Bret Harte

“ Something of this spontaneousness and finality belonged to the character of Bret Harte. If he was weak in conviction and principle, he was strong in instinct. If he yielded easily to certain temptations, he was impregnable to others, because he was protected against them by the whole current of his nature. It would be as impossible to imagine Bret Harte taking sides against the oppressed, as it would be to imagine him performing his literary work in a slovenly manner. ”

“ He easily persuades himself that the thing [Pg 286] which he wishes to do is the right thing for him to do. This was a trait of Bret Harte’s character, and it naturally accompanies that lack of introspection which was so marked in him. There was a want of background, both intellectual and moral, in his nature. He was an observer, not a thinker, and his genius was shown only as he lived in the life of others. Even his poetry is dramatic, not lyric. It was very seldom that Bret Harte, in his tales or elsewhere, advanced any abstract sentiment or idea ”

“ More than a generation ago this magazine was printing the stories of Bret Harte—stories that revealed with great accuracy and skill and sympathy the spirit of the California mining camp. Bret Harte had lived and breathed the grim and romantic spirit of this environment. Fusing this experience with an imagination that emotionalized a native instinct for story-telling, Bret Harte was able to lend to his writing a verisimilitude that easily won the reader's interest in the charm and novelty of that strenuous and elemental western life. ”

“ The one kind of woman that did not attract Bret Harte as a subject for literature was the conventional woman of the world. He could draw her fairly well, for we have Amy Forester in A Night on the Divide, Jessie Mayfield in Jeff Briggs’s Love Story, Grace Nevil in A Mæcenas of the Pacific Slope, Mrs. Ashwood in A First Family of Tasajara, and Mrs. Horncastle in Three Partners. But these women do not bear the stamp of Bret Harte’s genius. ”

“ Even as a child, Bret Harte had no sense of sin,—no sense of that hideous discrepancy between character and ideals, between conduct and duty, which ought to oppress all men, and which, at some period of their lives, does oppress most men. Everybody, from the Digger Indian up, has a standard of right and wrong; everybody is aware that he continually falls below that standard; and from these two facts of consciousness arise the sense of sin, remorse, repentance, and the instinct of expiation. Perhaps this is religion, or the fundamental feeling upon which religion is based. ”

“ I can well imagine that Bret Harte attracted the least attention. It is extremely doubtful to my mind if he ever had much actual experience of the mining camps. To a man of his vivid imagination, a mere suggestion afforded a plot for a story; even the Laird's Toreadors, it will be recalled, were commercially successful when purely imaginary; he only failed when he subsequently studied the real thing in Spain.
Bret Harte was a man who in a primitive community might well escape notice. In appearance, manner and training, he was the exact antithesis of Mark Twain. ”

“ A nature so impressionable as Bret Harte’s, so responsive, would insensibly have been affected by his surroundings, and the more so because he had in himself no strong, intellectual basis. His life was ruled by taste, rather than by conviction; and taste is a harder matter than conviction to preserve unimpaired. Of all the criticisms passed upon Bret Harte there has been nothing more true than Madame Van de Velde’s observations upon this point: “It was decidedly fortunate that he left California when he did, never to return to it ”

“ Chesterton continues, “is like being rebuked by the pyramids or by the starry heavens. There is about Yuba Bill this air of a pugnacious calm, a stepping back to get his distance for a shattering blow, which is like that of Dr. Johnson at his best. And the effect is inexpressibly increased by the background and the whole picture which Bret Harte paints so powerfully,—the stormy skies, the sombre gorge, the rocking and spinning coach, and high above the feverish passengers the huge, dark form of Yuba Bill, a silent mountain of humor.” ”

“ This at least is to be said: the extravagance or improvidence of a man like Bret Harte stands upon a very different footing from that of an ordinary person. [Pg 239] We should be ashamed not to show some consideration, even in money matters, for the soldier who has served his country in time of war; and the romancer who has contributed to the entertainment of the race is entitled to a similar indulgence.
Soon after Bret Harte’s arrival in the East his friends urged him to give public lectures on the subject of life in California. ”

“ How much twenty-four hundred a year seemed to him then, and how little a few years later! A Pioneer who knew them both writes: “Mrs. Frémont helped Bret Harte in many ways. In turn he marvelled at her worldly wisdom,—being able to tell one how to make a living. He named her daughter’s pony ‘Chiquita,’ after the equine heroine of his poem.” It was by Mrs. Frémont’s intervention that Bret Harte first appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly,” for, some years before he achieved fame, namely in 1863, The Legend of Monte del Diablo was published in that magazine. ”

“ The photographs of Bret Harte, taken at various periods in his life, reveal great changes, apart from those of age. The first one, at seventeen, shows an intellectual youth, very mature for his age, with a fine forehead, the hair parted at one side, and something of a rustic appearance. In the next picture, taken at the age of thirty-five or thereabout, we see a determined-looking man, with slight side-whiskers, a drooping mustache, and clothes a little “loud.” ”

“ The real difficulty of writing like Bret Harte is shown by the fact that as a story-teller he has no imitators. His style is so individual as to make imitation impossible. And yet occasionally the inspiration failed. It is a peculiarity of Bret Harte, shown especially in the longer stories, and most of all perhaps in Gabriel Conroy, that there are times when the reader almost believes that Bret Harte has dropped the pen, and some inferior person has taken it up. Author and reader come to the ground with a thud. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even that English critic who was perhaps his greatest admirer, makes the remark, literally true, but nevertheless misleading, that Bret Harte “did not create a perfectly noble, superior, commanding woman.” No, but he created, or at least sketched, more than one woman of a very noble type. What type of woman is most valuable to the world? Surely that which is fitted to become the mother of heroes; and to that type Bret Harte’s best women belong. They have courage, tenderness, sympathy, the power of self-sacrifice ”

“ Nobody will know that the Southern spy was the wife of the Northern general! You see, I have thought even of that!”
“And thinking of that,” said Brant slowly, “you have put yourself—I will not say in my power, for you are in the power of any man in this camp who may know you, or even hear you speak. Well, let us understand each other plainly. I do not know how great a sacrifice your devotion to your cause demands of you; I do know what it seems to demand of me. ”

“ A bitter smile came over Brant's face, but passed as quickly.
“Enough,” he said quietly, “I will meet you beside the Run, and cross the marsh with you until you are within hailing distance of your lines. I will be in plain clothes, Alice,” he went on slowly, “for it will not be the commander of this force who accompanies you, but your husband, and, without disgracing his uniform, he will drop to your level; for the instant he passes his own lines, in disguise, he will become, like you, a spy, and amenable to its penalties.” ”

“ The optimism for which Bret Harte was remarkable had its root in that same sympathy which formed the basis of his humor and pathos. The unsympathetic critic invariably despairs of mankind and the universe. ”

“ 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? ”

“ God bless you and keep you and the children safe for the sake of
“Frank.”
Bret Harte’s friends, however, were aware of his situation, and they procured for him an appointment by President Hayes as United States Commercial Agent at Crefeld in Prussia. The late Charles A. Dana was especially active in this behalf. Bret Harte, much as he dreaded the sojourn in a strange country, gladly accepted the appointment, and leaving his family for the present at Sea Cliff, Long Island, he sailed for England in June, 1878, little thinking that he was never to return. ”

“ There was a pause, a rattle of arms voices—another pause—and Brant stood breathlessly listening. Then the voice rose again slowly and clearly: “Pass the mulatto woman!”
Thank God! she was saved! But the thought had scarcely crossed his mind before it seemed to him that a blinding crackle of sparks burst out along the whole slope below the wall, a characteristic yell which he knew too well rang in his ears, and an undulating line of dusty figures came leaping like gray wolves out of the mist upon his pickets. He heard the shouts of his men falling back as they fired ”

“ Bret Harte was also gifted with an agreeable personality. He was even-tempered and good-natured. He was an ideal guest and enjoyed his friends. Whatever his shortcomings and whatever his personal responsibility for them, he deserves to be treated with the consideration and generosity he extended to others. He was never censorious, and instances of his magnanimity are many. Severity of judgment is a custom that few of us can afford, and to be generous is never a mistake. Harte was extremely sensitive, and he deplored controversy. ”

“ It was from these Western and Southwestern emigrants that Bret Harte’s nobler kind of woman, and, in most cases, of man also was drawn. The “great West” furnished his heroic characters,—California was only their accidental and temporary abiding-place. These people were of the muscular, farm type, with such health and such nerves as result from an out-door life, from simple, even coarse food, from early hours and abundant sleep.
The Pioneer women did indeed lack education and inherited refinement, as Bret Harte himself occasionally points out. ”

“ One can hardly help speculating about Bret Harte’s personal taste and preferences in regard to women. Cressy and the Rose of Tuolumne were both blondes; and yet on the whole he certainly preferred brunettes. Even his blue-eyed girls usually have black hair. The Treasure of the Redwoods disclosed from the recesses of her sunbonnet “a pale blue eye and a thin black arch of eyebrow.” One associates a contralto voice with a brunette, and Bret Harte’s heroines, so far as the subject is mentioned, have contralto voices. Not one is spoken of as having a soprano voice. ”

“ The deficiency in Bret Harte was perhaps this, that he lacked a profound knowledge of human nature. A human being regarded as material for a writer of fiction may be divided into two parts. There is that part, the more elemental one, which he shares with other men, and there is, secondly, that part which differentiates him from other men. In other words, he is both a type of human nature, and a particular specimen with individual variations. ”

“ An acute, if somewhat degenerate critic, Mr. James Douglas, writing in the “Bookman,” [69] presents the case against the Luck and the Outcasts in its most extreme form: “There is no doubt that we have outgrown the art which relies on picturesque lay figures grouped against a romantic background.... In Bret Harte’s best stories the presence of the scene painter, the stage carpenter and the stage manager jars on our consciousness.... Bret Harte takes Cherokee Sal, an Indian prostitute, puts her in a degraded mining settlement, and sanctifies her by motherhood. That is good art. ”

“ Bret Harte’s representation of California is true; there is no exaggeration in it; but there were other aspects of life there which would have been equally true. If we were to call up in imagination the various story-writers of Bret Harte’s day, it would be easy to guess what features of life on the Golden Slope would have attracted them, had they been there in the days of the Pioneers: how the social peculiarities of San Francisco, with its flamboyant demi-monde and its early appeal to the divorce court, would have interested one ”

“ It is this sincerity that sanctifies the rapidity and frankness of Bret Harte’s love-affairs. Genuine passion takes no account of time, and supplies by one instinctive rush of feeling the experience of years. Given the right persons, time becomes as long and as short as eternity. Thus it was with the two lovers who met and parted at midnight on the hilltop. ”