Another English writer relates that “At the time when there was some talk of war between Britain and America, he, while deploring even the suggestion of such a catastrophe, earnestly avowed his intention of instantly returning to his own country, should hostilities break out.”
No two men could be more opposed in many respects than Hawthorne and Bret Harte. Nevertheless they had some striking points of resemblance. Both were men who united primitive instincts with consummate refinement; and different as is the subject-matter of their stories, the style and attitude are not unlike. They had the same craving for beauty of form, the same self-repression, the same horror of what is prolix or tawdry, the same love of that simplicity which is the perfection of art.
Long residence in England seems to have had much the same effect upon both men. It heightened their feeling for their native country almost in proportion as it pleased their own susceptibilities. Hawthorne’s fondness for England was an almost unconscious feeling. When he returned to America, there to live for the remainder of his days, he did not find himself at home in the manner or to the degree which he had expected. “At Rome,” his son writes, “an unacknowledged homesickness affected him, an Old-Homesickness, rather than a yearning for America. He may have imagined that it was America that he wanted, but when at last we returned there, he still looked backward toward England.”
That a man should find it more agreeable to live in one country, and yet be firmly convinced that the social system of another country was superior, is nothing remarkable. It is the presence of equality in the United States and its absence in England which make the chief difference between them. Even that imperfect equality to which we have attained has rendered the American people the happiest and the most moral in the world. To the superficial visitor, indeed, who has seen only a few great cities in the United States, it might seem that equality is not much more prevalent here than it is in England; but let him tarry a while in the smaller cities, in the towns and villages of the Union, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and he will reach a different conclusion. An English writer of unusual discernment speaks of “that conscious independence, that indefinable assertion of manhood, which is the key to the American character.”
One result of Bret Harte’s long residence in England was the circulation in this country of many false reports and statements about him which galled his sensitive nature. He had many times declined to be “interviewed,” and probably made enemies in that way. “But when,” writes Mme. Van de Velde, “in a moment of good nature he yielded to pressing solicitations, and allowed himself to be questioned, the consequences were, on the whole, to his disadvantage. From that moment the door was opened to a flood of apocryphal statements of various length and importance; sometimes entirely false, sometimes tinged with a dangerous verisimilitude; often grotesque, occasionally malicious, but one and all purporting to be derived from unquestionable sources.”
Mr. Pemberton hints at more serious troubles which afflicted Bret Harte’s last years. “If he, in common with many of us, had his deep personal disappointments and sorrows, he bore them with the chivalry of a Bayard and a silence as dignified as it was pathetic. To a man of his sensitive nature, the barbed shafts of ‘envy and calumny and hate and pain’ lacerated with a cruelty that at times must have seemed unendurable. Under such torments he often writhed, but he suffered all things with a quiet patience that afforded a glorious example to those friends who, knowing of his wounds, had to be silent concerning them, and could offer him no balm.”
During the year 1901 Bret Harte’s health was failing, although he still kept at work. His disease was cancer of the throat. He hoped to go abroad the following summer, and he had written in a letter to a friend, “Alas! I have never been light-hearted since Switzerland.” But early in 1902 his condition became serious, and he went to stay with Mme. Van de Velde at Camberley. The Spring was cold and sunless, and he grew worse as it advanced. Nevertheless he was engaged in writing a play with Mr. Pemberton, and was meditating a new story which should reintroduce that favorite of the public, Colonel Starbottle. In March a surgical operation was performed on his throat, but the relief was slight and temporary; and from that time forward Bret Harte must have known that his fate was sealed, although he said nothing to his friends and with them appeared to be in good, even high spirits.
April 17, feeling somewhat better, he sat down to begin his new tale. He headed it, “A Friend of Colonel Starbottle’s,” and wrote the opening sentence and part of another sentence. Dissatisfied with this beginning, he tried again, and taking a fresh sheet of paper, he wrote the title and one sentence. There the manuscript ends. He was unable to continue it, although after this date he wrote a few letters to friends. On May 5 he was sitting in the morning, at his desk, thus engaged, when a hemorrhage of the throat suddenly attacked him. He was put to bed, and doctors were sent for. He rallied from this attack, but a second hemorrhage, late in the afternoon, rendered him partly unconscious, and soon afterward he died peacefully in the presence of Mme. Van de Velde and her attendants.
There is something sad in the death of any man far from home and country, with no kith or kin about him, though ministered to by devoted friends. Even Bret Harte’s tombstone bears the name of one who was a stranger to his blood and race. We cannot help recalling what Tennessee’s Partner said. “When a man has been running free all day, what’s the natural thing for him to do? Why, to come home.” Alas! there was no home-coming for Bret Harte; and if, as may have been the case, he felt little or no regret at his situation, the sadness of it would only be intensified by that circumstance. Some deterioration is inevitable when a husband and father foregoes, even unwillingly, those feelings of responsibility and affection which centre in the family,—feelings so natural that to a considerable degree we share them even with the lower animals.
That Bret Harte’s separation from his family was in part, at least, his own fault seems highly probable from his character and career. He abhorred sentimentality in literature, and the few examples of it in his writings may be ascribed to the influence of Dickens. Nevertheless, with all his virility, it must be admitted that his nature was that of a sentimentalist. A sentimentalist is one who obeys the natural good impulses of the human heart, but whose virtue does not go much beyond that. He has right feelings and acts upon them, but in cases where there is nothing to provoke the right feeling he falls short. He is strong in impulse, but weak in principle. When we see a fellow-being in danger or distress our instinct is to assist him. If we fail to do so, it is because we hearken to reason rather than to instinct; because we obey the selfish, second thought which reason suggests, instead of obeying the spontaneous impulse which nature puts into our hearts.