III.

As for Harte’s talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he admired.  He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in others.  He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not, apparently.  Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante’s noticing how the dog’s skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.

But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that Sandy drunkenly slept under in ‘The Idyl of Iced Gulch’, he asked, “Why, is that an azalea?” To be sure, this might have been less from his ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an azalea in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea of Californian size could easily lend itself to.

You never could be sure of Harte; he could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything or anybody.  Except for those slight recognitions of literary, traits in his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from his conversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliant fellow-Hebrew Heine, as “rather scorbutic.”  He preferred to talk about the little matters of common incident and experience.  He amused himself with such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked his way to Phillips Avenue, where he adventurously supposed his host to be living.  “Why,” the postman said, “there is no Phillips Avenue in Cambridge.  There’s Phillips Place.”  “Well,” Harte assented, “Phillips Place will do; but there is a Phillips Avenue.”  He entered eagerly into the canvass of the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at the reception made for him, but he had even a greater pleasure in compassionating his host for the vast disparity between the caterer’s china and plated ware and the simplicities and humilities of the home of virtuous poverty; and he spluttered with delight at the sight of the lofty ‘epergnes’ set up and down the supper-table when he was brought in to note the preparations made in his honor.  Those monumental structures were an inexhaustible joy to him; he walked round and round the room, and viewed them in different perspectives, so as to get the full effect of the towering forms that dwarfed it so.