The Life of Bret Harte Part 24

Bret Harte, one would think, must have been a romantic and imaginative lover, and yet in his poetry there is little, if anything, to indicate that he was ever deeply in love. Of romantic devotion to a woman, as to a superior being, we find no trace either in his stories or in his poetry.

How far removed from Bret Harte is that mingled feeling of love and veneration which, originating in the Middle Ages, has lasted, in poetry at least, almost down to our own time, as in these lines from a writer who was contemporary with Bret Harte:--

When thy cheek is dewed with tears On some dark day when friends depart, When life before thee seems all fears And all remembrance one long smart,

Then in the secret sacred cell Thy soul keeps for her hour of prayer, Breathe but my name, that I may dwell Part of thy wors.h.i.+p alway there.

Bret Harte was cast in a different mould. No doubts or fears distracted him. So far as we know, he asked no questions about the universe, and troubled himself very little about the destiny of mankind. He was essentially unreligious, unphilosophic, true to his own instincts, but indifferent to all matters that lay beyond them. And yet within that range he had a depth and sincerity of feeling which issued in real poetry. Bret Harte, with all the refinement, love of elegance, reserve and self-restraint which characterized him, was a very natural man. He possessed in full degree what one philosopher has called the primeval instincts of pity, of pride, of pugnacity. He loved his fellow-man, he loved his country, he loved nature, and these pa.s.sions, curbed by that unerring sense of artistic form and clothed in that beauty of style which belonged to him, were expressed in a few poems that seem likely to last forever. It was not often that he felt the necessary stimulus, but when he did feel it, the response was sure. Of these immortal poems, if we may make bold to call them such, probably the best known is that on the death of d.i.c.kens. This is the last stanza:--

And on that grave where English oak and holly And laurel wreaths entwine, Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly, This spray of Western pine![108]

Still better is the poem on the death of Starr King. It is very short; let us have it before us.

RELIEVING GUARD

THOMAS STARR KING. OBIIT MARCH 4, 1864.

Came the relief. "What, sentry, ho!

How pa.s.sed the night through thy long waking?"

"Cold, cheerless, dark,--as may befit The hour before the dawn is breaking."

"No sight? no sound?" "No; nothing save The plover from the marshes calling, And in yon western sky, about An hour ago, a star was falling."

"A star? There's nothing strange in that."

"No, nothing; but above the thicket, Somehow it seemed to me that G.o.d Somewhere had just relieved a picket."

What impresses the reader most, or at least first, in this poem is its extreme conciseness and simplicity. The words are so few, and the weight of suggestion which they have to carry so heavy, that the misuse of a single word,--a single word not in perfect taste, would have spoiled the beauty of the whole. Long years ago the "Sat.u.r.day Review"--the good old, ferocious Sat.u.r.day--sagely remarked: "It is not given to every one to be simple"; and only genius could have achieved the simplicity of this short poem. "The relief came" would have been prose. "Came the relief" is poetry, not merely because the arrangement of the words is unusual, but because this short inverted sentence strikes a note of abruptness and intensity which prepares the reader for what is to come, and which is maintained throughout the poem;--had it not so been maintained, an anti-climax would have resulted.

Moreover, short and simple as this poem is, it seems to contain three distinct strands of feeling. There is, first, the personal feeling for Thomas Starr King; and although he was a minister and not a soldier, there is a suitability in connecting him with the picket, for, as we have seen, it was owing to him, more than to any other man, that California was saved to the Union in the Civil War. Secondly, there is the National patriotic feeling which forms the strong under-current of the poem, nowhere expressed, but unmistakably implied, and present in the minds of both poet and reader. Possibly, we may even find in "the hour before the dawn" an allusion to the period when Mr. King died and the poem was written; for that was the final desperate period of the war, darkened by a terrible expenditure of human life and suffering, and lightened only by a prospect of the end then slowly but surely coming into view. Thirdly, there is the feeling for nature which the poem exhibits in its firm though scanty etching of the sombre night, the lonely marshes, and the distant sky. The poem is a blending of these three feelings, each one enhancing the other;--and even this does not complete the tale, for there is the final suggestion that the death of a man may be of as much consequence in the mind of the Creator, and as nicely calculated, as the falling of a star.

The truth is that Bret Harte's national poems, with which this tribute to Starr King may properly be cla.s.sed, have a depth of personal feeling not often found elsewhere in his poetry. In common with all men of primitive impulses, he was genuinely patriotic. "America was always 'my country'

with him," writes one who knew him in England; "and I remember how he flushed with almost boyish pleasure when, in driving through some casual rural festivities, his quick eye noted a stray American flag among the display of bunting."

This patriotic feeling gave to his national poems the true lyrical note.

Among the best of these is that stirring song of the drum, called _The Reveille_, which was read at a crowded meeting held in the San Francisco Opera House immediately after President Lincoln had called for one hundred thousand volunteers. In this poem the student of American history, and especially the foreign student, will find an expression of that National feeling which animated the Northern people, and which sanctified the horrors of the Civil War,--one of the few wars recorded in history that was waged for a pure ideal,--the ideal of the Union.

With these poems may be cla.s.sed some stanzas from _Cadet Grey_ describing the life of the West Point cadet, and this one in particular:--

Within the camp they lie, the young, the brave, Half knight, half schoolboy, acolytes of fame, Pledged to one altar, and perchance one grave; Bred to fear nothing but reproach and blame, Ascetic dandies o'er whom vestals rave, Clean-limbed young Spartans, disciplined young elves, Taught to destroy, that they may live to save, Students embattled, soldiers at their shelves, Heroes whose conquests are at first themselves.

It has been said that one function of literature, and especially of poetry, is to enable a nation to understand and appreciate, and thus more completely to realize, the ideals which it has instinctively formed; and in the lines just quoted Bret Harte has done this for West Point.

The poem on San Francisco glows with patriotic and civic feeling, and it expressed a sentiment which, at the time when it was written, hardly anybody in the city, except the poet himself, entertained. San Francisco in 1870 was dominated by that cold, hard, self-satisfied, commercial spirit which Bret Harte especially hated, and which furnished one reason, perhaps the main reason, for his departure from the State.

Drop down, O fleecy Fog, and hide Her sceptic sneer and all her pride!

Wrap her, O Fog, in gown and hood Of her Franciscan Brotherhood.

Hide me her faults, her sin and blame; With thy gray mantle cloak her shame!

And yet it was impossible for Bret Harte, with his deep, abiding faith in the good instincts of mankind, not to look forward to a better day for San Francisco,

When Art shall raise and Culture lift The sensual joys and meaner thrift,

And all fulfilled the vision we Who watch and wait shall never see.

There is also a strong lyrical element in Bret Harte's treatment of nature in his poetry, as well as in his prose. What he always gives is his own impression of the scene, not a mere description of it, although this impression may be conveyed by a few slight touches, sometimes even by a single word. The opening stanza of the poem on the death of d.i.c.kens is an ill.u.s.tration:--

Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting, The river sang below; The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting Their minarets of snow.

Ruskin somewhere a.n.a.lyzes the difference between real poetry and prose in a versified form, and quoting a few lines from Byron, he points out the single word in them which makes the pa.s.sage poetic. In the lines just quoted from Bret Harte, the word "sang" has the same poetic quality; and no one who has ever heard the sound which the poet here describes can fail to recognize the truth of his metaphor.[109]

This is always Bret Harte's method. He reproduces the emotional effect of the scene upon himself, and thus exhibits nature to the reader as she appeared to him. Emotion, it need not be said, is transmitted much more effectively than ideas or information. In fact, an objective, detailed description of a landscape, however accurate or exhaustive, will leave the reader almost as it found him; whereas a single word which enables him to share the emotion inspired by the scene in the breast of the writer will transport him at a bound to the spot itself.

The charm of life in California consisted largely in this, that it was lived in the open air. It was almost a perpetual camping out, made delightful by the mildness of the climate and the beauty of the surroundings. Even the cheerful fires of pine or of scrub oak which burn so frequently in the cabins of Bret Harte's miners, are kindled mainly to offset the dampness of the rainy season; and though the fire blazes merrily on the hearth the door of the hut is usually open. The Reader knows how "Union Mills" indolently left one leg exposed to the rain on the outside of the threshold, the rest of his body being under cover inside.

Bret Harte in his poems and stories availed himself of this out-door life to the fullest extent. When the Rose of Tuolumne was summoned from her bedroom, at two o'clock in the morning, to entertain her father's guest, the youthful poet, she met him, not in the stuffy sitting-room of the house, but in the moonlight outside, with the snow-crowned Sierras dimly visible in the distance, and "quaint odors from the woods near by perfuming the warm, still air."

The young Englishman, Mainwaring, and Louise Macy, the Phyllis of the Sierras, could not help being confidential sitting in the moonlight on that unique veranda which overhung the Great Canon, two thousand feet deep, as many wide, and lined with tall trees, dark and motionless in the distance. If the Outcasts of Poker Flat had met their fate in ordinary surroundings, victims either of the machinery of the law or of man's violence, we should think of them only as criminals; but with nature herself as their executioner, and the scene of their death that remote, wooded amphitheatre in the mountains, they regain their lost dignity as human beings. How vast is the difference between John Oakhurst shooting himself in a bedroom at some second-cla.s.s hotel, and performing the same act at the head of a snow-covered ravine and beneath the lofty pine tree to which he affixed the playing card that contained his epitaph!

In _Tennessee's Partner_, the whole tragedy is transacted in the open air, excepting the trial scene; and even the little upper room which serves as a court house for the lynching party is hardly a screen from the landscape. "Against the blackness of the pines the windows of the old loft above the express office stood out staringly bright; and through their curtainless panes the loungers below could see the forms of those who were even then deciding the fate of Tennessee. And above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and pa.s.sionless, crowned with remoter pa.s.sionless stars."

Nature, thank G.o.d, does not share our emotions, and, so far as we know, is swayed by no emotions of her own. But she inspires certain emotions in us, and is a visible, tangible representation of strength and serenity. Those who delight in nature are a long way from regarding her as they would a brick or a stone. A certain pantheism, such as Wordsworth was accused of, can be attributed to everybody who loves the landscape. There is a mystery in the beautiful inanimate world, as there is in every other phase of the universe. "A forest," said Th.o.r.eau, "is in all mythologies a sacred place"; and it must ever remain such. Let anybody wander alone upon some mountain-side or hilltop, and watch the wind blowing through the scanty, unmown gra.s.s, and it will be strange if the vague consciousness of some presence other than his own does not insinuate itself into his mind. He will begin to understand how it was that the Ancients peopled every bush and stream with nymphs or deities. Richard Jeffries went even further than Wordsworth. "Though I cannot name the ideal good," he wrote, "it seems to me that it will be in some way closely a.s.sociated with the ideal beauty of nature."

Bret Harte did not trouble himself much about the ideal good; but he had in full degree the modern feeling for nature, and found in her a mysterious charm and solace,--"that profound peace," to use his own language, "which the mountains alone can give their lonely or perturbed children."

In one of the stories, _Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy_, he describes the unlucky and unhappy miner going to the door of his cabin at midnight.

"In the feverish state into which he had gradually worked himself it seemed to him impossible to await the coming of the dawn. But he was mistaken. For even as he stood there all nature seemed to invade his humble cabin with its free and fragrant breath, and invest him with its great companions.h.i.+p. He felt again, in that breath, that strange sense of freedom, that mystic touch of partners.h.i.+p with the birds and beasts, the shrubs and trees, in this greater home before him. It was this vague communion that had kept him there, that still held these world-sick, weary workers in their rude cabins on the slopes around him; and he felt upon his brow that balm that had nightly lulled him and them to sleep and forgetfulness. He closed the door, crept into his bunk, and presently fell into a profound slumber."

This kind of communion with nature depends upon a certain degree of solitude, and the mere suggestion of a crowd puts it to flight at once.

Even the magnificence of the Swiss mountains is almost spoiled for the real lover of nature by those surroundings from which only the skilled mountain-climber is able to escape. Mere solitude, on the other hand, provided that it be out of doors, is almost always beautiful and certainly beneficent in itself.

He who lives in a desert or in a wood, on a mountain top, like the Twins of Table Mountain, or in an unpeopled prairie, may have many faults and vices, but there are some from which he will certainly be free. He will be serene and simple, if nothing more. "It is impossible," as Thomas Hardy remarks, "for any one living upon a heath to be vulgar"; and the reason is obvious. Vulgarity, as we all know, is merely a form of insincerity. To be vulgar is to say and do things not naturally and out of one's own head, but in the attempt to be or to appear something different from the reality. There can be no vulgarity on the heath, on the farm, or in the mining camp, for there everybody's character and circ.u.mstances are known; there is no opportunity for deceit, and there is no motive for pretence.

Moreover, the primitive simplicity of the mining and the logging camp, or even that of an isolated farming community, is not essentially different from the cultivated simplicity of the aristocrat. The laboring man and the aristocrat have very much the same sense of honor and the same ideals; and those writers who are at home with one are almost always at home with the other. Sir Walter Scott and Tolstoi are examples. But between these two extremes, which meet at many points, comes the citified, trading, clerking cla.s.s, which has lost its primitive, manly instincts, and has not yet regained them in the chastened form of convictions.

It is no exaggeration to say that the society which Bret Harte enjoyed in London was more akin to that of the mining camp than to that of San Francisco. In both cases the charm which attracted him was the charm of simplicity; in the mining camp, the simplicity of nature, in London the simplicity of cultivation and finish.

CHAPTER XX

BRET HARTE'S PIONEER DIALECT

Occasionally Bret Harte uses an archaic word, not because it is archaic, but because it expresses his meaning better than any other, or gives the needed stimulus to the imagination of the reader. Thus, in _A First Family of Tasajara_ we read that "the former daughters of Sion were there, _burgeoning_ and expanding in the glare of their new prosperity with silver and gold."