The Life of Bret Harte Part 23

"'Why, wot's up, old fellow?'

"'I'm sick.'

"'How sick?'

"'I've got a fevier, and childblains, and roomatiz,' returned Johnny, and vanished within. After a moment's pause he added in the dark, apparently from under the bedclothes,--'And biles!'

"There was an embarra.s.sing silence. The men looked at each other and at the fire."

How graphically in this story are the characters of the Old Man and his boy Johnny indicated by a few strokes of humor and pathos! Perhaps this is the greatest charm of humor in literature, namely, that it so easily becomes the vehicle of character. Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield are revealed to us mainly by those humorous touches which display the foibles, the eccentricities, and even the virtues of each.

Wit, on the other hand, being a purely intellectual quality, is a comparatively uninteresting gift. How small is the part that wit plays in literature! Personality is the charm of literature, as it is of life, and humor is always a revelation of personality. The Essays of Lamb amount almost to an autobiography. Goldsmith had humor, Congreve wit; and probably that is the main reason why "She Stoops to Conquer" still holds the stage, whereas the plays of Congreve are known only to the scholar.

California was steeped in humor, and none but a humorist could have interpreted the lives of the Pioneers. They were, in the main, scions of a humorous race. Democracy is the mother of humor, and the ideal of both was found in New England and in the Western States, whence came the greater part of the California immigration. In pa.s.sing from New England to the isolated farms of the Far West, American humor had undergone some change.

The Pioneer, struggling with a new country, and often with chills and fever, religious in a gloomy, emotional, old-fas.h.i.+oned way, leading a lonely life, had developed a humor more saturnine than that of New England. Yuba Bill, in all probability, was an emigrant from what we now call the Middle West. Upon this New England and Western humor as a foundation, California engrafted its own peculiar type of humor, which was the product of youth, courage and energy wrestling with every kind of difficulty and danger. The Pioneers had something of the Mark Tapley spirit, and triumphed over fate by making a jest of the worst that fate could do to them.

Nothing short of great prosperity could awe the miner into taking a serious view of things. His solemnity after a "strike" was remarkable. In '52 and '53 a company of miners had toiled fruitlessly for fourteen months, digging into solid rock which, from its situation and from many other indications, had promised to be the hiding-place of gold. At last they abandoned the claim in despair, except that one of their number lingered to remove a big, loose block of porphyry upon which he had long been working. Behind that block he found sand and gravel containing gold in such abundance as, eventually, to enrich the whole company. The next day happened to be Sunday, and for the first time in those fourteen months they all went to church.

A "find" like this was a gift of the G.o.ds, something that could not be depended upon. It imposed responsibilities, and suggested thoughts of home. But hards.h.i.+p, adversity, danger and sudden death,--these were all in the day's work, and they could best be endured by making light of them.

California humor was, therefore, in one way, the reverse of ordinary American humor. In place of grotesque exaggeration, the California tendency was to minimize. The Pioneer was as euphemistic in speaking of death as was the Greek or Roman of cla.s.sic times. "To pa.s.s in his checks,"

was the Pacific Slope equivalent for the more dignified _Actum est de me_.

This was the phrase, as the Reader will remember, that Mr. Oakhurst immortalized by writing it on the playing card which, affixed to a bowie-knife, served that famous gambler for tombstone and epitaph. He used it in no flippant spirit, but in the sadly humorous spirit of the true Californian, as if he were loath to attribute undue importance to the mere fact that the unit of his own life had been forever withdrawn from the sum total of human existence.

Of this California minimizing humor, frequent also in the pages of Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, there is an example in Bret Harte's poem, _Cicely_:--

I've had some mighty mean moments afore I kem to this spot,-- Lost on the Plains in '50, drownded almost and shot; But out on this alkali desert, a-hunting a crazy wife, Was r'aly as on-satis-factory as anything in my life.

There is another familiar example in these well-known lines by Truthful James:--

Then Abner Dean of Angels raised a point of order, when A chunk of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen, And he smiled a kind of sickly smile, and curled up on the floor, And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.

This was typical California humor, and Bret Harte, in his stories and poems, more often perhaps in the latter, gave frequent expression to it; but it was not typical Bret Harte humor. The humor of the pa.s.sage just quoted from _How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar_, the humor that made Bret Harte famous, and still more the humor that made him beloved, was not saturnine or satirical, but sympathetic and tender. It was humor not from an external point of view, but from the victim's point of view. The Californians themselves saw persons and events in a different way; and how imperfect their vision was may be gathered from the fact that they stoutly denied the truth of Bret Harte's descriptions of Pioneer life. They were too close at hand, too much a part of the drama themselves, to perceive it correctly. Bret Harte had the faculty as to which it is hard to say how much is intellectual and how much is emotional, of getting behind the scenes, and beholding men and motives as they really are.

That brilliant critic, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, declares that Bret Harte was a genuine American, that he was also a genuine humorist, but that he was not an American humorist; and then he proceeds to support this very just ant.i.thesis as follows: "American humor is purely exaggerative; Bret Harte's humor was sympathetic and a.n.a.lytical. The wild, sky-breaking humor of America has its fine qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two qualities,--reverence and sympathy. And these two qualities were knit into the closest texture of Bret Harte's humor. Mark Twain's story ... about an organist who was asked to play appropriate music to an address upon the parable of the Prodigal Son, and who proceeded to play with great spirit, 'We'll all get blind drunk when Johnny comes marching home' is an instance.... If Bret Harte had described that scene it would in some subtle way have combined a sense of the absurdity of the incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos of the scene. You would have felt that the organist's tune was funny, but not that the Prodigal Son was funny."

No excuse need be offered for quoting further what Mr. Chesterton has to say about the parodies of Bret Harte, for it covers the whole ground: "The supreme proof of the fact that Bret Harte had the instinct of reverence may be found in the fact that he was a really great parodist. Mere derision, mere contempt, never produced or could produce parody. A man who simply despises Paderewski for having long hair is not necessarily fitted to give an admirable imitation of his particular touch on the piano. If a man wishes to parody Paderewski's style of execution, he must emphatically go through one process first: he must admire it and even reverence it.

Bret Harte had a real power of imitating great authors.... This means and can only mean that he had perceived the real beauty, the real ambition of Dumas and Victor Hugo and Charlotte Bronte. In his imitation of Hugo, Bret Harte has a pa.s.sage like this: 'M. Madeline was, if possible, better than M. Myriel. M. Myriel was an angel. M. Madeline was a good man.' I do not know whether Victor Hugo ever used this ant.i.thesis; but I am certain that he would have used it and thanked his stars for it, if he had thought of it. This is real parody, inseparable from imitation."

The optimism for which Bret Harte was remarkable had its root in that same sympathy which formed the basis of his humor and pathos. The unsympathetic critic invariably despairs of mankind and the universe. This is apparent in social, moral, and even political matters. A typical reformer, such as the late Mr. G.o.dkin, gazing horror-struck at Tammany and the Tammany politician, discerns no hope for the future. But the Tammany man himself, knowing the virtues as well as the vices of his people, is optimistic to the point of exuberance. After all, there is something in the human heart, amid all its vileness, which ranges mankind on the side of the angels, not of the devils. The sympathetic critic perceives this, and therefore he has confidence in the future of the race; and may even indulge the supreme hope that from this terrible world we shall pa.s.s into another and better state of existence.

CHAPTER XIX

BRET HARTE AS A POET

Whether Bret Harte will make his appeal to posterity mainly as a poet or as a prose writer is a difficult question, upon which, as upon all similar matters relating to him, the critics have expressed the most diverse opinions. There is perhaps more unevenness in his poetry than in his prose, and certainly more facility in imitating other writers. _Cadet Grey_ is, in form, almost a parody of "Don Juan." _The Angelus_ might be ascribed to Longfellow (though he never could have written that last stanza), _The Tale of a Pony_ to Saxe or Barham, a few others to Praed, one to Campbell, and one to Calverley. Even that very beautiful poem, _Conception de Arguello_, a thing almost perfect in its way, strikes no new note. And yet who could forget the picture which it draws of the deserted maiden, grieving,--

Until hollows chased the dimples from her cheeks of olive brown, And at times a swift, shy moisture dragged the long sweet lashes down.

Hardly less pathetic is the description of the grim Commander, her father, striving vainly to comfort the maid with "proverbs gathered from afar,"

until at last

... the voice sententious faltered, and the wisdom it would teach Lost itself in fondest trifles of his soft Castilian speech;

And on "Concha," "Conchit.i.ta," and "Conchita," he would dwell With the fond reiteration which the Spaniard knows so well.

So with proverbs and caresses, half in faith and half in doubt, Every day some hope was kindled, flickered, faded, and went out.

Few, indeed, are the poets who have surpa.s.sed the tender simplicity and pathos of these lines; and yet there is nothing very original about them either in form or substance. But there are several poems by Bret Harte, perhaps half a dozen, which do bear the mark of original genius, and which, from the perfection of their form, seem destined to last forever.

The _Heathen Chinee_, little as Bret Harte himself thought of it, is certainly one of these. This poem, says Mr. James Douglas, "is merely an anecdote, an American anecdote, not more deeply humorous than a hundred other American anecdotes. But it is cast in an imperishable mould of style.... Mr. Swinburne's n.o.ble rhythm sang itself into his soul, and he gave it forth again in an incongruously comic theme. The rhythm of a melancholy dirge became the rhythm of duplicity in the garb of innocence.

The sadness and the sighing of Meleagar became the bland iniquity of Ah Sin, and the indignantly injured depravity of Bill Nye. It was a miracle of humorous counterpoint, a marvel of incongruously a.s.sociated ideas."

Too much, however, can easily be made of the part played by the metre of the _Heathen Chinee_. _Artemis in Sierra_ is as good in its way as the _Heathen Chinee_, and the very different metre employed in that poem is made equally effective as the vehicle of irony and burlesque.

Mr. Douglas goes on to say that the Atalanta metre failed in the poem called _Dow's Flat_, "because there was no exquisite discord between the sound and the sense, between the rhyme and the reason."

But did it fail? Let these two specimen stanzas answer:--

For a blow of his pick Sorter caved in the side, And he looked and turned sick, Then he trembled and cried.

For you see the dern cuss had struck--"Water?"--Beg your parding, young man,--there you lied!

It was _gold_,--in the quartz, And it ran all alike; And I reckon five oughts Was the worth of that strike; And that house with the coopilow's his'n,--which the same isn't bad for a Pike.

Almost all of Bret Harte's dialect poems have this same perfection of form, and in the whole range of literature it would be difficult to find any verses which tell so much in so small a compa.s.s. The poems are short, the lines are usually short, the words are short; but with the few strokes thus available, the poet paints a picture as complete as it is vivid. The thing is so simple that it seems easy, and yet where shall we find its counterpart?

These poems not only please for the moment, but they are read with pleasure over and over again, and year after year. Perhaps their most striking quality is their dramatic quality. They tell a story, and often depict a person. Truthful James, for example, is known to us only as the narrator of a few startling tales; and yet even by his manner of telling them he gives us a fair notion of his own character. The opening lines of _The Spelling Bee at Angels_ are an example:--

Waltz in, waltz in, ye little kids, and gather round my knee, And drop them books and first pot-hooks, and hear a yarn from me.

I kin not sling a fairy tale of Jinnys fierce and wild, For I hold it is unchristian to deceive a simple child; But as from school yer driftin' by, I thowt ye'd like to hear Of a "Spelling Bee" at Angels that we organized last year.

As for Miss Edith, her character is shown in every line.

You think it ain't true about Ilsey? Well, I guess I know girls, and I say There's nothing I see about Ilsey to show she likes you, anyway!

I know what it means when a girl who has called her cat after one boy Goes and changes its name to another's. And she's done it--and I wish you joy!

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE HOME OF "TRUTHFUL JAMES," JACKa.s.s FLAT, TUOLUMNE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

Copyright, Century Co.]

But these dramatic poems of Bret Harte are surpa.s.sed by his lyrical poems,--surpa.s.sed, at least, in respect to that moral elevation which lyrical poetry seems to have in comparison with dramatic poetry. Lyrical poetry strikes the higher note. It is the fusion in the poet's own experience of thought and feeling;--it is _his_ experience; a first-hand report of one man's impression of the universe. Whereas dramatic poetry, with all the splendor of which it is capable, is, after all, only a second-hand report, a representation of what other men have thought or felt, or said or done. Not Shakspere himself has so elevated mankind, raised his moral standard, or enlarged his conceptions of the universe, as have the great lyrical poets.

Bret Harte cannot, of course, be ranked with these; nor, in saying that his lyrical poems are his best poems, do we necessarily a.s.sert for him any high degree of lyrical power. Perhaps, indeed, the chief defect in his poetry is an absence of the personal or lyrical element. He gives us exquisite impressions of human character and of nature, but there is little of that brooding, reflective quality, which affords the deepest and most lasting charm of poetry. His poetry lacks atmosphere; it lacks the pensive, religious note.