Within the camp they lie, the young, the brave,
Half knight, half schoolboy, acolytes of fame,
Pledged to one altar, and perchance one grave;
Bred to fear nothing but reproach and blame,
Ascetic dandies o’er whom vestals rave,
Clean-limbed young Spartans, disciplined young elves,
Taught to destroy, that they may live to save,
Students embattled, soldiers at their shelves,
Heroes whose conquests are at first themselves.
It has been said that one function of literature, and especially of poetry, is to enable a nation to understand and appreciate, and thus more completely to realize, the ideals which it has instinctively formed; and in the lines just quoted Bret Harte has done this for West Point.
The poem on San Francisco glows with patriotic and civic feeling, and it expressed a sentiment which, at the time when it was written, hardly anybody in the city, except the poet himself, entertained. San Francisco in 1870 was dominated by that cold, hard, self-satisfied, commercial spirit which Bret Harte especially hated, and which furnished one reason, perhaps the main reason, for his departure from the State.
Drop down, O fleecy Fog, and hide
Her sceptic sneer and all her pride!
Wrap her, O Fog, in gown and hood
Of her Franciscan Brotherhood.
Hide me her faults, her sin and blame;
With thy gray mantle cloak her shame!
And yet it was impossible for Bret Harte, with his deep, abiding faith in the good instincts of mankind, not to look forward to a better day for San Francisco,
When Art shall raise and Culture lift
The sensual joys and meaner thrift,
And all fulfilled the vision we
Who watch and wait shall never see.
There is also a strong lyrical element in Bret Harte’s treatment of nature in his poetry, as well as in his prose. What he always gives is his own impression of the scene, not a mere description of it, although this impression may be conveyed by a few slight touches, sometimes even by a single word. The opening stanza of the poem on the death of Dickens is an illustration:—
Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting,
The river sang below;
The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting
Their minarets of snow.
Ruskin somewhere analyzes the difference between real poetry and prose in a versified form, and quoting a few lines from Byron, he points out the single word in them which makes the passage poetic. In the lines just quoted from Bret Harte, the word “sang” has the same poetic quality; and no one who has ever heard the sound which the poet here describes can fail to recognize the truth of his metaphor.[109]
This is always Bret Harte’s method. He reproduces the emotional effect of the scene upon himself, and thus exhibits nature to the reader as she appeared to him. Emotion, it need not be said, is transmitted much more effectively than ideas or information. In fact, an objective, detailed description of a landscape, however accurate or exhaustive, will leave the reader almost as it found him; whereas a single word which enables him to share the emotion inspired by the scene in the breast of the writer will transport him at a bound to the spot itself.