As to his heroines, he had such a faculty of describing them that they stand before us almost as clearly as if we saw them in the flesh. He does not simply tell us that they are beautiful,—we see for ourselves that they are so; and one reason for this is the sympathetic keenness with which he observed all the details of the human face and figure. Thus Julia Porter’s face “appeared whiter at the angles of the mouth and nose through the relief of tiny freckles like grains of pepper.”
There are subtleties of coloring that have escaped almost everybody else. Who but Bret Harte has really described the light which love kindles upon the face of a woman? “Yerba Buena’s strangely delicate complexion had taken on itself that faint Alpine glow that was more of an illumination than a color.” And so of Cressy, as the Schoolmaster saw her at the dance. “She was pale, he had never seen her so beautiful.... The absence of color in her usually fresh face had been replaced by a faint magnetic aurora that seemed to him half spiritual. He could not take his eyes from her; he could not believe what he saw.”
The forehead, the temples, and more especially the eyebrows of his heroines—these and the part which they play in the expression of emotion, are described by Bret Harte with a particularity which cannot be found elsewhere. Even the eyelashes of his heroines are often carefully painted in the picture. Flora Dimwood “cast a sidelong glance” at the hero, “under her widely-spaced, heavy lashes.” Of Mrs. Brimmer, the fastidious Boston woman, it is said that “a certain nervous intensity occasionally lit up her weary eyes with a dangerous phosphorescence, under their brown fringes.”
The eyes and eyelashes of that irrepressible child, Sarah Walker, are thus minutely and pathetically described: “Her eyes were of a dark shade of burnished copper,—the orbits appearing deeper and larger from the rubbing in of habitual tears from long wet lashes.”
Bret Harte has the rare faculty of making even a tearful woman attractive. The Ward of the Golden Gate “drew back a step, lifted her head with a quick toss that seemed to condense the moisture in her shining eyes, and sent what might have been a glittering dewdrop flying into the loosened tendrils of her hair.” The quick-tempered heroine is seen “hurriedly disentangling two stinging tears from her long lashes”; and even the mannish girl, Julia Porter, becomes femininely deliquescent as she leans back in the dark stage-coach, with the romantic Cass Beard gazing at her from his invisible corner. “How much softer her face looked in the moonlight!—How moist her eyes were—actually shining in the light! How that light seemed to concentrate in the corner of the lashes, and then slipped—flash—away! Was she? Yes, she was crying.”
There is great subtlety not only of perception but of thought in the description of the Two Americans at the beginning of their intimacy:—
“Oddly enough, their mere presence and companionship seemed to excite in others that tenderness they had not yet felt themselves. Family groups watched the handsome pair in their innocent confidence and, with French exuberant recognition of sentiment, thought them the incarnation of Love. Something in their manifest equality of condition kept even the vainest and most susceptible of spectators from attempted rivalry or cynical interruption. And when at last they dropped side by side on a sun-warmed stone bench on the terrace, and Helen, inclining her brown head toward her companion, informed him of the difficulty she had experienced in getting gumbo soup, rice and chicken, corn cakes, or any of her favorite home dishes in Paris, an exhausted but gallant boulevardier rose from a contiguous bench, and, politely lifting his hat to the handsome couple, turned slowly away from what he believed were tender confidences he would not permit himself to hear.”
Without this subtlety, a writer may have force, even eloquence, as Johnson and Macaulay had those qualities, but he is not likely to have an enduring charm. Subtlety seems to be the note of the best modern writers, of the Oxford school in particular, a subtlety of language which extracts from every word its utmost nicety of meaning, and a subtlety of thought in which every faculty is on the alert to seize any qualification or limitation, any hint or suggestion that might be hovering obscurely about the subject.
Yet subtlety, more perhaps than any other quality of a good style, easily becomes a defect. If it is the forte of some writers, it is the foible, not to say the vice, of others. The later works of Henry James, for instance, will at once occur to the Reader as an example. Bret Harte himself is sometimes, but rarely, over-subtle, representing his characters as going through processes of thought or speech much too elaborate for them, or for the occasion.
There is an example of this in Susy, where Clarence says: “‘If I did not know you were prejudiced by a foolish and indiscreet woman, I should believe you were trying to insult me as you have your adopted mother, and would save you the pain of doing both in her house by leaving it now and forever.’”