It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return in literary material.  Harte was in the midst of new and alien conditions,—­[See a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U.S. for a few months and then published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and its people.  Twain’s rebuttal (Mr. Froude’s Progress) would have been ’a propos’ for Harte in Cambridge.  D.W.]—­and he had always his temperament against him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his muse.  He would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did for the money, but actually if not literally he could not do more.  When it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed.  He was of the order of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner world he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens.  There was nothing of his easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of a Puritanic severity, and of a conscience that forgave him no pang.  Other California writers have testified to the fidelity with which he did his work as editor.  He made himself not merely the arbiter but the inspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature had hardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a literary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization.

It is useless to wonder now what would have been his future if the publisher of the Overland Monthly had been of imagination or capital enough to meet the demand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridge host as the condition of his remaining in California.  Publishers, men with sufficient capital, are of a greatly varying gift in the regions of prophecy, and he of the Overland Monthly was not to be blamed if he could not foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand a year to continue editing the magazine.  He did according to his lights, and Harte came to the East, and then went to England, where his last twenty-five years were passed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific Slope discovery.  It was always the same plant, leaf and flower and fruit, but it perennially pleased the constant English world, and thence the European world, though it presently failed of much delighting these fastidious States.  Probably he would have done something else if he could; he did not keep on doing the wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but because it was for him the only possible thing.  Very likely he might have preferred not doing anything.

IV.