This same Fred Somers was a very shrewd observer of life and letters, and Bierce profited by his advice. After he established a considerable reputation as an editor in the East. Somers still corresponded occasionally with Bierce and kept in touch with his work. Its continued bitterness brought forth this comment: “Now if you had not drummed and hunted these literary pismires out of their holes, and bruited them into public sympathy and recognition we should have been free of them. Yet you still continue poling at Windmills, setting them up often yourself — and for a wage — sneering at the industry. Sycophant or blackguard there is little choice.” This was exactly the dilemma in which Bierce was so often involved: instead of his satire “lashing rascals through the world,” it merely earned them popular sympathy. His remorseless attacks on David Lesser Lezinsky, a young poet in San Francisco, aligned many people, fundamentally in sympathy with Bierce, with the enemy. Ina Coolbrith, for one, turned against Bierce because of his unrelenting satire. Of course, Bierce explained his position by remarking to a friend: “It is perfect rot to say that I am responsible for Lezinsky’s death. I never met him and would have refused to do so had the occasion arisen. I never once attacked him personally but only his verse. When he elected to become a poet, he impliedly consented to public criticisms of that which he made public.” Bierce’s journalistic satire was impulsive and irrational. It was the result of irritation grown chronic. He attempted, at various times, several philosophic justifications for his attitude, but never once did he strike close to the real fact, which was that he could not avoid being indignant. There was nothing eclectic about his position.
His first philosophy of criticism was, and it is still a popular theory, that he hugely enjoyed scourging rascals, and that he did it for entertainment. He once attempted an elaborate statement of this theory in his column of “Prattle”:
“I know a chap whose trade is censure; fools are his theme and satire is his song. Knaves and vulgarians, impostors, sycophants, the variously unworthy and the specifically detestable, no sooner draw his eye than he is on to them with bitter abuse.... Moreover this fellow’s social habits are consistent with his literary: he is imperfectly civil to the rich and distinguished, coldly declines introductions, utters his mind with freedom concerning people’s characters, takes an infantile delight in cutting men whose acquaintance he deems no longer desirable, cherishes the most shocking convictions, maintains a private system of morality and is not in sympathy with civilization. From the books and proverbs it is clearly deducible that this person ought to be the most miserable of men, tormented by conscience, baffled by secret and overt antagonisms, hunted by the dogs of hate reared in his own kennels, and roosted on by homing curses thicker than blackbirds on a tree. So far as I can see, the wretch is mainly engaged in more deeply imbedding his kidneys in broader layers of leafy fat, peacefully nourishing an oleaginous and comfortable content, gratifying his soul with a bird’s-eye view of human illfare, happy in the prospect of a green old age and indulging fascinating dreams of a blessed hereafter.”
This was written after twenty years at the trade of hired satirist; it was, at best, an ex post facto rationalization, and none are more illusive or unreliable. Properly to analyze his cynicism, one must start at a point prior to his becoming a journalist, for, as I have shown, his first writings were (a) atheistic pamphlets; (b) satirical journalism. From the moment he began to write, he had a satirical bent. Furthermore, it is quite apparent that his satire sprang from no such contented, harum-scarum, jolly motive as he suggests. His explanation is mere camouflage. It is impossible to associate such force and energy, with a desire merely to amuse himself. He was rather hesitant about admitting his idealism but he was essentially idealistic and romantic, just as he was always overtly cynical and realistic.
In order to come closer to his motives, one must turn to James Watkins, just as Watkins shall be called upon to explain Bierce’s aesthetics. Bierce once wrote Watkins that his cynicism was the great barrier to the development of his creative powers. To this letter Watkins replied, and because the passage answering Bierce’s doubt blazes a way to the very heart of the darkness and misunderstanding in Bierce, I shall quote a considerable passage:
“Why, yes, if you read into the word ‘cynic’ a meaning special to this mode of thought and arrest the meaning at the mode. But this thinking is in fact no more than fetching the images and pictures out of the dim religious light where all manner of unnatural colors are strained upon them through painted windows, and handling them in the light of day. Turn them round and about, knock the dust off, see how they are made, and examine the canvas side, plenty of bugs tumble out, which excite disgust. But then, as often, you earn a laugh — or cause for laughter, which is not quite the same thing. Now, I hold, as an issue of simple propriety in the use of language, that, allowing this to be the mental process of the cynic, its motive must be of one special sort before that mind can rightly be employed. I take it that your cynic must do all this out of an inborn hate of dirt, which is the reverse aspect of his love of light and sweetness. But, unless the individual be inspired by this spirit, the noble word ‘cynic’ does not apply. There are folk who raise a dust out of pure love of annoying others, — out of cussedness — to whom the annoyance is itself an aim and an end. Many religious folk, for example, make others uncomfortable as a good in itself — self-operative for righteousness, which it is understanding righteousness in their sense, as one aspect of hatefulness. Or another way, in the overflow and waste of benevolence turn a ray of light in on abodes of filth and creeping things, on the chance that the responsible occupant may be led to clean up, and refrain from breeding typhuses and plagues. Sure, it is using language out of its meaning to class such a loitering lantern-bearer among the order of cynics.
Now, it is true of myself — I know that you are mixed with a more coercive conscience — that I do not care one damn for the alleged human being who lives in that filth. He is less to me than the strange dog, of whose race I am really fond. But I am superstitious about typhuses. It is a distinct superstition with me that, if you keep your lantern slide shut when passing pest spots, the germs bred there will contrive to lay hold on you. Hence the blinks of light I aim to shed on such places, hasting on to something more agreeable. You drag open shutters and pour in a beam of illumination as from a Drummond apparatus; this attests the love of light which implies hatred of murk and muck, and wrath against them by whom these things are maintained. My performance is misprized by pure cowardice, and accompanied by no sentiment but disgust for them by whom these things are maintained. You are the cynic: I am something less.
Because you are a cynic and informed with righteous indignation, you glow and scorn, and distil words that are destructive of animal tissue. I would be glad to, for I think it a fine thing to do, and to be able to do; but my power is limited to stopping the passersby like the good bishop, to invite attention to the offense—’Observe this grisly beard, Observe, my friends, this nose’: then tillup along over the cobbles with a conciliatory, if not positively apologetic, carriage. The word cynic is inapplicable unless to bigger men than me.
The bearing of all this? Dear boy, it is an apology for not doing anything serious; an apology, and in part a caveat against misjudgment. Don’t think that I think that what I am doing is serious. That is all. That is the whole meaning of it all. The day is still as far as ever when you and I are to run a sheet that is to lash the rascals as with whips of scorpions, naked through the world. But, Oh my God! what larks it would be!”
It seems to me that Watkins, with all his kindly insight and intuition, stated Bierce’s position far better than Bierce ever did himself. And, it is to be noted, Watkins points out the pettiness of the attitude that would justify satire as a form of self-amusement, under which theory “the annoyance is itself an aim and an end.” Such a philosophy is, of course, sophomoric. Watkins perceived the more fundamental nature of all great satire.
During these years after his ret
urn from England, when he was reëstablishing his reputation on the coast as a writer and editor, Bierce was living happily with his wife and family in San Rafael. It has been said that Bierce’s subsequent trouble with his wife was the “cause” of his cynicism. But Prentice Mulford, who also had trouble with his wife, was the most saccharine of optimists. Furthermore, the three great tragedies in Bierce’s life all occurred after he was past middle-age. He was writing in the same vein for The News-Letter in 1869, before his marriage, that he wrote after the separation.
These early years reveal no organic invections; Bierce was living happily with his wife and children, had many friends, and was actually quite a popular social figure. He joined the Bohemian Club when it was formed on March 9, 1872. After his return from England, he took an active interest in the affairs of the club and was secretary for the year 1876- 1877. Years later he quarreled with the club. The occasion was the visit to San Francisco of the Emperor of Brazil. His Majesty was received with such sycophancy, particularly at the club, that Bierce resigned in disgust. He said the “flexibility of the republican knee and the arch of his back” were inexplicable. But while his association with the club lasted, it was very pleasant indeed. Many of his friends were fellow club-members, notably Jeremiah Lynch, the Egyptologist, and author of “Three Years in the Klondike” and “A Senator of the Fifties,” and E. L. G. Steele, who published “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians.” Occasionally the paper would print a notice that “Mr. Bierce is confined to his home in San Rafael with a severe attack of asthma.” The blight was unconquerable and relentless. It plagued his days and made his nights livid with agony. Sometimes, however, he suffered from minor casualties. In fact, his life was interspersed with semi-humorous accidents: he shot himself in the foot when in the Sub-Treasury; broke a rib at Calistoga Hot Springs when his bicycle went over a bank (old Schram’s white wine was probably responsible for this); and had lumbago in his old age, followed with hives! Once while crossing the bay from San Rafael, he was standing on the deck when a barge rammed into the ferry boat. He attempted to jump aboard the other ship and was thrown into the bay and nearly drowned. It amused him for weeks thereafter to speculate on the pleasures of death by drowning over those of asthmatic strangulation. Death was, truly, the last and silliest folly. He had led columns in attack at Pickett’s Mill, and now his life was threatened by the most childish disasters.
In San Rafael he had many friends, among others Sheriff Tunstead, a renowned “man hunter” of Marin County. He was a giant of a man, with huge moustachios, and the voice of Paul Bunyan. His pictures are as amusing as anything to be seen on the comedy lots at Studio City. This old fellow went for long tramps and hunting expeditions with Bierce. They both enjoyed the outdoors and were crack shots. Mrs. Bierce detested Tunstead. The vulgar old ruffian was forever poking his head in a window and yelling: “Where’s Bierce?” just at the moment when one of the children would run in breathless to announce that Mrs. Charley Crocker’s carriage approached. Mrs. Bierce once asked her husband why he associated with such a character as Tunstead who “had no manners.” Bierce replied:
“True enough, my dear, but you should see him shoot!” Bierce and Tunstead would spend long nights over a bottle in the study where the shades of Pascal, Sir John Mandeville, and Thomas Browne hovered, listening to these two old soldiers match stories of hangings, murders and other such humorous tamperings with the life-stream. Bierce, for all his fine rhetoric, liked honesty even when he found it in illiterate sheriffs.
To illustrate the complete honesty and consistency of Bierce, one example will suffice. Pixley launched a movement to oust General O. H. LaGrange from his position as head of the United States Mint. Bierce had known La Grange for many years; in fact, he had induced LaGrange to give his brother Albert a position in the Mint when the latter arrived on the coast in 1869. The attitude of The Argonaut was thus putting Bierce in a very embarrassing position. So he went to Pixley and asked permission to state his own private views on LaGrange in a signed article. This request was granted and on September 1, 1877, Bierce’s defense of his old friend appeared, cheek by jowl with a biting and accusatory editorial. General LaGrange was befriended by Bierce on more than one occasion. It seems that the General could not, like many another mortal, resist the unscrupulous type of woman. His enemies were constantly producing one of these discarded but revengeful amours to cause the General great confusion and embarrassment at critical political junctures. But when Mr and Mrs. Bierce separated, the General was one of the first to denounce Bierce, without waiting for an explanation. Bierce never forgave La-, Grange this disloyalty and wrote him a letter in which he said that it was his desire that LaGrange should always remember the hurt and sorrow that his criticism had caused, particularly in the light of what had happened in the early days of their acquaintance. Poor Bierce! He could write the cleverest epigram imaginable on the frailty of friendship, but when he lost a friend in private life it was only with deep sorrow.
In later years Bierce repudiated most of his work written for The Argonaut. He acted wisely, for much of it was ephemeral and ill advised. But, realizing that it was written just as journalism, there is an amazing clarity and force to such statements as this: “There was enough of Lincoln to kill and enough of Grant to kick; but Hayes is only a magic-lantern image without even a surface to be displayed upon. You can not see him, you can not feel him; but you know that he extends in lessening opacity all the way from the dark side of John Sherman to the confines of space.” Or such cogent reasoning as this: “No man of sane intelligence will plead for religion on the ground that it is better than nothing. It is not better than nothing if it is not true. Truth is better than anything or all things; the next best thing to truth is absence of error.” He anticipated Nietzsche by saying: “No one but Jesus Christ ever loved mankind.” Not only was he beating some of the sound tenets of skepticism into the gaseous souls of his fellow citizens, but he was pummeling them out of their magnificent rhetoric, their incurable fondness for bombast, which was really the same thing. He made this suggestion to Loring Pickering, editor of one of San Francisco’s largest daily newspapers: “Mr. Pickering, I have told you a dozen times that to call rain a ‘pluvial dispensation,’ is to be a magniloquent idiot, compared with whose style the song of a sturdy jackass in braying his love to a star is chaste and elegant diction.”
Bierce had returned from England impressed with the possibility of an intelligent control of life. He reëntered a madhouse in San Francisco; became a partisan in the struggle with and was personally pitted against, Denis Kearney. The experience threw him off balance and forever prejudiced him against anything that even sounded of sociological amelioration. His name for an unpleasant person was always “an anarchist.” He elevated sandlotism to universal significance; he magnified it out of all proportion to scale or perspective. The Bay District was the world in petto, and Kearney was its Nero. Bierce actually used such historical names as Jack Cade and Wat Tyler in searching out parallels for Kearney. He became slightly prophetical, and, like most prophets, slightly ridiculous. His excitement was justified at the moment: only Anatole France kept his head during the Dreyfus trial.
If the ideas that Bierce championed in later years are to be understood, or rather the psychological states of mind that produced these ideas, one must constantly remember his experience. To illustrate the importance of this relation, take the volume “The Shadow on the Dial.” It consists of a number of essays which, when gathered into book form, were not read as they were printed — by the side of news stories of riots, arson and theft. Many of the essays did not carry the date of their appearance as a footnote; hence confusion was inevitable. The title essay itself, “The Shadow on the Dial,” appeared in The Argonaut as an attack on Kearney, some thirty-two years prior to its publication in book form. When the book was published, Bierce dropped Kearney’s name, and generalized an incident into an historical principle. This is apparent in such a passage as the following:
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br /> “The Kearneyism ‘episode’ is not an episode; it is part of the general movement. Thousands of armed men are drilling all over the United States to overthrow the government. I tell you the good God, Majority, means mischief.”
Much of Bierce’s writing during this period was simply hysterical journalism, inspired by the moment and forgotten with its passage. George Sterling, who was scoffed at as a thinker, had some ideas on the significance of time that Bierce might have read with profit. George did not agree with Theodore Dreiser’s “Hey-Rub-a-Dub-Dub” when it appeared. It sounded specious to one who had heard the roar of the surf at Monterey with its undertone of eternity, so he wrote a little essay “The Implications of Infinity.” Bierce, however much he might have appreciated the essay, would never have accepted its philosophy. And, after all, who was the real cynic, Bierce or Sterling? Sterling was wise enough to be cynical of mere intelligence, so-called, and wrote few essays but was careful to be always kind and gentle. Bierce’s splendid indignation hardened and crystallized into intolerable prejudice and bias. His violently reactionary views on crime, his merciless attacks on “rose-water penology,” are incredible when read apart from his experience. When one learns, however, that in the eighties California had a Governor by the name of Stoneman who pardoned all the most atrocious criminals, a new light dawns. After this experience, Bierce would never listen to reason about criminals.
“Stoneman at last is made to dwell
Where pardons do not come;
O Father, thou dost all things well
Though rather late with some.”
It is interesting to speculate on what might have been the consequences had Bierce stayed with The Argonaut. In two years he had made it the foremost weekly in the West. Who can tell what might have resulted if he had remained as editor? He resigned from The Argonaut for private reasons and was not discharged as some of his biographers would have us believe. Ultimately he would have either resigned or been discharged, for he could not have endured Frank Pixley forever. They had nothing in common except an aversion to Denis Kearney. But Bierce was swept away from journalism by the excitement over the newly opened mining territory in the Black Hills. He decided to become a miner and The Argonaut lost its first, and one is tempted to add, its only editor.
Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated) Page 351