The one kind of woman that did not attract Bret Harte as a subject for literature was the conventional woman of the world. He could draw her fairly well, for we have Amy Forester in A Night on the Divide, Jessie Mayfield in Jeff Briggs’s Love Story, Grace Nevil in A Mæcenas of the Pacific Slope, Mrs. Ashwood in A First Family of Tasajara, and Mrs. Horncastle in Three Partners. But these women do not bear the stamp of Bret Harte’s genius.
His Army and Navy girls are better, because they are redeemed from commonplaceness by their patriotism. Miss Portfire in The Princess Bob and her Friends, and Julia Cantire in Dick Boyle’s Business Card, represent those American families, more numerous than might be supposed, in which it is almost an hereditary custom for the men to serve in the Army or Navy, and for the women to become the wives and mothers of soldiers and sailors. In such families patriotism is a constant inspiration, to a degree seldom felt except by those who represent their country at home or abroad.
Bret Harte was patriotic, as many of his poems and stories attest, and his long residence in England did not lessen his Americanism. “Apostates” was his name for those American girls who marry titled foreigners, and he often speaks of the susceptibility of American women to considerations of rank and position. In A Rose of Glenbogie, after describing the male guests at a Scotch country house, he continues: “There were the usual half-dozen smartly-frocked women who, far from being the females of the foregoing species, were quite indistinctive, with the single exception of an American wife, who was infinitely more Scotch than her Scotch husband.” And in The Heir of the McHulishes the American Consul is represented as being less chagrined by the bumptiousness of his male compatriots than by “the snobbishness and almost servile adaptability of the women. Or was it possible that it was only a weakness of the sex which no Republican nativity or education could eliminate?”
CHAPTER XV
BRET HARTE AT CREFELD
The sums that Bret Harte received for his stories and lectures did not suffice to free him from debt, and he suffered much anxiety and distress from present difficulties, with no brighter prospects ahead. An additional misfortune was the failure of a new paper called “The Capital,” which had been started in Washington by John J. Piatt.
There is an allusion to this in a letter written by Bret Harte to his wife from Washington.[93] “Thank you, dear Nan, for your kind, hopeful letter. I have been very sick, very much disappointed; but I’m better now, and am only waiting for some money to return. I should have, for the work that I have done, more than would help us out of our difficulties. But it doesn’t come, and even the money I’ve expected from the ‘Capital’ for my story is seized by its creditors. That hope and the expectations I had from the paper and Piatt in the future amount to nothing. I have found that it is bankrupt.
“Can you wonder, Nan, that I have kept this from you? You have so hard a time of it there, and I cannot bear to have you worried if there is the least hope of a change in my affairs as they look, day by day. Piatt has been gone nearly a month, was expected to return every day, and only yesterday did I know positively of his inability to fulfil his promises. —— came here three days ago, and in a very few moments I learned from him that I need expect nothing for the particular service I had done him. I’ve been vilified and abused in the papers for having received compensation for my services, when really and truly I have only received less than I should have got from any magazine or newspaper for my story. I sent you the fifty dollars by Mr. D——, because I knew you would be in immediate need, and there is no telegraph transfer office on Long Island. It was the only fifty I have made since I’ve been here.