A Backward Glance at Eighty: Recollections & Comment

by Charles A. Murdock

Pathetic and inexplicable were the closing days of this gifted man. An exile from his native land, unattended by family or kin, sustaining his lonely life by wringing the dregs of memory, and clasping in farewell the hands of a fancied friend of his dear old reprobate Colonel, he, like Kentuck, "drifted away into the shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown sea."

In his more than forty years of authorship he was both industrious and prolific. In the nineteen volumes of his published work there must be more than two hundred titles of stories and sketches, and many of them are little known. Some of them are disappointing in comparison with his earlier and perhaps best work, but many of them are charming and all are in his delightful style, with its undertone of humor that becomes dominant at unexpected intervals. His literary form was distinctive, with a manner not derived from the schools or copied from any of his predecessors, but developed from his own personality. He seems to have founded a modern school, with a lightness of touch and a felicity of expression unparalleled. He was vividly imaginative, and also had the faculty of giving dramatic form and consistency to an incident or story told by another. He was a story-teller, equally dexterous in prose or verse. His taste was unerring and he sought for perfect form. His atmosphere was breezy and healthful—out of doors with the fragrance of the pine-clad Sierras. He was never morbid and introspective. His characters are virile and natural men and women who act from simple motives, who live and love, or hate and fight, without regard to problems and with small concern for conventionalities. Harte had sentiment, but was realistic and fearless. He felt under no obligation to make all gamblers villains or all preachers heroes. He dealt with human nature in the large and he made it real.

His greatest achievement was in faithfully mirroring the life of a new and striking epoch. He seems to have discovered that it was picturesque and to have been almost alone in impressing this fact on the world. He sketched pictures of pioneer life as he saw or imagined it with matchless beauty and compelled the interest and enjoyment of all mankind.

His chief medium was the short story, to which he gave a new vogue. Translated into many tongues, his tales became the source of knowledge to a large part of the people of Europe as to California and the Pacific. He associated the Far West with romance, and we have never fully outlived it.

That he was gifted as a poet no one can deny. Perhaps his most striking use of his power as a versifier was in connection with the romantic Spanish background of California history. Such work as "Concepcion de Arguello" is well worth while. In his "Spanish Idylls and Legends" he catches the fine spirit of the period and connects California with a past of charm and beauty. His patriotic verse has both strength and loveliness and reflects a depth of feeling that his lighter work does not lead us to expect. In his dialect verse he revels in fun and shows himself a genuine and cleanly humorist.

If we search for the source of his great power we may not expect to find it; yet we may decide that among his endowments his extraordinary power of absorption contributes very largely. His early reference to "eager absorption" and "photographic sensitiveness" are singularly significant expressions. Experience teaches the plodder, but the man of genius, supremely typified by Shakespeare, needs not to acquire knowledge slowly and painfully. Sympathy, imagination, and insight reveal truth, and as a plate, sensitized, holds indefinitely the records of the exposure, so Harte, forty years after in London, holds in consciousness the impressions of the days he spent in Tuolumne County. It is a great gift, a manifestation of genius. He had a fine background of inheritance and a lifetime of good training.

Bret Harte was also gifted with an agreeable personality. He was even-tempered and good-natured. He was an ideal guest and enjoyed his friends. Whatever his shortcomings and whatever his personal responsibility for them, he deserves to be treated with the consideration and generosity he extended to others. He was never censorious, and instances of his magnanimity are many. Severity of judgment is a custom that few of us can afford, and to be generous is never a mistake. Harte was extremely sensitive, and he deplored controversy. He was quite capable of suffering in silence if defense of self might reflect on others. His deficiencies were trivial but damaging, and their heavy retribution he bore with dignity, retaining the respect of those who knew him.

As to what he was, as man and author, he is entitled to be judged by a jury of his peers. I could quote at length from a long list of associates of high repute, but they all concur fully with the comprehensive judgment of Ina Coolbrith, who knew him intimately. She says, "I can only speak of him in terms of unqualified praise as author, friend, and man."

In the general introduction that Harte wrote for the first volume of his collected stories he refers to the charge that he "confused recognized standards of morality by extenuating lives of recklessness and often criminality with a single solitary virtue" as "the cant of too much mercy." He then adds: "Without claiming to be a religious man or a moralist, but simply as an artist, he shall reverently and humbly conform to the rules laid down by a great poet who created the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, whose works have lasted eighteen hundred years, and will remain when the present writer and his generations are forgotten. And he is conscious of uttering no original doctrine in this, but only of voicing the beliefs of a few of his literary brethren happily living, and one gloriously dead, [Footnote: Evidently Dickens.] who never made proclamation of this from the housetops."

Bret Harte had a very unusual combination of sympathetic insight, emotional feeling, and keen sense of the dramatic. In the expression of the result of these powers he commanded a literary style individually developed, expressive of a rare personality. He was vividly imaginative, and he had exacting ideals of precision in expression. His taste was unerring. The depth and power of the great soul were not his. He was the artist, not the prophet. He was a delightful painter of the life he saw, an interpreter of the romance of his day, a keen but merciful satirist, a humorist without reproach, a patriot, a critic, and a kindly, modest gentleman. He was versatile, doing many things exceedingly well, and some things supremely well. He discerned the significance of the remarkable social conditions of early days in California and developed a marvelous power of presenting them in vivid and attractive form. His humor is unsurpassed. It is pervasive, like the perfume of the rose, never offending by violence. His style is a constant surprise and a never-ending delight. His spirit is kindly and generous. He finds good in unsuspected places, and he leaves hope for all mankind. He was sensitive, peace-loving, and indignant at wrong, a scorner of pretense, independent in thought, just in judgment. He surmounted many difficulties, bore suffering without complaint, and left with those who really knew him a pleasant memory. It would seem that he was a greater artist and a better man than is commonly conceded.