That there should be any doubt as to the author’s attitude upon this point shows how carefully Bret Harte keeps his own personality in the background. He does not sit in judgment upon his characters; he seldom says even a word of praise or blame in regard to them. All that he leaves to the reader. Moreover, he has a rare power of perceiving the defects of his own heroes and heroines. Occasionally, in fact, the reader of Bret Harte is a little shocked by his admission of some moral or intellectual blemish in the person whom he is sketching; and yet, after a moment’s reflection, one is always forced to agree that the blemish is really there, and that without it the portrait would be incomplete and misleading.
A fine example of this subtlety of art is found in Maruja, where the author frankly declares that his heroine could not quite appreciate the delicacy shown by Captain Carroll when he abstained from any display of affection, lest he should presume upon the fact that he had just undertaken a difficult service at her request. “Maruja stretched out her hand. The young man bent over it respectfully, and moved toward the door. She had expected him to make some protestation—perhaps even to claim some reward. But the instinct which made him forbear even in thought to take advantage of the duty laid upon him, which dominated even his miserable passion for her, and made it subservient to his exaltation of honor, ... all this, I grieve to say, was partly unintelligible to Maruja, and not entirely satisfactory.... He might have kissed her! He did not.”
Bret Harte did not describe perfect characters or mere types, destitute of individual peculiarities, but real men and women. Let us, therefore, be thankful for Maruja’s lack of delicacy and for Jack Hamlin’s petulance and arrogance. His failings in this respect were a part of the piquancy of his character, and in part, also, they resulted from his discontent with himself.
DENNISON’S EXCHANGE, AND PARKER HOUSE, DECEMBER, 1849, BEFORE THE FIRE
Copyright, Century Co.
This discontent is hidden by his more obvious traits, his love of music and of children, the facile manner in which he charmed and subdued horses, dogs, servants, women, and all the other inferior animals, as Bret Harte somewhere puts it; his scorn of all meanness, his chivalrous defence of all weakness; his iron nerve; his self-confidence and easy, graceful assurance; his appreciation of the refinements and niceties of existence. These are his obvious qualities; but behind them all was something more important and more original, namely, an undertone of self-condemnation which ran through his life, and gave the last touch of recklessness and abandon to his character. We never quite realize what Jack Hamlin was until we come to that scene in the story of his protegée where, grasping by the shoulders the two blackguards who had discovered his secret and were attempting to take advantage of it, he forced them beyond the rail, above the grinding paddle-wheel of the flying steamer, and threatened to throw himself and them beneath it.
“‘No,’ said the gambler, slipping into the open space with a white and rigid face in which nothing seemed living but the eyes,—‘No; but it’s telling you how two d—d fools who didn’t know when to shut their mouths might get them shut once and forever. It’s telling you what might happen to two men who tried to “play” a man who didn’t care to be “played,”—a man who didn’t care much what he did, when he did it, or how he did it, but would do what he’d set out to do—even if in doing it he went to hell with the men he sent there.’ He had stepped out on the guards, beside the two men, closing the rail behind him. He had placed his hands on their shoulders; they had both gripped his arms; yet, viewed from the deck above, they seemed at that moment an amicable, even fraternal group, albeit the faces of the three men were dead white in the moonlight.”
One might draw a parallel, not altogether fanciful, between those three figures standing in apparent quietude on the verge of what was worse than a precipice, and those other three that compose the immortal group of the Laocoön.
The tragedy of Jack Hamlin’s life, that which formed a dark background to his gay and adventurous career, was his own deep dissatisfaction with his lawless and predatory manner of existence. In this respect, his experience was the universal experience intensified; and that is why one can find in Hamlin something of that representative character which readers of many different races and kinds have found in Hamlet. Who that has passed the first flush of youth, and has ever taken a single glance at his own heart will fail to sympathize with Jack Hamlin’s self-disgust! It is this feeling that goes as far as anything can go to reconcile a man to death, for death ends the struggle. There is no remorse in the grave.