CONTEMPORARY MEN 
 OF LETTERS SERIES 
 
 EDITED BY 
 WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY 
 
 BRET HARTE
 
 FROM A PAINTING BY JOHN PETTIE, R.A. 
 
 REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE FINE ARTS SOCIETY, LONDON. 
 PHOTOGRAPH BY FRADELLE & YOUNG, LONDON.
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 BY HENRY W. BOYNTON 
 
 Contemporary 
 
 NEW YORK 
 McCLURE, PHILLIPS 
 MCMIII 
 
 CO.
 
 COFYBIGHT, 1903, BY 
 
 McCLURB, PHILLIPS A CO. 
 
 Published, October, 1903
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. LIFE 3 
 
 II. PERSONALITY 48 
 
 III. WORK . 80 
 
 26S991
 
 BRET HAUTE
 
 I 
 
 LIFE 
 
 Though Bret Harte was not an old man 
 when he died, the best of his life and work 
 was lived and done a generation ago. He 
 had one brilliant vision and spent the rest 
 of his life in reminding himself of it. In 
 consequence, it ought to be easier than it 
 often can be with one who has died so 
 recently to arrive at something like a fair 
 estimate of his total effectiveness. Not 
 much has been done toward this so far. 
 Bret Harte's death called forth all sorts 
 of newspaper judgments, and a so-called 
 biography, which proved to be at once 
 perfunctory and fulsome. The purpose 
 of the present sketch is to consider sober- 
 ly what sort of man Bret Harte really 
 
 [3]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 was, and what, being that sort of man, 
 he really did. 
 
 Francis Brett Harte was born in Al- 
 bany, N. Y., August 25, 1839. He is 
 said to have had English, German, and 
 Hebrew blood in his veins. His father 
 was "professor" of Greek in the Albany 
 Female College, which was apparently a 
 girls' seminary of the old type. The boy 
 in early years was not robust, and his 
 father was sensible enough to keep him 
 away from school routine for a time. He 
 had learned to read, however, and was not 
 kept away from books; and he was not 
 slower than other boys in getting up an 
 appetite for stories. Beginning at seven 
 with "Dombey and Son," he made his 
 way presently, via Dickens, pretty well 
 [4]
 
 LIFE 
 
 through the itinerary of the English 
 novel. Luckily at that time the "juve- 
 nile" had not yet been invented by the 
 senile, nor had Smollett and Fielding 
 been put out of reach on the upper shelves 
 of the family library. Bret Harte began 
 to write fiction with the best English 
 models before him; though, as we shall 
 see, his work as a whole was based not 
 upon the best of the fiction with which 
 he was familiar, but rather, as was natu- 
 ral for a talent not quite of the first kind, 
 upon the fiction which was most popular 
 in his day. 
 
 There was nothing unusual in this boy- 
 ish fondness for stories, or in any other 
 quality which the boy showed; not even, 
 alas, in his production, at the age of 
 [51
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 eleven, of some verses which were good 
 enough to be printed in a New York 
 journal. The parents, it appears, disap- 
 proved of this effusion, not so much be- 
 cause it was bad verse as because they 
 considered poets rather disreputable per- 
 sons and feared that the son might turn 
 out to be one. 
 
 He had in due time four or five years 
 of common-school instruction; it was all 
 over before his fifteenth year, and he 
 never had any more instruction of any 
 kind. He does not appear, at any time, 
 to have expressed regret for his lack of 
 academic training. We may as well take 
 it for granted that there was nothing for 
 him to regret. What a man might have 
 done under different circumstances is as 
 [6]
 
 LIFE 
 
 much a matter of surmise as what he 
 might have done with a different charac- 
 ter and endowment. Bret Harte's nature 
 was assimilative rather than acquisitive; 
 his mind followed the line of least resist- 
 ance, and if one is to guess at all, one may 
 as well guess that university training 
 could have done little for him. In this, 
 as in several other respects, he resembled 
 Irving and Dickens, the two writers 
 whose influence upon him is most appar- 
 ent, especially in his early work. Like 
 them, he seems to have had the faculty 
 in youth of foregathering with the books 
 and the people that could be of greatest 
 use to him. And it was during precisely 
 the years which he would naturally have 
 spent in the seclusion of college life that
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 he was able to assimilate most from the 
 open world. 
 
 At all events, the father's death left 
 this boy of fifteen no choice but to find 
 something to do for a living. In 1854 
 he and his mother undertook the journey 
 to California by way of the Isthmus of 
 Panama. Here one is faced by one of 
 the little mysteries in Bret Harte's life 
 which ordinary inquiry fails to solve. It 
 would have been quite natural that, left 
 an orphan at fifteen, he should, like any 
 other unattached penniless American boy 
 of the period, have turned West in the 
 trail of the forty-niners. All manner of 
 golden fables were making their way 
 eastward, and irresistibly luring the un- 
 employed to try their hand at the new 
 [8]
 
 LIFE 
 
 game. But this boy was not an orphan, 
 his mother had to go with him, and the 
 hardships of the journey West made it 
 not a light undertaking for a woman. 
 One speculates a little as to which took 
 the other. Was the boy over-eager for 
 her endurance? or did they, as one rumor 
 goes, follow an older son who had gone 
 to the mines? She does not cumber our 
 narrative long; we hear of her as hav- 
 ing lived at Oakland with her son for 
 a time, and after that we hear nothing. 
 
 San Francisco, where the boy first 
 looked unsuccessfully for work, was not 
 by this time the most romantic spot in 
 California, in its open and confessed char- 
 acter. So far as its legislative enact- 
 ments and journalistic pronunciamentos 
 [9]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 indicated, it might have been a model 
 town according to the Anglo-Saxon con- 
 vention; a town eager to forget its fron- 
 tier habits, absorbed in the consideration 
 of its own dignity, and gravely bent upon 
 the attainment of rank as a centre of 
 civilisation. Beneath the surface, and not 
 far beneath, it was as picturesque and 
 lawless as any lover of raw humanity 
 could have desired it to be. Young 
 Frank Harte did not find a fortune ready 
 to his hand there (did not, in fact, find 
 any sort of profitable "job"), but he did 
 see the city pretty thoroughly; and in a 
 surprisingly short time had begun to 
 form the impression of California life 
 which was, after a time, to make his lit- 
 erary fortune. 
 
 [10]
 
 LIFE 
 
 The conditions of life in San Francisco 
 must have seemed strangely varied to a 
 boy who had been brought up in the staid 
 old Dutch town of Albany. There was 
 the pioneer from the East settling into 
 Western citizenship ; the old Spanish resi- 
 dent and, a more important fact, his 
 daughter; the " Heathen Chinee" ; the 
 professional gambler; the miner come to 
 town to get rid of his gold-dust: nearly 
 all the types, in short, which later became 
 the writer's stock-in-trade. 
 
 But Bret Harte had for some time yet 
 no suspicion of the use which he was to 
 make of his experiences. He was not go- 
 ing about with a note-book looking for 
 "copy." He was looking for a living, 
 and in the meantime enjoying every ex- 
 [11]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 perience for its own sake. California in 
 the fifties was a place in which experience 
 might be had very readily, if not very 
 cheaply. Not finding any means of sup- 
 porting himself and his mother in San 
 Francisco, he presently set out on foot 
 for Sonora, Calaveras County, where he 
 set up a school. The experiment, like 
 other early experiments, was not espe- 
 cially successful, except as it gave him the 
 opportunity for new impressions. What 
 some of these impressions were he has 
 himself recorded: 
 
 "Here I was thrown among the 
 strangest social conditions that the latter- 
 day world has perhaps seen. The setting 
 was itself heroic. The great mountains 
 of the Sierra Nevada lifted majestic, 
 [12]
 
 LIFE 
 
 snow-capped peaks against a sky of purest 
 blue. Magnificent pine forests of trees 
 which were themselves enormous gave to 
 the landscape a sense of largeness and 
 greatness. It was a land of rugged 
 canons, sharp declivities, and magnificent 
 distances. Amid rushing waters and 
 wildwood freedom, an army of strong 
 men, in red shirts and top-boots, were 
 feverishly in search of the buried gold of 
 earth. Nobody shaved, and hair, mous- 
 taches, and beards were untouched by 
 shears or razor. Weaklings and old men 
 were unknown. It took a stout heart and 
 a strong frame to dare the venture, to 
 brave the journey of 3,000 miles and 
 battle for life in the wilds. It was a civ- 
 ilisation composed entirely of young men,
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 for on one occasion, I remember, an 
 elderly man he was fifty, perhaps, but 
 he had a gray beard was pointed out as 
 a curiosity in the city, and men turned in 
 the street to look at him as they would 
 have looked at any other unfamiliar ob- 
 ject. 
 
 "These men, generally speaking, were 
 highly civilised, many of them being cul- 
 tured and professionally trained. They 
 were in strange and strong contrast with 
 their surroundings, for all the trammels 
 and conventionalities of settled civilisa- 
 tion had been left thousands of miles be- 
 hind. It was a land of perfect freedom, 
 limited only by the instinct and the habit 
 of law which prevailed in the mass. All 
 its forms were original, rude, and pictu- 
 [14]
 
 LIFE 
 
 resque. Woman was almost unknown, 
 and enjoyed the high estimation of a 
 rarity. The chivalry natural to manhood 
 invested her with ideal value when respect 
 could supplement it, and with exceptional 
 value even when it could not. Strong 
 passions brought quick climaxes, all the 
 better and worse forces of manhood being 
 in unbridled play. To me it was like a 
 strange, ever-varying panorama, so novel 
 that it was difficult to grasp comprehen- 
 sively. In fact, it was not till years after- 
 ward that the great mass of primary im- 
 pressions on my mind became sufficiently 
 clarified for literary use." 
 
 The lad had one qualification for 
 school-teaching, though he can hardly 
 have had any other an understanding of 
 [15]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 children. Oddly enough, his literary 
 treatment of childish character is less sen- 
 timental than his handling of adult char- 
 acter. . Probably the routine of school- 
 life was bitter enough to the taste of one 
 who was himself little better than "a 
 truant schoolboy," to use his own phrase. 
 The hard manual labor and the modest 
 returns of placer mining, as he tried it a 
 little later, were not more to his taste; 
 and before, at the age of nineteen, he re- 
 turned to San Francisco he had hard 
 experience as a tax-collector, a Wells- 
 Fargo Express messenger, a druggist's 
 assistant, and a compositor. Many of his 
 subsequent tales turned upon these early 
 experiences, though more of them have 
 to do with what he saw and heard than 
 [16]
 
 LIFE 
 
 with what he did. And what he did was 
 of even less profit to his pocket. When 
 presently he returned to San Francisco, 
 he was still in search of employment, and 
 only his experience as compositor proved 
 of value to him; it got him the chance to 
 set type in the composing-room of The 
 Golden Era. 
 
 "The Golden Era" says Mr. Charles 
 Warren Stoddard, "was the cradle and 
 grave of many a high hope there was 
 nothing to be compared with it that side 
 of the Mississippi; and though it could 
 point with pride it never failed to do so 
 to a somewhat notable line of contribu- 
 tors, it had always the fine air of the 
 amateur. ... I remember his [the 
 editor's] calling my attention to a certain 
 
 [17]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 anonymous contribution, just received, 
 and nodding his head prophetically, for 
 he already had his eye on its fledgling 
 author, a young compositor on the floor 
 above. It was Bret Harte's first appear- 
 ance in The Golden Era." 
 
 Of the quality of the audience to which 
 The Golden Era addressed itself, Bret 
 Harte gave, late in life, a surprisingly 
 flattering account. His earlier efforts, 
 he says, "were addressed to an audience 
 half foreign in their sympathies, and still 
 imbued with Eastern or New England 
 habits and literary traditions. 'Home' 
 was still potent with these voluntary ex- 
 iles in their moments of relaxation. East- 
 ern magazines and current Eastern lit- 
 erature formed their literary recreation, 
 [18]
 
 LIFE 
 
 and the sale of the better class of periodi- 
 cals was singularly great. Nor was this 
 taste confined to American literature. 
 The illustrated and satirical English 
 journals were as frequently seen in Cali- 
 fornia as in Massachusetts; -and the au- 
 thor records that he has experienced more 
 difficulty in procuring a copy of Punch 
 in an English provincial town than was 
 his fortune at 'Red Dog' or 'One-Horse 
 Gulch.' An audience thus liberally 
 equipped and familiar with the best mod- 
 ern writers was naturally critical and ex- 
 acting, and no one appreciates more than 
 he does the salutary effects of this severe 
 discipline upon his earlier efforts." 
 
 It may be wrong to imagine that mem- 
 ory tinged the facts with a rosy bloom. 
 [19]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 The means by which this critical and ex- 
 acting temper expressed itself were, at 
 least, not always Eastern or academic. 
 The first book with which Bret Harte had 
 to do was an anthology of Californian 
 verse. Here is one of the salutary and 
 severe notices which, according to the 
 author's own account, it received a 
 "tempered" version, moreover: 
 
 "The hogwash and purp-stuff ladled 
 
 out from the slop-bucket of Messrs. 
 
 and Co., of Frisco, by some lop-eared 
 Eastern apprentice, and called 'A Com- 
 pilation of Californian Verse,' might be 
 passed over, so far as criticism goes. A 
 club in the hands of any able-bodied citi- 
 zen of Red Dog and a steamboat ticket 
 to the Bay, cheerfully contributed from 
 [20]
 
 LIFE 
 
 this office, would be all-sufficient. But 
 when an imported greenhorn dares to call 
 his flapdoodle mixture ' Calif ornian,' it is 
 an insult to the State that has produced 
 the gifted 'Yellow Hammer,' whose lofty 
 flights have, from time to time, dazzled 
 our readers in the columns of The Jay 
 Hawk. That this complacent editorial 
 jackass, browsing among the docks and 
 thistles which he has served up in this vol- 
 ume, should make no allusion to Califor- 
 nia's greatest bard is rather a confession 
 of his idiocy than a slur upon the genius 
 .of our esteemed contributor." 
 
 Whatever may-be true of the general 
 literacy and refinement of that early Cali- 
 fornia, there is no doubt that San Fran- 
 cisco contained men of literary ability. 
 [21]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 At the moment of Harte's connection 
 with The Golden Era the city possessed 
 a group of vigorous young journalists, 
 most of whom had literary ambition. 
 Among them were Mark Twain, Charles 
 Warren Stoddard, Prentice Mulford, 
 and Charles Henry Webb. Largely to 
 provide a vehicle for their theories and 
 their work, The Calif or nian was founded. 
 The journal did not Jive long, in spite 
 of the unusual quality of its staff. Its 
 epitaph has been neatly phrased by Mr. 
 Howells. "These ingenuous young men," 
 he says, "with the fatuity of gifted peo- 
 ple, had established a literary newspaper 
 in San Francisco, and they brilliantly co- 
 operated to its early extinction." 
 
 Among the casual presences attracted 
 [22]
 
 LIFE 
 
 by that old California was a certain Sam 
 Clemens, who had begun to write over 
 the signature of Mark Twain, but had re- 
 ceived no general recognition. Curiously 
 enough, it was through Bret Harte and 
 The Calif ornian that his first hit was 
 made.l A month after their first meeting] 
 Mr. Clemens called on Harte, who tells^ 
 this story: "He had been away in the min- 
 ing districts on some newspaper assign- 
 ment in the meantime. In the course of 
 conversation he remarked that the un- 
 earthly laziness that prevailed in the town 
 he had been visiting was beyond any- 
 thing in his previous experience. He said 
 the men did nothing all day long but sit 
 around the bar-room stove, spit, and 
 'swop lies.' He spoke in a slow, rather 
 
 [23]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 satirical drawl, which was in itself irre- 
 sistible. He went on to tell one of those 
 extravagant stories, and half uncon- 
 sciously dropped into the lazy tone and 
 manner of the original narrator. I asked 
 him to tell it again to a friend who came 
 in, and then asked him to write it out for 
 The Calif ornian. He did so, and when 
 published it was an emphatic success. It 
 was the first work of his that had at- 
 tracted general attention, and it crossed 
 the Sierras for an Eastern reading. The 
 story was 'The Jumping Frog of Cala- 
 veras.' It is now known and laughed 
 over, I suppose, wherever the English 
 tongue is spoken; but it will never be as 
 funny to anyone in print as it was to me, 
 told for the first time by the unknown 
 [24]
 
 LIFE 
 
 Twain himself on that morning in the 
 San Francisco Mint." 
 
 Bret Harte was at this time secretary 
 to the superintendent of the United 
 States Mint, and also had a place upon 
 the staff of The Golden Era, to which, 
 upon the collapse of The Calif ornian, 
 Mark Twain became a frequent contribu- 
 tor. Most of Harte's own work during 
 this period was purely journalistic in 
 
 ^p. 
 
 effect, though he had already produced 
 prose and verse of a literary quality. 
 
 His most decisive step from journalism 
 to literature was made when, in 1868, he 
 became the editor of the newly founded 
 Overland Monthly. In the second num- 
 ber appeared "The Luck of Roaring 
 Camp," the first and the most famous of 
 [25]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 his short stories. It is worth while to 
 quote somewhat fully from the author's 
 own account of the circumstances under 
 which the story was printed, and of the 
 reception which it met: 
 
 "When the first number of the Over- 
 land Monthly appeared the author, then 
 its editor, called the publisher's attention 
 to the lack of any distinctively Califor- 
 nian romance in its pages, and averred 
 that, should no other contribution come 
 in, he himself would supply the omission 
 in the next number. No other contribu- 
 tion was offered, and the author, having 
 the plot and the general idea in his mind, 
 in a few days sent the manuscript of 'The 
 Luck of Roaring Camp' to the printer. 
 He had not yet received the proof-sheets 
 [26]
 
 LIFE 
 
 when he was suddenly summoned to the 
 office of the publisher, whom he found 
 standing, the picture of dismay and anxi- 
 ety, with the proof before him. The in- 
 dignation and stupefaction of the author 
 can be well understood when he was told 
 that the printer, instead of returning the 
 proofs to him, had submitted them to the 
 publisher, with the emphatic declaration 
 that the matter there was so indecent, 
 irreligious, and improper that his proof- 
 reader a young lady had with diffi- 
 culty been induced to continue its perusal, 
 and that he, as a friend of the publisher, 
 and a well-wisher of the magazine, was 
 impelled to present to him personally this 
 shameless evidence of the manner in which 
 the editor was imperilling the future use- 
 [27]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 fulness of that enterprise." The pub- 
 lisher and others who read the story were 
 inclined to agree that it ought not to 
 appear in the Overland Monthly. "Fi- 
 nally the story was submitted to three 
 gentlemen of culture and experience, 
 friends of publisher and author, who were 
 unable, however, to come to any clear 
 decision. It was, however, suggested to 
 the author that, assuming the natural 
 hypothesis that his editorial reasoning 
 might be warped by his literary predilec- 
 tions in a consideration of one of his own 
 productions, a personal sacrifice would at 
 this juncture be in the last degree heroic. 
 This last suggestion had the effect of 
 ending all further discussion, for he at 
 once informed the publisher that the 
 [28]
 
 LIFE 
 
 question of the propriety of the story 
 was no longer at issue; the only question 
 was of his capacity to exercise the proper 
 editorial judgment, and that unless he 
 was permitted to test that capacity by 
 the publication of the story, and abide 
 squarely by the result, he must resign his 
 editorial position." 
 
 Of course the story was printed, and, 
 except among the unco guid and a class 
 of Calif ornians who thought the dignity 
 of California ought to be upheld if neces- 
 sary at the expense of truth, scored a 
 great success. In the Eastern States and 
 in England the response was immediate 
 and enthusiastic. One of the most flat- 
 tering signs of its success was a letter 
 from Fields, Osgood & Co., publishers of 
 
 [29]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 The Atlantic Monthly, asking for a story 
 in the vein of "The Luck of Roaring 
 Camp." 
 
 At first this general approbation had 
 a good effect. "Thus encouraged," he 
 wrote many years later, " 'The Luck of 
 Roaring Camp' was followed by 'The 
 Outcasts of Poker Flat,' 'Higgles,' 'Ten- 
 nessee's Partner,' and those various other 
 characters who had impressed the author 
 when, a mere truant schoolboy, he had 
 lived among them. It is hardly necessary 
 to say to any observer of human nature 
 that at this time he was advised by kind 
 and well-meaning friends to content him- 
 self with the success of the 'Luck,' and 
 not tempt criticism again; or from that 
 moment ever after he was in receipt of 
 [30]
 
 LIFE 
 
 that equally sincere contemporaneous 
 criticism which assured him gravely that 
 each successive story was a falling off 
 from the last. Howbeit, by reinvigorated 
 confidence in himself and some conscien- 
 tious industry, he managed to get to- 
 gether in a year six or eight of these 
 sketches, which, in a volume called 'The 
 Luck of Roaring Camp and other 
 Sketches,' gave him that encouragement 
 in America and England that has since 
 seemed to justify him in swelling these 
 records of a picturesque passing civilisa- 
 tion into the compass of the present 
 edition. 
 
 "A few words regarding the peculiar 
 conditions of life and society that are 
 here rudely sketched, and often but bare- 
 [31]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 ly outlined. The author is aware that, 
 partly from a habit of thought and ex- 
 pression, partly from the exigencies of 
 brevity in his narratives, and partly from 
 the habit of addressing an audience fa- 
 miliar with the local scenery, he often 
 assumes, as premises already granted by 
 the reader, the existence of a peculiar and 
 romantic state of civilisation, the like of 
 which few English readers are inclined 
 to accept without corroborative facts and 
 figures. These he could only give by re- 
 ferring to the ephemeral records of Cali- 
 fornian journals of that date and the testi- 
 mony of far-scattered witnesses, survivors 
 of the exodus of 1849. He must beg the 
 reader to bear in mind that this emigra- 
 tion was either across a continent almost 
 [32]
 
 LIFE 
 
 unexplored or by the way of a long and 
 dangerous voyage around Cape Horn, 
 and that the promised land itself pre- 
 sented the singular spectacle of a patri- 
 archal Latin race who had been left to 
 themselves, forgotten by the world, for 
 nearly three hundred years. The faith, 
 courage, vigour, youth, and capacity for 
 adventure necessary to this emigration 
 produced a body of men as strongly dis- 
 tinctive as the companions of Jason. Un- 
 like most pioneers, the majority were men 
 of profession and education; all were 
 young, and all had staked their future in 
 the enterprise. Critics who have taken 
 large and exhaustive views of mankind 
 and society from club windows in Pall 
 Mall or the Fifth Avenue can only accept 
 
 [33]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 for granted the turbulent chivalry that 
 thronged the streets of San Francisco in 
 the gala day of her youth, and must read 
 the blazon of their deeds like the doubtful 
 quarterings of the shield of Amadis de 
 Gaul. The author has been frequently 
 asked if such and such incidents were real 
 if he had ever met such and such char- 
 acters. To this he must return the same 
 answer, that in only a single instance was 
 he conscious of drawing purely from his 
 imagination and fancy for a character 
 and a logical succession of incidents 
 drawn therefrom. A few weeks after his 
 story was published he received a letter, 
 authentically signed, correcting some of 
 the minor details of his facts (?) and en- 
 closing as corroborative evidence a slip 
 [34]
 
 LIFE 
 
 from an old newspaper, wherein the main 
 incident of his supposed fanciful creation 
 was recorded with a largeness of state- 
 ment that far transcended his powers of 
 imagination." 
 
 His first great success was quickly fol- 
 lowed by his second; it could not have 
 occurred to anybody then that there could 
 never be any further successes of the same 
 rank. "Plain Language from Truthful 
 James," or, as it came to be called, "The 
 Heathen Chinee," at once gained a no- 
 toriety even wider than his short stories 
 had won. Like "The Luck of Roaring 
 Camp," it aroused only mild interest in 
 San Francisco, but in the East and in 
 England it was hailed with delight. 
 After the passage of a generation it re- 
 
 [35]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 mains one of the best known humorous 
 poems in the language; its phraseology 
 has even attained the secondary fame of 
 being familiar to thousands who do not 
 know the whole poem. The author him- 
 self grew a little tired of the excessive 
 popularity of a mere jeu d f esprit. 
 
 Some light is thrown upon his charac- 
 ter, as well as upon the history of these 
 famous verses, in the following item from 
 the San Francisco News-Letter, written 
 shortly after Harte's death: 
 
 "Slow of speech and thought, he never 
 could be depended upon to supply copy 
 on time to his printer. For a period he 
 was supposed to be a regular contributor 
 to the columns of this paper, but he was 
 never a 'regular' contributor to any pa- 
 [36]
 
 LIFE 
 
 per. On one occasion, after a silence of 
 two or three weeks, he suddenly recalled 
 his duty to the News-Lett er, and going 
 through some manuscript, selected a short 
 poem and handed it in to this office. The 
 late Mr. Marriott, who was conceded to 
 be an excellent judge of poetry, rejected 
 it, asserting that it was 'twaddle.' About 
 a year afterward Mr. Harte, being hard 
 up for copy, as he usually was, published 
 his rejected poem in the Overland 
 Monthly, of which he had become editor. 
 It made the writer famous in a day, for 
 it was none other than 'The Heathen 
 Chinee,' which was soon in everybody's 
 mouth. This writer afterward asked Mr. 
 Marriott how he came to reject so popu- 
 lar a success. He replied that 'it was evi- 
 
 [37]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 d^nt that the best might sometimes be 
 :en.' The fact was that by his dila- 
 tor|ness Mr. Harte had become persona 
 grata, and the venerable editor took 
 this \ way of getting even with him." 
 
 r e shall have something to say pres- 
 ently of the merit of "The Heathen 
 Chinee." Here we have to consider only 
 its sudden popularity and the effect of 
 that popularity upon its author's career. 
 There is little doubt that it served to 
 clinch the general conviction that Bret 
 Harte was too important a person to live 
 in California. 
 
 In the spring of 1870, at all events, the 
 
 now famous writer left California not to 
 
 return. He had lived there for sixteen 
 
 years. Between the ages of fifteen and 
 
 [38]
 
 LIFE 
 
 nineteen, in the course of his miscellane- 
 ous experience of California life, he had 
 gathered pretty much all the material 
 for his work. During the next five or 
 six years he was profitably employed in 
 growing old enough to begin to make 
 effective use of this material. Most of 
 his best work was done within two years 
 of his assumption of the Overland 
 Monthly editorship. His motives in leav- 
 ing California at the end of these two 
 years have been a good deal discussed. 
 The plain truth seems to be that his head 
 was turned, and he naturally edged tow- 
 ard the point of the compass from which 
 the applause came loudest. It is impos- 
 sible not to see weakness in the facility 
 with which he succumbed to the pressure 
 
 [39]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 which was brought to bear upon him by 
 Eastern publishers and Eastern admirers. 
 It is possible, however, that too much 
 has been made of the effect upon his work 
 of his physical removal to the East, and, 
 subsequently, to England. His interpre- 
 tation of early California life appears to 
 have been complete; very likely if he had 
 remained he would have been unable to 
 make effective literary use of the more 
 complicated conditions which were al- 
 ready developing. Just that one pictu- 
 resque episode in American life he seems 
 to have been born to understand and to 
 chronicle, and he can hardly be held re- 
 sponsible for having outlived the moment 
 without being able to forget it. Cer- 
 tainly there never came another moment 
 [40]
 
 LIFE 
 
 which he knew how to interpret in the 
 same way; and he had, if he was to write 
 at all, to remain for the rest of his life 
 his own copyist, when he did not choose 
 to be the copyist of others. 
 
 Before we follow him across the con- 
 tinent to New York it may be worth 
 while to note what sort of place he had 
 made for himself in California. He had 
 gained and held for years a fairly profit- 
 able sinecure in the San Francisco Mint; 
 he had gained and held with credit the 
 editorship of the Overland Monthly; 
 and he had been invited, not long be- 
 fore his departure for the East, to a chair 
 of literature at the University of Cali- 
 fornia. Such marks of public approba- 
 [41]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 tion he had received, and he had made 
 warm personal friends. He had also 
 gained a reputation for that unreliability, 
 so far as meeting engagements and pay- 
 ing debts are concerned, which is sup- 
 posed (except by employers and cred- 
 itors) to be an engaging if not virtuous 
 corollary of "the artistic temperament." 
 
 With such a nature and with such s, 
 fame the young author was not likely to 
 bear himself very wisely during the dan- 
 gerous process, upon which the public is 
 inclined in such cases to insist, of transla- 
 tion from a personality into a personage. 
 According to the usual fatuous method 
 of publics, his Eastern admirers lost no 
 time in feting and flattering their idol of 
 the moment beyond the point of reason. 
 [42]
 
 LIFE 
 
 He was introduced to authors' clubs, 
 forced to give a Phi Beta Kappa poem 
 at Harvard (which, naturally, turned out 
 to be rather inadequate), and urged to 
 write for the best magazines. The At- 
 lantic Monthly subsidised him, for a time, 
 at a salary of ten thousand dollars a year. 
 The result was what might have been 
 expected by those who really knew the 
 man. During, we will say, the three 
 years which assisted in the production of 
 the author's strongest and most sincere 
 work he seems to have been inspired by 
 a genuine creative impulse, made more 
 fruitful in its later manifestations by the 
 grateful sense that the world was ready 
 to appreciate the best of what he could 
 give it. This was the period of perfect 
 [43]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 balance between the working of the cre- 
 ative instinct and the sense of its accept- 
 able worth which, to any but the highest 
 order of creative genius, must be brief. 
 Later, and with a somewhat indecorous 
 suddenness, as it seems to the student of 
 such phenomena, the balance was de- 
 stroyed. A little flattery, a little money 
 in sight, and the artist (quite innocently, 
 like a child whose head is turned by too 
 much attention) becomes an artisan. 
 
 The unreliability which we have noted 
 as characteristic of his career in Califor- 
 nia became more and more marked dur- 
 ing the years immediately following his 
 translation to the East. In San Fran- 
 cisco his life had never wholly lacked the 
 safeguard of routine which is so essential 
 [44]
 
 LIFE 
 
 to the productiveness of temperaments 
 like his. He was now his own master, 
 free to do his work as he chose, and un- 
 hampered by the pressure of small duties. 
 Consequently he did very little. The 
 salary of ten thousand dollars paid by 
 The Atlantic Monthly, for an indefinite 
 number of contributions, proved a very 
 bad speculation, for the Atlantic. 
 
 In New York he found himself con- 
 tinually more involved in social engage- 
 ments, and his summers were passed at 
 expensive resorts, such as Cohasset, Len- 
 ox, and Newport. {"He was, in short, 
 growing idle and extravagant, making 
 something of a figure in the world about 
 town, and hardly holding his own in the 
 world of letters. In the course of a few 
 
 [45]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 years he was hopelessly in debt. He 
 made a good deal of money, by lecturing 
 as well as by writing, but it was his in- 
 stinct to live beyond his means. He had 
 already tasted the joys of the political 
 sinecure, and when at length a chance 
 came to lie by for a time in that kind of 
 safe harbour he was not slow in accept- 
 ing it. In 1878 he left his family and 
 his more pressing embarrassments in 
 America to accept a small Prussian Con- 
 sulate. "It is to be hoped," wrote the 
 London Athenaeum, with unconscious 
 irony, "that his consular duties at Cre- 
 feld will not prove so engrossing as to 
 prevent him from continuing to write." 
 Bret Harte was quite incapable of being 
 inconvenienced by consular duties, either 
 [46]
 
 LIFE 
 
 at Crefeld, or at Glasgow, whither, by the 
 labours of American friends, he presently 
 found himself transferred. It seems, in- 
 deed, to be clear that his absorption in 
 the duties of his post at Glasgow was 
 so notoriously a fault of omission that his 
 removal in 1885 was a matter of neces- 
 sity. .- The rest of his life he spent in Eng- 
 land, and during those seventeen years, 
 though he wrote much, he produced noth- 
 ing which added materially to his reputa- 
 tion. He died at the country-house of a 
 friend in Surrey, May 5, 1902. 
 
 [47]
 
 II 
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 What, then, is the sum of our impres- 
 sion of Bret Harte's personality? It is 
 safe to say, to begin with, that its chief 
 ingredient was temperament rather than 
 character. There was nothing heroic 
 about the man, either for good or ill. 
 Those boyish experiences of his in Cali- 
 fornia do indicate that he was not defi- 
 cient in physical courage. He showed 
 constancy, too, in his early attempts at 
 literature, and, in the moment of his first 
 realisation of power, a kind of exaltation 
 which for a time kept him up to the mark. 
 Thereafter, as we have said, he followed 
 the line of least resistance, drifting upon 
 a pleasant tide of approbation, filling, in 
 [48]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 the approved way, the literary orders 
 which unfailingly came to him, and, in 
 short, making the easiest possible business 
 of his art and of his life. 
 
 Such letters of his as have been pub- 
 lished present him, on the whole, in a more 
 favourable light than one would expect. 
 They are not only neat and humorous, 
 they often attract one strongly to the 
 writer for his own sake. They remind 
 one that it is not enough to consider a 
 man's relation to his employers or his 
 creditors, or even to his work. We have 
 also to ask what kind of man he was in 
 the eyes of his friends, and how much he 
 counted for in their lives. 
 
 His domestic experience was not ideal. 
 He was married just before he reached 
 [49]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 the not over-marriageable age of twenty- 
 three, and when he left California there 
 were two children, who were followed 
 later by two more. No open scandal was 
 ever connected with his name, but it is 
 not a secret that for some time before his 
 departure from America his home life 
 was not of the pleasantest. Letters writ- 
 ten during a lecturing tour in the West 
 in 1873 show that the break, if break 
 there was, came later. One notices that 
 he talks, as a man may to his wife, a 
 good deal of his inconveniences and his 
 symptoms : 
 
 "I did not want to write this disap- 
 pointment to you as long as there was 
 some prospect of better things. You can 
 imagine, however, how I feel at this cruel 
 [50]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 loss of time and money to say nothing 
 of my health, which is still so poor. I had 
 almost recovered from my cold, but while 
 lecturing at Ottawa at the Skating Rink, 
 a hideous, dismal, damp barn the only 
 available place in town I caught a fresh 
 cold, and have been coughing badly ever 
 since. And you can well imagine that my 
 business annoyances do not add greatly to 
 my sleep or appetite. 
 
 "I make no comment; you can imag- 
 ine the half -sick, utterly disgusted man 
 who glared at that audience over his desk 
 that night, and d d them inwardly in his 
 heart." 
 
 These letters also contain passages 
 which show that the eye which had been 
 so keen in California days had not grown 
 [51]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 dull. Of the society of a Kansas city he 
 says: 
 
 "And, of course, as in all such places, 
 the women contrast poorly with the men 
 even in feminine qualities. Somehow a 
 man here may wear fustian and glaring 
 colours and paper collars and yet keep his 
 gentleness and delicacy, but a woman in 
 glaring 'Dolly Vardens' and artificial 
 flowers changes nature with him at once. 
 I've seen but one that interested me an 
 old negro wench. She was talking and 
 laughing outside my door the other even- 
 ing, but her laugh was so sweet and unc- 
 tuous and musical so full of breadth and 
 goodness, that I went outside and talked 
 to her while she was scrubbing the stones. 
 She laughed as a canary-bird sings be- 
 [52]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 cause she couldn't help it. It did me a 
 world of good, for it was before the lec- 
 ture, at twilight, when I am very blue and 
 low-tuned. She had been a slave." 
 
 His first letters from Cref eld are more 
 than perfunctorily affectionate. He finds 
 himself very lonely and forlorn: 
 
 "It's been up-hill work ever since I 
 left New York, but I shall try to see it 
 through, please God! I don't allow my- 
 self to think over it at all, or I should go 
 crazy. I shut my eyes to it, and in doing 
 so perhaps I shut out what is often so 
 pleasant to a traveller's first impressions, 
 but thus far London has only seemed to 
 me a sluggish nightmare through which 
 I have waked, and Paris a confused sort 
 of hysterical experience. I had hoped for 
 [53]
 
 HARTE 
 
 a little kindness and rest here. Perhaps 
 it may come. To-day I found here (for- 
 warded from London) a kind little re- 
 sponse to my card, from Froude, who 
 invites me to come to his country place 
 an old seaport village in Devonshire. If 
 everything has gone well here if I can 
 make it go well here I shall go back to 
 London and Paris for a vacation of a few 
 weeks, and see Froude at last. 
 
 "At least, Nan, be sure I've written 
 now the worst; I think things must be 
 better soon. I shall, please God, make 
 some friends in good time, and will try 
 and be patient. But I shall not think of 
 sending for you until I see clearly that I 
 can stay myself. If the worst comes to 
 the worst I shall try to stand it for a year, 
 [54]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 and save enough to come home and begin 
 anew there. But I could not stand it to 
 see you break your heart here through 
 disappointment, as I mayhap may do." 
 
 It would be unfair to suggest that there 
 is deliberate disingenuousness in the clos- 
 ing sentences, yet, allowing for the im- 
 personal loneliness and nostalgia which so 
 naturally belongs to a first experience in 
 a strange land, it is hard to take them 
 quite seriously. Indeed, there is a touch 
 of shrillness about the whole passage 
 which does not quite explain itself. Bret 
 Harte had, like all self-indulgent and sen- 
 timental persons, great capacity for self- 
 pity. At all events, after triumphantly 
 "standing" his expatriation for a year, he 
 found it possible to stand it pretty cheer- 
 [55]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 fully for the rest of his life; and the mo- 
 ment at which he could think of sending 
 for his family was postponed with equal 
 success. 
 
 The vacation for which he had so 
 pleasantly begun to plan at the first mo- 
 ment of his consular labours was soon 
 effected. A month later he is writing 
 from Froude's estate in Devonshire, and 
 the letter contains a fine burst of enthu- 
 siasm about his host: 
 
 "But Froude dear old noble fellow 
 is splendid. I love him more than I ever 
 did in America. He is great, broad, 
 manly democratic in the best sense of 
 the word, scorning all sycophancy and 
 meanness, accepting all that is around 
 him, yet more proud of his literary pro- 
 [56]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 f ession than of his kinship with these peo- 
 ple whom he quietly controls. There are 
 only a few literary men like him here, but 
 they are Kings. I could not have had a 
 better introduction to them than through 
 Froude, who knows them all, who is Ten- 
 nyson's best friend, and who is anxious to 
 make my entree among them a success." 
 
 A letter written shortly after from 
 London concludes: "I dare not go with 
 Osgood to Liverpool for fear I shall get 
 on the steamer with him and return ; " 
 whereupon his adoring biographer re- 
 marks: "There is something very pathetic 
 in the picture of the man whose thoughts 
 turned to the West, but whose duties 
 pointed to the East." His duties at the 
 moment pointed somewhat farther east- 
 [57]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 ward than London, and after some three 
 months more of vacation he did make his 
 way back to Crefeld. 
 
 There we presently behold him, become 
 somewhat domesticated for a time, taking 
 observations of German life, making a 
 German friend or two, and listening to 
 German music. Altogether the most 
 spirited passage in his letters of this 
 period describes his first impression of 
 Wagner, of the probable inadequacy of 
 which, to be just, he seemed quite aware: 
 
 "My first operatic experience was 
 'Tannhauser.' I can see your superior 
 smile, Anna, at this ; and I know how you 
 will take my criticism of Wagner, so I 
 don't mind saying plainly that it was the 
 most diabolically hideous and stupidly 
 [58]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 monotonous performance I ever heard. 
 I shall say nothing about the orchestral 
 harmonies, for there wasn't anything go- 
 ing on of that kind, unless you call some- 
 thing that seemed like a boiler factory at 
 work in the next street, and the wind 
 whistling through the rigging of a chan- 
 nel steamer, harmony. But I must say 
 one thing! In the third act, I think, 
 Tannhauser and two other minstrels sing 
 before the King and Court to the accom- 
 paniment of their harps and the boiler 
 factory. Each minstrel sang, or rather 
 declaimed, something like the multipli- 
 cation table for about twenty minutes. 
 Tannhauser, when his turn came, de- 
 claimed longer and more lugubriously 
 and ponderously and monotonously than 
 [59] 

 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 the others, and went into 'nine times nine 
 are eighty-one' and 'ten times two are 
 twenty,' when suddenly, when they had 
 finished, they all drew their swords and 
 rushed at him. I turned to Gen. Von 
 Rauch and said to him that 'I didn't won- 
 der at it.' 'Ah,' said he, 'you know the 
 story, then?' 'No, not exactly,' I replied. 
 'Ja wohl,' said Von Rauch, 'the story is 
 that these minstrels are all singing in 
 praise of Love, but they are furious at 
 Tannhauser, who loves Hilda the Ger- 
 man Venus, for singing in the praise of 
 Love so wildly, so warmly, so passionate- 
 ly: Then I concluded that I really did 
 not understand Wagner." 
 
 Bret Harte, we find, was as prone to 
 repeat his good things as other good let- 
 [60]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 ter-writers. In an early letter from Cre- 
 feld he says: "I know now from my 
 observations, both here and in Paris and 
 London, where the scene-painters at the 
 theatres get their subjects. Those impos- 
 sible houses, those unreal, silent streets, 
 all exist in Europe." Seventeen years 
 later, during his last visit to the Conti- 
 nent, he is struck with the similar spec- 
 tacularity of the Swiss landscape, and 
 writes (the italics are his own) : 
 
 "This part of Switzerland is entirely 
 new to me. I can only tell you that the 
 two photographs I send you are abso- 
 lutely true in detail and effect, and that 
 the characteristic, and even the defect, of 
 the scenery here is that it looks as if it 
 were artistically composed; all the drop- 
 [61]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 curtains, all the stage scenes, all the ballet 
 backgrounds you have ever seen in the 
 theatre exist here in reality. The painter 
 has nothing to compose the photogra- 
 pher still less; that chalet, that terrace, 
 that snow-peak, is exactly where it ought 
 to be. The view from my balcony at this 
 moment is a picture hanging on my wall 
 not a view at all. You begin to have a 
 horrible suspicion that Daudet's joke 
 about all 'Switzerland being a gigantic 
 hotel company' is true. You hesitate 
 about sitting down on this stone terrace 
 lest it shouldn't be 'practical'; and you 
 don't dare knock at the door of this bright 
 Venetian-awned shop lest it should be only 
 painted canvas. There is a whole street 
 in Montreux that I have seen a dozen 
 [62]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 times in Grand Opera. The people 
 tourists of all nations are the only 
 things real, and in the hotels, when they 
 are in full-dress on the balconies or sa- 
 loons, they look like the audience!" 
 
 During his first stay in London, Harte 
 had arranged for a lecture tour in Eng- 
 land which had been a pecuniary failure. 
 A second experiment, made a little later, 
 was successful. Apparently he had only 
 one lecture, which he called "The Argo- 
 nauts of '49," and which he had delivered 
 many times in America. The warmth 
 with which he was received by English 
 audiences, as well as by English society, 
 probably made each return to Crefeld 
 more difficult. Some seven months after 
 his appointment he writes: 
 [63]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 "I am very seriously thinking of ask- 
 ing the department to change my loca- 
 tion. Germany is no place for me. I 
 feel it more and more every day. So that 
 if I do not hold out any hopes to you it is 
 because I do not know if I shall stay here. 
 There are so many places better for my 
 health, for my literary plans, for my 
 comfort, and for my purse than this. I 
 shall write quietly to one or two of my 
 Washington friends to see if it can be 
 managed. I shall have made a good head 
 here; by good luck, I fear, more than by 
 management. The consular business will 
 exceed this year any previous year, and 
 I can hand over to the Government quite 
 a handsome sum." 
 
 Certainly Germany was not the place 
 [64]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 for him. He was unacquainted with the 
 language and literature, and unable to 
 grasp the German point of view and way 
 of life. Yet his work was extremely 
 popular in Germany, appearing to be, in 
 its quality of sentiment, singularly intel- 
 ligible to the Teutonic mind. "But the 
 Crefeld invoices were not to hold him 
 long in thrall," says the biographer, sym- 
 pathetically. The Washington friends 
 managed a transfer to Scotland, and for 
 some years Harte was free to be the titu- 
 lar thrall of the Glasgow invoices, and, 
 in practice, to enjoy the ready English 
 hospitality to which he was now welcome. 
 He made many friends among distin- 
 guished Englishmen, and in fact found 
 a place in the society of London such as 
 [65]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 seems never to have been quite open to 
 him in Boston or New York; a not un- 
 common experience for brilliant Ameri- 
 cans abroad. He became intimate also 
 with two literary men, with whom he had 
 much in common, William Black and 
 Walter Besant; was entertained by the 
 Lowells, and corresponded with by John 
 Hay; and there was never a break in his 
 intimacy with Froude. 
 
 He formed an even closer intimacy with 
 Monsieur and Madame Van de Velde 
 the former of the Belgian diplomatic 
 corps, the latter apparently a clever wom- 
 an of the world. In her house and in the 
 presence of herself "and her attendants," 
 according to the English chronicler, Bret 
 Harte died. His wife and children were 
 [66]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 present at the funeral, some days later. 
 A newspaper letter of Madame Van de 
 Velde's is worth quoting, as it explains 
 the English attitude toward this Ameri- 
 can author, and as it throws light upon 
 his own character as others saw it: 
 
 "It is difficult for an observant 
 stranger to pass even a short time in 
 Great Britain without becoming aware of 
 a distinctively characteristic trait in the 
 inhabitants, and it is impossible for any- 
 one who has lived a number of years there 
 not to be absolutely convinced of its 
 dominance. The Englishman, in his cold, 
 undemonstrative fashion, is intensely pa- 
 triotic; in his heart of hearts he firmly 
 believes that in the scheme of creation he 
 was formed out of special clay, while the 
 [67]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 remainder of human beings have been 
 moulded from a much inferior material. 
 He is equally sure that no effort of grace 
 can ever raise the alien to his level; but, 
 while he is piously grateful for this dis- 
 pensation of Providence, he recognises 
 and appreciates the right of an outsider 
 to maintain an exalted opinion of his own 
 country and nationality; he respects him 
 for it even when he endeavours to prove 
 it erroneous; nay, more, should his argu- 
 ments successfully establish a recognition 
 of his own superiority, he immediately 
 ceases to entertain regard and toleration 
 for the too easily persuaded stranger. 
 This thoroughly English and so far hon- 
 ourable peculiarity is one of the reasons, 
 apart from his merits as a literary celeb- 
 [68]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 rity, why Bret Harte is extremely popu- 
 lar in England, and has always been so. 
 "Before he took up his residence in 
 London his genius and originality had 
 won him admirers, but when he gave them 
 the opportunity of becoming acquainted 
 with the man, independently, as it were, 
 of the author, they promptly ascertained 
 that no more uncompromising American 
 had ever set foot among them. Time has 
 not dulled Bret Harte's instinctive af- 
 fection for the land of his birth, for its 
 institutions, its climate, its natural beau- 
 ties, and, above all, its character and 
 moral attributes of its inhabitants. Even 
 his association with the aristocratic repre- 
 sentatives of London society has been 
 impotent to modify his views or to win 
 [69]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 him over to less independent professions. 
 He is as single-minded to-day as he was 
 when he first landed on British soil. A 
 general favourite in the most diverse cir- 
 cles, social, literary, scientific, artistic, or 
 military, his strong primitive nature and 
 his positive individuality have remained 
 intact. Always polite and gentle, neither 
 seeking nor evading controversy, he is 
 steadfastly unchangeable in his political 
 and patriotic beliefs. He has frequently 
 been heard to express himself frankly on 
 the vexed question of Anglo-American 
 marriages, severely satirising those of his 
 fair compatriots who, dazzled by the lus- 
 tre of lordly alliances, have too closely 
 assimilated with the land of their adop- 
 tion, and apparently forgotten their 
 [70]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 country. To such he has not hesitated to 
 apply the term of 'apostates.' . . . 
 
 "It has been several times remarked 
 that the appearance of Bret Harte does 
 not coincide with the preconceived ex- 
 pectations of his readers. They had 
 formed a vague, intangible idea of a 
 wild, reckless Californian, impatient of 
 social trammels, whose life among the 
 Argonauts must have fashioned him 
 after a type differing widely from the 
 reality. These idealists were partly dis- 
 appointed, partly relieved, when their 
 American visitor turned out to be a quiet, 
 low-voiced, easy-mannered, polished gen- 
 tleman, who, smiling, confessed that pre- 
 cisely because he had roughed it a good 
 deal in his youth he was inclined to enjoy 
 [71]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 the comforts and avail himself of the 
 facilities of an older civilisation when 
 placed within his reach. He also gently 
 intimated that days on the top of a stage- 
 coach, or on the back of a mustang, and 
 nights spent at poker, would not materi- 
 ally assist in the writing of stories which 
 are never produced fast enough to merit 
 the demand. 
 
 "The American humourist has been 
 represented as sinking into the slough 
 of sybaritic idleness; as working five 
 hours before breakfast and recruiting by 
 violent pedestrian exercise; he changed 
 his clothes six times a day; he neglected 
 his personal appearance; he has taken a 
 big mansion in Norfolk and entertained 
 on a large scale; he had hidden himself 
 [72]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 in a small cottage in the suburbs ; he filled 
 waste-paper baskets with torn notes of 
 invitations; he wrote sheets and sheets 
 of copy; society women booked him 
 months ahead to secure his presence at 
 their receptions; he made thousands of 
 pounds a year; he had ceased to write 
 at all; he had become 'quite English, 
 you know/ and had formally adjured 
 America. 
 
 "Singularly enough, many of Bret 
 Harte's countrymen in London did not 
 take the trouble to verify these state- 
 ments; they accepted them blindly, and 
 thus they may have been reproduced in 
 some American newspapers, together 
 with the account of the last debut of a 
 brilliant New York belle in London, or 
 [73]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 the detailed description of some million- 
 aire's festival. . . . 
 
 "It has been said that Bret Harte's sto- 
 ries fetch bigger prices in the market than 
 any similar form of literature of the pres- 
 ent day. This is perhaps correct, but he 
 does not consider himself justified on that 
 account in relaxing his labours. He has 
 obligations in America, and this claim 
 upon him forms at once the motive and 
 the reason of his prolonged stay in Eng- 
 land, in spite of the inclination and desire 
 so strong in his heart to revisit his native 
 land. 
 
 "Bret Harte has more than once been 
 
 asked to lecture in England on English 
 
 customs and English society, but he has 
 
 always demurred. He is too grateful for 
 
 [74]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 the welcome tendered to him to risk re- 
 paying it with apparent discourtesy of 
 censure; he is too honest and frank to 
 give indiscriminate praise or to lay him- 
 self open to the reproach of flattery. 
 Some day he may be persuaded to give 
 the world the result of close, keen, and 
 impartial observations, and we dare say 
 he will do so in the spirit of conscientious- 
 ness and sincerity so characteristic of all 
 his writings." 
 
 Of Bret Harte's modesty it is neces- 
 sary to say this: that while it is undoubt- 
 edly true that he shrank from public 
 attentions requiring his presence and ex- 
 ertion while he hated to be talked at by 
 strangers, and to talk to strangers of 
 himself he took his own product, to the 
 [75]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 very end, with quite sufficient seriousness. 
 He did not like to lecture, he did not like 
 to make after-dinner speeches, but he did 
 thoroughly enjoy adulation of a proper 
 and private sort. There is no evidence 
 that he realised the artistic futility of 
 trading upon his early success in the in- 
 terpretation of Californian life, or that 
 he recognised the failure of his occasional 
 attempts to interpret other phases of life. 
 Why should he? Periodicals and pub- 
 lishers, for thirty years, besieged him with 
 orders for stories, to which, in his own 
 time and to his own profit, he paid the 
 proper tribute of obedience. 
 
 As for his patriotism, it need only be 
 said that it was of the amiably trucu- 
 lent sort which is expected of the Amer- 
 [76]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 lean abroad. That he ever seriously de- 
 sired to return to America is a point of 
 mere surmise. He was having a very 
 comfortable existence in England. He 
 could command in America neither the 
 social nor the literary standing which 
 England was glad to give him. From 
 his wife and family (when Madame Van 
 de Velde wrote) he had been for some 
 time estranged. The line of least re- 
 sistance did not run westward from Liv- 
 erpool. 
 
 There is, in fine, no doubt that Bret 
 Harte was, to casual friends and ac- 
 quaintances, an amiable and companion- 
 able person. Nobody has ever alleged 
 that he had vices, unless weakness is a 
 vice; and an amiable weakness, a willing- 
 [77]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 ness to give his friends and his public 
 what they desired, characterised his life 
 and his artistic career. The life of Eng- 
 lish clubs and country-houses evidently 
 demanded nothing which he was not able 
 to give, and his public was, unfortunate- 
 ly, not exacting. So far as it was Eng- 
 lish, it had a pretty vague notion of the 
 veracity of his replicas of the early Cali- 
 fornian sketches. Nor was judgment in 
 the Eastern States of America greatly 
 more discriminating. The man had not 
 only no trouble in disposing of his wares ; 
 he had more "orders" than he could fill. 
 So he went down in comfort to the grave, 
 and his most charitable epitaph would in- 
 clude, in some form, the statement that, 
 though his only inspiration was outlived 
 [78]
 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 by more than thirty years, that was not, 
 directly, his fault; and the remark might 
 fairly be appended that a single inspira- 
 tion, a single moment of supreme sin- 
 cerity, is more than is allotted to one in a 
 million of our admirable and progressive 
 species. 
 
 [79]
 
 Ill 
 
 WORK 
 
 It was apparently a good-fortune which 
 led Bret Harte to the field of his one 
 notable success, and an ill-fortune which 
 led him away from it; but there is a 
 tide in the affairs of men, and certainly 
 in this case the important fact is not that 
 the moment of flood came so early and 
 was so brief, but that the man was, after 
 all, able to seize and make the most of it. 
 With the appearance of "The Luck 
 of Roaring Camp" began the single 
 period in his life which one studies with 
 almost unqualified satisfaction, the pe- 
 riod during which, both as man and as 
 artist, his integrity maintained itself 
 quite above fear and above reproach. 
 [80]
 
 WORK 
 The immediate SCIL ^tion created by The 
 
 Luck" has^ as some '"one has said, fno 
 _/ 
 
 parallel in the history of English fiction^ 
 except in the instances of "Waverley" 
 and "Pickwick." ! No other short story 
 ever leaped so suddenly into what proved 
 to be permanent fame. Of course the 
 novelty of its theme had much to do with 
 its first success. The pursuit of local 
 colour and the local type was a compara- 
 tively new chase, and hardly before or 
 since have colour and type offered them- 
 selves so glowing and salient as in the 
 California which Bret Harte knew.) But 
 fidelity to the local fact is a subordinate 
 virtue in the practice of fiction, and it 
 may well be that the public which was 
 startled and delighted by Harte's early 
 [81]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 tales fancied a charm : n the accessories of 
 his art which T" -Hy inhered in its sub- 
 stance. They were fascinated not more 
 by the oddity of the theme than by the 
 author's unmoral attitude toward it; and 
 if in his later work there came to be some- 
 thing a little conscious, even spectacular, 
 in his maintenance of that attitude, the 
 fact was evidently due to the belabouring 
 he had received at the hands of well- 
 meaning moral persons. Eventually he 
 thought it worth while to formulate a de- 
 fence of what had been in the beginning 
 an instinctive point of view: 
 
 "He (the author) has been repeatedly 
 cautioned, kindly and unkindly, intelli- 
 gently and unintelligently, against his 
 alleged tendency to confuse recognised 
 [82]
 
 WORK 
 
 standards of morality by extenuating 
 lives of recklessness, and often criminal- 
 ity, with a single solitary virtue. He 
 might easily show that he has never writ- 
 ten a sermon, that he has never moralised 
 or commented upon the actions of his 
 heroes, that he has never voiced a creed 
 or obtrusively demonstrated an ethical 
 opinion. He might easily allege that this 
 merciful effect of his art arose from the 
 reader's weak human sympathies, and 
 hold himself irresponsible. But he would 
 be conscious of a more miserable weakness 
 in thus divorcing himself from his fellow- 
 men who in the domain of art must ever 
 walk hand in hand with him. So he pre- 
 fers to say that, of all the various forms 
 in which cant presents itself to suffering 
 [83]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 humanity, he knows of none so outra- 
 geous, so illogical, so undemonstrable, so 
 marvellously absurd, as the cant of 'Too 
 Much Mercy.' When it shall be proven 
 to him 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 aus- 
 tere lives out of situation and position, 
 and the repentant Magdalen supplant- 
 ing the blameless virgin in society then 
 he will lay aside his pen and extend his 
 hand to the new Draconian discipline in 
 fiction. But until then he will, without 
 claiming to be a religious man or a moral- 
 ist, but simply as an artist, reverently and 
 humbly conform to the rules laid down 
 [84]
 
 WORK 
 
 by a Great Poet who created the parable 
 of the 'Prodigal Son' and the 'Good 
 Samaritan,' whose works have lasted 
 eighteen hundred years, and will remain 
 when the present writer and his genera- 
 tion are forgotten." 
 
 One reads this passage with qualified 
 satisfaction. Based upon a right feeling 
 of indignation, it succeeds in being both 
 didactic and sentimental. When Bret 
 Harte wrote "The Luck of Roaring 
 Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker 
 Flat" he had a strong instinct to tell the 
 bare truth about human life as he knew 
 it in California. He had also, for better 
 or worse, a decided instinct to invest hu- 
 man nature, in whatsoever dubious guise 
 he might find it, with certain attributes of 
 
 [85]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 ideal grace. The resultant of these two 
 impulses was sometimes effective, some- 
 times merely confusing. 
 
 Apart from questions of substance and 
 morals, these first stories possessed an- 
 other claim upon public interest. The 
 writer had an unmistakable touch of his 
 own. It is during this period that we 
 feel sure of the sincerity of this touch; 
 the earlier stories are patent imitations of 
 Irving and Dickens, and the later, most of 
 them, are as patent imitations of himself. 
 
 It is not generally known that Bret 
 Harte had been, long before he received 
 Mr. Fields's letter about "The Luck," a 
 contributor to The Atlantic. As early as 
 1863 "The Legend of Monte del Diablo" 
 [86]
 
 WORK 
 
 had appeared in its columns. It was a 
 graceful and spirited sketch, but one can 
 understand easily enough why neither this 
 Spanish- American tale nor its subsequent 
 companions in the same vein excited any 
 especial interest. They are obviously and 
 successfully imitative of Irving, not only 
 in their general atmosphere and treat- 
 ment, but in their very idioms and ca- 
 dences. Just as in his earlier character- 
 stories Bret Harte instinctively imitated 
 Dickens, in these sketches he insensibly 
 fell into the mood and manner of the 
 chronicler of the Alhambra, whose spell 
 was still fresh upon the world. 
 
 Here, for example, is the opening pas- 
 sage from "The Legend of Monte del 
 Diablo": 
 
 [87]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 "For many years after Father Juni- 
 pero Serro first rang his bell in the wil- 
 derness of Upper California, the spirit 
 which animated that adventurous priest 
 did not wane. The conversion of the 
 heathen went on rapidly in the establish- 
 ment of missions throughout the land. 
 So sedulously did the good Fathers set 
 about their work that around their iso- 
 lated chapels there presently arose adobe 
 huts, whose mud-plastered and savage 
 tenants partook regularly of the provi- 
 sions, and occasionally of the Sacrament, 
 of their pious hosts. Nay, so great was 
 their progress, that one zealous Padre is 
 reported to have administered the Lord's 
 Supper on Sabbath morning to 'over 
 three hundred heathen salvages.' It was 
 [88]
 
 WORK 
 
 not to be wondered that the Enemy of 
 Souls, being greatly incensed thereat, and 
 alarmed at his decreasing popularity, 
 should have grievously tempted and em- 
 barrassed these holy Fathers, as we shall 
 presently see. 
 
 "Yet they were happy, peaceful days 
 for California. The vagrant keels of 
 prying Commerce had not as yet ruffled 
 the lordly gravity of her bays. No torn 
 and ragged gulch betrayed the suspicion 
 of golden treasure. The wild oats 
 drooped idly in the morning heat or 
 wrestled with the afternoon breezes. 
 Deer and antelope dotted the plain. The 
 water-courses brawled in their familiar 
 channels, nor dreamed of shifting their 
 regular tide. The wonders of the Yo- 
 [89]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 Semite and Calaveras were as yet unre- 
 corded. The holy Fathers noted little of 
 the landscape beyond the barbaric prodi- 
 gality with which the quick soil repaid the 
 sowing. A new conversion, the advent of 
 a saint's day, or the baptism of an Indian 
 baby was at once the chronicle and marvel 
 of their day. 
 
 "At this blissful epoch there lived at 
 the Mission of San Pablo Father Jose 
 Antonio Haro, a worthy brother of the 
 Society of Jesus. He was of tall and 
 cadaverous aspect. A somewhat roman- 
 tic history had given a poetic interest to 
 his lugubrious visage. While a youth, 
 pursuing his studies at famous Sala- 
 manca, he had become enamoured of the 
 charms of Dona Carmen de Torrence- 
 [90]
 
 WORK 
 
 vara as that lady passed to her matutinal 
 devotions. Untoward circumstances, has- 
 tened perhaps by a wealthier suitor, 
 brought this amour to a disastrous issue, 
 and Father Jose entered a monastery, 
 taking upon himself the vows of celibacy. 
 It was here that his natural fervour and 
 poetic enthusiasm conceived expression as 
 a missionary. A longing to convert the 
 uncivilised heathen succeeded his frivolous 
 earthly passion, and a desire to explore 
 and develop unknown fastnesses continu- 
 ally possessed him. In his flashing eye 
 and sombre exterior was detected a sin- 
 gular commingling of the discreet Las 
 Casas and the impetuous Balboa." 
 
 The early stories of modern California 
 life are as clearly studies after Dickens. 
 [91]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 Here, for instance, is a bit of dialogue 
 from "M'liss," which was written while 
 Harte was still a compositor on The 
 Golden Era: 
 
 "Suddenly she threw herself forward, 
 calling on God to strike her dead, and fell 
 quite weak and helpless with her face on 
 the master's desk, crying and sobbing as 
 if her heart would break. 
 
 "The master lifted her gently, and 
 waited for the paroxysm to pass. When, 
 with face still averted, she was repeating 
 between her sobs the mea culpa of child- 
 ish penitence that 'she'd be good, she 
 didn't mean to,' etc. it came to him to 
 ask her why she had left Sabbath-school. 
 
 "Why had she left Sabbath-school? 
 Why? Oh, yes. What did he (McSnag- 
 [92]
 
 WORK 
 
 ley) want to tell her she was wicked for? 
 What did he tell her God hated her for? 
 If God hated her, what did she want to 
 go to Sabbath-school for? She didn't 
 want to be beholden to anybody who 
 hated her. 
 
 "Had she told McSnagley this? 
 
 "Yes, she had. 
 
 "The master laughed. It was a hearty 
 laugh, and echoed so oddly in the little 
 school-house, and seemed so inconsistent 
 and discordant with the sighing of the 
 pines without, that he shortly corrected 
 himself with a sigh. The sigh was quite 
 as sincere in its way, however, and after 
 a moment of serious silence he asked 
 about her father. 
 
 "Her father. What father? Whose 
 [93]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 father? What had he ever done for her? 
 Why did the girls hate her? Come, now! 
 What made the folks say, 'Old Bummer 
 Smith's M'liss,' when she passed? Yes; 
 oh, yes. She wished he was dead she 
 was dead everybody was dead; and her 
 sobs broke forth anew." 
 
 Harte's mimetic faculty was already 
 being deliberately exercised, as the "Con- 
 densed Novels," published in 1867, 
 showed. We may, in this connection, 
 quote the opening paragraphs of his de- 
 liberate parody of Dickens, which he 
 called, "The Haunted Man: A Christmas 
 Story": 
 
 "Don't tell me that it wasn't a knocker. 
 I had seen it often enough, and I ought 
 to know. So ought the three o'clock beer, 
 [94]
 
 WORK 
 
 in dirty high-lows, swinging himself over 
 the railing, or executing a demoniacal jig 
 upon the door-step ; so ought the butcher, 
 although butchers as a general thing are 
 scornful of such trifles ; so ought the post- 
 man, to whom knockers of the most ex- 
 travagant description were merely human 
 weaknesses, that were to be pitied and 
 used. And so ought for the matter of 
 that, etc., etc., etc. 
 
 " But then it was such a knocker. A 
 wild, extravagant, and utterly incompre- 
 hensible knocker. A knocker so mysteri- 
 ous and suspicious that policeman 437, 
 first coming upon it, felt inclined to take 
 it instantly in custody, but compromised 
 with his professional instincts by sharply 
 and sternly noting it with an eye that ad- 
 [95]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 mitted of no nonsense, but confidently 
 expected to detect its secret yet. An ugly 
 knocker; a knocker with a hard, human 
 face, that was a type of the harder human 
 face within. A human face that held be- 
 tween its teeth a brazen rod. So here- 
 after, in the mysterious future, should be 
 held, etc., etc. 
 
 "But if the knocker had a fierce human 
 aspect in the glare of day, you should 
 have seen it at night, when it peered out 
 of the gathering shadows and suggested 
 an ambushed figure ; when the light of the 
 street-lamps fell upon it, and wrought a 
 play of sinister expression in its hard out- 
 lines; when it seemed to wink meaningly 
 at a shrouded figure who, as the night fell 
 darkly, crept up the steps and passed into 
 [96]
 
 WORK 
 
 the mysterious house; when the swinging 
 door disclosed a back passage into which 
 the figure seemed to lose itself and be- 
 come a part of the mysterious gloom; 
 when the night grew boisterous and the 
 fierce wind made furious charges at the 
 knocker, as if to wrench it off and carry 
 it away in triumph. Such a night as this. 
 "It was a wild and pitiless wind. A 
 wind that had commenced life as a gentle 
 country zephyr, but, wandering through 
 manufacturing towns, had become de- 
 moralised, and, reaching the city, had 
 plunged into extravagant dissipation and 
 wild excesses. A roistering wind that in- 
 dulged in Bacchanalian shouts on the 
 street-corners, that knocked off the hats 
 from the heads of helpless passengers, and 
 [97]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 then fulfilled its duties by speeding away, 
 like all young prodigals to sea." 
 
 This is a purer example of parody than 
 Bret Harte commonly produced. As a 
 rule his imitations are of the broad bur- 
 lesque order, when they are not the in- 
 struments of satire. 
 
 We have taken pains to note how 
 closely a young writer reproduced the 
 style of the two popular authors to whom 
 he was most nearly akin in tempera- 
 ment. But there was nothing strange 
 in this: the odd thing is that he should 
 have somewhat abruptly emerged from 
 this imitative habit with a style of his own. 
 It was never an altogether pure or good 
 style. That was a day of loose and 
 [98]
 
 WORK 
 
 "picturesque" writing, and Bret Harte, 
 with his journalistic training and self- 
 cultivated taste, was not exempt from the 
 vices of the period. But in that best mood 
 of his, his style did possess a primary in- 
 tegrity; it did express the writer as he 
 was. So far as the faculty of expressing 
 his own personality could so constitute 
 him, Bret Harte was an artist: not of the 
 most refined type, for his nature was not 
 of marked refinement; not of the most 
 powerful type, for he was not a great 
 man. 
 
 He is said to have taken great pains 
 with the form of his work. "His writing 
 materials," says Mr. Noah Brooks, "the 
 light and heat, and even the adjustment 
 of the furniture of the writing-room, 
 [99]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 must be as he desired, otherwise he could 
 not get on with his work. Even when 
 his environment was all that he could 
 wish, there were times when the divine 
 afflatus would not come and the day's 
 work must be abandoned." 
 
 Mr. C. W. Stoddard, another friend 
 of the California days, gives similar tes- 
 timony: "One day I found him pacing 
 the floor of his office, knitting his brows 
 and staring at vacancy. I considered 
 why. He was watching and waiting for 
 a word, the right word, the one word to 
 fit into a line of recently written prose. 
 I suggested one: it would not answer; it 
 must be a word of two syllables, or the 
 natural rhythm of the sentence would 
 suffer. Thus he perfected his prose." 
 [100]
 
 WORK 
 
 All this is doubtless true; yet the fact 
 remains that Bret Harte never compassed 
 a pure style. With all his efforts tow- 
 ard form he never could make himself a 
 writer of distinction. His style lacks 
 firmness and consistency much as jiis life 
 lacked these qualities; it lacks refinement, 
 precisely as his nature lacked refinement. 
 With all his particularity injbhe cholce^of 
 words he could only use them as counters. 
 He had no sense of language as an or- 
 ganism, and_his diction is consequently 
 often conventional, inflated, or_ coarse.. 
 The same thing is true with regard to 
 larger questions of treatment. What (to 
 cite a single instance) could be more pop- 
 ularly effective, what could be in worse 
 taste, than the melodr,ainatic denouement 
 L01]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 of "The Luck of Roaring Camp," other- 
 wise so masterly a sketch? There is a 
 similar touch of conventionality in the 
 ending of "Tennessee's Partner," and of 
 more than one other of the famous early 
 stories. They have, in fact, a dual and 
 somewhat conflicting character as sketches 
 and as tales. Harte wished to record the 
 truth, but it was his instinct to give the 
 truth a conventionally ideal turn; and 
 perhaps the commentator who called him 
 a "realistic idealist" came about as near 
 classifying him as one can come. 
 
 In his treatment of character we are 
 confronted with the same puzzling con- 
 trasts between the sincere and the mere- 
 tricious. What characterisation more 
 fine, strong, and simple than that of 
 [102]
 
 WORK 
 
 M'liss, Yuba Bill, Tennessee's Partner, 
 and Higgles? What more set and mere- 
 tricious than that of the Oakhursts, Star- 
 bottles, Hamlins, and the procession of 
 furbelowed creatures, all eyes and ankles, 
 who represent Bret Harte's conception of 
 womanhood? It has been often asserted 
 not^only that Harte was a great artist, but 
 that he was a great student of character. 
 In both instances his achievement was in- 
 evitably compromised by the limitations 
 of his personality. A certain direct, hu- 
 mourous acceptance of the ruder condi- 
 tions of frontier life seems to have been 
 his most valuable asset : this and a remark- 
 able instinctive faculty for conveying his 
 impressions. He was, however, keen to 
 see what was picturesque and spectacular 
 
 [103]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 in the more complex aspects of that life; 
 and this impression, for whatever it might 
 be worth, he was also able to convey. He 
 worked, in short, under that complication 
 of motives which has proved the undoing 
 of so many born story-writers : the instinct 
 to portray and the instinct to amuse. In 
 the end and, alas, long before the end 
 the latter instinct was completely vic- 
 torious. 
 
 According to his own account, it was 
 his purpose from the outset to aid in 
 founding "a distinctive Western Ameri- 
 can literature," and he appears to have 
 thought that he had actually achieved 
 this. IJisJtr^aimerrtjD^^ 
 Jack Hamlin suggests very well his liny 
 itation as an interpreter of Western life. 
 
 [ ID* ;T
 
 WORK 
 
 The_spirit^of the mining camp he cer- 
 tainly did embody in literature. Other- 
 wise, he was interested in the people who 
 live in the Far West, and in the things 
 which happen there, as a connoisseur in 
 the materials of fiction rather than as a 
 passionate student. We do not, of course, 
 ask for statistics, or a complete philos- 
 ophy, or a long face, from the creative 
 artist. Mr. Owen Wister has offered us 
 none of these things. . Yet by his interpre- 
 tation of ranch life he has contrived, in 
 the very act of pleasing us, to make us 
 think. Bret Harte was content to make 
 us wonder. He was not greatly con- 
 cerned that his reading of that life should 
 be profoundly significant; it must be pic- 
 turesque. Mr. Jack Hamlin is a rascal 
 [105]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 under a film of smooth manners. .JLart 
 oilhis attractiveness consists in our knowl- 
 edge of his rascality, a lure a good many 
 centuries older than Jack Hamlin or Jack 
 Sheppard. Owen Wister's Virginian is 
 a gentleman under a coat of roughness. 
 This also is an immemorial type of hero. 
 So far as they are private persons, it is 
 proper that we should get as much pleas- 
 ure out of one type as out of the other. 
 But we can, after all, hardly yield to Jack 
 Hamlin and the Virginian the immunities 
 of private life. If the phenomena of the 
 West really interest us, we shall find our- 
 selves considering the claims of each in 
 turn to be taken as representative of the 
 frontier phase of civilisation. Weighed 
 in such a mood, Mr. Jack Hamlin, with 
 [106]
 
 WORK 
 
 all his fascinations, is found wanting; 
 one must be lightly pleased with him, or 
 not at all. The Virginian (who Will never 
 become as famous as Mr. Hamlin) is far 
 more edifying; he is much more nearly in 
 the line of descent from those strong fron- 
 tiersmen of Bret Harte's earliest work. 
 
 Even that work was not, it is plain, 
 based upon a conscious philosophy. He 
 had no faculty of subtle analysis ; he did 
 have a crude, strong understanding of 
 the^crude, strong^ frontier life. The fla- 
 vour of that life has best been suggested, 
 so far as generalisation is concerned, by 
 a dweller in the Bret Harte country: 
 "Somehow the rawness of the land fa- 
 vours the sense of personal relation to the 
 supernatural. There is not much interven- 
 [107]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 tion of crops, cities, clothes, and manners 
 between you and the organising forces 
 to cut off communication. All this begets 
 in Jimville a state that passes explanation 
 unless you will accept an explanation that 
 passes belief. Along with killing and 
 drunkenness, coveting of women, charity, 
 simplicity, there is a certain indifference, 
 blankness, emptiness, if you will, of all 
 vapourings, no bubbling of the pot it 
 wants the German to coin a word for 
 that no bread-envy, no brother-fervour. 
 . . . It is pure Greek in that it repre- 
 sents the courage to shear off what is not 
 worth while. Beyond that it endures 
 without snivelling, renounces without 
 self-pity, fears no death, rates itself not 
 too grea,t in the scheme of things; so do 
 [108]
 
 WORK 
 
 beasts, so did St. Jerome in the desert, so 
 also in the elder day did the gods. Life, 
 its performance, cessation, is no new thing 
 to gape and wonder at." * 
 
 It is of life taken in this spirit that 
 Bret Harte first offered a reasonable in- 
 terpretation. Since then, by Kipling, by 
 Owen Wister, and by other hands, the 
 feat has been often repeated. Bret Harte 
 had no other interpretation to offer. He 
 had no power of making sophistication 
 interesting. Consequently his removal to 
 the East and to Europe did not, as hap- 
 pened with Mr. Henry James, open a 
 new career for him. He did not under- 
 stand the life of the common people in 
 
 * Jimville : A Bret Harte Town. Mary Austin, in The 
 Atlantic Monthly, November, 1902. 
 
 [109]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 Germany or England; and he utterly 
 failed in attempting to portray a lady or 
 a gentleman of any race. 
 
 Apart from his purely creative work 
 something remains to be said of him as 
 
 a Satirist. tllS ,i*irW1 jmpuV fnnnH 
 
 two modes of expressioniin humourous 
 verse and in prose parody. He was 
 capable of good serious verse. As early 
 as 1865 he had published a volume of 
 somewhat pretentious romantic poems, 
 which attracted rather less attention than 
 it deserved. Even earlier than this, how- 
 ever, he had hit upon his real vein in 
 "The Society upon the Stanislaus," in 
 which Truthful James and his artless 
 method of moralising appeared for the 
 [110]
 
 WORE 
 
 first time. But it remained for his later 
 narrative about the Heathen Chinee to 
 make the name of Truthful James fa- 
 mous. The explanation of the greater 
 vogue of the latter poem lies not only in 
 the prestige which now belonged to the 
 author of "The Luck," but in the more 
 strikingly satirical quality of the poem 
 itself. The swarming of the Chinese 
 upon the Pacific Slope had already be- 
 come a "question." "Chinese cheap la- 
 bour" had begun to be a war-cry; and 
 Bret Harte, with his instinct for the con- 
 crete, had hit upon an illustration of the 
 problem at once astonishingly simple and 
 astonishingly strong. The whole prob- 
 lem of this difficulty between East and 
 West is embodied in the game of euchre 
 
 [111]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 between Truthful James, Bill Nye, and 
 the innocent Ah Sin: 
 
 "Which we had a small game, 
 
 And Ah Sin took a hand; 
 It was euchre. The same 
 
 He did not understand; 
 But he smiled as he sat by the table. 
 
 With a smile that was childlike and bland. 
 
 "Yet the cards they were stacked 
 
 In a way that I grieve, 
 And my feelings were shocked 
 
 At the state of Nye's sleeve: 
 Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers t 
 
 And the same with intent to deceive. 
 
 "But the hands that were played 
 
 By that heathen Chinee, 
 And the points that were made 
 [112]
 
 WORK 
 
 Were quite frightful to see, 
 Till at last he put down a right bower, 
 Which the same Nye had dealt unto me. 
 
 "Then I looked up at Nye, 
 
 And he gazed upon me, 
 And he rose with a sigh, 
 
 And said, 'Can this be? 
 We are ruined by Chinese cheap labour / 
 
 And he went for that heathen Chinee. 
 
 "In the scene that ensued 
 
 I did not take a hand; 
 But the floor it was strewed 
 
 Like the leaves on the strand 
 With the cards that Ah Sin had been hiding 
 
 In the game he did not understand. 
 
 "In his sleeves, which were long, 
 He had twenty-four packs,-?- 
 Which was coming it strong, 
 [113]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 Yet I state but the facts; 
 
 And rve found on his nails, which were taper, 
 What's frequent in tapers that's wax. 
 
 "Which is why I remark. 
 
 And for tricks that are vain, 
 
 And my language is plain, 
 That for ways that are dark, 
 The heathen Chinee is peculiar, 
 
 Which the same I am free to maintain." 
 
 What is there omitted in this as a study 
 of international relations? The duplicity 
 of Bill Nye, his righteous Occidental in- 
 dignation at the superior duplicity of his 
 adversary, and the complacent moralising 
 of Truthful James himself constitute this 
 poem a consummate piece of satire. 
 
 The verses were the more effective from 
 [114]
 
 WORK 
 
 the oddity of their metrical structure. 
 They were built, by his own confession, 
 in whimsical imitation of the stately 
 threnody in Swinburne's "Atalanta in 
 Calydon." Harte is said to have illus- 
 trated the similarity by alternating the 
 lines in this way: 
 
 "Atalanta, the fairest of women, whose name is a 
 
 blessing to speak 
 Yet he played it that day upon William and me in 
 
 a way I despise 
 The narrowing Symplegades whitened the straits 
 
 of Propontis with spray 
 And we found on his nails which were taper , what's 
 
 frequent in tapers that's wax" 
 
 It is to be noted that the elements of 
 satire and parody are both present in this 
 [115]
 
 BRET HARTE 
 
 most famous of Bret Harte's metrical ex- 
 periments; and it was in the employment 
 of these elements that he longest main- 
 tained his strength. He never achieved 
 another "Heathen Chinee," but his first 
 prose volume was a series of "Condensed 
 Novels," and so was his last. 
 
 Somebody said, during the period of 
 Bret^Harte's undoing at the hands of 
 his genius was "a 
 
 lead and not a pocket." This was pre- 
 cisely untrue, as he presently proved to 
 the world's satisfaction. His pocket 
 made him rich in a day; his lead barely 
 yieldgd pay-ore.^ When he _died jonejpur- 
 nal said thatjthe_wj3rldjhad lost one of 
 its most beloved authors. Another said 
 [116]
 
 WORK 
 
 that neither the world nor JiteratureJiad 
 
 Camp" gave himjrtanding 
 smith andjterne and Irving and Dickens 
 and all the glorious company oj^the writ- 
 ers of sentiment. But his art did not 
 grow; it consequently did not hold its 
 own. He was not a consummate artist, 
 he was not a commanding personality. 
 One thing he did admirably, and the 
 world is in no danger of forgetting him. 
 
 THE END 
 
 [117]
 
 CONTEMPORARY MEN OF LETTERS SERIES 
 WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY, EDITOR 
 
 THE purpose of this series is to provide brief but compre- 
 hensive sketches, biographical and critical, of living writers 
 and of those who, though dead, may still properly be re- 
 garded as belonging to our time. There is a legitimate 
 interest in the lives of our contemporaries that is quite dis- 
 tinct from mere personal curiosity. There is also, in spite 
 of the obvious limitations of contemporary criticism, a 
 justifiable ambition to arrive at some final estimate of the 
 literary production of our age in advance of posterity. It 
 is to satisfy so far as possible this ambition and this interest 
 that the present series is planned. European as well as 
 English and American men of letters are included, so as to 
 give a complete survey of the intellectual and artistic life of 
 an age that is characteristically cosmopolitan. It is also 
 often called a decadent age, and it has therefore a varied 
 outlook on life. The diverse' and often conflicting points of 
 view that we thus meet with in modern poets and prose 
 writers are all treated intelligently and sympathetically by 
 writers especially qualified in every instance, although the 
 prevailing temper of the series is idealistic. 
 
 McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO., 
 141 East Twenty-fifth Street, New York.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 
 
 
 i-0 
 U8t 
 
 SEP 1 1976 
 
 u 
 
 JUN12 1981 
 
 REC'D 
 
 REC'D LD-URC 
 
 J UN 2 9 1987 
 REC'D LD-irat 
 
 *2 
 MHT31M 
 
 fLEKS^'; ... ' I 
 
 FEB 7 1983 
 
 Form L9-Series 444