Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 36

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And yet after all the real strength of Bret Harte came from his contact with this Western soil. Irving and Dickens and the early models that had so molded him served only to teach him his trade; the breath of life in his works all came from the new life of the West. It would be impossible for one to live during seventeen years of his early life in an atmosphere like that of the west coast and not be transformed by it. Taking his work altogether there is in it far more of California than there is of Dickens or of all the others of the older writers. Only a few things of the life of the West seem to have impressed him. He lived fifteen years in San Francisco yet we see almost nothing of that city in his work; the dramatic career of the Vigilantes he touched upon almost not at all. He selected the remote mining camps for his field and yet he seems to have been impressed by very few of the types that were found in them. Only a few of them ring true at every point, Yuba Bill the stage driver is one. We feel that he was drawn by a master who has actually lived with his model. Yuba Bill is the typical man of the region and the period—masterful, self-reliant, full of a humor that is elemental. There is no prolonged study of him. We see him for a tense moment as the stage swings up to the station, and then he is gone. He is as devoid of sentimentality as even Horace Bixby. The company have been shouting "Miggles!" at the dark cabin but have got no reply save from what proves later to have been a parrot:

"Extraordinary echo," said the Judge.

"Extraordinary d—d skunk!" roared the driver contemptuously. "Come out of that, Miggles, and show yourself. Be a man."

Miggles, however, did not appear.

Yuba Bill hesitated no longer. Taking a heavy stone from the road, he battered down the gate, and with the expressman entered the enclosure. …

"Do you know this Miggles?" asked the Judge of Yuba Bill.

"No, nor don't want to," said Bill shortly.

"But, my dear sir," expostulated the Judge, as he thought of the barred gate.

"Lookee here," said Yuba Bill, with fine irony, "hadn't you better go back and sit in the coach till yer introduced? I'm going in," and he pushed open the door of the building.

That rings true. If one were obliged to ride at night over a wild, road-agent-infested trail there is no character in all fiction whom we would more gladly have for driver than Yuba Bill. We would like to see more of him than the brief glimpses allowed us by his creator.

The humor in Harte is largely Western humor. There is the true California ring in such conversations, for instance, as those in the earlier pages of Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy. It is an atmosphere rather than a series of hits. One finds it in The Outcasts of Poker Flat:

A few of the committee had urged hanging him [Oakhurst] as a possible example, and a sure method of reimbursing themselves from his pockets of the sums he had won from them. "It's agin justice," said Jim Wheeler, "to let this yer young man from Roaring Camp—an entire stranger—carry away our money." But a crude sentiment of equity residing in the breasts of those who had been fortunate enough to win from Mr. Oakhurst overruled this narrower local prejudice.

This atmosphere of humor shimmers through all of the stories. There is never uproarious merriment, but there is constant humor. The conjugal troubles of the "old man" in How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar are thus touched upon:

His first wife, a delicate, pretty little woman, had suffered keenly and secretly from the jealous suspicions of her husband, until one day he invited the whole Bar to his house to expose her infidelity. On arriving, the party found the shy, petite creature quietly engaged in her household duties and retired abashed and discomfited. But the sensitive woman did not easily recover from her shock of this extraordinary outrage. It was with difficulty she regained her equanimity sufficiently to release her lover from the closet in which he was concealed and escape with him. She left a boy of three years to comfort her bereaved husband. The old man's present wife had been his cook. She was large, loyal, and aggressive.

His characters are exceptions and his situations are theatric, yet for all that he cannot be ignored. He caught the spirit of the early mining camps and with it the romantic atmosphere of the old Spanish Colonial civilization that was swept away by the Anglo-Saxon rush for gold. His name cannot fail to go down with the era he recorded, and to identify oneself forever with an era, even though that era be a brief and restricted one, is no small achievement. He is the writer of the epic of the gold rush of the middle century in America, and whatever the quality of that epic may be, it can never be forgotten. He said in 1868:

It may not have been an heroic era; it may have been a hard, ugly, unworked, vulgar and lawless era; but of such are heroes and aristocracies born. Three hundred years, and what a glamor shall hang about it! … A thousand years, and a new Virgil sings the American Æneid with the episode of Jason and the California golden fleece, and the historians tell us it is a myth! Laugh, my pioneer friends, but your great-great-great-great-grandchildren shall weep reverential tears. History, as was said of martyrdom, is "mean in the making" but how heroic it becomes in the perspective of five centuries![48]

And in many ways his work is really of epic strength. He dealt with elemental men, often with veritable demigods, as Yuba Bill. His canvases are as broad as those even of Mark Twain. His human drama is played before a truly Western background. While Tennessee is being tried for his life, "Above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and passionless, crowned with remoter passionless stars." At moments of crisis the narrative always moves with power. The wolves and the fire in the story In the Carquinez Woods are intensely vivid and lurid in their presentation. The ride from Simpson's Bar is told with the graphic thrill of an eye-witness, and the description of the snow-storm at the opening of Gabriel Conroy reminds one of Thomas Hardy.