In his Chronological Outlines of American Literature, Whitcomb mentions only thirteen American novels published during the seven years before 1870: Taylor's Hannah Thurston, John Godfrey's Fortunes, and Story of Kennett; Trowbridge's The Three Scouts; Donald G. Mitchell's Doctor Johns; Holmes's The Guardian Angel; Lanier's Tiger-Lilies, the transition novel of the decade as we shall see later in our study of Lanier; Louisa M. Alcott's Little Women; Beecher's Norwood; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar; Higginson's Malbone; Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy; and Mrs. Stowe's Oldtown Folks. To study the list is to realize the condition of American fiction during the sixties. It lacked incisiveness and construction and definite color; it droned and it preached.

Before pronouncing the decade the feeblest period in American fiction since the early twenties of the century, let us examine the most lauded novel written in America between 1860 and 1870, Elsie Venner (1861). Strictly speaking, it is not a novel at all: it is another Autocrat volume, chatty, discursive, brilliant. The Brahmins, sons and grandsons of ministers, might enter the law, medicine, teaching, literature, the lyceum lecture field—they never ceased to preach. New England for two centuries was a vast pulpit and American literature during a whole period was written on sermon paper. "The real aim of the story," the Autocrat naÏvely observes in his preface, "was to test the doctrine of 'original sin' and human responsibility." He is in no hurry, however. We read four chapters before we learn even the heroine's name. A novel can reasonably be expected to center about its title character: Elsie Venner speaks seventeen times during the story, and eleven of these utterances are delivered from her death-bed at the close of the book. There is no growth in character, no gradual moving of events to a culmination, no clear picture even of the central figure. Elsie is a mere case: the book, so far as she is concerned, is the record of a clinic. But even the clinic is not suffered to move uninterruptedly. Digressions are as frequent as even in the Autocrat papers. A widow is introduced for no apparent reason, studied for a chapter, and then dropped from the narrative. We never feel like one who has lost himself for a time in the life of another in a new world under new skies; we feel rather like one who is being personally conducted through New England by a skilful guide. Note this partial prospectus of what he has to show: Newburyport, Portsmouth, Portland, caste in New England, rural schools, Northampton and Mt. Holyoke, mountain vegetation, rattlesnakes in Massachusetts, the New England mansion house, school compositions, the old type of meeting house, varieties of school girls, the old-time India merchant, oysters in New England, hired help, colonial chimneys, young ladies' seminaries, the hemlock tree. The topics are interesting ones and they are brilliantly treated, often at length, but in a novel, even one written by Dr. Holmes, such things are "lumber." The novel is typical of the fiction of the era. It is discursive, loosely constructed, vague in its characterization, and lacking in cumulative force.

It is significant that the magazines of the period had very little use for the native product. Between 1864 and 1870, Harper's Magazine alone published no fewer than ten long serials by English novelists: Denis Duval by Thackeray; The Small House at Allington by Trollope; Our Mutual Friend by Dickens; The Unkind Word, Woman's Kingdom, and A Brave Lady by Dinah Mulock Craik; Armadale by Wilkie Collins; My Enemy's Daughter by Justin M'Carthy; Anteros by the Author of Guy Livingstone [G.A. Lawrence]; and Anne Furness by the Author of Mabel's Progress [Mrs. T.A. Trollope]. Even the Atlantic Monthly left its New England group of producers to publish Charles Reade's Griffith Gaunt in twelve instalments. In 1871 Scribner's Monthly began the prospectus of its second volume with this announcement:

Our contributors are among the best who write in the English language. George MacDonald—"the best of living story-writers"—will continue his beautiful story, entitled Wilfred Cumbermede, throughout the volume. We have the refusal of all Hans Christian Andersen's stories at the hand of his best translator, Mr. Horace E. Scudder. We have engaged the pen of Miss Thackeray, now regarded as the finest story-writer among the gifted women of Great Britain—not even excepting George Eliot. Mrs. Oliphant has written especially for us an exquisitely characteristic story, etc.

The feebleness of the period was understood even at the time. Charles Eliot Norton wrote Lowell in 1874: "There is not much in the magazine [Atlantic] that is likely to be read twice save by its writers, and this is what the great public likes. There must be a revival of letters in America, if literature as an art is not to become extinct. You should hear Godkin express himself in private on this topic."[37]

No wonder that the book-reviewer of Harper's Magazine for May, 1870, with nothing better before him than Miss Van Kortland, Anonymous; Hedged In, by Miss Phelps; and Askaros Kassis, by DeLeon, should have begun his review, "We are so weary of depending on England, France, and Germany for fiction, and so hungry for some genuine American romance, that we are not inclined to read very critically the three characteristic American novels which lie on our table." No wonder that when Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp in the Overland Monthly was read in the Atlantic office, Fields sent by return mail a request "upon the most flattering terms" for another story like it, and that the same mail brought also papers and reviews "welcoming the little foundling of California literature with an enthusiasm that half frightened its author."[38]

The new American fiction began with Bret Harte.

I

To turn from Mark Twain to Bret Harte is like turning from the great river on a summer night, fragrant and star-lit, to the glamour and unreality of the city theater. No contrast could be more striking. Francis Brett Harte, born August 25, 1839, was preËminently a man of the East and preËminently also a man of the city. He was born at Albany, New York, he spent his childhood in Providence, Rhode Island, in Philadelphia, in Lowell, Massachusetts, in Boston and other places, and the formative years between nine and eighteen he passed in Brooklyn and New York City. He lived all his young life in an atmosphere of culture. His father, a Union College man, a scholar, and a teacher who knew French and Spanish and Italian, Latin and Greek, had accumulated a large and well-selected library in which the boy, frail and sensitive, too frail in his early years to attend school, spent much of his childhood, reading Shakespeare and Froissart at six and Charles Dickens at seven. His mother, a woman of culture, directed his reading, and criticized with discernment his earliest attempts at poetry. It was the training school for a poet, a Bryant or a Longfellow, who should look to the older art for models and be inspired with the dream that had sent Irving and Willis and Taylor as pilgrims to the holy lands of literature across the sea.

The turning point in Harte's life came in 1854, when he was in his fifteenth year. His biographer, Merwin, tells the story:

In 1853 his mother [who had been a widow for nine years] went to California with a party of relatives and friends, in order to make her home there with her elder son, Henry. She had intended to take with her the other two children, Margaret and Francis Brett; but as the daughter was in school, she left the two behind for a few months, and they followed in February, 1854. They traveled by the Nicaragua route, and after a long, tiresome, but uneventful journey, landed safely in San Francisco.[39]

The mother must have remarried shortly after her arrival in California, for two sentences later on the biographer records that "They went the next morning to Oakland across the Bay, where their mother and her second husband, Colonel Andrew Williams, were living."

The young poet had been transplanted into new and strange soil and he took root slowly. During the next year, making his home with his mother at Oakland, he attempted to teach school and then to serve as an apothecary's assistant, but he made little headway in either profession. His heart was far away from the rough, new land that he had entered. He wrote poems and stories and sketches and sent them to the Eastern magazines; he read interminably, and dreamed of literature just as Aldrich and Timrod and Hayne and Stedman and Stoddard were even then dreaming of it on the other side of the continent. The next two years of his life, despite the efforts of his biographers, are vague and conjectural. It was his wander period. He began as tutor in a private family in Humboldt County, then, according to Charles Warren Stoddard, "he was an express messenger in the mountains when the office was the target of every lawless rifle in the territory; he was glutted with adventurous experiences."[40] Not for long, however. He seems to have spent the rest of the two years—prosaic anticlimax!—as a type-setter on the Humboldt Times and the Northern California, as a teacher in the town of Union, and as a drug clerk. That he ever was a miner is gravely to be doubted. He had small taste for roughing it and little sympathy with the typical California life of the times. He was a poet, rather, a man of the city, a reader of romance, how wide and attentive a reader we may judge from Condensed Novels which he soon after began to contribute to the San Francisco press.

The events in his life during the next fourteen years in San Francisco are quickly summarized. For the greater part of it he was connected with the Golden Era, first as a type-setter and later as an editor and contributor. In 1862 he was married. Two years later he was appointed Secretary of the California Mint, an office that allowed him abundant time for literary work. He was connected with Webb's brilliant and short-lived Californian, first as contributor and later as editor, and in 1868, when the Overland Monthly, which was to be the Atlantic of Western America, was founded, he was made the editor. The Luck of Roaring Camp in the second number and Plain Language from Truthful James in the September, 1870, number, brought him a popularity that in suddenness and extent had had no precedent in America, save in the case of Mrs. Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin. The enormous applause intoxicated him; California became too narrow and provincial; and in 1871 he left it, joyous as one who is returning home after long exile.

II

If we may trust Harte's own statement, made, it must be remembered, in the retrospect of later years, he set out deliberately to add a new province to American literature. During the period between 1862 and 1867, he wrote, according to his own statement, "The Society upon the Stanislaus and The Story of M'liss—the first a dialectical poem, the second a California romance—his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish, but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility—a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better known pages of the Overland Monthly, he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of The Luck of Roaring Camp, and the poem of The Heathen Chinee."[41]

But the poem and the romance were not his first efforts toward a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. His first vision of the literary possibilities of the region had been inspired by Irving, and he wrote in the Sketch Book manner during the greater part of his seventeen years upon the Pacific Coast. Behind the California of the gold and the excitement lay three hundred years of an old Spanish civilization. What Irving had done for the Hudson why could he not do for the Mission lands and the Spanish occupation, "that glorious Indian summer of California history, around which so much poetical haze still lingers—that bland, indolent autumn of Spanish rule, so soon to be followed by the wintry storms of Mexican independence and the reviving springs of American conquest"?[42] It was a vision worthy of a Hawthorne. That it possessed him for years and was abandoned with reluctance is evident to one who examines his early work.

He voiced it in The Angelus, Heard at the Mission Dolores, 1868, in the same volume of the Overland Monthly that contained The Luck of Roaring Camp:

It must not be forgotten that his Legend of Monte del Diablo, a careful Irvingesque romance, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly as early as 1863. During the same period he wrote The Right Eye of the Commander, The Legend of Devil's Point, The Adventure of Padre Viventio, and many short pieces, enough, indeed, to make up a volume the size of The Sketch Book.

Despite its echoes of Irving, it is significant work. Harte was the first to catch sight of a whole vast field of American romance. Again and again he recurs to it in his later poetry and prose; notably in Concepcion de Arguello and its prose version on page 191 of the first volume of the Overland Monthly, A Convert of the Mission, The Story of a Mine, In the Carquinez Woods, and in Gabriel Conroy, that chaotic book which has in it the materials for the greatest of American romances. Whenever he touches this old Spanish land he throws over it the mellow Washington Irving glow that had so thrilled him in his earlier years, and he writes with power. The Spanish part of Gabriel Conroy is exquisite; its atmosphere is faultless:

If there was a spot on earth of which the usual dead monotony of the California seasons seemed a perfectly consistent and natural expression, that spot was the ancient and time-honored pueblo and Mission of the blessed St. Anthony. The changeless, cloudless, expressionless skies of the summer seemed to symbolize that aristocratic conservatism which expelled all innovation and was its distinguishing mark....

As he drew rein in the court-yard of the first large adobe dwelling, and received the grave welcome of a strange but kindly face, he saw around him everywhere the past unchanged. The sun shone as brightly and fiercely on the long red tiles of the low roofs, that looked as if they had been thatched with longitudinal slips of cinnamon, even as it had shone for the last hundred years; the gaunt wolf-like dogs ran out and barked at him as their fathers and mothers had barked at the preceding stranger of twenty years before. There were the few wild, half-broken mustangs tethered by strong riatas before the veranda of the long low Fonda, with the sunlight glittering on their silver trappings; there were the broad, blank expanses of whitewashed adobe wall, as barren and guiltless of record as the uneventful days, as monotonous and expressionless as the staring sky above; there were the white, dome-shaped towers of the Mission rising above the green of olives and pear trees, twisted, gnarled and knotted with the rheumatism of age. ... The steamers that crept slowly up the darkening coast line were something remote, unreal, and phantasmal; since the Philippine galleon had left its bleached and broken ribs in the sand in 1640, no vessel had, in the memory of man, dropped anchor in the open roadstead below the curving Point of Pines.

Meager and fragmentary as these Spanish sketches are, they nevertheless opened the way for a new school of American romance.

III

Harte's first story with other than a legendary theme was M'liss, written for the Golden Era sometime before 1867. For the student of his literary art it is the most important of all his writings, especially important because of the revision which he made of it later after he had evolved his final manner. It is transition work. The backgrounds are traced in with Irving-like care; the character of the schoolmaster is done with artistic restraint and certainty of touch. M'liss is exquisitely handled. There is nothing better in all his work than this study of the fiery, jealous little heart of the neglected child. It is not necessarily a California story; it could have happened as well even in New England. It is not genre work, not mere exploiting of local oddities; it is worked out in life itself, and it strikes the universal human chord that brings it into the realm of true art.

But even in the earlier version of the story there are false notes. The names of the characters strike us as unusual: M'liss, McSnagley, Morpher, Clytemnestra, Kerg, Aristides, Cellerstina. We feel that the author is straining for the unusual; and we feel it more when the Rev. Joshua McSnagley comes upon the scene:

The reverend gentleman was glad to see him. Moreover, he observed that the master was looking "peartish," and hoped he had got over the "neuralgy" and "rheumatiz." He himself had been troubled with the dumb "ager" since last conference. But he had learned to "rastle and pray." Pausing a moment to enable the master to write his certain method of curing the dumb "ager" upon the book and volume of his brain, Mr. McSnagley proceeded to inquire after Sister Morpher. "She is an adornment to Christewanity, and has a likely growin' young family," added Mr. McSnagley.

Somehow it does not ring true. The author is thinking of the effect he hopes to produce. He must fill his reader with wonder. "A saintly Raphael-face, with blond beard and soft blue eyes, belonging to the biggest scamp in the diggings, turned toward the child and whispered, 'Stick to it, M'liss.'" That sentence is the key to the author's later manner. "Life in California is a paradox," he seems everywhere to say, "just look at this."

The transition from F.B. Harte the poet and romancer to Bret Harte the paradox maker and showman came through Dickens. It was the Dickens era in America. The great novelist had made his second tour of the country between November, 1867, and April, 1868, and his journeyings had been a triumphal progress. All classes everywhere were reading his books, and great numbers knew them literally by heart. Dickens wrote home from Washington, "Mr. Secretary Staunton (War Minister) was here.... He is acquainted with the minutest details of my books. Give him a passage anywhere and he will instantly cap it and go on with the context.... Never went to sleep at night without first reading something from my books which were always with him."[43] The same could have been said of Harte himself. Says Pemberton, "His knowledge of his [Dickens's] books was unrivaled.... He could have passed Charles Calverley's famous Pickwick Examination Paper with honors."[44] Everybody knew his Dickens; for a generation men could not speak of the man with moderation. Even a critic like Moncure D. Conway could say of Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop: "To this day I cannot help suspecting the sanity of any one who does not concede that they are the two best novels ever written."[45] The death of Dickens in 1870 let loose all over America a flood of eulogy and increased enormously the already great sales of his books.

The art of Dickens was peculiar. He had found in the lower strata of the population of London, that vast settling pool of Great Britain, a society made up of many sharply individualized personalities, abnormalities in body and soul, results of the peculiar inflexible characteristics of the English race and their hard and fast social distinctions. From fragments of this lower London Dickens built him a world of his own and peopled it with composite creations such as one finds nowhere save in the folklore of a primitive people—creatures as strange as their names, Quilp, Scrooge, Cratchit, Squeers, Snagsby. So tremendously did he believe in them, that we believe in them ourselves. So overflowing was he with high spirits and boisterous laughter that before we realize it we have surrendered completely and are living hilariously not in a land of actual men and women, but in the world that never was and never can be save in the books of Dickens. He never analyzed, he never sought the heart of things, or got at all below the surface of his characters; he was content simply to exhibit his marvelous creations with all their ludicrous incongruities, and the show is so entertaining and the showman exhibits it with such zest, such joyous abandon, that we stand like children and lose ourselves in wonder and enjoyment.

We can see now that the time was ripe for a California Dickens. There was a prepared audience—the whole nation was reading the great novelist of the people. California, moreover, was in the fierce light of the gold excitement—anything that came from it would find eager readers. It was a veritable Dickens land, more full of strange types than even the slums of London: Pikes, Greasers, Yankees, Chinese, gamblers, adventurers from all the wild places of the world, desperadoes, soldiers of fortune, restless seekers for excitement and gold. Everything was ready. Harte doubtless blundered into his success; doubtless he did not reason about the matter at all, yet the result remains the same: he came at the precise moment with the precise form of literature that the world was most sure to accept. It came about as the most natural thing in the world. Saturated with Dickens as he had been from his childhood, it is not strange that this motley society and its amazing surroundings should have appealed to him from the objective and the picturesque side; it is not strange that, even as did Dickens, he should have selected types and heightened them and peopled a new world with them; it is not strange that he should have given these types Dickens-like names: Miggles, McCorkle, Culpepper Starbottle, Calhoun Bungstarter, Fagg, Twinkler, Rattler, Mixer, Stubbs, Nibbles. His work is redolent of Dickens. Sometimes we seem to be reading a clever parody after the fashion of the Condensed Novels, as for instance this from The Romance of Madrono Hollow:

There was not much to hear. The hat was saying to the ribbons that it was a fine night, and remarking generally upon the clear outline of the Sierras against the blue-black sky. The ribbons, it so appeared, had admired this all the way home, and asked the hat if it had ever seen anything half so lovely as the moonlight on the summit? The hat never had; it recalled some lovely nights in the South in Alabama ("in the South in Ahlabahm" was the way the old man had heard it), but then there were other things that made the night seem so pleasant. The ribbons could not possibly conceive what the hat could be thinking about. At this point there was a pause, of which Mr. Folinsbee availed himself to walk very grimly and craunchingly down the gravel walk toward the gate. Then the hat was lifted, and disappeared in the shadow, and Mr. Folinsbee confronted only the half-foolish, half-mischievous, but wholly pretty face of his daughter.

M'liss is full of such echoes. A little later than M'liss, when he was required to furnish the Overland with a distinctly Californian story, he set about examining his field precisely as Dickens would have done. "What are some of the most unusual phases of this unique epoch?" he asked himself. During a short period women and children were rare in the remote mining districts. What would result if a baby were born in one of the roughest and most masculine of the camps? It is not hard to conjecture how Dickens would have handled the problem; The Luck of Roaring Camp is Harte's solution. The situation and the characters are both unique. They would have been impossible in any other place or at any other moment in the world's history. So with all of Harte's later stories: undoubtedly there may have been a Roaring Camp and undoubtedly there were Cherokee Sals and Kentucks, undoubtedly the gold rush developed here and there Jack Hamlins and Tennessees and Uncle Billys and Yuba Bills. The weakness of Harte is that he takes these and peoples California with them. Like Dickens, he selects a few picturesque and grotesque exceptions and makes of them a whole social system.

Harte had nothing of the earnestness and the sincerity of the older master; after a time he outgrew his manner, and evolved a style of his own—compressed, rapid, picturesque; but this early point of view he never changed. He sought ever for the startling and the dramatic and he elaborated the outside of it with care. He studied the map of California for picturesque names, just as Dickens studied the street signs of London. He passed by the common materials of human life to exhibit the strange phenomena of one single accidental moment in a corner of America.

Once he had begun, however, there was no possibility of stopping. The people demanded work like The Luck of Roaring Camp and would accept nothing else. It is pathetic to see him during the early years of his great fame, trying to impress upon the reading public that he is a poet after the old definition of the word. The Atlantic had paid him $10,000 to write for a year work like The Luck of Roaring Camp. He gave four stories, and he gave also five careful poems of the Longfellow-Whittier type. By 1873 he had put forth no fewer than fourteen books, nine of them being poems or collections of his poetry. In vain. The public ordered him back to the mines and camps that even then were as obsolete as the pony express across the Plains.

Despite his biographers, the latter part of his life is full of mystery. After seven years of literary work in New York City, he went in 1878 as consul to Crefeld, Germany. Two years later he was transferred to Glasgow, Scotland, where he remained for five years. The rest of his life he spent in London, writing year after year new books of California stories. He never returned to America; he was estranged from his family; he seemed to wish to sever himself entirely from all that had to do with his earlier life. He died May 5, 1902, and was buried in Frimby churchyard, in Surrey.

IV

A novelist must rise or fall with his characters. What of Harte? First of all we must observe that he makes no attempts at character development. Each personage introduced is the same at the close of the story as at the opening. He has no fully studied character: we have a burning moment, a flashlight glimpse—intense, paradoxical, startling, then no more. We never see the person again. The name may appear in later sketches, but it never designates the same man. Colonel Starbottle is consistent from story to story only in make-up, in stage "business," and the well known "gags"—as, for instance, a succession of phrases qualified by the adjective "blank." "Yuba Bill" is Harte's synonym for stage driver, "Jack Hamlin" for gambler. We have a feeling constantly that the characters are brought in simply to excite wonder. Gabriel Conroy devotes his life for years to the finding of his sister Grace. He leaves his wife to search for her; he can think of nothing else; yet when at length he does find her among the witnesses in a courtroom he takes it as a mere commonplace. A moment later, however, when told that his wife, for whom we know he cares nothing at all, has given birth to a son, he falls headlong in a swoon.

His characters may perhaps be true to facts; he may be able to give the prototype in every case; and yet we are not convinced. The stories told by the college freshman at home during his first Christmas vacation may all be true, and yet they may give a very false idea of college life in its entirety. So it is with Harte. The very year that he landed in California a procession of one thousand children, each child with a flower in his hand, marched one day in San Francisco. The Luck of Roaring Camp gives no such impression. In all save the remotest camps there were churches and worshipers, yet who would suspect it from Harte's tales? California has never accepted Harte's picture of its life, just as the South has never accepted Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is not fair to picture an era simply by dwelling on its exceptions and its grotesque possibilities. Art must rest upon the whole truth, not upon half truths.

The truth is that the man had no deep and abiding philosophy of life; he had indeed no philosophy at all. In the words of his discerning biographer, Merwin,

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; he was concerned only with the concrete; and it is noticeable that when he does venture to lay down a general principle, it fails to bear the impress of real conviction. The note of sincerity is wanting.[46]

The fact that his rascals in a crisis often do deeds of sublime heroism must not deceive us, despite the author's protestations of a great moral purpose underlying his work.

Without claiming to be a religious man or a moralist, but simply as an artist, he shall reverently and humbly conform to the rules laid down by a Great Poet who created the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, whose works have lasted eighteen hundred years, and will remain when the present writer and his generation are forgotten. And he is conscious of uttering no original doctrine in this, but of only voicing the beliefs of a few of his literary brethren happily living, and one gloriously dead, who never made proclamation of this from the housetops.[47]

This is insincere to the point of bathos. We feel like saying, "Bah!" Harte makes his villains heroes at the crisis simply to add finesse to his tale. He is dealing with paradoxes; he is working for his reader's wonder. If in a moment where pity is expected, woman is harsh and man tender; if the reputed good man is a rascal at the supreme test, and the reputed rascal proves suddenly to be a saint, it adds to the effectiveness of the tale.

Everywhere there is the atmosphere of the theater. The painted backgrounds are marvels of skill. There are vast color effects, and picturesque tableaux. There is a theatric quality about the heroines; we can see the make-up upon their faces. Too often they talk the stagiest of stage talk as in the first parting scene between Grace Conroy and Arthur Poinset. The end is always a drop-curtain effect. Even Tennessee's Partner must have its appropriate curtain. We can imagine a double curtain for The Outcasts of Poker Flat: the first tableau showing the two dead women in the snow, the second the inscription over the body of Oakhurst, the gambler. Instead of closing the book with a long breath as after looking at a quivering section of human life, we say, "How strange! What brilliant work!" and we feel like clapping our hands for a tableau of all the cast, the spot light, and the quick curtain.

Bret Harte had no real affection for the West; he never again visited it; he never even wrote to the friends he had left there. With Mark Twain it was greatly different. The West to him was home; he loved it; he recorded its deepest life with sympathy. To Harte it was simply a source of literary material. He skimmed its surface and found only the melodramatic and the sensational.

V

And yet after all the real strength of Bret Harte came from his contact with this Western soil. Irving and Dickens and the early models that had so molded him served only to teach him his trade; the breath of life in his works all came from the new life of the West. It would be impossible for one to live during seventeen years of his early life in an atmosphere like that of the west coast and not be transformed by it. Taking his work altogether there is in it far more of California than there is of Dickens or of all the others of the older writers. Only a few things of the life of the West seem to have impressed him. He lived fifteen years in San Francisco yet we see almost nothing of that city in his work; the dramatic career of the Vigilantes he touched upon almost not at all. He selected the remote mining camps for his field and yet he seems to have been impressed by very few of the types that were found in them. Only a few of them ring true at every point, Yuba Bill the stage driver is one. We feel that he was drawn by a master who has actually lived with his model. Yuba Bill is the typical man of the region and the period—masterful, self-reliant, full of a humor that is elemental. There is no prolonged study of him. We see him for a tense moment as the stage swings up to the station, and then he is gone. He is as devoid of sentimentality as even Horace Bixby. The company have been shouting "Miggles!" at the dark cabin but have got no reply save from what proves later to have been a parrot:

"Extraordinary echo," said the Judge.

"Extraordinary d—d skunk!" roared the driver contemptuously. "Come out of that, Miggles, and show yourself. Be a man."

Miggles, however, did not appear.

Yuba Bill hesitated no longer. Taking a heavy stone from the road, he battered down the gate, and with the expressman entered the enclosure....

"Do you know this Miggles?" asked the Judge of Yuba Bill.

"No, nor don't want to," said Bill shortly.

"But, my dear sir," expostulated the Judge, as he thought of the barred gate.

"Lookee here," said Yuba Bill, with fine irony, "hadn't you better go back and sit in the coach till yer introduced? I'm going in," and he pushed open the door of the building.

That rings true. If one were obliged to ride at night over a wild, road-agent-infested trail there is no character in all fiction whom we would more gladly have for driver than Yuba Bill. We would like to see more of him than the brief glimpses allowed us by his creator. The humor in Harte is largely Western humor. There is the true California ring in such conversations, for instance, as those in the earlier pages of Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy. It is an atmosphere rather than a series of hits. One finds it in The Outcasts of Poker Flat:

A few of the committee had urged hanging him [Oakhurst] as a possible example, and a sure method of reimbursing themselves from his pockets of the sums he had won from them. "It's agin justice," said Jim Wheeler, "to let this yer young man from Roaring Camp—an entire stranger—carry away our money." But a crude sentiment of equity residing in the breasts of those who had been fortunate enough to win from Mr. Oakhurst overruled this narrower local prejudice.

This atmosphere of humor shimmers through all of the stories. There is never uproarious merriment, but there is constant humor. The conjugal troubles of the "old man" in How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar are thus touched upon:

His first wife, a delicate, pretty little woman, had suffered keenly and secretly from the jealous suspicions of her husband, until one day he invited the whole Bar to his house to expose her infidelity. On arriving, the party found the shy, petite creature quietly engaged in her household duties and retired abashed and discomfited. But the sensitive woman did not easily recover from her shock of this extraordinary outrage. It was with difficulty she regained her equanimity sufficiently to release her lover from the closet in which he was concealed and escape with him. She left a boy of three years to comfort her bereaved husband. The old man's present wife had been his cook. She was large, loyal, and aggressive.

His characters are exceptions and his situations are theatric, yet for all that he cannot be ignored. He caught the spirit of the early mining camps and with it the romantic atmosphere of the old Spanish Colonial civilization that was swept away by the Anglo-Saxon rush for gold. His name cannot fail to go down with the era he recorded, and to identify oneself forever with an era, even though that era be a brief and restricted one, is no small achievement. He is the writer of the epic of the gold rush of the middle century in America, and whatever the quality of that epic may be, it can never be forgotten. He said in 1868:

It may not have been an heroic era; it may have been a hard, ugly, unworked, vulgar and lawless era; but of such are heroes and aristocracies born. Three hundred years, and what a glamor shall hang about it!... A thousand years, and a new Virgil sings the American Æneid with the episode of Jason and the California golden fleece, and the historians tell us it is a myth! Laugh, my pioneer friends, but your great-great-great-great-grandchildren shall weep reverential tears. History, as was said of martyrdom, is "mean in the making" but how heroic it becomes in the perspective of five centuries![48]

And in many ways his work is really of epic strength. He dealt with elemental men, often with veritable demigods, as Yuba Bill. His canvases are as broad as those even of Mark Twain. His human drama is played before a truly Western background. While Tennessee is being tried for his life, "Above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter passionless stars." At moments of crisis the narrative always moves with power. The wolves and the fire in the story In the Carquinez Woods are intensely vivid and lurid in their presentation. The ride from Simpson's Bar is told with the graphic thrill of an eye-witness, and the description of the snow-storm at the opening of Gabriel Conroy reminds one of Thomas Hardy.

VI

Finally, Harte was the parent of the modern form of the short story. It was he who started Kipling and Cable and Thomas Nelson Page. Few indeed have surpassed him in the mechanics of this most difficult of arts. According to his own belief, the form is an American product. We can do no better than to quote from his essay on The Rise of the Short Story. It traces the evolution of a peculiarly American addition to literature.

But while the American literary imagination was still under the influence of English tradition, an unexpected factor was developing to diminish its power. It was humor, of a quality as distinct and original as the country and civilization in which it was developed. It was first noticeable in the anecdote or "story," and, after the fashion of such beginnings, was orally transmitted. It was common in the bar-rooms, the gatherings in the "country store," and finally at public meetings in the mouths of "stump orators." Arguments were clinched and political principles illustrated by "a funny story." It invaded even the camp meeting and pulpit. It at last received the currency of the public press. But wherever met it was so distinctly original and novel, so individual and characteristic, that it was at once known and appreciated abroad as "an American story." Crude at first, it received a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality remained. It was concise and condense, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant, or a miracle of under-statement. It voiced not only the dialect, but the habits of thought of a people or locality. It gave a new interest to slang. From a paragraph of a dozen lines it grew into half a column, but always retaining its conciseness and felicity of statement. It was a foe to prolixity of any kind; it admitted no fine writing nor affectation of style. It went directly to the point. It was burdened by no conscientiousness; it was often irreverent; it was devoid of all moral responsibility, but it was original! By degrees it developed character with its incident, often, in a few lines, gave a striking photograph of a community or a section, but always reached its conclusion without an unnecessary word. It became—and still exists as—an essential feature of newspaper literature. It was the parent of the American "short story."[49]

Harte has described the genesis of his own art. It sprang from the Western humor and was developed by the circumstances that surrounded him. Many of his short stories are models. They contain not a superfluous word; they handle a single incident with graphic power; they close without moral or comment. The form came as a natural evolution from his limitations and powers. With him the story must of necessity be brief. He who depicts the one good deed in a wicked life must of necessity use a small canvas. At one moment in his career Jack Hamlin or Mother Shipton or Sandy does a truly heroic deed, but the author must not extend his inquiries too far. To make a novel with Mother Shipton as heroine would be intolerable.

Harte was unable to hold himself long to any one effort. Like Byron, he must bring down his quarry at a single spring; he had no patience to pursue it at length. Gabriel Conroy is at the same time the best and the worst American novel of the century. It is the best in its wealth of truly American material and in the brilliant passages that strew its pages; it is the worse in that it utterly fails in its construction, and that it builds up its characters wholly from the outside. Its hero, moreover, changes his personality completely three times during the story, and its heroine is first an uneducated Pike maiden of the Southwest, then a Spanish seÑorita:

Features small, and perfectly modeled; the outline of the small face was a perfect oval, but the complection was of burnished copper.... The imperious habit of command; an almost despotic control of a hundred servants; a certain barbaric contempt for the unlimited revenues at her disposal that prompted the act, became her wonderfully. In her impatience the quick blood glanced through her bronzed cheek, her little slipper tapped the floor imperiously and her eyes flashed in the darkness.

Later we learn that she had been adopted into this Spanish family after her lover had abandoned her in the earlier chapters, and had been given her complexion by means of a vegetable stain. But there is still another lightning change. At the end of the book she becomes a Pike again and weakly marries the unrepentant rascal who earlier had betrayed her. In the words of Artemus Ward, "it is too much." It is not even good melodrama, for in melodrama the villain is punished at the end.

Bret Harte was the artist of impulse, the painter of single burning moments, the flashlight photographer who caught in lurid detail one dramatic episode in the life of a man or a community and left the rest in darkness.

VII

In his later years Harte's backgrounds became less sharp in outline. His methods grew more romantic; his atmospheres more mellow and golden. The old Spanish dream of the days of his early art possessed him again, and he added to his gallery of real creations—M'liss, Yuba Bill, Jack Hamlin, Tennessee's Partner—one that perhaps is the strongest of them all, Enriquez Saltillo, the last of a fading race. Nothing Harte ever did will surpass that creation of his old age. In Chu Chu, The Devotion of Enriquez, and The Passing of Enriquez we have the fitting close of the work of the romancer of the west coast. For once at least he saw into the heart of a man. Listen to Enriquez as he makes his defense:

Then they say, "Dry up, and sell out"; and the great bankers say, "Name your own price for your stock, and resign." And I say, "There is not gold enough in your bank, in your San Francisco, in the mines of California, that shall buy a Spanish gentleman. When I leave, I leave the stock at my back; I shall take it, nevarre!" Then the banker he say, "And you will go and blab, I suppose?" And then, Pancho, I smile, I pick up my mustache—so! and I say: "Pardon, seÑor, you haf mistake. The Saltillo haf for three hundred year no stain, no blot upon him. Eet is not now—the last of the race—who shall confess that he haf sit at a board of disgrace and dishonor!" And then it is that the band begin to play, and the animals stand on their hind legs and waltz, and behold, the row he haf begin.

It is the atmosphere of romance, for the mine which had caused all the trouble had been in the family three hundred years and it had become a part of the family itself. When it passed into the hands of the new rÉgime, when his wife, who also was of the new rÉgime, deserted him, then passed Enriquez. The earth that for three hundred years had borne his fathers opened at the earthquake and took him to herself. It was the conception of a true romancer. The work of Bret Harte opened and closed with a vision of romance, a vision worthy even of a Hawthorne.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bret Harte. (1839–1902.) The Lost Galleon and Other Tales [Poems], 1867; Condensed Novels and Other Papers, 1867; The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches, 1870; Plain Language from Truthful James, 1870; The Pliocene Skull, 1871; Poems, 1871; East and West Poems, 1871; The Heathen Chinee and Other Poems, 1871; Poetical Works, 1872; Mrs. Skagg's Husbands, 1873; M'liss: An Idyl of Red Mountain, 1873; Echoes of the Foot-Hills [Poems], 1875; Tales of the Argonauts, 1875; Gabriel Conroy, 1876; Two Men of Sandy Bar, 1876; Thankful Blossom, 1877; The Story of a Mine, 1878; Drift from Two Shores, 1878; The Twins of Table Mountain, 1879; Works in five volumes, 1882; Flip, and Found at Blazing Star, 1882; In the Carquinez Woods, 1884; On the Frontier, 1884; Maruja, 1885; By Shore and Sedge, 1885; Snow Bound at Eagle's, 1885; A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready, 1887; The Crusade of the Excelsior, 1887; The Argonauts of North Liberty, 1888; A Phyllis of the Sierras, 1888; Cressy, 1889; The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh, 1889; A Waif of the Plains, 1890; A Ward of the Golden Gate, 1890; A Sappho of Green Springs, 1891; Colonel Starbottle's Client, 1892; A First Family of Tasajara, 1892; Susy: a Story of the Plains, 1893; Sally Dows and Other Stories, 1893; A ProtÉgÉ of Jack Hamlin's, 1894; The Bell-Ringer of Angel's, 1894; In a Hollow of the Hills, 1895; Clarence, 1895; Barker's Luck, 1896; Three Partners, 1897; Tales of Trail and Town, 1898; Stories in Light and Shadow, 1898; Mr. Jack Hamlin's Meditation, 1899; From Sandhill to Pine, 1900; Under the Redwoods, 1901; Openings in the Old Trail, 1902; Life of Bret Harte, by T. Edgar Pemberton, 1903; Bret Harte, by Henry W. Boynton, 1905; The Life of Bret Harte with Some Account of the California Pioneers, by Henry Childs Merwin, 1911.

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