an afford, and to be generous is
never a mistake. Harte was extremely sensitive, and he deplored
controversy. He was quite capable of suffering in silence if defense of
self might reflect on others. His deficiencies were trivial but
damaging, and their heavy retribution he bore with dignity, retaining
the respect of those who knew him.

As to what he was, as man and author, he is entitled to be judged by a
jury of his peers. I could quote at length from a long list of
associates of high repute, but they all concur fully with the
comprehensive judgment of Ina Coolbrith, who knew him intimately. She
says, "I can only speak of him in terms of unqualified praise as author,
friend, and man."

In the general introduction that Harte wrote for the first volume of his
collected stories he refers to the charge that he "confused recognized
standards of morality by extenuating lives of recklessness and often
criminality with a single solitary virtue" as "the cant of too much
mercy." He then adds: "Without claiming to be a religious man or a
moralist, but simply as an artist, he shall reverently and humbly
conform to the rules laid down by a great poet who created the parables
of the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, whose works have lasted
eighteen hundred years, and will remain when the present writer and his
generations are forgotten. And he is conscious of uttering no original
doctrine in this, but only of voicing the beliefs of a few of his
literary brethren happily living, and one gloriously dead, [Footnote:
Evidently Dickens.] who never made proclamation of this from the
housetops."

Bret Harte had a very unusual combination of sympathetic insight,
emotional feeling, and keen sense of the dramatic. In the expression of
the result of these powers he commanded a literary style individually
developed, expressive of a rare personality. He was vividly imaginative,
and he had exacting ideals of precision in expression. His taste was
unerring. The depth and power of the great soul were not his. He was the
artist, not the prophet. He was a delightful painter of the life he saw,
an interpreter of the romance of his day, a keen but merciful satirist,
a humorist without reproach, a patriot, a critic, and a kindly, modest
gentleman. He was versatile, doing many things exceedingly well, and
some things supremely well. He discerned the significance of the
remarkable social conditions of early days in California and developed a
marve