Part 3 (1/2)
He said the men did nothing all day long but sit around the bar-room stove, spit, and 'swop lies.' He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, and half unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator. I asked him to tell it again to a friend who came in, and then asked him to write it out for 'The Californian.' He did so, and when published it was an emphatic success. It was the first work of his that had attracted general attention, and it crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading. The story was 'The Jumping Frog of Calaveras.' It is now known and laughed over, I suppose, wherever the English language is spoken; but it will never be as funny to any one in print as it was to me, told for the first time by the unknown Twain himself on that morning in the San Francisco Mint.”
The first article that appeared in ”The Californian” was Bret Harte's _Neighborhoods I have Moved From_, and next his _Ballad of the Emeu_, but neither was signed. Both of these are in the collected edition of his works. The _Condensed Novels_ were continued in ”The Californian,” and Bret Harte also contributed to it many poems, sketches, essays, editorial articles and book reviews. Some of these were unsigned; some were signed ”B” or ”Bret,” and occasionally the signature was his full name.
[Ill.u.s.tration: STOREs.h.i.+P APOLLO
Old s.h.i.+p used as a Saloon
Copyright, Century Co.]
No reader who appreciates the finished workmans.h.i.+p of Bret Harte will be surprised to learn that he was a slow and intensely self-critical writer.
There is much interesting testimony on this point. Mr. Howells says: ”His talent was not a facile gift; he owned that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a line.... When it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey and Sterne and Steele, in his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner world, he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens.”
Noah Brooks wrote as follows: ”Scores of writers have become known to me in the course of a long life, but I have never known another so fastidious and so laborious as Bret Harte. His writing materials, the light and heat, and even the adjustment of the furniture of the writing-room, must be as he desired; otherwise he could not go on with his work. Even when his environment was all that he could wish, there were times when the divine afflatus would not come and the day's work must be abandoned. My editorial rooms in San Francisco were not far from his secluded den, and often, if he opened my door late in the afternoon, with a peculiar cloud on his face, I knew that he had come to wait for me to go to dinner with him, having given up the impossible task of writing when the mood was not on him. 'It's no use, Brooks,' he would say. 'Everything goes wrong; I cannot write a line. Let's have an early dinner at Martini's.' As soon as I was ready we would go merrily off to dine together, and, having recovered his equanimity, he would stick to his desk through the later hours of the night, slowly forging those masterpieces which cost him so dearly.
”Harte was reticent concerning his work while it was in progress. He never let the air in upon his story or his verses. Once, indeed, he asked me to help him in a calculation to ascertain how long a half-sack of flour and six pounds of side-meat[8] would last a given number of persons. This was the amount of provision he had allowed his outcasts of Poker Flat, and he wanted to know just how long the snow-bound scapegoats could live on that supply. I used to save for him the Eastern and English newspaper notices of his work, and once, when he had looked through a goodly lot of these laudatory notes, he said: 'These fellows see a heap of things in my stories that I never put there.'”
Mr. Stoddard recalls this incident: ”One day I found him pacing the floor of his office in the United States Mint; he was knitting his brows and staring at vacancy,--I wondered why. He was watching and waiting for a word, the right word, the one word of all others to fit into a line of recently written prose. I suggested one; it would not answer; it must be a word of two syllables, or the natural rhythm of the sentence would suffer.
Thus he perfected his prose.”
In the sketch ent.i.tled _My First Book_, printed in volume ten of his works, Bret Harte has given some amusing reminiscences concerning the volume of California poems edited by him, and published in 1866. His selection as Editor, he says, ”was chiefly owing to the circ.u.mstance that I had from the outset, with precocious foresight, confided to the publisher my intention of not putting any of my own verses in the volume.
Publishers are appreciative; and a self-abnegation so sublime, to say nothing of its security, was not without its effect.” After narrating his extreme difficulty in reducing the number of his selections from the numerous poets of California, he goes on to describe the reception of the volume. It sold well, the purchasers apparently being amateur poets who were anxious to discover whether they were represented in the book.
”People would lounge into the shop, turn over the leaves of other volumes, say carelessly 'Got a new book of California poetry out, haven't you?'
purchase it, and quietly depart.”
”There were as yet,” the Editor continues, ”no notices from the press; the big dailies were silent; there was something ominous in this calm. Out of it the bolt fell;” and he quotes the following notice from a country paper: ”'The Hogwash and ”purp” stuff ladled out from the slop-bucket of Messrs. ---- and Co., of 'Frisco, by some lop-eared Eastern apprentice, and called ”A Compilation of Californian Verse,” might be pa.s.sed over, so far as criticism goes. A club in the hands of any able-bodied citizen of Red Dog, and a steamboat ticket to the Bay, cheerfully contributed from this office, would be all-sufficient. But when an imported greenhorn dares to call his flapdoodle mixture ”Californian,” it is an insult to the State that has produced the gifted ”Yellowhammer,” whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in the columns of the ”Jay Hawk.” That this complacent editorial jacka.s.s, browsing among the docks and thistles which he has served up in this volume, should make no allusion to California's greatest bard is rather a confession of his idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor.'”
Other criticisms, inspired by like omissions, followed, each one rivalling its predecessor in severity. ”The big dailies collected the criticisms and published them in their own columns with the grim irony of exaggerated head-lines. The book sold tremendously on account of this abuse, but I am afraid that the public was disappointed. The fun and interest lay in the criticisms, and not in any pointedly ludicrous quality in the rather commonplace collection ... and I have long since been convinced that my most remorseless critics were not in earnest, but were obeying some sudden impulse, started by the first attacking journal.... It was a large, contagious joke, pa.s.sed from journal to journal in a peculiar cyclonic Western fas.h.i.+on.”
A year later, not, as Bret Harte himself states, in 1865, but in 1867, the first collection of his own poems was published. The volume was a thin twelvemo, bound in green cloth, with a gilt design of a sail on the cover, the t.i.tle-page reading as follows: ”The Lost Galleon and Other Tales. By Fr. Bret Harte, San Francisco. Tame and Bacon, Printers, 1867.” Most of these poems are contained in the standard edition of his works.
In the same year were published the _Condensed Novels_ and the _Bohemian Papers_, reprinted from ”The Bulletin” and ”The Californian,” and making, as the author himself said, ”a single, not very plethoric volume, the writer's first book of prose.” He adds that ”during this period,” _i. e._ from 1862 to 1867, he produced ”_The Society upon the Stanislaus_, and _The Story of M'liss_,--the first a dialectical poem, the second a Californian romance,--his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish, but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility,--a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better known pages of the 'Overland Monthly,' he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, and the poem of the _Heathen Chinee_.”
The ”Overland Monthly” was founded in July, 1868, by Anton Roman, a bookseller on Montgomery Street, and later on Clay Street. Mr. Roman was possessed of that enthusiasm which every new enterprise demands. ”He had thought and talked about the Magazine,” he declared, ”until it was in his bones.” Bret Harte became the first Editor, and it was he who selected the name. The ”Overland” was well printed, on good paper, and the cover was adorned by that historic grizzly bear who, standing on the ties of the newly-laid railroad track, with half-turned body and lowered head, seems prepared to dispute the right of way with the locomotive which might shortly be expected to come screaming down the track.
There was originally no railroad track in the picture, simply the bear; and how the deficiency was supplied is thus explained by Mark Twain in a letter to Thomas Bailey Aldrich: ”Do you know the prettiest fancy and the neatest that ever shot through Harte's brain? It was this: When they were trying to decide upon a vignette for the cover of the 'Overland,' a grizzly bear (of the arms of the State of California) was chosen. Nahl Bros. carved him and the page was printed, with him in it, looking thus:
[Ill.u.s.tration]
”As a bear, he was a success--he was a good bear.--But then, it was objected, that he was an _objectless_ bear--a bear that _meant_ nothing in particular, signified nothing,--simply stood there snarling over his shoulder at nothing--and was painfully and manifestly a boorish and ill-natured intruder upon the fair page. All hands said that--none were satisfied. They hated badly to give him up, and yet they hated as much to have him there when there was no _point_ to him. But presently Harte took a pencil and drew these two simple lines under his feet and behold he was a magnificent success!--the ancient symbol of Californian savagery snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive Civilization, the first Overland locomotive!
[Ill.u.s.tration]
”I think that was nothing less than inspiration itself.”
In the same letter Mark Twain pays the following magnanimous tribute to his old friend: ”Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coa.r.s.e grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land,--and this grateful remembrance of mine ought to be worth its face, seeing that Bret broke our long friends.h.i.+p a year ago without any cause or provocation that I am aware of.”
The Editor had no prose article of his own in the first number of the ”Overland,” but he contributed two poems, the n.o.ble lines about San Francisco, which, with characteristic modesty he placed in the middle of the number, and the poem ent.i.tled _Returned_[9] in the ”Etc.” column at the end.
And now we come to the publication which first made Bret Harte known upon the Atlantic as well as upon the Pacific coast. The opening number of the ”Overland” had contained no ”distinctive Californian romance,” as Bret Harte expressed it, and none such being offered for the second number, the Editor supplied the omission with _The Luck of Roaring Camp_. But the printer, instead of sending the proof-sheets to the writer of the story, as would have been the ordinary course, submitted them to the publisher, with a statement that the matter was so ”indecent, irreligious and improper” that his proofreader, a young lady, had with difficulty been induced to read it. Then followed many consultations between author, publisher, and various high literary authorities whose judgment had been invoked. Opinions differed, but the weight of opinion was against the tale, and the expediency of printing it. Nevertheless, the author--conceiving that his fitness as Editor was now in question--stood to his guns; the publisher, though fearful of the result, stood by him; and the tale was published without the alteration of a word. It was received very coldly by the secular press in California, its ”singularity”