BRET HARTE (1836-1902)

Francis Brett Hart (to give him his name in its earliest form) was born at Albany, New York, on 25 August, 1836. His father was an accomplished scholar, but he never was materially successful in life, and he died in 1845. Harte's boyhood and youth were passed in a number of Eastern cities, chiefly Brooklyn and New York. He was precocious, quiet, studious, sensitive, and delicate in health. He was reading Froissart and Shakespeare at the age of six, and Dickens's Dombey and Son a year later, and shortly afterwards such writers as Cervantes, Fielding, and Washington Irving. He astonished his mother, a competent judge, by the ease with which he learned to read Greek. He left school when thirteen to enter a lawyer's office, was later employed by a merchant, and was self-supporting before he was sixteen. In 1854 he and his sister Margaret journeyed to California, following their mother, who had preceded them by several months and had married a Colonel Andrew Williams, with whom she was living in Oakland. The story of Harte's life in California is not fully known and, where facts are established, there still remain unanswered questions concerning his feelings and inner development. It seems probable, however, that he did not take kindly to his new surroundings. He had literary ambitions but was apparently further from any opportunity or hope of gratifying them than when he had been in the East. For several years he drifted from one employment to another; he was a tutor, a school-teacher, a drug-clerk, an express messenger, a typesetter, and possibly a miner. But in 1857 his sister obtained for him a position as typesetter for the Golden Era of San Francisco, and he soon became a contributor to this periodical and was promoted to its editorial room. In 1862 he married Anna Griswold, of New York. In 1864 he was made Secretary of the California Mint, an office which was almost a sinecure and which scarcely interfered with either his editorial or his creative work. He is said to have lived during these years a quiet and studious life, and certainly it was one which was very productive. In 1868, when the Overland Monthly was established, with the hope that it would become the Atlantic Monthly of the West, Harte was chosen its editor. In its second number he published The Luck of Roaring Camp, in 1869 The Outcasts of Poker Flat, and in 1870 Plain Language from Truthful James, or the Heathen Chinee, and these three pieces suddenly made him extraordinarily famous from one end of the United States to the other. He had begun his literary work as a follower of Irving, and had seen in the Spanish civilization of California an opportunity to do for that region what Irving had done for New York and its vicinity. But now the great vogue of Dickens in America apparently suggested to him the trick of combining California "local color" with caricature and paradox, and thus it was his happy fortune to create a new kind of American literature for which the whole country seemed to be waiting. He was the creator of the modern American short-story. To signalize his sudden eminence he was made Professor of recent literature in the University of California and, far more important, he was offered $10,000 to write exclusively during the coming year for the Atlantic Monthly. At once, in 1871, he made a triumphal progress to the East, joyfully leaving California for ever. He had, perhaps, never been happy there, but latterly his unhap‐ piness had been augmented by resentment against Californians who, he thought, had done all in their power to hinder his success and to belittle his achievements. He felt that now he was going where he was properly appreciated. The feeling probably was short-lived, but he was not, at any rate, tempted to return to the West. Somehow during his first year in the East he accumulated many debts, and at its close was hard pressed for funds. Then began a struggle for money which apparently lasted without intermission until his death. For several years he made not very successful attempts to add to his income by lecturing. Finally in 1878 he managed by his own efforts to secure an appointment as Consul to Crefeld, in Germany. He went abroad without his family, and never returned to America, nor did he ever again live with his wife or children. A few years before his death his wife came to England, but there was no change in the nature of their relations with each other, as far as is known. The reason for their separation has never been divulged, and it would appear from Harte's recently published Letters that it was curiously never recognized as an actual separation by either of them. They kept up a correspondence until Harte's death, in which there was frequent discussion of visits, which was, however, in the end, if not at first, a palpable pretense; though Harte continued to support her and their children, generally sending her $3,000 the year. In 1880 he was transferred to the consulate at Glasgow, Scotland, and he held this post until 1885, when he was removed, probably for

political reasons, though he was charged with neglect of duty. He felt by now something of the resentment against all America which he had formerly felt against California. In addition, he had made friends in England, and he also felt that he could make a better income from literary work by remaining there than he could if he returned to the United States. Accordingly he remained abroad, living chiefly in London until his death on 5 May, 1902.

"Harte was a conscious artist, a workman who had served a careful apprenticeship. His stories are models of condensation, his characters are as distinct and as striking as are those of Dickens, his climaxes are dramatic, and his closing effect is always impressively theatric. Sentiment he used with a free hand, but he kept it more within control than did the creator of Little Nell. Fiction with him, as with Poe, was a deliberate thing, to be written with the reader always in mind. His unit necessarily was short. He had no power to trace the growth of a soul or to record the steps of an evolution." (F. L. Pattee, Camb. Hist. Am. Lit., II.) Harte's biographer (H. C. Merwin) has said: "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."

MLISS1

CHAPTER I

JUST where the Sierra Nevada begins to subside in gentler undulations, and the rivers grow less rapid and yellow, on the side of a great red mountain, stands "Smith's Pocket." Seen from the red road at sunset, in the red light and the red dust, its white houses look like the outcroppings of quartz on the mountain-side. The red stage topped with red-shirted passengers is lost to view half a dozen times in the tortuous descent, turning up unexpectedly in out-of-the-way places, and vanishing altogether within a hundred yards of the town. It is probably owing to this sudden twist in the road that the advent of a stranger at Smith's Pocket is usually attended with a peculiar circum

Written, according to Harte's own statement (Letters, p. 23) in 1860 for the San Francisco Golden Era. It was published in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches in 1870, and separately in 1873. "Harte's first story with other than a legendary theme was Mliss. ... For the student of his literary art it is the most important of all his writings, especially important because of the revision which he made of it later after he had evolved his final manner. It is transition work. The backgrounds are traced in with Irving-like care; the character of the schoolmaster is done with artistic restraint and certainty of touch. Mliss is exquisitely handled. There is nothing better in all his work.

But even in the earlier version of the story there are false notes. . . . The author is thinking of the effect he hopes to produce. He must fill his reader with wonder." (F. L. Pattee, History of American Literature since 1870.)

Mliss is here reprinted with the permission of, and by arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers.

stance. Dismounting from the vehicle at the stage-office, the too confident traveler is apt to walk straight out of town under the impression that it lies in quite another direction. It is related that one of the tunnelmen, two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant passengers with a carpet-bag, umbrella, Harper's Magazine, and other evidences of "civilization and refinement," plodding along over the road he had just ridden, vainly endeavoring to find the settlement of Smith's Pocket.

An observant traveler might have found some compensation for his disappointment in the weird aspect of that vicinity. There were huge fissures on the hillside, and displacements of the red soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of man; while, halfway down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road, hiding in their sallow depths unlovely streams that crept away to a clandestine union with the great yellow torrent below, and here and there were the ruins of some cabin, with the chimney alone left intact and the hearthstone open to the skies.

The settlement of Smith's Pocket owed its origin to the finding of a "pocket" on its site by a veritable Smith. Five thousand dollars were taken out of it in one half-hour by Smith. Three thousand dollars were expended by Smith and others in erecting a flume and in tunneling. And then Smith's