But this same perfect understanding may be arrived at in a crowd as well as in solitude. Cressy and the Schoolmaster were mutually aware of each other’s presence at the dance before they had exchanged a look, and when their eyes met it was in “an isolation as supreme as if they had been alone.”
Could any country in the world except our own produce a Cressy! She has all the beauty, much of the refinement, and all the subtle perceptions of a girl belonging to the most sophisticated race and class; and underneath she has the strong, primordial, spontaneous qualities, the wholesome instincts, the courage, the steadfastness of that Pioneer people, that religious, fighting, much-enduring people to whom she belonged.
Cressy is the true child of her father; and there is nothing finer in all Bret Harte than his description of this rough backwoodsman, ferocious in his boundary warfare, and yet full of vague aspirations for his daughter, conscious of his own deficiencies, and oppressed with that melancholy which haunts the man who has outgrown the ideals and conventions of his youth. Hiram McKinstry, compared with the masterful Yuba Bill, the picturesque Hamlin, or the majestic Starbottle, is not an imposing figure; but to have divined him was a greater feat of sympathetic imagination than to have created the others.
It is characteristic, too, of Bret Harte that it is Cressy’s father who is represented as acutely conscious of his own defects in education; whereas her mother remains true to the ancestral type, deeply distrusting her husband’s and her daughter’s innovations. Mrs. McKinstry, as the Reader will remember, “looked upon her daughter’s studies and her husband’s interest in them as weaknesses that might in course of time produce infirmity of homicidal purpose and become enervating of eye and trigger finger.... ‘The old man’s worrits hev sorter shook out a little of his sand,’ she had explained.”
Mr. McKinstry, on the other hand, had almost as much devotion to “Kam” as Matthew Arnold had to Culture, and meant very nearly the same thing by it. Thus he said to the Schoolmaster: “‘I should be a powerful sight more kam if I knowed that when I was away huntin’ stock or fightin’ stakes with them Harrisons that she was a-settin’ in school with the other children and the birds and the bees, listenin’ to them and to you. Mebbe there’s been a little too many scrimmages goin’ on round the ranch sence she’s been a child; mebbe she orter know sunthin’ more of a man than a feller who sparks her and fights for her.’
“The master was silent. Had this selfish, savage, and literally red-handed frontier brawler been moved by some dumb instinct of the power of gentleness to understand his daughter’s needs better than he?”
Alas that no genius has arisen to write the epic of the West, as Hawthorne and Mary Wilkins and Miss Jewett have written the epic of New England! Bret Harte’s stories of the Western people are true and striking, but his limitations prevented him from giving much more than sketches of them. They are not presented with that fullness which is necessary to make a figure in fiction impress itself upon the popular imagination, and become familiar even to people who have never read the book in which it is contained. Cressy, like the other heroines of Bret Harte, flits across the scene a few times, and we see her no more. Mrs. McKinstry is drawn only in outline; and yet she is a strong, tragic figure, of a type now extinct, or nearly so, as powerful and more sane than Meg Merrilies, and far more worthy of a permanent place in literature.