of traits, no heightening of character. The buttons on its frock-coat will be of the right size and number. The uniform which embellishes our gallant colonels of the Territorial army will doubtless be correct in colour and cut. The soul, if any, of civic worthy or citizen-soldier will be discreetly kept in the background. The twenty-first century will know the twentieth clothed itself, and that must satisfy its ardent curiosity.

And while the portraitpainters of England have increased enormously, the photographers have grown at a yet quicker rate. Every man his own camera is a simple theory of life, which will soon be put into practice. That unfortunate creature known as a public man cannot leave his house without being confronted by a machine to make his picture. The result is a hideous familiarity which nothing can check or assuage. Politicians are the favourite prey of these fiends, and it is our own fault if we have not discovered from the illustrated prints how every "public man" in England takes his stand at golf or acquits himself at tennis. And there is this peculiarity in the photographic camera, that, being a machine, it is incapable of truth. It does not, like Van Dyck, present us with an image more loftily splendid than the original. It prefers to show us our statesmen and our actresses in a false light, wrongly proportioned,

Im

aneous, in a momentary position in which the human eye will never detect them. agine 8 poor creature, a hundred years hence, turning over the discoloured pages of a popular magazine, and being confronted with the erring images of the illustrious men of to-day! What a shock will his nervous system receive! Even if he do not think very highly of our contemporaries, he could hardly expect them to appear as ridiculous as they do appear when the camera catches them off their guard.

It may be that every age deserves the portraiture that it gets, and that ours suffers no real hardship. The nineteenth century had its great figures both in and out of Parliament. The unjustly despised Victorian age was in reality an age of energy and talent. Vainly we look in this Georgian era of ours for talent or energy. A passion of mutual admiration in policy as in the arts dulls at once our energy and our sensibility. If our dramatists are the greatest save Shakespeare, if every month brings forth an unexampled masterpiece of poetry, what wonder is it that our supine rulers believe themselves the greatest statesmen that ever smiled upon a confused world? Though their self-complacency makes them helpless in a moment of crisis, that does not matter. It is merely the malicious who would underrate their wisdom, and history (they brag) will do

came into the nineteenth century an artist with so fine a sense of the short story as Bret Harte displayed even in the least of his works.

And Bret Harte's life was worth writing, because his career is unique in the history of letters. Born in 1834, the son of a wanderer, halfschoolmaster, half politician, who is said to have died because Henry Clay was defeated in an election, Bret Harte was a man of letters from his cradle. Whatever shifts he was driven to by the necessity of earning a living, he never lost sight or sense of his vocation. A lucky accident took him to California soon after the rush made for gold in 1849, and in a few years his observant eyes gathered the material that was to last him a lifetime of literary activity. It was as though the vision of those years had blinded him for ever. He travelled far and apace, but he saw nothing else. Europe revealed nothing to him save the possibility of a pleasant life. When he took pen in hand his mind and his thought went instantly back to the forty-niners, the gambling companions of his early days. For this strange exclusion of all later sounds and sights there is, we believe, no parallel. And there is an irony, pathetic if fitting, in the fact that the story which death left unfinished on his table was called "A Friend of Colonel Starbottle's."

Hence it is of the utmost importance to know something of the pioneers who went westward in '49, if we are to appreciate the style and method of Bret Harte. And it is this knowledge which Mr Merwin gives us. His chapters on the Pioneers are, in a sense, the most valuable in the book. At any rate, no better commentary upon Bret Harte could be desired. The story which Mr Merwin tells is a complete justification for what a foolish critic called the "perverse romanticism of his tales." If his tales are romantic, they are romantic because, given the material, they could not be otherwise. It was the spirit of adventure as well as the lust of gold which took the adventurers to the Far West. They were brave men, careless of their comfort as of their life, with a code of their own, and a rough justice which none of them dare flout. Whatever we have learned since of their character and bravery fully corroborates whatever Bret Harte wrote. "The faith, courage, vigour, youth, and capacity for adventure necessary to this emigration," said Bret Harte himself, "produced a body of men as strongly distinctive as were the companions of Jason." In other words, the pioneers were, as Mr Merwin tells us, "picked men, placed in extraordinary circumstances"; they were such "as enlist in the first years of a war." They were young, tall, and handsome, fit for deeds of daring and chivalry. The mere fact

that they had reached the West was proof of their endurance. "They had been sifted," says Mr Merwin, "and winnowed by the hardships and privations which beset both the land and the sea route. Thousands of the weaker had succumbed to starvation or disease, and their bones were whitening the plains or lying in the vast depths of the Pacific Ocean." If they travelled round the Horn, they were starved by greedy sea-captains. If they crossed the Isthmus on foot, they ran the risk of fever or an Indian's knife. Yet the West drew them. The song of gold sang in their ears. And they went as cheerfully to death or fortune as the crusaders of old or the leaders of forlorn hopes to the North Pole. This means that they were idealists, sworn to take generous views of life and death, and ready to sacrifice even the gold which they sought for a principle of thought or conduct.

thought was a false popularity brought him no pleasure. The complete and universal success of The Heathen Chinee' was a wonder and an embarrassment to him. He never loved the society of men of letters nor the applause of coteries. He was a fastidious man of the world, who without a tinge of snobbishness preferred to live among his kind. A strange interpreter, it may be thought, of the forty-niners! He was strange, indeed-strange in his preferences, strange in his treatment of them. For he brought to the interpretation of the mining camp all the resources of the literary artist. Nor did his attachment to literary tradition ever weaken. The short story was no new artifice. He gave it a turn, which was neither Poe's nor Balzac's. He owed and acknowledged a vast debt in sentiment and workmanship to Dickens and to Hood. He borrowed the metre of his 'Heathen Chinee' from Swinburne. But this is merely to say that he was a man of letters who refused to cut himself adrift from his moorings. The result was his own and all his own. sense he was not a poet at all. His poetry tramped zealously on foot. Yet it achieved precisely the effect at which its author aimed, and which he could have achieved by no other process. The characters which he drew have the trick of remaining with us always, like old friends. They are real with the reality of truth. MacSnagly and Tennessee's

In a

Oakhurst, the Gentleman of La Plate and the Man who Read Dickens, they are unforgettable and will never be forgotten. And as Bret Harte had a keen perception of character, so he had a fine sense of nature. His personages belong to the mountains which they traverse and to the stars which shine down upon them. His stories are lived and written in the open air. The wind of heaven still keeps them fresh, and persuades us, as we read, that we too are wanderers in the Far West of gold and chivalry, of murder and adventure. In England Bret Harte found his place early, and kept it. In America he is not yet assured of respect. He is a good deal lower than

Jewett. Neither in his life nor in his work did he suit himself to the austere taste of Boston. He did not like to be taken too seriously, and his ebullient joviality at a dinner of the Saturday Club left, and still leaves, "an an unpleasant impression." But America has always been somewhat censorious of her men of letters. She deplored Poe, and she compares Bret Harte unfavourably with mediocrities. For us, who know not the prejudices of East and West, this censoriousness matters not a jot. We are content to accept Poe and Bret Harte as masters of English literature, and to leave their saddened compatriots to hug their prejudices what zest they may.

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