Despite his biographers, the latter part of his life is full of mystery. After seven years of literary work in New York City, he went in 1878 as consul to Crefeld, Germany. Two years later he was transferred to Glasgow, Scotland, where he remained for five years. The rest of his life he spent in London, writing year after year new books of California stories. He never returned to America; he was estranged from his family; he seemed to wish to sever himself entirely from all that had to do with his earlier life. He died May 5, 1902, and was buried in Frimby churchyard, in Surrey.
A novelist must rise or fall with his characters. What of Harte? First of all we must observe that he makes no attempts at character development. Each personage introduced is the same at the close of the story as at the opening. He has no fully studied character: we have a burning moment, a flashlight glimpse--intense, paradoxical, startling, then no more. We never see the person again. The name may appear in later sketches, but it never designates the same man. Colonel Starbottle is consistent from story to story only in make-up, in stage "business," and the well known "gags"--as, for instance, a succession of phrases qualified by the adjective "blank." "Yuba Bill" is Harte's synonym for stage driver, "Jack Hamlin" for gambler. We have a feeling constantly that the characters are brought in simply to excite wonder. Gabriel Conroy devotes his life for years to the finding of his sister Grace. He leaves his wife to search for her; he can think of nothing else; yet when at length he does find her among the witnesses in a courtroom he takes it as a mere commonplace. A moment later, however, when told that his wife, for whom we know he cares nothing at all, has given birth to a son, he falls headlong in a swoon.
His characters may perhaps be true to facts; he may be able to give the prototype in every case; and yet we are not convinced. The stories told by the college freshman at home during his first Christmas vacation may all be true, and yet they may give a very false idea of college life in its entirety. So it is with Harte. The very year that he landed in California a procession of one thousand children, each child with a flower in his hand, marched one day in San Francisco. _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ gives no such impression. In all save the remotest camps there were churches and worshipers, yet who would suspect it from Harte's tales? California has never accepted Harte's picture of its life, just as the South has never accepted _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. It is not fair to picture an era simply by dwelling on its exceptions and its grotesque possibilities. Art must rest upon the whole truth, not upon half truths.
