However, Harte had accumulated a number of debts, and his editorial policies, excellent in themselves, but undiplomatically executed, were the cause of a series of arguments with the publisher of the Overland monthly.  Fairly assured of profitable pickings in the East, he left California (permanently, as it proved).  The East, however, was financially unappreciative.  Harte wrote an unsuccessful novel and collaborated with Mark Twain on an unremunerative play.  His attempts to increase his income by lecturing were even less rewarding.  From his departure from California in 1872 to his death thirty years later, Harte’s struggles to regain financial stability were unremitting:  and to these efforts is due the relinquishment of his early ideal of “a peculiarly characteristic Western American literature.”  Henceforth Harte accepted, as Prof.  Hicks remarks, “the role of entertainer, and as an entertainer he survived for thirty years his death as an artist.”

The final period extends from 1878, when he managed to get himself appointed consul to Crefeld in Germany, to 1902, when he died of a throat cancer.  He left for Crefeld without his wife or son—­perhaps intending, as his letters indicate, to call them to him when circumstances allowed; but save for a few years prior to his death, the separation, for whatever complex of reasons, remained permanent.  Harte, however, continued to provide for them as liberally as he was able.  In Crefeld Harte wrote A legend of SAMMERSTANDT, views from A German SPION, and Unser Karl.  In 1880 he transferred to the more lucrative consulship of Glasgow, and robin gray, a tale of Scottish life, is the product of his stay there.  In 1885 he was dismissed from his consulship, probably for political reasons, though neglect of duty was charged against him.  He removed to London where he remained, for most part, until his death.

Bret Harte never really knew the life of the mining camp.  His mining experiences were too fragmentary, and consequently his portraits of mining life are wholly impressionistic.  “No one,” Mark Twain wrote, “can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with pick and shovel and drill and fuse.”  Yet, Twain added elsewhere, “Bret Harte got his California and his Californians by unconscious absorption, and put both of them into his tales alive.”  That is, perhaps, the final comment.  Much could be urged against Harte’s stories:  the glamor they throw over the life they depict is largely fictitious; their pathetic endings are obviously stylized; their technique is overwhelmingly derivative.  Nevertheless, so excellent a critic as Chesterton maintained that “There are more than nine hundred and ninety-nine excellent reasons which we could all have for admiring the work of Bret Harte.”  The figure is perhaps exaggerated, but there are many reasons for admiration.  First, Harte originated a new and incalculably influential