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 indifference of their author in being dramatizations of
his longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts. The
direction in which his originality lasted longest, and most strikingly
affirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse.
Whatever minds there may be about Harte's fiction finally, there can
hardly be more than one mind about his poetry. He was indeed a poet;
whether he wrote what drolly called itself "dialect," or wrote language,
he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch.
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