Part 6 (1/2)

And yet there is nothing that savors of coa.r.s.eness, much less of levity, in these abrupt romances. When Bret Harte's heroes and heroines meet, it is the coming together of two souls that recognize and attract each other.

It is like a stroke of lightning, and is accepted with a primeval simplicity and un-selfconsciousness. The impression is as deep as it is sudden.

What said Juliet of the anonymous young man whom she had known something less than an hour?

”Go, ask his name: if he be married My grave is like to be my wedding bed.”

So felt Liberty Jones when she exclaimed to Dr. Ruysdael, ”I'll go with you or I'll die!”

It is this sincerity that sanctifies the rapidity and frankness of Bret Harte's love-affairs. Genuine pa.s.sion takes no account of time, and supplies by one instinctive rush of feeling the experience of years. Given the right persons, time becomes as long and as short as eternity. Thus it was with the two lovers who met and parted at midnight on the hilltop.

”There they stood alone. There was no sound or motion in earth or woods or heaven. They might have been the one man and woman for whom this goodly earth that lay at their feet, rimmed with the deepest azure, was created.

And seeing this they turned toward each other with a sudden instinct, and their hands met, and then their lips in one long kiss.”

But this same perfect understanding may be arrived at in a crowd as well as in solitude. Cressy and the Schoolmaster were mutually aware of each other's presence at the dance before they had exchanged a look, and when their eyes met it was in ”an isolation as supreme as if they had been alone.”

Could any country in the world except our own produce a Cressy! She has all the beauty, much of the refinement, and all the subtle perceptions of a girl belonging to the most sophisticated race and cla.s.s; and underneath she has the strong, primordial, spontaneous qualities, the wholesome instincts, the courage, the steadfastness of that Pioneer people, that religious, fighting, much-enduring people to whom she belonged.

Cressy is the true child of her father; and there is nothing finer in all Bret Harte than his description of this rough backwoodsman, ferocious in his boundary warfare, and yet full of vague aspirations for his daughter, conscious of his own deficiencies, and oppressed with that melancholy which haunts the man who has outgrown the ideals and conventions of his youth. Hiram McKinstry, compared with the masterful Yuba Bill, the picturesque Hamlin, or the majestic Starbottle, is not an imposing figure; but to have divined him was a greater feat of sympathetic imagination than to have created the others.

It is characteristic, too, of Bret Harte that it is Cressy's father who is represented as acutely conscious of his own defects in education; whereas her mother remains true to the ancestral type, deeply distrusting her husband's and her daughter's innovations. Mrs. McKinstry, as the Reader will remember, ”looked upon her daughter's studies and her husband's interest in them as weaknesses that might in course of time produce infirmity of homicidal purpose and become enervating of eye and trigger finger.... 'The old man's worrits hev sorter shook out a little of his sand,' she had explained.”

Mr. McKinstry, on the other hand, had almost as much devotion to ”Kam” as Matthew Arnold had to Culture, and meant very nearly the same thing by it.

Thus he said to the Schoolmaster: ”'I should be a powerful sight more kam if I knowed that when I was away huntin' stock or fightin' stakes with them Harrisons that she was a-settin' in school with the other children and the birds and the bees, listenin' to them and to you. Mebbe there's been a little too many scrimmages goin' on round the ranch sence she's been a child; mebbe she orter know sunthin' more of a man than a feller who sparks her and fights for her.'

”The master was silent. Had this selfish, savage, and literally red-handed frontier brawler been moved by some dumb instinct of the power of gentleness to understand his daughter's needs better than he?”

Alas that no genius has arisen to write the epic of the West, as Hawthorne and Mary Wilkins and Miss Jewett have written the epic of New England!

Bret Harte's stories of the Western people are true and striking, but his limitations prevented him from giving much more than sketches of them.

They are not presented with that fullness which is necessary to make a figure in fiction impress itself upon the popular imagination, and become familiar even to people who have never read the book in which it is contained. Cressy, like the other heroines of Bret Harte, flits across the scene a few times, and we see her no more. Mrs. McKinstry is drawn only in outline; and yet she is a strong, tragic figure, of a type now extinct, or nearly so, as powerful and more sane than Meg Merrilies, and far more worthy of a permanent place in literature.

CHAPTER VI

PIONEER LIFE

To be successful and popular among the Pioneers was something really to a man's credit. Men were thrown upon their own resources, and, as in Mediaeval times, were their own police and watchmen, their own firemen, and in most cases their own judge and jury. There was no distribution of the inhabitants into separate cla.s.ses: they const.i.tuted a single cla.s.s, the only distinction being that between individuals. There was not even the broad distinction between those who worked with their heads and those who worked with their hands. Everybody, except the gamblers, performed manual labor; and although this condition could not long prevail in San Francisco or Sacramento, it continued in the mines for many months. In fact, any one who did not live by actual physical toil was regarded by the miners as a social excrescence, a parasite.[27]

An old miner, after spending a night in a San Francisco lodging house, paid the proprietor with gold dust. While waiting for his change he seemed to be studying the keeper of the house as a novel and not over-admirable specimen of humanity. Finally he inquired of him as follows: ”Say, now, stranger, do you do nothing else but just sit there and take a dollar from every man that sleeps in these beds?” ”Yes,” was the reply, ”that is my business.” ”Well, then,” said the miner after a little further reflection, ”it's a d.a.m.ned mean way of making your living; that's all I can say.”

Even those who were not democratic by nature became so in California. All men felt that they were, at last, free and equal. Social distinctions were rubbed out. A man was judged by his conduct, not by his bank account, nor by the set, the family, the club, or the church to which he belonged.[28]

All former records were wiped from the slate; and n.o.body inquired whether, in order to reach California, a man had resigned public office or position, or had escaped from a jail.

”Some of the best men,” says Bret Harte, ”had the worst antecedents, some of the worst rejoiced in a spotless, Puritan pedigree. 'The boys seem to have taken a fresh deal all round,' said Mr. John Oakhurst one day to me, with the easy confidence of a man who was conscious of his ability to win my money, 'and there is no knowing whether a man will turn out knave or king.'”

This, perhaps, sounds a little improbable, and yet here, as always, Bret Harte has merely stated the fact as it was. One of the most accurate contemporary historians says: ”The man esteemed virtuous at home becomes profligate here, the honest man dishonest, and the clergyman sometimes a profane gambler; while, on the contrary, the cases are not few of those who were idle or profligate at home, who came here to be reformed.”[29]

”It was a republic of incognitos. No one knew who any one else was, and only the more ill-mannered and uneasy even desired to know. Gentlemen took more trouble to conceal their gentility than thieves living in South Kensington would take to conceal their blackguardism.”[30]