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.