Produced by David Widger
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES—A Belated Guest
by William Dean Howells
It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things findscompensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries,of recording his memories of it. This is, in the first two or threeinstances, a pleasure. It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by thefire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if theAbsences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people,they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which hebasks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity. But anothertime comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to thepain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievousobligation. You are unable to choose your company among those immortalshades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to suchgleams of this 'dolce lome' as your reminiscences can shed upon them?Then they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms,that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out suchwelcome, great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two orthree instances, if one does one's duty by each. People begin to say,and not without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this: "Ah,here he is again with his recollections!" Well, but if the recollectionsby some magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of hisas, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at leastexcused?
My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlanticshore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in thesimple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universalattention and interest which met and followed it. He was indeed aprince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchantingart felt a patriotic property, for his promise and performance in thoseearliest tales of 'The Luck of Roaring Camp', and 'Tennessee's Partner',and 'Maggles', and 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat', were the earnests of anAmerican literature to come. If it is still to come, in great measure,that is not Harte's fault, for he kept on writing those stories, in oneform or another, as long as he lived. He wrote them first and last inthe spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time could quite help doing,but he wrote them from the life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the airof the newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the soul of hisfellow-countrymen not only with joy, but with pride such as theEuropeans, who adored him much longer, could never know in him.
When the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host forCambridge and the Boston neighborhood, while Harte was still in SanFrancisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read ofthe honors that attended his coming from point to point, his couragefell, as if he had perhaps, committed himself in too great an enterprise.Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this
"Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,"
his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed ofattending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent acarriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco?Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form, itmust have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into Bostonfor him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded,and not trust to the horse