“When the characters live, move, and have their being in the setting, the result is ‘atmosphere.’ Atmosphere is thus an effect. It is felt, not seen. Through its medium the reader must see all the action, yes, all the details of the story. Atmosphere gives value to the tones of fiction as in real life it does to landscape. The hills are actually the same in cloud and in sunshine, but the eye sees them as different through the mediate atmosphere. And so setting and characters, perfectly adjusted, make the reader, that is to say the beholder, see the story in the very tones the literary artist desires. A story of the sea has an atmosphere of its own, but the atmosphere does not consist merely of the accurately colored picture of sea and strand and sailor and ship and sky. The whole story is informed with the spirit of the sea—its tang clings to the garments, its winds breathe through every passage, its wonderful lights and glooms tone the whole story. Without it the story would be a poor thing, bloodless and inert.”[25]
HARTE AND HIS WRITINGS
Francis Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York, August 25, 1839, of gentle parents. Abandoning his common-school education at the age of fifteen, he followed the lure of the gold craze to California, but neither teaching nor mining enriched him, so in 1857 he became a compositor on the Golden Era, San Francisco. He then edited the Californian, and in 1864 was appointed secretary of the branch Mint, remaining until 1870. Two years before, however, he had become editor of the new Overland Monthly, where some of his best work appeared. This position did not prove permanent, and even less so was that of the professorship of “recent literature” in the University of California, for in 1871 he removed to New York. In 1878 he became United States Consul at Crefeld, Germany, and in 1880 was transferred to Glasgow, Scotland, holding this post until 1885. His later life was spent chiefly in London, where his brilliant talents brought him the full recognition of littérateurs. He died in London, May 6, 1902.
Bret Harte was a poet, critic, novelist, and short-story writer. His novels give him no such claim to fame as do his other writings. His best-known dialect verses are “The Society Upon the Stanislaus,” “Jim,” “Dickens in Camp,” “Dow’s Flat,” and “Plain Language From Truthful James” (often called “The Heathen Chinee”). His best sketches and short-stories include “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” “An Heiress of Red Dog,” “Miggles,” “Tennessee’s Partner,” “M’liss,” “The Idyl of Red Gulch,” “Brown of Calaveras,” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”—which was first published in The Overland Monthly, January, 1869.
If artistic repression, dramatic feeling, mingled humor and pathos, deft character drawing, a sure sense of a “good story,” and the ability to win the reader in spite of himself—if the certain possession of all these are marks of fictional genius, surely Bret Harte deserves the name. For themes, he chose—and doubtless over-colored at times—the people and the happenings of '49 during the gold craze, and not a few have charged him with a fondness for heroes and heroines of undoubted reputations—for evil. Social outcasts, they say, he treated too tenderly. But Bret Harte himself effectively answered this criticism when he said:
“When it shall be proven to him that communities are degraded and brought to guilt and crime, suffering or destitution, from a predominance of this quality [too much mercy]; when he shall see pardoned ticket-of-leave men elbowing men of austere lives out of situation and position, and the repentant Magdalen supplanting the blameless virgin in society, then he will lay aside his pen and extend his hand to the new Draconian discipline in fiction. But until then he will, without claiming to be a religious man or a moralist, but simply as an artist, reverently and humbly conform to the rules laid down by a Great Poet, who created the parable 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.”
The secret of the American short story is the treatment of characteristic American life, with absolute knowledge of its peculiarities and sympathy with its methods; with no fastidious ignoring of its habitual expression, or the inchoate poetry that may be found even hidden in its slang; with no moral determination except that which may be the legitimate outcome of the story itself; with no more elimination than may be necessary for the artistic conception, and never from the fear of the fetich of conventionalism. Of such is the American short story of to-day—the germ of American literature to come.—Bret Harte, The Rise of the Short Story, Cornhill Magazine, July, 1899.
He expounds an important half-truth which has been too much neglected: that as being is greater than seeming, appearances are often deceitful; under the most repellent exterior a soul of goodness may exist. But if we study him over much, we may become victims of the delusion that any person whose dress and manners are respectable, is, to say the least, a suspicious character, while drunken and profane ruffians are the saints of the earth.—Walter Lewin, The Abuse of Fiction.
Mr. Kipling is a great man at sentiment (though we hear more of his anti-sentimental side), but has he written a child-story we can remember as long as “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” or anything we shall remember as long as “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” or “Tennessee’s Partner”? These things are not so exact in their “business” (to borrow a term from still another art), but, perhaps on that very account, they remain symbols of the human heart. They have the simplicity of classics, a simplicity in which all unnecessary subtleties are dissolved.—Richard Le Gallienne, Rudyard Kipling: A Criticism.