by BERTHA CLARK POPE
"The question that starts to the lips of ninety-nine readers out of a
hundred," says Arnold Bennett, in a review in the London _NEW AGE_ in
1909, "even the best informed, will assuredly be: 'Who is Ambrose
Bierce?' I scarcely know, but I will say that among what I may term
'underground reputations' that of Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most
striking example. You may wander for years through literary circles
and never meet anybody who has heard of Ambrose Bierce, and then you
may hear some erudite student whisper in an awed voice: 'Ambrose
Bierce is the greatest living prose writer.' I have heard such an
opinion expressed."
Bierce himself shows his recognition of the "underground" quality of
his reputation in a letter to George Sterling: "How many times, and
during a period of how many years must one's unexplainable obscurity
be pointed out to constitute fame? Not knowing, I am almost disposed
to consider myself the most famous of authors. I have pretty nearly
ceased to be 'discovered,' but my notoriety as an obscurian may be
said to be worldwide and everlasting."
Anything which would throw light on such a figure, at once obscure
and famous, is valuable. These letters of Ambrose Bierce, here printed
for the first time, are therefore of unusual interest. They are the
informal literary work--the term is used advisedly--of a man esteemed
great by a small but acutely critical group, read enthusiastically by
a somewhat larger number to whom critical examination of what they
read seldom occurs, and ignored by the vast majority of readers; a man
at once more hated and more adored than any on the Pacific Coast; a
man not ten years off the scene yet already become a tradition and a
legend; whose life, no less than his death, held elements of mystery,
baffling contradictions, problems for puzzled conjecture, motives and
meanings not vouchsafed to outsiders.
Were Ambrose Bierce as well known as he deserves to be, the
introduction to these letters could be slight; we should not have to
stop to inquire who he was and what he did. As it is, we must.
Ambrose Bierce, the son of Marcus Aurelius and Laura (Sherwood)
Bierce, born in Meiggs County, Ohio, June 24, 1842, was at the
outbreak of the Civil War a youth without formal education, but with a
mind already trained. "My father was a poor farmer," he once said to a
friend, "and could give me no general education, but he had a good
library, and to his books I owe all that I have." He promptly
volunteered in 1861 and served throughout the war. Twice, at the risk
of his life, he rescued wounded companions from the battlefield, and
at Kenesaw Mountain was himself severely wounded in the head. He was
brevetted Major for distinguished services; but in after life never
permitted the title to be used in addressing him. There is a story
that when the war was over he tossed up a coin to determine what
should be his career. Whatever the determining auguries, he came at
once to San Francisco to join his favorite brother Albert--there were
ten brothers and sisters to choose from--and for a short time worked
with him in the Mint; he soon began writing paragraphs for the
weeklies, particularly the _ARGONAUT_ and the _NEWS LETTER_.
"I was a slovenly writer in those days," he observes in a letter forty
years later, "though enough better than my neighbors to have attracted
my own attention. My knowledge of English was imperfect 'a whole lot.'
Indeed, my intellectual status (whatever it may be, and God knows it's
enough to make me blush) was of slow growth--as was my moral. I mean,
I had not literary sincerity." Apparently, attention other than his
own was attracted, for he was presently editing the _NEWS LETTER_.
In 1872 he went to London and for four years was on the staff of
_FUN_. In London Bierce found congenial and stimulating associates.
The great man of his circle was George Augustus Sala, "one of the most
skilful, finished journalists ever known," a keen satiric wit, and the
author of a ballad of which it is said that Swift might have been
proud. Another notable figure was Tom Hood the younger, mordantly
humorous. The satiric style in journalism was popular then; and
"personal" journals were so personal that one "Jimmy" Davis, editor of
the _CUCKOO_ and the _BAT_ successively, found it healthful to remain
some years in exile in France. Bierce contributed to several of these
and to _FIGARO_, the editor of which was James Mortimer. To this
gentleman Bierce owed what he designated as the distinction of being
"probably the only American journalist who was ever employed by an
Empress in so congenial a pursuit as the pursuit of another
journalist." This other journalist was M. Henri Rochefort, communard,
formerly editor of _LA LANTERNE_ in Paris, in which he had made
incessant war upon the Empire and all its personnel, particularly the
Empress. When, an exile, Rochefort announced his intention of renewing
_LA LANTERNE_ in London, the exiled Empress circumvented him by
secretly copyrighting the title, _THE LANTERN_, and proceeding to
publish a periodical under that name with the purpose of undermining
his influence. Two numbers were enough; M. Rochefort fled to Belgium.
Bierce said that in "the field of chromatic journalism" it was the
finest thing that ever came from a press, but of the literary
excellence of the twelve pages he felt less qualified for judgment as
he had written every line.
This was in 1874. Two years earlier, under his journalistic pseudonym
of "Dod Grile," he had published his first books--two small volumes,
largely made up of his articles in the San Francisco _NEWS LETTER_,
called _The Fiend's Delight_, and _Nuggets And Dust Panned Out In
California_. Now, he used the same pseudonym on the title-page of a
third volume, _Cobwebs from an Empty Skull_. The _Cobwebs_ were
selections from his work in _FUN_--satirical tales and fables, often
inspired by weird old woodcuts given him by the editors with the
request that he write something to fit. His journalistic associates
praised these volumes liberally, and a more distinguished admirer was
Gladstone, who, discovering the _Cobwebs_ in a second-hand bookshop,
voiced his delight in their cleverness, and by his praise gave a
certain currency to Bierce's name among the London elect. But despite
so distinguished a sponsor, the books remained generally unknown.
Congenial tasks and association with the brilliant journalists of the
day did not prevent Bierce from being undeniably hard up at times. In
1876 he returned to San Francisco, where he remained for twenty-one
years, save for a brief but eventful career as general manager of a
mining company near Deadwood, South Dakota. All this time he got his
living by writing special articles--for the _WASP_, a weekly whose
general temper may be accurately surmised from its name, and,
beginning in 1886, for the _EXAMINER_, in which he conducted every
Sunday on the editorial page a department to which he gave the title
he had used for a similar column in _THE LANTERN_--_Prattle_. A partial
explanation of a mode of feeling and a choice of themes which Bierce
developed more and more, ultimately to the practical exclusion of all
others, is to be found in the particular phase through which
California journalism was just then passing.
In the evolution of the comic spirit the lowest stage, that of delight
in inflicting pain on others, is clearly manifest in savages, small
boys, and early American journalism. It was exhibited in all parts of
America--Mark Twain gives a vivid example in his _Journalistic Wild
Oats_ of what it was in Tennessee--but with particular intensity in
San Francisco. As a community, San Francisco exalted personal courage,
directness of encounter, straight and effective shooting. The social
group was so small and so homogeneous that any news of importance
would be well known before it could be reported, set up in type,
printed, and circulated. It was isolated by so great distances from
the rest of the world that for years no pretense was made of
furnishing adequate news from the outside. So the newspapers came to
rely on other sorts of interest. They were pamphlets for the
dissemination of the opinions of the groups controlling them, and
weapons for doing battle, if need be, for those opinions. And there
was abundant occasion: municipal affairs were corrupt, courts weak or
venal, or both. Editors and readers enjoyed a good fight; they also
wanted humorous entertainment; they happily combined the two. In the
creative dawn of 1847 when the foundations of the journalistic earth
were laid and those two morning stars, the _CALIFORNIAN_ of Monterey
and the _CALIFORNIA STAR_ of San Francisco, sang together, we find the
editors attacking the community generally, and each other
particularly, with the utmost ferocity, laying about them right and
left with verbal broad-axes, crow-bars, and such other weapons as
might be immediately at hand. The _CALIFORNIA STAR'S_ introduction to
the public of what would, in our less direct day, be known as its
"esteemed contemporary" is typical:
"We have received two late numbers of the _CALIFORNIAN_, a dim,
dirty little paper printed in Monterey on the worn-out materials
of one of the old California _WAR PRESSES_. It is published and
edited by Walter Colton and Robert Semple, the one a _WHINING
SYCOPHANT_, and the other an _OVER-GROWN LICK-SPITTLE_. At the
top of one of the papers we find the words 'please exchange.'
This would be considered in almost any other country a bare-faced
attempt to swindle us. We should consider it so now were it not
for the peculiar situation of our country which induces us to do
a great deal for others in order for them to do us a little
good.... We have concluded to give our paper to them this year,
so as to afford them some insight into the manner in which a
Republican newspaper should be conducted. They appear now to be
awfully verdant."
Down through the seventies and eighties the tradition persisted,
newspapers being bought and read, as a historian of journalism
asserts, not so much for news as to see who was getting "lambasted"
that day. It is not strange, then, that journals of redoubtable
pugnacity were popular, or that editors favored writers who were
likely to excel in the gladiatorial style. It is significant that
public praise first came to Bierce through his articles in the caustic
_NEWS LETTER_, widely read on the Pacific Coast during the seventies.
Once launched in this line, he became locally famous for his fierce
and witty articles in the _ARGONAUNT_ and the _WASP_, and for many
years his column _Prattle_ in the _EXAMINER_ was, in the words of Mr.
Bailey Millard, "the most wickedly clever, the most audaciously
personal, and the most eagerly devoured column of _causerie_ that ever
was printed in this country."
In 1896 Bierce was sent to Washington to fight, through the Hearst
newspapers, the "refunding bill" which Collis P. Huntington was trying
to get passed, releasing his Central Pacific Railroad from its
obligations to the government. A year later he went again to
Washington, where he remained during the rest of his journalistic
career, as correspondent for the New York _AMERICAN_, conducting also
for some years a department in the _COSMOPOLITAN_.
Much of Bierce's best work was done in those years in San Francisco.
Through the columns of the _WASP_ and the _EXAMINER_ his wit played
free; he wielded an extraordinary influence; his trenchant criticism
made and unmade reputations--literary and otherwise. But this to
Bierce was mostly "journalism, a thing so low that it cannot be
mentioned in the same breath with literature." His real interest lay
elsewhere. Throughout the early eighties he devoted himself to writing
stories; all were rejected by the magazine editors to whom he offered
them. When finally in 1890 he gathered these stories together into
book form and offered them to the leading publishers of the country,
they too, would have none of them. "These men," writes Mr. Bailey
Millard, "admitted the purity of his diction and the magic of his
haunting power, but the stories were regarded as revolting."
At last, in 1891, his first book of stories, _Tales of Soldiers and
Civilians_, saw the reluctant light of day. It had this for foreword:
"Denied existence by the chief publishing houses of the country,
this book owes itself to Mr. E. L. G. Steele, merchant, of this
city, [San Francisco]. In attesting Mr. Steele's faith in his
judgment and his friend, it will serve its author's main and best
ambition."
There is Biercean pugnacity in these words; the author flings down the
gauntlet with a confident gesture. But it cannot be said that anything
much happened to discomfit the publishing houses of little faith.
Apparently, Bierce had thought to appeal past the dull and unjust
verdict of such lower courts to the higher tribunal of the critics and
possibly an elect group of general readers who might be expected to
recognize and welcome something rare. But judgment was scarcely
reversed. Only a few critics were discerning, and the book had no
vogue. When _The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter_ was published by F.
J. Schulte and Company, Chicago, the next year, and _Can Such Things
Be_ by The Cassell Publishing Company, the year following, a few
enthusiastic critics could find no words strong enough to describe
Bierce's vivid imagination, his uncanny divination of atavistic
terrors in man's consciousness, his chiseled perfection of style; but
the critics who disapproved had even more trouble in finding words
strong enough for their purposes and, as before, there was no general
appreciation.
For the next twenty years Ambrose Bierce was a prolific writer but,
whatever the reason, no further volumes of stories from his pen were
presented to the world. _Black Beetles in Amber_, a collection of
satiric verse, had appeared the same year as _The Monk and the
Hangman's Daughter_; then for seven years, with the exception of a
republication by G. P. Putnam's Sons of _Tales of Soldiers and
Civilians_ under the title, _In the Midst of Life_, no books by
Bierce. In 1899 appeared _Fantastic Fables_; in 1903 _Shapes of Clay_,
more satiric verse; in 1906 _The Cynic's Word Book_, a dictionary of
wicked epigrams; in 1909 _Write it Right_, a blacklist of literary
faults, and _The Shadow on the Dial_, a collection of essays covering,
to quote from the preface of S. O. Howes, "a wide range of subjects,
embracing among other things, government, dreams, writers of dialect
and dogs"--Mr. Howes might have heightened his crescendo by adding
"emancipated woman"; and finally--1909 to 1912--_The Collected Works
of Ambrose Bierce_, containing all his work previously published in
book form, save the two last mentioned, and much more besides, all
collected and edited by Bierce himself.
On October 2, 1913, Ambrose Bierce, having settled his business
affairs, left Washington for a trip through the southern states,
declaring in letters his purpose of going into Mexico and later on to
South America. The fullest account of his trip and his plans is
afforded by a newspaper clipping he sent his niece in a letter dated
November 6, 1913; through the commonplaceness of the reportorial
vocabulary shines out the vivid personality that was making its final
exit:
"Traveling over the same ground that he had covered with General
Hazen's brigade during the Civil War, Ambrose Bierce, famed
writer and noted critic, has arrived in New Orleans. Not that
this city was one of the places figuring in his campaigns, for he
was here after and not during the war. He has come to New Orleans
in a haphazard, fancy-free way, making a trip toward Mexico. The
places that he has visited on the way down have become famous in
song and story--places where the greatest battles were fought,
where the moon shone at night on the burial corps, and where in
day the sun shone bright on polished bayonets and the smoke
drifted upward from the cannon mouths.
"For Mr. Bierce was at Chickamauga; he was at Shiloh; at
Murfreesboro; Kenesaw Mountain, Franklin and Nashville. And then
when wounded during the Atlanta campaign he was invalided home.
He 'has never amounted to much since then,' he said Saturday. But
his stories of the great struggle, living as deathless
characterizations of the bloody episodes, stand for what he 'has
amounted to since then.'
"Perhaps it was in mourning for the dead over whose battlefields
he has been wending his way toward New Orleans that Mr. Bierce
was dressed in black. From head to foot he was attired in this
color, except where the white cuffs and collar and shirt front
showed through. He even carried a walking cane, black as ebony
and unrelieved by gold or silver. But his eyes, blue and piercing
as when they strove to see through the smoke at Chickamauga,
retained all the fire of the indomitable fighter.
"'I'm on my way to Mexico, because I like the game,' he said, 'I
like the fighting; I want to see it. And then I don't think
Americans are as oppressed there as they say they are, and I want
to get at the true facts of the case. Of course, I'm not going
into the country if I find it unsafe for Americans to be there,
but I want to take a trip diagonally across from northeast to
southwest by horseback, and then take ship for South America, go
over the Andes and across that continent, if possible, and come
back to America again.
"'There is no family that I have to take care of; I've retired
from writing and I'm going to take a rest. No, my trip isn't for
local color. I've retired just the same as a merchant or business
man retires. I'm leaving the field for the younger authors.'
"An inquisitive question was interjected as to whether Mr. Bierce
had acquired a competency only from his writings, but he did not
take offense.
"'My wants are few, and modest,' he said, 'and my royalties give
me quite enough to live on. There isn't much that I need, and I
spend my time in quiet travel. For the last five years I haven't
done any writing. Don't you think that after a man has worked as
long as I have that he deserves a rest? But perhaps after I have
rested I might work some more--I can't tell, there are so many
things--' and the straightforward blue eyes took on a faraway
look, 'there are so many things that might happen between now and
when I come back. My trip might take several years, and I'm an
old man now.'
"Except for the thick, snow-white hair no one would think him
old. His hands are steady, and he stands up straight and
tall--perhaps six feet."
In December of that same year the last letter he is known to have
written was received by his daughter. It is dated from Chihuahua, and
mentions casually that he has attached himself unofficially to a
division of Villa's army, and speaks of a prospective advance on
Ojinaga. No further word has ever come from or of Ambrose Bierce.
Whether illness overtook him, then an old man of seventy-one, and
death suddenly, or whether, preferring to go foaming over a precipice
rather than to straggle out in sandy deltas, he deliberately went
where he knew death was, no one can say. His last letters, dauntless,
grave, tender, do not say, though they suggest much. "You must try to
forgive my obstinacy in not 'perishing' where I am," he wrote as he
left Washington. "I want to be where something worth while is going
on, or where nothing whatever is going on." "Good-bye--if you hear of
my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please
know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats
old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in
Mexico--ah, that is euthanasia!" Whatever end Ambrose Bierce found in
Mexico, the lines of George Sterling well express what must have been
his attitude in meeting it:
"Dream you he was afraid to live?
Dream you he was afraid to die?
Or that, a suppliant of the sky,
He begged the gods to keep or give?
Not thus the shadow-maker stood,
Whose scrutiny dissolved so well
Our thin mirage of Heaven or Hell--
The doubtful evil, dubious good....
"If now his name be with the dead,
And where the gaunt agaves flow'r,
The vulture and the wolf devour
The lion-heart, the lion-head,
Be sure that heart and head were laid
In wisdom down, content to die;
Be sure he faced the Starless Sky
Unduped, unmurmuring, unafraid."
In any consideration of the work of Ambrose Bierce, a central question
must be why it contains so much that is trivial or ephemeral. Another
question facing every critic of Bierce, is why the fundamentally
original point of view, the clarity of workmanship of his best
things--mainly stories--did not win him immediate and general
recognition.
A partial answer to both questions is to be found in a certain discord
between Bierce and his setting. Bierce, paradoxically, combined the
bizarre in substance, the severely restrained and compressed in form.
An ironic mask covered a deep-seated sensibility; but sensibility and
irony were alike subject to an uncompromising truthfulness; he would
have given deep-throated acclaim to Clough's
"But play no tricks upon thy soul, O man,
Let truth be truth, and life the thing it can."
He had the aristocrat's contempt for mass feeling, a selectiveness
carried so far that he instinctively chose for themes the picked
person and experience, the one decisive moment of crisis. He viewed
his characters not in relation to other men and in normal activities;
he isolated them--often amid abnormalities.
All this was in sharp contrast to the literary fashion obtaining when
he dipped his pen to try his luck as a creative artist. The most
popular novelist of the day was Dickens; the most popular poet,
Tennyson. Neither looked straight at life; both veiled it: one in
benevolence, the other in beauty. Direct and painful verities were
best tolerated by the reading public when exhibited as instances of
the workings of natural law. The spectator of the macrocosm in action
could stomach the wanton destruction of a given human atom; one so
privileged could and did excuse the Creator for small mistakes like
harrying Hetty Sorrell to the gallow's foot, because of the conviction
that, taking the Universe by and large, "He was a good fellow, and
'twould all be well." This benevolent optimism was the offspring of a
strange pair, evangelicism and evolution; and in the minds of the
great public whom Bierce, under other circumstances and with a
slightly different mixture of qualities in himself, might have
conquered, it became a large, soft insincerity that demanded "happy
endings," a profuse broadness of treatment prohibitive of harsh
simplicity, a swathing of elemental emotion in gentility or moral
edification.
But to Bierce's mind, "noble and nude and antique," this mid-Victorian
draping and bedecking of "unpleasant truths" was abhorrent. Absolutely
direct and unafraid--not only in his personal relations but, what is
more rare, in his thinking--he regarded easy optimism, sure that God
is in his heaven with consequently good effects upon the world, as
blindness, and the hopefulness that demanded always the "happy
ending," as silly. In many significant passages Bierce's attitude is
the ironic one of Voltaire: "'Had not Pangloss got himself hanged,'
replied Candide, 'he would have given us most excellent advice in this
emergency; for he was a profound philosopher.'" Bierce did not fear to
bring in disconcerting evidence that _a priori_ reasoning may prove a
not infallible guide, that causes do not always produce the effects
complacently pre-argued, and that the notion of this as the best of
all possible worlds is sometimes beside the point.
The themes permitted by such an attitude were certain to displease
the readers of that period. In _Tales of Soldiers and Civilians_, his
first book of stories, he looks squarely and grimly at one much
bedecked subject of the time--war; not the fine gay gallantry of war,
the music and the marching and the romantic episodes; but the ghastly
horror of it; through his vivid, dramatic passages beats a hatred of
war, not merely "unrighteous" war, but all war, the more disquieting
because never allowed to become articulate. With bitter but beautiful
truth he brings each tale to its tragic close, always with one last
turn of the screw, one unexpected horror more. And in this book--note
the solemn implication of the title he later gave it, _In the Midst of
Life_--as well as in the next, _Can Such Things Be_, is still another
subject which Bierce alone in his generation seemed unafraid to
consider curiously: "Death, in warfare and in the horrid guise of the
supernatural, was painted over and over. Man's terror in the face of
death gave the artist his cue for his wonderful physical and
psychologic microscopics. You could not pin this work down as realism,
or as romance; it was the greatest human drama--the conflict between
life and death--fused through genius. Not Zola, in the endless pages
of his _Debacle_, not the great Tolstoi in his great _War and Peace_
had ever painted war, horrid war, more faithfully than any of the
stories of this book; not Maupassant had invented out of war's
terrible truths more dramatically imagined plots.... There painted an
artist who had seen the thing itself, and being a genius, had made it
an art still greater.
Death of the young, the beautiful, the brave, was the closing note of
every line of the ten stories of war in this book. The brilliant,
spectacular death that came to such senseless bravery as Tennyson
hymned for the music-hall intelligence in his _Charge of the Light
Brigade_; the vision-starting, slow, soul-drugging death by hanging;
the multiplied, comprehensible death that makes rivers near
battlefields run red; the death that comes by sheer terror; death
actual and imagined--every sort of death was on these pages, so
painted as to make Pierre Loti's _Book of Pity and Death_ seem but
feeble fumbling."
Now death by the mid-Victorian was considered almost as undesirable an
element in society as sex itself. Both must be passed over in silence
or presented decently draped. In the eighties any writer who dealt
unabashed with death was regarded as an unpleasant person.
"Revolting!" cried the critics when they read Bierce's _Chickamauga_
and _The Affair at Coulter's Notch_.
Bierce's style, too, by its very fineness, alienated his public.
Superior, keen, perfect in detail, finite, compressed--such was his
manner in the free and easy, prolix, rambling, multitudinous
nineteenth century.
Bierce himself knew that although it is always the fashion to jeer at
fashion, its rule is absolute for all that, whether it be fashion in
boots or books.
"A correspondent of mine," he wrote in 1887 in his _EXAMINER_ column,
"a well-known and clever writer, appears surprised because I do not
like the work of Robert Louis Stevenson. I am equally hurt to know
that he does. If he was ever a boy he knows that the year is
divided, not into seasons and months, as is vulgarly supposed, but
into 'top time,' 'marble time,' 'kite time,' et cetera, and woe to the
boy who ignores the unwritten calendar, amusing himself according to
the dictates of an irresponsible conscience. I venture to remind my
correspondent that a somewhat similar system obtains in matters of
literature--a word which I beg him to observe means fiction. There
are, for illustration--or rather, there were--James time, Howells
time, Crawford time, Russell time and Conway time, each epoch--named
for the immortal novelist of the time being--lasting, generally
speaking, as much as a year.... All the more rigorous is the law of
observance. It is not permitted to admire Jones in Smith time. I must
point out to my heedless correspondent that this is not Stevenson
time--that was last year." It was decidedly not Bierce time when
Bierce's stories appeared.
And there was in him no compromise--or so he thought. "A great
artist," he wrote to George Sterling, "is superior to his world and
his time, or at least to his parish and his day." His practical
application of that belief is shown in a letter to a magazine editor
who had just rejected a satire he had submitted:
"Even _you_ ask for literature--if my stories are literature, as you
are good enough to imply. (By the way, all the leading publishers of
the country turned down that book until they saw it published without
them by a merchant in San Francisco and another sort of publishers in
London, Leipsig and Paris.) Well, you wouldn't do a thing to one of my
stories!
"No, thank you; if I have to write rot, I prefer to do it for the
newspapers, which make no false pretenses and are frankly rotten, and
in which the badness of a bad thing escapes detection or is forgotten
as soon as it is cold.
"I know how to write a story (of 'happy ending' sort) for magazine
readers for whom literature is too good, but I will not do so, so long
as stealing is more honorable and interesting. I have offered you ...
the best that I am able to make; and now you must excuse me." In these
two utterances we have some clue to the secret of his having ceased,
in 1893, to publish stories. Vigorously refusing to yield in the
slightest degree to the public so far as his stories were concerned,
he abandoned his best field of creative effort and became almost
exclusively a "columnist" and a satirist; he put his world to rout,
and left his "parish and his day" resplendently the victors.
All this must not be taken to mean that the "form and pressure of the
time" put into Bierce what was not there. Even in his creative work he
had a satiric bent; his early training and associations, too, had been
in journalistic satire. Under any circumstances he undoubtedly would
have written satire--columns of it for his daily bread, books of it
for self-expression; but under more favorable circumstances he would
have kept on writing other sort of books as well. Lovers of literature
may well lament that Bierce's insistence on going his way and the
demands of his "parish" forced him to overdevelop one power to the
almost complete paralysis of another and a perhaps finer.
As a satirist Bierce was the best America has produced, perhaps the
best since Voltaire. But when he confined himself to "exploring the
ways of hate as a form of creative energy," it was with a hurt in his
soul, and with some intellectual and spiritual confusion. There
resulted a kink in his nature, a contradiction that appears
repeatedly, not only in his life, but in his writings. A striking
instance is found in his article _To Train a Writer_:
"He should, for example, forget that he is an American and
remember that he is a man. He should be neither Christian nor
Jew, nor Buddhist, nor Mahometan, nor Snake Worshiper. To local
standards of right and wrong he should be civilly indifferent. In
the virtues, so-called, he should discern only the rough notes of
a general expediency; in fixed moral principles only time-saving
predecisions of cases not yet before the court of conscience.
Happiness should disclose itself to his enlarging intelligence as
the end and purpose of life; art and love as the only means to
happiness. He should free himself of all doctrines, theories,
etiquettes, politics, simplifying his life and mind, attaining
clarity with breadth and unity with height. To him a continent
should not seem wide nor a century long. And it would be needful
that he know and have an ever-present consciousness that this is
a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented
with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed
with illusions--frothing mad!"
Up to that last sentence Ambrose Bierce beholds this world as one
where tolerance, breadth of view, simplicity of life and mind, clear
thinking, are at most attainable, at least worthy of the effort to
attain; he regards life as purposive, as having happiness for its end,
and art and love as the means to that good end. But suddenly the
string from which he has been evoking these broad harmonies snaps with
a snarl. All is evil and hopeless--"frothing mad." Both views cannot
be held simultaneously by the same mind. Which was the real belief of
Ambrose Bierce? The former, it seems clear. But he has been hired to
be a satirist.
On the original fabric of Bierce's mind the satiric strand has
encroached more than the design allows. There results not only
considerable obliteration of the main design, but confusion in the
substituted one. For it is significant that much of the work of Bierce
seems to be that of what he would have called a futilitarian, that he
seldom seems able to find a suitable field for his satire, a foeman
worthy of such perfect steel as he brings to the encounter; he fights
on all fields, on both sides, against all comers; ubiquitous,
indiscriminate, he is as one who screams in pain at his own futility,
one who "might be heard," as he says of our civilization, "from afar
in space as a scolding and a riot." That Bierce would have spent so
much of his superb power on the trivial and the ephemeral, breaking
magnificent vials of wrath on Oakland nobodies, preserving
insignificant black beetles in the amber of his art, is not merely, as
it has long been, cause of amazement to the critics; it is cause of
laughter to the gods, and of weeping among Bierce's true admirers.
Some may argue that Bierce's failure to attain international or even
national fame cannot be ascribed solely to a lack of concord between
the man and his time and to the consequent reaction in him. It is true
that in Bierce's work is a sort of paucity--not a mere lack of
printed pages, but of the fulness of creative activity that makes
Byron, for example, though vulgar and casual, a literary mountain
peak. Bierce has but few themes, few moods; his literary river runs
clear and sparkling, but confined--a narrow current, not the opulent
stream that waters wide plains of thought and feeling. Nor has Bierce
the power to weave individual entities and situations into a broad
pattern of existence, which is the distinguishing mark of such writers
as Thackeray, Balzac, and Tolstoi among the great dead, and Bennett
and Wells among the lesser living. Bierce's interest does not lie in
the group experience nor even in the experience of the individual
through a long period. His unit of time is the minute, not the month.
It is significant that he never wrote a novel--unless _The Monk and
the Hangman's Daughter_ be reckoned one--and that he held remarkable
views of the novel as a literary form, witness this passage from
_Prattle_, written in 1887:
"English novelists are not great because the English novel is
dead--deader than Queen Anne at her deadest. The vein is worked
out. It was a thin one and did not 'go down.' A single century
from the time when Richardson sank the discovery shaft it had
already begun to 'pinch out.' The miners of today have abandoned
it altogether to search for 'pockets,' and some of the best of
them are merely 'chloriding the dumps.' To expect another good
novel in English is to expect the gold to 'grow' again."
It may well be that at the bottom of this sweeping condemnation was an
instinctive recognition of his own lack of constructive power on a
large scale.
But an artist, like a nation, should be judged not by what he cannot
do, but by what he can. That Bierce could not paint the large canvas
does not make him negligible or even inconsiderable. He is by no means
a second-rate writer; he is a first-rate writer who could not
consistently show his first-rateness.
When he did show his first-rateness, what is it? In all his best work
there is originality, a rare and precious idiosyncracy; his point of
view, his themes are rich with it. Above all writers Bierce can
present--brilliantly present--startling fragments of life, carved out
from attendant circumstance; isolated problems of character and
action; sharply bitten etchings of individual men under momentary
stresses and in bizarre situations. Through his prodigious emotional
perceptivity he has the power of feeling and making us feel some
strange, perverse accident of fate, destructive of the individual--of
making us feel it to be real and terrible. This is not an easy thing
to do. De Maupassant said that men were killed every year in Paris by
the falling of tiles from the roof, but if he got rid of a principal
character in that way, he should be hooted at. Bierce can make us
accept as valid and tragic events more odd than the one de Maupassant
had to reject. "In the line of the startling,--half Poe, half
Merimee--he cannot have many superiors," says Arnold Bennett.... "A
story like _An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge_--well, Edgar Allan Poe
might have deigned to sign it. And that is something.
"He possesses a remarkable style--what Kipling's would have been had
Kipling been born with any significance of the word 'art'--and a quite
strangely remarkable perception of beauty. There is a feeling for
landscape in _A Horseman in the Sky_ which recalls the exquisite
opening of that indifferent novel, _Les Freres Zemganno_ by Edmond de
Goncourt, and which no English novelist except Thomas Hardy, and
possibly Charles Marriott, could match." The feeling for landscape
which Bennett notes is but one part of a greater power--the power to
make concrete and visible, action, person, place. Bierce's
descriptions of Civil War battles in his _Bits of Autobiography_ are
the best descriptions of battle ever written. He lays out the field
with map-like clearness, marshals men and events with precision and
economy, but his account never becomes exposition--it is drama. Real
battles move swiftly; accounts make them seem labored and slow. What
narrator save Bierce can convey the sense of their being lightly
swift, and, again and again the shock of surprise the event itself
must have given?
This could not be were it not for his verbal restraint. In his
descriptions is no welter of adjectives and adverbs; strong exact
nouns and verbs do the work, and this means that the veritable object
and action are brought forward, not qualifying talk around and about
them. And this, again, could not be were it not for what is, beyond
all others, his greatest quality--absolute precision. "I sometimes
think," he once wrote playfully about letters of his having been
misunderstood, "I sometimes think that I am the only man in the world
who understands the meaning of the written word. Or the only one who
does not." A reader of Ambrose Bierce comes almost to believe that not
till now has he found a writer who understands--completely--the
meaning of the written word. He has the power to bring out new
meanings in well-worn words, so setting them as to evoke brilliant
significances never before revealed. He gives to one phrase the
beauty, the compressed suggestion of a poem; his titles--_Black
Beetles in Amber_, _Ashes of the Beacon_, _Cobwebs from an Empty
Skull_ are masterpieces in miniature. That he should have a gift of
coining striking words naturally follows: in his later years he has
fallen into his "anecdotage," a certain Socialist is the greatest
"futilitarian" of them all, "femininies"--and so on infinitely. Often
the smaller the Biercean gem, the more exquisite the workmanship. One
word has all the sparkle of an epigram.
In such skill Ambrose Bierce is not surpassed by any writer, ancient
or modern; it gives him rank among the few masters who afford that
highest form of intellectual delight, the immediate recognition of a
clear idea perfectly set forth in fitting words--wit's twin brother,
evoking that rare joy, the sudden, secret laughter of the mind. So
much for Bierce the artist; the man is found in these letters. If
further clue to the real nature of Ambrose Bierce were needed it is to
be found in a conversation he had in his later years with a young
girl: "You must be very proud, Mr. Bierce, of all your books and your
fame?" "No," he answered rather sadly, "you will come to know that all
that is worth while in life is the love you have had for a few people
near to you."