This was typical California humor, and Bret Harte, in his stories and poems, more often perhaps in the latter, gave frequent expression to it; but it was not typical Bret Harte humor. The humor of the passage just quoted from How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar, the humor that made Bret Harte famous, and still more the humor that made him beloved, was not saturnine or satirical, but sympathetic and tender. It was humor not from an external point of view, but from the victim’s point of view. The Californians themselves saw persons and events in a different way; and how imperfect their vision was may be gathered from the fact that they stoutly denied the truth of Bret Harte’s descriptions of Pioneer life. They were too close at hand, too much a part of the drama themselves, to perceive it correctly. Bret Harte had the faculty as to which it is hard to say how much is intellectual and how much is emotional, of getting behind the scenes, and beholding men and motives as they really are.
That brilliant critic, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, declares that Bret Harte was a genuine American, that he was also a genuine humorist, but that he was not an American humorist; and then he proceeds to support this very just antithesis as follows: “American humor is purely exaggerative; Bret Harte’s humor was sympathetic and analytical. The wild, sky-breaking humor of America has its fine qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two qualities,—reverence and sympathy. And these two qualities were knit into the closest texture of Bret Harte’s humor. Mark Twain’s story ... about an organist who was asked to play appropriate music to an address upon the parable of the Prodigal Son, and who proceeded to play with great spirit, ‘We’ll all get blind drunk when Johnny comes marching home’ is an instance.... If Bret Harte had described that scene it would in some subtle way have combined a sense of the absurdity of the incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos of the scene. You would have felt that the organist’s tune was funny, but not that the Prodigal Son was funny.”
No excuse need be offered for quoting further what Mr. Chesterton has to say about the parodies of Bret Harte, for it covers the whole ground: “The supreme proof of the fact that Bret Harte had the instinct of reverence may be found in the fact that he was a really great parodist. Mere derision, mere contempt, never produced or could produce parody. A man who simply despises Paderewski for having long hair is not necessarily fitted to give an admirable imitation of his particular touch on the piano. If a man wishes to parody Paderewski’s style of execution, he must emphatically go through one process first: he must admire it and even reverence it. Bret Harte had a real power of imitating great authors.... This means and can only mean that he had perceived the real beauty, the real ambition of Dumas and Victor Hugo and Charlotte Brontë. In his imitation of Hugo, Bret Harte has a passage like this: ‘M. Madeline was, if possible, better than M. Myriel. M. Myriel was an angel. M. Madeline was a good man.’ I do not know whether Victor Hugo ever used this antithesis; but I am certain that he would have used it and thanked his stars for it, if he had thought of it. This is real parody, inseparable from imitation.”
The optimism for which Bret Harte was remarkable had its root in that same sympathy which formed the basis of his humor and pathos. The unsympathetic critic invariably despairs of mankind and the universe. This is apparent in social, moral, and even political matters. A typical reformer, such as the late Mr. Godkin, gazing horror-struck at Tammany and the Tammany politician, discerns no hope for the future. But the Tammany man himself, knowing the virtues as well as the vices of his people, is optimistic to the point of exuberance. After all, there is something in the human heart, amid all its vileness, which ranges mankind on the side of the angels, not of the devils. The sympathetic critic perceives this, and therefore he has confidence in the future of the race; and may even indulge the supreme hope that from this terrible world we shall pass into another and better state of existence.
CHAPTER XIX
BRET HARTE AS A POET
Whether Bret Harte will make his appeal to posterity mainly as a poet or as a prose writer is a difficult question, upon which, as upon all similar matters relating to him, the critics have expressed the most diverse opinions. There is perhaps more unevenness in his poetry than in his prose, and certainly more facility in imitating other writers. Cadet Grey is, in form, almost a parody of “Don Juan.” The Angelus might be ascribed to Longfellow (though he never could have written that last stanza), The Tale of a Pony to Saxe or Barham, a few others to Praed, one to Campbell, and one to Calverley. Even that very beautiful poem, Conception de Arguello, a thing almost perfect in its way, strikes no new note. And yet who could forget the picture which it draws of the deserted maiden, grieving,—
Until hollows chased the dimples from her cheeks of olive brown,
And at times a swift, shy moisture dragged the long sweet lashes down.