That the pattern was arbitrary, theatrical, sentimental, somewhat meretricious in design, in a word insincere like its inventor, has been repeated at due intervals ever since 1868. The charge is true; yet it is far from the whole truth concerning Bret Harte's artistry. In mastery of the technique of the short story he is fairly comparable with Poe, though less original, for it was Poe who formulated, when Bret Harte was a child of six, the well-known theory of the unity of effect of the brief tale. This unity Harte secured through a simplification, often an insulation, of his theme, the omission of quarreling details, an atmosphere none the less novel for its occasional theatricality, and characters cunningly modulated to the one note they were intended to strike. Tennessee's Partner, The Outcast of Poker Flat, and all the rest are triumphs of selective skill--as bright nuggets as ever glistened in the pan at the end of a hard day's labor. That they do not adequately represent the actual California of the fifties, as old Californians obstinately insist, is doubtless true, but it is beside the point. Here is no Tolstoi painting the soul of his race in a few pages: Harte is simply a disciple of Poe and Dickens, turning the Poe construction trick gracefully, with Dickensy characters and consistently romantic action.
The West has been rediscovered many a time since that decade which witnessed the first literary bonanza of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. It will continue to be discovered, in its fresh sources of appeal to the imagination, as long as Plains and Rockies and Coast endure, as long as there is any glow upon a distant horizon. It is not places that lose romantic interest: the immemorial English counties and the Bay of Naples offer themselves freely to the artist, generation after generation. What is lost is the glamour of youth, the specific atmosphere of a given historical epoch. Colonel W. F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill") has typified to millions of American boys the great period of the Plains, with its Indian fighting, its slaughter of buffaloes, its robbing of stage-coaches, its superb riders etched against the sky. But the Wild West was retreating, even in the days of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. The West of the cowboys, as Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister knew it and wrote of it in the eighties and nineties, has disappeared, though it lives on in fiction and on the screen.