The Life of Bret Harte, with Some Account of the California Pioneers

THE BELLS, SAN GABRIEL MISSION
Copyright, Detroit Photographic Co.

Each Mission had its garrison, for the intention was to overcome the natives by arms, if they should offer resistance to Holy Church. But the California Indians were a mild, inoffensive people, lacking the character and courage of the Indians who inhabited the Plains, and they quickly succumbed to that combination of spiritual authority and military force which the Padres wielded. At the end of the eighteenth century there were eighteen Missions in California, with forty Padres, and a neophyte Indian population of about thirteen thousand. But all this melted away when the Missions were secularized. In 1822 Mexico became independent of Spain, and thenceforth California was an outlying, neglected Mexican province. From that time the office-holding class of Mexicans were intriguing to get possession of the Mission lands, flocks and herds; and in 1833 they succeeded. The Missions were broken up, the Friars were deprived of all support; and many of the Christian Indians were reduced to a cruel slavery in which their labor was recompensed chiefly by intoxicating liquors. Little better was the fate of the others. Released from the strict discipline in which they had been held by the priests, they scattered in all directions, and quickly sank into a state of barbarism worse than their original state.

But the Missions were not absolutely deserted. In some cases a small monastic brotherhood still inhabited the buildings once thronged by soldiers and neophytes; and these men were of great service. They ministered to the spiritual needs of Spanish and Mexicans; they instructed the sons and daughters of the ranch-owners; they kept alive religion, and to some extent learning in the community; and, finally,—if one may say so without irreverence,—they contributed that Mediæval element which, otherwise, would have been the one thing lacking to complete the picturesque contrasts of Pioneer life. The Missions had been the last expression of the instinct of conquest upon the part of a decaying nation; and the Angelus that nightly rang from some fast-crumbling tower sounded the knell of Spanish rule in America.

CHAPTER XIII

Moreover, there was much friction between Bret Harte and the new publisher of the “Overland,” who had succeeded Mr. Roman; and finally, the moral and intellectual atmosphere of San Francisco was uncongenial to him. The early, generous, reckless days of California had passed, and now, especially in San Francisco, a commercial type of man was coming to the front. In The Argonauts of North Liberty, Bret Harte has depicted “Ezekiel Corwin, ... a shrewd, practical, self-sufficient and self-asserting unit of the more cautious later California emigration.”

More than once Bret Harte had run counter to California sentiment. As we have seen already, he was dismissed from his place as assistant Editor of a country newspaper because he had chivalrously espoused the cause of the friendless Indian. His first contribution to the “Overland,” as also we have seen, was that beautiful poem in which he laments the shortcomings of the city. Had the same thing been said in prose, the business community would certainly have resented it.

I know thy cunning and thy greed,
Thy hard, high lust, and wilful deed,

And all thy Glory loves to tell
Of specious gifts material.

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

And yet, with characteristic optimism, the poet looks forward to a time—

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

Later, but in the same year, Bret Harte incurred the enmity of some leading men in San Francisco by his gentle ridicule of their attempts to explain away—for the sake of Eastern capitalists—the destructive earthquake which shook the city in October, 1868. An old Californian thus relates the story: “As soon as the first panic at this disturbance had subsided, and while lesser shocks were still shaking the earth, some of the leading business men of San Francisco organized themselves into a sort of vigilance committee, and visited all the newspaper offices. They strictly enjoined that the story of the earthquake be treated with conservatism and understatement;—it would injure California if Eastern people were frightened away by exaggerated reports of el temblor; and a similar censorship was exercised over the press despatches sent out from San Francisco at that time.

“This greatly amused Bret Harte, and in his ‘Etc.’ in the November number of the ‘Overland,’ he treated the topic jocularly, saying that, according to the daily papers, the earthquake would have suffered serious damage if the people had only known it was coming. Harte’s pleasantry excited the wrath of some of the solid men of San Francisco, and when, not long after that, it was proposed to establish a chair of recent literature in the University of California and invite Bret Harte to occupy it, one of the board of regents, whose word was a power in the land, temporarily defeated the scheme by swearing roundly that a man who had derided the dispute between the earthquake and the newspapers should never have his support for a professorship. Subsequently, however, this difficulty was overcome, and Harte received his appointment.”

San Francisco was then a crude, commercial, restless town, caring little for art or literature, religious in a narrow way, confident of its own ideals, and as content with the stage through which it was passing as if human history had known, and human imagination could conceive, nothing higher or better.

In A Jack and Jill of the Sierras Bret Harte makes the youthful hero reproach himself by saying, or rather thinking, “He had forgotten them for those lazy, snobbish, purse-proud San Franciscans—for Bray had the miner’s supreme contempt for the moneyed trading classes.”

Bret Harte, whose view of life was mainly derived from eighteenth-century literature, shared that contempt, and expressed his own feeling, no doubt, in the sentiment which he attributes to the two girls in Devil’s Ford. “It seemed to them that the five millionaires of Devil’s Ford, in their radical simplicity and thoroughness, were perhaps nearer the type of true gentlemanhood than the citizens who imitated a civilization which they were unable yet to reach.”

No wonder, then, that, with tempting offers from the East, harassed with debts, disputes, cares and anxieties, disgusted with the atmosphere in which he was living,—no wonder Bret Harte felt that the hour for his departure had struck. Had he remained longer, his art would probably have suffered. A nature so impressionable as Bret Harte’s, so responsive, would insensibly have been affected by his surroundings, and the more so because he had in himself no strong, intellectual basis. His life was ruled by taste, rather than by conviction; and taste is a harder matter than conviction to preserve unimpaired. Of all the criticisms passed upon Bret Harte there has been nothing more true than Madame Van de Velde’s observations upon this point: “It was decidedly fortunate that he left California when he did, never to return to it; for his quick instinctive perceptions would have assimilated the new order of things to the detriment of his talent. As it was, his singularly retentive memory remained unbiassed by the transformation of the centres whence he drew his inspiration. California remained to him the Mecca of the Argonauts.”

Bret Harte left many warm friends in California, and they were much hurt, in some cases much angered, because they never had a word from him afterward. And yet it is extremely doubtful if he expected any such result. Certainly it was not intended. Kind and friendly feelings may still exist, although they are not expressed in letters. Bret Harte was indolent and procrastinating about everything except the real business of his life, and into that all his energy was poured. And there was another reason for the failure to communicate with his old friends, which has probably occurred to the Reader, and which is suggested in a private letter from one of the very persons who were aggrieved by his silence. “He went away with a sore heart. He had cares, difficulties, hurts here, many, and they may have embittered him against all thoughts of the past.”

This, no doubt, is true. The California chapter in Bret Harte’s life was closed, and it would have been painful for him to reopen it even by the writing of a letter. To say this, however, is not to acquit him of all blame in the matter.

The night before he left California a few of his more intimate friends gave him a farewell dinner which, in the light of all that followed, now wears an almost tragic aspect. It is thus described by one of the company: “A little party of us, eight, all working writers, met for a last symposium. It was one of the veritable noctes ambrosianae; the talk was intimate, heart-to-heart, and altogether of the shop. Naturally Harte was the centre of the little company, and he was never more fascinating and companionable. Day was breaking when the party dispersed, and the ties that bound our friend to California were sundered forever.”

Bret Harte left San Francisco in February, 1871.

Seventeen years before he had landed there, a mere boy, without money or prospects, without trade or profession. Now he was the most distinguished person in California, and his departure marked the close of an epoch for that State. Who can imagine the mingled feelings, half-triumphant, half-bitter, with which he must have looked back upon the slow-receding, white-capped Sierras that had bounded his horizon for those seventeen eventful years!

CHAPTER XIV

That Mr. Pemberton was right as to the “guide” being an afterthought, is proved by the following account, for which the author of this book is indebted to Mr. Francis F. Browne, at that time editor of the “Lakeside Monthly”: “I remember quite clearly Mr. Harte’s visit to my office,—a small,[84] rather youthful looking but alert young man of pleasing manners and conversation. We talked of the literary situation, and he seemed impressed with the opportunity offered by Chicago for a high-class literary enterprise. A day or two after his arrival here Mr. Harte was invited to a dinner at the house of a prominent citizen, to meet the gentlemen who were expected to become interested in the magazine project with him. Mr. Harte accepted the invitation. There is no doubt that he intended going, for he was in my office the afternoon of the dinner, and left about five o’clock, saying he was going home to dress for the occasion. But he did not appear at the dinner; nor did he send any explanation whatever. There being then no telephones, no explanation was given until the next day, and it was then to the effect that he had supposed a carriage would be sent for him, and had waited for it until too late to start. A friend of the author tells me that he had previously asked Mr. Harte whether he should call for him and take him to the dinner; but Harte assured him that this was not at all necessary, that he knew perfectly well how to find the place. The other members of the party, however, were on hand, and after waiting, with no little surprise, for the chief guest to appear, they proceeded to eat their dinner and disperse; but Mr. Harte and the project of a literary connection with him in Chicago no longer interested them.”

It is evident that for some reason, unknown outside of his own family, Bret Harte could not or would not attend the dinner, and simply remained away. The result was thus stated by the author himself in a letter to a friend in California: “I presume you have heard through the public press how nearly I became editor and part owner of the ‘Lakeside,’ and how the childishness and provincial character of a few of the principal citizens of Chicago spoiled the project.”

Bret Harte, therefore, continued Eastward, leaving Chicago on February 11, “stopping over” a few days in Syracuse, and reaching New York on February 20. His stories and poems—especially the Heathen Chinee—had lifted him to such a pinnacle of renown that his progress from the Pacific to the Atlantic was detailed by the newspapers with almost as much particularity as were the movements of Admiral Dewey upon his return to the United States after the capture of Manilla. The commotion thus caused extended even to England, and a London paper spoke humorously, but kindly, of the “Bret Harte circular,” which recorded the daily events of the author’s life.

“The fame of Bret Harte,” remarked the “New York Tribune,” as the railroad bore him toward that city, “has so brilliantly shot to the zenith as to render any comments on his poems a superfluous task. The verdict of the popular mind has only anticipated the voice of sound criticism.”

In New York Mr. Harte and his family went immediately to the house of his sister, Mrs. F. F. Knaufft, at number 16 Fifth Avenue; and with her they spent the greater part of the next two years. Three days after their arrival in New York the whole family went to Boston, Mr. Harte being engaged to dine with the famous Saturday Club, and being desirous of seeing his publishers. He arrived in Boston February 25, his coming having duly been announced by telegrams published in all the papers. Upon the morning of his arrival the “Boston Advertiser” had the following pleasant notice of the event. “He will have a hearty welcome from many warm friends to whom his face is yet strange; and after a journey across the continent, in which his modesty must have been tried almost as severely as his endurance by the praises showered upon him, we hope that he will find Boston so pleasant, even in the soberest dress which she wears during the year, that he may tarry long among us.”

In Boston, or rather at Cambridge, just across Charles River, Bret Harte was to be the guest of Mr. Howells, then the assistant Editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” James Russell Lowell being the Editor-in-Chief. Mr. Howells’ account[85] of this visit is so interesting, and throws so much light upon Bret Harte’s character, that it is impossible to refrain from quoting it here:—

“When the adventurous young Editor who had proposed being his host for Boston, while Harte was still in San Francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress Eastward, read of the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage fell, as if he perhaps had committed himself in too great an enterprise. Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this dear son of memory, great heir of fame, his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco? Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form, it must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into Boston for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded, and not trust to the horse-car and the express to get him and his baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous guest.

“However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the station, and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he were not even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were surely the most winning in the world. The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk trees, and patches of park and lawn. They found everything so fine, so refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the natural forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with them. Their host heard them with misgiving for the world of romance which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but a lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must always have felt California to be. It is different now, when people are every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home from the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of that great early day have gone back to live amidst the scenes which inspired and prospered them.

“Before they came in sight of the Editor’s humble roof he had mocked himself to his guest at his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less formidable than he had loomed afar. He accepted with joy the theory of passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as delightfully as it went on. From first to last Cambridge amused him as much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass. It has already been told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to him, he said, ‘Why, you couldn’t stand on your front porch and fire off your revolver without bringing down a two-volumer,’ and no doubt the pleasure he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild California he had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known it, had invented.

“Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in the tie-backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or incomings might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the homing pigeon’s flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest eye.

“It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out to, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him into his clothes, and then into the carriage, where a good deal of final buttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very late. He was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his patience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gayety from his whole person, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned.

“Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be said that it was worth while to have him on any terms. There was never a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest. It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the appreciation of another’s word which goes far to establish for a man the character of born humorist.

“It must be said of him that if he took the honors easily that were paid him, he took them modestly, and never by word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them. It was fine to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific sympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the incidents that ‘broke up the Society upon the Stanislaus.’”

Of his personal appearance at this time Mr. Howells says: “He was then, as always, a child of extreme fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore in a mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and fascinating forward thrust of the under-lip, its fine eyes and good forehead, then thickly covered with black hair which grew early white, while his mustache remained dark, the most enviable and consoling effect possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dyeing.”

It can easily be imagined, although Mr. Howells does not say so, that the atmosphere of Cambridge was far from being congenial to Bret Harte. University towns are notorious for taking narrow, academic views of life; and in Cambridge, at least during the period in question, the college circle was complicated by some remnants of colonial aristocracy that looked with suspicion upon any person or idea originating outside of England—Old or New. Bret Harte, as may be imagined, was not awed by his new and highly respectable surroundings. “It was a little fearsome,” writes Mr. Howells, “to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of ‘The Cathedral.’ But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who could say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious line picturing the bobolink as he

Runs down a brook of laughter in the air.

That, Bret Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and Lowell smoked, well content with the phrase. Yet they were not men to get on well together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte had none. Afterward, in London, they did not meet often or willingly.”

Bret Harte was taken to see Emerson at Concord, but probably without much profit on either side, though with some entertainment for the younger man. “Emerson’s smoking,” Mr. Howells relates, “amused Bret Harte as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how Emerson proposed having a ‘wet night’ with him, over a glass of sherry, and urged the wine upon his young friend with a hospitable gesture of his cigar.”

“Longfellow, alone,” Mr. Howells adds, “escaped the corrosive touch of his subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of his reverence. That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity of Longfellow’s he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow’s beautiful and perfected art which is almost a test of a critic’s own fineness.”

Bret Harte and Longfellow met at an evening party in Cambridge, and walked home together afterward; and when Longfellow died, in 1882, Bret Harte wrote down at some length his impressions of the poet.[86] It had been a characteristic New England day in early Spring, with rain followed by snow, and finally clearing off cold and still.

“I like to recall him at that moment, as he stood in the sharp moonlight of the snow-covered road; a dark mantle-like cloak hiding his evening dress, and a slouched felt hat covering his full silver-like locks. The conventional gibus or chimney-pot would have been as intolerable on that wonderful brow as it would be on a Greek statue, and I was thankful there was nothing to interrupt the artistic harmony of the most impressive vignette I ever beheld.... I think I was at first moved by his voice. It was a very deep baritone without a trace of harshness, but veiled and reserved as if he never parted entirely from it, and with the abstraction of a soliloquy even in his most earnest moments. It was not melancholy, yet it suggested one of his own fancies as it fell from his silver-fringed lips

‘Like the water’s flow
Under December’s snow.’

Yet no one had a quicker appreciation of humour, and his wonderful skill as a raconteur, and his opulence of memory, justified the saying of his friends that ‘no one ever heard him tell an old story or repeat a new one.’... Speaking of the spiritual suggestions in material things, I remember saying that I thought there must first be some actual resemblance, which unimaginative people must see before the poet could successfully use them. I instanced the case of his own description of a camel as being ‘weary’ and ‘baring his teeth,’ and added that I had seen them throw such infinite weariness into that action after a day’s journey as to set spectators yawning. He seemed surprised, so much so that I asked him if he had seen many—fully believing he had travelled in the desert. He replied simply, ‘No,’ that he had ‘only seen one once in the Jardin des Plantes.’ Yet in that brief moment he had noticed a distinctive fact, which the larger experience of others fully corroborated.”

Mr. Pemberton also contributes this interesting reminiscence: “With his intimate friends Bret Harte ever delighted to talk enthusiastically of Longfellow, and would declare that his poems had greatly influenced his thoughts and life. Hiawatha he declared to be ‘not only a wonderful poem, but a marvellously true descriptive narrative of Indian life and lore.’ I think he knew it all by heart.”

Bret Harte and his family stayed a week with Mr. Howells, and one event was the Saturday Club dinner which Mr. Howells has described. “Harte was the life of a time which was perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul. The truth is, there was nothing but careless stories, carelessly told, and jokes and laughing, and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be.”

One of the guests, unused to the society of literary men, Mr. Howells says, had looked forward with some awe to the occasion, and Bret Harte was amused at the result. “‘Look at him!’ he said from time to time. ‘This is the dream of his life’; and then shouted and choked with fun at the difference between the occasion, and the expectation he would have imagined in his commensal’s mind.” The “commensal,” as appears from a subsequent essay by Mr. Howells, was Mark Twain, who, like Bret Harte, had recently arrived from the West. Somehow, the account of this dinner as given by Mr. Howells leaves an unpleasant impression.

The atmosphere of Boston was hardly more congenial to Bret Harte than that of Cambridge. Boston was almost as provincial as San Francisco, though in a different way. The leaders of society were men and women who had grown up with the bourgeois traditions of a rich, isolated commercial and colonial town; and they had the same feeling of horror for a man from the West that they had for a Methodist. The best part of Boston was the serious, well-educated, conscientious element, typified by the Garrison family; but this element was much less conspicuous in 1871 than it had been earlier. The feeling for art and literature, also, was neither so widespread nor so deep as it had been in the thirty-five years preceding the Civil War. Moreover, the peculiar faults of the Boston man, his worship of respectability, his self-satisfied narrowness, his want of charity and sympathy,—these were the very faults that especially jarred upon Bret Harte, and it is no wonder that the man from Boston makes a poor appearance in his stories.

“It was a certain Boston lawyer, replete with principle, honesty, self-discipline, statistics, authorities, and a perfect consciousness of possessing all these virtues, and a full recognition of their market values. I think he tolerated me as a kind of foreigner, gently waiving all argument on any topic, frequently distrusting my facts, generally my deductions, and always my ideas. In conversation he always appeared to descend only halfway down a long moral and intellectual staircase, and always delivered his conclusions over the balusters.”[87]

And yet, with characteristic fairness, Bret Harte does not fail to portray the good qualities of the Boston man. The Reader will remember the sense of honor, the courage and energy, and even—under peculiar circumstances—the capacity to receive new ideas, shown by John Hale, the Boston man who figures in Snow-Bound at Eagle’s, and who was of the same type as the lawyer just described.

Henry Hart and his family spent a year in Boston when Bret Harte was about the age of four, but, contrary to the general impression, Bret Harte never lived there afterward, although he once spent a few weeks in the city as the guest of the publisher, Mr. J. R. Osgood, then living on Pinckney Street, in the old West End. A small section of the north side of Pinckney Street forms the northern end of Louisburg Square; and this square, as it happens, is the only place in Boston which Bret Harte depicts. Here lived Mr. Adams Rightbody, as appears from the brief but unmistakable description of the place in The Great Deadwood Mystery. A telegram to Mr. Rightbody had been sent at night from Tuolumne County, California; and its progress and delivery are thus related: “The message lagged a little at San Francisco, laid over half an hour at Chicago, and fought longitude the whole way, so that it was past midnight when the ‘all-night’ operator took it from the wires at Boston. But it was freighted with a mandate from the San Francisco office; and a messenger was procured, who sped with it through dark, snow-bound streets, between the high walls of close-shuttered, rayless houses to a certain formal square, ghostly with snow-covered statues. Here he ascended the broad steps of a reserved and solid-looking mansion, and pulled a bronze bell-knob that, somewhere within those chaste recesses, after an apparent reflective pause, coldly communicated the fact that a stranger was waiting without—as he ought.”

That Bret Harte made no mistake in selecting Louisburg Square as the residence of that intense Bostonian, Mr. Rightbody, will be seen from Mr. Lindsay Swift’s description in his “Literary Landmarks of Boston.” “This retired spot is the quintessence of the older Boston. Without positive beauty, its dignity and repose save it from any suggestion of ugliness. Here once bubbled up, it is fondly believed, in the centre of the iron-railed enclosure, that spring of water with which First Settler William Blackstone helped to coax Winthrop and his followers over the river from Charlestown. There is no monument to Blackstone, here or anywhere, but in this significant spot stand two statues, one to Columbus and one to Aristides the Just, both of Italian make, and presented to the city by a Greek merchant of Boston.”

After the week’s stay in Cambridge, with, of course, frequent excursions to Boston, Bret Harte and his family returned to New York. The proposals made to him by publishing houses in that city were, Mr. Howells reports, “either mortifyingly mean or insultingly vague”; and a few days later Bret Harte accepted the offer of James R. Osgood and Company, then publishers of “The Atlantic,” to pay him ten thousand dollars during the ensuing year for whatever he might write in the twelve months, be it much or little. This offer, a munificent one for the time, was made despite the astonishing fact that of the first volume of Bret Harte’s stories, issued by the same publishers six months before, only thirty-five hundred copies had then been sold. The arrangement did not, of course, require Mr. Harte’s residence in Boston, and for the next two Winters he remained with his sister in New York, spending the first Summer at Newport.

It has often been stated that the rather indefinite contract which the publishers made with Bret Harte turned out badly for them, and that he wrote but a single story, as it is sometimes put, during the whole year. But the slightest investigation will show that these statements do our author great injustice. The year of the contract began with July, 1871, and ended with June, 1872; and the two volumes of the “Atlantic” covering that period, No. 28 and No. 29, contain the following stories by Bret Harte:—

The Poet of Sierra Flat, Princess Bob and Her Friends, The Romance of Madroño Hollow, How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar;

And the following poems: A Greyport Legend, A Newport Romance, Concepcion de Arguello, Grandmother Tenterden, The Idyl of Battle Hollow.

Surely, this was giving full measure, and it represents a year of very hard work, unless indeed it was partly done in California. One of the stories, How Santa Clans Came to Simpson’s Bar, is, as every reader of Bret Harte will admit, among the best of his tales, inferior only to Tennessee’s Partner, The Luck, and The Outcasts.

It is noticeable that all these “Atlantic Monthly” stories deal with California; and an amusing illustration of Bret Harte’s literary habits may be gathered from the fact that in every case his story brings up the rear of the magazine, although it would naturally have been given the place of honor. Evidently the manuscript was received by the printers at the last possible moment. One of the poems, the Newport Romance, seems to lack those patient, finishing touches which it was his custom to bestow.

For the next seven years of Bret Harte’s life there is not much to record. During the greater part of the time New York was his winter home. From his Summer at Newport resulted the poems already mentioned, A Greyport Legend and A Newport Romance. Hence also a scene or two in Mrs. Skaggs’s Husbands, published in 1872. But the poems deal with the past, and neither in them nor in any story did the author attempt to describe that luxurious, exotic life, grafted upon the Atlantic Coast, over which other romancers have fondly lingered.

Two or three Summers were spent by Bret Harte and his family in Morristown, New Jersey. Here he wrote Thankful Blossom, a pretty story of Revolutionary times, describing events which occurred at the very spot where he was living, but lacking the strength and originality of his California tales. “Thankful Blossom” was not an imaginary name, but the real name of one of his mother’s ancestors, a member of the Truesdale family; and it should be mentioned that before writing this story Bret Harte, with characteristic thoroughness, made a careful study of the place where Washington had his headquarters at Morristown, and of the surrounding country.

One other Summer the Harte family spent at New London, in Connecticut, and still another at Cohasset, a seashore town about twenty miles south of Boston. Here he became the neighbor and friend of the actors, Lawrence Barrett and Stuart Robson, for the latter of whom he wrote the play called Two Men of Sandy Bar. This was produced in September, 1876, at the Union Square Theatre in New York, but, although not a failure, it did not attain permanent success. The principal characters were Sandy Morton, played by Charles R. Thorne, and Colonel Starbottle, taken by Stuart Robson. John Oakhurst, the Yankee Schoolmistress (from The Idyl of Red Gulch), a Chinaman, an Australian convict, and other figures taken from Bret Harte’s stories, also appeared in the piece. The part of Hop Sing, the Chinaman, was played by Mr. C. T. Parsloe, and with so much success that afterward, in collaboration with Mark Twain, Bret Harte wrote a melodrama for Mr. Parsloe called Ah Sin; but this, too, failed to keep the boards for long.

Mr. Pemberton speaks of another play in respect to which Bret Harte sought the advice of Dion Boucicault; but this appears never to have been finished. It was a cause of annoyance and disgust to Bret Harte after he had left this country, that a version of M’liss converting that beautiful story into a vulgar “song and dance” entertainment was produced on the stage and in its way became a great success. Bret Harte was unable to prevent these performances in the United States, but he did succeed, by means of a suit, threatened if not actually begun, in preventing their repetition in England. A very inferior theatrical version of Gabriel Conroy, also, was brought out in New York without the author’s consent, and much against his will.

Bret Harte had a lifelong desire to write a notable play, and made many attempts in that direction. One of them succeeded. With the help of his friend and biographer, Mr. Pemberton, he dramatized his story, The Judgment of Bolinas Plain; and the result, a melodrama in three acts, called Sue, was produced in New York in 1896, and was well received both by the critics and the audience. Afterward the play was successfully performed on a tour of the United States; and in 1898 it was brought out in London, and was equally successful there. The heroine’s part was taken by Miss Annie Russell, of whom Mr. Pemberton gracefully says, “How much the writers owed to her charming personality and her deft handling of a difficult part they freely and gratefully acknowledged.” But even this play has not become a classic.

Of his experience as a fellow-worker with Bret Harte, Mr. Pemberton gives this interesting account. “Infinite painstaking, I soon learned, was the essence of his system. Of altering and re-altering he was never tired, and though it was sometimes a little disappointing to find that what we had considered as finished over-night, had, at his desire, to be reconsidered in the morning, the humorous way in which he would point out how serious situations might, by a twist of the pen, or by incompetent acting, create derisive laughter, compensated for double or even treble work. No one realized more keenly than he did that to most things there is a comic as well as a serious side, and it seemed to make him vastly happy to put his finger on his own vulnerable spots.”

Mr. Pemberton speaks of several other plays written by Bret Harte and himself, and of one written by Bret Harte alone for Mr. J. L. Toole. But none of these was ever acted. It is needless to say that Bret Harte loved the theatre and had a keen appreciation of good acting. In a letter to Mr. Pemberton, he spoke of John Hare’s “wonderful portrayal of the Duke of St. Olpherts in ‘The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.’ He is gallantly attempting to relieve Mrs. Thorpe of the tray she is carrying, but of course lacks the quickness, the alertness, and even the actual energy to do it, and so follows her with delightful simulation of assistance all over the stage, while she carries it herself, he pursuing the form and ignoring the performance. It is a wonderful study.”

Bret Harte had not been long in the East, probably he had not been there a month, before he began to feel the pressure of those money difficulties from which neither he, nor his father before him, was ever free. Doubtless he would often have been at a loss for ready money, even if he had possessed the wealth of all the Indies. He left debts in California, and very soon had acquired others in New York and Boston.

Mr. Noah Brooks, who was intimate with Bret Harte in New York as well as in San Francisco, wrote, after his death: “I had not been long in the city before I found that Harte had already incurred many debts, chiefly for money borrowed. When I said to Bowles[88] that I was anxious on Harte’s account that a scandal should not come from this condition of things, Bowles said, with his good-natured cynicism, ‘Well, it does seem to me that there ought to be enough rich men in New York to keep Harte a-going.’

“One rich man, a banker and broker, with an ambition to be considered a patron of the arts and literature, made much of the new literary lion, and from him Harte obtained a considerable sum, $500 perhaps, in small amounts varying from $5 to $50 at a time. One New Year’s day Harte, in as much wrath as he was ever capable of showing, spread before me a note from our friend Dives in which the writer, who, by the way, was not reckoned a generous giver, reminded Harte that this was the season of the year when business men endeavored to enter a new era with a clean page in the ledger; and, in order to enable his friend H. to do that, he took the liberty of returning to him sundry I. O. U.’s which his friend H. had given him from time to time. ‘Damn his impudence!’ exclaimed the angry artist.

“‘What are you going to do about it?’ I asked, with some amusement. ‘Going to do about it!’ he answered with much emphasis on the first word. ‘Going! I have made a new note for the full amount of these and have sent it to him with an intimation that I never allow pecuniary matters to trespass on the sacred domain of friendship.’ Poor Dives was denied the satisfaction of giving away a bad debt.”

“Once, while we were waiting on Broadway for a stage to take him down town, he said, as the lumbering vehicle hove in sight, ‘Lend me a quarter; I haven’t money enough to pay my stage fare.’ Two or three weeks later, when I had forgotten the incident, we stood in the same place waiting for the same stage, and Harte, putting a quarter of a dollar in my hand, said: ‘I owe you a quarter and there it is. You hear men say that I never pay my debts, but [this with a chuckle] you can deny the slander.’ While he lived in Morristown, N. J., it was said that he pocketed postage stamps sent to him for his autographs, and these applications were so numerous that with them he paid his butcher’s bill. A bright lady to whom this story was told declared that the tale had been denied, ‘on the authority of the butcher.’ Nobody laughed more heartily at this sally than Harte did when it came to his ears.”

“Never,” says Mr. Howells, to the same effect, “was any man less a poseur. He made simply and helplessly known what he was at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself.” And then Mr. Howells relates the following incident: “In the course of events which in his case were so very human, it came about on a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given, and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where Harte dined, and in the ante-room at the lecture-hall, and on the platform where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and untroubled charm. He was indeed the only one privy to the law’s presence who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier time ventured to suggest, ‘Well, Harte, this is the old literary tradition: this is the Fleet business over again,’ he joyously smote his thigh and cried out: ‘Yes; that’s it; we can see it all now,—the Fleet Prison with Goldsmith, Johnson, and all the rest of the old masters in a bunch!’”

It is highly probable that in his own mind, though perhaps half unconsciously, Bret Harte excused himself by the “old literary tradition” for his remissness in paying his debts. And for such a feeling on his part there would be, the present writer makes bold to say, some justification. It is a crude method of collecting from the community a small part of the compensation due to the author for the pleasure which he has conferred upon the world in general. The method, it must be admitted, is imperfectly just. The particular butcher or grocer to whom a particular poet is indebted may have a positive distaste for polite literature, and might naturally object to paying for books which other people read. Nevertheless there is an element of wild justice in the attitude of the poet. The world owes him a living, and if the world does not pay its debt, why, then, the debt may fairly be levied upon the world in such manner as is possible. This at least is to be said: the extravagance or improvidence of a man like Bret Harte stands upon a very different footing from that of an ordinary person. We should be ashamed not to show some consideration, even in money matters, for the soldier who has served his country in time of war; and the romancer who has contributed to the entertainment of the race is entitled to a similar indulgence.

Soon after Bret Harte’s arrival in the East his friends urged him to give public lectures on the subject of life in California. The project was extremely distasteful to him, for he had an inborn horror of notoriety,—even of publicity; and this feeling, it may be added, is fully shared by the other members of his family. But his money difficulties were so great, and the prospect held out to him was so flattering that he finally consented. He prepared two lectures; the first, entitled The Argonauts, is now printed, with some changes, as the Introduction to the second volume of his collected works. This lecture was delivered at Albany, New York, on December 3, 1872, at Tremont Temple in Boston on the thirteenth of the same month, on December 16 at Steinway Hall in New York, and at Washington on January 7, 1873.

From Washington the lecturer wrote to his wife: “The audience was almost as quick and responsive as the Boston folk, and the committee-men, to my great delight, told me they made money by me.... I called on Charlton at the British Minister’s, and had some talk with Sir Edward Thornton, which I have no doubt will materially affect the foreign policy of England. If I have said anything to promote a better feeling between the two countries I am willing he should get the credit of it. I took a carriage and went alone to the Capitol of my country. I had expected to be disappointed, but not agreeably. It is really a noble building,—worthy of the republic,—vast, magnificent, sometimes a little weak in detail, but in intent always high-toned, grand and large principled.”[89]

The same lecture was delivered at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on January 9, 1873, and at Ottawa and Montreal in March of that year.

From Montreal he wrote to Mrs. Harte as follows:[90]—