California's Harte

BRET HARTE--GEORGE R. STEWART JR. --Houghton Mifflin ($5)./-

Francis Bret Harte (1836-1902)** arrived on the U. S. scene about the same time as Mark Twain, for a time rivaled him as foremost Western writer. Harte was born in Albany, N. Y., never liked his adopted State of California very much, and spent the last 24 years of his life abroad. A writer of serious ambitions, he rode to fame on the gales of laughter caused by a funny poem of which he was ashamed.

The California that was still bristling with forty-niners looked askance at Harte, with his foppish dress, his over-genteel manners. Harte returned the snobbish stare. With the flowing mustaches of his day, a leonine head of hair, an aquiline nose that hinted, without betraying his Jewish ancestry, Harte was a fine figure of a literary man. In later years it was reported that he had lived a rough and minerish life. Biographer Stewart doubts it, thinks Harte's devilishness was mostly in printing offices. As long as Harte kept culling posies from the rhetorical anthology he considered good writing, not even California paid him much attention. When he began to cultivate his own garden and write stories in the dialect of his adopted State the whole U. S. sat up and took notice. Luck of Roaring Camp made Harte's reputation; the humorous poem The Heathen Chinee made him a national figure. It begins:

Which I wish to remark,

And my language is plain,

That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain

The heathen Chinee is peculiar. . . .

When he heard the East a-calling Harte responded with alacrity. Boston and Manhattan lionized him; he enjoyed it. But he acted like a flash in the pan: fell down on writing contracts, got into debt, antagonized lion-hunters. When Statesman John Hay once complained to Harte that he was short of funds, Harte replied: "Your own fault. Why did you fool away your money paying your debts?" When friends got him the job of U. S. commercial agent at Crefeld, Germany he took it gratefully, though it meant leaving his wife and family behind. He never rejoined them: from Crefeld he was shifted to Glasgow as consul; when President Cleveland and the Democrats came in (1885) and Harte lost his job, he decided to stay in England. He tried every kind of writing (even advertisements), attempted many plays, but never repeated his early successes. With Mark Twain, Harte collaborated on a comedy, Ah Sin; it was a failure. Bret Harte was still toiling away at his hack-writing when Death came for him in Camberley at 66.

/-Published Dec. 1.

**Christened Francis Brett Hart, at 12 he dropped the t; 13 years before his father had added the e to Hart.

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