has commonly been credited to
him. One of these communications, dated May 4, 1882, gives a detailed
account of the peculiar Glasgow custom according to which the several
flats or floors of tenement houses are owned by separate persons, usually
the occupants, each owner of a floor being a joint proprietor, with the
other floor-owners, of the land on which the building stands, of the roof,
the staircase and the walls. Another letter states, in answer to a
question by the Department, that there were at the time probably not more
than six American citizens resident in Glasgow, and that only one such was
known to the Consul or to his predecessor. This, in an English-speaking
city of six hundred thousand people, seems extraordinary.
The most interesting of Bret Harte's communications to the State
Department is perhaps the following:--
"On a recent visit to the Island of Iona, within this Consular District, I
found in the consecrated ground of the ruined Cathedral the graves of
nineteen American seamen who had perished in the wreck of the 'Guy
Mannering' on the evening of the 31st of December, 1865, on the north
coast of the island. The place where they are interred is marked by two
rows of low granite pediments at the head and feet of the dead,
supporting, and connected by, an iron chain which encloses the whole
space. This was done by the order and at the expense of the Lord of the
Manor, the present Duke of Argyle.
* * * * *
"I venture to make these facts known to the Department, satisfied that
such recognition of the thoughtful courtesy of the Duke of Argyle as would
seem most fit and appropriate to the Department will be made, and that
possibly a record of the names of the seamen will be placed upon some
durable memorial erected upon the spot.
* * * * *
"In conclusion I beg to state that should the Department deem any
expenditure by the Government for this purpose inexpedient, I am willing,
with the permission of the Department, to endeavor to procure by private
subscription a sufficient fund for the outlay."
It is a pleasure to record that these suggestions were adopted by the
State Department. A letter of acknowledgment and thanks was sent to the
Duke of Argyle, and a shaft or obelisk with the names of the seamen
inscribed thereon was erected by the United States Government in the
latter part of the year 1882.
Bret Harte's Consular experiences with seamen recall those of Hawthorne at
Liverpool, and he appears to have acted with an equal sense of humanity.
In one case he insisted that two sailors who had been convicted of theft
should nevertheless receive the three months' pay due them, without which
they would have been penniless on their discharge from prison. He took the
ground that conviction of this offence was not equivalent to desertion,
and therefore that the wages were not forfeited. He adds: "The case did
not appear to call for any leniency on the part of the Government toward
the ship-owners. The record of the ship's voyage was one of
unseaworthiness, brutality and inefficiency."
In another case, the Consul supplied from his own pocket the wants of a
shipwrecked American sailor, and procured for him a passage home, there
being no government fund available for the purpose.
A glimpse of his Consular functions is given in the opening paragraph of
_Young Robin Gray_:--
"The good American bark Skyscraper was swinging at her moorings in the
Clyde, off Bannock, ready for sea. But that good American bark--although
owned in Baltimore--had not a plank of American timber in her hulk, nor a
native American in her crew, and even her nautical 'goodness' had been
called in serious question by divers of that crew during her voyage, and
answered more or less inconclusively with belaying-pins, marlin-spikes,
and ropes' ends at the hands of an Irish-American Captain and a Dutch and
Danish Mate. So much so, that the mysterious powers of the American Consul
at St. Kentigern[101] had been evoked to punish mutiny on the one hand,
and battery and starvation on the other; both equally attested by
manifestly false witness and subornation on each side. In the exercise of
his functions, the Consul had opened and shut some jail doors, and
otherwise effected the usual sullen and deceitful compromise, and his flag
was now flying, on a final visit, from the stern sheets of a smart boat
alongside. It was with a feeling of relief at the end of the interview
that he at last lifted his head above an atmosphere of perjury and
bilge-water and came on deck."
When the Consul reached the deck he saw, for the first time, Ailsa
Callender, one of the most charming of his heroines, and as
characteristically Scotch as M'liss was characteristically Western. The
Reader will not be sorry to recall the impression that Ailsa Callender
subsequently made upon the young American, Robert Gray:--
"'She took me to task for not laying up the yacht on Sunday that the men
could go to "Kirk," and for swearing at a bargeman who ran across our
bows. It's their perfect simplicity and sincerity in all this that gets
me! You'd have thought that the old man was my guardian, and the daughter
my aunt.' After a pause he uttered a reminiscent laugh. 'She thought we
ate and drank too much on the yacht, and wondered what we could find to do
all day. All this, you know, in the gentlest, caressing sort of voice, as
if she was really concerned, like one's own sister. Well, not exactly like
mine,'--he interrupted himself grimly,--'but, hang it all, you know what I
mean. You know that our girls over there haven't got _that_ trick of
voice. Too much self-assertion, I reckon; things made too easy for them by
us men. Habit of race, I dare say.' He laughed a little. 'Why, I mislaid
my glove when I was coming away, and it was as good as a play to hear her
commiserating and sympathizing and hunting for it as if it were a lost
baby.'
"'But you've seen Scotch girls before this,' said the Consul. 'There were
Lady Glairn's daughters whom you took on a cruise.'
"'Yes, but the swell Scotch all imitate the English, as everybody else
does, for the matter of that, our girls included; and they're all alike.'"
The shrewd, solid, genial, even religious Sir James MacFen, in _The Heir
of the McHulishes_, and the porter in _A Rose of Glenbogie_, are native to
the soil, and have no counterparts in America, east or west.
These three stories dealing with Scotch scenes and people prove the
falsity of the assertion sometimes made that Bret Harte could write only
about California:--he could have gone on writing about Scotland all his
life, had he continued to live there, and the tales would have been as
readable, if not so nearly unique, as those which deal with California. He
liked the Scotch people, and was received by them with great kindness and
hospitality. "On my birthday," he wrote, "which became quite accidentally
known to a few friends in the hotel, my table was covered with bouquets of
flowers and little remembrances from cigar-cases to lockets."
At this period Bret Harte made the acquaintance of William Black and
Walter Besant, and with the former he became very intimate. In the life of
William Black by his friend, Sir Wemyss Reid, there are many references to
Bret Harte. The two story-writers first met as guests of Sir George
Wombwell, who had invited them and a few others, including Mr. Shepard,
the American vice-Consul at Bradford, to make a driving trip to the ruined
abbeys of Eastern Yorkshire. The party dined together at the Yorkshire
Club in York, which was the meeting point. "I remember few more lively
evenings than that," writes Sir Wemyss Reid. "Black and Bret Harte, whose
acquaintance he had just made, vied with each other in the good stories
they told and the repartees they exchanged."
Shortly afterward Black wrote to Reid, "Bret Harte went down to us at
Brighton, and if we didn't amuse him he certainly amused us. He is coming
again next week."
Later he wrote again from the Reform Club in London, to Reid: "In a few
weeks' time don't be surprised if Bret Harte and I come and look in upon
you--that is, if he is not compelled for mere shame's sake to go to his
Consular duties ( ! ! ! ) at once. He is the most extraordinary globule of
mercury--comet--aerolite gone drunk--flash of lightning doing Catherine
wheels--I ever had any experience of. Nobody knows where he is, and the
day before yesterday I discovered here a pile of letters that had been
slowly accumulating for him since February, 1879. It seems he never
reported himself to the all-seeing Escott [the hall porter], and never
asked for letters when he got his month's honorary membership last year.
People are now sending letters to him from America addressed to me at
Brighton! But he is a mystery and the cause of mystifications."
In the following July there is another mention of Bret Harte in one of
Black's letters. "Bret Harte was to have been back from Paris last night,
but he is a wandering comet. The only place he is sure not to be found in
is the Glasgow Consulate."
But the Consul's wanderings were not so frequent as Mr. Black supposed.
Bret Harte had almost a monomania for not answering letters; and his
absence from Glasgow could not safely be inferred from his failure to
acknowledge communications addressed to him there. A rumor as to the
Consul's prolonged desertion of his post had reached the State Department
at Washington, and in November, 1882, the Department wrote to him
requesting a report on the subject. He replied that he had not been away
from Glasgow beyond the usual limit of ten days,[102] at any one time,
except on holidays and Sundays. This report appears to have been accepted
as satisfactory, and the incident was closed.
At one time Bret Harte was to have dined with Sir Wemyss Reid and William
Black at the Reform Club; "but in his place," says the biographer, "came a
telegram in which I was invited to ask Black and Lockyer, who had just
spent a few days with him in Scotland, their opinion of the game of
poker--evidence that they had not spent all their time in Scotland in
viewing scenery."
The damp climate of Glasgow did not agree with Bret Harte, and so early
in his residence there as July, 1881, he wrote to the State Department
requesting leave of absence for three months, with permission to visit the
United States, on the ground that the state of his health was such that he
might require a complete change of scene and air. The request was granted,
but the Consul did not return to his native country.
In March, 1885, Bret Harte wrote to Black as follows:--
"My DEAR BLACK,--I was in the far South, trying to get rid of an
obstinate cold, when your note reached me, and haven't been in London
for some time. I expected you to drop in here on your way up to
'Balnagownie's arms'--whoever she may be. I'm afraid I don't want any
'Ardgay' in mine, thank you. Why any man in this damp climate should
want to make himself wetter by salmon-fishing passes my
comprehension. Is there no drier sport to be had in all Great
Britain? I shudder at the name of a river, and shiver at the sight of
any fish that isn't dried. I hear, too, that you are in the habit of
making poetry on these occasions, and that you are dropping lines all
over the place. How far is that place--anyway? I shall be in Glasgow
until the end of March, and if you'll dry yourself thoroughly and
come in and dine with me at that time, I'll show you how 'the
laboring poor' of Glasgow live. Yours always,
"BRET HARTE."
But, alas for Bret Harte! when this letter was written, his labors at
Glasgow were about to cease. In the year 1885 a new Administration entered
upon its duties at Washington, and many Consuls were superseded, perhaps
for good cause. Bret Harte was removed in July, and another man of
letters, Mr. Frank Underwood of Boston, reigned in his stead.