A Belated Guest (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance) — Inside the Classic

A Prince in a Counting-Room

Howells frames Harte's arrival as a fairy-tale progress, then immediately juxtaposes it with the disappointing sales figure. The contrast is deliberate: the stories that had been 'talked over, and laughed over, and cried over all up and down the land' could not move books. Howells notes that despite this, Boston publishers offered Harte ten thousand dollars for a year's work—after New York offers had been 'mortifyingly mean' or 'insultingly vague.' The episode reveals a literary economy where reputation and revenue diverged sharply.

Howells does not explain why sales were low, but he implies that the Eastern literary market was slow to convert magazine fame into book purchases. The offer itself, generous yet speculative, underscores the gamble publishers took on Harte's name.

The Discipline Behind the Carefree Mask

Howells insists that Harte's public improvidence masked an inner severity. He describes Harte as 'of the order of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey' in outer relations, but 'one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens' in his inner creative world. The essay claims Harte was a 'stern, rigorous, exacting self-master' who forgave himself no pang. This characterization is supported by testimony from other California writers about Harte's editorial work on the Overland Monthly, where he made 'the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose.'

Howells attributes Harte's later inability to produce new material to temperament and the 'niggard nature of his muse,' not laziness. The portrait is sympathetic but not indulgent: Harte kept writing the same mining-camp stories because, Howells suggests, it was 'the only possible thing' for him.

The Unmade Decision in California

Howells speculates about a counterfactual: what if the Overland Monthly publisher had met Harte's implied condition—ten thousand a year to stay in California? The publisher lacked 'imagination or capital,' and Harte came East, then went to England for twenty-five years. Howells notes that Harte's later work, though it 'perennially pleased the constant English world,' failed to delight 'these fastidious States.'

The essay does not claim Harte would have written differently had he stayed. Instead, it presents the California decision as a hinge point, then declines to overstate its consequences. Howells's tone is more resigned than judgmental: the publisher 'did according to his lights.'

Howells's account is valuable less for biographical facts than for its layered perspective: a host remembering a guest, a literary insider observing a market, and a friend acknowledging limitations. Readers should attend to how Howells uses financial details and temperamental contrasts to build a portrait that is neither hagiography nor debunking. The essay rewards attention to its structure—the way it moves from public spectacle to private discipline to missed opportunity—and to the specific, often wry, evidence Howells selects.

Reading Howells on Bret Harte’s quiet disappointment brought back sitting alone with my father’s old copy of Main Currents, the way Brandes traced German longing through Romanticism’s private rooms. Both books caught artists stranded between place and expectation, celebrated yet oddly absent from their own lives. Harte’s silence, Brandes’s melancholy—I recognized that hollow, familiar ache of being seen, never known. Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 2. The Romantic School in Germany — Text and Context once gave me that same strange comfort, a hand resting quietly on my shoulder.