The Life of Bret Harte Part 26

Mark Twain's authority on a matter of Western dialect will hardly be questioned, and this same use of "which" is not infrequent in his stories.

Here, for instance, is an example from "Tom Sawyer": "We said it was Parson Silas, and we judged he had found Sam Cooper drunk in the road, which he was always trying to reform him." Finally, that well-known Pioneer, Mr. Warren Cheney, an early contributor to the "Overland,"

testifies that "which" as thus used "is perfectly good Pike."[115]

The rather astonis.h.i.+ng fact is that Bret Harte uses dialect words and phrases to the number, roughly estimated, of three hundred, and a hasty investigation has served to identify all but a few of these as legitimate Pioneer expressions. A more thorough search would no doubt account satisfactorily for every one of them.

However, that dialect should be authentic is not so important as that it should be interesting. Many story-writers report dialect in a correct and conscientious form, but it wearies the reader. Dialect to be interesting must be the vehicle of humor, and the great masters of dialect, such as Thackeray and Sir Walter Scott, are also masters of humor. Bret Harte had the same gift, and he showed it, as we have seen, not only in Pioneer speech, but also in the Spanish-American dialect of Enriquez Saltello and his charming sister, in the Scotch dialect of Mr. Callender, in the French dialect of the innkeeper who entertained Alkali d.i.c.k, and in the German dialect of Peter Schroeder. For one thing, a too exact reproduction of dialect almost always has a misleading and awkward effect. The written word is not the same as the spoken word, and the constant repet.i.tion of a sound which would hardly be noticed in speech becomes unduly prominent and wearisome if put before our eyes in print. In the following pa.s.sage it will be seen how Bret Harte avoids the too frequent occurrence of "ye"

(which Tinka Gallinger probably used) by alternating it with "you":--

"'No! no! ye shan't go--ye mustn't go,' she said, with hysterical intensity. 'I want to tell ye something! Listen!--you--you--Mr. Fleming!

I've been a wicked, wicked girl! I've told lies to dad--to mammy--to you!

I've borne false witness--I'm worse than Sapphira--I've acted a big lie.

Oh, Mr. Fleming, I've made you come back here for nothing! Ye didn't find no gold the other day. There wasn't any. It was all me! I--I--_salted that pan_!'"

Bret Harte's writings offer a wide field for the study of what might be called the psychological aspect of dialect, especially so far as it relates to p.r.o.nunciation. What governs the dialect of any time and place?

Is it purely accidental that the London c.o.c.kney says "piper" instead of paper, and that the Western Pioneer says "b'ar" for bear,--or does some inner necessity determine, or partly determine, these departures from the standard p.r.o.nunciation? This, however, is a subject which lies far beyond our present scope. Suffice it to say that it would be difficult to convince the reader of Bret Harte that there is not some inevitable harmony between his characters and the dialect or other language which they employ. Who, for example, would hesitate to a.s.sign to Yuba Bill, and to none other, this remark: "I knew the partikler style of d.a.m.n fool that you was, and expected no better."

CHAPTER XXI

BRET HARTE'S STYLE

In discussing Bret Harte, it is almost impossible to separate substance from style. The style is so good, so exactly adapted to the ideas which he wishes to convey, that one can hardly imagine it as different. Some thousands of years ago an Eastern sage remarked that he would like to write a book such as everybody would conceive that he might have written himself, and yet so good that n.o.body else could have written the like.

This is the ideal which Bret Harte fulfilled. Almost everything said by any one of his characters is so accurate an expression of that character as to seem inevitable. It is felt at once to be just what such a character must have said. Given the character, the words follow; and anybody could set them down! This is the fallacy underlying that strange feeling, which every reader must have experienced, of the apparent easiness of writing an especially good conversation or soliloquy.

The real difficulty of writing like Bret Harte is shown by the fact that as a story-teller he has no imitators. His style is so individual as to make imitation impossible. And yet occasionally the inspiration failed. It is a peculiarity of Bret Harte, shown especially in the longer stories, and most of all perhaps in _Gabriel Conroy_, that there are times when the reader almost believes that Bret Harte has dropped the pen, and some inferior person has taken it up. Author and reader come to the ground with a thud.

Mr. Warren Cheney has remarked upon this defect as follows:--

"With most authors there is a level of general excellence along which they can plod if the wings of genius chance to tire for a time; but with Mr. Harte the case is a different one. His powers are impulsive rather than enduring. Ideas strike him with extraordinary force, but the inspiration is of equally short duration. So long as the flush of excitement lasts, his work will be up to standard; but when the genius flags, he has no individual fund of dramatic or narrative properties to sustain him."

But of these lapses there are few in the short stories, and none at all in the best stories. In them the style is almost flawless. There are no mannerisms in it; no affectations; no egotism; no slang (except, of course, in the mouths of the various characters); nothing local or provincial, nothing which stamps it as of a particular age, country or school,--nothing, in short, which could operate as a barrier between author and reader.

But these are only negative virtues. What are the positive virtues of Bret Harte's style? Perhaps the most obvious quality is the deep feeling which pervades it. It is possible, indeed, to have good style without depth of feeling. John Stuart Mill is an example; Lord Chesterfield is another; Benjamin Franklin another. In general, however, want of feeling in the author produces a coldness in the style that chills the reader. Herbert Spencer's autobiography discloses an almost inhuman want of feeling, and the same effect is apparent in his dreary, frigid style.

On the other hand, it is a truism that the language of pa.s.sion is invariably effective, and never vulgar. Grief and anger are always eloquent. There are men, even practised authors, who never write really well unless something has occurred to put them out of temper. Good style may perhaps be said to result from the union of deep feeling with an artistic sense of form. This produces that conciseness for which Bret Harte's style is remarkable. What author has used shorter words, has expressed more with a few words, or has elaborated so little! His points are made with the precision of a bullet going straight to the mark, and nothing is added.

How effective, for example, is this dialogue between Helen Maynard, who has just met the one-armed painter for the first time, and the French girl who accompanies her: "'So you have made a conquest of the recently acquired but unknown Greek statue?' said Mademoiselle Renee lightly.

"'It is a countryman of mine,' said Helen simply.

"'He certainly does not speak French,' said Mademoiselle mischievously.

"'Nor think it,' responded Helen, with equal vivacity."

Possibly Bret Harte sometimes carries this dramatic conciseness a little too far,--so far that the reader's attention is drawn from the matter in hand to the manner in which it is expressed. To take an example, _Johnson's Old Woman_ ends as follows:--

"'I want to talk to you about Miss Johnson,' I said eagerly.

"'I reckon so,' he said with an exasperating smile. 'Most fellers do. But she ain't _Miss_ Johnson no more. She's married.'

"'Not to that big chap over from Ten Mile Mills?' I said breathlessly.

"'What's the matter with _him_,' said Johnson. 'Ye didn't expect her to marry a n.o.bleman, did ye?'

"I said I didn't see why she shouldn't,--and believed that she _had_."

This is extremely clever, but perhaps its very cleverness, and its abruptness, divert the reader's interest for a moment from the story to the person who tells it.

One other characteristic of Bret Harte's style, and indeed of any style which ranks with the best, is obvious, and that is subtlety. It is the office of a good style to express in some indefinable manner those _nuances_ which mere words, taken by themselves, are not fine enough to convey. Thoughts so subtle as to have almost the character of feelings; feelings so well defined as just to escape being thoughts; attractions and repulsions; those obscure movements of the intellect of which the ordinary man is only half conscious until they are revealed to him by the eye of genius;--all these things it is a part of style to express, or at least to imply. Subtlety of style presupposes, of course, subtlety of thought, and possibly also subtlety of perception. Certainly Bret Harte had both of these capacities; and many examples might be cited of his minute and sympathetic observation. For instance, although he had no knowledge of horses, and occasionally betrays his ignorance in this respect, yet he has described the peculiar gait of the American trotter with an accuracy which any technical person might envy. "The driver leaned forward and did something with the reins--Rose never could clearly understand what, though it seemed to her that he simply lifted them with ostentatious lightness; but the mare suddenly seemed to _lengthen herself_ and lose her height, and the stalks of wheat on either side of the dusty track began to melt into each other, and then slipped like a flash into one long, continuous, s.h.i.+mmering green hedge. So perfect was the mare's action that the girl was scarcely conscious of any increased effort.... So superb was the reach of her long, easy stride that Rose could scarcely see any undulations in the brown, s.h.i.+ning back on which she could have placed her foot, nor felt the soft beat of the delicate hoofs that took the dust so firmly and yet so lightly."[116]

Equally correct is the description of the "great, yellow mare" Jovita, that carried d.i.c.k Bullen on his midnight ride:[117] "From her Roman nose to her rising haunches, from her arched spine hidden by the stiff _manchillas_ of a Mexican saddle, to her thick, straight bony legs, there was not a line of equine grace. In her half-blind but wholly vicious white eyes, in her protruding under lip, in her monstrous color, there was nothing but ugliness and vice."

Jovita, plainly, was drawn from life, and she must have been of thoroughbred blood on one side, for her extraordinary energy and temper could have been derived from no other source. Such a mare would naturally have an unusually straight hind leg; and Bret Harte noticed it.

As to his heroines, he had such a faculty of describing them that they stand before us almost as clearly as if we saw them in the flesh. He does not simply tell us that they are beautiful,--we see for ourselves that they are so; and one reason for this is the sympathetic keenness with which he observed all the details of the human face and figure. Thus Julia Porter's face "appeared whiter at the angles of the mouth and nose through the relief of tiny freckles like grains of pepper."

There are subtleties of coloring that have escaped almost everybody else.

Who but Bret Harte has really described the light which love kindles upon the face of a woman? "Yerba Buena's strangely delicate complexion had taken on itself that faint Alpine glow that was more of an illumination than a color." And so of Cressy, as the Schoolmaster saw her at the dance.

"She was pale, he had never seen her so beautiful.... The absence of color in her usually fresh face had been replaced by a faint magnetic aurora that seemed to him half spiritual. He could not take his eyes from her; he could not believe what he saw."

The forehead, the temples, and more especially the eyebrows of his heroines--these and the part which they play in the expression of emotion, are described by Bret Harte with a particularity which cannot be found elsewhere. Even the eyelashes of his heroines are often carefully painted in the picture. Flora Dimwood "cast a sidelong glance" at the hero, "under her widely-s.p.a.ced, heavy lashes." Of Mrs. Brimmer, the fastidious Boston woman, it is said that "a certain nervous intensity occasionally lit up her weary eyes with a dangerous phosph.o.r.escence, under their brown fringes."

The eyes and eyelashes of that irrepressible child, Sarah Walker, are thus minutely and pathetically described: "Her eyes were of a dark shade of burnished copper,--the orbits appearing deeper and larger from the rubbing in of habitual tears from long wet lashes."

Bret Harte has the rare faculty of making even a tearful woman attractive.

The Ward of the Golden Gate "drew back a step, lifted her head with a quick toss that seemed to condense the moisture in her s.h.i.+ning eyes, and sent what might have been a glittering dewdrop flying into the loosened tendrils of her hair." The quick-tempered heroine is seen "hurriedly disentangling two stinging tears from her long lashes"; and even the mannish girl, Julia Porter, becomes femininely deliquescent as she leans back in the dark stage-coach, with the romantic Ca.s.s Beard gazing at her from his invisible corner. "How much softer her face looked in the moonlight!--How moist her eyes were--actually s.h.i.+ning in the light! How that light seemed to concentrate in the corner of the lashes, and then slipped--flash--away! Was she? Yes, she was crying."

There is great subtlety not only of perception but of thought in the description of the Two Americans at the beginning of their intimacy:--

"Oddly enough, their mere presence and companions.h.i.+p seemed to excite in others that tenderness they had not yet felt themselves. Family groups watched the handsome pair in their innocent confidence and, with French exuberant recognition of sentiment, thought them the incarnation of Love.

Something in their manifest equality of condition kept even the vainest and most susceptible of spectators from attempted rivalry or cynical interruption. And when at last they dropped side by side on a sun-warmed stone bench on the terrace, and Helen, inclining her brown head toward her companion, informed him of the difficulty she had experienced in getting gumbo soup, rice and chicken, corn cakes, or any of her favorite home dishes in Paris, an exhausted but gallant boulevardier rose from a contiguous bench, and, politely lifting his hat to the handsome couple, turned slowly away from what he believed were tender confidences he would not permit himself to hear."

Without this subtlety, a writer may have force, even eloquence, as Johnson and Macaulay had those qualities, but he is not likely to have an enduring charm. Subtlety seems to be the note of the best modern writers, of the Oxford school in particular, a subtlety of language which extracts from every word its utmost nicety of meaning, and a subtlety of thought in which every faculty is on the alert to seize any qualification or limitation, any hint or suggestion that might be hovering obscurely about the subject.

Yet subtlety, more perhaps than any other quality of a good style, easily becomes a defect. If it is the forte of some writers, it is the foible, not to say the vice, of others. The later works of Henry James, for instance, will at once occur to the Reader as an example. Bret Harte himself is sometimes, but rarely, over-subtle, representing his characters as going through processes of thought or speech much too elaborate for them, or for the occasion.

There is an example of this in _Susy_, where Clarence says: "'If I did not know you were prejudiced by a foolish and indiscreet woman, I should believe you were trying to insult me as you have your adopted mother, and would save you the pain of doing both in _her_ house by leaving it now and forever.'"

And again, in _A Secret of Telegraph Hill_, where Herbert Bly says to the gambler whom he has surprised in his room, hiding from the Vigilance Committee: "'Whoever you may be, I am neither the police nor a spy. You have no right to insult me by supposing that I would profit by a mistake that made you my guest, and that I would refuse you the sanctuary of the roof that covers your insult as well as your blunder.'" And yet the speaker is not meant to be a prig.

There is another characteristic of Bret Harte's style which should perhaps be regarded as a form of subtlety, and that is the surprising resources of his vocabulary. He seems to have gathered all the words and idioms that might become of service to him, and to have stored them in his memory for future use. If a peculiar or technical expression was needed, he always had it at hand. Thus when the remorseful Joe Corbin told Colonel Starbottle about his sending money to the widow of the man whom he had killed in self-defence, the Colonel's apt comment was, "A kind of expiation or amercement of fine, known to the Mosaic, Roman and old English law." And yet his reading never took a wide range. His large vocabulary was due partly, no doubt, to an excellent memory, but still more to his keen appreciation of delicate shades in the meaning of words.

He had a remarkable gift of choosing the right word. In the following lines, for example, the whole effect depends upon the discriminating selection of the verbs and adjectives:--

Bunny, thrilled by unknown fears, Raised his soft and pointed ears, Mumbled his prehensile lip, Quivered his pulsating hip.