short, but their brief extent suffices to ing things-the power of telling an entire possess us of all there is worth knowing of story or of depicting a whole state of things the sturdy sentiment that underlies them. in a very few words-which brought to Mr. Penelope's tirade is a capital picture of the Harte the reputation of having created a way in which a woman uses a scolding distinctive American literature. This trait tongue to hide the treacherous softness that appears with great pathetic effect in the is in her heart; and the climax, in which it former poem, where, on top of all the rest of appears that she was not only not in earnest, his bad luck, Dow's wife and five children but ready to accept Joe then and there, will come in on him from the States. touch a chord of experience in the heart of more than one man. It is less hacknied than the others, and is so good in illustration as to justify quotation. "So you've kem 'yer again, And one answer won't do? That I've struck, it is you. O Sal! 'yer's that derned fool from Simpson's cavor- "Kem in, ef you will. Them theer cushings this year. For that cheer was my old man's, Joe Simpson, and they don't make such men about 'yer. "He was tall, was my Jack, And as strong as a tree. And you come a courtin' his widder! Lord! where "You'd fill my Jack's place? And a man of your size, With no baird to his face Nor a snap to his eyes. "It was rough-mighty rough; But the boys they stood by, And the old woman-well, she did washing, and took Equally happy is the way in which the status of society at Poverty Flat is fixed in one line written by "Miss Jo," after her translation to New York society, to her lover at home in California, reminding him of a ball at the "Fork": "Of Harrison's barn with its muster Of flags festooned over the wall; This feature redeems many of the later And nary— Sho! thar! I was foolin'-I was, Joe, work, and make a distinct addition to serio for sartain-don't rise. "Sit down. Law! why, sho! I'm as weak as a gal. Sal! Don't you go, Joe, Or I'll faint-sure I shall. Sit down-anywheer, wheer you like, Joe-in that cheer if you choose-Lord! where's Sal?"" "Jim" displays a wealth of pathos in the presentation of the strong friendships that bound together the miners of those days; and "Chiquita" is remarkable for its delightful use of the modern hexameter. In "Dow's Flat" and "Her Letter" occur good instances of the peculiar method of present comic literature. They are positively unique in their way; there is nothing in literature with which to test them. Bret Harte has been compared to Lowell; but the "Biglow Papers," whether as satires or word pictures of life and manners, are less purely artistic than the best work of the western poet. One thinks twice of the rareness of real originality before venturing an estimate of their rank and duration; and I observe that Mr. Howells puts no mean limit on them. It is no little in favor of mass judgment that these dialect poems first brought Mr. Harte the reputation among those who have literary weight, which his more ambitious efforts, in other lines, had failed to do for him. From the date of publication of "The Heathen Chinee" his success as a poet has been assured. His parodies are good-natured hits at the styles of different bards, and bear the same general relation to the poems that the "Condensed Novels" do to his prose. They are earlier work and of rather uneven merit. The address "To the Pliocene Skull"-a very clever imitation of Holmes's "De Sauty"—is the best, and like most of the others easily recognizable. It is hard to understand why Mr. Harte should keep these parodies in his editions when he has discarded so much that is better in giving them a place. The imitations in some cases are not bad, and the mannerisms of Poe and other authors are deftly handled. They are mainly interesting in that they show that Mr. Harte is uneven; but as one does not care to perpetuate this fact, the probabilities are that sooner or later they will be relegated by the author to their place as youthful effusions, and as a part of Mr. Harte's past be thenceforth forgotten. "Let me of my heart take counsel; sounding drum." The heart, trembling with the thought of standing where bullets are whistling, and brothers falling at its side, tempts itself into believing that victory may bring only greater ills, and yet through everything hears persistent the throb and hum, as "The drum Answered Come! Bret Harte's dialect diversions, so cramped in range, could not have been made Death shall reap the braver harvest,' said the solemn without some supplemental work in the way of legitimate song. His American poetry will always be overshadowed by his Californian verse; but he has shown himself quite equal to delighting us all in English of perfect saneness and sobriety. His earlier work the Spanish legends and the war lyrics are noticeable for their taste and vigor. He has a free hand as a poet. Satire, dialect verse and humor, seem to flow Better there in death united than in life a recreantfrom him as naturally as his most delicate fancies. He seldom becomes subjective; it is not consistent with his mental equipment; and he does not always make truth the object of his serious verse. Some of the long poems lack completeness, and many betray a touch still somewhat groping. Thoroughly and admirably good is "John Burns of Gettysburg," and alone would serve to make the reputation of another man. "How are you, Come." These doubtings troubled many spirits in those days. But the end was good. Mr. Harte has felt this, and the last stanza rises almost to a pæan: "Thus they answered-hoping, fearing, Sanitary," "The Goddess," "Battle Bunny," For the great heart of the nation, throbbing, an "Our Privilege," read like first poems. swered, 'Lord, we come!"" Love poetry plays a small part in Bret Harte's verse. As in prose, he seems to write of and for his own sex alone. Looking from the civilized standpoint, I do not remember one thoroughly delicate woman in his works. There are "Flips" and "Miss Joes" in abundance; but the charming women, such as one finds in Mr. Howells, are conspicuous by their absence. Occasionally, however, one stumbles on little bits of song and tender snatches. Quite often these are followed by half-apology, as if the poet was ashamed at being discovered at anything sentimental. They are not true love songs, in that they are never reflective, being for the most part the depicting of something Mr. Harte has observed in others. His sense never was more subtle, his touch never more delicate, than in the delightful "Newport Legend." The picture is perfect of the fair Quakeress who faded away with the bunch of mignonette, which alone remained to her of her fickle lover; and whose spirit haunts the old house in the odor of mignonette, that alone recalls her story. The poet waits for her in the darkened room till he breathes the odor. There is a suggestion of Longfellow in the lines: "For the laugh is fled from porch and lawn, And the bugle died from the fort on the hill, Somewhere in the darkness the clock strikes two; When the perfume has come and passed, even the fresh morning air and sunlight cannot lift its breath from his imagination; for, "The soul of that subtle, sad perfume, As the spiced embalmings, they say, outlast The mummy laid in his rocky tomb, Awakens my buried past. And I think of the passion that shook my youth "Miss Blanche Says" is highly dramatic, and written in the strong elementary meter that appeals to the middle-class reader. The close is a little blurred in some of its lines; but the throwing of the rose to the passing veterans serves admirably to illustrate Mr. Harte's idea of poetry. "You smile, O poet, and what do you? You lean from your window and watch life's Trampling and struggling through dust and dew, Touches your fancy to thrill and haunt you, And you pluck from your bosom the verse that grows, And down it flies like my red, red rose, "The Mountain Heart's-ease" reflects the same idea. "The Angelus" and "Dickens in Camp" are simple, pathetic, and direct. People were right in liking "Concepcion de Arguello," than which there are few more touching idyls of the affections. ample of Mr. Harte's lyric taste, perhaps the "Bugle Song" from "Cadet Grey" is as light and fanciful as any: "Fades the light And afar Goeth day, cometh night, And a star Leadeth all, Speedeth all "Love, good night! Must thou go As an ex When the day and the light Need thee so Needeth all, Heedeth all That is best?" Bret Harte's poems that have to do with There is an intoxicating feeling in all of Nature. The philosophic spirit of Wordsworth is entirely wanting. He approaches her with the lightness of a happy, full-spirited child. His descriptions are seldom productive of thought. Their power lies in their freshness. He assumes the attitude of one who knows about the charms of the mountains and the spicy balm of the forests, and who wishes to share with you the secret. He pictures these beauties felicitously and well, but that is the end. He never tells you what he thinks about it, nor attempts to stamp your notion with his individuality. But he beguiles one curiously. The boyish instincts linger in the man. The breath of the woods, the flash of a bird's wing, the perfume of the flowers, are magic in bringing back the old childish thrill. Our pulses dance with his as we read, and without a care to know the reason why. A few of his poems bring messages from the ocean. has been abroad in the storm, when "The marshes, black with summer drought; Were all abroad with sea foam white." He Concepcion waiting for her lover saw how, "Day by day the daylight glittered on the vacant, smiling seas." And when "The air and woods are still, The faintest rustle in the trees below, The lowest tremor from the mountain rill, Comes to the ear as but the trailing flow Of spirit robes that walk unseen the hill; The moon, low sailing o'er the upland farm, The moon, low sailing where the waters fill The lozenge lake, beside the banks of balm, Gleams like a chevron on the river's arm." IV. The highest praise that could be given a man in times gone by was that he dealt simply, honestly, and briefly with his hearers. The same encomium is applicable to Bret Harte, but in a different sense from more conventional writers. In prose as in poetry he occupies a unique position in American authorship, not only in that his work lies "The rains came, and far-breaking, on the fierce in unfurrowed fields, but that he looks at life south-wester tost Dashed the whole long coast with color, and then vanished and were lost; Still she found him with the waters, lifted by the morning breeze, Still she lost him with the folding of the great white-tinted seas." But by far the greater part are inland in their imagery pictures of valley, plain, and hills. Bret Harte has the true western spirit, to which the deserted cabin is near and familiar, and mountain streams and pine-spiced air are like wine. What he likes are the forests with their living tenants, and the plains that roll unplowed. "On a Cone of the Big Trees" has a pleasing and honest avowal of these mountaineering tastes: "Thou bringest me back the halcyon days The sweet fatigue that seemed a pleasure; The blazing slopes, the red dust rising; And then the dim, brown, columned vault, With its cool, damp, sepulchral spicing." "Cadet Grey" contains a stanza equally characteristic. Very few of Bret Harte's poems are entirely given to description. The pictures are scattered about through work of different vein, often -as heremerely serving as a foil for the comic vein of the piece: from such a peculiar standpoint. His greatest mental power and rarest imagery are to be found in his prose tales. To them, and to his imitations and sketches, the bulk of his time has been given. He is an apostle of the impressionist school, and his susceptibility carries him almost to the entire suppression of his individuality. His strain of Jewish blood brings him an oriental luxuriance of coloring. He has all the arts of the romancers at his fingers' ends. A pupil of Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Irving, the most original of his prose reflects in some degree the styles. of individuals of this group. He assumes the methods of one or the other, as the needs of his subject demand, and applies them to people and situations in ordinary life; while his judgment seems unerring in divining which pose to assume. His studies of character are always made from personal observation. With a facility that is almost unconsciousness, he absorbs and reproduces all that is unusual in the things with which he is brought in contact. fact accounts for the meagerness of incidents depicted by him, the absence from his pages of many well-known and startling events-such as the Vigilance Committee in San Francisco-which would seem to be attractive material for a Californian novelist. This The dates of the production of these tales are of small importance. There is a group of six stories-most of them produced early He is master of that portion of criticism fascinating in the performance condemned, which consists of analysis, and this faculty, and turns upon himself and enjoys it. Mr. in all probability, is the source of many of Harte ventures no speculation on what the his happiest efforts. Yet I doubt if it will effect would be if this sort of thing were carguide him in the production of enduring lit- ried generally into society; and I doubt if erature. No writer is of high grade who, he would want to carry the matter so far. besides the analytical faculty, does not He presents merely the facts as they are possess the deductive faculty of judgment. and where they are; and the only lesson Bret Harte's strength is unquestionable in taught is a little leniency in judgment, and a those brilliant pieces of analysis, "The Con- charitable disbelief in total depravity. Perdensed Novels." They are reductions to haps Miggles would not, in real life, have scale of the intellects of noted authors, and given herself up to a career of such unselfprod at faults and mannerisms as unmerci- ish devotion, and perhaps Oakhurst was not fully and surely as Poe's most sarcastic equal to the act of shooting himself so as to shafts. They are parodies, but they are save food for his starving companions; but more: aside from the burlesque of style and there appears to be the stamp of truth upon manners, the spirit of the individual novelist it as we read, and that is all that can be deis condensed and imitated till the work manded. assumes the proportions of a new creation. But nowhere does Bret Harte allow himself to record a judgment of the thing condensed. This faculty is the key to all his following work. The field is altered, but the method remains the same. In the Spanish legends there is always a tinge of Irving; and the dramatic stories have many of the Dickens ear-marks. Mr. Harte's contempt for the "cant of 'too much mercy"" crops out even in the stories that seem most moral. They carry the idea that in this world of lawlessness and crime there is a steady undercurrent of purity and honor that is plainly to be seen if we will but look for it. They are his firm endeavor to substitute the world of sentiment for the world of sense. He struggles, in the name of human charity, to screen behind some single virtue the moral filth and blackness of the desperado. It hurts him to believe that any man is irreclaimably bad. His impatient spirit took arms against the conventionalism of "man's inhumanity to man," and expressed itself in works of which "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" and "Miggles" are the most perfect types. Yet he presents his immorality in such an unmoral way as to render it practically harmless. The stories are masterpieces of delicate handling: so much so that the moral censor who has made out his case against them often finds something treacherously that stand head and shoulders above the remainder of Bret Harte's prose. Yet much interest attaches to the earlier sketches, in that they are studies in the material from which Mr. Harte has produced his more finished pictures. They are unpretending in form, and display a remarkable facility for grasping and recording the particulars of all that he reports. The work in them is strong, and betrays the spirit of the storyteller behind that of the reporter. "Notes by Flood and Field," for instance, is almost a story in itself, as is also the sketch called "High-Water Mark." In each there is a distinct line of fiction, and the character drawing is more vigorous than in much of his later work. These sketches were the foundation on which Bret Harte built up the stories that brought him his sudden reputation. Nothing illustrates his methods of work better than the progressive character of these productions. He has a way of groping round a thing with his words in search of the best methods of expression for it. The same thought will be found repeated in successive articles, but smoother and more polished with each repetition. One can almost see the painful work of erasure and interlineation. |