SOURCE: “Bret Harte on Bayard Taylor: An Unpublished Tribute,” in The Markham Review, Vol. 3, No. 6, May, 1973, pp. 101-104.

[In the following essay, Luedtke and Morrow offer a commentary on Bret Harte's obituary of Taylor, and examine the relationship between the two authors.]

When Bayard Taylor died in Berlin on December 28, 1878, the one man who most fittingly could write his obituary for the German nation had just settled in the Ruhr town of Crefeld: his countryman, Francis Bret Harte. For Taylor, the German ambassadorship to which he had just been appointed culminated an affair with the heart of Germany which reached back beyond his acclaimed translation of Goethe's Faust in 1871-72 to the first appearance of his many travel books and poems in Germany in 1851.¹ Karl Bleibtreu's translation of eighty of Taylor's Gedichte in 1879, although inferior to earlier translations by Karl Knortz, Friedrich Spielhagen, and Adolf Strodtmann, was one sign of Germany's sadness at his passing.

The first two periods of American letters in Germany—the prose writings of Irving and Cooper, and the novels of Stowe—were succeeded in the late 1850's by the poetry of Longfellow and Bryant, and in the 1860's the reputation of American prose in Germany was maintained almost wholly by the travel literature of Taylor, Melville, and Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Taylor was best known in Germany as the author of lyrics and travel books, and, although his works appeared in German editions with moderate regularity through 1882, his major circulation there occurred in the sixties. In lyrics and travel narratives alike, Taylor's lively characterizations, his colorful descriptions of places seen, and his sympathetic portrayals of lower classes were well suited to broad German middle class tastes for the exotic and entertaining.²

Bayard Taylor's ambassadorship to Berlin closed a distinguished career of literary-cultural mediation. The less prestigious consulship which Bret Harte assumed in Crefeld in 1878, on the other hand, recognized a protege who had already surpassed his master and was on his way to becoming one of the all-time bestselling American writers in Germany. When Bret Harte and Mark Twain opened up the vistas of California and Nevada for the Germans in the early 1870's, a decade of American poetry was easily forgotten and a splurge of American local color tales and “Goldgräber Geschichten” which was to dominate the last decades of the century had begun. Although difficult for our contemporaries to believe, until at least 1878, comparisons of Harte and Twain in Germany worked strongly in favor of the former. While Mark Twain was appreciated as a journalist, humorist, and good natured satirist, Harte was given the supreme accolade of Dichter for his mastery of the genre of the short story and for his smooth verses and popular tales. His infusions of the rough life of the mining camps with humor, sentimentality, and nobility amidst the depravity and squalor fed the same German tastes for exotic lands and strange peoples which Bayard Taylor had whetted. In 1872, the Tauchnitz Verlag published two volumes of Harte's Prose and Poetry, and in 1873—still a full year before the first appearance of Twain's Jim Smiley's Beruhmter Springfrosch in Germany—His Kalifornische Novellen and Tales of the Argonauts (1873-75) followed. German critics would gradually learn that Harte's development had ceased with his first successes while Twain gained stature as a social critic and philosopher.³ But publication of Harte's works in Germany in the last three decades of the century continued to exceed Twain's, and by 1912 had reached a total of 109 separate editions of prose and poetry.⁴

Bret Harte and Bayard Taylor encountered each other several times during their lives. These two victims of forgotten stardom apparently first crossed paths in New York City at the occasion mentioned in Harte's tribute (late 1853 or 1854) when Harte, as a spellbound boy, listened to the most famous young traveler of his age tell about foreign lands. In 1870, Harte, then editor of The Overland Monthly, probably met Taylor again, on Taylor's third visit to California.⁵ At that time Harte gave Taylor's most recent book, By-Ways of Europe, a generally favorable review for the Overland. In the review Harte objected to Taylor's “egotism” and “oppressive sense of oration” but praised the author's “honest descriptions” and “graphic realism.”⁶ A few years later Taylor wrote about Harte's work in The Echo Club, a collection of burlesques and parodies. Harte survived reasonably unscathed and even garnered a compliment. After a parody of “Truthful James” and scorn for Harte's “proported realism” and slavish imitation of Dickens, one of Taylor's characters said:

He [Harte] never could have written that [“Plain Language from Truthful James”] if he had been only a humorist. His later work shows that he is a genuine poet.⁷

During the years 1871 to 1877, Harte and Taylor spent a good deal of time on the East Coast, although they did not see much, if any, of each other. But they had many mutual friends, including Mark Twain, who paid careful attention to the diplomatic appointments the new Rutherford B. Hayes administration made in 1878. By that year Twain and Harte were irreconcilably estranged, after their unsuccessful collaboration on the play, Ah Sin, despite their long friendship.⁸ In 1878 the Clemens family was planning a European vacation with an extended stay in Germany, and Mark Twain went to great trouble to attend Taylor's American farewell banquet. On April 11, 1878, the Clemenses sailed for Europe with the Taylors aboard the Holsatia. In a letter to William Dean Howells on May 4, 1878, Twain praised Taylor highly, saying, “I tell you Bayard Taylor is a really loveable man.”⁹ At the same time Twain was far less enthusiastic about Bret Harte's German appointment, despite its low status. In an 1878 letter to Howells from Heidelberg, Twain made one of his most famous indictments of Harte, finally calling him “a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler.”¹⁰

In Germany Taylor seemed polite but distant to Harte, possibly the result of two weeks at sea with Mark Twain. Taylor wrote the publisher, James R. Osgood, concerning Harte's Crefeld appointment: “it’s a capital place of a kind,—little work, next to no responsibility, and $3,000 a year, which is enough to live upon well, in Crefeld.”¹¹ Harte, however, had a somewhat different view of life in the “capital” Crefeld. He wrote to his wife, Anna, who remained on the East Coast:

… I’ve found out all about the cost of living in Germany, and my conclusion is this: you cannot live—in any respectable or decent fashion—on less than you can live decently in America [Harte's italics]. … Crefeld is a modern town. … Look any way, walk any way, north, east, south, and west, the same little blocks of stucco-fronted, shutterless houses, with windows from which no face ever shows through the muslin-shrouded panes. … The winter is here already—grim, black, bitter. … We have had two earthquakes at Crefeld, since I’ve been here [about six months; again Harte's italics]¹²

With Taylor's unexpected death, Harte's critical feelings toward the Minister subsided. Within a few days of Taylor's death, Harte wrote a brief but important memorial essay for the influential Berliner Tageblatt. This tribute, entitled “Zum Andenken Bayard Taylors” (“In Memory of Bayard Taylor”) has to our knowledge never been translated or republished since that date.¹³ In January, 1879, Harte wrote to his wife:

Mrs. Bayard Taylor has sent me a book of her late husband's and a very kind note, and it occurs to me to enclose today the letter I received from her in answer to one I wrote her after hearing of her husband's death. You remember that I did not feel very kindly toward him, nor had he troubled himself much about me when I came here alone and friendless, but his death choked back my resentment, and what I wrote to her, and afterwards in the ‘Tageblatt,’ I felt very honestly.¹⁴

Harte's essay appeared as three wide columns of Fraktur type in the December 29, 1878, issue of the Berliner Tageblatt. The article has biographical significance as one of the few extant sources about Harte's early reading, the literary influences on him, and his cultural activities. The article indicates that Harte heard several notable Lyceum lectures and that they impressed him greatly. (One recalls with irony Harte's own largely unsuccessful lecture career of the mid-1870's.) Zum Andenken also substantiates the claim that Harte left New York for California in early 1854.¹⁵

Published only ten days after Taylor's death, this article is hardly the carefully crafted, however sentimental, work that Harte typically produced. Nonetheless, characteristic touches do appear. Harte opens with a dramatic local color setting delivered in a tone of sentiment and patriotism typical of his most famous writings. He is highly conscious of the task at hand—to write about the nature of the American character, and eulogize a representative man. Hart tries to capture Taylor's essence as a speaker in metaphorical rather than critical terms, such as seeing in Taylor “a Robinson Crusoe incarnate, a Sinbad come to life.” Yet, evidence of Harte's keen critical eye is present in the surprisingly accurate, if off-hand, biographical information, and in his estimate of Taylor as a cultural symbol and poet that is at once complimentary without being an outright lie. In the foreground is Harte's pose as eulogist, not literary critic. The elegaic effect is strongest at the end of the essay when Harte, having honored Taylor as a poet, traveler, and man, turns to Classical elegaic conventions. After meditating upon the nature of his subject in a mood of solemnity, Harte laments the loss in Pastoral terms: “In the workshop we miss his lofty figure; his sweet laughter no longer sounds in our ear.” The tribute ends with acceptance, and mercifully without processions, refrains, or heavily rhetorical questions. Clearly Harte has been stunned and moved by Taylor's sudden death, and the occasion affords a downhill artist the chance to write some fresh insights and information about his subject and himself.

IN MEMORY OF BAYARD TAYLOR¹⁶

A quarter of a century ago, in the audience which had gathered in America's largest city to hear the lecture of a famous young American, there also was a boy who was an omnivorous reader of newspapers, like almost the entire youth of America. The lecture gave a vivid description of personal experiences on trips in foreign lands. It was rich in exciting news, sharp and adroit in critical observations, and only moderately didactic; but it showed an energy which broke all opposition and a true American enthusiasm in combating obstacles. The audience had come to honor the victory of the traveler over difficulties such as used to put themselves obstructively in the path of each average young American: inexperience, insufficient wealth, lack of knowledge and models. The joy over the poetry of his language and the fortunate selection of his comparisons receded behind admiration for his energy. The audience was composed of regular visitors to the lecture series set up by the Lyceum; these were ladies and gentlemen accustomed to hearing Emerson; Sumner, Wendell, Philipp [Wendell Phillips] and Everth [Edward Everett]—popular and professional speakers. A few literary celebrities were also present who had taken the place of honor on the platform according to American custom and the wish of the assemblage; but it was soon clear, nonetheless, that the learnedness, the consummate form, and the profundity of the earlier lecturers did not influence opinion to the disfavor of the young traveler or make his lecture appear the less captivating.

Many in the hall were already acquainted with the subject matter of the lecture. They had had the opportunity to make themselves familiar with it, for in a series of electrifying articles which the traveler had sent to a distinguished journal during his wanderings, he had enlarged upon all his observations.¹⁷ Curiosity, therefore, had contributed to the large attendance, and something of this curiosity might also have moved this boy, who had read the letters before, and to whom the speaker, with his captivating, romantic figure, appeared as an embodiment of the dreams of the future which warmed the heart of every American youth. The speaker appeared in the eye of the boy like a Robinson Crusoe incarnate, a Sinbad come to life—it’s twenty-five years ago—but the memory has grown up with the child and today has a heightened meaning for the man; for this speaker was Bayard Taylor and to his youthful admirer has fallen the task of writing these lines. …

Twenty-five years in a land which makes history as quickly as America is an enormous time, and perhaps it’s understandable that this lecture by Bayard Taylor and its success already belong to a vanished generation and appear to have been lost in the fulness of his present fame. For while he was admired by his countrymen even in such early youth as a characteristic expression of their energy and their spirit of enterprise, it was his lot in later years to turn attention to himself (successively and always successfully) as a journalist, poet, and translator of poets, and to bind that interest. Perhaps he has satisfied the insatiable hunger for the always new and unusual, which makes the American public simultaneously the most grateful and most dangerous, precisely in that he had already left the area of travel and adventure before a competitor had appeared, in order to distinguish himself effortlessly and successfully in so many other fields. The fact remains, however, that few (or none) of his countrymen have seen their versatility crowned by an equal success.

It has been maintained that there are a dozen different people planted in every American, a bundle of all conceivable talents, and that in the effort to realize all these potentialities his vital energy is often lost before it has succeeded in discovering its most developed talent. But in Mr. Taylor's various achievements nothing came out as an experiment or as dilettantism. He wrote poetry not to see if he could write poetry, but rather because he could do no other than to write poetry. He wrote a short story because he bore the living material within himself. His intimate knowledge of the German language, his poetic talent, and above all his innate impatience to be a pathfinder made him the admired translator of the greatest German poet [i.e., Goethe].

And yet his gaze was clear enough to recognize the worth of practical considerations. His love of travel finally became for him a rest after his work and ceased to be the literary bridge which connected him to his public. His knowledge of lands and people and geographic and climatic variations in manners of observation and thought, as well as his considerable skill with the pen, induced him to lay upon himself the yoke of editorial activity in the great journal of which he was part owner.¹⁸ His adroitness in amiable small-talk also carried itself over onto the written word and often worked its charm at social and public gatherings as well. His political convictions—and like all sound men, Bayard Taylor was a man of firm political views which were not influencable by party pressures—he expressed in his lectures with such noble, fearless simplicity that in the days of agitation preceding the American rebellion he was hissed off the stage in the North by a fainthearted, irresolute, compromise-seeking audience.¹⁹

When the moment demanded it he made even poetry, his greatest and by far most distinguished gift, serviceable to utility. His Pegasus was bridled and ridden into the plowfield of translation, or, to the merriment of the unsuspecting audience, which noticed nothing of the folded wings under the many-colored caparison, made his jumps in the circus. His imitations of famous contemporary poets published by the Echo-Club are an exquisite example of his humor, but they delight more through the apparent pleasures which he had in invention and through technical adroitness than through any intention of satire, for this did not lie within the circle of his talents. The longing for battle, the heritage of the greatest spirits, was not among his character traits.

What he achieved in diverse and often difficult fields was always excellent and artistically perfect, but he didn’t startle his readers into sudden admiration or snatch them into muddled raptures as less significant writers often do. He founded no school and discovered no new form of poetry, and therefore he has also been spared the doubtful honor of being imitated. He had no retinue of entranced women and men glowing with admiration, but he also provoked no jealousy. He demanded no partisans and did not arouse opposition. He remained relatively exempt from petty and spiteful criticism. He has stepped down into his grave unembittered by hate, and no leaf, no flower, has been withheld from him by envy.

The general admiration for his character and his greatness found in America its affectionate expression in the conferring of the honorary office which he filled so excellently, but for such a short time. It could almost appear an irony of fortune that death has followed so quickly upon the accumulation of honors in the flower of his manly vigor, but it has been granted to so few literary greats to die at the summit of their fame and honor—without blemishes on their name, without the strife between passion for creation and diminishing power—that such an end can perhaps be regarded as the best close of a life so blessed by fortune. Fifty-three years are not too little for the span of an American life. In this half-century there is repeated and compressed into his life the history of his fatherland. His childhood learned to know the conflict and perils which threatened his beloved republic. He learned at an early age to walk independently—and after fifty years his feet are weary—they have wandered around the globe—and he too must make room for a new champion, who was perhaps already on his heels in the race.

But however abstract yet to the point such a philosophy may be, it offers little solace for the loss of a personality who was as good, as gentle, as winning, as refreshing as Bayard Taylor. The world is always ready to forget the workman if his work remains behind; it undervalues the blessed influence of the example, and the witness and stimulation for all contemporary activity which proceed out of a noble spirit. Thus it is not enough for us that our fellow worker has completed his work, that it has been found good, and that it was rewarded. In the workshop we miss his lofty figure, his sweet laughter no longer sounds in our ear. Now that he is gone, our ambition and the desire for emulation have also gone; and sorrowfully we lay the tool aside, for with his death the soul has escaped from it. …

Only a few writers have found among comrades of all places such warm recognition as he; so that one of his oldest admirers, like the writer of these lines, in a strange land and a strange language, can scarcely say anything to the honor of his friend that will not have already been uttered much more strikingly.

Notes

1. In his survey of American Literature in Germany, 1861-1872 (“University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature,” No. 35; Chapel Hill, 1964), p. 71, Eugene F. Timpe dated the first German publications of Taylor's travel books in 1853 (1) and 1858 (2). The Hinrichs' Bucher-Catalog, 1851-1865 (Leipzig, 1875), Vol. 2, pp. 41, 367, however, lists the Taylor publications of the 1850's as El-Dorado (Weimar, 1851), Eine Reise nach Centralafrika (Leipzig, 1855), Nordliche Reise (Leipzig, 1858) and Winterreise durch Lappland (Leipzig, 1858).

2. Timpe, pp. 41, 72-73.

3. Lawrence Marsden Price, The Reception of United States Literature in Germany (“University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature,” No. 39; Chapel Hill, 1966), pp. 111-12.

4. Listed in Clement Vollmer, “The American Novel in Germany, 1871-1913,” German American Annals, ns. Vol. 15 (1917), pp. 195-99.

5. The Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, ed. Marie Hansen-Taylor and Horace E. Scudder (Boston, 1884), II, pp. 528-529.

6. The Overland Monthly, III (August, 1869), 195-196. No manuscript of this review survives, but it is generally thought to be by Harte. See George B. Stewart, A Bibliography of the Writings of Bret Harte in the Magazines and Newspapers of California, 1857-1871 (Berkeley, 1933).

7. The Echo Club (Boston, 1876), p. 160.

8. George Stewart, Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile (Boston, 1931), p. 245. See also Margaret Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte (Norman, Okla., 1964), pp. 113-158.

9. Mark Twain-Howells Letters, ed. Smith, Gibson, Anderson (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), I, p. 227.

10. Letters, I, p. 235.

11. The Unpublished Letters of Bayard Taylor in the Huntington Library, ed. John R. Schultz (San Marino, 1937), p. 208.

12. The Letters of Bret Harte, ed. Geoffrey Bret Harte (Boston, 1926), pp. 83, 86, 115.

13. An early laudatory study of Taylor, The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor, by Russell H. Conwell (Boston, 1879), contains some sixty pages of tribute to Taylor from such figures as Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Tennyson, Stoddard, Bryant, and Whipple, as well as such lesser-known literary and publishing figures as James T. Fields. Harte's essay, however, is not mentioned.

14. Letters, p. 128. If Harte's letter to Mrs. Taylor survives, it has to our knowledge never been published.

15. Harte probably heard Taylor lecture in New York City in late December, 1853, or early in January, 1854. Taylor returned to New York from an around the world cruise on December 20, 1853. He was in and around New York City during January, 1854, setting up a lecture tour of major and minor cities to conclude with numerous appearances in rural Midwest towns. See Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, I, pp. 262-268, and Schultz, Unpublished Letters, pp. 35-38. Still unpublished manuscript letters by Bayard Taylor in the Huntington Library place Taylor in New York City on January 12, 1854, and January 22, 1854. George Stewart and other Harte biographers agree that Harte and his fifteen year old sister, Margaret, left New York City for California aboard the Brother Johnathan on February 20, 1854. Their arrival in San Francisco on March 26, 1854, is verified only from haphazard passenger records printed in local newspapers.

16. The authors are indebted to Ms. Linda Barnett for uncovering a copy of Zum Andenken Bayard Taylors in the Willard S. Morse Collection of Bret Harte Materials housed in the Research Library, University of California, Los Angles. We are also indebted to Professor Hershel Parker for editorial assistance, and to Ms. Annelie Hagan for her suggestions and assistance with the translation.

17. Most of Taylor's travel exploits were serialized in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune.

18. Taylor owned New York Tribune stock most of his adult life.

19. This incident happened in Brooklyn shortly after Lincoln's 1860 election. Taylor was an uncompromising Abolitionist. See Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, I, p. 373.