The sums that Bret Harte received
for his stories and lectures did not suffice to free
him from debt, and he suffered much anxiety and distress
from present difficulties, with no brighter prospects
ahead. An additional misfortune was the failure
of a new paper called “The Capital,” which
had been started in Washington by John J. Piatt.
There is an allusion to this in a
letter written by Bret Harte to his wife from Washington.
“Thank you, dear Nan, for your kind, hopeful
letter. I have been very sick, very much disappointed;
but I’m better now, and am only waiting for
some money to return. I should have, for the work
that I have done, more than would help us out of our
difficulties. But it doesn’t come, and
even the money I’ve expected from the ‘Capital’
for my story is seized by its creditors. That
hope and the expectations I had from the paper and
Piatt in the future amount to nothing. I have
found that it is bankrupt.
Can you wonder, Nan, that I have kept this from you? You have so
hard a time of it there, and I cannot bear to have you worried if there is
the least hope of a change in my affairs as they look, day by day. Piatt
has been gone nearly a month, was expected to return every day, and only
yesterday did I know positively of his inability to fulfil his promises.
came here three days ago, and in a very few moments I learned from him that
I need expect nothing for the particular service I had done him. Ive been
vilified and abused in the papers for having received compensation for my
services, when really and truly I have only received less than I should have
got from any magazine or newspaper for my story. I sent you the fifty
dollars by Mr. D ,
because I knew you would be in immediate need, and
there is no telegraph transfer office on Long Island.
It was the only fifty I have made since I’ve
been here.
“I am waiting to hear from Osgood
regarding an advance on that wretched story.
He writes me he does not quite like it. I shall
probably hear from him to-night. When the
money comes I shall come with it. God bless
you and keep you and the children safe for the sake
of
“FRANK.”
Bret Harte’s friends, however,
were aware of his situation, and they procured for
him an appointment by President Hayes as United States
Commercial Agent at Crefeld in Prussia. The late
Charles A. Dana was especially active in this behalf.
Bret Harte, much as he dreaded the sojourn in a strange
country, gladly accepted the appointment, and leaving
his family for the present at Sea Cliff, Long Island,
he sailed for England in June, 1878, little thinking
that he was never to return.
Crefeld is near the river Rhine, about
thirty miles north of Cologne. Its chief industry
is the manufacture of silks and velvets, in respect
to which it is the leading city in Germany, and is
surpassed by no other place in Europe except Lyons.
This industry was introduced in Crefeld by Protestant
refugees who fled thither from Cologne in the seventeenth
century in order to obtain the protection of the Prince
of Orange. A small suburb of Philadelphia was
settled mainly by emigrants from Crefeld, and bears
the same name.
The Prussian Crefeld is a clean, spacious
place, with wide streets, substantial houses, and
all the appearance of a Dutch town. At this time
it contained about seventy-five thousand inhabitants.
Bret Harte arrived at Crefeld on the morning of July
17, 1878, after a sleepless journey of twelve hours
from Paris, and on the same day he wrote to his wife
a very homesick letter.
I have audaciously travelled alone nearly four hundred miles through an
utterly foreign country on one or two little French and German phrases, and a
very small stock of assurance, and have delivered my letters to my predecessor,
and shall take possession of the Consulate to-morrow. Mr. , the present incumbent, appears
to me I do not know how I shall modify
my impression hereafter as a very narrow,
mean, ill-bred, and not over-bright Puritanical German.
It was my intention to appoint him my vice-Consul an
act of courtesy suggested both by my own sense of right
and Mr. Leonard’s advice, but he does not seem
to deserve it, and has even received my suggestion
of it with the suspicion of a mean nature. But
at present I fear I may have to do it, for I know
no one else here. I am to all appearance utterly
friendless; I have not received the first act of kindness
or courtesy from any one, and I suppose this man sees
it. I shall go to Bavaria to-morrow to see the
Consul there, who held this place as one of his dependencies,
and try to make matters straight."
This letter shows that the craving
for sympathy and companionship, which is associated
with artistic natures, was intensely felt by Bret Harte,
more so, perhaps, than would have been expected in
a man of his self-reliant character. His despondent
tone is almost child-like. The letter goes on:
“It’s been up-hill work ever since I left
New York, but I shall try to see it through, please
God! I don’t allow myself to think over
it at all, or I should go crazy. I shut my eyes
to it, and in doing so perhaps I shut out what is
often so pleasant to a traveller’s first impressions;
but thus far London has only seemed to me a sluggish
nightmare through which I have waked, and Paris a confused
sort of hysterical experience. I had hoped for
a little kindness and rest here.... At least,
Nan, be sure I’ve written now the worst; I think
things must be better soon. I shall, please God,
make some friends in good time, and will try and be
patient. But I shall not think of sending for
you until I see clearly that I can stay myself.
If the worst comes to the worst I shall try to stand
it for a year, and save enough to come home and begin
anew there. But I could not stand it to see you
break your heart here through disappointment, as I
mayhap may do.”
The tone of this letter is so exaggerated
that it might seem as if Bret Harte had been a little
theatrical and insincere, that he had endeavored to create an impression which
was partly false. But such a conjecture would be erroneous, for under the
same date, with the addition of the word midnight, we find him writing a
second letter to correct the effect of the first, as follows:
“MY DEAR NAN, I wrote and mailed you a letter this afternoon
that I fear was rather disconsolate, so I sit down to-night to send another,
which I hope will take a little of the blues out of the first. Since I
wrote I have had some further conversation with my predecessor, Mr. , and I think I can manage
matters with him. He has hauled in his horns
considerably since I told him that the position I offered
him so far as the honor of it went was
better than the one he held. For the one
thing pleasant about my office is that the dignity
of it has been raised on my account. It
was only a dependence a Consular Agency before
it was offered to me.
“I feel a little more hopeful,
too, for I have been taken out to a ’fest’ or
a festival of one of the vintners, and one
or two of the people were a little kind.
I forced myself to go; these German festivals
are distasteful to me, and I did not care to show my
ignorance of their language quite so prominently,
but I thought it was the proper thing for me
to do. It was a very queer sight. About
five hundred people were in an artificial garden
beside an artificial lake, looking at artificial
fireworks, and yet as thoroughly enjoying it
as if they were children. Of course there were
beer and wine. Here as in Paris everybody
drinks, and all the time, and nobody gets drunk.
Beer, beer, beer; and meals, meals, meals. Everywhere
the body is worshipped. Beside them we are
but unsubstantial spirits. I write this
in my hotel, having had to pass through a mysterious
gate and so into a side courtyard and up a pair
of labyrinthine stairs, to my dim ‘Zimmer’
or chamber. The whole scene, as I returned to-night,
looked as it does on the stage, the
lantern over the iron gate, the inn strutting
out into the street with a sidewalk not a foot wide.
I know now from my own observation, both here
and in Paris and London, where the scene-painters
at the theatres get their subjects. Those impossible
houses those unreal silent streets all exist
in Europe.”
On one of those first, melancholy
days at Crefeld, the new Consul, walking listlessly
along the main street of the town, happened to throw
a passing glance at the window of a bookseller’s
shop, and there he saw on the back of a neat little
volume the familiar words “Bret Harte.”
It was a German translation of his stories, and it
is easy to imagine how the sight refreshed and comforted
the homesick exile. After that, he felt that to
some extent, at least, he was living among friends.
Translations of Bret Harte’s poems and stories
had appeared before this in German magazines, and
later his stories were reproduced in Germany, in book
form, as fast as they were published in England.
In fact, his books have been printed in every language
of Europe, and translations of his stories have appeared
in the “Revue des Deux Mondes,”
in the “Moscow Gazette,” and in periodicals
of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark and Sweden.
In 1878 a translation of six of Bret Harte’s
tales was published in the Servian language, with an
enthusiastic preface in German, by the translator,
Ivan B. Popovitch.
The impression that Bret Harte received
from Europe, and it is the one that every
uncontaminated American must receive, may
be gathered from a letter written by him to his younger
son, then a small boy: “We drove out the
other day through a lovely road, bordered with fine
poplar trees, and more like a garden walk than a country
road, to the Rhine, which is but two miles and a half
from this place. The road had been built by Napoleon
the First when he was victorious everywhere, and went
straight on through everybody’s property, and
even over their dead bones. Suddenly to the right
we saw the ruins of an old castle, vine-clad and crumbling,
exactly like a scene on the stage. It was all
very wonderful. But Papa thought, after all,
he was glad his boys live in a country that is as yet
quite pure, and sweet and good;
not in one where every field seems to cry out with
the remembrance of bloodshed and wrong, and where so
many people have lived and suffered, that to-night,
under this clear moon, their very ghosts seemed to
throng the road and dispute our right of way.
Be thankful, my dear boy, that you are an American.
Papa was never so fond of his country before, as in
this land that has been so great, so powerful, and
so very, very hard and wicked."
Bret Harte, though disclaiming any
knowledge of music, had a real appreciation of it,
and wrote as follows to his wife who was a connoisseur:
“I have been several times to the opera at Dusseldorf,
and I have been hesitating whether I should slowly
prepare you for a great shock or tell you at once
that musical Germany is a humbug. My first operatic
experience was ‘Tannhaeuser.’ I can
see your superior smile, Anna, at this; and I know
how you will take my criticism of Wagner, so I don’t
mind saying plainly, that it was the most diabolically
hideous and stupidly monotonous performance I ever
heard. I shall say nothing about the orchestral
harmonies, for there wasn’t anything going on
of that kind, unless you call something that seemed
like a boiler factory at work in the next street,
and the wind whistling through the rigging of a channel
steamer, harmony.... But what I wanted to say
was that even my poor uneducated ear detected bad
instrumentation and worse singing in the choruses.
I confided this much to a friend, and he said very
frankly that I was probably right, that the best musicians
and choruses went to America....
“Then I was awfully disappointed
in ‘Faust,’ or, as it is known here in
the playbills, ‘Marguerite.’ You know
how I love that delicious idyl of Gounod’s,
and I was in my seat that night long before the curtain
went up. Before the first act was over I felt
like leaving, and yet I was glad I stayed. For
although the chorus of villagers was frightful, and
Faust and Méphistophélès spouted and declaimed blank
verse at each other whole pages of Goethe,
yet the acting was superb. I have never seen such
a Marguerite. But think of my coming to Germany
to hear opera badly sung, and magnificently acted!"
Having put the affairs of the Consular
office upon a proper footing, Bret Harte returned
to England about the middle of August for a short vacation,
which proved, however, to be a rather long one.
His particular object was a visit to James Anthony
Froude at his house in Devonshire. Bret Harte
had a great admiration for Froude’s writings;
and when the two men met they formed a friendship
which was severed only by death.
From Froude’s home Bret Harte
wrote to his wife as follows: “Imagine,
if you can, something between ‘Locksley Hall,’
and the High Walled Garden, where Maud used to walk,
and you have some idea of this graceful English home.
I look from my windows down upon exquisite lawns and
terraces, all sloping toward the sea wall, and then
down upon the blue sea below.... I walk out in
the long, high garden, past walls hanging with netted
peaches and apricots, past terraces looking over the
ruins of an old feudal castle, and I can scarcely
believe I am not reading an English novel or that
I am not myself a wandering ghost. To heighten
the absurdity, when I return to my room I am confronted
by the inscription on the door, ’Lord Devon’
(for this is the property of the Earl of Devon, and
I occupy his favourite room), and I seem to have died
and to be resting under a gilded mausoleum that lies
even more than the average tombstone does. Froude
is a connection of the Earl’s, and has hired
the house for the Summer.
“But Froude dear
old noble fellow is splendid. I love
him more than I ever did in America. He is great,
broad, manly, democratic in the best sense
of the word, scorning all sycophancy and meanness,
accepting all that is around him, yet more proud of
his literary profession than of his kinship with these
people whom he quietly controls. There are only
a few literary men like him here, but they are kings.
So far I’ve avoided seeing any company here;
but Froude and I walk and walk, and talk and talk.
They let me do as I want, and I have not been well
enough yet to do aught but lounge. The doctor
is coming to see me to-day, and if I am no better I
shall return in a day or two to London, and then to
Crefeld."
Bret Hartes health seems at all times to have been easily upset, and he was
particularly subject to colds and sore throats. This letter was written in
August, but it was the first week in November before he was on his way back to
Crefeld. While in London he had arranged for a lecture tour in England
during the next January (1879), and in that month a volume of his stories and
poems was published in England with the following Introduction by the author:
“In offering this collection
of sketches to the English public, the author is conscious
of attaching an importance to them that may not be
shared by the general reader, but which he, as an
American writer on English soil, cannot fail to feel
very sensibly. The collection is made by himself,
the letter-press revised by his own hand, and he feels
for the first time that these fugitive children of
his brain are no longer friendless in a strange land,
entrusted to the care of a foster-mother, however discreet,
but are his own creations, for whose presentation
to the public in this fashion he is alone responsible.
Three or four having been born upon English soil may
claim the rights of citizenship, but the others he
must leave to prove their identity with English literature
on their own merits.”
The lecture on the Argonauts, delivered
the first time at the Crystal Palace, was very well
received both by the hearers and the press; but financially
it was a disappointment. Bret Harte was in England
three weeks, lectured five times, and made only two
hundred dollars over and above his expenses.
A second lecture tour, however, carried
out in March of the same year, was successful in every
way. The audiences were enthusiastic, and the
payment was liberal.
It was during this visit to England
that Bret Harte became involved in a characteristic
tangle. He had received the compliment of being
asked to respond for Literature at the Royal Academy
banquet in 1879, and, with his constitutional unwillingness
to give a point-blank refusal, had promised or half-promised
to be present. Meanwhile, he had returned to
Crefeld, and the prospect of speaking at the dinner
loomed more and more horrific in his imagination,
while the uncertainty in which he left the matter
was a source of vexation in London. Letters and
telegrams from his friends remained unanswered, until
finally, Sir Frederic Leighton, the President of the
Academy, sent him a message, the reply to which was
prepaid, saying, “In despair; cannot do without
you. Please telegraph at once if quite impossible.”
This at last drew from Bret Harte
a telegram stating that the pressure of official business
would render it impossible for him to leave Crefeld.
But the matter was not quite ended yet. In a
day or two Bret Harte received a letter from Froude,
good-naturedly reminding him that a note as well as
a telegram was due to Sir Frederic Leighton.
“The President of the Royal Academy,”
he wrote, “is a sacred person with the state
and honors of a sovereign on these occasions.”
And after some further delay Bret Harte did write
to Sir Frederic, and received in reply the following
polite but possibly somewhat ironical note: “Dear
Mr. Bret Harte, It was most kind of you
to write to me after your telegram. I fully understand
the impossibility of your leaving your post, and sincerely
regret my loss.”
A year later, however, in 1880, Bret
Harte answered the toast to Literature at the Royal
Academy dinner, and his brief speech on that occasion
is included in the volume of lectures by him recently
published.
In October of this year, 1879, Bret
Harte wrote to Washington stating that his health
had suffered at Crefeld, and requesting leave of absence
for sixty days in order that he might follow the advice
of his physician, and seek a more favorable climate.
He also asked for a reply by telegraph; and in the
same letter he made application for a better Consular
position, mentioning, as one reason for the exchange,
that the business of the Agency at Crefeld had greatly
increased during his tenure. His request for
leave of absence was immediately granted, and in November
he wrote to the State Department acknowledging the
receipt of its telegram and letter, but adding, “Neither
my affairs nor my health have enabled me yet to avail
myself of the courtesy extended to me by the Department.
When I shall be able to do so, I shall, agreeably
to your instructions, promptly inform you.”
He took this leave of absence in the following January
and April.
So far as can be judged from his communications
to the State Department, Bret Harte discharged the
duties of the Agency in a very business-like manner.
For one thing, he reduced the time consumed in passing
upon invoices of goods intended for exportation to
the United States from twenty-four hours to three
hours, greatly to the convenience of the Crefeld manufacturers.
The increase in the value of the silks and velvets
shipped to this country during Bret Harte’s term
amounted to about two hundred thousand dollars quarterly;
but perhaps the demands of trade had something to
do with this.
Two of the reports to the State Department from our Agent at Crefeld deserve
to be rescued from their official oblivion. The first is dated, October 8,
1879, and it accompanies a table showing the rainfall, snowfall, and
thunderstorms occurring in the district from July 1, 1878, to June 30, 1879.
The Agent states:
“The table is compiled from
the observations of a competent local meteorologist.
In mitigation of the fact that it has rained in this
district in the ratio of every other day in the year,
it may be stated that the general gloom has been diversified
and monotony relieved by twenty-nine thunderstorms
and one earthquake.”
The second communication, dated October
10, 1879, is in response to an official inquiry.
“In reference to the Department Circular dated
August 27, 1879, I have the honor to report that upon
careful inquiry of the local authorities of this district
I find that there is not now and never has been any
avowed Mormon emigration from Crefeld, nor any emigration
of people likely to become converts to that faith.
Its name as well as its tenets are unknown to the
inhabitants, and only to officials through the Department
Circular.
“The artisans and peasants of
this district that class from which the
Mormon ranks are supposed to be recruited are
hard-working, thrifty, and home-loving. They
are averse to emigration for any purpose, and as Catholics
to any new revealed religion. A prolific household
with one wife seems to exclude any polygamous
instinct in the manly breast, while the woman, who
works equally with her husband, evinces no desire to
share any division of the affections or the profits.
The like may be predicated of the manufacturers, with
the added suggestion that a duty of 60 per cent ad
valorem by engaging the fullest powers of the intellect
in its evasion, leaves little room for the play of
the lower passions. In these circumstances I
did not find it necessary to report to the Legation
at Berlin.”
The literary product of Bret Harte’s
two years at Crefeld was A Legend of Sammtstadt,
in which there is a pleasant blending of the romantic
and the humorous, The Indiscretion of Elsbeth,
the Views from a German Spion, and Unser
Karl. Unser Karl, however, was not written,
or at least was not published, until several years
later.
Perhaps the most valuable impression
which Bret Harte carried away from Crefeld was that
of the German children. Children always interested
him, and in Prussia he found a new variety, which
he described in the Views from a German Spion:
“The picturesqueness of Spanish and Italian
childhood has a faint suspicion of the pantomime and
the conscious attitudinizing of the Latin races.
German children are not exuberant or volatile; they
are serious, a seriousness, however, not
to be confounded with the grave reflectiveness of
age, but only the abstract wonderment of childhood.
These little creatures I meet upon the street whether
in quaint wooden shoes and short woollen petticoats,
or neatly booted and furred, with school knapsacks
jauntily borne on little square shoulders all
carry likewise in their round chubby faces their profound
wonderment and astonishment at the big busy world into
which they have so lately strayed. If I stop
to speak with this little maid, who scarcely reaches
to the top-boots of yonder cavalry officer, there is
less of bashful self-consciousness in her sweet little
face than of grave wonder at the foreign accent and
strange ways of this new figure obtruded upon her
limited horizon. She answers honestly, frankly,
prettily, but gravely. There is a remote possibility
that I might bite; and with this suspicion plainly
indicated in her round blue eyes, she quietly slips
her little red hand from mine, and moves solemnly
away.”
The Continental practice of making
the dog a beast of burden shocked Bret Harte, as it
must shock any lover of the animal. “Perhaps
it is because I have the barbarian’s fondness
for dogs, and for their lawless, gentle, loving uselessness
that I rebel against this unnatural servitude.
It seems as monstrous as if a child were put between
the shafts and made to carry burdens; and I have come
to regard those men and women, who in the weakest,
perfunctory way affect to aid the poor brute by laying
idle hands on the barrow behind, as I would unnatural
parents.... I fancy the dog seems to feel the
monstrosity of the performance, and, in sheer shame
for his master, forgivingly tries to assume it is
play; and I have seen a little collie running
along, barking and endeavoring to leap and gambol in
the shafts, before a load that any one out of this
locality would have thought the direst cruelty.
Nor do the older or more powerful dogs seem to become
accustomed to it.”
And then comes an example of that
extraordinary keenness of observation with which Bret
Harte was gifted: “I have said that
the dog was generally sincere in his efforts.
I recall but one instance to the contrary. I
remember a young collie who first attracted my attention
by his persistent barking. Whether he did this,
as the plough-boy whistled, ’for want of thought,’
or whether it was a running protest against his occupation,
I could not determine, until one day I noticed that,
in barking, he slightly threw up his neck and shoulders,
and that the two-wheeled barrow-like vehicle behind
him, having its weight evenly poised on the wheels
by the trucks in the hands of its driver, enabled
him by this movement to cunningly throw the centre
of gravity and the greater weight on the man, a
fact which the less sagacious brute never discerned....
I cannot help thinking that the people who have lost
this gentle, sympathetic, characteristic figure from
their domestic life and surroundings have not acquired
an equal gain through his harsh labors.”
Of his Consular experiences at Crefeld
the following is the only one which found its way
into literature: “The Consul’s chief
duty was to uphold the flag of his own country by
the examination and certification of divers invoices
sent to his office by the manufacturers. But,
oddly enough, these messengers were chiefly women, not
clerks, but ordinary household servants, and on busy
days the Consulate might have been mistaken for a
female registry office, so filled and possessed it
was by waiting Maedchen. Here it was that Gretchen,
Liebchen, and Clarchen, in the cleanest of gowns,
and stoutly but smartly shod, brought their invoices
in a piece of clean paper, or folded in a blue handkerchief,
and laid them, with fingers more or less worn and
stubby from hard service, before the Consul for his
signature. Once, in the case of a very young Maedchen,
that signature was blotted by the sweep of a flaxen
braid upon it as the child turned to go; but generally
there was a grave, serious business instinct and sense
of responsibility in these girls of ordinary peasant
origin, which, equally with their sisters of France,
were unknown to the English or American woman of any
class.”
Bret Harte remained nearly two years
at Crefeld, but his wife did not join him there, and,
so far as the world knows, they never met again.
In May, 1880, he was transferred to the much more
lucrative and more desirable Consulship at Glasgow.
It was one of the last cases in which government bestowed
public office as a reward for literary excellence, a
custom so hallowed by age and association that every
lover of literature will look back upon it with fond
regret.