BRET HARTE AS A POET
Whether Bret Harte will make his appeal to posterity mainly as a poet or
as a prose writer is a difficult question, upon which, as upon all similar
matters relating to him, the critics have expressed the most diverse
opinions. There is perhaps more unevenness in his poetry than in his
prose, and certainly more facility in imitating other writers. _Cadet
Grey_ is, in form, almost a parody of "Don Juan." _The Angelus_ might be
ascribed to Longfellow (though he never could have written that last
stanza), _The Tale of a Pony_ to Saxe or Barham, a few others to Praed,
one to Campbell, and one to Calverley. Even that very beautiful poem,
_Conception de Arguello_, a thing almost perfect in its way, strikes no
new note. And yet who could forget the picture which it draws of the
deserted maiden, grieving,--
Until hollows chased the dimples from her cheeks of olive brown,
And at times a swift, shy moisture dragged the long sweet lashes down.
Hardly less pathetic is the description of the grim Commander, her father,
striving vainly to comfort the maid with "proverbs gathered from afar,"
until at last
... the voice sententious faltered, and the wisdom it would teach
Lost itself in fondest trifles of his soft Castilian speech;
And on "Concha," "Conchitita," and "Conchita," he would dwell
With the fond reiteration which the Spaniard knows so well.
So with proverbs and caresses, half in faith and half in doubt,
Every day some hope was kindled, flickered, faded, and went out.
Few, indeed, are the poets who have surpassed the tender simplicity and
pathos of these lines; and yet there is nothing very original about them
either in form or substance. But there are several poems by Bret Harte,
perhaps half a dozen, which do bear the mark of original genius, and
which, from the perfection of their form, seem destined to last forever.
The _Heathen Chinee_, little as Bret Harte himself thought of it, is
certainly one of these. This poem, says Mr. James Douglas, "is merely an
anecdote, an American anecdote, not more deeply humorous than a hundred
other American anecdotes. But it is cast in an imperishable mould of
style.... Mr. Swinburne's noble rhythm sang itself into his soul, and he
gave it forth again in an incongruously comic theme. The rhythm of a
melancholy dirge became the rhythm of duplicity in the garb of innocence.
The sadness and the sighing of Meleagar became the bland iniquity of Ah
Sin, and the indignantly injured depravity of Bill Nye. It was a miracle
of humorous counterpoint, a marvel of incongruously associated ideas."
Too much, however, can easily be made of the part played by the metre of
the _Heathen Chinee_. _Artemis in Sierra_ is as good in its way as the
_Heathen Chinee_, and the very different metre employed in that poem is
made equally effective as the vehicle of irony and burlesque.
Mr. Douglas goes on to say that the Atalanta metre failed in the poem
called _Dow's Flat_, "because there was no exquisite discord between the
sound and the sense, between the rhyme and the reason."
But did it fail? Let these two specimen stanzas answer:--
For a blow of his pick
Sorter caved in the side,
And he looked and turned sick,
Then he trembled and cried.
For you see the dern cuss had struck--"Water?"--Beg your parding, young
man,--there you lied!
It was _gold_,--in the quartz,
And it ran all alike;
And I reckon five oughts
Was the worth of that strike;
And that house with the coopilow's his'n,--which the same isn't bad for
a Pike.
Almost all of Bret Harte's dialect poems have this same perfection of
form, and in the whole range of literature it would be difficult to find
any verses which tell so much in so small a compass. The poems are short,
the lines are usually short, the words are short; but with the few strokes
thus available, the poet paints a picture as complete as it is vivid. The
thing is so simple that it seems easy, and yet where shall we find its
counterpart?
These poems not only please for the moment, but they are read with
pleasure over and over again, and year after year. Perhaps their most
striking quality is their dramatic quality. They tell a story, and often
depict a person. Truthful James, for example, is known to us only as the
narrator of a few startling tales; and yet even by his manner of telling
them he gives us a fair notion of his own character. The opening lines of
_The Spelling Bee at Angels_ are an example:--
Waltz in, waltz in, ye little kids, and gather round my knee,
And drop them books and first pot-hooks, and hear a yarn from me.
I kin not sling a fairy tale of Jinnys fierce and wild,
For I hold it is unchristian to deceive a simple child;
But as from school yer driftin' by, I thowt ye'd like to hear
Of a "Spelling Bee" at Angels that we organized last year.
As for Miss Edith, her character is shown in every line.
You think it ain't true about Ilsey? Well, I guess I know girls,
and I say
There's nothing I see about Ilsey to show she likes you, anyway!
I know what it means when a girl who has called her cat after one boy
Goes and changes its name to another's. And she's done it--and I wish
you joy!
[Illustration: THE HOME OF "TRUTHFUL JAMES," JACKASS FLAT, TUOLUMNE
COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
Copyright, Century Co.]
But these dramatic poems of Bret Harte are surpassed by his lyrical
poems,--surpassed, at least, in respect to that moral elevation which
lyrical poetry seems to have in comparison with dramatic poetry. Lyrical
poetry strikes the higher note. It is the fusion in the poet's own
experience of thought and feeling;--it is _his_ experience; a first-hand
report of one man's impression of the universe. Whereas dramatic poetry,
with all the splendor of which it is capable, is, after all, only a
second-hand report, a representation of what other men have thought or
felt, or said or done. Not Shakspere himself has so elevated mankind,
raised his moral standard, or enlarged his conceptions of the universe, as
have the great lyrical poets.
Bret Harte cannot, of course, be ranked with these; nor, in saying that
his lyrical poems are his best poems, do we necessarily assert for him any
high degree of lyrical power. Perhaps, indeed, the chief defect in his
poetry is an absence of the personal or lyrical element. He gives us
exquisite impressions of human character and of nature, but there is
little of that brooding, reflective quality, which affords the deepest and
most lasting charm of poetry. His poetry lacks atmosphere; it lacks the
pensive, religious note.
Bret Harte, one would think, must have been a romantic and imaginative
lover, and yet in his poetry there is little, if anything, to indicate
that he was ever deeply in love. Of romantic devotion to a woman, as to a
superior being, we find no trace either in his stories or in his poetry.
How far removed from Bret Harte is that mingled feeling of love and
veneration which, originating in the Middle Ages, has lasted, in poetry at
least, almost down to our own time, as in these lines from a writer who
was contemporary with Bret Harte:--
When thy cheek is dewed with tears
On some dark day when friends depart,
When life before thee seems all fears
And all remembrance one long smart,
Then in the secret sacred cell
Thy soul keeps for her hour of prayer,
Breathe but my name, that I may dwell
Part of thy worship alway there.
Bret Harte was cast in a different mould. No doubts or fears distracted
him. So far as we know, he asked no questions about the universe, and
troubled himself very little about the destiny of mankind. He was
essentially unreligious, unphilosophic, true to his own instincts, but
indifferent to all matters that lay beyond them. And yet within that range
he had a depth and sincerity of feeling which issued in real poetry. Bret
Harte, with all the refinement, love of elegance, reserve and
self-restraint which characterized him, was a very natural man. He
possessed in full degree what one philosopher has called the primeval
instincts of pity, of pride, of pugnacity. He loved his fellow-man, he
loved his country, he loved nature, and these passions, curbed by that
unerring sense of artistic form and clothed in that beauty of style which
belonged to him, were expressed in a few poems that seem likely to last
forever. It was not often that he felt the necessary stimulus, but when he
did feel it, the response was sure. Of these immortal poems, if we may
make bold to call them such, probably the best known is that on the death
of Dickens. This is the last stanza:--
And on that grave where English oak and holly
And laurel wreaths entwine,
Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly,
This spray of Western pine![108]
Still better is the poem on the death of Starr King. It is very short; let
us have it before us.
RELIEVING GUARD
THOMAS STARR KING. OBIIT MARCH 4, 1864.
Came the relief. "What, sentry, ho!
How passed the night through thy long waking?"
"Cold, cheerless, dark,--as may befit
The hour before the dawn is breaking."
"No sight? no sound?" "No; nothing save
The plover from the marshes calling,
And in yon western sky, about
An hour ago, a star was falling."
"A star? There's nothing strange in that."
"No, nothing; but above the thicket,
Somehow it seemed to me that God
Somewhere had just relieved a picket."
What impresses the reader most, or at least first, in this poem is its
extreme conciseness and simplicity. The words are so few, and the weight
of suggestion which they have to carry so heavy, that the misuse of a
single word,--a single word not in perfect taste, would have spoiled the
beauty of the whole. Long years ago the "Saturday Review"--the good old,
ferocious Saturday--sagely remarked: "It is not given to every one to be
simple"; and only genius could have achieved the simplicity of this short
poem. "The relief came" would have been prose. "Came the relief" is
poetry, not merely because the arrangement of the words is unusual, but
because this short inverted sentence strikes a note of abruptness and
intensity which prepares the reader for what is to come, and which is
maintained throughout the poem;--had it not so been maintained, an
anti-climax would have resulted.
Moreover, short and simple as this poem is, it seems to contain three
distinct strands of feeling. There is, first, the personal feeling for
Thomas Starr King; and although he was a minister and not a soldier,
there is a suitability in connecting him with the picket, for, as we have
seen, it was owing to him, more than to any other man, that California was
saved to the Union in the Civil War. Secondly, there is the National
patriotic feeling which forms the strong under-current of the poem,
nowhere expressed, but unmistakably implied, and present in the minds of
both poet and reader. Possibly, we may even find in "the hour before the
dawn" an allusion to the period when Mr. King died and the poem was
written; for that was the final desperate period of the war, darkened by a
terrible expenditure of human life and suffering, and lightened only by a
prospect of the end then slowly but surely coming into view. Thirdly,
there is the feeling for nature which the poem exhibits in its firm though
scanty etching of the sombre night, the lonely marshes, and the distant
sky. The poem is a blending of these three feelings, each one enhancing
the other;--and even this does not complete the tale, for there is the
final suggestion that the death of a man may be of as much consequence in
the mind of the Creator, and as nicely calculated, as the falling of a
star.
The truth is that Bret Harte's national poems, with which this tribute to
Starr King may properly be classed, have a depth of personal feeling not
often found elsewhere in his poetry. In common with all men of primitive
impulses, he was genuinely patriotic. "America was always 'my country'
with him," writes one who knew him in England; "and I remember how he
flushed with almost boyish pleasure when, in driving through some casual
rural festivities, his quick eye noted a stray American flag among the
display of bunting."
This patriotic feeling gave to his national poems the true lyrical note.
Among the best of these is that stirring song of the drum, called _The
Reveille_, which was read at a crowded meeting held in the San Francisco
Opera House immediately after President Lincoln had called for one hundred
thousand volunteers. In this poem the student of American history, and
especially the foreign student, will find an expression of that National
feeling which animated the Northern people, and which sanctified the
horrors of the Civil War,--one of the few wars recorded in history that
was waged for a pure ideal,--the ideal of the Union.
With these poems may be classed some stanzas from _Cadet Grey_ describing
the life of the West Point cadet, and this one in particular:--
Within the camp they lie, the young, the brave,
Half knight, half schoolboy, acolytes of fame,
Pledged to one altar, and perchance one grave;
Bred to fear nothing but reproach and blame,
Ascetic dandies o'er whom vestals rave,
Clean-limbed young Spartans, disciplined young elves,
Taught to destroy, that they may live to save,
Students embattled, soldiers at their shelves,
Heroes whose conquests are at first themselves.
It has been said that one function of literature, and especially of
poetry, is to enable a nation to understand and appreciate, and thus more
completely to realize, the ideals which it has instinctively formed; and
in the lines just quoted Bret Harte has done this for West Point.
The poem on San Francisco glows with patriotic and civic feeling, and it
expressed a sentiment which, at the time when it was written, hardly
anybody in the city, except the poet himself, entertained. San Francisco
in 1870 was dominated by that cold, hard, self-satisfied, commercial
spirit which Bret Harte especially hated, and which furnished one reason,
perhaps the main reason, for his departure from the State.
Drop down, O fleecy Fog, and hide
Her sceptic sneer and all her pride!
Wrap her, O Fog, in gown and hood
Of her Franciscan Brotherhood.
Hide me her faults, her sin and blame;
With thy gray mantle cloak her shame!
And yet it was impossible for Bret Harte, with his deep, abiding faith in
the good instincts of mankind, not to look forward to a better day for San
Francisco,
When Art shall raise and Culture lift
The sensual joys and meaner thrift,
And all fulfilled the vision we
Who watch and wait shall never see.
There is also a strong lyrical element in Bret Harte's treatment of nature
in his poetry, as well as in his prose. What he always gives is his own
impression of the scene, not a mere description of it, although this
impression may be conveyed by a few slight touches, sometimes even by a
single word. The opening stanza of the poem on the death of Dickens is an
illustration:--
Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting,
The river sang below;
The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting
Their minarets of snow.
Ruskin somewhere analyzes the difference between real poetry and prose in
a versified form, and quoting a few lines from Byron, he points out the
single word in them which makes the passage poetic. In the lines just
quoted from Bret Harte, the word "sang" has the same poetic quality; and
no one who has ever heard the sound which the poet here describes can fail
to recognize the truth of his metaphor.[109]
This is always Bret Harte's method. He reproduces the emotional effect of
the scene upon himself, and thus exhibits nature to the reader as she
appeared to him. Emotion, it need not be said, is transmitted much more
effectively than ideas or information. In fact, an objective, detailed
description of a landscape, however accurate or exhaustive, will leave the
reader almost as it found him; whereas a single word which enables him to
share the emotion inspired by the scene in the breast of the writer will
transport him at a bound to the spot itself.
The charm of life in California consisted largely in this, that it was
lived in the open air. It was almost a perpetual camping out, made
delightful by the mildness of the climate and the beauty of the
surroundings. Even the cheerful fires of pine or of scrub oak which burn
so frequently in the cabins of Bret Harte's miners, are kindled mainly to
offset the dampness of the rainy season; and though the fire blazes
merrily on the hearth the door of the hut is usually open. The Reader
knows how "Union Mills" indolently left one leg exposed to the rain on the
outside of the threshold, the rest of his body being under cover inside.
Bret Harte in his poems and stories availed himself of this out-door life
to the fullest extent. When the Rose of Tuolumne was summoned from her
bedroom, at two o'clock in the morning, to entertain her father's guest,
the youthful poet, she met him, not in the stuffy sitting-room of the
house, but in the moonlight outside, with the snow-crowned Sierras dimly
visible in the distance, and "quaint odors from the woods near by
perfuming the warm, still air."
The young Englishman, Mainwaring, and Louise Macy, the Phyllis of the
Sierras, could not help being confidential sitting in the moonlight on
that unique veranda which overhung the Great Canon, two thousand feet
deep, as many wide, and lined with tall trees, dark and motionless in the
distance. If the Outcasts of Poker Flat had met their fate in ordinary
surroundings, victims either of the machinery of the law or of man's
violence, we should think of them only as criminals; but with nature
herself as their executioner, and the scene of their death that remote,
wooded amphitheatre in the mountains, they regain their lost dignity as
human beings. How vast is the difference between John Oakhurst shooting
himself in a bedroom at some second-class hotel, and performing the same
act at the head of a snow-covered ravine and beneath the lofty pine tree
to which he affixed the playing card that contained his epitaph!
In _Tennessee's Partner_, the whole tragedy is transacted in the open air,
excepting the trial scene; and even the little upper room which serves as
a court house for the lynching party is hardly a screen from the
landscape. "Against the blackness of the pines the windows of the old loft
above the express office stood out staringly bright; and through their
curtainless panes the loungers below could see the forms of those who were
even then deciding the fate of Tennessee. And above all this, etched on
the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with
remoter passionless stars."
Nature, thank God, does not share our emotions, and, so far as we know, is
swayed by no emotions of her own. But she inspires certain emotions in us,
and is a visible, tangible representation of strength and serenity. Those
who delight in nature are a long way from regarding her as they would a
brick or a stone. A certain pantheism, such as Wordsworth was accused of,
can be attributed to everybody who loves the landscape. There is a mystery
in the beautiful inanimate world, as there is in every other phase of the
universe. "A forest," said Thoreau, "is in all mythologies a sacred
place"; and it must ever remain such. Let anybody wander alone upon some
mountain-side or hilltop, and watch the wind blowing through the scanty,
unmown grass, and it will be strange if the vague consciousness of some
presence other than his own does not insinuate itself into his mind. He
will begin to understand how it was that the Ancients peopled every bush
and stream with nymphs or deities. Richard Jeffries went even further than
Wordsworth. "Though I cannot name the ideal good," he wrote, "it seems to
me that it will be in some way closely associated with the ideal beauty of
nature."
Bret Harte did not trouble himself much about the ideal good; but he had
in full degree the modern feeling for nature, and found in her a
mysterious charm and solace,--"that profound peace," to use his own
language, "which the mountains alone can give their lonely or perturbed
children."
In one of the stories, _Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy_, he describes the
unlucky and unhappy miner going to the door of his cabin at midnight.
"In the feverish state into which he had gradually worked himself it
seemed to him impossible to await the coming of the dawn. But he was
mistaken. For even as he stood there all nature seemed to invade his
humble cabin with its free and fragrant breath, and invest him with its
great companionship. He felt again, in that breath, that strange sense of
freedom, that mystic touch of partnership with the birds and beasts, the
shrubs and trees, in this greater home before him. It was this vague
communion that had kept him there, that still held these world-sick, weary
workers in their rude cabins on the slopes around him; and he felt upon
his brow that balm that had nightly lulled him and them to sleep and
forgetfulness. He closed the door, crept into his bunk, and presently fell
into a profound slumber."
This kind of communion with nature depends upon a certain degree of
solitude, and the mere suggestion of a crowd puts it to flight at once.
Even the magnificence of the Swiss mountains is almost spoiled for the
real lover of nature by those surroundings from which only the skilled
mountain-climber is able to escape. Mere solitude, on the other hand,
provided that it be out of doors, is almost always beautiful and
certainly beneficent in itself.
He who lives in a desert or in a wood, on a mountain top, like the Twins
of Table Mountain, or in an unpeopled prairie, may have many faults and
vices, but there are some from which he will certainly be free. He will be
serene and simple, if nothing more. "It is impossible," as Thomas Hardy
remarks, "for any one living upon a heath to be vulgar"; and the reason is
obvious. Vulgarity, as we all know, is merely a form of insincerity. To be
vulgar is to say and do things not naturally and out of one's own head,
but in the attempt to be or to appear something different from the
reality. There can be no vulgarity on the heath, on the farm, or in the
mining camp, for there everybody's character and circumstances are known;
there is no opportunity for deceit, and there is no motive for pretence.
Moreover, the primitive simplicity of the mining and the logging camp, or
even that of an isolated farming community, is not essentially different
from the cultivated simplicity of the aristocrat. The laboring man and the
aristocrat have very much the same sense of honor and the same ideals; and
those writers who are at home with one are almost always at home with the
other. Sir Walter Scott and Tolstoi are examples. But between these two
extremes, which meet at many points, comes the citified, trading, clerking
class, which has lost its primitive, manly instincts, and has not yet
regained them in the chastened form of convictions.
It is no exaggeration to say that the society which Bret Harte enjoyed in
London was more akin to that of the mining camp than to that of San
Francisco. In both cases the charm which attracted him was the charm of
simplicity; in the mining camp, the simplicity of nature, in London the
simplicity of cultivation and finish.