Selected Stories of Bret Harte | Page 4

GRAY, a tale of Scottish life, is the product of his stay there. In 1885
he was dismissed from his consulship, probably for political reasons,
though neglect of duty was charged against him. He removed to
London where he remained, for most part, until his death.
Bret Harte never really knew the life of the mining camp. His mining
experiences were too fragmentary, and consequently his portraits of
mining life are wholly impressionistic. "No one," Mark Twain wrote,
"can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with pick and
shovel and drill and fuse." Yet, Twain added elsewhere, "Bret Harte got
his California and his Californians by unconscious absorption, and put
both of them into his tales alive." That is, perhaps, the final comment.
Much could be urged against Harte's stories: the glamor they throw
over the life they depict is largely fictitious; their pathetic endings are
obviously stylized; their technique is overwhelmingly derivative.
Nevertheless, so excellent a critic as Chesterton maintained that "There

are more than nine hundred and ninety-nine excellent reasons which we
could all have for admiring the work of Bret Harte." The figure is
perhaps exaggerated, but there are many reasons for admiration. First,
Harte originated a new and incalculably influential type of story: the
romantically picturesque "human- interest" story. "He created the local
color story," Prof. Blankenship remarks, "or at least popularized it, and
he gave new form and intent to the short story." Character motivating
action is central to this type of story, rather than mood dominating
incident. Again Harte's style is really an eminently skilful one,
admirably suited to his subjects. He can manage the humorous or the
pathetic excellently, and his restraint in each is more remarkable than
his excesses. His sentences have both force and flow; his backgrounds
are crisply but carefully sketched; his characters and caricatures have
their own logical consistency. Finally, granted the desirability of the
theatric finale, it is necessary to admit that Harte always rings down his
curtain dramatically and effectively.
ARTHUR ZEIGER, M.A.

THE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP
There was commotion in Roaring Camp. It could not have been a fight,
for in 1850 that was not novel enough to have called together the entire
settlement. The ditches and claims were not only deserted, but "Tuttle's
grocery" had contributed its gamblers, who, it will be remembered,
calmly continued their game the day that French Pete and Kanaka Joe
shot each other to death over the bar in the front room. The whole camp
was collected before a rude cabin on the outer edge of the clearing.
Conversation was carried on in a low tone, but the name of a woman
was frequently repeated. It was a name familiar enough in the
camp,--"Cherokee Sal."
Perhaps the less said of her the better. She was a coarse and, it is to be
feared, a very sinful woman. But at that time she was the only woman
in Roaring Camp, and was just then lying in sore extremity, when she
most needed the ministration of her own sex. Dissolute, abandoned,

and irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to
bear even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible
in her loneliness. The primal curse had come to her in that original
isolation which must have made the punishment of the first
transgression so dreadful. It was, perhaps, part of the expiation of her
sin that, at a moment when she most lacked her sex's intuitive
tenderness and care, she met only the half-contemptuous faces of her
masculine associates. Yet a few of the spectators were, I think, touched
by her sufferings. Sandy Tipton thought it was "rough on Sal," and, in
the contemplation of her condition, for a moment rose superior to the
fact that he had an ace and two bowers in his sleeve.
It will be seen also that the situation was novel. Deaths were by no
means uncommon in Roaring Camp, but a birth was a new thing.
People had been dismissed the camp effectively, finally, and with no
possibility of return; but this was the first time that anybody had been
introduced AB INITIO. Hence the excitement.
"You go in there, Stumpy," said a prominent citizen known as
"Kentuck," addressing one of the loungers. "Go in there, and see what
you kin do. You've had experience in them things."
Perhaps there was a fitness in the selection. Stumpy, in other climes,
had been the putative head of two families; in fact, it was owing to
some legal informality in these proceedings that Roaring Camp--a city
of refuge--was indebted to his company. The crowd approved the
choice, and Stumpy was wise enough to bow to the majority. The door
closed on the extempore surgeon and midwife, and Roaring Camp sat
down outside, smoked