literary return to his publishers was one
story and two or three poems. They had not profited much by his book,
which, it will doubtless amaze a time of fifty thousand editions selling
before their publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hundred in
the sixth month of its career, as Harte himself,

"With sick and scornful looks averse,"

confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview with the Boston
counting-room. It was the volume which contained "The Luck of Roaring
Camp," and the other early tales which made him a continental, and then
an all but a world-wide fame. Stories that had been talked over, and
laughed over, and cried over all up and down the land, that had been
received with acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as their
popularity, and recognized as the promise of greater things than any done
before in their kind, came to no more than this pitiful figure over the
booksellers' counters. It argued much for the publishers that in spite
of this stupefying result they were willing, they were eager, to pay him
ten thousand dollars for whatever, however much or little, he chose to
write in a year: Their offer was made in Boston, after some offers
mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in New
York.

It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return in
literary material. Harte was in the midst of new and alien
conditions,--[See a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U.S. for a few
months and then published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and its
people. Twain's rebuttal (Mr. Froude's Progress) would have been 'a
propos' for Harte in Cambridge. D.W.]--and he had always his temperament
against him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his
muse. He would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did
for the money, but actually if not literally he could not do more. When
it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and
he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself
nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order
of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in
his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner
world he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens. There was
nothing of his easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of a
Puritanic severity, and of a conscience that forgave