BRET HARTE AS A PARODIST

With a Note on Nationalism in Literature

IN GENERAL, probably, when all considerations are duly balanced, it may be said that nationalism is a bad thing for literature. When a nation becomes “great”—that is, when it begins to cut a big figure in industry and trade—it usually begins to feel that it must have a great art to match. It must have a great literature, great poetry, great music, great painting. If it has not already got them it must either valiantly pretend that what it has got is great or else bend its energies to a mechanical sort of improvisation in greatness. For example, in the last century, when Germany became a great world power in the political and economic sense, she felt the imperious need of a great literature; and (apart from scientific and philosophic literature) not having it, she set to work resolutely to glorify what she had and made a rather unconvincing job of it. To the mind unprepossessed by German nationalism, German literature, with the exceptions noted, has not been successfully recommended by the nationalist appraisal. A single illustration will suffice. In her rapid progress towards industrial, commercial and political eminence, Germany felt the appropriateness of having an eminent epic poem to correspond; so she took the Nibelungenlied, inflated her own critical estimate of it considerably, and put it before the attention of the rest of the world. She already possessed great music, music universally acknowledged as of the very first order; and her music in the person of Richard Wagner went out to service of the nationalist spirit in the bolstering up and exploitation of the Nibelungenlied as one of the world’s great epics. Even with the aid of this powerful auxiliary, the attempt failed. The world did not accept Germany’s critical estimate even when that estimate bore the stamp of this adventitious, but highly persuasive, recommendation. It remained fully appreciative, fully disposed to give generous credit and admiration where they were due—no one can pretend that it did not—but fully aware that the Nibelungenlied is not a great epic poem, and that no effort of nationalist imagination can make it so. Even at that, the world’s judgment was happy to make a differentiation in favor of a certain temperamental partiality, as when someone told a French critic that Béranger was not really a great poet, and the Frenchman replied, “True, he is not; but for us, he is.” Nothing can be said against the legitimacy and soundness of this view; but the nationalist spirit is usually not content to regard the matter in this objective fashion. It is dissatisfied with anything short of a general consent to the validity of its own estimate.

The nationalist spirit in the United States took an opposite course. When we became a world power, in the modern sense, and began to feel the appropriateness of having a great literature to correspond, our tendency was rather to slight the merits of such literature as we already had, and to magnify the prospects of what we were going to produce. The tacit assumption of our nationalism was that the great American novel, drama, poem, had not yet been written, but that we were “going strong,” very strong indeed, and that at any moment now they might be expected. In fact, every publisher was sure he had them already on the press, and felt no false modesty about proclaiming his certainty; while reviewers took their cue from publishers and backed up their pretensions with columns of resonant and stereotyped fustian. So far did all this extravagance go, as we are all aware, that book reviewing largely passed over from its own legitimate field into that of a kind of brummagem criticism. It developed an abominable glossary of its own by wresting to a special use such words as intrigue, derive, arresting, vibrant, vital—we all know them; and the joint efforts of reviewer and publisher even made necessary the coinage of the special descriptive word, “blurb.”

In short, in our manifestation of the nationalist spirit as compared, say, with Germany’s, we are “forward-looking,” and there is, of course, some virtue in that. It is a hopeful attitude, and hopefulness is exhilarating. It is a hospitable attitude, and hospitality is meritorious. Yet one may frankly doubt but what our course has been the worse for literature. After all, to go back to our illustration, the Nibelungenlied was, for the German, at least a fixed quantity, it was there, and considerable time had passed over its head. It was therefore possible for a German to put a deliberate discount on his nationalism, to take a disinterested view of his epic, and appraise it accordingly. He could do this, moreover, undistracted by the haunting uncertainty that seems to beset criticism when exercised under the influence of a forward-looking nationalism—the fear of taking omne novum pro magnifico, whether for better or for worse. Our type of nationalism keeps criticism sitting on the edge of the chair in impatience for the advent of something, it knows not what; and keeps it meanwhile continuously discomposed and dishevelled by a thunderous succession of false alarms.

In view of this, it has often occurred to me that serious criticism in this country would do well resolutely to break with our nationalism, and devote itself to re-appraising the literature produced, let us say, up to twenty years ago. It is at least debatable whether criticism has ever any proper business with contemporary literature. Goethe, the greatest of critics, thought not. “Don’t read your fellow-strivers, fellow-workers,” was his uncompromising word on the subject. It is noticeable, too, that other great critics show an instinct for going at contemporary literature with very long teeth. They seem instinctively to prefer letting time sift it a little before they take it up. Emerson’s observation on this—“never read a book until it is at least a year old”—is well known, and it has the merit of sterling good sense in any circumstances; but in circumstances like ours, with the nationalist spirit marshalling us so rigorously the other way, it deserves unquestioning acceptance. By so doing, our criticism may rehabilitate itself and become respectable, and again it may not; but otherwise it surely never can. Serious criticism need not fear that our nationalism will go begging if deprived of its support. There will still be plenty of blurbs, plenty of the journalistic treatment of literature, plenty of forward-looking reviewers, plenty of literary log-rolling. Nationalism can very handily do without the serious critic’s co-operation; and meanwhile the serious critic can devote himself undisturbed to the revamping and rehabilitation of his legitimate business which has long been in so bad a way as to be almost no business at all.

I have even thought that a literary publication might make a good feature out of some straight reviews of old books, reviews that should relate these books as strictly to the present as if they had just come off the press. This notion came up in my mind again the other day when I was re-reading Turgenev’s Fathers and Children and remarking its apparent applicability to the spiritual circumstances of modern Russia, as far as I understand them. I should think that a critical review of that book would interest a reflective Russian considerably. For my own part, I should greatly like to read a straight group-review of John Hay’s Breadwinners, Henry Adams’s Democracy and Warner-Clemens’s The Gilded Age. In another field, a competent reviewer could do something interesting with Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis. In yet another, with Henry George’s Protection or Free Trade. I am postulating, I repeat, that this reviewing should all be done from the standpoint of our own actual present circumstances, political, intellectual, social, spiritual, quite as if they were brand-new books by authors previously unknown. Similarly, in still another field, I should like to read an essay which should be not quite so much a group-review as a critical group-study of four minor—very minor—literary men of the last century, a study which should address itself to one question: i.e., how is it that the literary ability of R, W. Gilder, E. S. Nadal, Charles DeKay and Maurice Francis Egan never came to more than it did? I can imagine the country-wide chorus of Homeric laughter that this question would raise if it were put to our professors of English literature, but on the other hand I can imagine a disinterested and capable critic looking into it and finding that it led him a long way in unsuspected directions and through a survey of unlooked-for fields.

A really fresh, unprepossessed eye turned back on the body of our literature for the sake of what it might find there, and not for purposes of nationalist exploitation or of fastening on something and giving it a spectacular run of revival, as in the case of Melville a few years ago, might succeed in turning up some matters of fairly conspicuous literary merit. For instance, it might be shown, I think, and shown to a very good and useful purpose, that our literature contains about the best parody ever written. I do not remember ever having seen the name of Bret Harte brought forward in this connection; it no doubt has been, but I think not regularly. Matthew Arnold remarked that parody is a vile art, as it may be, but he gave it full credit for being an art, as it undoubtedly is; and there is an advantage in knowing where uncommonly good specimens of any are to be found. It is with this advantage only, and not with shifting the incidence of nationalism, that criticism is concerned. Our interest is only in knowing where to get at the best specimens of an art, and one very bad effect of nationalism is, as in this case, that it stands in the way of this knowledge. A sound literary interest is not in Harte as an American or even as a parodist, but in parody as an art, and in the fact that the best examples of it are to be found in one place rather than another; and the business of criticism is to keep open an access to these examples, to show wherein their merit lies and what their practical uses are. Further, when this access is blocked by the interference of anything alien to a purely literary interest, such as the nationalist spirit, it is the business of criticism to take up arms against the encroachment.

In 1870 Harte wrote a thin little volume called Condensed Novels, made up of seventeen parodies of authors current at the time. The book got some popularity, enough to move him to try his hand at a second series which for a reason that I shall presently mention did not do so well as the first. A critic need not trouble himself with the second series; it is not particularly good; but the first series repays careful attention. I shall not offer a critical study of it here, for my point is not so much the establishment of Harte’s place in literature, as the consideration of parody as an art and of Harte’s claims as an artist. My point is rather to arouse the critic to the insidious influence of the nationalist spirit in keeping us so steadily looking forward that we lose track of past achievements which even nationalism itself might very well use for its own purposes. Nationalism’s loss is of course not important; the important thing is that we all lose the benefit of a significant achievement by having our access to it virtually cut off, and that criticism should be prompt in showing where and what the interference is, and in doing all it can to restore our access.

Harte’s superiority as a parodist lies, first, in the sound literary instinct that led him to choose great subjects for his parodies. I am speaking, and shall speak throughout, only of his first series. His second series failed because he ran out of great subjects, and tried to make shift with subjects that were really too slight for effective parody. Fifteen out of his seventeen subjects in the first series were the most eminent popular writers of his period: Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Reade, Wilkie Collins, Disraeli, Lever, Bulwer-Lytton, Marryat and the author of Guy Livingstone were the British representatives; also an imaginary Braddon-Wood collaboration. France gave him Hugo and Dumas, and the United States gave him Cooper. Two of his subjects were not great literary figures by any means, but they were conspicuously associated with great social and political circumstances, and thus became themselves conspicuous, so Harte’s instinct in choosing them still remained a sound one. Belle Boyd was a notable spy of the Confederacy, and her memoirs lent themselves well to parody, especially as they gave occasion for an incidental playful drive at the pachydermatous British journalist, G. A. Sala, against whom Matthew Arnold loosed such exquisite raillery in Friendship’s Garland. T. S. Arthur was the old, original anti-saloon, anti-liquor, total-abstinence propagandist. He may, I think, be called the godfather of the movement which has culminated in the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. One of his books, Ten Nights in a Bar Room, is a propagandist classic, and is still in print.

It is gratifying to notice that the eminent Victorian novelists are emerging somewhat from the smoke-screen of disparagement that has kept them pretty well out of view, especially in our academic circles, for the last twenty-five years. They cannot be said to have come into their own, precisely, for they are not read by us to any extent; our literary preoccupations with the present and the future are too exacting—and too muddling—to allow that. But there seems to be a fairly general consciousness that with due allowance made for certain broad streaks of obvious, one may almost say conventional, foible, the principal novelists of the Nineteenth Century, in its middle and later decades, were deuced whaling big people, as British slang might put it. Their literary faults and failings were as conspicuous and distinct as their excellences, and as persistent; they did not move along for great stretches of composition on a dead level of fair-to-middling. Hugo, for example, was about half the time genius, half the time charlatan, but he was equally great at both; he was all there in either character, and entirely, blissfully unselfconscious about his appearance in either character; one would say that he never really knew, at any given moment, which of the two he was assuming. This it is that gives to his History of a Crime, for instance, a quality possessed, I sincerely believe, by no other book on earth. One laughs most indecorously all the way through it; it is one of the funniest compositions ever penned by man; and yet, all the time one is laughing, one is possessed completely by immense indignation and outrage at what is described there and by immense respect for the genius that describes it.

Here, then, we have the ideal subject matter for parody, and Harte deals with it in a manner worthy of his subject. Les Miserables, the reader will remember, has a dozen lines of preface in which Hugo is charlatan complete and perfect, of purest ray serene. Let the reader peruse it carefully, and then turn to this, with which Harte prefaces his parody:

As long as there shall exist three paradoxes, a moral Frenchman, a religious atheist and a believing sceptic; so long, in fact, as booksellers shall wait—say twenty-five years—for a new gospel; so long as paper shall remain cheap and ink three sous a bottle; I have no hesitation in saying that such books as these are not utterly profitless.

Nothing could be better. Dickens’s foibles and mannerisms, his mannerisms of mind as well as of style, are writ large and unselfconsciously on his pages; his weakness, as in the case of the other great Victorians, was set off most conspicuously against his strength, so that there could be no doubt or critical tergiversation about it. Harte, then, has this:

He sat alone in a gloomy library, listening to the wind that roared in the chimney. Around him novels and storybooks were strewn thickly; in his lap he held one with its pages freshly cut, and turned the leaves wearily until his eyes rested upon a portrait in its frontispiece. And as the wind howled the more fiercely, and the darkness without fell blacker, a strange and fateful likeness to that portrait appeared above his chair and leaned upon his shoulder. The Haunted Man gazed at the portrait and sighed. The figure gazed at the portrait and sighed too.

“Here again?” said the Haunted Man.

“Here again,” it repeated in a low voice.

“Another novel?”

“Another novel.”

“The old story?”

“The old story.”

“I see a child,” said the Haunted Man, gazing from the pages of the book into the fire, “a most unnatural child, a model infant. It is prematurely old and philosophic. It dies in poverty to slow music. It dies surrounded by luxury to slow music. It dies with an accompaniment of golden water and rattling carts to slow music. Previous to its decease it makes a will; it repeats the Lord’s Prayer, it kisses the ‘boofer lady.’ That child——”

“Is mine,” said the phantom.

“I see a good woman, undersized. I see several charming women, but they are all undersized. They are more or less imbecile and idiotic, but always fascinating and undersized. They wear coquettish caps and aprons. I observe that feminine virtue is invariably below the medium height, and that it is always simple and infantine. These women——”

“Are mine.”

“I see a haughty, proud and wicked lady. She is tall and queenly. I remark that all proud and wicked women are tall and queenly. That woman——”

“Is mine,” said the phantom, wringing its hands.

“I see several things continually impending. I observe that whenever an accident, a murder or death is about to happen, there is something in the furniture, in the locality, in the atmosphere, that foreshadows and suggests it years in advance. I cannot say that in real life I have noticed it; the perception of this surprising fact belongs——”

“To me,” said the phantom. The Haunted Man continued in a despairing tone:

“I see the influence of this in the magazines and daily papers. I see weak imitators rise up and enfeeble the world with senseless formula. I am getting tired of it. It won’t do, Charles! it won’t do,” and the Haunted Man buried his head in his hands and groaned.

Comparing Harte’s book with Sir Owen Seaman’s little volume called Borrowed Plumes, we see clearly how Harte’s instinct for the choice of great subjects stood by him. Sir Owen Seaman is a highly gifted parodist, but he simply had nothing to parody; the contemporary writers whom he parodied were too slight and insubstantial for anyone to parody with anything like a classic resulting. Harte’s superiority comes out again in his keeping his work free from caricature. With all his keen discernment of weaknesses and absurdity, he never fails to communicate the sense that he is dealing with a great subject. In fact if I were trying to interest a modern student in these distinguished Victorians, I am not sure but that I would approach the task by way of Harte’s parodies. One who reads Miss Mix, Harte’s parody on Jane Eyre, will find Miss Brontë’s preposterous ineptitudes and absurdities faithfully reflected, but yet he will get the impression that somehow, nevertheless, Jane Eyre manages to be a highly-considerable piece of work. In The Dweller of the Threshold one confronts all the pinchbeck writing, all the baroque transcendentalism; in Lothair one confronts the tireless climber and insatiable toadeater; but one cannot quite get away from the conviction that as literary men, Disraeli and Lord Lytton were extremely respectable figures, notwithstanding. Here is Alexandre Dumas in the raw, at the conclusion of The Ninety-nine Guardsmen:

Suddenly the ladder was lifted two feet from below. This enabled the king to leap in the window. At the farther end of the apartment stood a young girl, with red hair and a lame leg. She was trembling with emotion.

“Louise!”

“The King!”

“Ah, my God, mademoiselle.”

“Ah, my God, sire.”

But a low knock at the door interrupted the lovers. The King uttered a cry of rage; Louise one of despair.

The door opened and d’Artagnan entered.

“Good-evening, sire,” said the musketeer.

The King touched a bell. Porthos appeared in the doorway.

“Good-evening, sire.”

“Arrest M. d’Artagnan.”

Porthos looked at d’Artagnan and did not move.

The King almost turned purple with rage. He again touched the bell. Athos entered.

“Count, arrest Porthos and d’Artagnan.”

The Count de la Fere glanced at Porthos and d’Artagnan, and smiled sweetly.

“Sacre! Where is Aramis?” said the King, violently.

“Here, sire,” and Aramis entered.

“Arrest Athos, Porthos and d’Artagnan.”

“Arrest yourself.”

The King shuddered and turned pale. “Am I not King of France?”

“Assuredly, sire„ but we are also severally Porthos, Aramis, dArtagnan and Athos.”

“Ah!” said the King.

“Yes, sire.”

“What does this mean?”

“It means, your Majesty,” said Aramis, stepping forward, “that your conduct as a married man is highly improper. I am an Abbe, and I object to these improprieties. My good friends here, d’Artagnan, Athos and Porthos, pure-minded young men, are terribly shocked. Observe, sire, how they blush!”

Athos, Porthos and dArtagnan blushed.

“Ah,” said the King, thoughtfully, “you teach me a lesson. You are devoted and noble young gentlemen, but your only weakness is your excessive modesty. From this moment I make you all marshals and dukes, with the exception of Aramis.”

“And me, sire?” said Aramis.

“You shall be an archbishop.”

The four friends looked up and then rushed into each other’s arms. The King embraced Louise de la Valliere by way of keeping them company. A pause ensued. At last Athos spoke:

“Swear, my children, that next to yourselves, you will respect the King of France; and remember that ‘forty years after’ we will meet again.”

Yes, this is indeed a very lifelike Dumas, and by no means a caricature. If I might reproduce the entire parody, I believe that with all its keen penetration it would still carry the conviction that Dumas was a valid and substantial literary quantity; that if one wished to cultivate Dumas, one might get a prepossessing and appetizing foretaste of him from the flavor of Harte’s work.

As Harte avoided caricature, so also he avoided burlesque. He did not tell his own story or introduce his own literary notions or his own style. To make the distinction clear, one may place any specimen of his work beside the best and most delightful burlesque that ever has come my way, which is Thackeray’s Rowena and Rebecca. There Thackeray had an idea of his own to work out, and an excellent one it was. He was dissatisfied with the novelist’s habit of abandoning the hero and heroine at the marriage altar; there was a good deal of life to be lived after marriage, and some of it doubtless interesting. He was especially dissatisfied when Sir Walter Scott ended his novel with the marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena, for he thought that Rowena was a very poor affair, not being good enough for Ivanhoe. “Must the Disinherited Knight, whose blood has been fired by the suns of Palestine, and whose heart has been warmed in the company of the tender and beautiful Rebecca, sit down contented for life by the side of such a frigid piece of propriety as that icy, faultless, prim, niminy-piminy Rowena? Forbid it fate, forbid it poetical justice!”

When one thinks of it, indeed, the question is natural and searching. So Thackeray set out on a sequel to Ivanhoe, to get the matter reasonably adjusted. But he does not imitate Scott; he tells his own story in his own style—and the story is captivating, the style is rare and rich. He has no concern with Sir Walter’s mannerisms or with bringing Sir Walter at all before the reader’s consciousness. Even by indirection. He deals, that is, in pure burlesque. Harte, on the other hand, is concerned exclusively with the author and does not engage the reader’s mind upon any idea, story or style of his own; he deals in pure parody.

The foregoing, as I said, does not pretend to be a critical treatment of Harte in his capacity of parodist, but only a brief and partial intimation of a few points that would naturally come up in such a treatment of him, if one were ever made. One could easily establish him, I think, as the best of all parodists—one could do it, probably, by no more than an elaboration of the points of superiority that I have noted, and no doubt it is worth doing. I cite his case merely in support of a different contention. His Condensed Novels is something that we are likely to miss—we whose connection with literature is unprofessional—which most of us have missed, and in missing it have missed a good deal that is both interesting and formative. I believe our loss is largely due to our being too exclusively forward-looking in our survey of our literature; and this is due in great part to the fashion set by the nationalist spirit. My suggestion is, therefore, that criticism disregard flatly both the fashion and the spirit that sets it. Criticism’s business is with a good thing, wherever found, and whether it has to look in one direction for it, or in another, is quite immaterial. Criticism’s business distinctly is not to go out to service to nationalism or to heed the fashions that nationalism dictates for its own purposes; and if criticism is unconsciously falling in with these, it should feel with gratitude the wakening hand of anyone who has noticed its aberration.