A History of American Literature Since 1870. Fred Lewis Pattee
depicts the one good deed in a wicked life must of necessity use a small canvas. At one moment in his career Jack Hamlin or Mother Shipton or Sandy does a truly heroic deed, but the author must not extend his inquiries too far. To make a novel with Mother Shipton as heroine would be intolerable.
Harte was unable to hold himself long to any one effort. Like Byron, he must bring down his quarry at a single spring; he had no patience to pursue it at length. Gabriel Conroy is at the same time the best and the worst American novel of the century. It is the best in its wealth of truly American material and in the brilliant passages that strew its pages; it is the worse in that it utterly fails in its construction, and that it builds up its characters wholly from the outside. Its hero, moreover, changes his personality completely three times during the story, and its heroine is first an uneducated Pike maiden of the Southwest, then a Spanish señorita:
Features small, and perfectly modeled; the outline of the small face was a perfect oval, but the complection was of burnished copper. … The imperious habit of command; an almost despotic control of a hundred servants; a certain barbaric contempt for the unlimited revenues at her disposal that prompted the act, became her wonderfully. In her impatience the quick blood glanced through her bronzed cheek, her little slipper tapped the floor imperiously and her eyes flashed in the darkness.
Later we learn that she had been adopted into this Spanish family after her lover had abandoned her in the earlier chapters, and had been given her complexion by means of a vegetable stain. But there is still another lightning change. At the end of the book she becomes a Pike again and weakly marries the unrepentant rascal who earlier had betrayed her. In the words of Artemus Ward, "it is too much." It is not even good melodrama, for in melodrama the villain is punished at the end.
Bret Harte was the artist of impulse, the painter of single burning moments, the flashlight photographer who caught in lurid detail one dramatic episode in the life of a man or a community and left the rest in darkness.
VII
In his later years Harte's backgrounds became less sharp in outline. His methods grew more romantic; his atmospheres more mellow and golden. The old Spanish dream of the days of his early art possessed him again, and he added to his gallery of real creations—M'liss, Yuba Bill, Jack Hamlin, Tennessee's Partner—one that perhaps is the strongest of them all, Enriquez Saltillo, the last of a fading race. Nothing Harte ever did will surpass that creation of his old age. In Chu Chu, The Devotion of Enriquez, and The Passing of Enriquez we have the fitting close of the work of the romancer of the west coast. For once at least he saw into the heart of a man. Listen to Enriquez as he makes his defense:
Then they say, "Dry up, and sell out"; and the great bankers say, "Name your own price for your stock, and resign." And I say, "There is not gold enough in your bank, in your San Francisco, in the mines of California, that shall buy a Spanish gentleman. When I leave, I leave the stock at my back; I shall take it, nevarre!" Then the banker he say, "And you will go and blab, I suppose?" And then, Pancho, I smile, I pick up my mustache—so! and I say: "Pardon, señor, you haf mistake. The Saltillo haf for three hundred year no stain, no blot upon him. Eet is not now—the last of the race—who shall confess that he haf sit at a board of disgrace and dishonor!" And then it is that the band begin to play, and the animals stand on their hind legs and waltz, and behold, the row he haf begin.
It is the atmosphere of romance, for the mine which had caused all the trouble had been in the family three hundred years and it had become a part of the family itself. When it passed into the hands of the new régime, when his wife, who also was of the new régime, deserted him, then passed Enriquez. The earth that for three hundred years had borne his fathers opened at the earthquake and took him to herself. It was the conception of a true romancer. The work of Bret Harte opened and closed with a vision of romance, a vision worthy even of a Hawthorne.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bret Harte. (1839–1902.) The Lost Galleon and Other Tales [Poems], 1867; Condensed Novels and Other Papers, 1867; The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches, 1870; Plain Language from Truthful James, 1870; The Pliocene Skull, 1871; Poems, 1871; East and West Poems, 1871; The Heathen Chinee and Other Poems, 1871; Poetical Works, 1872; Mrs. Skagg's Husbands, 1873; M'liss: An Idyl of Red Mountain, 1873; Echoes of the Foot-Hills [Poems], 1875; Tales of the Argonauts, 1875; Gabriel Conroy, 1876; Two Men of Sandy Bar, 1876; Thankful Blossom, 1877; The Story of a Mine, 1878; Drift from Two Shores, 1878; The Twins of Table Mountain, 1879; Works in five volumes, 1882; Flip, and Found at Blazing Star, 1882; In the Carquinez Woods, 1884; On the Frontier, 1884; Maruja, 1885; By Shore and Sedge, 1885; Snow Bound at Eagle's, 1885; A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready, 1887; The Crusade of the Excelsior, 1887; The Argonauts of North Liberty, 1888; A Phyllis of the Sierras, 1888; Cressy, 1889; The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh, 1889; A Waif of the Plains, 1890; A Ward of the Golden Gate, 1890; A Sappho of Green Springs, 1891; Colonel Starbottle's Client, 1892; A First Family of Tasajara, 1892; Susy: a Story of the Plains, 1893; Sally Dows and Other Stories, 1893; A Protégé of Jack Hamlin's, 1894; The Bell-Ringer of Angel's, 1894; In a Hollow of the Hills, 1895; Clarence, 1895; Barker's Luck, 1896; Three Partners, 1897; Tales of Trail and Town, 1898; Stories in Light and Shadow, 1898; Mr. Jack Hamlin's Meditation, 1899; From Sandhill to Pine, 1900; Under the Redwoods, 1901; Openings in the Old Trail, 1902; Life of Bret Harte, by T. Edgar Pemberton, 1903; Bret Harte, by Henry W. Boynton, 1905; The Life of Bret Harte with Some Account of the California Pioneers, by Henry Childs Merwin, 1911.
CHAPTER V
THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY
The new era of vulgarity in literature, complained of by Stedman, came as a revolt against mid-century tendencies. The movement was not confined to America. In the early seventies, as we have seen, Millet and his Breton peasants for a time took possession of French art; Hardy with his Wessex natives caught the ear of England; Björnson made the discovery that in the Scandinavian peasant lay the only survival of the old Norse spirit; and the Russians Tourgenieff and Tolstoy cast aside the old mythology and told with minuteness the life of the peasant and the serf. Everywhere there was a swing toward the wild and unconventional, even toward the coarse and repulsive. The effeminacy of early Tennysonianism, the cloying sweetness of the mid-century annual, Keatsism, Hyperionism, Heineism, had culminated in reaction. There was a craving for the acrid tang of uncultivated things in borderlands and fields unsown.
In America had sprung up a group of humorists who had filled the newspapers and magazines of the era with that masculine laughter which was echoing along the Mississippi and the Ohio and the gold camps of the Sierras. They were pioneers; they were looking for incongruities and exaggerations, and quite by accident they discovered a new American type, the Pike—strange creature to inspire a new literature.
I
America has evolved four types, perhaps five, that are unique "new birth of our new soil": the Yankee of the Hosea Biglow and Sam Lawson variety; the frontiersman and scout exemplified in Leather Stocking; the Southern "darky" as depicted by Russell, Harris, Page, and others; the circuit rider of the frontier period; and the Pike.