The Life of Bret Harte Part 18

Mr. Noah Brooks, who was intimate with Bret Harte in New York as well as in San Francisco, wrote, after his death: "I had not been long in the city before I found that Harte had already incurred many debts, chiefly for money borrowed. When I said to Bowles[88] that I was anxious on Harte's account that a scandal should not come from this condition of things, Bowles said, with his good-natured cynicism, 'Well, it does seem to me that there ought to be enough rich men in New York to keep Harte a-going.'

"One rich man, a banker and broker, with an ambition to be considered a patron of the arts and literature, made much of the new literary lion, and from him Harte obtained a considerable sum, $500 perhaps, in small amounts varying from $5 to $50 at a time. One New Year's day Harte, in as much wrath as he was ever capable of showing, spread before me a note from our friend Dives in which the writer, who, by the way, was not reckoned a generous giver, reminded Harte that this was the season of the year when business men endeavored to enter a new era with a clean page in the ledger; and, in order to enable his friend H. to do that, he took the liberty of returning to him sundry I. O. U.'s which his friend H. had given him from time to time. 'd.a.m.n his impudence!' exclaimed the angry artist.

"'What are you going to do about it?' I asked, with some amus.e.m.e.nt. 'Going to do about it!' he answered with much emphasis on the first word. 'Going!

I have made a new note for the full amount of these and have sent it to him with an intimation that I never allow pecuniary matters to trespa.s.s on the sacred domain of friends.h.i.+p.' Poor Dives was denied the satisfaction of giving away a bad debt."

"Once, while we were waiting on Broadway for a stage to take him down town, he said, as the lumbering vehicle hove in sight, 'Lend me a quarter; I haven't money enough to pay my stage fare.' Two or three weeks later, when I had forgotten the incident, we stood in the same place waiting for the same stage, and Harte, putting a quarter of a dollar in my hand, said: 'I owe you a quarter and there it is. You hear men say that I never pay my debts, but [this with a chuckle] you can deny the slander.' While he lived in Morristown, N. J., it was said that he pocketed postage stamps sent to him for his autographs, and these applications were so numerous that with them he paid his butcher's bill. A bright lady to whom this story was told declared that the tale had been denied, 'on the authority of the butcher.'

n.o.body laughed more heartily at this sally than Harte did when it came to his ears."

"Never," says Mr. Howells, to the same effect, "was any man less a _poseur_. He made simply and helplessly known what he was at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself." And then Mr. Howells relates the following incident: "In the course of events which in his case were so very human, it came about on a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given, and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where Harte dined, and in the ante-room at the lecture-hall, and on the platform where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and untroubled charm. He was indeed the only one privy to the law's presence who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier time ventured to suggest, 'Well, Harte, this is the old literary tradition: this is the Fleet business over again,' he joyously smote his thigh and cried out: 'Yes; that's it; we can see it all now,--the Fleet Prison with Goldsmith, Johnson, and all the rest of the old masters in a bunch!'"

It is highly probable that in his own mind, though perhaps half unconsciously, Bret Harte excused himself by the "old literary tradition"

for his remissness in paying his debts. And for such a feeling on his part there would be, the present writer makes bold to say, some justification.

It is a crude method of collecting from the community a small part of the compensation due to the author for the pleasure which he has conferred upon the world in general. The method, it must be admitted, is imperfectly just. The particular butcher or grocer to whom a particular poet is indebted may have a positive distaste for polite literature, and might naturally object to paying for books which other people read. Nevertheless there is an element of wild justice in the att.i.tude of the poet. The world owes him a living, and if the world does not pay its debt, why, then, the debt may fairly be levied upon the world in such manner as is possible.

This at least is to be said: the extravagance or improvidence of a man like Bret Harte stands upon a very different footing from that of an ordinary person. We should be ashamed not to show some consideration, even in money matters, for the soldier who has served his country in time of war; and the romancer who has contributed to the entertainment of the race is ent.i.tled to a similar indulgence.

Soon after Bret Harte's arrival in the East his friends urged him to give public lectures on the subject of life in California. The project was extremely distasteful to him, for he had an inborn horror of notoriety,--even of publicity; and this feeling, it may be added, is fully shared by the other members of his family. But his money difficulties were so great, and the prospect held out to him was so flattering that he finally consented. He prepared two lectures; the first, ent.i.tled _The Argonauts_, is now printed, with some changes, as the Introduction to the second volume of his collected works. This lecture was delivered at Albany, New York, on December 3, 1872, at Tremont Temple in Boston on the thirteenth of the same month, on December 16 at Steinway Hall in New York, and at Was.h.i.+ngton on January 7, 1873.

From Was.h.i.+ngton the lecturer wrote to his wife: "The audience was almost as quick and responsive as the Boston folk, and the committee-men, to my great delight, told me they made money by me.... I called on Charlton at the British Minister's, and had some talk with Sir Edward Thornton, which I have no doubt will materially affect the foreign policy of England. If I have said anything to promote a better feeling between the two countries I am willing he should get the credit of it. I took a carriage and went alone to the Capitol of my country. I had expected to be disappointed, but not agreeably. It is really a n.o.ble building,--worthy of the republic,--vast, magnificent, sometimes a little weak in detail, but in intent always high-toned, grand and large principled."[89]

The same lecture was delivered at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on January 9, 1873, and at Ottawa and Montreal in March of that year.

From Montreal he wrote to Mrs. Harte as follows:[90]--

"In Ottawa I lectured twice, but the whole thing was a pecuniary failure. There was scarcely enough money to pay expenses, and of course nothing to pay me with. ---- has no money of his own, and although he is blamable for not thoroughly examining the ground before bringing me to Ottawa, he was evidently so completely disappointed and miserable that I could not find it in my heart to upbraid him. So I simply told him that unless the Montreal receipts were sufficient to pay me for my lecture there, and a reasonable part of the money due me from Ottawa, I should throw the whole thing up.

To-night will in all probability settle the question. Of course there are those who tell me privately that he is no manager, but I really do not see but that he has done all that he could, and that his only fault is in his sanguine and hopeful nature.

"I did not want to write of this disappointment to you so long as there was some prospect of better things. You can imagine, however, how I feel at this cruel loss of time and money--to say nothing of my health, which is still so poor. I had almost recovered from my cold, but in 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 appet.i.te.

"Apart from this, the people of Ottawa have received me very kindly.

They have vied with each other in social attention, and if I had been like John Gilpin, 'on pleasure bent,' they would have made my visit a success. The Governor-General of Canada invited me to stay with him at his seat, Rideau Hall, and I spent Sunday and Monday there. Sir John and Lady Macdonald were also most polite and courteous.

"I shall telegraph you to-morrow if I intend to return at once. Don't let this worry you, but kiss the children for me and hope for the best. I would send you some money but _there isn't any to send_, and maybe I shall only bring back myself.--Your affectionate

"FRANK.

"P. S.--26th.

"DEAR NAN,--I did not send this yesterday, waiting to find the result of last night's lecture. It was a _fair_ house and ---- this morning paid me one hundred and fifty dollars, of which I send you the greater part. I lecture again to-night, with fair prospects, and he is to pay something on account of the Ottawa engagement besides the fee for that night. I will write again from Ogdensburg.--Always yours,

"FRANK."

This lecture trip in the Spring of 1873 was followed in the Autumn by a similar trip in the West, with lectures at St. Louis, Topeka, Atchison, Lawrence, and Kansas City. From St. Louis he wrote to his wife as follows:--

"MY DEAR ANNA,--As my engagement is not until the 21st at Topeka, Kansas, I lie over here until to-morrow morning, in preference to spending the extra day in Kansas. I've accepted the invitation of Mr.

Hodges, one of the managers of the lecture course, to stay at his house. He is a good fellow, with the usual American small family and experimental housekeeping, and the quiet and change from the hotel are very refres.h.i.+ng to me. They let me stay in my own room--which by the way is hung with the chintz of our 49th Street house--and don't bother me with company. So I was very good to-day and went to church. There was fine singing. The contralto sang your best sentences from the _Te Deum_, 'We believe that Thou shalt come,' &c., &c., to the same minor chant that I used to admire.

"The style of criticism that my lecture--or rather myself as a lecturer--has received, of which I send you a specimen, culminated this morning in an editorial in the 'Republic,' which I shall send you, but have not with me at present. I certainly never expected to be mainly criticised for being _what I am not_, a handsome fop; but this a.s.sertion is at the bottom of all the criticism. They may be right--I dare say they are--in a.s.serting that I am no orator, have no special faculty for speaking, no fire, no dramatic earnestness or expression, but when they intimate that I am running on my good looks--save the mark! I confess I get hopelessly furious. You will be amused to hear that my gold studs have again become 'diamonds,' my worn-out s.h.i.+rts 'faultless linen,' my haggard face that of a 'Spanish-looking exquisite,' my habitual quiet and 'used-up' way, 'gentle and eloquent languor.' But you will be a little astonished to know that the hall I spoke in was worse than Springfield, and _notoriously_ so--that the people seemed genuinely pleased, that the lecture inaugurated the 'Star' course very handsomely, and that it was the first of the first series of lectures ever delivered in St.

Louis."

In a letter dated Lawrence, Kansas, October 23, 1873, he relates an interesting experience.

"MY DEAR ANNA,--I left Topeka--which sounds like a name Franky might have invented--early yesterday morning, but did not reach Atchison, only sixty miles distant, until seven o'clock at night--an hour before the lecture. The engine as usual had broken down, and left me at four o'clock fifteen miles from Atchison, on the edge of a bleak prairie with only one house in sight. But I got a saddle-horse--there was no vehicle to be had--and strapping my lecture and blanket to my back I gave my valise to a little yellow boy--who looked like a dirty terra-cotta figure--with orders to follow me on another horse, and so tore off towards Atchison. I got there in time; the boy reached there two hours after.

"I make no comment; you can imagine the half-sick, utterly disgusted man who glared at that audience over his desk that night, and d----d them inwardly in his heart. And yet it was a good audience, thoroughly refined and appreciative, and very glad to see me. I was very anxious about this lecture, for it was a venture of my own, and I had been told that Atchison was a rough place--energetic but coa.r.s.e. I think I wrote you from St. Louis that I had found there were only three actual engagements in Kansas, and that my list which gave Kansas City twice was a mistake. So I decided to take Atchison.

I made a hundred dollars by the lecture, and it is yours, for yourself, Nan, to buy 'Minxes' with, if you want, for it is over and above the amount Eliza and I footed up on my lecture list. I shall send it to you as soon as the bulk of the pressing claims are settled.

"Everything thus far has gone well; besides my lecture of to-night I have one more to close Kansas, and then I go on to St. Joseph. I've been greatly touched with the very honest and sincere liking which these Western people seem to have for me. They seem to have read everything I have written--and appear to appreciate the best. Think of a rough fellow in a bearskin coat and blue s.h.i.+rt repeating to me _Conception de Arguello_! Their strange good taste and refinement under that rough exterior--even their tact--are wonderful to me. They are 'Kentucks' and 'd.i.c.k Bullens' with twice the refinement and tenderness of their California brethren....

"I've seen but one [woman] that interested me--an old negro wench.

She was talking and laughing outside my door the other evening, but her laugh was so sweet and unctuous 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--because she couldn't help it. It did me a world of good, for it was before the lecture, at twilight, when I am very blue and low-tuned. She had been a slave.

"I expected to have heard from you here. I've nothing from you or Eliza since last Friday, when I got yours of the 12th. I shall direct this to Eliza's care, as I do not even know where you are. Your affectionate

"FRANK."[91]

The same lecture was delivered in London, England, in January, 1879, and in June, 1880. Bret Harte's only other lecture had for its subject _American Humor_, and was delivered in Chicago on October 10, 1874, and in New York on January 26, 1875.[92] The money return from these lectures was slight, and the fatigue and exposure of the long journeys in the West had, his relatives think, a permanently bad effect upon Bret Harte's health.

In the Autumn of 1875 we find him at Lenox, in the Berks.h.i.+re Hills of Western Ma.s.sachusetts. Lenox has its place in literature, for Hawthorne spent a year there, and in adjoining towns once lived O. W. Holmes, Catherine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, and G. P. R. James.

_Gabriel Conroy_, Bret Harte's only novel, and on the whole, it must be admitted, a failure, though containing many exquisite pa.s.sages, was published in "Scribner's Magazine" in 1876.

The poems and stories which Bret Harte wrote during his seven years'

residence in the Eastern part of the United States did not deal with the human life of that time and place. They either concerned the past, like _Thankful Blossom_ and the Newport poems, or they harked back to California, like _Gabriel Conroy_ and the stories published in the "Atlantic." The only exceptions are the short and pathetic tale called _The Office-Seeker_, and the opening chapter of that powerful story, _The Argonauts of North Liberty_. North Liberty is a small town in Connecticut, and the scene is quickly transferred from there to California; but Joan, the Connecticut woman, remains the chief figure in the story.

It is seldom that Bret Harte fails to show some sympathy with the men and women whom he describes, or at least some relenting consciousness that they could not help being what they were. But it is otherwise with Joan.

She and her surroundings had a fascination for Bret Harte that was almost morbid. The man or woman whom we hate becomes an object of interest to us nearly as much as the person whom we love. An acute critic declares that Thackeray's wonderful insight into the characters and feelings of servants is due to the fact that he had almost a horror of them, and was abnormally sensitive to their criticisms,--the more felt for being unspoken. So Joan represents what Bret Harte hated more than anything else in the world, namely, a narrow, censorious, hypocritical, cold-blooded Puritanism. Her character is not that of a typical New England woman; its counterpart would much more easily be found among the men; but it is a perfectly consistent character, most accurately worked out. Joan combines a prim, provincial, horsehair-sofa respectability with a lawless and sensual nature,--an odd combination, and yet not an impossible one. She might, perhaps, be called the female of that species which Hawthorne immortalized under the name of Judge Pyncheon.

Joan is a puzzle to the reader, but so she was to those who knew her. Was she a conscious hypocrite, deliberately playing a false part in the world, or was she a monstrous egotist, one in whom the soul of truth had so died out that she thought herself justified in everything that she did, and committed the worst acts from what she supposed to be the most excusable motives? Her intimates did not know. One of the finest strokes in the story is the dawning of suspicion upon the mind of her second husband.

"For with all his deep affection for his wife, Richard Demorest unconsciously feared her. The strong man whose dominance over men and women alike had been his salient characteristic, had begun to feel an indefinable sense of some unrecognized quality in the woman he loved. He had once or twice detected it in a tone of her voice, in a remembered and perhaps even once idolized gesture, or in the accidental lapse of some bewildering word."

New England people at their best did not attract Bret Harte. That Miltonic conception of the universe upon which New England was built seemed to him simply ridiculous, and he did not appreciate the strength of character in which it resulted. Moreover, the crudity of New England offended his aesthetic taste as much as its theology offended his reason and his charity. North Liberty on a cold, stormy Sunday night in March is described with that _gusto_, with that minuteness of detail which could be shown only by one who loved it or by one who hated it.

And yet it would be unjust to say that Bret Harte had no conception of the better type of New England women. The schoolmistress in _The Idyl of Red Gulch_, one of his earliest and best stories, is as pure and n.o.ble a maiden, and as characteristic of the soil, as Hilda herself. The Reader will remember the description of Miss Mary as she appeared playing with her pupils in the woods. "The color came faintly into her pale cheeks....

Felinely fastidious and entrenched as she was in the purity of spotless skirts, collars and cuffs, she forgot all else, and ran like a crested quail at the head of her brood, until romping, laughing and panting, with a loosened braid of brown hair, a hat hanging by a knotted ribbon from her throat, she came ..." upon Sandy, the unheroic hero of the tale.

In the culminating scene of this story, the interview between Miss Mary and the mother of Sandy's illegitimate boy, when the teacher consents to take the child with her to her home in the East, although she is still under the shock of the discovery that Sandy is the boy's father,--in this scene the schoolmistress exhibits true New England restraint, and a beautiful absence of heroics. It was just at sunset. "The last red beam crept higher, suffused Miss Mary's eyes with something of its glory, nickered and faded and went out. The sun had set in Red Gulch. In the twilight and silence Miss Mary's voice sounded pleasantly, 'I will take the boy. Send him to me to-night.'"

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

As to eyes, he seems to have preferred them gray or brown, a "tender gray" and a "reddish brown." Ailsa Callender's hair was "dark with a burnished copper tint at its roots, and her eyes had the same burnished metallic l.u.s.tre in their brown pupils." Mrs. MacGlowrie was "a fair-faced woman with eyes the color of pale sherry."

A small foot with an arched instep was a _sine qua non_ with Bret Harte, and he speaks particularly of the small, well-shod foot of the Southwestern girl. He believed in breeding, and all his heroines were well-bred,--not well-bred in the conventional sense, but in the sense of coming from sound, courageous, self-respecting, self-improving stock.

Within these limits his range of heroines is exceedingly wide, including some that are often excluded from that category. He is rather partial to widows, for example, and always looks upon their innocent gayeties with an indulgent eye. Can a woman be a widow and untidy in her dress, and still retain her preeminence as heroine? Yes, Bret Harte's genius is equal even to that. "Mrs. MacGlowrie was looking wearily over some accounts on the desk before her, and absently putting back some tumbled sheaves from the shock of her heavy hair. For the widow had a certain indolent Southern negligence, which in a less pretty woman would have been untidiness, and a characteristic hook-and-eye-less freedom of attire, which on less graceful limbs would have been slovenly. One sleeve-cuff was unb.u.t.toned, but it showed the vein of her delicate wrist; the neck of her dress had lost a hook, but the glimpse of a bit of edging round the white throat made amends. Of all which, however, it should be said that the widow, in her limp abstraction, was really unconscious."

[Ill.u.s.tration: I THOUGHT YOU WERE THAT HORSE-THIEF

From "Lanty Foster's Mistake"