From this person Bret Harte undoubtedly derived an idea as to the appearance and carriage of Colonel Starbottle, and it is not unlikely that in drawing the character he had also in mind the notorious Judge David S. Terry. Terry, a native of Texas, was a fierce, fighting Southerner, a brave and honest man, but narrow, prejudiced, abusive, and ferocious. He was a leading Democrat, a judge of the Supreme Court of the State, and a bitter opponent of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee. He nearly killed an agent of the Committee who attempted to arrest one of his companions, and was himself in some danger of being hung by the Committee on that account. Later, Terry killed Senator Broderick, of whom mention has just been made, in a duel which seems to have had the essential qualities of a murder, and which was forced upon Broderick in much the same way that the fatal duel was forced upon Alexander Hamilton.
Later still, Terry became involved in the affairs of one of his clients, a somewhat notorious woman, whom he married,—clearly showing that mixture of chivalrous respect for women, combined with a capacity for misunderstanding them, and of being deluded by them, which was so remarkable in Colonel Starbottle. In the course of litigation on behalf of his wife, Terry bitterly resented certain action taken by Mr. Justice Field of the Supreme Court of the United States,—the same Field who began his judicial career as Alcalde of Marysville. Terry’s threats against the Justice, then an old man, were so open and violent, and his character was so well known, that, at the request of the court officials in San Francisco, a deputy marshal was assigned as a guard to the Justice while he should be hearing cases on the California circuit. At a railroad station, one day, Terry and the Justice met; and as Terry was, apparently, in the act of drawing a weapon, the deputy marshal shot and killed him.
It was Judge Terry who remarked of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee, which was mainly composed of business men,—the lawyers holding aloof,—that they were “a set of damned pork-merchants,”—a remark so characteristic of Colonel Starbottle that it is difficult to attribute it to anybody else.
Colonel Starbottle was as much the product of slavery as Uncle Tom himself, and he exemplified both its good and its bad effects. His fat white hand and pudgy fingers indicated the man who despised manual labor and those who performed it. His short, stubby feet, and tight-fitting, high-heeled boots conveyed him sufficiently well from office to bar-room, but were never intended for anything in the nature of a “constitutional.” His own immorality did not prevent him from cherishing a high ideal of feminine purity; but his conversation was gross. He was a purveyor, Bret Harte relates, “of sprightly stories such as Gentlemen of the Old School are in the habit of telling, but which, from deference to the prejudices of gentlemen of a more recent school, I refrain from transcribing here.”
He had that keen sense of honor, and the determination to defend it, even, if need be, at the expense of his life, which the Southern slave-holder possessed, and he had also the ferocity which belonged to the same character. One can hardly recall without a shudder of disgust the “small, beady black eyes” of Colonel Starbottle, especially when they “shone with that fire which a pretty woman or an affair of honor could alone kindle.”
The Reader will remember that the Colonel was always ready to hold himself “personally responsible” for any consequences of a hostile nature, and that by some irreverent persons he was dubbed “Old Personal Responsibility.” The phrase was not invented by Bret Harte. On the contrary, it was almost a catchword in California society; it was a Southern phrase, and indicated the Southerner’s attitude. In a leading article published in the “San Francisco Bulletin” in 1856, it is said, “The basis of many of the outrages which have disgraced our State during the past four years has been the ‘personal responsibility’ system,—a relic of barbarism.”
Colonel Starbottle’s lack of humor was also a Southern characteristic. The only humorists in the South were the slaves; and the reason is not far to seek. The Southerner’s political and social creed was that of an aristocrat; and an aristocrat is too dignified and too self-absorbed to enter curiously into other men’s feelings, and too self-satisfied to question his own. Dandies are notoriously grave men. The aristocratic, non-humorous man always takes himself seriously; and this trait in Colonel Starbottle is what makes him so interesting. “It is my invariable custom to take brandy—a wineglass-full in a cup of strong coffee—immediately on rising. It stimulates the functions, sir, without producing any blank derangement of the nerves.”
There is another trait, exemplified in Colonel Starbottle, which often accompanies want of humor, namely, a tendency to be theatrical. It would seem as if the ordinary course of human events was either too painful or too monotonous to be endured. We find ourselves obliged to throw upon it an aspect of comedy or of tragedy, by way of relief. The man of humor sees the incongruity,—in other words, the jest in human existence; and the non-humorous, having no such perception, represents it to himself and to others in an exaggerated or theatrical form. The one relies upon understatement; the other upon overstatement. Colonel Starbottle was always theatrical; his walk was a strut, and “his colloquial speech was apt to be fragmentary incoherencies of his larger oratorical utterances.”
But we cannot help feeling sorry for the Colonel as his career draws to a close, and especially when, after his discomfiture in the breach of promise case, he returns to his lonely chambers, and the negro servant finds him there silent and unoccupied before his desk. “‘’Fo’ God! Kernel, I hope dey ain’t nuffin de matter, but you’s lookin’ mighty solemn! I ain’t seen you look dat way, Kernel, since de day pooh Massa Stryker was fetched home shot froo de head.’ ‘Hand me down the whiskey, Jim,’ said the Colonel, rising slowly. The negro flew to the closet joyfully, and brought out the bottle. The Colonel poured out a glass of the spirit, and drank it with his old deliberation. ‘You’re quite right, Jim,’ he said, putting down his glass, ‘but I’m—er—getting old—and—somehow—I am missing poor Stryker damnably.’”
This is the last appearance of Colonel Starbottle. He represents that element of the moral picturesque,—that compromise with perfection which, in this imperfect and transitory world, is universally craved. Even Emerson, best and most respectable of men, admitted, in his private diary, that the irregular characters who frequented the rum-selling tavern in his own village were indispensable elements, forming what he called “the fringe to every one’s tapestry of life.”[55] Such men as he had in mind mitigate the solemnity and tragedy of human existence; and in them the virtuous are able to relax, vicariously, the moral tension under which they suffer. This is the part which Colonel Starbottle plays in literature.