Possibly Bret Harte sometimes carries this dramatic conciseness a little too far,—so far that the reader’s attention is drawn from the matter in hand to the manner in which it is expressed. To take an example, Johnson’s Old Woman ends as follows:—
“‘I want to talk to you about Miss Johnson,’ I said eagerly.
“‘I reckon so,’ he said with an exasperating smile. ‘Most fellers do. But she ain’t Miss Johnson no more. She’s married.’
“‘Not to that big chap over from Ten Mile Mills?’ I said breathlessly.
“‘What’s the matter with him,’ said Johnson. ‘Ye didn’t expect her to marry a nobleman, did ye?’
“I said I didn’t see why she shouldn’t,—and believed that she had.”
This is extremely clever, but perhaps its very cleverness, and its abruptness, divert the reader’s interest for a moment from the story to the person who tells it.
One other characteristic of Bret Harte’s style, and indeed of any style which ranks with the best, is obvious, and that is subtlety. It is the office of a good style to express in some indefinable manner those nuances which mere words, taken by themselves, are not fine enough to convey. Thoughts so subtle as to have almost the character of feelings; feelings so well defined as just to escape being thoughts; attractions and repulsions; those obscure movements of the intellect of which the ordinary man is only half conscious until they are revealed to him by the eye of genius;—all these things it is a part of style to express, or at least to imply. Subtlety of style presupposes, of course, subtlety of thought, and possibly also subtlety of perception. Certainly Bret Harte had both of these capacities; and many examples might be cited of his minute and sympathetic observation. For instance, although he had no knowledge of horses, and occasionally betrays his ignorance in this respect, yet he has described the peculiar gait of the American trotter with an accuracy which any technical person might envy. “The driver leaned forward and did something with the reins—Rose never could clearly understand what, though it seemed to her that he simply lifted them with ostentatious lightness; but the mare suddenly seemed to lengthen herself and lose her height, and the stalks of wheat on either side of the dusty track began to melt into each other, and then slipped like a flash into one long, continuous, shimmering green hedge. So perfect was the mare’s action that the girl was scarcely conscious of any increased effort.... So superb was the reach of her long, easy stride that Rose could scarcely see any undulations in the brown, shining back on which she could have placed her foot, nor felt the soft beat of the delicate hoofs that took the dust so firmly and yet so lightly.”[116]
Equally correct is the description of the “great, yellow mare” Jovita, that carried Dick Bullen on his midnight ride:[117] “From her Roman nose to her rising haunches, from her arched spine hidden by the stiff manchillas of a Mexican saddle, to her thick, straight bony legs, there was not a line of equine grace. In her half-blind but wholly vicious white eyes, in her protruding under lip, in her monstrous color, there was nothing but ugliness and vice.”
Jovita, plainly, was drawn from life, and she must have been of thoroughbred blood on one side, for her extraordinary energy and temper could have been derived from no other source. Such a mare would naturally have an unusually straight hind leg; and Bret Harte noticed it.