Harte's Sketches and Stories

THE collection of an author’s writings into a uniform edition compels the collection and revision of his readers’ judgments. From time to time, during the past fifteen years, it has been a pleasure to record the successes of Mr. Bret Harte, and to watch for each novel display of his power. Now, with the five substantial volumes of his works ¹ before us, we can hardly escape a corresponding deliberateness and formality of attitude, as we survey the contents and recall the excitement under which the original issues were received. We have become our own posterity, with the disadvantage that we are forced to rely upon the fading recollection of a sensation, and with the advantage of receiving a more multiform and cumulative impression. No author of genius writes himself out in one poem or book, and the light thrown upon his power by his united works is essential for understanding the value of each.

Whatever news we may yet have from Mr. Harte’s genius, he has given us enough in these five volumes for a consistent and tolerably comprehensive view of its scope and general features. The material in which he works is, for the most part, nature and human nature of the California variety; and the form which he employs is the story or the poem, though the story in one instance has been expanded into a novel, and the poem into a drama. Criticism he does not touch, except in the form of parody and burlesque. It is rare indeed that a writer deliberately sets such bounds to his work, and in the consistency of his literary career there is the mark of a mind which understands well its power and the limitations of its power. Not only so, but when one comes to make the acquaintance of Mr. Harte’s characters, he finds that they are variations of a few well-studied types; when he examines the scene of their action, he finds it marked by a few strong local signs. Then, as if to give even sharper features to the types, the same persons constantly recur; the same places form the background for action. It is somewhat with the reader as with the visitor to the Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, who is at first impressed by the artist’s fecundity and versatility, but gradually comes to respect more his fidelity to a few typical forms, produced in different material, and capable of distribution into a few notable groups.

With the existence of marked personalities, well-defined localities, situations, and relations, there is an absence of certain persons, scenes, and incidents which naturally occur to any one acquainted with California. San Francisco and its life, for example, and the dramatic incidents connected with the Vigilance Committee, are very slightly used, while the mining camp and the old Spanish life form essential features. Both the omission and the use illustrate the direct relation which Mr. Harte bears to his work, He has used his material at first hand, and has relied confidently upon his own observation and knowledge.

The more closely we draw the line about this author’s work, the more clearly do we perceive what his underlying power has effected. He has taken these well - defined and typical figures and scenes, and by the constructive force of Ids genius has built a California of the imagination, peopled it, and given it a destiny. The California of his construction has a romantic relation to the California of geography and history ; the men and women are images of classes to be found there, and the life and sentiment are poetic reflections of the real movement. By a steady obedience to an ideal, such as only an artist is capable of, he has added a distinct province to literature. He has annexed a California to romance as certainly as the FortyNiners and their successors annexed a California to the United States. The country is his by right of discovery and colonization.

In studying the processes by which this romancer has reached his final results, we have the advantage of seeing the sketches which represent studies in the material employed. The volume entitled The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories includes also a number of papers, headed respectively Earlier Papers, Bohemian Papers, and Spanish and American Legends. These, generally simple in form and unpretending, are of great interest as indicating the close study of particulars, and as involving in several instances the germs of later, more artistic work. They are the reports of a writer who is instinctively a romancer, and they bear somewhat the same relation to his art that Dickens’s early sketches and Uncommercial Traveller bear to his novels. The comparison suggests a likeness and an unlikeness in the two writers. Harte’s sketches are rarely disfigured by the merely grotesque, but, like Dickens, he is very apt to see and to hint at the possibilities of fiction in the sights and persons sketched. The absence of effort in these papers gives them a value as marking the power of the writer to see and to record. The paper, for example, entitled Notes by Flood and Field, though blurred a little in some of its lines, indicates a strength scarcely surpassed in his later work ; and an even stronger piece of writing is High Water Mark, in the same division. Indeed, this sketch, which professes to be the account of an actual adventure, is a remarkable illustration of what Bret Harte might have done, had it been given him to report California instead of inventing California. One comes back to it, after reading the stories, with a wistful look after the retreating author.

The sketches served as studies for the stories which gave Mr. Harte his sudden reputation, and among them is one which suggests a transition between the sketch and the story. M’liss, which is classed among the Earlier Papers, reads as if it were a school-master’s study of real life, thrown into the form of fiction in order to permit a little more freedom and the development of latent forces of character. The strength of the sketch is there in the outlining of the chief persons, in the touches of nature, in the humorous acceptance of the contrasts of California life; the weakness of the story appears in the melodramatic flourishes and in the importation of characters like McSnagley, which seem first to have done service in other people’s books. There is one portion of Mr. Harte’s work, altogether admirable in its way, which helps us to understand some of the workings of his genius. The Condensed Novels are unapproached, even by Thackeray, in their cleverness. They are reductions to scale of the minds of eminent novelists, and show an astonishing power of combined imitation and condensation. In effect, they are most amusing criticisms of the peculiarities of the authors burlesqued, and as unerring as photographs. One only, we may say, falls short of the excellence of the others, and that is the parody of Dickens, who had so serious an influence over Mr. Harte that the burlesque passes almost unconsciously into genuine admiration.

Well, the amazing cleverness of these Condensed Novels gives a clew to the author’s faculty for reproduction ; but the faculty is employed upon veritable persons and upon fictitious types with a similar power. Throughout the stories, one sees Californians and the cockneys of literature moving through the mazes with equal steps, and he is teased by the illusions which are thus created. The reality of the Californians is affected by the unreality of the cockneys, the second-hand characters are in turn infused with some of the life-blood of the real inhabitants, and both produce a patois, in which the amusing jargon of the mines and the imported cheap English of fiction are inextricably confused.

If this power of reproduction were confined to characters and their speech, one might good-naturedly accept the fool’s gold with the real, but it is in the action of the characters that the weakness is most manifest; for while separate incidents have often a vivid native realism, the web of the stories is woven upon a loom which is hopelessly foreign from the author’s invention. The most significant illustration is in the novel of Gabriel Conroy. In the short stories, the power is in the pictures of Californian life and character, and the conventional plots are accepted as carrying these. In the novel, greater demands are laid on characters and plot than they can meet. It is somewhat like the mechanical enlargement of a small drawing, when the exaggeration of outlines brings painfully to notice the indecision or faultiness of the work. Gabriel Conroy, who gives the name to the novel, and is the character about whom the persons of the story revolve in a wild dance of atoms, is a baby giant. He is presented to the reader as a foil, in his innocence, to the combined wickedness of the other characters. His steadfastness of affection is apparently intended as the pivot on which the book is to turn ; his strength of body is made the picturesque accompaniment of an awkward mind ; and yet, though he is, so to speak, the spinal column of the book, he becomes utterly useless at the most critical point. At the outset of the story, Gabriel is separated from his sister, Grace Conroy; and however errant the other characters may be, Gabriel’s one purpose throughout the book is to recover his sister, and to surrender the charge of a younger sister, who is left with him. As incidental to this, he marries a woman for whom he has no love, and finally abandons her that he may find his sister. When his sister reappears, at a trial which involves Gabriel’s life, and makes herself known, he receives the fact as the most ordinary of incidents, quite incapable of discomposing him, but a few minutes afterward falls into a swoon — at what ? At the announcement that his wife, for whom he does not care a straw, has given birth to a child ! This, coming in the crisis of the novel, at least in what one has hopelessly been anticipating as a crisis, has the effect of crumbling the entire structure of the story, and the reader looks back upon all the dark passages through which he has been wandering as leading not into the light, but into the vegetable cellar.

Only Mr. Harte himself could do justice to Gabriel Conroy by condensing it. Earthquakes occur for the purpose of interrupting conversation and stopping the delivery of a letter ; the hero topples a figure of Justice from the roof of a court-house, in order to arrest pursuit of himself; nearly everybody wears at some time in the course of the story a false wig; death and burial under tons of rocks have no power over characters who have already been snowed and starved out of life, with the faint suspicion, besides, of having eaten each other ; and there is a wild chase of all the persons in the story after their neighbors, with the devil in full view of the hindmost.

The miniature scenes of the stories are curiously expanded in the novel, with the effect, as we have said, of betraying their essential weakness. Thus, The Outcasts of Poker Flat, one of the most effective of the short stories, because of the grotesque contrast of the group of queer characters with a terribly tragical situation, is seen again upon an enlarged scale in the opening scenes of Gabriel Conroy; The Story of a Mine, which gives admirably the turns and twists of legal possession and dispossession, in spite of the ineffective conclusion, becomes in the novel a distorted picture of rascality and a hopeless tangle of forgeries, — so hopeless that the reader finally abandons the reins to the author, and lets him drive where he will, only asking to be brought to some final resting-place. The characters in the stories are collected from all quarters, and given house-room in the novel, and one feels that he is living very hard in the world which Mr. Harte has conjured up.

For it is a world. Keen observation, wit, perception of contrasts, the genius which lights man and nature with the unquenchable spark, — these are all present in Mr. Harte’s creative mind, and literature acknowledges a new master. But since we have intimated that this world of his has a charmed existence, that he has called it into being out of the material which California had to offer, we wish to ask further, What makes his world go ? What are the secret springs of character which determine the destiny of the persons whom he has set on the stage ? His persons are real to the eye; they are consistent with themselves ; they appear to be lacking in none of the attributes of humanity ; we say that they are charmingly natural. But what is the sun in this solar system of Mr. Harte’s ? Whence do the creatures get their life ?

We hesitate before the answer, but we are obliged to confess that Mr, Harte’s world is constructed upon the Ptolemaic system : the sun, moon, and stars revolve round it; the world itself is fixed, and a law to itself. If the reader will attend, he will find that the controlling force in the several stories is sentiment, and not principle. The emotional, and not the ethical, determines the life of this world of Mr. Harte’s, and so complete is the ascendency of sentiment that there is a needless waste of morals. In Gabriel Conroy, for example, Grace Conroy appears to the unsuspecting reader as a simple, pure, and courageous girl ; she even has a show of principle for a short time, to set off the selfishness of Philip Ashley, or Poinsett, — for nearly everybody in the book has an alias : but presently the reader has a dismal foreboding, for a line or two, that she is the mistress of her lover, and when she reappears, toward the close of the book, his conjecture becomes certainty. But there was absolutely no sort of need of ruining her. On the contrary, the story would have been stronger without this needless assumption. In effect, the women in these stories never seem to be heroines until they have lost their honor, and the men never seem to be brave until they have parted with their principles. Once these are out of the way, on both sides, and sentiment set up as the law of being, all moves on smoothly. Steadfastness in wickedness becomes quite as admirable as steadfastness in righteousness, and the colorless gambler, who fascinates every one within reach, goes through the exercise of self-denial with a charming insouciance which puts to shame the more awkward exhibitions of blushing innocents.

Mr. Harte has not been let alone in his world. He has been subjected to criticisms, and in the first volume of this collection he enters his somewhat impatient apology. “ Of all the various forms,” he says, “ in which cant presents itself to suffering humanity,” he knows of none “ so outrageous, so illogical, so undemonstrable, so marvelously absurd, as the cant of ' too much mercy.’ When it shall be proven to him [the author] that communities are degraded, and brought to guilt and crime, suffering or destitution, from a predominance of this quality; when he shall see pardoned ticket-of-leave men elbowing men of austere lives out of situation and position, and the repentant Magdalen supplanting the blameless virgin in society, then he will lay aside his pen, and extend his hand to the new Draconian discipline in fiction.” Mr. Harte’s world is indeed a compensation for the present, and possibly for the next. Poetic mercy, not poetic justice, brings it into harmony with the general order of the universe, and one has the happiness of finding that the variety show has made the pulpit unnecessary.

It is this unmoral treatment of immoral subjects which robs them of their noxious qualities. As soon as we fairly leave our conscience, like our coat, hanging on a nail outside, and enter Mr. Harte’s world in social and moral déshabillé, wo are entertained beyond measure. We read a Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst with all the enjoyment with which we might, under the same circumstances, read of the adventures of the prodigal son in a far country, before he came to himself. The people and scenes are so real, under the touch of this man of genius, and yet they belong so entirely to a neighboring world, that we are in no danger of running across them, and finding their recognition of our acquaintance awkward. People have vexed themselves over the problem of the inhabitancy of the moon ; certain essentials of life seem to the telescopic looker-on to be wanting. They should take thought from the success with which Mr. Harte’s world is inhabited by people who wear their principles as ornaments.

We come back with pleasure to a contemplation of those features of Mr. Harte’s work which have made him a new force in literature. He has given us to know some of the marks of a fleeting phase of civilization ; he has brought forward into the light certain tawdry and grotesque personages, who compel our sympathy even when we distrust them ; he has drawn distinct figures, which reveal their own life ; and he has given familiar sentiment new and pathetic situations. His babies and children, for example, reconcile us from time to time to a world in which sentiment is the ruling motive ; that they should so often grow up into somewhat shabby men and women, as when Olly, in Gabriel Conroy, develops into the smart Olivia, and Carry, in An Episode of Fiddletown, becomes a foolish schoolgirl, is Mr. Harte’s unconscious confession that sentiment has a way of losing its charm when it is put to the common uses of life, and becomes a working theory. When all our criticism is expended, and we have made peace with our judgment, we linger to have another look at the graphic, amusing, and novel sights which he draws with so free a hand.