On May 25, 1864, the first number of “The Californian” appeared. This was the famous weekly edited and published by the late Charles Henry Webb, and written mainly by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Webb himself, Prentice Mulford, and Mr. Stoddard. It was of “The Californian” that Mr. Howells wittily said: “These ingenuous young men, with the fatuity of gifted people, had established a literary newspaper in San Francisco, and they brilliantly coöperated to its early extinction.”

It is an interesting coincidence that Bret Harte and Mark Twain both began their literary careers in San Francisco, and at almost the same time. Bret Harte was engaged upon “The Californian,” and Mark Twain was a reporter for the “Morning Call,” when they were introduced to each other by a common friend, Mr. George Barnes. Bret Harte thus describes his first impression of the new acquaintance:—

“His head was striking. He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, and even the aquiline eye—an eye so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me—of an unusual and dominant nature. His eyebrows were very thick and bushy. His dress was careless, and his general manner one of supreme indifference to surroundings and circumstances. Barnes introduced him as Mr. Sam Clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very unusual talent in a number of newspaper articles contributed under the signature of ‘Mark Twain.’ We talked on different topics, and about a month afterward Clemens dropped in upon me again. He had been away in the mining districts on some newspaper assignment in the mean time. In the course of conversation he remarked that the unearthly laziness that prevailed in the town he had been visiting was beyond anything in his previous experience. He said the men did nothing all day long but sit around the bar-room stove, spit, and ‘swop lies.’ He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, and half unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator. I asked him to tell it again to a friend who came in, and then asked him to write it out for ‘The Californian.’ He did so, and when published it was an emphatic success. It was the first work of his that had attracted general attention, and it crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading. The story was ‘The Jumping Frog of Calaveras.’ It is now known and laughed over, I suppose, wherever the English language is spoken; but it will never be as funny to any one in print as it was to me, told for the first time by the unknown Twain himself on that morning in the San Francisco Mint.”

The first article that appeared in “The Californian” was Bret Harte’s Neighborhoods I have Moved From, and next his Ballad of the Emeu, but neither was signed. Both of these are in the collected edition of his works. The Condensed Novels were continued in “The Californian,” and Bret Harte also contributed to it many poems, sketches, essays, editorial articles and book reviews. Some of these were unsigned; some were signed “B” or “Bret,” and occasionally the signature was his full name.

STORESHIP APOLLO
Old Ship used as a Saloon
Copyright, Century Co.

No reader who appreciates the finished workmanship of Bret Harte will be surprised to learn that he was a slow and intensely self-critical writer. There is much interesting testimony on this point. Mr. Howells says: “His talent was not a facile gift; he owned that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a line.... When it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey and Sterne and Steele, in his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner world, he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens.”

Noah Brooks wrote as follows: “Scores of writers have become known to me in the course of a long life, but I have never known another so fastidious and so laborious as Bret Harte. His writing materials, the light and heat, and even the adjustment of the furniture of the writing-room, must be as he desired; otherwise he could not go on with his work. Even when his environment was all that he could wish, there were times when the divine afflatus would not come and the day’s work must be abandoned. My editorial rooms in San Francisco were not far from his secluded den, and often, if he opened my door late in the afternoon, with a peculiar cloud on his face, I knew that he had come to wait for me to go to dinner with him, having given up the impossible task of writing when the mood was not on him. ‘It’s no use, Brooks,’ he would say. ‘Everything goes wrong; I cannot write a line. Let’s have an early dinner at Martini’s.’ As soon as I was ready we would go merrily off to dine together, and, having recovered his equanimity, he would stick to his desk through the later hours of the night, slowly forging those masterpieces which cost him so dearly.

“Harte was reticent concerning his work while it was in progress. He never let the air in upon his story or his verses. Once, indeed, he asked me to help him in a calculation to ascertain how long a half-sack of flour and six pounds of side-meat[8] would last a given number of persons. This was the amount of provision he had allowed his outcasts of Poker Flat, and he wanted to know just how long the snow-bound scapegoats could live on that supply. I used to save for him the Eastern and English newspaper notices of his work, and once, when he had looked through a goodly lot of these laudatory notes, he said: ‘These fellows see a heap of things in my stories that I never put there.’”

Mr. Stoddard recalls this incident: “One day I found him pacing the floor of his office in the United States Mint; he was knitting his brows and staring at vacancy,—I wondered why. He was watching and waiting for a word, the right word, the one word of all others to fit into a line of recently written prose. I suggested one; it would not answer; it must be a word of two syllables, or the natural rhythm of the sentence would suffer. Thus he perfected his prose.”