n earlier
time ventured to suggest, "Well, Harte, this is the old literary
tradition; this is the Fleet business over again," he joyously smote his
thigh and crowed out, "Yes, the Fleet!" No doubt he tasted all the
delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quite
unaffected.

If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder
American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not
altogether in the wrong. If it disabled him for certain experiences of
life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality,
and perhaps most beautiful in his talent. It enabled him to do such
things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not
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