SKETCHES OF CALIFORNIAN LIFE.*
WE venture to predict that few will read a page or two of this modest volume, open it where they will, without being attracted to finish it, and that as few will lay it down without curiosity to hear more of the author. The prediction is a safe one, for novelty of subject combined with originality of style is everywhere fascinat- ing, even had we not already heard of the surprised delight with which the American public of the Eastern States have bailed the appearance of this writer of the Far West. Mr. Bret Harts is editor of the Overland Monthly, a genuine San Francisco periodical, brimming with the vigorous exuberance of its birthplace, and has gradually won great local repute by his prose and verse contributions to newspapers and magazines ; but the present collection of sketches is, we believe, his first appeal to the English-reading world at large.
What he has put before us is a vivid picture of life in the rough mining settlements of California, as it was fifteen to twenty years ago, "an era," he says, "still so recent, that in attempting to revive its poetry, I am conscious also of awakening the more prosaic recollections of its survivors, and yet an era replete with a certain Greek poetry, of which perhaps none were more unconscious than the heroes themselves." The majority of the characters introduced are decidedly improper. Gamblers, horse-stealers, drunkards, sluice- robbers, and sinful women are sure to be an important element in the unaccountable medley of humanity that gathers in gold- mining districts ; but they are at least human, and, if we may believe Mr. Haste, capable, on occasion, not only of moral feelings, but of downright virtuous action. Mr. Oakhurst, the gambler, and "Mother Shipton " exhibit a self-abnegation which is extra- ordinary without being incredible ; and the devotion of Miggles to the man who "used to know" her, and suddenly became a paralytic imbecile, is simply beautiful. No reader, however in- nocent, however sensitive, need fear any harm from this book. The characters may be apparently undesirable, and their lives and speech reckless ; still the moral purpose and sympathies of the writer are evident enough to make one feel quite safe in his hands. Indeed it may be objected that he is almost too pathetic. In most of his principal sketches our sympathies are so strongly excited as to become positively painful. Take, for instance, the narrative of the fourteen days' hopeless waiting for death of the snowbound Outcasts of Poker Flat, or the story of Tennessee's Partner. There is certainly no open hankering after effect here, no signs of a systematic siege laid to our feelings. The tale is told in a few pages, plainly, even abruptly, while every now and then the writer breaks in with some terse caustic comment, as if protesting against being betrayed unawares into emotion ; but his handiwork persists, in spite of all this, in turning out strangely affecting. No doubt it con- tributes considerably to this result that Mr. Harts knows when and how to stop. His habit is to break his stories off short directly the culminating point of interest is reached, often leaving a good deal of sequel to be added by the reader's imagination. 'This is notably the case in two of the most striking and characteris- tic idyls—for idyls more than anything else they are —in the volume. When the curtain suddenly falls upon " Mliss," the two principal actors—a high-souled earnest young schoolmaster, and a girl, aged eleven, whom he has reclaimed from untaught savagery, and with whom he is unquestionably in love—are starting hand-in-hand, by starlight, from a lone town in the Sierra Nevada, bound, so far as it appears, for nowhere. And the door of a stage-coach closes on the companion picture, the Idyl of Red Gulch, with an austere solitary schoolmistress flying from a reformed drunkard, who is 'clearly not indifferent to her. Yet we would not have it other- wise. It is not Mr. Harte's vocation to write three-volume novels, but to photograph detached incidents ; and as long as the pictures are clear and faithful representations of nature, we need not ask for more than a suggestion of what lies outside of the chosen field of view.
Mr. }Tarte evidently has the great advantage of long familiarity with the localities in which his scenes are laid, and makes a very telling use of this advantage whenever he finds occasion for scene- painting. We feel no difficulty in realizing the natural surround- ings among which his characters live and act. The crisp, bracing * The buck of Roaring Camp, and other Sketches. By Francis Bret Harte. Boston : _Fields, Osgood, and Co. 1870.
air of the Sierra slopes, the narrow valleys running up into wooded caffons and gold-producing gulches, and the all-pervading red dust and mud, take hold of our imagination at once, and fall naturally into their places in every picture. And then consider how dramatically man and his unlovely works serve as a foil to all this! Reckless red-shirted miners labour in these gulches, and squander their gold-dust in the gaudy " saloons " and gambling- houses of their rough settlements. These red mountain-sides echo the oaths and pistol-shots of bar-room rowdies, and look placidly on at robberies and lynchings. And what a strange dialect it is that is current here ! The language of cardplayers, the phrases of poker and euchre, are the favourite vehicles of expression for every kind of sentiment. Tennessee gallops away from Sandy Bar to escape the consequences of a long tale of misdeeds, and at the extremity of Grizzly Cation is confronted by a small man on a grey horse. " ' What have you got there ? I call,' said Tennessee quietly. 'Two bowers and an ace,' said the stranger, as quietly, showing two revolvers and a bowie-knife. 'That takes me,' returned Tennessee ; and with this gamblers' epigram, he threw away his useless pistol, and rode back with his captor." (p. 59.)
It is amusing to notice Mr. Harte's anxiety to draw out the frequent contrast between the physical appearance and real character and occupations of the dwellers in such places as Roaring Camp and Poker Flat. At Roaring Camp, "The greatest scamp had a Raphael face, with a profusion of blonde hair ; Oakhurst, a gambler, had the melancholy air and intellectual abstraction of a Hamlet; the coolest and most courageous man was scarcely over five feet in height, with a soft voice and an embarrassed, timid manner." (p. 3.) And another gambler, Mr. Hamlin, has scarcely come upon the stage, when our attention is directed to "his pale Greek face and Homeric gravity."
These last words remind us of the chief fault we have to find with Mr. Harte'a writing, a fault perhaps unconscious, but the more to be regretted as it often disfigures a genuine originality of style. He has at some time or other had an attack of Dickens-on- the-brain, with the unhappy result so constantly seen in our Cockney school of literature. When this distressing malady is upon him, he temporarily loses all his native terseness and humour, and vainly tries to supply the loss out of the penny-a-liner's phrase-book. At such times a schoolmistress's class-room—the school is always a respected feature of these wild settlements— becomes an "astute Vestal's temple" (p. 79), and of a drunken man lying in the sun it is remarked that "a tranquil philosophy, born of his physical condition, suffused and saturated his moral being." (p. 72.) Mr. Haste is certainly an inconsiderate employer of adjectives too. His favourite ones occur over and over again at short intervals. It is not many minutes after Yuba Bill has angrily scrutinized the imbecile Jim's "expression of perfectly gratuitous solemnity," that his own features "relax into an expres- sion of gratuitous and imbecile cheerfulness." One day Miss Mary picks her way through the red dust, "not without some feline cir- cumlocution ;" and another she walks in the woods " felinely fastidious." Still, our writer's "cheerful irrelevance" (his own expression) in this particular is in no way comparable with that of the author of Lothair.
We have now said enough, we hope, to call attention to this little book of sketches. From telling the author's stories we have purposely abstained, for it is his own manner of telling them that gives them their peculiar charm. The reader will find no lack of humour, but none of that Artemus Ward and Josh Billings kind of fun of which we have had almost a surfeit lately. The sketches included in the collection have obviously been composed at many different times, and are not all of equal merit, but they indicate so much power that we look forward with pleasure to hearing from Mr. Harte again.
Previous page
