And yet, with characteristic fairness, Bret Harte does not fail to portray the good qualities of the Boston man. The Reader will remember the sense of honor, the courage and energy, and even—under peculiar circumstances—the capacity to receive new ideas, shown by John Hale, the Boston man who figures in Snow-Bound at Eagle’s, and who was of the same type as the lawyer just described.
Henry Hart and his family spent a year in Boston when Bret Harte was about the age of four, but, contrary to the general impression, Bret Harte never lived there afterward, although he once spent a few weeks in the city as the guest of the publisher, Mr. J. R. Osgood, then living on Pinckney Street, in the old West End. A small section of the north side of Pinckney Street forms the northern end of Louisburg Square; and this square, as it happens, is the only place in Boston which Bret Harte depicts. Here lived Mr. Adams Rightbody, as appears from the brief but unmistakable description of the place in The Great Deadwood Mystery. A telegram to Mr. Rightbody had been sent at night from Tuolumne County, California; and its progress and delivery are thus related: “The message lagged a little at San Francisco, laid over half an hour at Chicago, and fought longitude the whole way, so that it was past midnight when the ‘all-night’ operator took it from the wires at Boston. But it was freighted with a mandate from the San Francisco office; and a messenger was procured, who sped with it through dark, snow-bound streets, between the high walls of close-shuttered, rayless houses to a certain formal square, ghostly with snow-covered statues. Here he ascended the broad steps of a reserved and solid-looking mansion, and pulled a bronze bell-knob that, somewhere within those chaste recesses, after an apparent reflective pause, coldly communicated the fact that a stranger was waiting without—as he ought.”
That Bret Harte made no mistake in selecting Louisburg Square as the residence of that intense Bostonian, Mr. Rightbody, will be seen from Mr. Lindsay Swift’s description in his “Literary Landmarks of Boston.” “This retired spot is the quintessence of the older Boston. Without positive beauty, its dignity and repose save it from any suggestion of ugliness. Here once bubbled up, it is fondly believed, in the centre of the iron-railed enclosure, that spring of water with which First Settler William Blackstone helped to coax Winthrop and his followers over the river from Charlestown. There is no monument to Blackstone, here or anywhere, but in this significant spot stand two statues, one to Columbus and one to Aristides the Just, both of Italian make, and presented to the city by a Greek merchant of Boston.”
After the week’s stay in Cambridge, with, of course, frequent excursions to Boston, Bret Harte and his family returned to New York. The proposals made to him by publishing houses in that city were, Mr. Howells reports, “either mortifyingly mean or insultingly vague”; and a few days later Bret Harte accepted the offer of James R. Osgood and Company, then publishers of “The Atlantic,” to pay him ten thousand dollars during the ensuing year for whatever he might write in the twelve months, be it much or little. This offer, a munificent one for the time, was made despite the astonishing fact that of the first volume of Bret Harte’s stories, issued by the same publishers six months before, only thirty-five hundred copies had then been sold. The arrangement did not, of course, require Mr. Harte’s residence in Boston, and for the next two Winters he remained with his sister in New York, spending the first Summer at Newport.
It has often been stated that the rather indefinite contract which the publishers made with Bret Harte turned out badly for them, and that he wrote but a single story, as it is sometimes put, during the whole year. But the slightest investigation will show that these statements do our author great injustice. The year of the contract began with July, 1871, and ended with June, 1872; and the two volumes of the “Atlantic” covering that period, No. 28 and No. 29, contain the following stories by Bret Harte:—
The Poet of Sierra Flat, Princess Bob and Her Friends, The Romance of Madroño Hollow, How Santa Claus Came to Simpson’s Bar;
And the following poems: A Greyport Legend, A Newport Romance, Concepcion de Arguello, Grandmother Tenterden, The Idyl of Battle Hollow.
Surely, this was giving full measure, and it represents a year of very hard work, unless indeed it was partly done in California. One of the stories, How Santa Clans Came to Simpson’s Bar, is, as every reader of Bret Harte will admit, among the best of his tales, inferior only to Tennessee’s Partner, The Luck, and The Outcasts.
It is noticeable that all these “Atlantic Monthly” stories deal with California; and an amusing illustration of Bret Harte’s literary habits may be gathered from the fact that in every case his story brings up the rear of the magazine, although it would naturally have been given the place of honor. Evidently the manuscript was received by the printers at the last possible moment. One of the poems, the Newport Romance, seems to lack those patient, finishing touches which it was his custom to bestow.
For the next seven years of Bret Harte’s life there is not much to record. During the greater part of the time New York was his winter home. From his Summer at Newport resulted the poems already mentioned, A Greyport Legend and A Newport Romance. Hence also a scene or two in Mrs. Skaggs’s Husbands, published in 1872. But the poems deal with the past, and neither in them nor in any story did the author attempt to describe that luxurious, exotic life, grafted upon the Atlantic Coast, over which other romancers have fondly lingered.