What character could be more Scotch, and less anything else, than the porter at the railway station where the Consul alighted on his way to visit the MacSpaddens. “‘Ye’ll no be rememberin’ me. I had a machine in St. Kentigern and drove ye to MacSpadden’s ferry often. Far, far too often! She’s a strange, flagrantitious creature; her husband’s but a puir fule, I’m thinkin’, and ye did yersel’ nae guid gaunin’ there.’”
Mr. Callender, again, Ailsa’s father, in Young Robin Gray, breathes Scotch Calvinism and Scotch thrift and self-respect in every line.
“‘Have you had a cruise in the yacht?’ asked the Consul.
“‘Ay,’ said Mr. Callender, ‘we have been up and down the loch, and around the far point, but not for boardin’ or lodgin’ the night, nor otherwise conteenuing or parteecipating.... Mr. Gray’s a decent enough lad, and not above instruction, but extraordinar’ extravagant.’”
Even the mysteries of Franco-English seem to have been fathomed by Bret Harte, possibly by his contact with French people in San Francisco. This is how the innkeeper explained to Alkali Dick some peculiarities of French custom: “‘For you comprehend not the position of la jeune fille in all France! Ah! in America the young lady she go everywhere alone; I have seen her—pretty, charming, fascinating—alone with the young man. But here, no, never! Regard me, my friend. The French mother, she say to her daughter’s fiancé, “Look! there is my daughter. She has never been alone with a young man for five minutes,—not even with you. Take her for your wife!” It is monstrous! It is impossible! It is so!’”
The moral complement of this rare capacity for reading human nature was the sympathy, the tenderness of feeling which Bret Harte possessed. Sympathy with human nature, with its weaknesses, with the tragedies which it is perpetually encountering, and above all, with its redeeming virtues,—this is the keynote of Bret Harte’s works, the mainspring of his humor and pathos. He had the gift of satire as well, but, fortunately for the world, he made far less use of it. Satire is to humor as corporal punishment is to personal influence. A satire is a jest, but a cutting one,—a jest in which the victim is held up to scorn or contempt.
Humor is a much more subtle quality than satire. Like satire, it is the perception of an incongruity, but it must be a newly discovered or invented incongruity, for an essential element in humor is the pleasurable surprise, the gentle shock which it conveys. A New Jersey farmer was once describing in the presence of a very humane person, the great age and debility of a horse that he had formerly owned and used. “You ought to have killed him!” interrupted the humane person indignantly. “Well,” drawled the farmer, “we did,—almost.” Satire is merely destructive, whereas sentiment is constructive. The most that satire can do is to show how the thing ought not to be done. But sentiment goes much further, for it supplies the dynamic power of affection. Becky Sharp dazzles and amuses; but Colonel Newcome softens and inspires.
There is often in Bret Harte a subtle blending of satire and humor, notably in that masterpiece of satirical humor, the Heathen Chinee. The poet beautifully depicts the naïve indignation of the American gambler at the duplicity of the Mongolian,—a duplicity exceeding even his own. “‘We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!’”
Another instance is that passage in The Rose of Tuolumne, where the author, after relating how a stranger was shot and nearly killed in a mining town, records the prevailing impression in the neighborhood “that his misfortune was the result of the defective moral quality of his being a stranger.” So, in The Outcasts of Poker Flat, when the punishment of Mr. Oakhurst was under consideration, “A few of the Committee had urged hanging him as a possible example and a sure method of reimbursing themselves from his pockets of the money 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.”
Even in these passages humor predominates over satire. In fact,—and it is a fact characteristic of Bret Harte,—the only satire, pure and simple, in his works is that which he directs against hypocrisy. This was the one fault which he could not forgive; and he especially detested that peculiar form of cold and calculating hypocrisy which occasionally survives as the dregs of Puritanism. Bret Harte was keenly alive to this aspect of New England character; and he has depicted it with almost savage intensity in The Argonauts of North Liberty. Ezekiel Corwin, a shrewd, flinty, narrow Yankee, is not a new figure in literature, but an old figure in one or two new situations, notably in his appearance at the mining camps as a vender of patent medicines. “That remarkably unfair and unpleasant-spoken man had actually frozen Hanley’s Ford into icy astonishment at his audacity, and he had sold them an invoice of the Panacea before they had recovered; he had insulted Chipitas into giving an extensive order in bitters; he had left Hayward’s Creek pledged to Burne’s pills—with drawn revolvers still in their hands.”