"whabg11" - читать интересную книгу автора (Howells William Dean)

screamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slim
shapes of the earlier date had come. The sight was not less a rapture to
him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the
passing years. The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of
those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, "or few or
none," to "shake against the cold," had whitened to a wintry snow on his,
while his mustache had kept its youthful black. "He looks," one of his
friends said to another as they walked home together, "like a French
marquis of the ancien regime." "Yes," the other assented, thoughtfully,
"or like an American actor made up for the part."

The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injustice
in its implication of anything histrionic in Harte's nature. Never was
any man less a 'poseur'; he made simply and helplessly known what he was
at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in
enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself. In the
course of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about on
a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to
right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given,
and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where
Harte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on the
platform, where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and
untroubled charm. He was indeed the only one privy to the law's presence
who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier
time ventured to suggest, "Well, Harte, this is the old literary
tradition; this is the Fleet business over again," he joyously smote his
thigh and crowed out, "Yes, the Fleet!" No doubt he tasted all the
delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quite
unaffected.

If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder
American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not
altogether in the wrong. If it disabled him for certain experiences of
life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality,
and perhaps most beautiful in his talent. It enabled him to do such
things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not
do, and indeed could not. His talent was not a facile gift; he owned
that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that
yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in
that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a
line. It may be owned for him that though he came to the East at thirty-
four, which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, he seemed to
have arrived after the age of observation was past for him. He saw
nothing aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in New York,
where he sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took him about the
whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report it aright, or
would not. After repeated and almost invariable failures to deal with
the novel characters and circumstances which he encountered he left off
trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical California he had half
discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as long as