Moreover, there was much friction between Bret Harte and the new publisher of the “Overland,” who had succeeded Mr. Roman; and finally, the moral and intellectual atmosphere of San Francisco was uncongenial to him. The early, generous, reckless days of California had passed, and now, especially in San Francisco, a commercial type of man was coming to the front. In The Argonauts of North Liberty, Bret Harte has depicted “Ezekiel Corwin, ... a shrewd, practical, self-sufficient and self-asserting unit of the more cautious later California emigration.”
More than once Bret Harte had run counter to California sentiment. As we have seen already, he was dismissed from his place as assistant Editor of a country newspaper because he had chivalrously espoused the cause of the friendless Indian. His first contribution to the “Overland,” as also we have seen, was that beautiful poem in which he laments the shortcomings of the city. Had the same thing been said in prose, the business community would certainly have resented it.
I know thy cunning and thy greed,
Thy hard, high lust, and wilful deed,
And all thy Glory loves to tell
Of specious gifts material.
Drop down, O Fleecy Fog, and hide
Her sceptic sneer and all her pride!
And yet, with characteristic optimism, the poet looks forward to a time—
When Art shall raise and Culture lift
The sensual joys and meaner thrift.
Later, but in the same year, Bret Harte incurred the enmity of some leading men in San Francisco by his gentle ridicule of their attempts to explain away—for the sake of Eastern capitalists—the destructive earthquake which shook the city in October, 1868. An old Californian thus relates the story: “As soon as the first panic at this disturbance had subsided, and while lesser shocks were still shaking the earth, some of the leading business men of San Francisco organized themselves into a sort of vigilance committee, and visited all the newspaper offices. They strictly enjoined that the story of the earthquake be treated with conservatism and understatement;—it would injure California if Eastern people were frightened away by exaggerated reports of el temblor; and a similar censorship was exercised over the press despatches sent out from San Francisco at that time.
“This greatly amused Bret Harte, and in his ‘Etc.’ in the November number of the ‘Overland,’ he treated the topic jocularly, saying that, according to the daily papers, the earthquake would have suffered serious damage if the people had only known it was coming. Harte’s pleasantry excited the wrath of some of the solid men of San Francisco, and when, not long after that, it was proposed to establish a chair of recent literature in the University of California and invite Bret Harte to occupy it, one of the board of regents, whose word was a power in the land, temporarily defeated the scheme by swearing roundly that a man who had derided the dispute between the earthquake and the newspapers should never have his support for a professorship. Subsequently, however, this difficulty was overcome, and Harte received his appointment.”
San Francisco was then a crude, commercial, restless town, caring little for art or literature, religious in a narrow way, confident of its own ideals, and as content with the stage through which it was passing as if human history had known, and human imagination could conceive, nothing higher or better.
In A Jack and Jill of the Sierras Bret Harte makes the youthful hero reproach himself by saying, or rather thinking, “He had forgotten them for those lazy, snobbish, purse-proud San Franciscans—for Bray had the miner’s supreme contempt for the moneyed trading classes.”
Bret Harte, whose view of life was mainly derived from eighteenth-century literature, shared that contempt, and expressed his own feeling, no doubt, in the sentiment which he attributes to the two girls in Devil’s Ford. “It seemed to them that the five millionaires of Devil’s Ford, in their radical simplicity and thoroughness, were perhaps nearer the type of true gentlemanhood than the citizens who imitated a civilization which they were unable yet to reach.”