Moreover, the primitive simplicity of the mining and the logging camp, or even that of an isolated farming community, is not essentially different from the cultivated simplicity of the aristocrat. The laboring man and the aristocrat have very much the same sense of honor and the same ideals; and those writers who are at home with one are almost always at home with the other. Sir Walter Scott and Tolstoi are examples. But between these two extremes, which meet at many points, comes the citified, trading, clerking class, which has lost its primitive, manly instincts, and has not yet regained them in the chastened form of convictions.
It is no exaggeration to say that the society which Bret Harte enjoyed in London was more akin to that of the mining camp than to that of San Francisco. In both cases the charm which attracted him was the charm of simplicity; in the mining camp, the simplicity of nature, in London the simplicity of cultivation and finish.
CHAPTER XX
BRET HARTE’S PIONEER DIALECT
Occasionally Bret Harte uses an archaic word, not because it is archaic, but because it expresses his meaning better than any other, or gives the needed stimulus to the imagination of the reader. Thus, in A First Family of Tasajara we read that “the former daughters of Sion were there, burgeoning and expanding in the glare of their new prosperity with silver and gold.”
Often, of course, the employment of an archaic expression confers upon the speaker that air of quaintness which the author wishes to convey. Johnson’s Old Woman, for example, “’Lowed she’d use a doctor, ef I’d fetch him.” The verb to use, in this sense, may still be heard in some parts of New England as well as in the West. “I never use sugar in my tea” is a familiar example.
Many other words which Bret Harte’s Pioneer people employ are still in service among old-fashioned country folk, although they have long since passed out of literature, and are never heard in cities. Thus Salomy Jane was accused by her father of “honeyfoglin’ with a hoss-thief”; and the blacksmith’s small boy spoke of Louise Macy as “philanderin’” with Captain Greyson. These good old English words are still used in the West and South. In the same category is “’twixt” for between. Dick Spindler spoke of “this yer peace and good-will ’twixt man and man.” “Far” in the sense of distant is another example: “The far barn near the boundary.” “Mannerly” in the sense of well-mannered has the authority of Shakspere and of Abner Nott in A Ship of ’49.
One of Bret Harte’s Western girls speaks of hunting for the plant known as “Old Man” (southernwood), because she wanted it for “smellidge.” “Smellidge” has the appearance of being a good word, and it was formerly used in New England and the West, but it is excluded from modern dictionaries.