LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--A Belated Guest

by William Dean Howells

A BELATED GUEST

It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things findscompensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries, of recording his memories of it. This is, in the first two or threeinstances, a pleasure. It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by thefire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if theAbsences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people, they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which hebasks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity. But anothertime comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to thepain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievousobligation. You are unable to choose your company among those immortalshades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to suchgleams of this 'dolce lome' as your reminiscences can shed upon them?Then they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms, that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out suchwelcome, great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two orthree instances, if one does one's duty by each. People begin to say, and not without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this: "Ah, here he is again with his recollections!" Well, but if the recollectionsby some magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of hisas, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at leastexcused?

I. 

My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlanticshore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in thesimple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universalattention and interest which met and followed it. He was indeed aprince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchantingart felt a patriotic property, for his promise and performance in thoseearliest tales of 'The Luck of Roaring Camp', and 'Tennessee's Partner', and 'Maggles', and 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat', were the earnests of anAmerican literature to come. If it is still to come, in great measure, that is not Harte's fault, for he kept on writing those stories, in oneform or another, as long as he lived. He wrote them first and last inthe spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time could quite help doing, but he wrote them from the life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the airof the newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the soul of hisfellow-countrymen not only with joy, but with pride such as theEuropeans, who adored him much longer, could never know in him. 

When the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host forCambridge and the Boston neighborhood, while Harte was still in SanFrancisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read ofthe honors that attended his coming from point to point, his couragefell, as if he had perhaps, committed himself in too great an enterprise. Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this

 "Dear son of memory, great heir of fame, "

his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed ofattending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent acarriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco?Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form, itmust have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into Bostonfor him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded, and not trust to the horse-car and the local expressman to get him andhis baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous guest. However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the station, and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he were noteven a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were surely themost winning in the world. He was then, as always, a child of extremefashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore in amustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovialphysiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose andfascinating thrust of the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead, then thickly crowned with the black hair which grew early white, whilehis mustache remained dark the most enviable and consoling effectpossible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying. Hewas, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the firstglance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first timecould say to him, "Mr. Harte, aren't you afraid to go about in the carsso recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?" "No, madam, " hecould answer in that rich note of his, with an irony touched bypseudo-pathos, "I bear a charmed life. "

The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms ofpersonal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the twoboys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city andsuburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration ofsuch aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalktrees, and patches of park and lawn. They found everything so fine, sorefined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the naturalforms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms withthem. Their host heard them without misgiving for the world of romancewhich Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtleperception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but alifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they mustalways have felt California to be. It is different now, when people areevery day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home fromthe first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of thatgreat early day have gone back to live amid the scenes which inspired andprospered them. 

Before they came in sight of the editor's humble roof he had mockedhimself to his guest for his trepidations, and Harte with burlesquemagnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something lessformidable than he had loomed afar. He accepted with joy the theory ofpassing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began asdelightfully as it went on. From first to last Cambridge amused him asmuch as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which wasstranger to him even than the refined trees and grass. It has alreadybeen told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited tohim, he said, "why, you couldn't stand on your front porch and fire offyour revolver without bringing down a two volumer, " and no doubt thepleasure he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wildCalifornia he had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether knownit, had invented. 

II. 

Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which hecould value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in thecuriosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts orhis fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in thetie-backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuouspoverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings orincomings might give. The chances were better with the outgoings thanwith the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the finalresult of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of thehoming pigeon's flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickesteye. It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearlyalways late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going outto, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get himinto his clothes, and then into the carriage where a good deal of finalbuttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so verylate. He was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; hispatience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived at the expectedhouses smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gaiety from his wholeperson, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned. 

Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may betruly said that it was worth while to have him on any terms. There neverwas a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest. 

It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almostnothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittestword, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express theappreciation of another's fit word which goes far to establish for a manthe character of boon humorist. It must be said of him that if he tookthe honors easily that were paid him he took them modestly, and never byword or look invited them, or implied that he expected them. It was fineto see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientificsympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing theincidents that "broke up the society upon the Stanislow. " It was alittle fearsome to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike forsomething over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of 'TheCathedral. ' But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man whocould say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that deliciousline picturing the bobolink as he

 "Runs down a brook of laughter in the air. "

This, Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, andLowell smoked well content with the praise. Yet they were not men to geton easily together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Hartehad none. Afterward in London they did not meet often or willingly. Lowell owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte's gift, while hesumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jewby finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father's side; hehad long contended for the Hebraicism of his name. 

With all his appreciation of the literary eminences whom Fields used toclass together as "the old saints, " Harte had a spice of irreverence thatenabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked, andto see the fun of a minor literary man's relation to them. Emerson'ssmoking amused him, as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of characterwith so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling howEmerson at Concord had proposed having a "wet night" with him over aglass of sherry, and had urged the scant wine upon his young friend witha hospitable gesture of his cigar. But this was long after the Cambridgeepisode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of hissubtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect ofhis reverence. That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, ofLongfellow's he honored with as much veneration as it was in him tobestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow's beautiful and perfected artwhich is almost a test of a critic's own fineness. 

III. 

As for Harte's talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme ofsatire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things headmired. He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but hecould very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence inothers. He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not, apparently. Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty ofhis description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, andlifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visiblyshaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante'snoticing how the dog's skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of theexquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly. 

But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush thatSandy drunkenly slept under in 'The Idyl of Iced Gulch', he asked, "Why, is that an azalea?" To be sure, this might have been less from hisignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sentSandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of anazalea in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azaleaof Californian size could easily lend itself to. 

You never could be sure of Harte; he could only by chance be caught inearnest about anything or anybody. Except for those slight recognitionsof literary, traits in his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from hisconversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliantfellow-Hebrew Heine, as "rather scorbutic. " He preferred to talk aboutthe little matters of common incident and experience. He amused himselfwith such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked hisway to Phillips Avenue, where he adventurously supposed his host to beliving. "Why, " the postman said, "there is no Phillips Avenue inCambridge. There's Phillips Place. " "Well, " Harte assented, "PhillipsPlace will do; but there is a Phillips Avenue. " He entered eagerly intothe canvass of the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at thereception made for him, but he had even a greater pleasure incompassionating his host for the vast disparity between the caterer'schina and plated ware and the simplicities and humilities of the home ofvirtuous poverty; and he spluttered with delight at the sight of thelofty 'epergnes' set up and down the supper-table when he was brought into note the preparations made in his honor. Those monumental structureswere an inexhaustible joy to him; he walked round and round the room, andviewed them in different perspectives, so as to get the full effect ofthe towering forms that dwarfed it so. 

He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be, but histeasing was of the quality of a caress, so much kindness went with it. Helamented as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night anabsent-minded brother in literature, who came in rubber shoes, andforgetfully wore them throughout the evening. That hospitable soul ofRalph Keeler, who had known him in California, but had trembled for theiracquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiledHarte for the friends of his simpler days, rejoiced in the unchangedcordiality of his nature when they met, and presently gave him one ofthose restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was always sumptuouslyproviding out of his destitution. Harte was the life of a time which wasperhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul. The truth is, therewas nothing but careless stories carelessly told, and jokes and laughing, and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlikethe ideal of a literary symposium as well might be; but there was presentone who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time, and towhom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realizedthen and there. "Look at him, " he said, from time to time. "This is thedream of his life, " and then shouted and choked with fun at thedifference between the occasion and the expectation he would haveimagined in his commensal's mind. At a dinner long after in London, where several of the commensals of that time met again, with otherliterary friends of a like age and stature, Harte laid his arms wellalong their shoulders as they formed in a half-circle before him, andscreamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slimshapes of the earlier date had come. The sight was not less a rapture tohim that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from thepassing years. The hair which the years had wholly swept from some ofthose thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, "or few ornone, " to "shake against the cold, " had whitened to a wintry snow on his, while his mustache had kept its youthful black. "He looks, " one of hisfriends said to another as they walked home together, "like a Frenchmarquis of the ancien regime. " "Yes, " the other assented, thoughtfully, "or like an American actor made up for the part. "

The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injusticein its implication of anything histrionic in Harte's nature. Never wasany man less a 'poseur'; he made simply and helplessly known what he wasat any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully inenjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself. In thecourse of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about ona subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided toright himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given, and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend whereHarte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on theplatform, where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb anduntroubled charm. He was indeed the only one privy to the law's presencewho was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earliertime ventured to suggest, "Well, Harte, this is the old literarytradition; this is the Fleet business over again, " he joyously smote histhigh and crowed out, "Yes, the Fleet!" No doubt he tasted all thedelicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quiteunaffected. 

If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elderAmerican world, it might very well be that his temperament was notaltogether in the wrong. If it disabled him for certain experiences oflife, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality, and perhaps most beautiful in his talent. It enabled him to do suchthings as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did notdo, and indeed could not. His talent was not a facile gift; he ownedthat he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before thatyellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, inthat exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe aline. It may be owned for him that though he came to the East atthirty-four, which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, heseemed to have arrived after the age of observation was past for him. Hesaw nothing aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in NewYork, where he sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took himabout the whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report itaright, or would not. After repeated and almost invariable failures todeal with the novel characters and circumstances which he encountered heleft off trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical California hehad half discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over aslong as he lived. This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason, was the best thing he could do, and it went as nearly as might be tosatisfy the insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer to befound on our map. 

It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from anybitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simpleAmerican public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any andeverything of him in fiction and drama. The long breath was not his; hecould not write a novel, though he produced the like of one or two, andhis plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it. At anyrate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and they denoted thefatigue or the indifference of their author in being dramatizations ofhis longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts. Thedirection in which his originality lasted longest, and most strikinglyaffirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse. 

Whatever minds there may be about Harte's fiction finally, there canhardly be more than one mind about his poetry. He was indeed a poet;whether he wrote what drolly called itself "dialect, " or wrote language, he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch. It must be allowed him that inprose as well he had the inventive gift, but he had it in verse far moreimportantly. There are lines, phrases, turns in his poems, characterizations, and pictures which will remain as enduringly asanything American, if that is not saying altogether too little for them. In poetry he rose to all the occasions he made for himself, though hecould not rise to the occasions made for him, and so far failed in thedemands he acceded to for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, as to come to thataugust Harvard occasion with a jingle so trivial, so out of keeping, soinadequate that his enemies, if he ever truly had any, must have sufferedfrom it almost as much as his friends. He himself did not suffer fromhis failure, from having read before the most elect assembly of thecountry a poem which would hardly have served the careless needs of aninformal dinner after the speaking had begun; he took the wholedisastrous business lightly, gayly, leniently, kindly, as that goldentemperament of his enabled him to take all the good or bad of life. 

The first year of his Eastern sojourn was salaried in a sum which tookthe souls of all his young contemporaries with wonder, if no baserpassion, in the days when dollars were of so much farther flight thannow, but its net result in a literary return to his publishers was onestory and two or three poems. They had not profited much by his book, which, it will doubtless amaze a time of fifty thousand editions sellingbefore their publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hundred inthe sixth month of its career, as Harte himself, "With sick and scornful looks averse, "

confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview with the Bostoncounting-room. It was the volume which contained "The Luck of RoaringCamp, " and the other early tales which made him a continental, and thenan all but a world-wide fame. Stories that had been talked over, andlaughed over, and cried over all up and down the land, that had beenreceived with acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as theirpopularity, and recognized as the promise of greater things than any donebefore in their kind, came to no more than this pitiful figure over thebooksellers' counters. It argued much for the publishers that in spiteof this stupefying result they were willing, they were eager, to pay himten thousand dollars for whatever, however much or little, he chose towrite in a year: Their offer was made in Boston, after some offersmortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in NewYork. 

It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return inliterary material. Harte was in the midst of new and alienconditions, --[See a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U. S. For a fewmonths and then published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and itspeople. Twain's rebuttal (Mr. Froude's Progress) would have been 'apropos' for Harte in Cambridge. D. W. ]--and he had always his temperamentagainst him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of hismuse. He would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he didfor the money, but actually if not literally he could not do more. Whenit came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, andhe became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himselfnothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the orderof literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, inhis relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the innerworld he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens. There wasnothing of his easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of aPuritanic severity, and of a conscience that forgave him no pang. OtherCalifornia writers have testified to the fidelity with which he did hiswork as editor. He made himself not merely the arbiter but theinspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature hadhardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he madethe sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created aliterary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization. 

It is useless to wonder now what would have been his future if thepublisher of the Overland Monthly had been of imagination or capitalenough to meet the demand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridgehost as the condition of his remaining in California. Publishers, menwith sufficient capital, are of a greatly varying gift in the regions ofprophecy, and he of the Overland Monthly was not to be blamed if he couldnot foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand a year to continueediting the magazine. He did according to his lights, and Harte came tothe East, and then went to England, where his last twenty-five years werepassed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific Slope discovery. Itwas always the same plant, leaf and flower and fruit, but it perenniallypleased the constant English world, and thence the European world, thoughit presently failed of much delighting these fastidious States. Probablyhe would have done something else if he could; he did not keep on doingthe wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but because it wasfor him the only possible thing. Very likely he might have preferred notdoing anything. 

IV. 

The joyous visit of a week, which has been here so poorly recovered fromthe past, came to an end, and the host went with his guest to the stationin as much vehicular magnificence as had marked his going to meet himthere. Harte was no longer the alarming portent of the earlier time, butan experience of unalloyed delight. You must love a person whose worsttrouble-giving was made somehow a favor by his own unconsciousness of thetrouble, and it was a most flattering triumph to have got him in time, oronly a little late, to so many luncheons and dinners. If only now hecould be got to the train in time the victory would be complete, thehappiness of the visit without a flaw. Success seemed to crown thefondest hope in this respect. The train had not yet left the station;there stood the parlor-car which Harte had seats in; and he was followedaboard for those last words in which people try to linger out pleasuresthey have known together. In this case the sweetest of the pleasures hadbeen sitting up late after those dinners, and talking them over, and thendegenerating from that talk into the mere giggle and making giggle whichCharles Lamb found the best thing in life. It had come to this as thehost and guest sat together for those parting moments, when Hartesuddenly started up in the discovery of having forgotten to get somecigars. They rushed out of the train together, and after a wild descentupon the cigar-counter of the restaurant, Harte rushed back to his car. But by this time the train was already moving with that deceitfulslowness of the departing train, and Harte had to clamber up the steps ofthe rearmost platform. His host clambered after, to make sure that hewas aboard, which done, he dropped to the ground, while Harte drew out ofthe station, blandly smiling, and waving his hand with a cigar in it, inpicturesque farewell from the platform. 

Then his host realized that he had dropped to the ground barely in timeto escape being crushed against the side of the archway that sharplydescended beside the steps of the train, and he went and sat down in thathandsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick at the danger that hadnot realized itself to him in season. To be sure, he was able, longafter, to adapt the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have acharacter, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of, actually crushedto death between a moving train and such an archway. 

Besides, he had then and always afterward, the immense super-compensationof the memories of that visit from one of the most charming personalitiesin the world, "In life's morning march when his bosom was young, "

and when infinitely less would have sated him. Now death has come tojoin its vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life, and thatblithe spirit is elsewhere. But nothing can take from him who remainsthe witchery of that most winning presence. Still it looks smiling fromthe platform of the car, and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it. Still a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that are nownumbered, and out of somewhere the hearer's sense is rapt with the mellowcordial of a voice that was like no other. 

[This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes: a great poetwrites the best prose. D. W. ]

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

 Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything Couldn't fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer Death's vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life Dollars were of so much farther flight than now Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself Express the appreciation of another's fit word Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller Now death has come to join its vague conjectures Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens