do, and indeed could not. His talent was not a facile gift; he owned
that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that
yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in
that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a
line. It may be owned for him that though he came to the East at
thirty-four, which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, he
seemed to have arrived after the age of observation was past for him. He
saw nothing aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in New
York, where he sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took him
about the whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report it
aright, or would not. After repeated and almost invariable failures to
deal with the novel characters and circumstances which he encountered he
left off trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical California he
had half discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as
long as he lived. This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason,
was the best thing he could do, and it went as nearly as might be to
satisfy the insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer to be
found on our map.

It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any
bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple
American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and
everything of him in fiction and drama. The long breath was not his; he
could not write a novel, though he produced the like of one or two, and
his plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it. At any
rate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and they denoted the
fatigue or the indifference of their author in being dramatizations of
his longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts. The
direction in which his originality lasted longest, and most strikingly
affirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse.