The Life of Bret Harte Part 27

Depth of feeling, subtlety of perception and intellect,--these qualities, supplemented by the sense of form and beauty, go far to account for the charm of Bret Harte's style. He had an ear for style, just as some persons have an ear for music; and he could extract beauty from language just as the musician can extract it from the strings of a violin. This kind of beauty is, in one sense, a matter of mere sound; and yet it is really much more than that. "Words, even the most perfect, owe very much to the spiritual cadence with which they are imbued."[118]

A musical sentence, made up of words harmoniously chosen, and of sub-sentences nicely balanced, must necessarily deepen, soften, heighten, or otherwise modify the bare meaning of the words. In fact, it clothes them with that kind and degree of feeling which, as the writer consciously or unconsciously perceives, will best further his intention. Style, in short, is a subst.i.tute for speech, the author giving through the medium of his style the same emotional and personal color to his thoughts which the orator conveys by the tone and inflections of his voice. Hence the saying that the style is the man.

If we were looking for an example of mere beauty in style, perhaps we could find nothing better than this description of Maruja, after parting from her lover: "Small wonder that, hidden and silent in her enwrappings, as she lay back in the carriage, with her pale face against the cold, starry sky, two other stars came out and glistened and trembled on her pa.s.sion-fringed lashes."

No less beautiful in style are these lines:--

Above the tumult of the canon lifted, The gray hawk breathless hung, Or on the hill a winged shadow drifted Where furze and thorn-bush clung.[119]

And yet, so exact is the correspondence between thought and word here, that we find ourselves doubting whether the charm of the pa.s.sage lies in its form, or in the mere idea conveyed to the reader with the least possible interposition of language; and yet, again, to raise that very doubt may be the supreme effect of a consummate style.

Bret Harte was sometimes a little careless in his style, careless, that is, in the way of writing obscurely or ungrammatically, but very seldom so careless as to write in a dull or unmusical fas.h.i.+on. To find a harsh sentence anywhere in his works would be almost, if not quite, impossible.

A leading English Review once remarked, "It was never among Mr. Bret Harte's accomplishments to labor cheerfully with the file"; and again, a few years later, "Mr. Harte can never be accused of carelessness." Neither statement was quite correct, but the second one comes very much nearer the truth than the first.

Beside these occasional lapses in the construction of his sentences, Bret Harte had some peculiarities in the use of English to which he clung, either out of loyalty to d.i.c.kens, from whom he seems to have derived them, or from a certain amiable perversity which was part of his character. He was a strong partisan of the "split infinitive." A Chinaman "caused the gold piece and the letter to instantly vanish up his sleeve." "To coldly interest Price"; "to unpleasantly discord with the general social harmony"; "to quietly reappear," are other examples.

The wrong use of "gratuitous" is a thoroughly d.i.c.kens error, and it almost seems as if Bret Harte went out of his way to copy it. In the story of _Miggles_, for example, it is only a few paragraphs after Yuba Bill has observed the paralytic Jim's "expression of perfectly gratuitous solemnity," that his own features "relax into an expression of gratuitous and imbecile cheerfulness."

"Aggravation" in the sense of irritation is another d.i.c.kens solecism which also appears several times in Bret Harte.

Beside these, Bret Harte had a few errors all his own. In _The Story of a Mine_, there is a strangely repeated use of the awkward expression "near facts," followed by a statement that the new private secretary was a little dashed as to his "near hopes." Diligent search reveals also "continued on" in one story, "different to" in another, "plead" for "pleaded," "who would likely spy upon you" in an unfortunate place, and "too occupied with his subject" somewhere else.

This short list will very nearly exhaust Bret Harte's errors in the use of English; but it must be admitted, also, that he occasionally lapses into a d.i.c.kens-like grandiloquence and cant of superior virtue. There are several examples of this in _The Story of a Mine_, especially in that part which relates to the City of Was.h.i.+ngton. The following paragraph is almost a burlesque of d.i.c.kens: "The actors, the legislators themselves, knew it and laughed at it; the commentators, the Press, knew it and laughed at it; the audience, the great American people, knew it and laughed at it. And n.o.body for an instant conceived that it ever, under any circ.u.mstances, might be different."

Still worse is this description of the Supreme Court, which might serve as a model of confused ideas and crude reasoning, only half believed in by the writer himself: "A body of learned, cultivated men, representing the highest legal tribunal in the land, still lingered in a vague idea of earning the scant salary bestowed upon them by the economical founders of the government, and listened patiently to the arguments of counsel, whose fees for advocacy of the claims before them would have paid the life income of half the bench."

That exquisite sketch, _Wan Lee, the Pagan_, is marred by this d.i.c.kens-like apostrophe to the clergy: "Dead, my reverend friends, dead!

Stoned to death in the streets of San Francisco, in the year of grace, eighteen hundred and sixty-nine, by a mob of half-grown boys and Christian school-children!"

In the description of an English country church, which occurs in _A Phyllis of the Sierras_, we find another pa.s.sage almost worthy of a "condensed novel" in which some innocent crusaders, lying cross-legged in marble, are rebuked for tripping up the unwary "until in death, as in life, they got between the congregation and the Truth that was taught there."

Bret Harte has been accused also of "admiring his characters in the wrong place," as d.i.c.kens certainly did; but this charge seems to be an injustice. A scene in _Gabriel Conroy_ represents Arthur Poinsett as calmly explaining to Dona Dolores that he is the person who seduced and abandoned Grace Conroy; and he makes this statement without a sign of shame or regret. "If he had been uttering a moral sentiment, he could not have been externally more calm, or inwardly less agitated. More than that, there was a certain injured dignity in his manner," and so forth.

This is the pa.s.sage cited by that very acute critic, Mr. E. S. Nadal. But there is nothing in it or in the context which indicates that Bret Harte admired the conduct of Poinsett. He was simply describing a type which everybody will recognize; but not describing it as admirable. Bret Harte depicted his characters with so much _gusto_, and at the same time was so absolutely impartial and non-committal toward them, that it is easy to misconceive his own opinion of them or of their conduct.[120] From another fault, perhaps the worst fault of d.i.c.kens, namely, his propensity for the sudden conversion of a character to something the reverse of what it always has been, Bret Harte--with the single exception of Mrs.

Tretherick, in _An Episode of Fiddletown_--is absolutely free.

It should be remembered, moreover, that Bret Harte's imitations of d.i.c.kens occur only in a few pa.s.sages of a few stories. When Bret Harte nodded, he wrote like d.i.c.kens. But the better stories, and the great majority of the stories, show no trace of this blemish. Bret Harte at his best was perhaps as nearly original as any author in the world.

On the whole, it seems highly probable--though the critics have mostly decided otherwise--that Bret Harte derived more good than bad from his admiration for d.i.c.kens. The reading of d.i.c.kens stimulated his boyish imagination and quickened that sympathy with the weak and suffering, with the downtrodden, with the waifs and strays, with the outcasts of society, which is remarkable in both writers. The spirit of d.i.c.kens breathes through the poems and stories of Bret Harte, just as the spirit of Bret Harte breathes through the poems and stories of Kipling. Bret Harte had a very pretty satirical vein, which might easily, if developed, have made him an author of satire rather than of sentiment. Who can say that the influence of d.i.c.kens, coming at the early, plastic period of his life, may not have turned the scale?

That d.i.c.kens surpa.s.sed him in breadth and scope, Bret Harte himself would have been the first to acknowledge. The mere fact that one wrote novels and the other short stories almost implies as much. If we consider the works of an author like Hawthorne, who did both kinds equally well, it is easy to see how much more effective is the long story. Powerful as Hawthorne's short stories are--the "Minister's Black Veil," for example--they cannot rival the longer-drawn, more elaborately developed tragedy of "The Scarlet Letter."

The characters created by d.i.c.kens have taken hold of the popular imagination, and have influenced public sentiment in a degree which cannot be attributed to the characters of Bret Harte. d.i.c.kens, moreover, despite his vulgarisms, despite even the cant into which he occasionally falls, had a depth of sincerity and conviction that can hardly be a.s.serted for Bret Harte. d.i.c.kens' errors in taste were superficial; upon any important matter he always had a genuine opinion to express. With respect to Bret Harte, on the other hand, we cannot help feeling that his errors in taste, though infrequent, are due to a want of sincerity, to a want of conviction upon deep things.

And yet, despite the fact that d.i.c.kens excelled Bret Harte in depth and scope, there is reason to think that the American author of short stories will outlast the English novelist. The one is, and the other is not, a cla.s.sic writer. It was said of d.i.c.kens that he had no "citadel of the mind,"--no mental retiring-place, no inward poise or composure; and this defect is shown by a certain feverish quality in his style, as well as by those well-known exaggerations and mannerisms which disfigure it.

Bret Harte, on the other hand, in his best poems and stories, exhibits all that restraint, all that absence of idiosyncrasy as distinguished from personality, which marks the true artist. What the world demands is the peculiar flavor of the artist's mind; but this must be conveyed in a pure and unadulterated form, free from any ingredient of eccentricity or self-will. In Bret Harte there is a wonderful economy both of thought and language. Everything said or done in the course of a story contributes to the climax or end which the author has in view. There are no digressions or superfluities; the words are commonly plain words of Anglo-Saxon descent; and it would be hard to find one that could be dispensed with.

The language is as concise as if the story were a message, to be delivered to the reader in the shortest possible time.

One other point of much importance remains to be spoken of, although it might be difficult to say whether it is really a matter of style or of substance. Nothing counts for more in the telling of a story, especially a story of adventure, than the author's att.i.tude toward his characters; not simply the fact that he blames or praises them, or abstains from doing so, but his unspoken att.i.tude, his real feeling, disclosed between the lines.

Too much admiration on the part of the author is fatal to a cla.s.sic effect, even though the admiration be implied rather than expressed. This is perhaps the greatest weakness of Mr. Kipling. That a man should be a gentleman is always, strangely enough, a matter of some surprise to that conscientious author, and that he should be not only a gentleman, but actually brave in addition, is almost too much for Mr. Kipling's equanimity. His heroes, those gallant young officers whom he describes so well, are exhibited to the reader with something of that pride which a showman or a fond mother might pardonably display. Mr. Kipling knows them thoroughly, but he is not of them. He is their humble servant. They are, he seems to feel, members of a species to which he, the author, and probably the reader also, are not akin. Now, almost everybody who writes about fighting or heroic men in these days,--about highwaymen, cow-boys, river-drivers, woodsmen, or other primitive characters,--imitates Mr.

Kipling, very seldom Bret Harte. Partly, no doubt, this is because Mr.

Kipling's mannerisms are attractive, and easily copied. That little trick, for example, of beginning sentences with the word "also," is a familiar earmark of the Kipling school.

But a stronger reason for imitating Mr. Kipling is that the att.i.tude of frank admiration which he a.s.sumes is the natural att.i.tude for the ordinary writer. Such a writer falls into it unconsciously, and does not easily rise above it. The author is a "tenderfoot," discoursing to another tenderfoot, the reader, about the brave and wonderful men whom he has met in the course of his travels; and the reader's astonishment and admiration are looked for with confidence.

Vastly different from all this is the att.i.tude of Bret Harte. He takes it for granted that the Pioneers in general had the instincts of gentlemen and the courage of heroes. His characters are represented not as exceptional California men, but as ordinary California men placed in rather exceptional circ.u.mstances. Brave as they are, they are never brave enough to surprise him. He is their equal. He never boasts of them nor about them. On the contrary, he gives the impression that the whole California Pioneer Society was constructed upon the same lofty plane,--as indeed it was, barring a few renegades.

When Edward Brice, the young expressman, "set his white lips together, and with a determined face, and unfaltering step," walked straight toward the rifle held in Snapshot Harry's unerring hands, the incident astonishes n.o.body,--except perhaps the reader. Certainly it does not astonish the persons who witness or the author who records it. It evokes a little good-humored banter from Snapshot Harry himself, and a laughing compliment from his beautiful niece, Flora Dimwood, but nothing more. We have been told that Shakspere cut no great figure in his own time because his contemporaries were cast in much the same heroic mould,--greatness of soul being a rather common thing in Elizabethan days. For a similar reason, the heroes of Bret Harte are accepted by one another, by the minor characters, and, finally, by the author himself, with perfect composure and without visible surprise.

Bret Harte makes the reader feel that he is describing not simply a few men and women of n.o.bility, but a whole society, an epoch, of which he was himself a part; and this gives an element of distinction, even of immortality, to his stories. Had only one man died at Thermopylae, the fact would have been remembered by the world, but it would have lost its chief significance. The death of three hundred made it a typical act of the Spartan people. The time will come when California, now strangely unappreciative of its own past, and of the writer who preserved it, will look back upon the Pioneers as the modern Greek looks back upon Sparta and Athens.

THE END

Footnotes:

[1] The final _e_ was added to Henry Hart's name in the last years of his life, and the family tradition is that this was done to distinguish him from another Henry Hart who, like himself, was very active in the political campaign of the year 1844.

[2] For the spelling of Henry Hart's name, see the footnote on page 1.

[3] The _Crusade of the Excelsior_ contains some reminiscences of the voyage.

[4] The following account of a ride in a California stage is given by Borthwick: "All sense of danger was lost in admiration of the coolness and dexterity of the driver as he circ.u.mvented every obstacle without going one inch farther out of his way than was necessary to save us from perdition. With his right foot he managed a brake, and, clawing at the reins with both hands, he swayed his body from side to side, to preserve his equilibrium, as now on the right pair of wheels, now on the left, he cut the outside edge round a stump or a rock; and when coming to a spot where he was going to execute a difficult manoeuvre on a slanting piece of ground, he trimmed the wagon, as we would a small boat in a squall, and made us all crowd up to the weather side to prevent a capsize."

[5] _Cressy._ The paragraph quoted is only a part of the description.

[6] _A Phyllis of the Sierras._

[7] Pemberton's "Life of Bret Harte," page 102.

[8] Side-meat is the thin flank of a pig, cured like a ham. It was the staple article of food in the Southwest.

[9] This poem is included in the author's collected poems under the t.i.tle, _The Return of Belisarius_.

[10] Bret Harte in the General Introduction to his works.

[11] The proof-sheets of the _Heathen Chinee_ are preserved in the University of California, and they show many changes in Bret Harte's writing. See "Bret Harte's Country," an interesting ill.u.s.trated article by Will. M. Clemens, in "The Bookman," vol. xiii, p. 224.

[12] _The Society upon the Stanislaus_ first appeared in the "News Letter."

[13] See Hittell's "History of California." This book, the best and fullest on the subject, contains ample evidence of our author's accuracy.

[14] A Forty-Niner, as defined by the California Society of Pioneers, is an immigrant who, before midnight of December 31, 1849, was within the State of California, or on s.h.i.+pboard within three miles of the coast, that being the extent of the maritime jurisdiction of the State.

[15] There was, however, a miner of seventy at Sonoma who had left a wife and six children at home in the East; and on October 1, 1850, there arrived in Sacramento a veteran of the Revolutionary War, ninety years of age. He had come all the way from Illinois to seek the fortune which fate had hitherto denied him. Unfortunately, he was so feeble that it became necessary to send him to a hospital, and history does not record his subsequent career, if indeed he survived to have one.