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 him no pang. Other
California writers have testified to the fidelity with which he did his
work as editor. He made himself not merely the arbiter but the
inspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature had
hardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made
the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a
literary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization.
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