Читать книгу The Life of Bret Harte, with Some Account of the California Pioneers - Henry Childs Merwin - Страница 13

SAN FRANCISCO, NOVEMBER, 1844

J. C. Ward, del.

It was doubtless Bret Harte’s experience in the drug store which suggested the story of Liberty Jones, whose discovery of an arsenical spring in the forest was the means of transforming that well-made, but bony and sallow Missouri girl into a beautiful woman, with well-rounded limbs, rosy cheeks, lustrous eyes and glossy hair.

It has been a matter of some discussion whether Bret Harte ever worked as a miner or not; and the evidence upon the point is not conclusive. But it is hard to believe that he did not try his luck at gold-seeking, when everybody else was trying, and his narrative How I Went to the Mines seems to have the ear-marks of an autobiographical sketch. It is regarded as such by his sisters; and the modest, deprecating manner in which the storyteller’s adventures are related, serves to confirm that impression.

Of all his experiences in California, those which gave him the most pleasure seem to have been his several short but fruitful terms of service as schoolmaster and tutor. His knowledge of children, being based upon sympathy, became both acute and profound. How many thousand million times have children gone to school of a morning and found the master awaiting them, and yet who but Bret Harte has ever described the exact manner of their approach!

“They came in their usual desultory fashion—the fashion of country school-children the world over—irregularly, spasmodically, and always as if accidentally; a few hand-in-hand, others driven ahead of or dragged behind their elders; some in straggling groups more or less coherent and at times only connected by far-off intermediate voices scattered over a space of half a mile, but never quite alone; always preoccupied by something else than the actual business in hand; appearing suddenly from ditches, behind trunks, and between fence-rails; cropping up in unexpected places along the road after vague and purposeless détours—seemingly going anywhere and everywhere but to school!”[5]

Bret Harte realized the essential truth that children are not little, immature men and women, but rather infantile barbarians, creatures of an archaic type, representing a period in the development of the human race which does not survive in adult life. Hence the reserve, the aloofness of children, their remoteness from grown people. There are certain things which the boy most deeply feels that he must not do, and certain other things that he must do; as, for example, to bear without telling any pains that may be inflicted upon him by his mates or by older boys. For a thousand years or more fathers and mothers have held a different code upon these points, but with how little effect upon their children! Johnny Filgee illustrated upon a truly Californian scale these boyish qualities of reticence and endurance. When he had accidentally been shot in the duel between the Master and Cressy’s father (the child being perched in a tree), he refrained from making the least sound, although a word or an outcry would have brought the men to his assistance. “A certain respect to himself and his brother kept him from uttering even a whimper of weakness.” Left alone in the dark woods, unable to move, Johnny became convinced that his end was near, and he pleased himself by thinking that “they would all feel exceedingly sorry and alarmed, and would regret having made him wash himself on Saturday night.” And so, having composed himself, “he turned on his side to die, as became the scion of an heroic race!”

Then follows a sentence in which the artist, with one bold sweep of his brush, paints in Nature herself as a witness of the scene; and yet her material immensity does not dwarf or belittle the spiritual superiority of the wounded youngster in the foreground: “The free woods, touched by an upspringing wind, waved their dark arms above him, and higher yet a few patient stars silently ranged themselves around his pillow.”

That other Johnny, for whom Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar, Richelieu Sharpe in A Phyllis of the Sierras, John Milton Harcourt in the First Family of Tasajara, Leonidas Boone, the Mercury of the Foot-Hills, and John Bunyan Medliker, the Youngest Prospector in Calaveras—all illustrate the same type, with many individual variations.

Another phase of the archaic nature of children is their extreme sensitiveness to impressions. Just as a squirrel hears more acutely than a man, and the dog’s sense of smell is keener, so a child, within the comparatively small range of his mental activity, is more open to subtle indications. Bret Harte often touches upon this quality of childhood, as in the following passage: “It was not strange, therefore, that the little people of the Indian Spring School knew perhaps more of the real relations of Cressy McKinstry to her admirers than the admirers themselves. Not that the knowledge was outspoken—for children rarely gossip in the grown-up sense, or even communicate by words intelligent to the matured intellect. A whisper, a laugh that often seemed vague and unmeaning, conveyed to each other a world of secret significance, and an apparently senseless burst of merriment in which the whole class joined—and that the adult critic set down to ‘animal spirits’—a quality much more rare with children than is generally supposed—was only a sympathetic expression of some discovery happily oblivious to older perceptions.”

This acuteness of perception, seen also in some men of a simple, archaic type, puts children in close relationship with the lower animals, unless, indeed, it is counteracted by that cruelty which is also a quality of childhood. When Richelieu Sharpe retired to rest, it was in company with a whole retinue of dependents. “On the pillow near him an indistinguishable mass of golden fur—the helpless bulk of a squirrel chained to the leg of his cot; at his feet a wall-eyed cat, who had followed his tyrannous caprices with the long-suffering devotion of her sex; on the shelf above him a loathsome collection of flies and tarantulas in dull green bottles, a slab of gingerbread for light nocturnal refreshment, and his sister’s pot of bear’s grease. … The sleeper stirred slightly and awoke. At the same moment, by some mysterious sympathy, a pair of beady bright eyes appeared in the bulk of fur near his curls, the cat stretched herself, and even a vague agitation was heard in the bottles on the shelf.”[6]

That last touch, intimating some community of feeling between Richelieu and his insects, is, as the Reader will grant, the touch of genius. Bridging the gulf impassable for an ordinary mind, it assumes a fact which, like the shape of Donatello’s ears, is true to the imagination, and not so manifestly impossible as to shock the reason.

It is sometimes said that California in the Fifties represented the American character in its most extreme form—the quintessence, as it were, of energy and democracy. This statement would certainly apply to the California children, in whom the ordinary forwardness of the American child became a sort of elfish precocity. Such a boy was Richelieu Sharpe. His gallantries, his independence, his self-reliance, his adult ambitions—these qualities, oddly assorted with the primeval, imaginative nature of the true child, made Richelieu such a youngster as was never seen outside of the United States, and perhaps never seen outside of California.

The English child of the upper classes, as Bret Harte knew him in after years, made a strange contrast to the Richelieu Sharpes and John Bunyan Medlikers that he had learned to love in California. In a letter to his wife written from the house of James Anthony Froude, in 1878, he said: “The eldest girl is not unlike a highly-educated Boston girl, and the conversation sometimes reminds me of Boston. The youngest daughter, only ten years old, told her sister, in reference to some conversation Froude and I had, that ‘she feared’ (this child) ‘that Mr. Bret Harte was inclined to be sceptical!’ Doesn’t this exceed any English story of the precocity of American children? The boy, scarcely fourteen, acts like a boy of eight (an American boy of eight) and talks like a man of thirty, so far as pure English and facility of expression go. His manners are perfect, yet he is perfectly simple and boy-like. The culture and breeding of some English children are really marvellous. But somehow—and here comes one of my ‘buts’—there’s always a suggestion of some repression, some discipline that I don’t like.”[7]

Bret Harte’s last employment during this wandering life was that of compositor, printer’s devil, and assistant editor of the “Northern California,” published at Eureka, a seacoast town in Humboldt County. Here he met Mr. Charles A. Murdock, who gives this interesting account of him: “He was fond of whist, genial, witty, but quiet and reserved, something of a ‘tease’ ” (the Reader will remember that Mr. Howells speaks of this trait) “and a practical joker; not especially popular, as he was thought to be fastidious, and to hold himself aloof from ‘the general’; but he was simply a self-respecting, gentlemanly fellow, with quiet tastes, and a keen insight into character. He was no roisterer, and his habits were clean. He was too independent and indifferent to curry favor, or to counterfeit a liking.”

During a temporary absence of the editor Bret Harte was entrusted with the conduct of the paper, and about that time a cowardly massacre of Indians was perpetrated by some Americans in the vicinity. This was no uncommon event, and the usual attitude of the Pioneers toward the Indians may be gathered from the following passage in a letter written to a newspaper in August, 1851, from Rogue River: “During this period we have been searching about in the mountains, disturbing villages, destroying all the males we could find, and capturing women and children. We have killed about thirty altogether, and have about twenty-eight now in camp.” At the Stanislaus Diggings, in 1851, a miner called to an Indian boy to help him catch a loose horse. The boy, not understanding English, and being frightened by the man’s gestures, ran away, whereupon the miner raised his gun and shot the boy dead.

Nobody hated injustice or cruelty more than Bret Harte, and in his editorial capacity he scathingly condemned the murder of Indians which occurred in the neighborhood of Eureka. The article excited the anger of the community, and a mob was collected for the avowed purpose of wrecking the newspaper office and hanging or otherwise maltreating the youthful writer. Bret Harte, armed with two pistols, awaited their coming during an evening which was probably the longest of his life. But the timely arrival of a few United States cavalrymen, sent for by some peace-lovers in the town, averted the danger; and the young journalist suffered no harm beyond an abrupt dismissal upon the hasty return of the editor.

This event ended his life as a wanderer, and he went back to San Francisco. There is not the slightest reason to think that during this period Bret Harte had any notion of describing California life in fiction or otherwise; and yet, if that had been his object, he could not have ordered his movements more wisely. He had lived on the seacoast and in the interior; he had seen cities, ranches, villages, and mines; he had been tutor, school-teacher, drug clerk, express messenger, printer, and editor. The period was less than two years, and yet he had accumulated a store of facts, impressions and images sufficient to last him a lifetime. He was of a most receptive nature; he was at a receptive age; the world was new to him, and he lived in it and observed it with all the zest of youth, of inexperience, of health and genius.