The Subjection of the Author to His Work

— Who has not, in reading certain authors, observed in them a quality of which the authors were themselves unaware, — the automatic nature of much that is written ?

The author sets out to prove what is to him at the time a self-evident proposition. It may be the benefits of free trade, it may be the superiority of mind over matter. As he advances, thoughts crowd upon him, modern instances swell the tide of proof ; crannies of his brain hitherto unexplored yield new evidence; by and by neglected facts and forgotten statements flock to his standard, all having a trend of their own, until he finds a motley array gathered in advocacy of what he by no means desired to show. Bret Harte once told me that in writing his earlier stories he found unexpected influences at work with him as collaborators, among which the public played an important and often an unwelcome part, especially in the selection of heroes and in what theatrical people would call the underlining of leading characters. Not only would individual creations find themselves cast for parts which must have greatly surprised them, but in time the whole story, plot and all, would take captive its creator, and bring up at a dénoûment far from what he had intended. For instance, in the Outcasts of Poker Flat, Jack Oakhurst was regarded as a very proper selection of reckless gambler and picturesque homicide to enact a part of “ general utility ; ” but obvious need compelled his maker to strip off or conceal some of the more objectionable qualities, so that the Byronic hero dies game, with martyr honors, to the slow music of an epitaph defining him as “ the strongest and the weakest of the party.” So keen an interest did the public take in his unblemished shirt front and his unruffled audacity that Mr. Jack Oakhurst awoke to find himself famous and almost respectable, while the puzzled author of his being was compelled, in obedience to popular clamor, to reproduce this sententious ruffian in subsequent stories. “ What the public could possibly find worth reading in that Heathen Chinee,” continued this literary Saturn, “ I could never make out; it was thrown in as a sort of makeweight. I was astonished at my luck in getting it printed, — by far the worst thing I ever wrote or read.” Perhaps this over-modest disclaimant did not realize the deftness, the exquisite precision, with which this little humorous squib met and rebutted the hue and cry about the Chinese question. The tumid eloquence of “Sand Lots Kearny,” as well as the stilted prose of California’s pedagogue, Senator Eugene Casserly, was answered, line upon line, in that quaint whimsical skitThe household word outweighed the sermon, and if, as Byron says,

so did the expected tragedy melt into the afterpiece, for a decade at least, and the rhetorical senator was laughed out of court. But it is biographers more than other men, I opine, who oftenest come to scoff and remain to pray. Of course there is nothing in the practice of biography, despite its punning possibilities, which should make less of flesh and blood than formerly ; nevertheless we somehow ascribe to biographical writers a sterner purpose of historic truth than is assumed of the tellers of tales. Yet I am told by sundry of the former guild that it is extremely difficult to avoid becoming eulogists, when satire was intended. So much good is learned about a man through unguarded expressions in his private letters, so much lovableness glistens in the tender reminiscences of surviving friends, that through the kinship revealed by the “ touch of nature ” we are compelled to admit the truth of Moore’s lines : —

Surely it is to the credit of human nature that this experience occurs so often ; that in considering his subject the biographer finds himself as one received into the bosom of the family, and any purpose he may have had to be severely just is laid aside for a comfortable conformity with the motto, “Nil de mortuis nisi bonum.”