The Life of Bret Harte Part 17

"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 antic.i.p.ated 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 a.s.sistant 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 coa.r.s.eness 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 pa.s.sing 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 gra.s.s. 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 const.i.tutional 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 b.u.t.toning 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 Aga.s.siz, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 G.o.d, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how Emerson proposed having a 'wet night' with him, over a gla.s.s 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 bal.u.s.ters."[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 circ.u.mstances--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-k.n.o.b 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 Madrono 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 ma.n.u.script was received by the printers at the last possible moment. One of the poems, the _Newport Romance_, seems to lack those patient, finis.h.i.+ng 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Coha.s.set, a seash.o.r.e 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 princ.i.p.al 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 repet.i.tion 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 cla.s.sic.

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 a.s.sistance 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.