But suppose that the person to be succored makes no appeal to the heart: suppose that he is thousands of miles away: suppose that one dislikes or even hates him: suppose that it is a question not of bestowing alms, or of giving assistance or of feeling sympathy, but of rendering bare justice. In such cases the sentimentalist lacks a sufficient spur for action: he feels no impulse: his heart remains cold: he makes excuses to himself; and having no strong sense of duty or principle to carry him through the ordeal, he becomes guilty of an act (or, more often, of a failure to act) which in another person would excite his indignation. In this sense Bret Harte was a sentimentalist.
He would have risked his life for a present friend, but was capable of neglecting an absent one.
This contradiction, if it be such, affords a clue to his character. In spite of his amiability, kindness, generosity, there was in Bret Harte an element of cruelty. Even his natural improvidence in money matters can hardly excuse him for selling the copyright of all his stories as they came out, leaving no income to be derived from them after his death.
The sentimentalist, being a creature of impulse, gets in the habit of obeying his impulses, good or bad, and is apt to find some difficulty at last in distinguishing between them. He easily persuades himself that the thing which he wishes to do is the right thing for him to do. This was a trait of Bret Harte’s character, and it naturally accompanies that lack of introspection which was so marked in him. There was a want of background, both intellectual and moral, in his nature. He was an observer, not a thinker, and his genius was shown only as he lived in the life of others. Even his poetry is dramatic, not lyric. It was very seldom that Bret Harte, in his tales or elsewhere, advanced any abstract sentiment or idea; he was concerned wholly with the concrete; and it is noticeable that when he does venture to lay down a general principle, it fails to bear the impress of real conviction. The note of sincerity is wanting. An instance will be found in the General Introduction which he wrote for the first volume of his collected stories, where he answers the charge that he had “confused recognized standards of morality by extenuating lives of recklessness and often criminality with a single, solitary virtue.” After describing this as “the cant of too much mercy,” he goes on to say:—
“Without claiming to be a religious man or a moralist, but simply as an artist, he shall reverently and humbly conform to the rules laid down by a Great Poet who created the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, whose works have lasted eighteen hundred years, and will remain when the present writer and his generation are forgotten. And he is conscious of uttering no original doctrine in this, but of only voicing the beliefs of a few of his literary brethren happily living, and one gloriously dead, who never made proclamation of this from the housetops.”
This is simply Dickens both in manner and substance, and the tone of the whole passage is insincere and exaggerated, almost maudlin. Lamentable, but perhaps not strange, that in the one place where Bret Harte explained and defended what might be called the prevailing moral of his stories, he should fall so far short of the reader’s expectation!
The truth is that Bret Harte took nothing seriously except his art, and apparently went through life with as little concern about the origin, nature, and destiny of mankind as it would be possible for any member of that unfortunate species to feel.
And yet there was a noble side to his character. He possessed in an unusual degree what is, perhaps, the most rare of all good qualities, namely, magnanimity. No man was ever more free from envy and jealousy; no writer was ever more quick to perceive and to praise excellence in others, or more slow to disparage or condemn. He used to say, and really seemed to believe, that Mr. John Hay’s imitations of his own dialect poems were better than the originals. All the misconstruction and unkind criticism of which he was the subject never drew from him a bitter remark. He had a tenderness for children and dumb animals, especially for dogs, and his sympathy with them gave him a wonderful insight into their natures. Who but Bret Harte could have penned this sentence which the Reader will recognize as occurring in The Argonauts of North Liberty: “He [Dick Demorest] had that piteous wistfulness of eye seen in some dogs and the husbands of many charming women,—the affection that pardons beforehand the indifference which it has learned to expect.”
In breadth and warmth of sympathy for his fellow-men Bret Harte had what almost might be described as a substitute for religion; what indeed has been described as religion itself. Long ago, an author who afterward became famous, touched with the fervor of youthful enthusiasm for his vocation, declared that “literature fosters in its adherents a sympathy with all that lives and breathes which is more binding than any form of religion.” A more recent thinker, Mr. Henry W. Montague, has finely said that “The most important function of Christianity is not to keep man from sinning, but to widen the range and increase the depth of his sympathies.”
Judged by these standards, Bret Harte could not be described as an irreligious writer. Who, more than he, has warmed the heart and suffused the eyes of his readers with pity for the unfortunate, with admiration for the heroic? “A kind thought is a good deed,” remarked an oriental sage. The doctrine is a dangerous one; but if it is true of any man, it is true of an author. His kind thoughts live after him, and they have the force and effect of deeds. Bret Harte’s stories are a legacy to the world, as full of inspiration as of entertainment.