BRET HARTE AS A WRITER OF FICTION
Bret Harte's faculty was not so much that of imagining as of apprehending
human character. Some writers of fiction, those who have the highest form
of creative imagination, are able from their own minds to spin the web and
woof of the characters that they describe; and it makes small difference
where they live or what literary material lies about them. Even these
authors do not create their heroes and heroines quite out of whole
cloth,--they have a shred or two to begin with; but their work is mainly
the result of creation rather than perception.
The test of creative imagination is that the characters portrayed by it
are subjected to various exigencies and influences: they grow, develop,
yes, even change, and yet retain their consistency. There is a masterly
example of this in Trollope's "Small House at Allington," where he depicts
the slow, astounding, and yet perfectly natural disintegration of Crosby's
moral character. The aftermath of love-making between Pendennis and
Blanche Amory is another instance. This has been called by one critic the
cleverest thing in all Thackeray; but still more clever, though clever is
too base a word for an episode so beautifully conceived, is that dawning
of passion, hopeless and quickly quenched, between Laura Pendennis and
George Warrington, the two strongest characters in the book. Only the hand
of creative genius can guide its characters safely through such labyrinths
of feeling, such back-eddies of emotion.
A few great novels have indeed been written by authors who did not
possess this faculty, especially by Dickens, in whom it was conspicuously
lacking; but no long story was ever produced without betraying its
author's deficiency in this respect if the deficiency existed. _Gabriel
Conroy_, Bret Harte's only novel, is so bad as a whole, though abounding
in gems, its characters are so inconsistent and confused, its ending so
incomprehensible, that it produces upon the reader the effect of a
nightmare.
In fact, the nearer Bret Harte's stories approach the character of an
episode the better and more dramatic they are. Of the longer stories, the
best, as everybody will admit, is _Cressy_, and that is little more than
the expansion of a single incident. As a rule, in reading the longer
tales, one remembers, as he progresses, that the situations and the events
are fictitious; they have not the spontaneous, inevitable aspect which
makes the shorter tales impressive. _Tennessee's Partner_ is as historical
as Robinson Crusoe. Bret Harte had something of a weakness for elaborate
plots, but they were not in his line. Plots and situations can hardly be
satisfactory or artistic unless they form the means whereby the characters
of the persons in the tale are developed, or, if not developed, at least
revealed to the reader. The development or the gradual revelation of
character is the _raison d'etre_ for the long story or novel.
But this capacity our author seems to have lacked. It might be said that
he did not require it, because his characters appear to us full-fledged
from the start. He has, indeed, a wonderful power of setting them before
the reader almost immediately, and by virtue of a few masterly strokes.
After an incident or two, we know the character; there is nothing more to
be revealed; and a prolongation of the story would be superfluous.
But here we touch upon Bret Harte's weakness as a portrayer of human
nature. It surely indicates some deficiency in a writer of fiction if
with the additional scope afforded by a long story he can tell us no more
about his people than he is able to convey by a short story. The
deficiency in Bret Harte was perhaps this, that he lacked a profound
knowledge of human nature. A human being regarded as material for a writer
of fiction may be divided into two parts. There is that part, the more
elemental one, which he shares with other men, and there is, secondly,
that part which differentiates him from other men. In other words, he is
both a type of human nature, and a particular specimen with individual
variations.
The ideal story-writer would be able to master his subject in each aspect,
and in describing a single person to depict at once both the nature of all
men and also the nature of that particular man. Shakspere, Sterne,
Thackeray have this power. Other writers can do the one thing but not the
other; and in this respect Hawthorne and Bret Harte stand at opposite
extremes. Hawthorne had a profound knowledge of human nature; but he was
lacking in the capacity to hit off individual characteristics. Arthur
Dimmesdale and Hester, even Miriam and Hilda, are not real to us in the
sense in which Colonel Newcome and Becky Sharp are real. Hawthorne's
figures are somewhat spectral; they lack flesh and blood. His forte was
not observation but reflection. He worked from the inside.
Bret Harte, on the other hand, worked from the outside. He had not that
faculty, so strong in Hawthorne, of delving into his own nature by way of
getting at the nature of other men; but he had the faculty of sympathetic
observation which enabled him to perceive and understand the
characteristic traits that distinguish one man from another.
_Barker's Luck_ and _Three Partners_, taken together, illustrate Bret
Harte's limitations in this respect. Each of these stories has Barker for
its central theme, the other personages being little more than foils to
him. In the first story, _Barker's Luck_, the plot is very simple, the
incidents are few, and yet we have the character of the hero conveyed to
us with exquisite effect. In _Three Partners_ the theme is elaborated, a
complicated plot is introduced, and Barker appears in new relations and
situations. But we know him no better than we did before. _Barker's Luck_
covered the ground; and _Three Partners_, a more ambitious story, is far
below it in verisimilitude and in dramatic effect. In the same way,
_M'liss_, in its original form, is much superior to the longer and more
complex story which its author wrote some years afterward, and which is
printed in the collected edition of his works, to the exclusion of the
earlier tale.
In one case, however, Bret Harte did succeed in showing the growth and
development of a character. The trilogy known as _A Waif of the Plains_,
_Susy_, and _Clarence_, is almost the same as one long story; and in it
the character of Clarence, from boyhood to maturity, is skilfully and
consistently traced. Upon this character Bret Harte evidently bestowed
great pains, and there are some notable passages in his delineation of it,
especially the account of the duel between Clarence and Captain Pinckney.
Not less surprising to Clarence himself than to the reader is the calm
ferocity with which he kills his antagonist; and we share the thrill of
horror which ran through the little group of spectators when it was
whispered about that this gentlemanly young man, so far removed in
appearance from a fire-eater, was the son of Hamilton Brant, the noted
duellist. The situation had brought to the surface a deep-lying, inherited
trait, of which even its possessor had been ignorant. In this character,
certainly in this incident, Bret Harte goes somewhat deeper than his wont.
We have his own testimony to the fact that his genius was perceptive
rather than creative. In those Scotch stories and sketches in which the
Consul appears, very much in the capacity of a Greek chorus, the author
lets fall now and then a remark plainly autobiographical in character.
Thus, in _A Rose of Glenbogie_, speaking of Mrs. Deeside, he says, "The
Consul, more _perceptive_ than analytical, found her a puzzle."
This confirms Bret Harte's other statement, made elsewhere, that his
characters, instead of being imagined, were copied from life. But they
were copied with the insight and the emphasis of genius. The ability to
read human nature is about the most rare of mental possessions. How little
do we know even of those whom we see every day, and whom, perhaps, we have
lived with all our lives! Let a man ask himself what his friend or his
wife or his son would do in some supposable emergency; how they would take
this or that injury or affront, good fortune or bad fortune, great sorrow
or great happiness, the defection of a friend, a strong temptation. Let
him ask himself any such question, and, in all probability, he will be
forced to admit that he does not know what would be the result. Who,
remembering his college or schoolboy days, will fail to recognize the
truth of Thoreau's remark, "One may discover a new side to his most
intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public"!
These surprises occur not because human nature is inconsistent,--the law
of character is as immutable as any other law;--it is because individual
character eludes us. But it did not elude Bret Harte. He had a wonderful
faculty both for understanding and remembering its outward manifestations.
His genius was akin to that of the actor; and this explains, perhaps, his
lifelong desire to write a successful play. Mr. Watts-Dunton has told us
with astonishment how Bret Harte, years after a visit to one of the
London Music Halls, minutely recounted all that he had heard and seen
there, and imitated all the performers. That he would have made a great
actor in the style of Joseph Jefferson is the opinion of that accomplished
critic.
The surprising quickness with which he seized and assimilated any new form
of dialect was a kind of dramatic capacity. The Spanish-English, mixed
with California slang, which Enriquez Saltello spoke, is as good in its
way as the immortal Costigan's Irish-English. "'To confer then as to thees
horse, which is not--observe me--a Mexican plug. Ah, no! you can your
boots bet on that. She is of Castilian stock--believe me and strike me
dead! I will myself at different times overlook and affront her in the
stable, examine her as to the assault, and why she should do thees thing.
When she is of the exercise I will also accost and restrain her. Remain
tranquil, my friend! When a few days shall pass much shall be changed, and
she will be as another. Trust your oncle to do thees thing! Comprehend me?
Everything shall be lovely, and the goose hang high.'"
Bret Harte's short stay in Prussia, and later in Scotland, enabled him to
grasp the peculiarities of nature and speech belonging to the natives.
Peter Schroeder, the idealist, could have sprung to life nowhere except
upon German soil. "Peter pondered long and perplexedly. Gradually an
explanation slowly evolved itself from his profundity. He placed his
finger beside his nose, and a look of deep cunning shone in his eyes.
'Dot's it,' he said to himself triumphantly, 'dot's shoost it! Der
Rebooplicans don't got no memories. Ve don't got nodings else.'"
What character could be more Scotch, and less anything else, than the
porter at the railway station where the Consul alighted on his way to
visit the MacSpaddens. "'Ye'll no be rememberin' me. I had a machine in
St. Kentigern and drove ye to MacSpadden's ferry often. Far, far too
often! She's a strange, flagrantitious creature; her husband's but a puir
fule, I'm thinkin', and ye did yersel' nae guid gaunin' there.'"
Mr. Callender, again, Ailsa's father, in _Young Robin Gray_, breathes
Scotch Calvinism and Scotch thrift and self-respect in every line.
"'Have you had a cruise in the yacht?' asked the Consul.
"'Ay,' said Mr. Callender, 'we have been up and down the loch, and around
the far point, but not for boardin' or lodgin' the night, nor otherwise
conteenuing or parteecipating.... Mr. Gray's a decent enough lad, and not
above instruction, but extraordinar' extravagant.'"
Even the mysteries of Franco-English seem to have been fathomed by Bret
Harte, possibly by his contact with French people in San Francisco. This
is how the innkeeper explained to Alkali Dick some peculiarities of French
custom: "'For you comprehend not the position of _la jeune fille_ in all
France! Ah! in America the young lady she go everywhere alone; I have seen
her--pretty, charming, fascinating--alone with the young man. But here,
no, never! Regard me, my friend. The French mother, she say to her
daughter's fiance, "Look! there is my daughter. She has never been alone
with a young man for five minutes,--not even with you. Take her for your
wife!" It is monstrous! It is impossible! It is so!'"
The moral complement of this rare capacity for reading human nature was
the sympathy, the tenderness of feeling which Bret Harte possessed.
Sympathy with human nature, with its weaknesses, with the tragedies which
it is perpetually encountering, and above all, with its redeeming
virtues,--this is the keynote of Bret Harte's works, the mainspring of his
humor and pathos. He had the gift of satire as well, but, fortunately for
the world, he made far less use of it. Satire is to humor as corporal
punishment is to personal influence. A satire is a jest, but a cutting
one,--a jest in which the victim is held up to scorn or contempt.
Humor is a much more subtle quality than satire. Like satire, it is the
perception of an incongruity, but it must be a newly discovered or
invented incongruity, for an essential element in humor is the pleasurable
surprise, the gentle shock which it conveys. A New Jersey farmer was once
describing in the presence of a very humane person, the great age and
debility of a horse that he had formerly owned and used. "You ought to
have killed him!" interrupted the humane person indignantly. "Well,"
drawled the farmer, "we did,--almost." Satire is merely destructive,
whereas sentiment is constructive. The most that satire can do is to show
how the thing ought _not_ to be done. But sentiment goes much further, for
it supplies the dynamic power of affection. Becky Sharp dazzles and
amuses; but Colonel Newcome softens and inspires.
There is often in Bret Harte a subtle blending of satire and humor,
notably in that masterpiece of satirical humor, the _Heathen Chinee_. The
poet beautifully depicts the naive indignation of the American gambler at
the duplicity of the Mongolian,--a duplicity exceeding even his own. "'We
are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!'"
Another instance is that passage in _The Rose of Tuolumne_, where the
author, after relating how a stranger was shot and nearly killed in a
mining town, records the prevailing impression in the neighborhood "that
his misfortune was the result of the defective moral quality of his being
a stranger." So, in _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_, when the punishment of
Mr. Oakhurst was under consideration, "A few of the Committee had urged
hanging him as a possible example and a sure method of reimbursing
themselves from his pockets of the money he had won from them. 'It's agin
justice,' said Jim Wheeler, 'to let this yer young man from Roaring
Camp--an entire stranger--carry away our money.' But a crude sentiment of
equity residing in the breasts of those who had been fortunate enough to
win from Mr. Oakhurst overruled this narrower local prejudice."
Even in these passages humor predominates over satire. In fact,--and it is
a fact characteristic of Bret Harte,--the only satire, pure and simple, in
his works is that which he directs against hypocrisy. This was the one
fault which he could not forgive; and he especially detested that peculiar
form of cold and calculating hypocrisy which occasionally survives as the
dregs of Puritanism. Bret Harte was keenly alive to this aspect of New
England character; and he has depicted it with almost savage intensity in
_The Argonauts of North Liberty_. Ezekiel Corwin, a shrewd, flinty, narrow
Yankee, is not a new figure in literature, but an old figure in one or two
new situations, notably in his appearance at the mining camps as a vender
of patent medicines. "That remarkably unfair and unpleasant-spoken man had
actually frozen Hanley's Ford into icy astonishment at his audacity, and
he had sold them an invoice of the Panacea before they had recovered; he
had insulted Chipitas into giving an extensive order in bitters; he had
left Hayward's Creek pledged to Burne's pills--with drawn revolvers still
in their hands."
Even here, however, the bitterness of the satire is tempered by the humor
of the situation. But in Joan, the heroine of the story, we have a really
new figure in literature, and it is drawn with an absence of sympathy, of
humor and of mitigating circumstances which is very rare, if not unique,
in Bret Harte.[106]
One other example of pure satire may be found in his works, and that is
Parson Wynn, the effusive, boisterous hypocrite who plays a subordinate
part in _The Carquinez Woods_.[107] With these few exceptions, however,
Bret Harte was a writer of sentiment, and that is the secret of his power.
Sentiment may take the form of humor or of pathos, and, as is often
remarked, these two qualities shade off into each other by imperceptible
degrees.
Some things are of that nature as to make
One's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache.
A consummate example of this blending of humor and pathos is found in the
story _How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar_. The boy Johnny, after
greeting the Christmas guests in his "weak, treble voice, broken by that
premature harshness which only vagabondage and the habit of premature
self-assertion can give," and after hospitably setting out the whiskey
bottle, with crackers and cheese, creeps back to bed, and is thus accosted
by Dick Bullen, the hero of the story:--
"'Hello, Johnny! You ain't goin' to turn in agin, are ye?'
"'Yes, I are,' responded Johnny decidedly.
"'Why, wot's up, old fellow?'
"'I'm sick.'
"'How sick?'
"'I've got a fevier, and childblains, and roomatiz,' returned Johnny, and
vanished within. After a moment's pause he added in the dark, apparently
from under the bedclothes,--'And biles!'
"There was an embarrassing silence. The men looked at each other and at
the fire."
How graphically in this story are the characters of the Old Man and his
boy Johnny indicated by a few strokes of humor and pathos! Perhaps this is
the greatest charm of humor in literature, namely, that it so easily
becomes the vehicle of character. Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar of
Wakefield are revealed to us mainly by those humorous touches which
display the foibles, the eccentricities, and even the virtues of each.
Wit, on the other hand, being a purely intellectual quality, is a
comparatively uninteresting gift. How small is the part that wit plays in
literature! Personality is the charm of literature, as it is of life, and
humor is always a revelation of personality. The Essays of Lamb amount
almost to an autobiography. Goldsmith had humor, Congreve wit; and
probably that is the main reason why "She Stoops to Conquer" still holds
the stage, whereas the plays of Congreve are known only to the scholar.
California was steeped in humor, and none but a humorist could have
interpreted the lives of the Pioneers. They were, in the main, scions of a
humorous race. Democracy is the mother of humor, and the ideal of both was
found in New England and in the Western States, whence came the greater
part of the California immigration. In passing from New England to the
isolated farms of the Far West, American humor had undergone some change.
The Pioneer, struggling with a new country, and often with chills and
fever, religious in a gloomy, emotional, old-fashioned way, leading a
lonely life, had developed a humor more saturnine than that of New
England. Yuba Bill, in all probability, was an emigrant from what we now
call the Middle West. Upon this New England and Western humor as a
foundation, California engrafted its own peculiar type of humor, which was
the product of youth, courage and energy wrestling with every kind of
difficulty and danger. The Pioneers had something of the Mark Tapley
spirit, and triumphed over fate by making a jest of the worst that fate
could do to them.
Nothing short of great prosperity could awe the miner into taking a
serious view of things. His solemnity after a "strike" was remarkable. In
'52 and '53 a company of miners had toiled fruitlessly for fourteen
months, digging into solid rock which, from its situation and from many
other indications, had promised to be the hiding-place of gold. At last
they abandoned the claim in despair, except that one of their number
lingered to remove a big, loose block of porphyry upon which he had long
been working. Behind that block he found sand and gravel containing gold
in such abundance as, eventually, to enrich the whole company. The next
day happened to be Sunday, and for the first time in those fourteen months
they all went to church.
A "find" like this was a gift of the gods, something that could not be
depended upon. It imposed responsibilities, and suggested thoughts of
home. But hardship, adversity, danger and sudden death,--these were all in
the day's work, and they could best be endured by making light of them.
California humor was, therefore, in one way, the reverse of ordinary
American humor. In place of grotesque exaggeration, the California
tendency was to minimize. The Pioneer was as euphemistic in speaking of
death as was the Greek or Roman of classic times. "To pass in his checks,"
was the Pacific Slope equivalent for the more dignified _Actum est de me_.
This was the phrase, as the Reader will remember, that Mr. Oakhurst
immortalized by writing it on the playing card which, affixed to a
bowie-knife, served that famous gambler for tombstone and epitaph. He used
it in no flippant spirit, but in the sadly humorous spirit of the true
Californian, as if he were loath to attribute undue importance to the mere
fact that the unit of his own life had been forever withdrawn from the sum
total of human existence.
Of this California minimizing humor, frequent also in the pages of Mark
Twain and Ambrose Bierce, there is an example in Bret Harte's poem,
_Cicely_:--
I've had some mighty mean moments afore I kem to this spot,--
Lost on the Plains in '50, drownded almost and shot;
But out on this alkali desert, a-hunting a crazy wife,
Was r'aly as on-satis-factory as anything in my life.
There is another familiar example in these well-known lines by Truthful
James:--
Then Abner Dean of Angels raised a point of order, when
A chunk of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen,
And he smiled a kind of sickly smile, and curled up on the floor,
And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.
This was typical California humor, and Bret Harte, in his stories and
poems, more often perhaps in the latter, gave frequent expression to it;
but it was not typical Bret Harte humor. The humor of the passage just
quoted from _How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar_, the humor that made
Bret Harte famous, and still more the humor that made him beloved, was not
saturnine or satirical, but sympathetic and tender. It was humor not from
an external point of view, but from the victim's point of view. The
Californians themselves saw persons and events in a different way; and how
imperfect their vision was may be gathered from the fact that they stoutly
denied the truth of Bret Harte's descriptions of Pioneer life. They were
too close at hand, too much a part of the drama themselves, to perceive it
correctly. Bret Harte had the faculty as to which it is hard to say how
much is intellectual and how much is emotional, of getting behind the
scenes, and beholding men and motives as they really are.
That brilliant critic, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, declares that Bret Harte was
a genuine American, that he was also a genuine humorist, but that he was
not an American humorist; and then he proceeds to support this very just
antithesis as follows: "American humor is purely exaggerative; Bret
Harte's humor was sympathetic and analytical. The wild, sky-breaking humor
of America has its fine qualities, but it must in the nature of things be
deficient in two qualities,--reverence and sympathy. And these two
qualities were knit into the closest texture of Bret Harte's humor. Mark
Twain's story ... about an organist who was asked to play appropriate
music to an address upon the parable of the Prodigal Son, and who
proceeded to play with great spirit, 'We'll all get blind drunk when
Johnny comes marching home' is an instance.... If Bret Harte had described
that scene it would in some subtle way have combined a sense of the
absurdity of the incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos of
the scene. You would have felt that the organist's tune was funny, but not
that the Prodigal Son was funny."
No excuse need be offered for quoting further what Mr. Chesterton has to
say about the parodies of Bret Harte, for it covers the whole ground: "The
supreme proof of the fact that Bret Harte had the instinct of reverence
may be found in the fact that he was a really great parodist. Mere
derision, mere contempt, never produced or could produce parody. A man who
simply despises Paderewski for having long hair is not necessarily fitted
to give an admirable imitation of his particular touch on the piano. If a
man wishes to parody Paderewski's style of execution, he must emphatically
go through one process first: he must admire it and even reverence it.
Bret Harte had a real power of imitating great authors.... This means and
can only mean that he had perceived the real beauty, the real ambition of
Dumas and Victor Hugo and Charlotte Bronte. In his imitation of Hugo, Bret
Harte has a passage like this: 'M. Madeline was, if possible, better than
M. Myriel. M. Myriel was an angel. M. Madeline was a good man.' I do not
know whether Victor Hugo ever used this antithesis; but I am certain that
he would have used it and thanked his stars for it, if he had thought of
it. This is real parody, inseparable from imitation."
The optimism for which Bret Harte was remarkable had its root in that same
sympathy which formed the basis of his humor and pathos. The unsympathetic
critic invariably despairs of mankind and the universe. This is apparent
in social, moral, and even political matters. A typical reformer, such as
the late Mr. Godkin, gazing horror-struck at Tammany and the Tammany
politician, discerns no hope for the future. But the Tammany man himself,
knowing the virtues as well as the vices of his people, is optimistic to
the point of exuberance. After all, there is something in the human heart,
amid all its vileness, which ranges mankind on the side of the angels, not
of the devils. The sympathetic critic perceives this, and therefore he has
confidence in the future of the race; and may even indulge the supreme
hope that from this terrible world we shall pass into another and better
state of existence.