Bret Harte

BRET HARTE would still have been a genius and a great writer if gold had never been discovered in California; but history records no happier union of the man and the hour than his advent to the Pacific coast close upon the heels of the pioneers. Some writers of fiction, those who have the very highest form of creative imagination, are able from their own minds to spin out the web and woof of the characters that they describe ; and it makes little difference where they live or what literary material lies about them. It is true that even such writers do not construct their heroes and heroines quite out of whole cloth; they have a shred or two to begin with. But their work is in the main and essentially the result not of perception but of creation. The proof of this creative power is that the characters portrayed by it are submitted to various exigencies and influences; they grow, develop, — yes, even change, and yet retain their harmony and consistency. The development of character, or at least the gradual revelation of character, forms the peculiar charm of the novel, as distinguished from the short story.

A few great novels have indeed been written by authors who did not possess this highest form of creative genius, especially by Dickens ; but no novel was ever written without betraying the author’s deficiency in this respect, if the deficiency existed. It is betrayed in the case both of Kipling and Bret Harte, each of whom has written a novel, and in each case the book is a failure. Gabriel Conroy, Bret Harte’s novel, is so bad as a whole, though abounding in gems, its characters are so inconsistent aud confused, its ending so incomprehensible, that it produces upon the reader the effect of a nightmare. It is evident that he took little interest in it, and it reinforces the impression, derived from a careful study of his stories and confirmed by his own statement, that his characters were copied from life. But they were copied with the insight and with the emphasis of genius.

The ability to read human nature as Bret Harte could read it is almost as rare as the higher form of creative ability. How little do we know even of those whom we see every day, whom we have lived with for years! 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 or bad fortune, a great sorrow or great happiness, a sudden temptation, the treachery of a friend. Let him ask himself any such question, and it is almost certain that, if he is honest with himself, he will have to admit that he can only conjecture what would be the result. This is not because human nature is inconsistent; the law of character is as immutable as any other law: it is because human nature eludes us.

But it did not elude Bret Harte. One who was intimate with him in California says: “ He found endless enjoyment in the people whom he saw and met casually. He read their characters as if they were open books.” Another early friend of his, Mr. Noah Brooks, in his reminiscences of Bret Harte narrates the following : “ In Sacramento he and I met Colonel Starbottle, who had, of course, another name. He wore a tall silk hat and loosely fitting clothes, and he carried on his left arm by its crooked handle a stout walking stick. The colonel was a dignified and benignant figure ; in politics he was everybody’s friend. A gubernatorial election was pending, and with the friends of Haight he stood at the hotel bar, and as they raised their glasses to their lips he said : ' Here’s to the Coming Event! ’ Nobody asked at that stage of the canvass what the coming event would be, and when the good colonel stood in the same place with the friends of Gorham he gave the same toast, ‘ The Coming Event.’ ”

The reader will recognize the picture at once, even to the manner in which the colonel carried his cane.

Bret Harte (christened Francis Brett) was born in Albany, New York, August 25, 1839, of an ancestry which, it is said, combined the English, German, and Hebrew strains. His father was a teacher of Greek in the Albany Female College, but he died while his son was still a child, and Bret Harte’s only instruction was obtained in the Albany public schools, and ceased when he was thirteen or fourteen years old. At the age of eleven he wrote a poem called Autumn Musings, which was published in the New York Sunday Atlas, but the household critics treated it with that frank severity which is peculiar to relatives, and the youthful poet wrote no more, so far as anybody knows, until he electrified the world with The Heathen Chinee.

In the spring of 1854, Mrs. Harte and her son sailed for California, — an adventurous step for a poor widow with a boy of fifteen; but no woman not adventurous could have borne such a son. Upon their arrival at San Francisco, Bret Harte walked thence to Sonoma, where he started a school. The school soon closed its doors, but so long as the English tongue remains, it will survive in the pages of Cressy. In all literature there are no children drawn with more sympathy, more insight, more subtlety, more tenderness than those sketched by Bret Harte. He apprehended both the savagery and the innocence of childhood. Every reader is the happier for having known that handsome and fastidious boy Rupert Filgee, who, secure in his avowed predilection for the tavern-keeper’s wife, rejected the advances of contemporary girls. “ And don’t you,” to Octavia Dean, “go on breathing over my head like that. If there’s anything I hate, it’s having a girl breathing around me. Yes, you were! I felt it in my hair.”

Upon the failure of the school, Bret Harte tried mining, but that, too, proved unprofitable. Later, at the age of seventeen, he became a deputy collector of taxes, and was sent into the lawless mining camps, where no taxes had ever been collected. But the miners yielded to the unarmed boy what armed men had not been able to extort, and, to the surprise of his superiors, he returned to San Francisco with the taxes in his pouch. Afterward he became a messenger for Wells, Fargo & Company’s Express, and traveled upon the box of a stagecoach, presumably with Yuba Bill as the driver. It was a dangerous business: his predecessor had been shot through the arm by a highwayman, his successor was killed ; but he escaped without injury. “ He bore a charmed life,” writes another of his early friends, Mr. C. W. Stoddard. “ Probably his youth was his salvation, for he ran a thousand risks, yet seemed only to gain in health and spirits.” Later, he drifted to San Francisco, where he began by setting type for a newspaper; from that he soon passed into being a contributor to the newspapers, writing, among other things, The Heathen Chinee, the Condensed Novels, and his first story, M’liss, which was published in the Golden Era. It was at this time that he held the position of Secretary in the United States Mint, a sinecure, or very nearly that, such as in the good old days was properly bestowed upon literary men. In 1868 he became the editor of the Overland Monthly, and finally he served for a brief period as Professor of Literature in a San Francisco college.

It will thus be perceived that Bret Harte knew by personal experience almost every form of life in California; and it was such a life as probably the world never saw before, as, almost certainly, it will never see again.

When Bret Harte first became famous he was accused of misrepresenting California society. A philosophic and historical writer of great ability once spoke of the “ perverse romanticism ” of his tales ; and since his death these accusations, if they may be called such, have been renewed in San Francisco with bitterness. It is strange that Californians themselves should be so anxious to strip from their state the distinction which Bret Harte conferred upon it, — so anxious to show that its heroic age never existed, that life in California has always been just as commonplace, respectable, and uninteresting as it is anywhere else in the world. But be this as it may, the records, the diaries, journals, and narratives written by pioneers themselves, and, most important of all, the daily newspapers published in San Francisco and elsewhere from 1849 to 1859, fully corroborate Bret Harte’s assertion that he described only what he saw and, in almost every case, only what actually occurred. The fact is that Bret Harte merely skimmed the cream from the surface. The pioneers and those who followed them in the early fifties were mainly young men, many of them well educated, and most of them far above the average in vigor and enterprise. They were such men as enlist in the first years of a war ; and few wars involve more casualties than fell to their lot. They were sifted again and again before the survivors reached their destination. Many were killed by the Apaches in the valleys of the Rio Grande and the Colorado ; many died of hunger and thirst; many had no other food during the last part of their journey than the putrefying bodies of the horses and oxen that had perished along the way.

In the story called Liberty Jones’s Discovery, Bret Harte has sketched the wan and demoralized appearance of a party of emigrants who just managed to reach the promised land. Many were caught by storms in the late autumn, and were snowed up in the mountains. In Gabriel Conroy are described the sufferings of such a party, a few of whom were rescued in the spring ; and the horrors which Bret Harte relates are only the actual facts of the case upon which his account is based. Those who came by sea had to face a long, wearisome voyage in lumbering craft, besides the deadly Panama fever, and the possible violence of the half-breeds on the Isthmus, who killed fifty out of one ship’s company.

Nor was life in California easy : the toil was severe, the food often bad, the exposure productive of rheumatism. Still more wearing upon the nervous system were the excitements, the chances and changes of a miner’s life. It has been remarked of the California pioneers, as of the veterans of the Civil War, that they have grown old prematurely. Few of them acquired wealth. Marshall, the sawmill foreman, who discovered those deposits which in five years produced gold to the tune of $50,000,000, died poor. No millionaires are found among the “ Forty-Niners,” those time-worn associates who gather annually to celebrate their achievements beneath the folds of the Bear Flag, — the ensign of a premature, half-comic, half-heroic attempt to wrest from Spain what was then an outlying and neglected province. Pioneers do not, as a rule, gather wealth; they make it possible for the shrewd men who come after them to do so.

But the California pioneers enjoyed an experience that was better than wealth. They had their hour. The conditions of society then prevailing were those which the Almighty and the American Constitution intended should prevail on this continent, but from which we are daily drifting further and further. All men felt that, whether they were born so or not, they had become free and equal. Social distinctions were rubbed out. A man was judged by his conduct; not by his bank account, nor by the class, the family, the club, or the church to which he belonged. Where all are rich equality must prevail, and how could any one be poor when the simplest kind of labor was rewarded at the rate of eight dollars per day ; when the average miner “ cleaned up ” twenty or thirty dollars as the fruit of his day’s work, and a taking of from three hundred to five hundred dollars a week for weeks together was not uncommon. Servants received about $150 a month ; and washerwomen acquired fortunes and founded families. It was cheaper to send one’s clothes to China to be laundered, and some thrifty persons availed themselves of the fact.

Everybody was young. A man of fifty with a gray beard was pointed out as a curiosity. A woman created more excitement in the streets of San Francisco than an elephant or a giraffe ; and little children were followed by admiring crowds eager to kiss them, to shake their hands, to hear their voices, and humbly begging permission to make them presents of gold nuggets and miners’ curiosities. Almost everybody was making money; nobody was hampered by past mistakes or misdeeds ; all records had been wiped from the slate; the future was full of possibilities ; and the dry, stimulating climate of California added its intoxicating effect to the general buoyancy of feeling. Best of all, men were thrown upon their own resources ; they themselves, and not a highly organized police and a brave fire department, protected their lives and their property. We pay more dearly than we think for such conveniences. The taxes which they involve are but a small part of the bill, — the training in manliness and self-reliance which we lose by means of them is a much more serious matter. In the mining camps of California, as in the mediæval towns of England, every man was his own policeman, fireman, carpenter, mason, and general functionary, — nay, he was his own judge, jury, sheriff, and constable. With pistol and bowie knife, he protected his gold, his claim, and his honor. There is something in the Anglo-Saxon nature, left to itself and freed from the restraints of a more or less effete public opinion, which causes it to resent an insult with whatever weapons are sanctioned by custom in the absence of law.

In the early days of California society reverted to this militant, heroic type. The reversion was inevitable under the circumstances, and it was greatly assisted by the social predominance of the Southern element. The class represented and partly caricatured in Colonel Starbottle was numerous, and, for reasons which we have not space to recall, was even more influential than its numbers warranted. An editorial defense of dueling was published in a San Francisco paper of Southern proclivities. The senior editor of the Alta California was killed in a duel; and at another time an assistant editor of the same paper published a long letter, in which, with an unconscious humor worthy of Colonel Starbottle himself, he denied the charge of having sought two rival editors with homicidal intent. “ I had simply resolved,” he wrote, “ to pronounce Messrs. Crane and Rice poltroons and cowards, and to spit in their faces ; and had they seen fit to resent it on the spot, I was prepared for them.” In those early days, when it was impossible to turn a neighbor in distress over to the police, or to a hospital, or to some society, charitable or uncharitable, or to dismiss him with a soup-ticket, — in that barbarous time, men were not only more warlike, they were more generous, more ready to act upon that instinctive feeling of pity, which is the basis of all morality. In short, the shackles of conventionality and tradition were cast off, and the primeval instincts of humanity — the instincts of pride, of pugnacity, and of pity — asserted themselves.

Such was the society in which Bret Harte, at the age of fifteen, “ a truant schoolboy,” to use his own words, was plunged. Few writers have shown more well-bred reticence about themselves, but we have seen how varied was his experience, and we catch a single glimpse of him in the exquisite poem, that “ spray of Western pine,” which he laid upon the grave of Dickens : —

The extent of the influence which Dickens exercised upon Bret Harte has been much discussed, and the critics commonly agree that this influence was wholly bad. It is true that on the surface we see only the bad effects of it, — certain faults of style, certain mannerisms, a certain mawkishness of sentiment. Bret Harte had a morbid passion for splitting infinitives, and he misuses a few words, such as “gratuitous” and “aggravating,” with malice aforethought. The truth is that a spice of self-will, a modest but radical unconventionality were just as much parts of his character as was the fastidiousness which in general controlled his style.

Occasionally, moreover, he lapses into a strange, pompous, involved manner, making his heroes and heroines, in moments of passion or excitement, deliver themselves in a way which seems ludicrously out of place, as, for example, in Susy, where Clarence says: “ If I did not know you were prejudiced by a foolish and indiscreet woman, I should believe you were trying to insult me as you have your adopted mother, and would save you the pain of doing both in her house by leaving it now and forever.” Or, again, in A Secret of Telegraph Hill, where Herbert Bly says to the gambler, whom he has surprised in his room hiding from the vigilance committee : " Whoever you may be, I am neither the police nor a spy. You have no right to insult me by supposing that I would profit by a mistake that made you my guest, and that I would refuse you the sanctuary of the roof that covers your insult as well as your blunder.” And yet the speaker is not meant to be a prig.

So again he imitates, or at least resembles, Dickens when he admires his heroes in the wrong place, representing them as saying or doing something quite out of keeping with their real character, and hardly to be described by any other word than that of vulgar. The reader will remember that passage in Our Mutual Friend, where Eugene Wrayburn, in his interview with the schoolmaster, taking advantage of both his natural superiority and the superiority of the circumstances in which they happen to be placed, treats the schoolmaster with an arrogance which Dickens evidently feels to be the natural manner of a fine gentleman, but which is really an example of that want of chivalry which is the essence of an ungentlemanly character. Bret Harte in several places makes Jack Hamlin act in almost precisely the same manner, playing the part of a bully in respect to men who were inferior to him socially, and inferior also in that capacity to shoot quickly and accurately, which made Mr. Hamlin formidable. Such, for example, was Hamlin’s treatment of Jenkinson, the tavern-keeper, whom the inimitable Enriquez Saltello described with Spanish courtesy as “our good Jenkinson, our host, our father;” or again, in Gabriel Conroy, where Hamlin insults the porter and threatens, as Bret Harte says, falling into the manner as well as the spirit of Dickens at his very worst, “ to forcibly dislodge certain vital and necessary organs from the porter’s body.”

On the whole, however, it seems highly probable that Bret Harte derived more good than bad from his admiration for Dickens. The reading of Dickens must have stimulated his boyish imagination, must have quickened that sympathy with the weak and suffering, with the downtrodden, with the waifs and strays, with the outcasts of society, which is the keynote of both writers. Sentiment and satire are the two moulds in one or the other of which must be cast all portrayal or discussion of human nature provided that it has any emotional character, — is anything more than coldly analytical. Sentiment furnishes the subjective, and satire the objective method. Sentiment is sympathy, and satire is antipathy. Swift’s weapon was satire ; that of Lamb was sentiment sharpened by satire. Sterne dealt almost entirely with sentiment. Thackeray could use both instruments with equal skill, but he is known chiefly as a satirist ; whereas Dickens was strong in sentiment, and commonly failed when he resorted to satire. Sentiment is an infinitely more valuable quality than satire. Satire is merely destructive, whereas sentiment is constructive. Becky Sharp is a warning ; but Colonel Newcome is an inspiration. Satire convicts : sentiment regenerates. The most that satire can do is to clear the ground, to lay bare the follies and vices of human nature, to show how the thing ought not to be done. This is an important and necessary office; but sentiment goes much further : it prompts to action ; it supplies the dynamic force of benevolence, of affection, of ambition. It makes the tears flow, the blood kindle. Satire is almost as objectionable as reform ; and reformers are notoriously unlovely persons. The reformer, like the satirist, can tear down, but he cannot build up ; and it is so much more important to build than to destroy that the office of the man of sentiment is far more valuable to the world than that of the man of satire. This is the justification of that popular judgment which, despite the critics, sets Dickens above Thackeray. Dickens, though perhaps the inferior, both as man and artist, is worth more to the world.

Bret Harte, like Dickens, deals mainly with sentiment, but, unlike Dickens, he is a master of satire as well. His satire is directed chiefly against that peculiar form of cold and hypocritical character which sometimes survives as the very dregs of Puritanism. This is the type which he has portrayed with almost savage intensity in the character of a woman who combines sensuality and deceit with the most orthodox form of Protestantism and horse - hair sofa respectability. Occasionally Bret Harte’s humor takes a satirical form, as when, after describing how a stranger was shot and nearly killed in a mining camp, he speaks of a prevailing impression in the camp " that his misfortune was the result of the defective moral quality of his being a stranger; ” or again in Cressy, where Mrs. McKinstry, the stern survivor of a Kentucky vendetta, is said to have " looked upon her daughter’s studies and her husband’s interest in them as a weakness that might in process of time produce an infirmity of homicidal purpose, and become enervating of eye and trigger finger. ‘ The old man’s worrits hev sorter shook out a little of his sand,’ she explained.”

In the main, however, Bret Harte was a writer of sentiment, and that is why he is so beloved. Sentiment resolves itself into humor and pathos ; and both humor and pathos are said to consist in the perception of incongruities. In humor, there is the perception of some incongruity which excites derision and a smile ; in pathos, there is the perception of some incongruity which excites pity and a tear. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that in no other writer in the world are humor and pathos so nearly the same as they are in Bret Harte. There are sentences and paragraphs in his stories and poems which might make one reader laugh and another weep, or which, more likely yet, would provoke a mingled smile and tear. Perhaps the most consummate example of this is found in the tale, How Santa Claus came to Simpson’s Bar.

The reader will remember that Johnny, after greeting the Christmas guests in his " weak, treble voice, broken by that premature hoarseness which only vagabondage and the habit of premature selfpossession can give,” and after hospitably setting out the whiskey bottle and some crackers, creeps back to bed, and is then accosted by Dick Bullen, the hero of the story.

“ ‘ Hello, Johnny ! you ain’t goin’ to turn in agin, are ye ? ’ said Dick.

“ ‘ 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.”

I might quote many similar passages. There is one in Gabriel Conroy which describes Olly, Gabriel’s little sister, getting out of bed to ask what it was that seemed to be troubling him. " She went up to him so softly that she startled him, — shaking a drop of water on the hand that she suddenly threw around his neck. ' You ain’t worrying about that woman, Gabe ? ’ ”

“ ‘ No,’ said Gabriel, with a laugh. Olly looked down at her hand. Gabriel looked up at the roof. ' There is a leak thar that has got to be stopped to-morrow. Go to bed, Olly, or you ’ll take your death.’ ”

In discussing Bret Harte, it is almost impossible to separate substance from style. The style is so good, so exactly adapted to the ideas which he wishes to convey, that one can hardly imagine it to be different. Some thousands of years ago, an Eastern sage remarked that he " would like to write a book such that everybody should conceive that he might have written it himself, and yet so good that nobody else could have written the like.” This is the ideal which Bret Harte fulfilled. Almost everything said by any one of his characters is so accurate an expression of that character as to seem inevitable. It is felt at once to be just what such a character must have said. Given the character, the words follow; and anybody could set them down ! This is the fallacy underlying that strange feeling, which every reader must have experienced, of the apparent easiness of writing an especially good or telling conversation or soliloquy.

In Bret Harte, at his best, the choice of words, the balance of the sentences, the rhythm of the paragraphs, are very nearly perfect. He had an ear for style just as some persons have an ear for music. In conciseness, in artistic restraint, he is the equal of Turgenieff, of Hawthorne, of Newman. All this could not have been achieved without effort. Bret Harte had the conscience of an artist, if he had no other conscience ; his masterpieces were slowly and painfully forged. “ One day,” wrote Mr. C. W. Stoddard, who was his friend in California, “ I found him pacing the floor of his office in the United States Branch Mint. He was knitting his brows and staring at vacancy. I wondered why. He was watching and waiting for a word. . . . I suggested one ; it would not answer ; it must be a word of two syllables, or the rhythm of the sentence would suffer. Fastidious to a degree, he could not overlook a lack of finish in a manuscript offered him. He had a special taste in the choice of titles, and I have known him to alter the name of an article two or three times, in order that the table of contents might read handsomely and harmoniously.”

The truth is, Bret Harte was essentially an artist, with all the peculiarities, mental and moral, which are commonly associated under that name; and this fact explains some apparent anomalies in his career. Why did he leave and never revisit California ? Why did he make his home in England ? Bret Harte left California when the glamour had departed from it, when, if not in the state generally, at least in San Francisco, where he was living, a calculating commercialism had in some degree replaced the generous mood of earlier days. It is well known that respectable San Francisco stood aghast at The Luck of Roaring Camp, the alarm having been sounded by a feminine proof-reader who was shocked by what she conceived to be the indecency of the tale. Not equally well known is the contrasting fact, now recorded, that another young girl, an assistant in the office of The Atlantic Monthly, first called Mr. Fields’s attention to the story, upon its publication in the Overland Monthly ; and Mr. Fields, having read it, wrote that letter, soliciting a contribution to the Atlantic, which, as Bret Harte himself has related, encouraged him and confounded his critics. Even the sense of humor must have been weakened in a community which insisted that the newspapers should skip lightly over the facts of a recent and destructive earthquake, lest Eastern capital should become alarmed.

Nor did Bret Harte find elsewhere in this country any rest for the sole of his foot. Fate took him to Cambridge, — a spot which, with all its virtues, could hardly have been congenial to a poet who had breathed the free air of the Sierras. New York and Boston were only one degree less crude than San Francisco, and almost as provincial. In London, he doubtless found not only a more literary and artistic atmosphere, but also a greater simplicity, — a cultivated simplicity different from, and yet essentially resembling the unsophisticated naturalness of a mining camp. Bret Harte’s incapacity to generalize, to deal with abstract notions or general propositions, is another trait of the artistic nature. Everything presented itself to him in a concrete form. He seldom attempts to point the moral of his tales, and when he does so he is apt to go astray. Nor is it easy to persuade one’s self that Bret Harte was a very conscientious man, or that he was actuated by lofty motives. Finally, there can be discerned in him that streak of coarseness which so often accompanies extreme refinement and fastidiousness.

But this is all that can be said in disparagement ; and one blushes to have said it, when one reflects upon the nobility of the characters with whom Bret Harte has enriched the world. It is related that of all his stories he himself preferred Tennessee’s Partner ; and this is easy to believe, because the hero of that tale is actuated by love and pity entirely unalloyed, without the slightest admixture of passion or self-interest. We must not stop to call the roll of Bret Harte’s heroes and heroines ; two characters only shall be mentioned, and first that of the schoolmistress in the Idyl of Red Gulch, who, true to her New England instincts and training, gathers her white skirts about her and flies from the temptation, though few would now call it such, which involved the happiness of her life. Not Hawthorne himself could have conceived a character actuated by purer motives, or could have told the story more delicately. The second is the Rose of Tuolumne, that beautiful figure, as brave, as womanly, as passionate as Juliet, who, in garments stained with the blood of the man whom she loved, dared his cowardly rival to turn his pistol upon her. Such women make the mothers of heroes, and the genius who can portray them is an element in the formation of an heroic race.

H. C. Merwin.