As for Harte's talk,it was mostly ironical,not to the extreme of satire,but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he admired.He did not apparently care to hear himself praised,but he could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in others.He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not,apparently.Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of his deion of a rabbit,startled with fear among the ferns,and lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly shaking it;then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante's noticing how the dog's skin moves upon it,and Harte spoke of the exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.
But once again,when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that Sandy drunkenly slept under in 'The Idyl of Iced Gulch',he asked,"Why,is that an azalea?"To be sure,this might have been less from his ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an azalea in a very small pot,so disproportionate to uses which an azalea of Californian size could easily lend itself to.
You never could be sure of Harte;he could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything or anybody.Except for those slight recognitions of literary,traits in his talk with Lowell,nothing remained from his conversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliant fellowHebrew Heine,as "rather scorbutic."He preferred to talk about the little matters of common incident and experience.He amused himself with such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked his way to Phillips Avenue,where he adventurously supposed his host to be living."Why,"the postman said,"there is no Phillips Avenue in Cambridge.There's Phillips Place.""Well,"Harte assented,"Phillips Place will do;but there is a Phillips Avenue."He entered eagerly into the canvass of the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at the reception made for him,but he had even a greater pleasure in compassionating his host for the vast disparity between the caterer's china and plated ware and the simplicities and humilities of the home of virtuous poverty;and he spluttered with delight at the sight of the lofty 'epergnes'set up and down the suppertable when he was brought in to note the preparations made in his honor.Those monumental structures were an inexhaustible joy to him;he walked round and round the room,and viewed them in different perspectives,so as to get the full effect of the towering forms that dwarfed it so.
He was a tease,as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be,but his teasing was of the quality of a caress,so much kindness went with it.
He lamented as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night an absentminded brother in literature,who came in rubber shoes,and forgetfully wore them throughout the evening.That hospitable soul of Ralph Keeler,who had known him in California,but had trembled for their acquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiled Harte for the friends of his simpler days,rejoiced in the unchanged cordiality of his nature when they met,and presently gave him one of those restaurant lunches in Boston,which he was always sumptuously providing out of his destitution.Harte was the life of a time which was perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul.The truth is,there was nothing but careless stories carelessly told,and jokes and laughing,and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes,the whole as unlike the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be;but there was present one who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time,and to whom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized then and there."Look at him,"he said,from time to time."This is the dream of his life,"and then shouted and choked with fun at the difference between the occasion and the expectation he would have imagined in his commensal's mind.At a dinner long after in London,where several of the commensals of that time met again,with other literary friends of a like age and stature,Harte laid his arms well along their shoulders as they formed in a halfcircle before him,and screamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slim shapes of the earlier date had come.The sight was not less a rapture to him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the passing years.The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of those thoughtful brows,or left spindling autumnal spears,"or few or none,"to "shake against the cold,"had whitened to a wintry snow on his,while his mustache had kept its youthful black."He looks,"one of his friends said to another as they walked home together,"like a French marquis of the ancien regime.""Yes,"the other assented,thoughtfully,"or like an American actor made up for the part."
