Beside these occasional lapses in the construction of his sentences, Bret Harte had some peculiarities in the use of English to which he clung, either out of loyalty to Dickens, from whom he seems to have derived them, or from a certain amiable perversity which was part of his character. He was a strong partisan of the “split infinitive.” A Chinaman “caused the gold piece and the letter to instantly vanish up his sleeve.” “To coldly interest Price”; “to unpleasantly discord with the general social harmony”; “to quietly reappear,” are other examples.
The wrong use of “gratuitous” is a thoroughly Dickens error, and it almost seems as if Bret Harte went out of his way to copy it. In the story of Miggles, for example, it is only a few paragraphs after Yuba Bill has observed the paralytic Jim’s “expression of perfectly gratuitous solemnity,” that his own features “relax into an expression of gratuitous and imbecile cheerfulness.”
“Aggravation” in the sense of irritation is another Dickens solecism which also appears several times in Bret Harte.
Beside these, Bret Harte had a few errors all his own. In The Story of a Mine, there is a strangely repeated use of the awkward expression “near facts,” followed by a statement that the new private secretary was a little dashed as to his “near hopes.” Diligent search reveals also “continued on” in one story, “different to” in another, “plead” for “pleaded,” “who would likely spy upon you” in an unfortunate place, and “too occupied with his subject” somewhere else.
This short list will very nearly exhaust Bret Harte’s errors in the use of English; but it must be admitted, also, that he occasionally lapses into a Dickens-like grandiloquence and cant of superior virtue. There are several examples of this in The Story of a Mine, especially in that part which relates to the City of Washington. The following paragraph is almost a burlesque of Dickens: “The actors, the legislators themselves, knew it and laughed at it; the commentators, the Press, knew it and laughed at it; the audience, the great American people, knew it and laughed at it. And nobody for an instant conceived that it ever, under any circumstances, might be different.”
Still worse is this description of the Supreme Court, which might serve as a model of confused ideas and crude reasoning, only half believed in by the writer himself: “A body of learned, cultivated men, representing the highest legal tribunal in the land, still lingered in a vague idea of earning the scant salary bestowed upon them by the economical founders of the government, and listened patiently to the arguments of counsel, whose fees for advocacy of the claims before them would have paid the life income of half the bench.”
That exquisite sketch, Wan Lee, the Pagan, is marred by this Dickens-like apostrophe to the clergy: “Dead, my reverend friends, dead! Stoned to death in the streets of San Francisco, in the year of grace, eighteen hundred and sixty-nine, by a mob of half-grown boys and Christian school-children!”
In the description of an English country church, which occurs in A Phyllis of the Sierras, we find another passage almost worthy of a “condensed novel” in which some innocent crusaders, lying cross-legged in marble, are rebuked for tripping up the unwary “until in death, as in life, they got between the congregation and the Truth that was taught there.”
Bret Harte has been accused also of “admiring his characters in the wrong place,” as Dickens certainly did; but this charge seems to be an injustice. A scene in Gabriel Conroy represents Arthur Poinsett as calmly explaining to Doña Dolores that he is the person who seduced and abandoned Grace Conroy; and he makes this statement without a sign of shame or regret. “If he had been uttering a moral sentiment, he could not have been externally more calm, or inwardly less agitated. More than that, there was a certain injured dignity in his manner,” and so forth.
This is the passage cited by that very acute critic, Mr. E. S. Nadal. But there is nothing in it or in the context which indicates that Bret Harte admired the conduct of Poinsett. He was simply describing a type which everybody will recognize; but not describing it as admirable. Bret Harte depicted his characters with so much gusto, and at the same time was so absolutely impartial and non-committal toward them, that it is easy to misconceive his own opinion of them or of their conduct.[120] From another fault, perhaps the worst fault of Dickens, namely, his propensity for the sudden conversion of a character to something the reverse of what it always has been, Bret Harte—with the single exception of Mrs. Tretherick, in An Episode of Fiddletown—is absolutely free.