Vastly different from all this is the attitude of Bret Harte. He takes it for granted that the Pioneers in general had the instincts of gentlemen and the courage of heroes. His characters are represented not as exceptional California men, but as ordinary California men placed in rather exceptional circumstances. Brave as they are, they are never brave enough to surprise him. He is their equal. He never boasts of them nor about them. On the contrary, he gives the impression that the whole California Pioneer Society was constructed upon the same lofty plane,—as indeed it was, barring a few renegades.
When Edward Brice, the young expressman, “set his white lips together, and with a determined face, and unfaltering step,” walked straight toward the rifle held in Snapshot Harry’s unerring hands, the incident astonishes nobody,—except perhaps the reader. Certainly it does not astonish the persons who witness or the author who records it. It evokes a little good-humored banter from Snapshot Harry himself, and a laughing compliment from his beautiful niece, Flora Dimwood, but nothing more. We have been told that Shakspere cut no great figure in his own time because his contemporaries were cast in much the same heroic mould,—greatness of soul being a rather common thing in Elizabethan days. For a similar reason, the heroes of Bret Harte are accepted by one another, by the minor characters, and, finally, by the author himself, with perfect composure and without visible surprise.
Bret Harte makes the reader feel that he is describing not simply a few men and women of nobility, but a whole society, an epoch, of which he was himself a part; and this gives an element of distinction, even of immortality, to his stories. Had only one man died at Thermopylæ, the fact would have been remembered by the world, but it would have lost its chief significance. The death of three hundred made it a typical act of the Spartan people. The time will come when California, now strangely unappreciative of its own past, and of the writer who preserved it, will look back upon the Pioneers as the modern Greek looks back upon Sparta and Athens.
THE END
INDEX