However, let us hear Mr. Douglas out: “Finally he drowns the child and his readers in a deluge of melodramatic sentiment. That is bad art.... The Outcasts might be analyzed in the same way. The whole tableau is arranged with a barefaced resolution to draw your tears. You feel that there is nothing inevitable in the isolation of the Outcasts, in the snow-storm, in the suicide of the card-sharper, or in the in-death-they-were-not-divided pathos of vice and virtue. And even Miggles, I fear, will hardly bear a close examination. The assault and battery on our emotions is too direct, too deliberate. We like to be outflanked nowadays, and the old-fashioned frontal attack melts away before our indulgent smiles with their high velocity and flat trajectory. M’liss, alas! no longer moves us. We prefer ‘What Maisie Knew’ to what M’liss didn’t know.”
But at this point the Reader may become a little impatient. What attention should be paid to a critic who prefers the effeminate subtleties of Henry James to the wholesome pathos of Bret Harte! And the man himself seems to be conscious of his degeneracy, for he concludes by saying, with admirable frankness, “Perhaps, after all, the fault is ours, not Bret Harte’s, and we ought to apologize for the sophisticated insidiousness of our nerves.”
One or two obvious remarks are suggested by Mr. Douglas’s canon of romance against realism. If it were adopted without qualification, sad havoc would be made with established reputations. All the great tragedians from Æschylus to Shakspere, and almost all the great story-tellers from Haroun al Raschid to Daniel Defoe would suffer. Antigone, Juliet and Robinson Crusoe were all the victims of accident. Moreover, without the element of accident, or romance as Mr. Douglas calls it, life could not truly be represented. What might conceivably happen, and what occasionally does happen, are as much a part of life as is the thing which always happens. Many a “Kentuck” was swept away by floods in California. To perish in a snow-storm was by no means an unheard-of event. It was on the twenty-third of November, 1850, that the Outcasts were exiled, and on that very day, as the newspapers recorded soon afterward, a young man was frozen to death in the snow while endeavoring to walk from Poor Man’s Creek to Grass Valley. One week later a miner from Virginia was frozen to death a few miles north of Downieville; and Poker Flat and Downieville are in the same county.[70]
To know a man, we must know how he acts in the face of death as well as how he appears in his shop or parlor; and therefore, unusual and tragic events, as well as commonplace events, have their place in good art.
But the substratum of truth in Mr. Douglas’s view seems to be this, that a tragedy which results from the character of the hero or heroine is, other things being equal, a higher form of art than the tragedy which results wholly, or in part, from accident. If human passion can work out the destiny desired by the author, without the intervention of fire, flood or disease, without the help of any catastrophe quaintly known in the common law as “the act of God,” why so much the better. From this point of view, we may fairly place Tennessee’s Partner even above The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat.
It only remains to add that like most of Bret Harte’s stories, as we have seen, Tennessee’s Partner was suggested by a real incident, which, however, ended happily; and the last chapter of the true story may be gathered from a paragraph which appeared in the California newspapers in June, 1903:—
“J. A. Chaffee, famous as the original of Tennessee’s Partner, has been brought to an Oakland Sanatorium. He has been living since 1849 in a small Tuolumne county mining camp with his partner, Chamberlain. In the early days he saved Chamberlain from the vigilance committee by a plea to Judge Lynch when the vigilantes had a rope around the victim’s throat. It was the only instance on record in the county where the vigilantes gave way in such a case. Chamberlain was accused of stealing the miners’ gold, but Chaffee cleared him, as every one believed Chaffee. The two men settled down to live where they have remained ever since, washing out enough placer gold to maintain them. Professor Magee of the University of California found Chaffee sick in his cabin last week, and induced him to come to Oakland for treatment. Chamberlain was left behind. Both men are over eighty.”
One who witnessed Chaffee’s rescue of his partner gives some details of the affair, which show how closely Bret Harte kept to the facts until he saw occasion to depart from them. Chaffee had a donkey and a cart—the only vehicle in the settlement, and he is described as standing before the vigilance committee, “hat in hand, his bald head bare, his big bandanna handkerchief hanging loosely about his neck.”
Of the four stories especially devoted to friendship, the second is Captain Jim’s Friend, published in the year 1887. This is almost a reductio ad absurdum of Tennessee’s Partner, for Captain Jim’s friend, Lacy Bassett, is a coward, a liar, and an impostor. In the end, Captain Jim discovers this, and he endeavors to wipe out the disgrace which, he thinks, Bassett has brought upon him by forcing the latter, at the point of his pistol, to a more manly course of conduct. And yet, when Bassett commits the dastardly act of firing at his life-long friend and benefactor, the heroic Captain Jim feels not only that his own reputation for “foolishness” is redeemed, but also, in his dying moments, he recurs to his old affection for the man who shot him; and thus the tinge of cynicism which the story would otherwise wear is removed.
The third story, In the Tules, is a recurrence to the theme of Tennessee’s Partner, the two leading characters being almost a repetition of those in the earlier story. In the Tules has not the spontaneousness of its predecessor, not quite the same tragic reality; but it is a noble story, nevertheless, and the climax forms one of those rare episodes which raise one’s idea of human nature.