Tales Of The Gold Rush

Tales Of The Gold Rush by Bret Harte (slipcased)


introduction by Oscar Lewispublished by Heritage Press
Hardcover in slipcase6.6 x 10.15 inches, 223 pages

Harte's short stories are humorous tales, but there are different kinds of humor. For instance, some kinds of humor are based on the disruption of expectation, while others are based on seeing the imperfection in the good. But Harte's humor is different from either of these. The humor in Harte's tales is that which is less funny -- although sometimes, as in "Prosper's 'Old Mother'", it becomes hilarious -- than good humored, is that of seeing the good in the hopelessly flawed. It is a form of humor that is at once frankly realistic and yet romantically optimistic. Wrongdoers cannot evade the consequences of their sins, but they receive any respect their good works can get them. An impenitent sinner can never be a saint, and the disreputable and rough-hewn can never fit the role of social exemplar -- but they have all the nobility of being human and can have all the honor of doing even just one thing that breaks them out of type.

All of the stories in this collection concern this aspect of human life. In particular, we see again and again how even unsavory and dubious characters can be ennobled by acting in a way that thoroughly respects one good thing -- the four that come up in the tales, in various combinations, are friendship, parenthood, marriage, and innocence -- and how human civilization is built of this. Our civilization is not built by saints. It is built by sinners, often thoroughly impenitent sinners, who nonetheless have at least one clear point of honor, which leads them to respect one good thing enough to make some genuine sacrifices for it. The tale that highlights this most explicitly, I think, is "A Protegee of Jack Hamlin", in which Jack Hamlin, a recurring character throughout the stories, and a cool-headed womanizing gambler, befriends a young lady when he prevents her from committing suicide. Hamlin's chosen lifestyle locks him in a bind; he cannot help her honestly. His reputation is such that he can barely be seen in the company of a woman without people assuming some fooling around is going on, so helping her openly would hurt her reputation. The good an innocent could do openly, the guilty must sometimes lie to do, and without any of the experience required to do it completely as it should be done. But he does it anyway, as best he knows how, and for a simple reason: though his morality is more than slightly hazy, he has one or two sharp, clear points of honor.

One of the things that helps make Harte's approach work is his clear recognition of this heroism of the hopelessly flawed. We see this in part in his repeated tendency to see his flawed characters as Argonauts, that is, in terms of Greek hero tale. We tend to read the Iliad and the Odyssey schoolishly, with somber faces and no regard for humor, but after all, what was the Trojan war but a camp of rough, flawed, over-the-top young men who made a few great sacrifices and sometimes were lucky, just as in a tale of the frontier, the Wild West, the cattle drive, or the gold rush? The social structures are somewhat different, and the background religion especially so, but the characters are much the same; you can see devious Odysseus in the cool-headed gamblers and sulky Achilles in the hot-headed young outlaws and the blunt Ajax in the dogged prospectors. The heroism of the one shows clearly the possibility of heroism in the other, and Harte takes full advantage of the parallels.