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Some may argue that Bierce's failure to attain international or even national fame cannot be ascribed solely to a lack of concord between the man and his time and to the consequent reaction in him. It is true that in Bierce's work is a sort of paucity—not a mere lack of printed pages, but of the fulness of creative activity that makes Byron, for example, though vulgar and casual, a literary mountain peak. Bierce has but few themes, few moods; his literary river runs clear and sparkling, but confined—a narrow current, not the opulent stream that waters wide plains of thought and feeling. Nor has Bierce the power to weave individual entities and situations into a broad pattern of existence, which is the distinguishing mark of such writers as Thackeray, Balzac, and Tolstoi among the great dead, and Bennett and Wells among the lesser living. Bierce's interest does not lie in the group experience nor even in the experience of the individual through a long period. His unit of time is the minute, not the month. It is significant that he never wrote a novel—unless The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter be reckoned one—and that he held remarkable views of the novel as a literary form, witness this passage from Prattle, written in 1887:
"English novelists are not great because the English novel is dead—deader than Queen Anne at her deadest. The vein is worked out. It was a thin one and did not 'go down.' A single century from the time when Richardson sank the discovery shaft it had already begun to 'pinch out.' The miners of today have abandoned it altogether to search for 'pockets,' and some of the best of them are merely 'chloriding the dumps.' To expect another good novel in English is to expect the gold to 'grow' again."
It may well be that at the bottom of this sweeping condemnation was an instinctive recognition of his own lack of constructive power on a large scale.
But an artist, like a nation, should be judged not by what he cannot do, but by what he can. That Bierce could not paint the large canvas does not make him negligible or even inconsiderable. He is by no means a second-rate writer; he is a first-rate writer who could not consistently show his first-rateness.
When he did show his first-rateness, what is it? In all his best work there is originality, a rare and precious idiosyncracy; his point of view, his themes are rich with it. Above all writers Bierce can present—brilliantly present—startling fragments of life, carved out from attendant circumstance; isolated problems of character and action; sharply bitten etchings of individual men under momentary stresses and in bizarre situations. Through his prodigious emotional perceptivity he has the power of feeling and making us feel some strange, perverse accident of fate, destructive of the individual—of making us feel it to be real and terrible. This is not an easy thing to do. De Maupassant said that men were killed every year in Paris by the falling of tiles from the roof, but if he got rid of a principal character in that way, he should be hooted at. Bierce can make us accept as valid and tragic events more odd than the one de Maupassant had to reject. "In the line of the startling,—half Poe, half Merimee—he cannot have many superiors," says Arnold Bennett.... "A story like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge—well, Edgar Allan Poe might have deigned to sign it. And that is something.
"He possesses a remarkable style—what Kipling's would have been had Kipling been born with any significance of the word 'art'—and a quite strangely remarkable perception of beauty. There is a feeling for landscape in A Horseman in the Sky which recalls the exquisite opening of that indifferent novel, Les Frères Zemganno by Edmond de Goncourt, and which no English novelist except Thomas Hardy, and possibly Charles Marriott, could match." The feeling for landscape which Bennett notes is but one part of a greater power—the power to make concrete and visible, action, person, place. Bierce's descriptions of Civil War battles in his Bits of Autobiography are the best descriptions of battle ever written. He lays out the field with map-like clearness, marshals men and events with precision and economy, but his account never becomes exposition—it is drama. Real battles move swiftly; accounts make them seem labored and slow. What narrator save Bierce can convey the sense of their being lightly swift, and, again and again the shock of surprise the event itself must have given?
This could not be were it not for his verbal restraint. In his descriptions is no welter of adjectives and adverbs; strong exact nouns and verbs do the work, and this means that the veritable object and action are brought forward, not qualifying talk around and about them. And this, again, could not be were it not for what is, beyond all others, his greatest quality—absolute precision. "I sometimes think," he once wrote playfully about letters of his having been misunderstood, "I sometimes think that I am the only man in the world who understands the meaning of the written word. Or the only one who does not." A reader of Ambrose Bierce comes almost to believe that not till now has he found a writer who understands—completely—the meaning of the written word. He has the power to bring out new meanings in well-worn words, so setting them as to evoke brilliant significances never before revealed. He gives to one phrase the beauty, the compressed suggestion of a poem; his titles—Black Beetles in Amber, Ashes of the Beacon, Cobwebs from an Empty Skull are masterpieces in miniature. That he should have a gift of coining striking words naturally follows: in his later years he has fallen into his "anecdotage," a certain Socialist is the greatest "futilitarian" of them all, "femininies"—and so on infinitely. Often the smaller the Biercean gem, the more exquisite the workmanship. One word has all the sparkle of an epigram.
In such skill Ambrose Bierce is not surpassed by any writer, ancient or modern; it gives him rank among the few masters who afford that highest form of intellectual delight, the immediate recognition of a clear idea perfectly set forth in fitting words—wit's twin brother, evoking that rare joy, the sudden, secret laughter of the mind. So much for Bierce the artist; the man is found in these letters. If further clue to the real nature of Ambrose Bierce were needed it is to be found in a conversation he had in his later years with a young girl: "You must be very proud, Mr. Bierce, of all your books and your fame?" "No," he answered rather sadly, "you will come to know that all that is worth while in life is the love you have had for a few people near to you."
A Memoir of Ambrose Bierce
by George Sterling
Though from boyhood a lover of tales of the terrible, it was not until my twenty-second year that I heard of Ambrose Bierce, I having then been for ten months a resident of Oakland, California. But in the fall of the year 1891 my friend Roosevelt Johnson, newly arrived from our town of birth, Sag Harbor, New York, asked me if I were acquainted with his work, adding that he had been told that Bierce was the author of stories not inferior in awesomeness to the most terrible of Poe's.
We made inquiry and found that Bierce had for several years been writing columns of critical comment, satirically named Prattle, for the editorial page of the Sunday Examiner, of San Francisco. As my uncle, of whose household I had been for nearly a year a member, did not subscribe to that journal, I had unfortunately overlooked these weekly contributions to the wit and sanity of our western literature—an omission for which we partially consoled ourselves by subsequently reading with great eagerness each installment of Prattle as it appeared. But, so far as his short stories were concerned, we had to content ourselves with the assurance of a neighbor that "they'd scare an owl off a tombstone."
However, later in the autumn, while making a pilgrimage to the home of our greatly worshipped Joaquin Miller, we became acquainted with Albert, an elder brother of Bierce's, a man who was to be one of my dearest of friends to the day of his death, in March, 1914. From him we obtained much to gratify our not unnatural curiosity as to this mysterious being, who, from his isolation on a lonely mountain above the Napa Valley, scattered weekly thunderbolts on the fool, the pretender, and the knave, and cast ridicule or censure on many that sat in the seats of the mighty. For none, however socially or financially powerful, was safe from the stab of that aculeate pen, the venom of whose ink is to gleam vividly from the pages of literature for centuries