Bret Harte Goes East: Some Unpublished Letters

Abstract

l ITERARY CRITICISM in our time has not dealt kindly with Bret EJHarte. But those who live in the West still have an interest in him apart from his intrinsic merit as a man of letters, for he was the first to memorialize (and, incidentally, to romanticize) the California mining country and the ragtag of rough-hewn characters who gave it color. In San Francisco, in Los Angeles, and in virtually every other California community, Bret Harte schools, libraries, parks, and streets bear witness to the fame of the brilliant comet that once streaked out of the Western sky across an awed continent, glowed incandescently in Boston for a while, and suddenly burned out. Like everybody else in California, Bret Harte was born in the East. He was strictly a dude rancher in the West and actually had very little sympathy with the forty-niners and their way of life. But he did have a remarkably discerning journalistic eye for mannerisms and habits of speech, and he was clever enough to pour old wine into new bottles, to take conventional story formulas and give them the aura of novelty that goes with an unusual setting. originality of Bret Harte, whiclh Eastern critics considered his chief virtue, was more seeming than real. It is now well known that he had to be pushed into his rightful field. Anton Roman, who founded the Overland Monthly, laid the talents of young Bret Harte (he was only thirty-two) under contribution with the specific proviso that he give over his highly sentimentalized, Irvingesque Spanish California legends in favor of local and contemporary material. result is common knowledge. The Luck of Roaring Camp vas followed by The Outcasts of Poker Flat, and, like Byron, Bret Harte awoke one morning to find himself famous. His brisk reportorial style, his mastery of picturesque narrative, and his shrewd understanding of the universal appeal of an artful blending of sentiment and wvit proved to be a combination of literary virtues that won immediate praise. Harte's social inclinations, as well as his literary aspirations, drew him inevitably toward Boston. Here, it seemed, were the charm and grace and ease of the cultured, intellectual life. Here was the hub of the world of American letters. Why, he was to say, you couldn't fire a revolver from your front porch anywhere wvithout bringing down a two-