Perhaps the final test of nobility in man or woman is the capacity to value something, be it honor, affection, or what you will, be it almost anything, but to value something more than life itself; and this is the characteristic of Bret Harte’s heroines. They are as ready to die for love as Juliet was, and along with this abandon they have the coolness, the independence, the practical faculty, which belong to their time and race, but which were not a part of woman’s nature in the age that produced Shakspere’s “unlessoned girl.”
Bret Harte’s heroines have a strong family resemblance to those of both Tourgueneff and Thomas Hardy. In each case the women obey the instinct of love as unreservedly as men of an archaic type obey the instinct of fighting. There is no question with them of material advantage, of wealth, position, or even reputation. Such considerations, so familiar to women of the world, never enter their minds. They love as nature prompts, and having once given their love, they give themselves and everything that they have along with it. There is a magnificent forgetfulness of self about them. This is the way of nature. Nature never counts the cost, never hoards her treasures, but pours them out, to live or die as the case may be, with a profusion which makes the human by-stander—economical, poverty-stricken man—stand aghast. In Russia this type of woman is frequently found, as Tourgueneff, and to a lesser degree Tolstoi, found her among the upper classes, which have retained a pristine quality long since bred out of the corresponding classes in England and in the United States. For women of the same type in England, Thomas Hardy is forced to look lower down in the social scale; and this probably accounts for the fact that his heroines are seldom drawn from the upper classes.
Women of this kind sometimes fail in point of chastity, but it is a failure due to impulse and affection, not to mere frivolity or sensuality. After all, chastity is only one of the virtues that women owe to themselves and to the race. The chaste woman who coldly marries for money is, as a rule, morally inferior to the unchaste woman who gives up everything for love.
It is to be observed, however, that Bret Harte’s women do not need this defence, for his heroines, with the single exception of the faithful Miggles, are virtuous. The only loose women in Bret Harte’s stories are the obviously bad women, the female “villains” of the play, and they are by no means numerous. Joan, in The Argonauts of North Liberty, the wives of Brown of Calaveras and The Bell-Ringer of Angel’s, respectively, the cold-blooded Mrs. Decker, and Mrs. Burroughs, the pretty, murderous, feline little woman in A Mercury of the Foot-Hills—these very nearly exhaust the list. On the other hand, in Thomas Hardy and Tourgueneff, to say nothing of lesser novelists, it is often the heroine herself who falls from virtue. Too much can hardly be made of the moral superiority of Bret Harte’s stories in this respect. It is due, not simply to his own taste and preference, but to the actual state of society in California, which, in this respect as in all others, he faithfully portrayed. The city of San Francisco might have told a different story; but in the mining and agricultural parts of the State the standard of feminine virtue was high. Perhaps this was due, in part at least, to the chivalry of the men reacting upon the women,—to that feeling which Bret Harte himself called “the Western-American fetich of the sanctity of sex,” and, again, “the innate Far-Western reverence for women.”
In all European societies, and now, to a lesser degree, in the cities of the United States, every man is, generally speaking, the enemy of every young and good-looking woman, as much as the hunter is the enemy of his game. How vast is the difference between this attitude of men to women and that which Bret Harte describes! The California men, as he says somewhere, “thought it dishonorable and a proof of incompetency to rise by their wives’ superior fortune.” They married for love and nothing else, and their love took the form of reverence.
The complement of this feeling, on the woman’s side, is a maternal, protecting affection, perhaps the noblest passion of which women are capable; and this is the kind of love that Bret Harte’s heroines invariably show. No mother could have watched over her child more tenderly than Cressy over her sweetheart. The cry that came from the lips of the Rose of Tuolumne when she flew to the rescue of her bleeding lover was “the cry of a mother over her stricken babe, of a tigress over her mangled cub.”
Bret Harte’s heroines are almost all of the robust type. A companion picture to the Rose is that of Jinny in the story When the Waters Were Up at “Jules’.” “Certainly she was graceful! Her tall, lithe, but beautifully moulded figure, even in its characteristic Southwestern indolence, fell into poses as picturesque as they were unconscious. She lifted the big molasses can from its shelf on the rafters with the attitude of a Greek water-bearer. She upheaved the heavy flour sack to the same secure shelf with the upraised palm of an Egyptian caryatid.”
Trinidad Joe’s daughter, too, was large-limbed, with blue eyes, black brows and white teeth. It was of her that the Doctor said, “If she spoke rustic Greek instead of bad English, and wore a cestus instead of an ill-fitting corset, you’d swear she was a goddess.”
Something more, however, goes to the making of a handsome woman than mere health and muscle. Bret Harte often speaks of the sudden appearance of beauty and refinement among the Western and Southwestern people. Kitty, for example, as the Reader will remember, “was slight, graceful, and self-contained, and moved beside her stumpy commonplace father and her faded commonplace mother, in the dining-room of the Boomville hotel, like some distinguished alien.” In A Vision of the Fountain, Bret Harte, half humorously, suggested an explanation. He speaks of the hero as “a singularly handsome young fellow with one of those ideal faces and figures sometimes seen in Western frontier villages, attributable to no ancestor, but evolved possibly from novels and books devoured by ancestresses in the long, solitary winter evenings of their lonely cabins on the frontier.”[26]
It seems more likely, however, that a fortunate environment is the main cause of beauty, a life free from care or annoyance; a deep sense of security; that feeling of self-respect which is produced by the respect of others, and, finally, surroundings which have either the beauty of art or the beauty of nature. These are the very advantages which, with many superficial differences, no doubt, are enjoyed alike by the daughters of frontiersmen and by the daughters of a nobility. On the other hand, they are the very advantages with which the middle class in cities, the cockney class, is almost always obliged to dispense, and that class is conspicuously deficient in beauty. Perhaps no one thing is more conducive to beauty than the absence of those hideous creations known as “social superiors.” Imagine a society in which it would be impossible to make anybody understand what is meant by the word “snob”! And yet such was, and to a considerable extent still is, the society of the Far West and of rural New England.