Harte was unable to hold himself long to any one effort. Like Byron, he must bring down his quarry at a single spring; he had no patience to pursue it at length. _Gabriel Conroy_ is at the same time the best and the worst American novel of the century. It is the best in its wealth of truly American material and in the brilliant passages that strew its pages; it is the worse in that it utterly fails in its construction, and that it builds up its characters wholly from the outside. Its hero, moreover, changes his personality completely three times during the story, and its heroine is first an uneducated Pike maiden of the Southwest, then a Spanish señorita: Features small, and perfectly modeled; the outline of the small face was a perfect oval, but the complection was of burnished copper.... The imperious habit of command; an almost despotic control of a hundred servants; a certain barbaric contempt for the unlimited revenues at her disposal that prompted the act, became her wonderfully. In her impatience the quick blood glanced through her bronzed cheek, her little slipper tapped the floor imperiously and her eyes flashed in the darkness. Later we learn that she had been adopted into this Spanish family after her lover had abandoned her in the earlier chapters, and had been given her complexion by means of a vegetable stain. But there is still another lightning change. At the end of the book she becomes a Pike again and weakly marries the unrepentant rascal who earlier had betrayed her. In the words of Artemus Ward, "it is too much." It is not even good melodrama, for in melodrama the villain is punished at the end. Bret Harte was the artist of impulse, the painter of single burning moments, the flashlight photographer who caught in lurid detail one dramatic episode in the life of a man or a community and left the rest in darkness. VII In his later years Harte's backgrounds became less sharp in outline. His methods grew more romantic; his atmospheres more mellow and golden. The old Spanish dream of the days of his early art possessed him again, and he added to his gallery of real creations--M'liss, Yuba Bill, Jack Hamlin, Tennessee's Partner--one that perhaps is the strongest of them all, Enriquez Saltillo, the last of a fading race. Nothing Harte ever did will surpass that creation of his old age. In _Chu Chu_, _The Devotion of Enriquez_, and _The Passing of Enriquez_ we have the fitting close of the work of the romancer of the west coast. For once at least he saw into the heart of a man. Listen to Enriquez as he makes his defense: