e had been writing romantic sketches in prose and verse for years;
he had steeped himself in Dickens, like everybody else in the
eighteen-sixties; and now he saw his pay-gravel shining back into his
own shining eyes. It was a pocket, perhaps, rather than a lead, but Bret
Harte worked to the end of his career this material furnished by the
camps, this method of the short story. He never returned to California
after his joyous exit in 1871. For a few years he tried living in New
York, but from 1878 until his death in 1902 Bret Harte lived in Europe,
still turning out California stories for an English and American public
which insisted upon that particular pattern.

That the pattern was arbitrary, theatrical, sentimental, somewhat
meretricious in design, in a word insincere like its inventor, has been
repeated at due intervals ever since 1868. The charge is true; yet it is
far from the whole truth concerning Bret Harte's artistry. In mastery
of the technique of the short story he is fairly comparable with Poe,
though less original, for it was Poe who formulated, when Bret Harte
was a child of six, the well-known theory of the unity of effect of the
brief tale. This unity Harte secured through a simplification, often
an insulation, of his theme, the omission of quarreling details, an
atmosphere none the less novel for its occasional theatricality, and
characters cunningly modulated to the one note they were intended to
strike. "Tennessee's Partner," "The Outcast of Poker Flat," and all
the rest are triumphs of selective skill--as bright nuggets as ever
glistened in the pan at the end of a hard day's labor. That they do
not adequately represent the actual California of the fifties, as old
Californians obstinately insist, is doubtless true, but it is beside the
point. Here is no Tolstoi painting the soul of his race in a few
pages: Harte is simply a disciple of Poe and Dickens, turning the Poe
construction trick gracefully, with Dickensy characters and consistently
romantic action.

The West has been rediscovered many a time since that decade which
witnessed the first literary bonanza of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. It
will continue to be discovered, in its fresh sources of appeal to the
imagination, as long as Plains and Rockies and Coast endure, as long
as there is any glow upon a distant horizon. It is not places that lose
romantic interest: the immemorial English counties and the Bay of Naples
offer themselves freely to th