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

CHAPTER XIX

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

The Heathen Chinee, little as Bret Harte himself thought of it, is certainly one of these. This poem, says Mr. James Douglas, “is merely an anecdote, an American anecdote, not more deeply humorous than a hundred other American anecdotes. But it is cast in an imperishable mould of style.... Mr. Swinburne’s noble rhythm sang itself into his soul, and he gave it forth again in an incongruously comic theme. The rhythm of a melancholy dirge became the rhythm of duplicity in the garb of innocence. The sadness and the sighing of Meleagar became the bland iniquity of Ah Sin, and the indignantly injured depravity of Bill Nye. It was a miracle of humorous counterpoint, a marvel of incongruously associated ideas.”

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

Mr. Douglas goes on to say that the Atalanta metre failed in the poem called Dow’s Flat, “because there was no exquisite discord between the sound and the sense, between the rhyme and the reason.”

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

For a blow of his pick
Sorter caved in the side,
And he looked and turned sick,
Then he trembled and cried.
For you see the dern cuss had struck—“Water?”—Beg your parding, young man,—there you lied!

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

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

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

Waltz in, waltz in, ye little kids, and gather round my knee,
And drop them books and first pot-hooks, and hear a yarn from me.
I kin not sling a fairy tale of Jinnys fierce and wild,
For I hold it is unchristian to deceive a simple child;
But as from school yer driftin’ by, I thowt ye’d like to hear
Of a “Spelling Bee” at Angels that we organized last year.

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

You think it ain’t true about Ilsey? Well, I guess I know girls, and I say
There’s nothing I see about Ilsey to show she likes you, anyway!
I know what it means when a girl who has called her cat after one boy
Goes and changes its name to another’s. And she’s done it—and I wish you joy!

THE HOME OF “TRUTHFUL JAMES,” JACKASS FLAT, TUOLUMNE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
Copyright, Century Co.

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

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

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 worship 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 passions, 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 Dickens. 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 passed 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 God
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 “Saturday Review”—the good old, ferocious Saturday—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 classed, 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 classed 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 Dickens is an illustration:—

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

Ruskin somewhere analyzes 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 passage 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 Cañon, 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-class 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 passionless, crowned with remoter passionless stars.”

Nature, thank God, 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 Thoreau, “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 grass, 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 associated 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 companionship. He felt again, in that breath, that strange sense of freedom, that mystic touch of partnership 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 circumstances 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 class, 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

One of Bret Harte’s Western girls speaks of hunting for the plant known as “Old Man” (southernwood), because she wanted it for “smellidge.” “Smellidge” has the appearance of being a good word, and it was formerly used in New England and the West, but it is excluded from modern dictionaries.

Some expressions which might be regarded as original with Bret Harte were really Pioneer terms of Western or Southern use. “Johnson’s Old Woman,” for “Johnson’s wife” was the ordinary phrase in Missouri, Indiana, Alabama, and doubtless all over the West and South. Thus a Missouri farmer is quoted as saying: “My old woman is nineteen years old to-day.” “You know fust-rate she’s dead” is another quaint expression used by Bret Harte, but not invented by him, for this use of “fust-rate” in the sense of very well was not uncommon in the West. In the poem called Jim, there are two or three words which the casual reader might suppose to be inventions of the poet.

What makes you star’,
You over thar?
Can’t a man drop
’S glass in yer shop
But you must r’ar?

This use of r’ar or rear, meaning to become angry, to rave, was frequent in Arkansas and Indiana, if not elsewhere.

The next stanza runs:—

Dead!
Poor—little—Jim!
Why, thar was me,
Jones, and Bob Lee,
Harry and Ben,—
No-account men:
Then to take him!

“No-account” in this sense was a common Western term; and so was “ornery,” from ordinary, meaning inferior, which occurs in the next and final stanza.

When Richelieu Sharpe excused himself for wearing his best “pants” on the ground that his old ones had “fetched away in the laig,” he was amply justified by the dialect of his place and time. So when little Johnny Medliker complained of the parson that “he hez been nigh onter pullin’ off my arm,” he used the current Illinois equivalent for “nearly.” Mr. Hays’ direction to his daughter, “Ye kin put some things in my carpet-bag agin the time when the sled comes round,” was also strictly in the vernacular.

No verbal error is more common than that of using superfluous prepositions. “To feed up the horses,” for instance, may still be heard almost anywhere in rural New England. On the same principle, Mr. Saunders, in The Transformation of Buckeye Camp, ruefully admits that he and his companion were thrown out of the saloon, “with two shots into us, like hounds ez we were.” This substitution of into for in, though common in the West, is probably now extinct in the Eastern States; but a purist, writing in the year 1814, quoted the following use as current at that time in New York: “I have the rheumatism into my knees.”

A few words were taken by the Pioneers from the Spanish. “Savey,” a corruption of sabe, was one of these, and Bret Harte employed it. “Hedn’t no savey, hed Briggs.”

The wealth of dialect in Bret Harte’s stories is not strange, considering that it was culled from Pioneers who represented every part of the country. But, it may be asked, how could there be such a thing as a California dialect:—all the Pioneers could not have learned to talk alike, coming as they did from every State in the Union! The answer is, first, that, in the main, the dialect of the different States was the same, being derived chiefly from the same source, that is, from England, directly or indirectly; and, secondly, the dialect of what we now call the Middle West—of Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois—tended to predominate on the Pacific Slope, because the Pioneers from that part of the country were in the majority. It is almost impossible to find a dialect word used in one Western State, and not in another.

There are, however, some Western, and more especially some Southern words which never became domiciled in New England. The word allow or ’low, in the sense of declare or state, is one of these, and Bret Harte often used it. “Then she ’lowed I’d better git up and git, and shet the door to. Then I ’lowed she might tell me what was up—through the door.”

And here is another example:—

“Rowley Meade—him ez hed his skelp pulled over his eyes at one stroke, foolin’ with a she-bear over on Black Mountain—allows it would be rather monotonous in him attemptin’ any familiarities with her.”

(“Rowley Meade,” by the way, is an example of Bret Harte’s felicity in the choice of names. No common fate could be reserved for one bearing a name like that.)

Lowell employs the word allow in its corrupted sense in the “Biglow Papers”; but he adds in a footnote that it was a use not of New England, but of the Southern and Middle States; and to prove the antiquity of the corruption he cites an instance of it in Hakluyt under the date of 1558.

“Cahoots” is another example. When the warlike Jim Hooker said to Clarence, “Young fel, you and me are cahoots in this thing,” he was using a common Western expression derived remotely from the old English word cahoot, signifying a company or partnership, but not known, it is believed, in New England.

“When we rose the hill,” “put to” (i. e. harness) the horse, “cavortin’ round here in the dew,” and “What yer yawpin’ at ther’?” are found in almost every State, East or West. But “I ain’t kicked a fut sens I left Mizzouri” is a Southern expression. “Blue mange” for blanc mange is probably original with Bret Harte.

One of Bret Harte’s most effective dialect words is “gait” in the sense of habit, or manner. “He never sat down to a square meal but what he said, ‘If old Uncle Quince was only here now, boys, I’d die happy.’ I leave it to you, gentlemen, if that wasn’t Jackson Wells’s gait all the time.” And Rupert Filgee, impatient at Uncle Ben Dabney’s destructive use of pens, exclaimed, “Look here, what you want ain’t a pen, but a clothes-pin and split nail! That’ll about jibe with your dilikit gait.”

“Gait” is a very old term in thieves’ lingo, meaning occupation or calling, from which the transition to “habit” is easy; and it is interesting to observe that in one place Bret Harte uses the word in a sense which is about half-way between the two meanings. Thus, when Mr. McKinstry was severely wounded in the duel, he apologized for requesting the attendance of a physician by saying, “I don’t gin’rally use a doctor, but this yer is suthin’ outside the old woman’s regular gait.” Bret Harte’s adoption of the word as a Pioneer expression is confirmed by Richard Malcolm Johnston, the recognized authority on Georgia dialect, for he makes one of his characters say:—

“After she got married, seem like he got more and more restless and fidgety in his mind, and in his gaits in general.”

The ridiculous charge has been made that Bret Harte’s dialect is not Californian or even American, but is simply cockney English. The only reason ever given for this statement is that Bret Harte uses the word “which” in its cockney sense, and that this use was never known in America.

Which I wish to remark,
And my language is plain,

is the most familiar instance, and others might be cited. Thus, in Mr. Thompson’s Prodigal we have this dialogue between the father of the prodigal and a grave-digger:—

“‘Did you ever in your profession come across Char-les Thompson?’

“‘Thompson be damned,’ said the grave-digger, with great directness.

“‘Which, if he hadn’t religion, I think he is,’ responded the old man.”

This use of “which” is indeed now identified with the London cockney, but it may still be heard in the eastern counties of England, whence, no doubt, it was imported to this country. Though far from common in the United States, it is used, according to the authorities cited below, in the mountainous parts of Virginia,[110] in West Virginia,[111] in the mountain regions of Kentucky,[112] especially in Eastern Kentucky,[113] and in the western part of Arkansas.[114]

Professor Edward A. Allen of the University of Missouri says that this use of “which” is “not Southern, but Western.”

Moreover, upon this point also we can cite the authority of Richard Malcolm Johnston, for the cockney use of “which” frequently occurs in his tales of Middle Georgia; as, for instance, in these sentences:—

“And which I wouldn’t have done that nohow in the world ef it could be hendered.”

“Which a man like you that’s got no wife.”

“Howbeever, as your wife is Nancy Lary, which that she’s the own dear sister o’ my wife.”

“And which I haven’t a single jubous doubt that, soon as the breath got out o’ her body, she went to mansion in the sky same as a bow-’n’-arrer, or even a rifle-bullet.”

Another authority on this point is the well-known writer of stories, Alfred Henry Lewis, a native of Arkansas. In his tales we find these expressions:—

“Which his baptismal name is Lafe.”

“Which if these is your manners.”

“Which, undoubted, the barkeeps is the hardest-worked folks in camp.”

“Which it is some late for night before last, but it’s jest the shank of the evening for to-night.”

No writer ever knew Virginia better than did the late George W. Bagby, and he attributes the cockney “which” to a backwoodsman from Charlotte County in that State. “And what is this part of the country called? Has it any particular name?”

“To be sho. Right here is Brilses, which it is a presink; but this here ridge ar’ called ‘Verjunce Ridge.’”

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 astonishing 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 Dick, 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 repetition 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 passage 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 pronunciation. What governs the dialect of any time and place? Is it purely accidental that the London cockney 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 pronunciation? 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 assign to Yuba Bill, and to none other, this remark: “I knew the partikler style of damn fool that you was, and expected no better.”

CHAPTER XXI

“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 passion 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 Renée 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 nobleman, 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, shimmering 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, shining 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 Dick 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-spaced, 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 phosphorescence, 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 shining 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 Cass Beard gazing at her from his invisible corner. “How much softer her face looked in the moonlight!—How moist her eyes were—actually shining 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 companionship 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.

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 substitute 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 passion-fringed lashes.”

No less beautiful in style are these lines:—

Above the tumult of the cañon 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 passage 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 fashion. 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 Dickens, 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 Dickens 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 Dickens 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 Dickens-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 Washington. The following paragraph is almost a burlesque of Dickens: “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 nobody for an instant conceived that it ever, under any circumstances, 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 Dickens-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 passage 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 Dickens certainly did; but this charge seems to be an injustice. A scene in Gabriel Conroy represents Arthur Poinsett as calmly explaining to Doña 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 passage 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 Dickens, 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 Dickens occur only in a few passages of a few stories. When Bret Harte nodded, he wrote like Dickens. 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 Dickens. The reading of Dickens 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 Dickens 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 Dickens, coming at the early, plastic period of his life, may not have turned the scale?

That Dickens surpassed 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 Dickens 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. Dickens, moreover, despite his vulgarisms, despite even the cant into which he occasionally falls, had a depth of sincerity and conviction that can hardly be asserted for Bret Harte. Dickens’ 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 Dickens 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 classic writer. It was said of Dickens 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 attitude toward his characters; not simply the fact that he blames or praises them, or abstains from doing so, but his unspoken attitude, his real feeling, disclosed between the lines. Too much admiration on the part of the author is fatal to a classic 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 attitude of frank admiration which he assumes is the natural attitude 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.