Читать книгу The Life of Bret Harte, with Some Account of the California Pioneers - Henry Childs Merwin - Страница 15

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Bret Harte returned to San Francisco in 1857, and his first occupation was that of setting type in the office of the “Golden Era.” To this paper his sister, Mrs. Wyman, had been a contributor for some time, and it was through her that Bret Harte obtained employment on it as a printer.

The “Golden Era” had been established by young men. “It was,” writes Mr. Stoddard, “the cradle and the grave of many a high hope. There was nothing to be compared with it on that side of the Mississippi; and though it could point with pride—it never failed to do so—to a somewhat notable list of contributors, it had always the fine air of the amateur, and was most complacently patronizing. The very pattern of paternal patronage was amiable Joe Lawrence, its Editor. He was an inveterate pipe-smoker, a pillar of cloud, as he sat in his editorial chair, an air of literary mystery enveloping him. He spoke as an oracle, and I remember his calling my attention to a certain anonymous contribution just received, and nodding his head prophetically, for he already had his eye on the fledgling author, a young compositor on the floor above. It was Bret Harte’s first appearance in the ‘Golden Era,’ and doubtless Lawrence encouraged him as he had encouraged me when, out of the mist about him, he handed me secretly, and with a glance of caution—for his business partner, the marble-hearted, sat at his ledger not far away—he handed me a folded paper on which he had written this startling legend! ‘Write some prose for the “Golden Era,” and I will give you a dollar a column.’ ”

BRET HARTE IN 1861

It was not long before Bret Harte was promoted from the compositor’s stand to the editorial room of the paper, and thus began his literary career. Among the sketches which he wrote a few years later, and which have been preserved in the complete edition of his works, are In a Balcony, A Boy’s Dog, and Sidewalkings. Except for a slight restraint and stiffness of style, as if the author had not quite attained the full use of his wings, they show no indications of youth or crudity. M’liss also appeared in the “Golden Era,” illustrated by a specially designed woodcut; and some persons think that this, the first, is also the best of Bret Harte’s stories. At all events, the early M’liss is far superior to the author’s lengthened and rewritten M’liss which was included in the collected edition of his works.

When it is added that the Condensed Novels, or at least the first of them, were also published in the “Golden Era,” it will be seen with what astonishing quickness his literary style matured. He wrote at first anonymously; afterward, gaining a little self-confidence, he signed his stories “B,” and then “Bret.”

It was while engaged in writing for the “Golden Era,” namely, on August 11, 1862, that Bret Harte was married to Miss Anna Griswold, daughter of Daniel S. and Mary Dunham Griswold of the city of New York. The marriage took place at San Raphael.

In 1864 he was appointed Secretary of the California Mint, an office which he held for six years and until he left California. For this position he was indebted to Mr. R. B. Swain, Superintendent of the Mint, a friend and parishioner of the Reverend Mr. King, who in that way became a friend of Bret Harte. Mr. Swain had a great liking for the young author, and made the official path easy for him. In fact, the position seems to have been one of those sinecures—or nearly that—which are the traditional reward of men of letters, but which a reforming and materialistic age has diverted to less noble uses.

In San Francisco, both before and after his marriage, Bret Harte lived a quiet, studious life, going very little into society. Of the time during which he was Secretary of the Mint, Mr. Stoddard writes: “He was now a man with a family; the resources derived from literature were uncertain and unsatisfactory. His influential friends paid him cheering visits in the gloomy office at the Mint where he leavened his daily loaves; and at his desk, between the exacting pages of the too literal ledger, many a couplet cropped out, and the outlines of now famous sketches were faintly limned. His friends were few, but notable. Society he ignored in those days. He used to accuse me of wasting my substance in riotous visitations, and thought me a spendthrift of time. He had the precious companionship of books, and the lives of those about him were as an open volume wherein he read ‘curiously and to his profit.’ ”

Of the notable friends alluded to by Mr. Stoddard, the most important were the Reverend Thomas Starr King, and Mrs. Jessie Benton Frémont, daughter of Senator Benton, and wife of that Captain, afterward General Frémont, who became the first United States Senator from California, and Republican candidate for the Presidency in 1856, but who is best known as The Pathfinder. His adventures and narratives form an important part of California history.

Mrs. Frémont was an extremely clever, kind-hearted woman, who assisted Bret Harte greatly by her advice and criticism, still more by her sympathy and encouragement. Bret Harte was always inclined to underrate his own powers, and to be despondent as to his literary future. On one occasion when, as not seldom happened, he was cast down by his troubles and anxieties, and almost in despair as to his prospects, Mrs. Frémont sent him some cheering news, and he wrote to her: “I shall no longer disquiet myself about changes in residence or anything else, for I believe that if I were cast upon a desolate island, a savage would come to me next morning and hand me a three-cornered note to say that I had been appointed Governor at Mrs. Frémont’s request, at a salary of $2400 a year.”

How much twenty-four hundred a year seemed to him then, and how little a few years later! A Pioneer who knew them both writes: “Mrs. Frémont helped Bret Harte in many ways. In turn he marvelled at her worldly wisdom—being able to tell one how to make a living. He named her daughter’s pony ‘Chiquita,’ after the equine heroine of his poem.” It was by Mrs. Frémont’s intervention that Bret Harte first appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly,” for, some years before he achieved fame, namely in 1863, The Legend of Monte del Diablo was published in that magazine. The story was gracefully, even beautifully written, but both in style and treatment it was a reflection of Washington Irving, who at that time rivalled Dickens as a popular author.

Many interesting letters were received by Mrs. Frémont from Bret Harte—letters, her daughter thinks, almost as entertaining as his published writings; but unfortunately these treasures were destroyed by a fire in the city of New York.

Starr King, Bret Harte’s other friend, was by far the most notable of the Protestant ministers in California. The son of a Universalist minister, he was born in the city of New York, but was brought up mainly in Charlestown, now a part of Boston. Upon leaving school he became first a clerk, then a school-teacher, and finally a Unitarian minister, preaching first at his father’s old church in Charlestown, and afterward at the Hollis Street Unitarian Church in Boston. He obtained a wide reputation as preacher and lecturer, and as author of “The White Hills,” still the best book upon the mountains of New England. In 1860, at the very time when his services were needed there, he became the pastor of a church in San Francisco, and to him is largely ascribed the credit of saving California to the Union. He was a man of deep moral convictions, and his addresses stirred the heart and moved the conscience of California.

The Southern element was very strong on the Pacific Slope, and it made itself felt in politics especially. Nearly one third of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, held in September, 1849, were Southern men, and they acted as a unit under the leadership of W. M. Gwinn, afterward a member of the United States Senate. The ultimate design of the Southern delegates was the division of California into two States, the more southern of which should be a slave State. Slavery in California was openly advocated. But the Southern party was a minority, and the State Constitution declared that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crime, shall ever be tolerated in this State.” The Constitution did, however, exclude the testimony of colored persons from the courts; and when, in 1852, the negroes in San Francisco presented a petition to the House of Representatives asking for this right or privilege, the House refused to receive the petition, a majority of the members taking it as an insult. One member seriously proposed that it should be thrown out of the window.

In May, 1852, the “San Francisco Daily Herald” declared that the delay in admitting California as a State was due to Northern Abolitionists, of whom it said, with characteristic mildness: “Take the vile crowd of Abolitionists from the Canadian frontier to the banks of the Delaware, and you cannot find one in ten thousand of them who from philanthropy cares the amount of a dollar what becomes of the colored race. What they want is office.” It does not seem to have occurred to the writer that in espousing the smallest and most hated political party in the whole country, the Abolitionists had not taken a very promising step in the direction of office-holding.

There was even talk of turning California into a “Pacific Republic,” in the event of a dissolution of the Union. And that event was longed for by at least one California paper on the ground that “it would shut down on the immigration of these vermin,” i.e. the Chinese. How far Southern effrontery went may be gathered from the fact that even the sacred institution of Thanksgiving Day was ridiculed by another California paper as an absurd Yankee notion.

From 1851 until the period of the Civil War the Democratic Party ruled the State of California under the leadership of Gwinn. Northern men constituted a majority of the party, but they submitted to the dictation of the Southerners, just as the Democratic Party in the North submitted to the dictation of the Southern leaders. The only California politician who could cope with Gwinn was Broderick—a typical Irishman, trained by Tammany Hall.

Not without difficulty was California saved to the Union; in fact, until the rebels fired upon Fort Sumter, the real sentiment of the State was unknown. Bret Harte has touched upon this episode. In Mrs. Bunker’s Conspiracy, the attempt of the extreme Southern element to seize and fortify a bluff commanding the city of San Francisco is foiled by a Northern woman; and in Clarence we have a glimpse of the city as it appeared after news came of the first act of open rebellion: “From every public building and hotel, from the roofs of private houses and even the windows of lonely dwellings, flapped and waved the striped and starry banner. The steady breath of the sea carried it out from masts and yards of ships at their wharves, from the battlements of the forts, Alcatraz and Yerba Buena. … Clarence looked down upon it with haggard, bewildered eyes, and then a strange gasp and fulness of the throat. For afar a solitary bugle had blown the reveille at Fort Alcatraz.”

At this critical time, a mass meeting was held in San Francisco, and, at the suggestion of Starr King, Bret Harte wrote a poem to be read at the meeting. The poem was called The Reveille, but is better known as The Drum. The first and last stanzas are as follows:—

Hark! I hear the tramp of thousands,

And of armèd men the hum;

Lo! a nation’s hosts have gathered

Round the quick alarming drum—

Saying, “Come,

Freemen, Come!

Ere your heritage be wasted,” said the quick alarming drum.

········

Thus they answered—hoping, fearing,

Some in faith, and doubting some,

Till a trumpet-voice, proclaiming,

Said, “My chosen people, come!”

Then the drum

Lo! was dumb,

For the great heart of the nation, throbbing, answered, “Lord, we come!”

As these last words were read, the great audience rose to its feet, and with a mighty shout proclaimed the loyalty of California. Emerson, as Mr. John Jay Chapman has finely said, sent a thousand sons to the war; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that Bret Harte’s noble poem fired many a manly heart in San Francisco.

When the war began, Starr King was active in establishing the California branch of the Sanitary Commission. He died of diphtheria in March, 1864, just as the tide of battle was turning in favor of the North. It will thus be seen that his career in California exactly covered, and only just covered, that short period in the history of the State when the services of such a man were, humanly speaking, indispensable.

The Reveille was followed by other patriotic poems, and after Mr. King’s death Bret Harte wrote in memory of him the poem called Relieving Guard, which indicates, one may safely say, the high-water mark of the author’s poetic talent. In the year following Mr. King’s death Bret Harte’s second son was born, and received the name of Francis King.

On May 25, 1864, the first number of “The Californian” appeared. This was the famous weekly edited and published by the late Charles Henry Webb, and written mainly by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Webb himself, Prentice Mulford, and Mr. Stoddard. It was of “The Californian” that Mr. Howells wittily said: “These ingenuous young men, with the fatuity of gifted people, had established a literary newspaper in San Francisco, and they brilliantly coöperated to its early extinction.”

It is an interesting coincidence that Bret Harte and Mark Twain both began their literary careers in San Francisco, and at almost the same time. Bret Harte was engaged upon “The Californian,” and Mark Twain was a reporter for the “Morning Call,” when they were introduced to each other by a common friend, Mr. George Barnes. Bret Harte thus describes his first impression of the new acquaintance:—

“His head was striking. He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, and even the aquiline eye—an eye so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me—of an unusual and dominant nature. His eyebrows were very thick and bushy. His dress was careless, and his general manner one of supreme indifference to surroundings and circumstances. Barnes introduced him as Mr. Sam Clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very unusual talent in a number of newspaper articles contributed under the signature of ‘Mark Twain.’ We talked on different topics, and about a month afterward Clemens dropped in upon me again. He had been away in the mining districts on some newspaper assignment in the mean time. In the course of conversation he remarked that the unearthly laziness that prevailed in the town he had been visiting was beyond anything in his previous experience. He said the men did nothing all day long but sit around the bar-room stove, spit, and ‘swop lies.’ He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, and half unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator. I asked him to tell it again to a friend who came in, and then asked him to write it out for ‘The Californian.’ He did so, and when published it was an emphatic success. It was the first work of his that had attracted general attention, and it crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading. The story was ‘The Jumping Frog of Calaveras.’ It is now known and laughed over, I suppose, wherever the English language is spoken; but it will never be as funny to any one in print as it was to me, told for the first time by the unknown Twain himself on that morning in the San Francisco Mint.”

The first article that appeared in “The Californian” was Bret Harte’s Neighborhoods I have Moved From, and next his Ballad of the Emeu, but neither was signed. Both of these are in the collected edition of his works. The Condensed Novels were continued in “The Californian,” and Bret Harte also contributed to it many poems, sketches, essays, editorial articles and book reviews. Some of these were unsigned; some were signed “B” or “Bret,” and occasionally the signature was his full name.

STORESHIP APOLLO

Old Ship used as a Saloon

Copyright, Century Co.

No reader who appreciates the finished workmanship of Bret Harte will be surprised to learn that he was a slow and intensely self-critical writer. There is much interesting testimony on this point. Mr. Howells says: “His talent was not a facile gift; he owned that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a line. … When it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey and Sterne and Steele, in his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner world, he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens.”

Noah Brooks wrote as follows: “Scores of writers have become known to me in the course of a long life, but I have never known another so fastidious and so laborious as Bret Harte. His writing materials, the light and heat, and even the adjustment of the furniture of the writing-room, must be as he desired; otherwise he could not go on with his work. Even when his environment was all that he could wish, there were times when the divine afflatus would not come and the day’s work must be abandoned. My editorial rooms in San Francisco were not far from his secluded den, and often, if he opened my door late in the afternoon, with a peculiar cloud on his face, I knew that he had come to wait for me to go to dinner with him, having given up the impossible task of writing when the mood was not on him. ‘It’s no use, Brooks,’ he would say. ‘Everything goes wrong; I cannot write a line. Let’s have an early dinner at Martini’s.’ As soon as I was ready we would go merrily off to dine together, and, having recovered his equanimity, he would stick to his desk through the later hours of the night, slowly forging those masterpieces which cost him so dearly.

“Harte was reticent concerning his work while it was in progress. He never let the air in upon his story or his verses. Once, indeed, he asked me to help him in a calculation to ascertain how long a half-sack of flour and six pounds of side-meat[8] would last a given number of persons. This was the amount of provision he had allowed his outcasts of Poker Flat, and he wanted to know just how long the snow-bound scapegoats could live on that supply. I used to save for him the Eastern and English newspaper notices of his work, and once, when he had looked through a goodly lot of these laudatory notes, he said: ‘These fellows see a heap of things in my stories that I never put there.’ ”

Mr. Stoddard recalls this incident: “One day I found him pacing the floor of his office in the United States Mint; he was knitting his brows and staring at vacancy—I wondered why. He was watching and waiting for a word, the right word, the one word of all others to fit into a line of recently written prose. I suggested one; it would not answer; it must be a word of two syllables, or the natural rhythm of the sentence would suffer. Thus he perfected his prose.”

In the sketch entitled My First Book, printed in volume ten of his works, Bret Harte has given some amusing reminiscences concerning the volume of California poems edited by him, and published in 1866. His selection as Editor, he says, “was chiefly owing to the circumstance that I had from the outset, with precocious foresight, confided to the publisher my intention of not putting any of my own verses in the volume. Publishers are appreciative; and a self-abnegation so sublime, to say nothing of its security, was not without its effect.” After narrating his extreme difficulty in reducing the number of his selections from the numerous poets of California, he goes on to describe the reception of the volume. It sold well, the purchasers apparently being amateur poets who were anxious to discover whether they were represented in the book. “People would lounge into the shop, turn over the leaves of other volumes, say carelessly ‘Got a new book of California poetry out, haven’t you?’ purchase it, and quietly depart.”

“There were as yet,” the Editor continues, “no notices from the press; the big dailies were silent; there was something ominous in this calm. Out of it the bolt fell;” and he quotes the following notice from a country paper: “ ‘The Hogwash and “purp” stuff ladled out from the slop-bucket of Messrs. ——and Co., of ’Frisco, by some lop-eared Eastern apprentice, and called “A Compilation of Californian Verse,” might be passed over, so far as criticism goes. A club in the hands of any able-bodied citizen of Red Dog, and a steamboat ticket to the Bay, cheerfully contributed from this office, would be all-sufficient. But when an imported greenhorn dares to call his flapdoodle mixture “Californian,” it is an insult to the State that has produced the gifted “Yellowhammer,” whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in the columns of the “Jay Hawk.” That this complacent editorial jackass, browsing among the docks and thistles which he has served up in this volume, should make no allusion to California’s greatest bard is rather a confession of his idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor.’ ”

Other criticisms, inspired by like omissions, followed, each one rivalling its predecessor in severity. “The big dailies collected the criticisms and published them in their own columns with the grim irony of exaggerated head-lines. The book sold tremendously on account of this abuse, but I am afraid that the public was disappointed. The fun and interest lay in the criticisms, and not in any pointedly ludicrous quality in the rather commonplace collection … and I have long since been convinced that my most remorseless critics were not in earnest, but were obeying some sudden impulse, started by the first attacking journal. … It was a large, contagious joke, passed from journal to journal in a peculiar cyclonic Western fashion.”

A year later, not, as Bret Harte himself states, in 1865, but in 1867, the first collection of his own poems was published. The volume was a thin twelvemo, bound in green cloth, with a gilt design of a sail on the cover, the title-page reading as follows: “The Lost Galleon and Other Tales. By Fr. Bret Harte, San Francisco. Tame and Bacon, Printers, 1867.” Most of these poems are contained in the standard edition of his works.

In the same year were published the Condensed Novels and the Bohemian Papers, reprinted from “The Bulletin” and “The Californian,” and making, as the author himself said, “a single, not very plethoric volume, the writer’s first book of prose.” He adds that “during this period,” i.e. from 1862 to 1867, he produced “The Society upon the Stanislaus, and The Story of M’liss—the first a dialectical poem, the second a Californian 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.”

The “Overland Monthly” was founded in July, 1868, by Anton Roman, a bookseller on Montgomery Street, and later on Clay Street. Mr. Roman was possessed of that enthusiasm which every new enterprise demands. “He had thought and talked about the Magazine,” he declared, “until it was in his bones.” Bret Harte became the first Editor, and it was he who selected the name. The “Overland” was well printed, on good paper, and the cover was adorned by that historic grizzly bear who, standing on the ties of the newly-laid railroad track, with half-turned body and lowered head, seems prepared to dispute the right of way with the locomotive which might shortly be expected to come screaming down the track.

There was originally no railroad track in the picture, simply the bear; and how the deficiency was supplied is thus explained by Mark Twain in a letter to Thomas Bailey Aldrich: “Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot through Harte’s brain? It was this: When they were trying to decide upon a vignette for the cover of the ‘Overland,’ a grizzly bear (of the arms of the State of California) was chosen. Nahl Bros. carved him and the page was printed, with him in it, looking thus:

“As a bear, he was a success—he was a good bear.—But then, it was objected, that he was an objectless bear—a bear that meant nothing in particular, signified nothing—simply stood there snarling over his shoulder at nothing—and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that—none were satisfied. They hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as much to have him there when there was no point to him. But presently Harte took a pencil and drew these two simple lines under his feet and behold he was a magnificent success!—the ancient symbol of Californian savagery snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive Civilization, the first Overland locomotive!

“I think that was nothing less than inspiration itself.”

In the same letter Mark Twain pays the following magnanimous tribute to his old friend: “Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land—and this grateful remembrance of mine ought to be worth its face, seeing that Bret broke our long friendship a year ago without any cause or provocation that I am aware of.”

The Editor had no prose article of his own in the first number of the “Overland,” but he contributed two poems, the noble lines about San Francisco, which, with characteristic modesty he placed in the middle of the number, and the poem entitled Returned[9] in the “Etc.” column at the end.

And now we come to the publication which first made Bret Harte known upon the Atlantic as well as upon the Pacific coast. The opening number of the “Overland” had contained no “distinctive Californian romance,” as Bret Harte expressed it, and none such being offered for the second number, the Editor supplied the omission with The Luck of Roaring Camp. But the printer, instead of sending the proof-sheets to the writer of the story, as would have been the ordinary course, submitted them to the publisher, with a statement that the matter was so “indecent, irreligious and improper” that his proofreader, a young lady, had with difficulty been induced to read it. Then followed many consultations between author, publisher, and various high literary authorities whose judgment had been invoked. Opinions differed, but the weight of opinion was against the tale, and the expediency of printing it. Nevertheless, the author—conceiving that his fitness as Editor was now in question—stood to his guns; the publisher, though fearful of the result, stood by him; and the tale was published without the alteration of a word. It was received very coldly by the secular press in California, its “singularity” being especially pointed out; and it was bitterly denounced by the religious press as being immoral and unchristian. But there was a wider public to hear from. The return mail from the East brought newspapers and reviews “welcoming the little foundling of Californian literature with an enthusiasm that half frightened its author.”[10] The mail brought also a letter from the Editor of the “Atlantic Monthly” with a request “upon the most flattering terms” that he would write a story for the “Atlantic,” similar to the Luck.

It should be recorded, as an interesting contrast to the impression made by the Luck upon the San Francisco young woman, that it was also a girl, Miss Susan M. Francis, a literary assistant with the publishers of the “Atlantic Monthly,” who, struck by the freshness and beauty of the tale, brought it to the attention of Mr. James T. Fields, then the Editor of the magazine, with the result which Bret Harte has described.

Nor should the attitude of the California young person, and of San Francisco in general, excite surprise. The Pioneers could not be expected to see the moral beauty that lay beneath the rough outward aspect of affairs on the Pacific Slope. The poetry of their own existence was hidden from them. But California, though crude, was self-distrustful, and it bowed to the decision of the East. Bret Harte was honored, even if not understood or appreciated.

The “Overland” was well received, and the high character of the first two numbers was long maintained. Aside from Bret Harte’s work, many volumes of prose and verse have been republished from the magazine, and most of them deserved the honor. In the early Fifties the proportion of really educated men to the whole population was greater in California than in any other State, and probably this was true even of the period when the “Overland” was founded. Scholarship and cultivation were concealed in rough mining towns, in lumber camps, and on remote ranches. Among the women, especially, were many who, like the Sappho of Green Springs, gathered from their lonely, primitive lives a freshness and originality which perhaps they never would have shown in more conventional surroundings. This class furnished numerous readers and a few writers. Officers of the Army and Navy stationed in California contributed some interesting scientific and literary articles to the early numbers of the “Overland.”

Notwithstanding the success of his first story, Bret Harte was in no haste to rush into print with another. He had none of that disposition to make hay while the sun shines which has spoiled many a story-writer. Six months elapsed before the Luck was followed by The Outcasts of Poker Flat. Meanwhile he was carefully and patiently discharging his duties as Editor. Mr. Stoddard has thus described him in that capacity: “Fortunately for me he took an interest in me at a time when I was most in need of advice, and to his criticism and his encouragement I feel that I owe all that is best in my literary efforts. He was not afraid to speak his mind, and I know well enough what occasion I gave him: yet he did not judge me more severely than I judged myself. … I am sure that the majority of the contributors to the ‘Overland Monthly’ profited as I did by his careful and judicious criticism. Fastidious to a degree, he could not overlook a lack of finish in the manuscript offered to him. He had a special taste in the choice of titles, and I have known him to alter the name of an article two or three times in order that the table of contents might read handsomely and harmoniously.”

One of the most frequent contributors to the “Overland” was Miss Ina B. Coolbrith, author of many polished and imaginative poems and stories. In a recent letter Miss Coolbrith thus speaks of Bret Harte as an Editor: “To me he was unfailingly kind and generous, looking out for my interests as one of his contributors with as much care as he accorded to his own. I can only speak of him in terms of unqualified praise as author, friend and man.”

The poem entitled Plain Language from Truthful James, or the Heathen Chinee, as it is popularly known, and as Bret Harte himself afterward called it, first appeared in the “Overland” for September, 1870. Within a few weeks it had spread over the English-speaking world. The Luck of Roaring Camp gave Bret Harte a literary reputation, but this poem made him famous. It was copied by the newspapers almost universally, both here and in England; and it increased the circulation of the “Overland” so much that, two months after its appearance, a single news company in New York was selling twelve hundred copies of the magazine. Almost everybody had a clipping of these verses tucked into his waistcoat pocket or carried in his purse. Quotations from it were on every lip, and some of its most significant lines were recited with applause in the National House of Representatives.

It came at a fortunate moment when the people of this country were just awaking to the fact that there was a “Chinese problem,” and when interest in the race was becoming universal in the East as well as in the West. Says that acute critic, Mr. James Douglas: “There is an element of chance in the fabrication of great poems. The concatenation comes, the artist puts the pieces into their places, and the result is permanent wonder. The Heathen Chinee in its happy felicity is quite as unique as ‘The Blessed Damozel.’ ”

The Heathen Chinee is remarkable for the absolutely impartial attitude of the writer. He observes the Chinaman neither from the locally prejudiced, California point of view, nor from an ethical or reforming point of view. His part is neither to approve nor condemn, but simply to state the fact as it is, not indeed with the coldness of an historian but with the sympathy and insight of a poet. But this is not all, in fact, as need hardly be said, it is not enough to make the poem endure. It endures because it has a beauty of form which approaches perfection. It is hackneyed, and yet as fresh as on the day when it was written.[11]

Truthful James himself who tells the story was a real character—nay is, for, at the writing of these pages, he still lived in the same little shanty where he was to be found when Bret Harte knew him. At that time, in 1856, or thereabout, Bret Harte was teaching school at Tuttletown, a few miles north of Sonora, and Truthful James, Mr. James W. Gillis, lived over the hill from Tuttletown, at a place called Jackass Flat. Mr. Gillis was well known and highly respected in all that neighborhood, and he figures not only in Bret Harte’s poetry, but also in Mark Twain’s works, where he is described as “The Sage of Jackass Hill.”

It is a proof both of Bret Harte’s remarkable freedom from vanity, and of the keen criticism which he bestowed upon his own writings, that he never set much value upon the Heathen Chinee, even after its immense popularity had been attained. When he wrote it, he thought it unworthy of a place in the “Overland” and handed it over to Mr. Ambrose Bierce, then Editor of the “News Letter,”[12] a weekly paper, for publication there. Mr. Bierce, however, recognizing its value, unselfishly advised Bret Harte to give it a place in the “Overland,” and this was finally done. “Nevertheless,” says Mr. Bierce, “it was several months before he overcame his prejudice against the verses and printed them. Indeed he never cared for the thing, and was greatly amused by the meanings that so many read into it. He said he meant nothing whatever by it.”

We have Mark Twain’s word to the same effect. “In 1866,” he writes, “I went to the Sandwich Islands, and when I returned, after several years, Harte was famous as the author of the Heathen Chinee. He said that the Heathen Chinee was an accident, and that he had higher literary ambitions than the fame that could come from an extravaganza of that sort.” “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” Mr. Clemens goes on to say, “was the salvation of his literary career. It placed him securely on a literary road which was more to his taste.”

Bret Harte, indeed, frequently held back for weeks poems which he had completed, but with which he was not content. As one of his fellow-workers declared, “He was never fully satisfied with what he finally allowed to go to the printer.”

His position in San Francisco was now assured. He had been made professor of recent literature in the University of California; he retained his place at the Mint, he was the successful Editor of the “Overland,” and he was happy in his home life. One who knew him well at this period speaks of him as “always referring to his wife in affectionate terms, and quoting her clever speeches, and relating with fond enjoyment the funny sayings and doings of his children.”

Let us, for the moment, leave Bret Harte thus happily situated, and glance at that Pioneer life which he was now engaged in portraying. Said a San Francisco paper in 1851, “The world will never know, and no one could imagine the heart-rending scenes, or the instances of courage and heroic self-sacrifice which have occurred among the California Pioneers during the last three years!”

And yet when these words were penned there was growing up in the East a stripling destined to preserve for posterity some part, at least, of those very occurrences which otherwise would have remained “unrecorded and forgot.”