Bret Harte’s Heroines

IN Bret Harte’s stories woman is subordinated to man just as love is subordinated to friendship. The principal figure in almost all the tragic tales is a man. There is no female character, moreover, that appears and reappears in one story after another, as do Yuba Bill, Jack Hamlin, and Colonel Starbottle; and, so far as we can judge from a writer of such reserve, the gusto which Bret Harte evidently felt in writing about these worthies was not evoked to the same degree by any of his heroines.

And yet what modern author has exhibited a more charming gallery of heroines, or has depicted the passion of love in so pure and wholesome a form! The critic must clear up his ideas about what constitutes nobility in woman, before he can fairly estimate the women described by Bret Harte. A sophisticated reader would be almost sure to underestimate them. Even that English critic who was perhaps his greatest admirer, makes the remark, literally true, but nevertheless misleading, that Bret Harte “did not create a perfectly noble, superior, commanding woman.” No; but he created, or at least sketched, more than one woman of a very noble type. What type of woman is most valuable to the world? Surely that which is fitted to become the mother of heroes; and to that type Bret Harte’s best women belong. They have courage, tenderness, sympathy, the power of self-sacrifice; they have even that strain of fierceness which seems to he inseparable, in man or beast, from the capacity for deep affection. They do indeed lack education, and inherited refinement. Bret Harte himself occasionally points out the deficiency in this respect of his pioneer women. “She brushed the green moss from his sleeve with some towelling, and although this operation brought her so near to him that her breath 7emdash; as soft and warm as the Southwest trades — stirred his hair, it was evident that this contiguity was only frontier familiarity, as far removed from conscious coquetry, as it was, perhaps, from educated delicacy.”

And yet it is very easy to exaggerate this defect. In most respects the wholesomeness, the democratic sincerity and dignity of Bret Harte’s women (and of his men as well) give them the substantial benefits of gentle blood. Thus he says of one of his characters, “He had that innate respect for the secrets of others which is as inseparable from simplicity as it is from high breeding;” and this remark might have been put in a much more general form. In fact, the essential similarity between simplicity and high breeding runs through the whole nature of Bret Harte’s characters, and perhaps, moreover, explains why the man who loved the mining camps of California fled from philistine San Francisco and provincial Boston to cosmopolitan London.

Be this as it may, the defects of Bret, Harte’s heroines relate rather to the ornamental than to the indispensable part of life, whereas the qualities in which they excel are those fundamental feminine qualities upon which, in the last analysis, is founded the greatness of nations. Bret Harte’s women have the independence, the innocent audacity, the clear commonsense, the resourcefulness, typical of the American woman, and they have, besides, a depth of feeling which is rather primeval than American, which certainly is not a part of the typical American woman as we know her in the Eastern States.

Perhaps the final test of nobility in man or woman is the capacity to value something, be it honor, affection, or what you will, be it almost anything, but to value something more than life itself, and this is the characteristic of Bret Harte’s heroines. They are as ready to die for love as Juliet was, and along with this abandon they have the coolness, the independence, the practical faculty, which belong to their time and race, but which were not a part of woman’s nature in the age that produced Shakespeare’s “unlessoned” girl.

Bret Harte’s heroines have a strong family resemblance to those of both Turgénieff and Thomas Hardy. In each case the women obey the instinct of love as unreservedly as men of an archaic type obey the instinct of fighting. There is no question with them of material advantage, of wealth, position, or even reputation. Such considerations, so familiar to women of the world, never enter their minds. They love as nature prompts, and having once given their love, they give themselves and everything that they have along with it. There is a magnificent forgetfulness of self about them. This is the way of nature. Nature never counts the cost, never hoards her treasures, but pours them out, to live or die as the case may be, with a profusion which makes the human by-stander — economical, poverty-stricken man — stand aghast. In Russia this type of woman is frequently found, as Turgénieff, and to a lesser degree Tolstoi, found her among the upper classes, which have retained a primeval quality long since bred out of the corresponding classes in England and in the United States. For women of the same type in England, Thomas Hardy is forced to look lower down in the social scale; and this probably accounts for the fact that his heroines are seldom drawn from the upper classes.

Women of this type sometimes fail in point of chastity, but it is a failure due to impulse and affection, not to mere frivolity or sensuality. After all, chastity is only one of the virtues that women owe to themselves and to the race. The chaste woman who coldly marries lor money is, as a rule, morally inferior to the unchaste woman who gives up everything for love.

It is to be observed, however, that Bret Harte’s women do not need this defense, for his heroines, with the single exception of Miggles, are virtuous. The only loose women in Bret Harte’s stories are the obviously bad women, the female “villains” of the play, and they are by no means numerous. Joan, in “ The Argonauts of North Liberty,” the wives of ” Brown of Calaveras,” and of “ The Bell-Ringer of Angels,” respectively, the cold-blooded Mrs. Decker, and Mrs. Burroughs, the pretty, murderous, feline little woman in “ A Mercury of the Foothills” — these very nearly exhaust the list. On the other hand, in Thomas Hardy and Turgénieff, to say nothing of lesser novelists, it is often the heroine herself who falls from virtue. Too much can hardly be made of the moral superiority of Bret Harte’s stories in this respect. It is due not simply to his own taste and preference, but to the actual state of society in California, which, in this respect as in all others, he faithfully portrayed. The city of San Francisco might have told a different story; but in the mining and agricultural parts of the state the standard of feminine virtue was high. Perhaps this was due, in part at least, to the chivalry of the men, reacting upon the women, — to that feeling which Bret Harte himself called “the western-American fetich of the sanctity of sex,” and, again, “the innate Far-Western reverence for women.”

In all European societies, and now, to a lesser degree, in the cities of the United States, every man is, generally speaking, the enemy of every young and good-looking woman, as much as the hunter is the enemy of his game. How vast is the difference between this attitude of men to women and that which Bret Harte describes! The California men, as he says elsewhere, “thought it dishonorable and a proof of incompetency to rise by their wives’ superior fortune.” They married for love and nothing else, and their love took the form of reverence.

The complement of this feeling, on the woman’s side, is a maternal, protecting affection, perhaps the noblest passion of which women are capable; and this is the kind of love that Bret Harte’s heroines invariably show. No mother could have watched over her child more tenderly than Cressy over her sweetheart. The cry that came from the lips of the Rose of Tuolumne when she flew to the rescue of her bleeding lover was “the cry of a mother over her stricken babe, of a tigress over her mangled cub.”

Let us recall the picture of the Rose as she first appears in the story, — summoned out of bed by her father, in the middle of the night, to help entertain his troublesome guest, the youthful poet. While the two men await her coming on the piazza, the elder confides some family secrets to his young friend.

“‘But hush,’ said Mr. McCloskey — ‘ that’s her foot on the Stairs. She’s cummin’.’ She came. I don’t think the French window ever held a finer view than when she put aside the curtains and stepped out. She had dressed herself simply and hurriedly, but with a woman’s knowledge of her best points, so that you got the long curves of her shapely limbs, the shorter curves of her round waist and shoulders, the long sweep of her yellow braids, and even the delicate rose of her complexion, without knowing how it was delivered to you. . . . it was two o’clock in the morning, the cheek of this Tuolumne goddess was as dewy and fresh as an infant’s, and she looked like Marguerite, without ever having heard of Goethe’s heroine.”

Bret Harte’s heroines are almost all of the robust type. A companion picture to the Rose is that of Jinny in the story “ When the Waters were up at Jules.”

“Certainly she was graceful! Her tall, lithe, but beautifully moulded figure, even in its characteristic Southwestern indolence, fell into poses as picturesque as they were unconscious. She lifted the big molasses can from its shelf on the rafters with the attitude of a Greek waterbearer. She upheaved the heavy flour sack to the same secure shelf with the upraised palms of an Egyptian caryatid.”

Trinidad Joe’s daughter, also, was large-limbed, with blue eyes, black brows, and white teeth. It was of her that the doctor said, “If she spoke rustic Greek instead of bad English, and wore a cestus instead of an ill-fitting corset, you ’d swear she was a goddess.”

It is to be remembered that Bret Harte’s nobler type of women, and in most cases of his men also, was drawn from the western and southwestern emigrants. The “great West” furnished his heroic characters, — California was only their accidental and temporary abiding place. The eastern emigrants came by sea, and very few women accompanied them. The western and southwestern emigrants crossed the plains, and brought their wives and children along. These people were of the muscular, farm type, with such health and such nerves as spring from an out-door life, from simple, even coarse food, from early hours and abundant sleep. The women shared the courage of their fathers and brothers. Bret Harte’s heroines are womanly to their finger-tips, but they have nerves of steel. Such was Lanty Foster, in whose veins flowed “the blood that had never nourished cravens or degenerates, but had given itself to sprinkle and fertilize desert solitudes where man might follow; . . . whose first infant cry had been answered by the yelp and scream of panther; whose father’s rifle had been leveled across her cradle, to cover the stealthy Indian who prowled outside.”

Bret Harte’s women show their primitive character in their love-affairs, in respect to which they are much like Shakespeare’s heroines. “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight!”

John Ashe’s betrothed and Ridgway Dent had known each other a matter of two hours or so, before they exchanged that immortal kiss which nearly cost the lives of both. Two brief meetings, and one of those in the dark, sufficed to win for the brave and clever young deputy sheriff the affections of Lanty Foster. In “ A Jack and Gill of the Sierras,” a handsome girl from the East tumbles over a precipice, and falls upon the recumbent hero, part way down, with such violence as to stun him. This is hardly romantic, but the dangerous and difficult ascent which they make together furnishes the required opportunity. Ten minutes of contiguity suffice, and so well is the girl’s character indicated by a few masterly strokes, that the reader feels no surprise at the result.

And yet there is nothing that savors of coarseness, much less of levity, in these abrupt love-affairs. When Bret Harte’s heroes and heroines meet, it is the coming together of two souls that recognize and attract each other. It is like a stroke of lightning, and is accepted with a primeval simplicity and un-selfconsciousness. The impression is as deep as it is sudden.

What said Juliet of the anonymous young man whom she had known something less than an hour?

“ Go, ask his name : if he be marrièdMy grave is like to be my wedding bed.”

So felt Liberty Jones when she exclaimed to Dr. Rysdael. “I’ll go with you or I’ll die!”

It is this sincerity that sanctifies the rapidity and frankness of Bret Harte’s love-affairs. Genuine passion takes no account of time, and supplies by one instinctive rush of feeling the experience of years. Given the right persons, time becomes as long and as short as eternity. Thus it was with the two lovers who met and parted at midnight on the hilltop. “There they stood alone. There was no sound of motion in earth or woods or heaven. They might have been the one man and woman for whom this goodly earth that lay at their feet, rimmed with the deepest azure, was created. And seeing this they turned toward each other with a sudden instinct, and their hands met, and then their lips in one long kiss.”

But this same perfect understanding may be arrived at in a crowd as well as in solitude. Cressy and the Schoolmaster were mutually aware of each other’s presence at the dance before they had exchanged a look, and when their eyes met it was in “an isolation as supreme as if they had been alone.”

Cressy is so real, so lifelike, that her first appearance in the story, namely her return to school, after the episode of a broken engagement, leaves the reader firmly convinced of her previous existence. This is what the youthful schoolmaster saw on that memorable morning; —

“In the rounded, untouched, and untroubled freshness of her cheek and chin, and the forward droop of her slender neck, she appeared a girl of fifteen; in her developed figure and the maturer drapery of her full skirts she seemed a woman; in her combination of naïve recklessness and perfect understanding of her person she was both. In spite of a few school-books that jauntily swung from a strap in her gloved hand, she bore no resemblance to a pupil; in her pretty gown of dotted muslin, with bows of blue ribbon on the skirt and corsage, and a cluster of roses in her belt, she was as inconsistent and incongruous to the others as a fashion-plate would have been in the dry and dogeared pages before them. Yet she carried it off with a demure mingling of the naïveté of youth and the aplomb of a woman, and as she swept down the narrow aisle, burying a few small wondering heads in the overflow of her flounces, there was no doubt of her reception in the arch smile that dimpled her cheek. Dropping a half curtsy to the master, the only suggestion of equality with the others, she took her place at one of the larger desks, and resting her elbow on the lid began quietly to remove her gloves. It was Cressy McKinstry.”

Poor Cressy, like Daisy Miller, was the pathetic victim of circumstances, chief among which was the lack of a lover worthy of being her husband. Could any country in the world, except our own, produce a Cressy! She has all the beauty, much of the refinement, and all the subtle perceptions of a girl belonging to the most sophisticated race and class; and underneath she has the strong, primeval, spontaneous qualities, the wholesome instincts, the courage, the steadfastness of that pioneer people, that religious, fighting, much-enduring people to whom she belonged.

Cressy is the true child of her father; and there is nothing finer in all Bret Harte than his description of this rough backwoodsman, ferocious in his boundary warfare, and yet full of vague aspirations for his daughter, conscious of his own deficiencies, and oppressed with that melancholy which haunts the man who has outgrown the ideals and conventions of his youth. Hiram McKinstry, compared with the masterful Yuba Bill, the picturesque Hamlin, or the majestic Starbottle, is not an imposing figure; but to have divined him was a greater feat of sympathetic imagination than to have created the others.

It is characteristic, too, of Bret Harte that it is Cressy’s father who is represented as acutely conscious of his own defects in education; whereas her mother remains true to the ancestral type, deeply distrusting her husband’s and her daughter’s innovations. Mrs. McKinstry, as the reader will remember, “looked upon her daughter’s studies and her husband’s interest in them as weaknesses that might in course of time produce infirmity of homicidal purpose and become enervating of eye and trigger finger. . . . ‘ The old man’s worritts hev sorter shook out a little of his sand,’ she had explained.”

Alas that no genius has arisen to write the epic of the West, as Hawthorne and Mary Wilkins and Miss Jewett have written the epic of New England! Bret Harte’s stories of the western people are true and striking, but his limitations prevented him from giving much more than sketches of them. They are not presented with that fullness which is necessary to make a, figure in fiction impress itself upon the popular imagination, and become familiar even to people who have never read the book in which it is contained. Cressy, like Bret Harte’s other heroines, flits across the scene once or twice, and we see her no more. Mrs. McKinstry is sketched only in outline, and yet she is a strong, tragic figure of a type now extinct or nearly so, as powerful and more sane than Meg Merrilies, and much more worthy of a permanent place in literature.

Bret Harte’s heroines include to a remarkable degree almost everything that was interesting in feminine California. Even the aborigines have a place. The Princess Bob is an Indian. So is the Mermaid of Lighthouse Point; and in “ Peter Atherley’s Ancestors” we have a group of squaws, the youngest of whom is thus touchingly described: “A girl of sixteen in years, a child of six in intellect, she flashed her little white teeth upon him when he lifted his tent-flap, content to receive his grave melancholy bow, or patiently trotted at his side, carrying things he did not want, which she had taken from the lodge. When he sat down to write, she remained seated at a distance, looking at him with glistening beady eyes like blackberries set in milk, and softly scratching the little bare brown ankle of one foot with the turned-in toes of the other, after an infantile fashion.”

Next in point of time come the Spanish occupants of the soil. Bret Harte has not given us such an elaborate portrait of a Spanish girl as he has of that fascinating and gallant young gentleman Enrico Saltello; but there is a charming sketch of his sister Consuelo. It will be remembered that Consuelo, fancying or pretending to fancy a prearranged meeting between her American suitor and a certain Miss Smith, dashes off on the erratic Chu Chu, and is found by her agonized lover two hours later reclining by the roadside, “with her lovely blue-black hair undisheveled,” and apparently unhurt, but still, as she declares, the victim of a serious accident. Thus she replies to her lover’s tender inquiries as to the nature of her injuries:

“ ‘ You comprehend not, my poor Pancho! It is not of the foot, the ankle, the arm, or the head that I can say “ She is broke! ” I would it were even so. But,’ she lifted her sweet lashes slowly, — ‘ I have derranged my inside. It is an affair of my family. My grandfather have once tumble over the bull at a rodeo. He speak no more; he is dead. For why? He has derrange his inside. Believe me, it is of the family. You comprehend ? The Saltellos are not as the other peoples for this. . . . When you are happy and talk in the road to the Essmith, you will not think of me, you will not see my eyes, Pancho; these little grass’ —she ran her plump little fingers through a tussock — ‘will hide them; and the small animals in black that live here will have much sorrow— but you will not. It ees better so! My father will not that I, a Catholique, should marry into a camp-meeting, and live in a tent, and make howl like the coyote.’ ”

Thackeray himself was not a greater master of dialect than Bret Harte, and as Thackeray seems to bring out the character of Costigan by his brogue, so Bret Harte, by means of her delightfully broken English, discloses the gentle, piquant, womanly, grave, non-humorous, but tenderly playful character of the Spanish señorita. Consuelo is not the only one. There are Donna Supelvida in “ Gabriel Conroy;” Rosita Pico, the friend of Mrs. Demorest, in “The Argonauts of North Liberty;” Pepita Ramirez, by whose charms Stephen Masterton, the Methodist preacher, became “ A Convert of the Mission,” and Carmen de Haro, in “ The Story of a Mine,” whose voice was “so musical, so tender, so sympathizing, so melodious, so replete with the graciousness of womanhood, that she seemed to have invented the language.”

The Mexican women are represented by the passionate Teresa, who met her fate, in a double sense, “ In the Carquinez Woods,” finding there both a lover and her death; and even the charming daughter of a Spanish mother and an American or English father is not missing. Such marriages were frequent among the adventurous Anglo-Saxons who had settled in California long before the discovery of gold. It was said, indeed, that the señoritas preferred Americans as husbands, and this preference accounted in part for the bitter feeling against them entertained by the Spaniards. It was bad enough that they should acquire the land, without capturing the women also. José Castro, the military commander of the province, declared, in 1846, that such indignities could not be borne by Castilian blood. “A California Cavaliero cannot woo a Señorita, if opposed in his suit by an American sailor; and these heretics must be cleared from the land.”

In “ Maruja ” we have the daughter of a New England whaling captain and a Spanish woman of good family, who unites the best qualities of both races. “ Her eyes were beautiful, and charged with something more than their own beauty. With a deep brunette setting even to the darkened curves, the pupils were as blue as the sky above them. But they were lit with another intelligence. The soul of the Salem whaler looked out of the passion-darkened orbits of the mother, and was resistless.”

As to the American women who emigrated to California, Bret Harte’s gallery contains a picture, or at least a sketch of every type. Of the western and southwestern women mention has already been made. The South is represented by Sally Dows, who appears not only in the story of that name, but also in “ Colonel Starbottle’s Client.” Sally Dows is a “reconstructed ” rebel, a rebel indeed who never believed in the war, but who stood by her kindred. She is a charming young woman, graceful, physically and mentally, coquettish but businesslike, cool and alluring, and always mistress of herself and the situation. The key to her character dawns at last upon her northern lover: “Looking at her closely now he understood the meaning of those pliant graces, so unaffected and yet always controlled by the reasoning of an unbiased intellect; her frank speech and plausible intonations! Before him stood the trueborn daughter of a long race of politicians ! All that he had heard of their dexterity, tact, and expediency rose here incarnate with the added grace of womanhood.”

In his portrayal of eastern women Bret Harte is less successful. There was no Yankee blood in his veins, and he was inclined to dislike New England people and New England ideas. Moreover, the conventional well-bred woman of any race or clime did not interest him. Writers of fiction, as a rule, find their material in one particular class, and in the dependents or inferiors with whom that class comes especially in contact. Dickens is the historian of the London cockney, Thackeray of aristocratic and literary London, Trollope of the English county families, and to some extent, of Englishmen in public life, Rhoda Broughton of the county families and of academic society, George Eliot of the middle and farmer class, Thomas Hardy of the farmer and peasant class, Mr. Howells of the typical well-to-do American family. Bret Harte, on the other hand, drew his material from every class and condition — from the widow Hiler to Louise Macey, from Mrs. McKinstry to Cherry Brooks; but women did not usually attract him as subjects for literature, unless they were close to nature, or else emancipated from custom and tradition by some originality of mind or character.

He could indeed draw fairly well the accomplished woman of the world, such for example as Amy Forester in “ A Night on the Divide,” Jessie Mayfield in “ Jeff Briggs’ Love Story,” Grace Nevil in “ A Mæcenas of the Pacific Slope,” Mrs. Ashwood in “ A First Family of Tasajara,” and Mrs. Horncastle in “Three Partners.” But these women do not bear the stamp of Bret Harte’s genius.

His army and navy girls are better, because they are redeemed from commonplaceness by their patriotism. Miss Portfire in “ The Princess Bob and Her Friends,” and Julia Cantire in “ Dick Boyle’s Business Card,” represent those American families, more numerous than might be supposed, in which it is almost an hereditary custom for the men to serve in the army or navy, and for the women to become the wives and mothers of soldiers and sailors. In such families patriotism is a constant inspiration, to a degree seldom felt except by those who represent their country at home or abroad.

Bret Harte was patriotic, as many of his poems and stories attest, and his long residence in England did not abate his Americanism. “Apostates” was his name for those American girls who marry titled foreigners, and he often speaks of the susceptibility of American women to considerations of rank and position.

In “ A Rose of Glenbogie,” after describing the male guests at a Scotch country house, he continues: “There were the usual half-dozen smartly-frocked women who, far from being the females of the foregoing species, were quite indistinctive, with the single exception of an American wife, who was infinitely more Scotch than her Scotch husband.” And in the “ The Heir of the McHulisches ” the American consul is represented as being less chagrined by the bumptiousness of his male compatriots than by “the snobbishness and almost servile adaptability of the women. Or was it possible that it was only a weakness of the sex which no Republican nativity or education could eliminate ? ” What American has not asked himself this same question!

The only New England woman of whom Bret Harte has made an elaborate study, with the possible exception of Thankful Blossom, is that very bad person, Joan, in “ The Argonauts of North Liberty.” The subject had almost a morbid fascination for him. As Hawthorne pointed out in The Scarlet Letter, the man or woman whom we hate becomes an object of interest to us, almost as much as the person whom we love. An acute critic declares that Thackeray’s wonderful insight into the characters and feelings of servants was due to the fact that he had a kind of horror of them, and was morbidly sensitive to their criticisms —the more keenly felt for being unspoken. So Joan represents what Bret Harte hated more than anything else in the world, namely, a narrow, censorious, hypocritical, cold-blooded Puritanism. Her character is not that of a typical New England woman; its counterpart would much more easily be found among the men; but it is a perfectly consistent character, most accurately worked out. Joan combines a prim, provincial, horsehair-sofa respectability with a lawless and sensual nature, — an odd combination, and yet not an impossible one. She might perhaps be called the female of that species which Hawthorne immortalized under the name of Judge Pyncheon.

Joan is a puzzle to the reader, but so she was to those who knew her. Was she a conscious hypocrite, deliberately playing a false part in the world, or was she a monstrous egotist, one in whom the soul of truth had so died out that she thought herself justified in everything that she did, and committed the worst acts from what she supposed to be the most excusable motives ? Her intimates did not know. One of the finest strokes in the story is the dawning of suspicion upon the mind of her second husband. “For with all his deep affection for his wife, Richard Demorest unconsciously feared her. The strong man whose dominance over men and women alike had been his salient characteristic, had begun to feel an indefinable sense of some unrecognized quality in the woman he loved. He had once or twice detected it in a tone of her voice, in a remembered and perhaps even once idolized gesture, or in the accidental lapse of some bewildering word.”

And yet it would be unjust to say that Bret Harte had no conception of the better type of New England women. The schoolmistress in “ The Idyl of Red Gulch,” one of the earliest and one of the best stories, is as pure and heroic a maiden, and as characteristic of the soil, as Hilda. The reader will remember the description of Miss Mary as she appeared playing with her pupils in the woods: “The color came faintly into her pale cheek . . . felinely fastidious, and intrenched as she was in the purity of spotless skirts, collars and cuffs, she forgot all else, and ran like a crested quail at the head of her brood, until romping, laughing, and panting, with a loosened braid of brown hair, a hat hanging by a knotted ribbon from her throat, she came” — upon Sandy, the unheroic hero of the tale.

In the culminating scene of this story, the interview between Miss Mary and the mother of Sandy’s illegitimate boy, when the teacher consents to take the child with her to her home in the East and bring him up, although she is still under the shock of the discovery of Sandy’s relation to him, — in this scene the schoolmistress exhibits true New England restraint, and a beautiful absence of heroics. It was just at sunset. “ The last red beam crept higher, suffused Miss Mary’s eyes with something of its glory, flickered and faded and went out. The sun had set on Red Gulch. In the twilight and silence Miss Mary’s voice sounded pleasantly. ‘ I will take the boy. Send him to me to-night.’ ”

One can hardly help speculating about Bret Harte’s personal taste and preferences in regard to women. Cressy and the Rose of Tuolumne were both blondes; and yet on the whole he certainly preferred brunettes. Even his blue-eyed girls usually have black hair. The Treasure of the Redwoods disclosed from the recesses of her sunbonnet “ a pale blue eye and a thin black arch of eyebrow.” One associates a contralto voice with a brunette, and Bret Harte’s heroines, so far as the subject is mentioned, have contralto voices. Not one is spoken of as having a soprano voice. Even Lhe slight and blue-eyed Tinka Gallinger “ sang in a youthful, rather nasal contralto.”

As to eyes, he seems to have preferred them gray or brown, a “tender gray” and a “ reddish brown.” Ailsa Callender’s hair was “ dark with a burnished copper tint at its roots, and her eyes had the same burnished metallic lustre in their brown pupils.” Mrs. MacGlowrie was “ a fair-faced woman with eyes the color of pale sherry.”

A small foot with an arched instep was a sine qua non with Bret Harte, and he speaks particularly of the small, well-shod foot of the southwestern girl. He believed in breeding, and all of his heroines were well-bred, not well-bred in the conventional sense, but in the sense of coming from sound, courageous, selfrespecting, self-improving stock. Within these limits his range of heroines is exceedingly wide, including some that are often excluded from that category. He is rather partial to widows, for example, and always looks upon their innocent gayeties with an indulgent eye. It was thus that he saw the widow of the “Santa Ana ” valley as she appeared at the first dancing party ever held in that region: “The widow arrived, looking a little slimmer than usual in her closely buttoned black dress, white collar and cuffs, very glistening in eye and in hair, and with a faint coming and going of color.”

“ The Blue Grass Penelope,” Dick Spindler’s hostess, and Mrs. Ashwood, in “ A First Family of Tasajara,” are all charming widows. Can a woman be a widow and untidy in her dress, and still retain her preëminence as heroine ? Yes, Bret Harte’s genius is equal even to that. “ Mrs. MacGlowrie was looking wearily over some accounts on the desk before her, and absently putting back some tumbled sheaves from the shock of her heavy hair. For the widow had a certain indolent southern negligence, which in a less pretty woman would have been untidiness, and a characteristic hook-andeye-less freedom of attire, which on less graceful limbs would have been slovenly. One sleeve-cuff was unbuttoned, but it showed the vein of her delicate wrist; the neck of her dress had lost a hook, but the glimpse of a bit of edging round the white throat made amends. Of all which, however, it should be said that the widow, in her limp abstraction, was really uncon scious.”

Red-haired women have been so popular in fiction during recent years that it was perhaps no great feat for Bret Harte in the ” Buckeye Hollow Inheritance ” to make a heroine out of a red-haired girl and a bad-tempered one too; but what other romancer has ever dared to represent a young and lovely woman as “ hard of hearing ”! There can be no question that the youngest Miss Piper was not quite normal in this respect, although, doubtless, for purposes of coquetry and sarcasm, she magnified the defect. In her memorable interview with the clever young grocery clerk (whom she afterward married) she begins by failing to hear distinctly the title of the book which he was reading when she entered the store; and we have this picture: “Miss Delaware, leaning sideways and curling her little fingers around her pink ear, ‘ Did you say the first principles of geology or politeness? You know I am so deaf; but of course it could n’t be that.’ ”

The same heroine was much freckled, — in fact her freckles were a part of that charm which suddenly overcame the bashful suitor of Virginia Piper, whom Delaware was endeavoring to assist in his courtship. “Speak louder, or come closer,” she said. He came closer, so close in fact that “ her soft satin cheek, peppered and salted as it was by sun freckles and mountain air,” proved irresistible; and thereupon, abruptly abandoning his suit to the oldest, he kissed the youngest Miss Piper — and received a sound box on the ear for his temerity and fickleness. Freckles become positive enhancements of beauty under Bret Harte’s sympathetic touch. Julia Porter’s face “ appeared whiter at the angles of the mouth and nose through the relief of tiny freckles like grains of pepper.”

Bret Harte bestowed great care upon the details of the human face and figure. There are subtleties of coloring, for example, that have escaped almost everybody else. Who but Bret Harte has really described the light which love kindles upon the face of a woman? “Yerba Buena’s strangely delicate complexion had taken on itself that faint Alpine glow that was more of an illumination than a color.” And so of Cressy, as the Schoolmaster saw her at the dance. “ She was pale, he had never seen her so beautiful. . . . The absence of color in her usually fresh face had been replaced by a faint magnetic aurora that seemed to him half spiritual. He could not take his eyes from her; he could not believe what he saw.”

The forehead, the temples, and more especially the eyebrows of his heroines — these and the part which they play in the expression of emotion —are described by Bret Harte with a particularity which cannot be found elsewhere. To cite a few out of many examples: Susy showed “ a pretty distress in her violet eyes and curving eyebrows; ” and the eyebrows of the princess “ contracted prettily in an effort to understand.” Kate Howard “ was silent for a minute, with her arched black brows knitted;” and of the unfortunate Concepcion de Aguello it is written: —

The small mouth quivered, as for some denied caress,And the fair young brow was knitted in an infantile distress.

Even the eyelashes of Bret Harte’s heroines are carefully painted in the picture. Flora Dimwood “ cast a sidelong glance ” at the hero, “ under her widelyspaced heavy lashes.” The eyes and eyelashes of that irrepressible child, Sarah Walker, are thus minutely and pathetically described: “ Her eyes were of a dark shade of burnished copper, — the orbits appearing deeper and larger from the rubbing in of habitual tears from long wet lashes.”

Bret Harte has the rare faculty of making even a tearful woman attractive. The Ward of the Golden Gate “ drew back a step, lifted her head with a quick toss that seemed to condense the moisture in her shining eyes, and sent what might have been a glittering dewdrop flying into the loosened tendrils of her hair.” The quick-tempered heroine is seen “ hurriedly disentangling two stinging tears from her long lashes; ” and even the mannish girl, Julia Porter, becomes femininely deliquescent as she leans back in the dark stage coach, with the romantic Cass Beard gazing at her from his invisible corner. “ How much softer her face looked in the moonlight!—How moist her eyes were — actually shining in the light! How that light seemed to concerntrate in the corner of the lashes, and then slipped — flash — away! Was she ? Yes, she was crying.”

One might go on indefinitely, quoting from Bret Harte’s vivid and always brief descriptions of feminine feature and aspect; but doubtless the reader has not forgotten them, and I can only hope that he will not regret to have looked once more upon these familiar portraits painted in brilliant, and, as we believe, unfading colors.