The Life of Bret Harte Part 21

Bret Harte's habits were regular and simple. He smoked a good deal, drank very little, and took exercise every day. At one time he played golf, and at another he was somewhat interested in amateur photography. But his real recreation, as well as his labor, was found in that imaginary world which sprang to life under his pen. He was often a guest at English country houses, and was familiar with the history of English cathedrals, abbeys, churches, and historical ruins. He made a pilgrimage to Macbeth's country in Scotland and to Charlotte Bronte's home in Yorks.h.i.+re. He loved Byron's poetry, and was once a guest at Newstead Abbey. He frequently visited Lord Compton, later Marquis of Northampton, at Compton Wyngates in Warwicks.h.i.+re near the battleground of Edgehill, and at Castle Ashby at Northampton.

Reminiscences of these visits may be found in _The Desborough Connections_ and _The Ghosts of Stukeley Castle_. He belonged to various clubs, such as The Beefsteak, The Rabelais, The Kinsmen; but during the last few years of his life he frequented only the Royal Thames Yacht Club.

"This selection seemed to me so odd," writes Mr. Pemberton, "for he had no love of yachting, that I questioned him concerning it. 'Why, my dear fellow,' he said, 'don't you see? I never use a club until I am tired of my work and want relief from it. If I go to a literary club I am asked all sorts of questions as to what I am doing, and my views on somebody's last book, and to these I am expected to reply at length. Now my good friends in Albemarle Street talk of their yachts, don't want my advice about them, are good enough to let me listen, and I come away refreshed by their conversation.'"[103]

So Hawthorne, it will be remembered, cared little for the meetings of the Sat.u.r.day Club in Boston, and was often an absentee, but he delighted in the company of the Yankee sea-captains at Mrs. Blodgett's boarding-house in Liverpool. "Captain Johnson," he wrote, "a.s.signed as a reason for not boarding at this house that the conversation made him sea-sick; and indeed the smell of tar and bilge-water is somewhat strongly perceptible in it."

The truth is that an aversion to the society of purely literary men should naturally be looked for in writers of a profound or original stamp of mind. Something may be learned and some refreshment of spirit may be obtained from almost any man who knows almost anything at first hand,--even from a market-gardener or a machinist; and if his subject is what might be called a natural one, such as s.h.i.+ps, horses or cows, it is bound to have a certain intellectual interest. But the ordinary, clever, sophisticated litterateur is mainly occupied neither with things nor with ideas, but with forms of expression, and consequently he is a long way removed from reality. It may be doubted if any society in the world is less profitable than his.

Mr. Moncure Conway, in his autobiography, gives an amusing reminiscence of Bret Harte's p.r.o.neness to escape from what are known as "social duties."

Mrs. Conway "received" on Monday afternoons, and Bret Harte had told her that he would be present on a particular Monday, but he failed to appear,--much to the regret of some persons who had been invited for the occasion. "When chancing to meet him," writes Mr. Conway, "I alluded to the disappointment; he asked forgiveness and said, 'I will come next Monday--_even though I promise_.'"

He had a constant dread that his friends.h.i.+p or acquaintance would be sought on account of his writings, rather than for himself. A lady who sat next to him at dinner without learning his name, afterward remarked, "I have always longed to meet him, and I would have been so different had I only known who my neighbor was." This, unfortunately, being repeated to Bret Harte, he exclaimed, "Now, why can't a woman realize that this sort of thing is insulting?... If Mrs. ---- talked with me, and found me uninteresting as a man, how could she expect to find me interesting because I was an author?"

During the last ten or fifteen years of his life, Bret Harte seldom went far from home. He never visited Switzerland until September, 1895, and even then he carried his ma.n.u.script with him, and devoted to it part of each day. He took great delight in the Swiss mountains, often spoke of his vacation there, and was planning to go again during the summer of his death.

From Lucerne he wrote to a friend[104] as follows: "Strangest of all, I find my heart going back to the old Sierras whenever I get over three thousand feet of Swiss alt.i.tude, and--dare I whisper it?--in spite of their pictorial composition, I wouldn't give a mile of the dear old Sierras, with their honesty, sincerity, and magnificent uncouthness, for one hundred thousand kilometres of the picturesque Vaud."

Of Geneva he wrote to the same correspondent: "I thought I should not like Geneva, fancying it a kind of continental Boston, and that the shadow of John Calvin and the old reformers, or still worse the sentimental idiocy of Rousseau, and the De Staels and Mme. de Warens still lingered there."

But he did like Geneva; and of the lake, as he viewed it from his hotel window, he wrote, "Ask him if he ever saw an expanse of thirty miles of water exactly the color of the inner sh.e.l.l of a Mother-of-Pearl oyster."

Of Geneva itself he wrote again: "It is gay, brilliant, and even as _pictorial_ as the end of Lake Leman; and as I sit by my hotel window on the border of the lake I can see Mont Blanc--thirty or forty miles away--framing itself a perfect vignette. Of course I know the whole thing was arranged by the Grand Hotel Company that run Switzerland. Last night as I stood on my balcony looking at the great semi-circle of lights framing the quay and harbor of the town, a great fountain sent up a spray from the lake three hundred feet high, illuminated by beautifully shaded 'lime lights,' exactly like a 'transformation scene.' Just then, the new moon--a pale green sickle--swung itself over the Alps! But it was absolutely too much! One felt that the Hotel Company were overdoing it!

And I wanted to order up the hotel proprietor and ask him to take it down.

At least I suggested it to the Colonel,[105] but he thought it would do as well if we refused to pay for it in the bill."

The same correspondent, by the way, quotes an amusing letter from Bret Harte, written in 1888, from Stoke Pogis, near Windsor Castle: "I had the honor yesterday of speaking to a man who had been in personal attendance upon the Queen for fifty years. He was naturally very near the point of translation, and gave a vague impression that he did not require to be born again, but remained on earth for the benefit of American tourists."

Bret Harte's reasons for remaining so long in England have already been explained in part. The chief cause was probably the pecuniary one, for by living in England he was able to obtain more from his writings than he could have obtained as a resident of the United States. He continued to contribute to the support of his wife, although after his departure from this country Mrs. Harte and he did not live together. The cause of their separation was never made known. On this subject both Mr. Harte and his wife maintained an honorable silence, which, it is to be hoped, will always be respected.

A few years before her husband's death, Mrs. Harte came to England to live. The older son, Griswold Harte, died in the city of New York, in December, 1901, leaving a widow and one daughter. The second son, Francis King Harte, was married in England some years ago, and makes his home there. He has two children. Bret Harte was often a visitor at his son's house. The older daughter, Jessamy, married Henry Milford Steele, an American, and lives in the United States. The younger daughter, Ethel, is unmarried, and lives with her mother.

Beyond the pecuniary reason which impelled Bret Harte to live in England were other reasons which every American who has spent some time in that country will understand, and which are especially strong in respect to persons of nervous temperament. The climate is one reason; for the English climate is the natural antidote to the American; and perhaps the residents of each country would be better if they could exchange habitats every other generation.

England has a soothing effect upon the hustling American. He eats more, worries less, and becomes a happier and pleasanter animal. A similar change has been observed in high-strung horses taken from the United States to England. And so of athletes--the English athlete, transported to this country, gains in speed, but loses endurance; whereas our athletes on English soil gain endurance and lose speed. The temperament and manners of the English people have the same pleasant effect as the climate upon the American visitor. Why is John Bull always represented as an irascible animal? Perhaps he is such if his rights, real or a.s.sumed, are invaded, or if his will is thwarted; but as the stranger meets him, he is civil and good-natured. In fact, this is one of the chief surprises which an American experiences on his first visit to England.

More important still, perhaps, is the ease of living in a country which has a fixed social system. The plain line drawn in England between the gentleman and the non-gentleman cla.s.s makes things very pleasant for those who belong to the favored division. It gives the gentleman a vantage ground in dealing with the non-gentleman which proves as convenient, as it is novel, to the American. The fact that it must be inconvenient for the non-gentleman cla.s.s, which outnumbers the other some thousands to one, never seems to trouble the Englishman, although the American may have some qualms.

Furthermore, strange as it may seem, the position of an author, _per se_ is, no doubt, higher in London (though perhaps not elsewhere in England) than it is in the United States. With us, the well-to-do publisher has a better standing in what is called "society" than the impecunious author.

In London the reverse would be the case. New York and Boston looked askance upon Bret Harte, doubting if he were quite respectable; but London welcomed him. Bret Harte was often asked to lecture in England, and especially to speak or write upon English customs or English society; but he always refused, being unwilling, as Thackeray was in regard to the United States, either to censure a people from whom he had received great hospitality, or to praise them at the expense of truth.

Nor was his belief in America and the American social system weakened in the least by his long residence in England or by his enjoyment of the amenities of English life.

An English author wrote of him, while he was yet living: "Time has not dulled Bret Harte's instinctive affection for the land of his birth, for its inst.i.tutions, its climate, its natural beauties, and, above all, the character and moral attributes of its inhabitants. Even his a.s.sociation with the most aristocratic representatives of London society has been impotent to modify his views or to win 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 favorite in the most diverse circles, 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."

Another English writer relates that "At the time when there was some talk of war between Britain and America, he, while deploring even the suggestion of such a catastrophe, earnestly avowed his intention of instantly returning to his own country, should hostilities break out."

No two men could be more opposed in many respects than Hawthorne and Bret Harte. Nevertheless they had some striking points of resemblance. Both were men who united primitive instincts with consummate refinement; and different as is the subject-matter of their stories, the style and att.i.tude are not unlike. They had the same craving for beauty of form, the same self-repression, the same horror of what is prolix or tawdry, the same love of that simplicity which is the perfection of art.

Long residence in England seems to have had much the same effect upon both men. It heightened their feeling for their native country almost in proportion as it pleased their own susceptibilities. Hawthorne's fondness for England was an almost unconscious feeling. When he returned to America, there to live for the remainder of his days, he did not find himself at home in the manner or to the degree which he had expected. "At Rome," his son writes, "an unacknowledged homesickness affected him, an Old-Homesickness, rather than a yearning for America. He may have imagined that it was America that he wanted, but when at last we returned there, he still looked backward toward England."

That a man should find it more agreeable to live in one country, and yet be firmly convinced that the social system of another country was superior, is nothing remarkable. It is the presence of equality in the United States and its absence in England which make the chief difference between them. Even that imperfect equality to which we have attained has rendered the American people the happiest and the most moral in the world.

To the superficial visitor, indeed, who has seen only a few great cities in the United States, it might seem that equality is not much more prevalent here than it is in England; but let him tarry a while in the smaller cities, in the towns and villages of the Union, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and he will reach a different conclusion. An English writer of unusual discernment speaks of "that conscious independence, that indefinable a.s.sertion of manhood, which is the key to the American character."

One result of Bret Harte's long residence in England was the circulation in this country of many false reports and statements about him which galled his sensitive nature. He had many times declined to be "interviewed," and probably made enemies in that way. "But when," writes Mme. Van de Velde, "in a moment of good nature he yielded to pressing solicitations, and allowed himself to be questioned, the consequences were, on the whole, to his disadvantage. From that moment the door was opened to a flood of apocryphal statements of various length and importance; sometimes entirely false, sometimes tinged with a dangerous verisimilitude; often grotesque, occasionally malicious, but one and all purporting to be derived from unquestionable sources."

Mr. Pemberton hints at more serious troubles which afflicted Bret Harte's last years. "If he, in common with many of us, had his deep personal disappointments and sorrows, he bore them with the chivalry of a Bayard and a silence as dignified as it was pathetic. To a man of his sensitive nature, the barbed shafts of 'envy and calumny and hate and pain'

lacerated with a cruelty that at times must have seemed unendurable. Under such torments he often writhed, but he suffered all things with a quiet patience that afforded a glorious example to those friends who, knowing of his wounds, had to be silent concerning them, and could offer him no balm."

During the year 1901 Bret Harte's health was failing, although he still kept at work. His disease was cancer of the throat. He hoped to go abroad the following summer, and he had written in a letter to a friend, "Alas! I have never been light-hearted since Switzerland." But early in 1902 his condition became serious, and he went to stay with Mme. Van de Velde at Camberley. The Spring was cold and sunless, and he grew worse as it advanced. Nevertheless he was engaged in writing a play with Mr.

Pemberton, and was meditating a new story which should reintroduce that favorite of the public, Colonel Starbottle. In March a surgical operation was performed on his throat, but the relief was slight and temporary; and from that time forward Bret Harte must have known that his fate was sealed, although he said nothing to his friends and with them appeared to be in good, even high spirits.

April 17, feeling somewhat better, he sat down to begin his new tale. He headed it, "A Friend of Colonel Starbottle's," and wrote the opening sentence and part of another sentence. Dissatisfied with this beginning, he tried again, and taking a fresh sheet of paper, he wrote the t.i.tle and one sentence. There the ma.n.u.script ends. He was unable to continue it, although after this date he wrote a few letters to friends. On May 5 he was sitting in the morning, at his desk, thus engaged, when a hemorrhage of the throat suddenly attacked him. He was put to bed, and doctors were sent for. He rallied from this attack, but a second hemorrhage, late in the afternoon, rendered him partly unconscious, and soon afterward he died peacefully in the presence of Mme. Van de Velde and her attendants.

There is something sad in the death of any man far from home and country, with no kith or kin about him, though ministered to by devoted friends.

Even Bret Harte's tombstone bears the name of one who was a stranger to his blood and race. We cannot help recalling what Tennessee's Partner said. "When a man has been running free all day, what's the natural thing for him to do? Why, to come home." Alas! there was no home-coming for Bret Harte; and if, as may have been the case, he felt little or no regret at his situation, the sadness of it would only be intensified by that circ.u.mstance. Some deterioration is inevitable when a husband and father foregoes, even unwillingly, those feelings of responsibility and affection which centre in the family,--feelings so natural that to a considerable degree we share them even with the lower animals.

That Bret Harte's separation from his family was in part, at least, his own fault seems highly probable from his character and career. He abhorred sentimentality in literature, and the few examples of it in his writings may be ascribed to the influence of d.i.c.kens. Nevertheless, with all his virility, it must be admitted that his nature was that of a sentimentalist. A sentimentalist is one who obeys the natural good impulses of the human heart, but whose virtue does not go much beyond that. He has right feelings and acts upon them, but in cases where there is nothing to provoke the right feeling he falls short. He is strong in impulse, but weak in principle. When we see a fellow-being in danger or distress our instinct is to a.s.sist him. If we fail to do so, it is because we hearken to reason rather than to instinct; because we obey the selfish, second thought which reason suggests, instead of obeying the spontaneous impulse which nature puts into our hearts.

But suppose that the person to be succored makes no appeal to the heart: suppose that he is thousands of miles away: suppose that one dislikes or even hates him: suppose that it is a question not of bestowing alms, or of giving a.s.sistance or of feeling sympathy, but of rendering bare justice.

In such cases the sentimentalist lacks a sufficient spur for action: he feels no impulse: his heart remains cold: he makes excuses to himself; and having no strong sense of duty or principle to carry him through the ordeal, he becomes guilty of an act (or, more often, of a failure to act) which in another person would excite his indignation. In this sense Bret Harte was a sentimentalist.

He would have risked his life for a present friend, but was capable of neglecting an absent one.

This contradiction, if it be such, affords a clue to his character. In spite of his amiability, kindness, generosity, there was in Bret Harte an element of cruelty. Even his natural improvidence in money matters can hardly excuse him for selling the copyright of all his stories as they came out, leaving no income to be derived from them after his death.

The sentimentalist, being a creature of impulse, gets in the habit of obeying his impulses, good or bad, and is apt to find some difficulty at last in distinguis.h.i.+ng between them. He easily persuades himself that the thing which he wishes to do is the right thing for him to do. This was a trait of Bret Harte's character, and it naturally accompanies that lack of introspection which was so marked in him. There was a want of background, both intellectual and moral, in his nature. He was an observer, not a thinker, and his genius was shown only as he lived in the life of others.

Even his poetry is dramatic, not lyric. It was very seldom that Bret Harte, in his tales or elsewhere, advanced any abstract sentiment or idea; he was concerned wholly 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. An instance will be found in the _General Introduction_ which he wrote for the first volume of his collected stories, where he answers the charge that he had "confused recognized standards of morality by extenuating lives of recklessness and often criminality with a single, solitary virtue." After describing this as "the cant of too much mercy," he goes on to say:--

"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."

This is simply d.i.c.kens both in manner and substance, and the tone of the whole pa.s.sage is insincere and exaggerated, almost maudlin. Lamentable, but perhaps not strange, that in the one place where Bret Harte explained and defended what might be called the prevailing moral of his stories, he should fall so far short of the reader's expectation!

The truth is that Bret Harte took nothing seriously except his art, and apparently went through life with as little concern about the origin, nature, and destiny of mankind as it would be possible for any member of that unfortunate species to feel.

And yet there was a n.o.ble side to his character. He possessed in an unusual degree what is, perhaps, the most rare of all good qualities, namely, magnanimity. No man was ever more free from envy and jealousy; no writer was ever more quick to perceive and to praise excellence in others, or more slow to disparage or condemn. He used to say, and really seemed to believe, that Mr. John Hay's imitations of his own dialect poems were better than the originals. All the misconstruction and unkind criticism of which he was the subject never drew from him a bitter remark. He had a tenderness for children and dumb animals, especially for dogs, and his sympathy with them gave him a wonderful insight into their natures. Who but Bret Harte could have penned this sentence which the Reader will recognize as occurring in _The Argonauts of North Liberty_: "He [d.i.c.k Demorest] had that piteous wistfulness of eye seen in some dogs and the husbands of many charming women,--the affection that pardons beforehand the indifference which it has learned to expect."

In breadth and warmth of sympathy for his fellow-men Bret Harte had what almost might be described as a subst.i.tute for religion; what indeed has been described as religion itself. Long ago, an author who afterward became famous, touched with the fervor of youthful enthusiasm for his vocation, declared that "literature fosters in its adherents a sympathy with all that lives and breathes which is more binding than any form of religion." A more recent thinker, Mr. Henry W. Montague, has finely said that "The most important function of Christianity is not to keep man from sinning, but to widen the range and increase the depth of his sympathies."

Judged by these standards, Bret Harte could not be described as an irreligious writer. Who, more than he, has warmed the heart and suffused the eyes of his readers with pity for the unfortunate, with admiration for the heroic? "A kind thought is a good deed," remarked an oriental sage.

The doctrine is a dangerous one; but if it is true of any man, it is true of an author. His kind thoughts live after him, and they have the force and effect of deeds. Bret Harte's stories are a legacy to the world, as full of inspiration as of entertainment.

It was not by accident or as the result of mere literary taste that he selected from the chaos of California life the heroic and the pathetic incidents. Those who know California only through his tales and poems naturally think that the aspect of it which Bret Harte presents was the only aspect; that the Pioneer life would have impressed any other observer just as it impressed him, the single difference being that Bret Harte had the ability to report what he saw and heard. But such is not the case.

Bret Harte's representation of California is true; there is no exaggeration in it; but there were other aspects of life there which would have been equally true. If we were to call up in imagination the various story-writers of Bret Harte's day, it would be easy to guess what features of life on the Golden Slope would have attracted them, had they been there in the days of the Pioneers: how the social peculiarities of San Francisco, with its flamboyant _demi-monde_ and its early appeal to the divorce court, would have interested one; how the adventures of outlaws and robbers would have filled the mind of another; and how a third would have been content to describe the picturesque traits of the Spanish inheritors of the soil.

Bret Harte does indeed touch upon all these points and upon many others,--not a phase of California life escaped him,--but he does not dwell upon them. His main theme is those heroic impulses of loyalty, of chivalry, of love, of pure friends.h.i.+p, which are strong enough to triumph over death and the fear of death, and which, nevertheless, are often found where, except to the discerning eye of sympathy, their existence would be wholly unsuspected.

For this selection the world owes Bret Harte a debt of grat.i.tude; and none the less because it was made instinctively. The actions of a really perfect character would all be instinctive and spontaneous. In such a man conscience and inclination would coincide. His taste and his sense of duty would be one and the same thing. A mean, an unkind, an unjust act would be a solecism as impossible for him as it would be to eat with his knife. The struggle would have been over before he was born, and his ancestors would have bequeathed to him a nature in harmony with itself. The credit for his good deeds would belong, perhaps, rather to his ancestors than to himself, but we should see in him the perfection of human nature, the final product of a thousand imperfect natures.