Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 33

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If we may trust Harte's own statement, made, it must be remembered, in the retrospect of later years, he set out deliberately to add a new province to American literature. During the period between 1862 and 1867, he wrote, according to his own statement, "The Society upon the Stanislaus and The Story of M'liss—the first a dialectical poem, the second a California romance—his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish, but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility—a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better known pages of the Overland Monthly, he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of The Luck of Roaring Camp, and the poem of The Heathen Chinee."[41]

But the poem and the romance were not his first efforts toward a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. His first vision of the literary possibilities of the region had been inspired by Irving, and he wrote in the Sketch Book manner during the greater part of his seventeen years upon the Pacific Coast. Behind the California of the gold and the excitement lay three hundred years of an old Spanish civilization. What Irving had done for the Hudson why could he not do for the Mission lands and the Spanish occupation, "that glorious Indian summer of California history, around which so much poetical haze still lingers—that bland, indolent autumn of Spanish rule, so soon to be followed by the wintry storms of Mexican independence and the reviving springs of American conquest"?[42] It was a vision worthy of a Hawthorne. That it possessed him for years and was abandoned with reluctance is evident to one who examines his early work.

He voiced it in The Angelus, Heard at the Mission Dolores, 1868, in the same volume of the Overland Monthly that contained The Luck of Roaring Camp:

Borne on the swell of your long waves receding,

I touch the further Past—

I see the dying glow of Spanish glory,

The sunset dream and last.

Before me rise the dome-shaped Mission towers;

The white Presidio;

The swart commander in his leathern jerkin,

The priest in stole of snow.

Once more I see Portata's cross uplifting

Above the setting sun;

And past the headland, northward, slowly drifting

The freighted galleon.

It must not be forgotten that his Legend of Monte del Diablo, a careful Irvingesque romance, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly as early as 1863. During the same period he wrote The Right Eye of the Commander, The Legend of Devil's Point, The Adventure of Padre Viventio, and many short pieces, enough, indeed, to make up a volume the size of The Sketch Book.

Despite its echoes of Irving, it is significant work. Harte was the first to catch sight of a whole vast field of American romance. Again and again he recurs to it in his later poetry and prose; notably in Concepcion de Arguello and its prose version on page 191 of the first volume of the Overland Monthly, A Convert of the Mission, The Story of a Mine, In the Carquinez Woods, and in Gabriel Conroy, that chaotic book which has in it the materials for the greatest of American romances. Whenever he touches this old Spanish land he throws over it the mellow Washington Irving glow that had so thrilled him in his earlier years, and he writes with power. The Spanish part of Gabriel Conroy is exquisite; its atmosphere is faultless:

If there was a spot on earth of which the usual dead monotony of the California seasons seemed a perfectly consistent and natural expression, that spot was the ancient and time-honored pueblo and Mission of the blessed St. Anthony. The changeless, cloudless, expressionless skies of the summer seemed to symbolize that aristocratic conservatism which expelled all innovation and was its distinguishing mark. …

As he drew rein in the court-yard of the first large adobe dwelling, and received the grave welcome of a strange but kindly face, he saw around him everywhere the past unchanged. The sun shone as brightly and fiercely on the long red tiles of the low roofs, that looked as if they had been thatched with longitudinal slips of cinnamon, even as it had shone for the last hundred years; the gaunt wolf-like dogs ran out and barked at him as their fathers and mothers had barked at the preceding stranger of twenty years before. There were the few wild, half-broken mustangs tethered by strong riatas before the veranda of the long low Fonda, with the sunlight glittering on their silver trappings; there were the broad, blank expanses of whitewashed adobe wall, as barren and guiltless of record as the uneventful days, as monotonous and expressionless as the staring sky above; there were the white, dome-shaped towers of the Mission rising above the green of olives and pear trees, twisted, gnarled and knotted with the rheumatism of age. … The steamers that crept slowly up the darkening coast line were something remote, unreal, and phantasmal; since the Philippine galleon had left its bleached and broken ribs in the sand in 1640, no vessel had, in the memory of man, dropped anchor in the open roadstead below the curving Point of Pines.

Meager and fragmentary as these Spanish sketches are, they nevertheless opened the way for a new school of American romance.