“I make no comment; you can imagine the half-sick, utterly disgusted man who glared at that audience over his desk that night, and d——d them inwardly in his heart. And yet it was a good audience, thoroughly refined and appreciative, and very glad to see me. I was very anxious about this lecture, for it was a venture of my own, and I had been told that Atchison was a rough place—energetic but coarse. I think I wrote you from St. Louis that I had found there were only three actual engagements in Kansas, and that my list which gave Kansas City twice was a mistake. So I decided to take Atchison. I made a hundred dollars by the lecture, and it is yours, for yourself, Nan, to buy ‘Minxes’ with, if you want, for it is over and above the amount Eliza and I footed up on my lecture list. I shall send it to you as soon as the bulk of the pressing claims are settled.
“Everything thus far has gone well; besides my lecture of to-night I have one more to close Kansas, and then I go on to St. Joseph. I’ve been greatly touched with the very honest and sincere liking which these Western people seem to have for me. They seem to have read everything I have written—and appear to appreciate the best. Think of a rough fellow in a bearskin coat and blue shirt repeating to me Conception de Arguello! Their strange good taste and refinement under that rough exterior—even their tact—are wonderful to me. They are ‘Kentucks’ and ‘Dick Bullens’ with twice the refinement and tenderness of their California brethren....
“I’ve seen but one [woman] that interested me—an old negro wench. She was talking and laughing outside my door the other evening, but her laugh was so sweet and unctuous and musical—so full of breadth and goodness that I went outside and talked to her while she was scrubbing the stones. She laughed as a canary bird sings—because she couldn’t help it. It did me a world of good, for it was before the lecture, at twilight, when I am very blue and low-tuned. She had been a slave.
“I expected to have heard from you here. I’ve nothing from you or Eliza since last Friday, when I got yours of the 12th. I shall direct this to Eliza’s care, as I do not even know where you are. Your affectionate
“Frank.”[91]
The same lecture was delivered in London, England, in January, 1879, and in June, 1880. Bret Harte’s only other lecture had for its subject American Humor, and was delivered in Chicago on October 10, 1874, and in New York on January 26, 1875.[92] The money return from these lectures was slight, and the fatigue and exposure of the long journeys in the West had, his relatives think, a permanently bad effect upon Bret Harte’s health.
In the Autumn of 1875 we find him at Lenox, in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. Lenox has its place in literature, for Hawthorne spent a year there, and in adjoining towns once lived O. W. Holmes, Catherine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, and G. P. R. James.
Gabriel Conroy, Bret Harte’s only novel, and on the whole, it must be admitted, a failure, though containing many exquisite passages, was published in “Scribner’s Magazine” in 1876.
The poems and stories which Bret Harte wrote during his seven years’ residence in the Eastern part of the United States did not deal with the human life of that time and place. They either concerned the past, like Thankful Blossom and the Newport poems, or they harked back to California, like Gabriel Conroy and the stories published in the “Atlantic.” The only exceptions are the short and pathetic tale called The Office-Seeker, and the opening chapter of that powerful story, The Argonauts of North Liberty. North Liberty is a small town in Connecticut, and the scene is quickly transferred from there to California; but Joan, the Connecticut woman, remains the chief figure in the story.
It is seldom that Bret Harte fails to show some sympathy with the men and women whom he describes, or at least some relenting consciousness that they could not help being what they were. But it is otherwise with Joan. She and her surroundings had a fascination for Bret Harte that was almost morbid. The man or woman whom we hate becomes an object of interest to us nearly as much as the person whom we love. An acute critic declares that Thackeray’s wonderful insight into the characters and feelings of servants is due to the fact that he had almost a horror of them, and was abnormally sensitive to their criticisms,—the more felt for being unspoken. So Joan represents what Bret Harte hated more than anything else in the world, namely, a narrow, censorious, hypocritical, cold-blooded Puritanism. Her character is not that of a typical New England woman; its counterpart would much more easily be found among the men; but it is a perfectly consistent character, most accurately worked out. Joan combines a prim, provincial, horsehair-sofa respectability with a lawless and sensual nature,—an odd combination, and yet not an impossible one. She might, perhaps, be called the female of that species which Hawthorne immortalized under the name of Judge Pyncheon.