JOAQUIN MILLER
The work of Harte and even of Hay is the work of an onlooker rather
than a sharer. One feels that both were studying their picturesque
surroundings objectively for the sake of "copy"; but Joaquin Miller,
like Mark Twain, may be said to have emerged from the materials he
worked in. He could write in his later years, "My poems are literally
my autobiography." "If you care to read further of my life, making
allowance for poetic license, you will find these [poems] literally
true." In some ways he is a more significant figure than either Harte
or Hay. No American writer, not even Thoreau or Whitman, has ever been
more uniquely individual, and none, not even Mark Twain, has woven into
his writings more things that are peculiarly American, or has worked
with a more thorough first-hand knowledge of the picturesque elements
that went into the making of the new West. He is the poet of the
American westward march, the poet of "the great American desert," the
poet preeminently of the mountain ranges from Alaska to Nicaragua as
John Muir is their prose interpreter.
I
The life of Miller is a series of foot-notes to his poems. He was born
on the line of the westward march. In the valuable autobiographical
preface to the Bear edition of his poems he writes: "My cradle was a
covered wagon, pointed west. I was born in a covered wagon, I am told,
at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio."
That was in 1841, and the name given him was Cincinnatus Hiner Miller.
His parents, like those of Mark Twain, were of that restless generation
that could abide nowhere long, but must press ever on and on westward.
His mother's people had migrated from the Yadkin River country in North
Carolina with the Boones, "devoted Quakers in search of a newer land";
his grandfather Miller was a Scotchman, a restless pioneer who had
fallen at Fort Meigs, leaving a family of small children to come up
as they could in the wilderness. One of them, the father of the poet,
picked up in a varied career along the border certain elements of book
learning that enabled him to teach school in the settlement towns of
Ohio and Indiana.
The boy's earliest memories were of the frontier with its land
clearing, its Indian neighbors, and its primitive hardships. Schooling
he received at the hands of his father. The first book that he could
remember was Fremont's _Explorations_, read aloud to the family by
the father until all knew it literally by heart, maps and all. Lured
by its enthusiastic descriptions and by reports of a former pupil
who had gone to Oregon and by the new act of Congress which gave to
every homesteader six hundred and forty acres of land free, on March
17, 1852, with "two big heavily laden wagons, with eight yoke of oxen
to each, a carriage and two horses for mother and baby sister, and a
single horse for the three boys to ride," the family set out across the
wild continent of America. "The distance," he records, "counting the
contours of often roundabout ways, was quite, or nearly, three thousand
miles. The time was seven months and five days. There were no bridges,
no railroad levels, nothing of the sort. We had only the road as nature
had made it. Many times, at night, after ascending a stream to find a
ford, we could look back and see our smoldering camp-fires of the day
before."
That heroic journey into the unknown West with its awful dangers, its
romantic strangeness, its patriarchal conditions, its constant demand
for self-dependence, made an indelible impress on the young lad. It
was a journey of Argonauts, one of the thousands of journeys that made
picturesque a whole epoch. He has described it in some of the most
stirring of his poems. All through his poetry occur stanzas like this:
What strength! what strife! what rude unrest!
What shocks! what half-shaped armies met!
A mighty nation moving West,
With all its steely sinews set
Against the living forests. Hear
The shouts, the shots of pioneer,
The rending forests, rolling wheels,
As if some half-checked army reels,
Recoils, redoubles, comes again,
Loud-sounding like a hurricane.
He has described it too in prose that is really stirring. His
dedicatory preface to _The Ship in the Desert_, London, 1876, is a poem
of the Whitman order. Note a stanza like this:
How dark and deep, how sullen, strong and lionlike the mighty
Missouri rolled between his walls of untracked wood and cleft
the unknown domain of the middle world before us! Then the
frail and buffeted rafts on the river, the women and children
huddled together, the shouts of the brawny men as they swam
with the bellowing cattle, the cows in the stormy stream
eddying, whirling, spinning about, calling to their young,
their bright horns shining in the sun. The wild men waiting
on the other side; painted savages, leaning on their bows,
despising our weakness, opening a way, letting us pass on to
the unknown distances, where they said the sun and moon lay
down together and brought forth the stars. The long and winding
lines of wagons, the graves by the wayside, the women weeping
together as they passed on. Then hills, then plains, parched
lands like Syria, dust and alkali, cold streams with woods,
camps by night, great wood fires in circles, tents in the
center like Caesar's battle camps, painted men that passed like
shadows, showers of arrows, the wild beasts howling from the
hills.
Two years with his parents on the new Oregon farm, and the lad ran away
to the mines. "Go, I must. The wheels of the covered wagon in which I
had been born were whirling and whirling, and I must be off." For a
time he was cook in a mining camp, but it was work impossible for a
boy of thirteen, and soon he was on his wanderings again, first with
one Ream, an adventurer, then with Mountain Joe, a trader in half-wild
horses. He was drawn into Gibson's fight with the Modocs, was wounded
frightfully by an arrow that pierced close to the base of the brain,
and later was nursed back to life by a squaw who had adopted him in
place of her son who had fallen in the battle. "When the spring came
and Mount Shasta stood out white and glorious above the clouds, I
hailed him as a brother." And again he stole away and joined another
band of Indians. "When the Modocs arose one night and massacred
eighteen men, every man in the Pit River Valley, I alone was spared and
spared only because I was _Los bobo_, the fool. Then more battles and
two more wounds." For a long time his mind was like that of a child.
The Indians indeed, as he records, treated him "as if [he] had been
newly born to their tribe."
Soon I was stronger, body and soul. The women gave me
gold--from whence?--and I being a "renegade," descended to San
Francisco and set sail for Boston, but stopped at Nicaragua
with Walker. Thence up the coast to Oregon, when strong enough.
I went home, went to college some, taught school some, studied
law at home some; but ever and ever the lure of the mountains
called and called, and I could not keep my mind on my books.
But I could keep my mind on the perils I had passed. I could
write of them, and I did write of them, almost every day. _The
Tale of the Tall Alcalde_, _Oregonian_, _Californian_, _With
Walker in Nicaragua_--I had lived all these and more; and they
were now a part of my existence.... Meantime I was admitted to
the bar. Then came the discovery of gold in Idaho, Montana, and
so on, and I was off like a rocket with the rest.
To call Miller illiterate, as many, especially in printing offices
which have handled his copy, have done, is hardly fair. His father,
it must be remembered, was a schoolmaster with the Scotch reverence
for serious books and for education, and the boy's early schooling
was not neglected. To say, on the other hand, as many, including the
poet himself, have said, that he received a college education, is
also to speak without knowledge. He did complete a course in Columbia
University, Eugene, Oregon, in 1859, but it was an institution in no
way connected with the present University of Oregon. It was, rather, a
mission school maintained by the Methodist Church South, and, according
to Professor Herbert C. Howe of the University of Oregon, "its
instruction was, at its utmost stretch, not enough to carry its pupils
through the first half of a high school course, and most of its pupils
were of grammar grade." It was closed suddenly early in the Civil-War
period because of the active Southern sympathies of its president, who
was himself very nearly the whole "university." It is significant that
at almost the same time the Eugene _Democratic Register_ edited by
Miller was suppressed for alleged disloyalty to the Union.
For a period the poet undoubtedly did apply himself with diligence to
books. Of his fellow students at Eugene he has recorded, "I have never
since found such determined students and omnivorous readers. We had all
the books and none of the follies of the great centers." The mania for
writing had seized him early. Assisted by his father, he had recorded
the events of his trip across the plains in a journal afterwards burned
with his parental home in Oregon. "The first thing of mine in print was
the valedictory class poem, 'Columbia College.'" Undoubtedly during
this period he read widely and eagerly. "My two brothers and my sister
were by my side, our home with our parents, and we lived entirely to
ourselves, and really often made ourselves ill from too much study. We
were all school teachers when not at college."
Living away from the centers of culture, with books as exotic things
that came from without, almost as from another world, Miller, like many
another isolated soul, grew to maturity with the feeling that something
holy lay about the creation of literature and that authors, especially
poets, were beings apart from the rest of men. Poetry became to him
more than an art: it became a religion. "Poetry," he declared in his
first London preface, "is with me a passion which defies reason." It
was an honest declaration. During the sixties as express messenger
in the Idaho gold fields, as newspaper editor, and judge, he wrote
verse continually--"I lived among the stars"--but he preserved of all
he wrote only a few rather colorless pieces which he published in
1868 with the title _Specimens_. The next year he issued at Portland,
Oregon, _Joaquin et al_, a book of one hundred and twenty-four pages.
It was his salute to the literary world. He addressed it "To the Bards
of San Francisco Bay," and his address sheds light upon the timid young
poet:
I am as one unlearned, uncouth,
From country come to join the youth
Of some sweet town in quest of truth,
A skilless Northern Nazarine,
From whence no good can ever come.
I stand apart as one that's dumb:
I hope, I fear, I hasten home,
I plunge into my wilds again.
He followed his book down to what was to him the glorious city of art
and of soul that would welcome him with rapture, for was he too not
a bard? Says Charles W. Stoddard, "Never had a breezier bit of human
nature dawned upon me this side of the South Seas than that poet of the
Sierra when he came to San Francisco in 1870."[62]
But the great Western city, as did New York a few months later, went on
totally unaware of his advent. The bards even of San Francisco Bay did
not come to the borders of the town to welcome the new genius. They
seemed unaware of his presence. Harte was inclined to be sarcastic,
but finally allowed the _Overland Monthly_ to say a word of faint
praise for the young poet, despite what it termed his "pawing and
curvetting." "His passion," it declared in a review written probably
by Ina Coolbrith, "is truthful and his figures flow rather from his
perception than his sentiment." But that was all. He considered himself
persecuted. His associates in the law had made fun of the legal term
in the title of his book, had hailed him as "Joaquin" Miller, and had
treated him as a joke. "I was so unpopular that when I asked a place
on the Supreme Bench at the Convention, I was derisively told: 'Better
stick to poetry.' Three months later, September 1, 1870, I was kneeling
at the grave of Burns. I really expected to die there in the land of
my fathers." He would support himself as Irving had supported himself
with his pen. He sought cheap quarters in the great city and began to
write. February 1, 1871, he recorded in his diary: "I have nearly given
up this journal to get out a book. I wanted to publish a great drama
called 'Oregonian,' but finally wrote an easy-going little thing which
I called 'Arazonian,' and put the two together and called the little
book _Pacific Poems_. It has been ready for the printer a long time."
He took the manuscript from publisher to publisher until, as he
declares, every house in London had rejected it. His reception by
Murray shows the general estimate of poetry by London publishers in the
early seventies:
He held his head to one side, flipped the leaves, looked in,
jerked his head back, looked in again, twisted his head like a
giraffe, and then lifted his long finger:
"Aye, now, don't you know poetry won't do? Poetry won't do,
don't you know?"
"But will you not read it, please?"
"No, no, no. No use, no use, don't you know?"
Then in desperation he printed a part of it at his own expense under
the title _Pacific Poems_ and sent out copies broadcast to the press.
Never was venture so unpromising crowned with results so startling. The
little book was hailed everywhere as something remarkable. The _St.
James Gazette_ declared that the poem "Arazonian"--that was Miller's
early spelling of the word--was by Browning. The new author was traced
to his miserable lodgings and made a lion of, and before the year was
over the whole original manuscript of _Pacific Poems_ had been brought
out in a beautiful edition with the title _Songs of the Sierras_.
Its author's real name did not appear upon the title page. The poems
were by "Joaquin Miller," a name destined completely to supersede the
more legal patronymic. "The third poem in my first London book," he
explains, "was called 'California,' but it was called 'Joaquin' in
the Oregon book. And it was from this that I was, in derision, called
'Joaquin.' I kept the name and the poem, too, till both were at least
respected."[63]
Few American books have been received by the English press, or any
press for that matter, with such unanimous enthusiasm. Miller was
the literary discovery of the year. The _London Times_ declared the
book the "most remarkable utterance America has yet given"; the
_Evening Standard_ called it poetry "the most original and powerful."
The pre-Raphaelite brotherhood counted its author as one of their
own number, and gave him a dinner. Browning hailed him as an equal,
and the press everywhere celebrated him as "the Oregon Byron." The
reason for it all can be explained best, perhaps, in words that
W. M. Rossetti used in his long review of the poet in the _London
Academy_: "Picturesque things picturesquely put ... indicating strange,
outlandish, and romantic experiences." The same words might have been
used by a reviewer of Byron's first Eastern romance on that earlier
morning when he too had awakened to find himself famous. The book,
moreover, was felt to be the promise of stronger things to come. "It is
a book," continued Rossetti, "through whose veins the blood pulsates
with an abounding rush, while gorgeous subtropical suns, resplendent
moons, and abashing majesties of mountain form ring round the
gladiatorial human life."
II
Of Miller's subsequent career, his picturesque travels, his log cabin
life in Washington, D. C., his Klondike experiences and the like, it is
not necessary to speak. There was always an element of the sensational
about his doings and his equipment. To the majority of men he was a
_poseur_ and even a mountebank. At times indeed it was hard for even
his friends to take him with seriousness. How was one, for instance,
to approach in serious mood _As It Was in the Beginning_, 1903, a book
twelve inches by five, printed on coarse manila wrapping stock, bound
in thin yellow paper, and having on the cover an enormous stork holding
in his bill President Roosevelt as an infant? Those who were closest to
him, however, are unanimous in declaring that all this eccentricity was
but the man himself, the expression of his own peculiar individuality,
and that he was great enough to rise above the conventionalities of
life and be himself. C. W. Stoddard, who of all men, perhaps, knew him
most intimately in his earlier period, maintained that
People who knew him wondered but little at his pose, his
Spanish mantle and sombrero, his fits of abstraction or
absorption, his old-school courtly air in the presence of
women--even the humblest of the sex. He was thought eccentric
to the last degree, a bundle of affectations, a crank--even a
freak. Now I who have known Joaquin Miller as intimately as
any man could know him, know that these mannerisms are natural
to him; they have developed naturally; they are his second
nature.[64]
Hamlin Garland, Charles F. Lummis, and many others who have known the
poet intimately have spoken in the same way. His mannerisms and his
eccentric point of view arose from the isolation in which his formative
years were passed, his ignorance of life, his long association with
highly individualized men in the mines and the camps and the mountains,
and his intimate knowledge of the picturesque Spanish life of Mexico
and Central America. His education had been peculiar, even unique. "All
that I am," he declares in _My Own Story_,[65] "or ever hope to be I
owe them [the Indians]. I owe no white man anything at all." He had
never been a boy, he was utterly without sense of humor, and he had a
native temperament aside from all this, that was all his own--need we
say more?
III
When one approaches the poetry of Joaquin Miller, one is at first
confused by the lavishness of it, the strength, and then swiftly the
dreary weakness of it. It is like his own landscapes, abounding in vast
barrens and flats, with here and there glimpses of glittering peaks and
vast ranges, and now and then oases full of marvelous revel of color
and strange birds and tropic flowers. Three-fourths of all he wrote is
lifeless and worthless, but the other quarter is to American poetry
what the Rockies are to the American landscape. Few poets have so
needed an editor with courage to reject and judgment to arrange. Miller
himself has edited his poems with barbarous savageness. He has not
hesitated to lop off entire cantos, to butcher out the whole trunk of
a poem, leaving only straggling and unrelated branches, to add to work
in his early manner stanzas after his later ideals, and to revamp and
destroy and cast utterly away after a fashion that has few precedents.
He has done the work with a broad-ax when a lancet was needed. His
editings are valuable, indeed, only in the new prose matter that he has
added as foot-note and introduction.
The key to Miller's poetry is an aphorism from his own pen: "We must,
in some sort, live what we write if what we write is to live." The
parts of his work that undoubtedly will live are those poems that
deal most closely with the material from which he sprang and of which
his early life was molded. He is the poet of the frontier and of the
great mid-century exodus across the Plains. Poems like "The Heroes of
Oregon," and "Exodus for Oregon," are a part of the national history.
They thrill at every point with reality and life.
The Plains! the shouting drivers at the wheel;
The crash of leather whips; the crush and roll
Of wheels; the groan of yokes and grinding steel
And iron chain, and lo! at last the whole
Vast line, that reach'd as if to touch the goal,
Began to stretch and stream away and wind
Toward the west, as if with one control;
Then hope loom'd fair, and home lay far behind;
Before, the boundless plain, and fiercest of their kind.
And again
Then dust arose, a long dim line like smoke
From out of riven earth. The wheels went groaning by,
Ten thousand feet in harness and in yoke,
They tore the ways of ashen alkali,
And desert winds blew sudden, swift and dry.
The dust! it sat upon and fill'd the train!
It seemed to fret and fill the very sky.
Lo! dust upon the beasts, the tent, the plain,
And dust, alas! on breasts that rose not up again.
Pictures of the Plains, the Indian camp, the mine, the mountain, the
herd, the trail, are to be found scattered everywhere in his work.
One finds them in the most unlikely places--diamonds embedded often
in whole acres of clay. In so unpromising a book as _As It Was in the
Beginning_ with its grotesque introduction explaining in characteristic
mixed metaphor that "When, like a sentinel on his watch tower, the
President, with his divine audacity and San Juan valor, voiced the real
heart of the Americans against 'race suicide,' I hastened to do my
part, in my own way, ill or well, in holding up his hands on the firing
line"--even in this book one finds sudden flashes of truest poetry.
He is describing winter on the Yukon. About him are an eager band of
gold-seekers ready to press north:
The siege of Troy knew scarce such men;
The cowards had not voyaged then,
The weak had died upon the way.
He describes with realism the horrors and the beauties of the Arctic
night, then at last the rising of the sun after the long darkness:
Then glad earth shook her raiment wide,
As some proud woman satisfied,
Tiptoed exultant, till her form,
A queen above some battle storm,
Blazed with the glory, the delight
Of battle with the hosts of night.
And night was broken, light at last
Lay on the Yukon. Night had past.
In passages like these the imagination of the poet breaks out for a
moment like the moon from dark clouds, but all too often it is _only_
for a moment.
He is the poet preeminently of the mountains of the Northwest.
The spell of them was on him as it was on John Muir. At times in
their presence he bursts into the very ecstasy of poetry; sonorous
rhapsodies and invocations in which he reaches his greatest heights:
Sierras, and eternal tents
Of snow that flash o'er battlements
Of mountains! My land of the sun,
Am I not true? have I not done
All things for thine, for thee alone,
O sun-land, sea-land thou mine own?
There is a sweep and vastness about him at his best that one finds in
no other American poet. No cameo cutting for him, no little panels, no
parlor decorations and friezes. His canvas is all out of doors and as
broad as the continent itself:
Oh, heart of the world's heart! West! my West!
Look up! look out! There are fields of kine,
There are clover-fields that are red as wine;
And a world of kine in the fields take rest,
And ruminate in the shade of the trees
That are white with blossoms or brown with bees.
There are emerald seas of corn and cane;
There are cotton fields like a foamy main,
To the far-off South where the sun was born.
The wild freedom of the Western air beats and surges in his lines:
Room! room to turn round in, to breathe and be free,
To grow to be giant, to sail as at sea
With the speed of the wind on a steed with his mane
To the wind, without pathway or route or a rein.
Room! room to be free where the white border'd sea
Blows a kiss to a brother as boundless as he;
Where the buffalo come like a cloud on the plain,
Pouring on like the tide of a storm-driven main,
And the lodge of the hunter to friend or to foe
Offers rest; and unquestion'd you come or you go.
My plains of America! Seas of wild lands!
From a land in the seas in a raiment of foam,
That has reached to a stranger the welcome of home,
I turn to you, lean to you, lift you my hands.
Or again this magnificent apostrophe to the Missouri River:
Hoar sire of hot, sweet Cuban seas,
Gray father of the continent,
Fierce fashioner of destinies,
Of states thou hast upreared or rent,
Thou know'st no limit; seas turn back
Bent, broken from the shaggy shore;
But thou, in thy resistless track,
Art lord and master evermore.
Missouri, surge and sing and sweep!
Missouri, master of the deep,
From snow-reared Rockies to the sea
Sweep on, sweep on eternally!
And grandest of all, the poem that has all America in it and the
American soul, perhaps the grandest single poem of the period,
"Columbus":
Behind him lay the gray Azores,
Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores;
Before him only shoreless seas.
The good mate said: "Now must we pray,
For lo! the very stars are gone,
Brave Adm'r'l speak; what shall I say?"
"Why, say: 'Sail on! sail on! and on!'"
In his enthusiasm for the mountains and the American landscape Miller
was thoroughly sincere. Despite all his posturing and his fantastic
costumes he was a truly great soul, and he spoke from his heart when
he said in 1909: "But pity, pity, that men should so foolishly waste
time with either me or mine when I have led them to the mighty heart
of majestic Shasta. Why yonder, lone as God and white as the great
white throne, there looms against the sapphire upper seas a mountain
peak that props the very porch of heaven; and yet they bother with and
want to torment a poor mote of dust that sinks in the grasses at their
feet."[66]
IV
This leads us to the second phase of Miller's personality: he was a
philosopher, a ponderer upon the deeper things of the spirit. He had
inherited with his Scotch blood a religious strain, and a large section
of his poetry deals with regions far indeed from his Sierras. He has
written much upon the common fundamentals of humanity: religion, love,
honor, courage, truth, and the like. In his "Vale! America," written in
Italy during his second European sojourn, he could say,
I have lived from within and not from without,
And again
Could I but return to my woods once more,
And dwell in their depths as I have dwelt,
Kneel in their mosses as I have knelt,
Sit where the cool white rivers run,
Away from the world and half hid from the sun,
Hear winds in the wood of my storm-torn shore,
To tread where only the red man trod,
To say no word, but listen to God!
Glad to the heart with listening--
It seems to me that I then could sing,
And sing as never sung man before.
There was within him indeed something of the recluse and the hermit.
No one of the period, not even Muir or Burroughs, approached Nature
with more of worship. He would live with her and make her central in
every point of his life. In his later years he built him a cabin on the
heights above San Francisco Bay with a tremendous outlook of sea and
mountain and sky, and lived there the rest of his life.
I know a grassy slope above the sea,
The utmost limit of the westmost land.
In savage, gnarl'd, and antique majesty
The great trees belt about the place, and stand
In guard, with mailed limb and lifted hand,
Against the cold approaching civic pride.
The foamy brooklets seaward leap; the bland
Still air is fresh with touch of wood and tide,
And peace, eternal peace, possesses, wild and wide.
He became more and more solitary, more and more of a mystic as the
years went on. Even from the first, as Rossetti pointed out, there is
an almost oriental pantheism in him. It came perhaps from his Indian
training. "Some curious specimens," Rossetti observed, "might be culled
of the fervid interfusion of external nature and the human soul in his
descriptive passages. The great factors of the natural world--the sea,
the mountains, the sun, moon, and stars--become personalities, animated
with an intense life and dominant possession."
But Miller was by no means a satyr, as many have pictured him,
delighting in wildness for the mere sake of wildness. He overflowed
with humanity. No man was ever more sensitive or more genuinely
sympathetic. In his later years he sat above the tumult a prophet and
seer, and commented and advised and warned. Great areas of his poetry
have nothing to do with the West, nothing at all with the manner and
the material that are so naturally associated with his name. For
decades his voice was heard wherever there was oppression or national
wrong. He wrote sonorous lyrics for the Indians, the Boers, the Russian
Jews; he wrote the ringing "Cuba Libre" which was read by the Baroness
de Bazus in the leading American cities before the Spanish war; he
championed the cause of woman; and everywhere he took the side of the
weaker against the strong. In this he resembles Mark Twain, that other
prophet of the era. The freedom of the new West was in both of them,
the true American "hatred of tyranny intense." He was won always by
gentleness and beauty: he wrote a _Life of Christ_, he wrote _The City
Beautiful_, and _Songs of the Soul_.
But almost all that he wrote in this pet field of his endeavor perished
with its day. Of it all there is no single poem that may be called
distinctive. He moralizes, he preaches, he champions the weak, but he
says nothing new, nothing compelling. He is not a singer of the soul:
he is the maker of resounding addresses to the peaks and the plains
and the sea; the poet of the westward march of a people; the poet of
elemental men in elemental surroundings--pioneers amid the vastness of
the uttermost West.
V
It is easy to find defects in Miller's work. Even the sophomore can
point out his indebtedness to Byron and to Swinburne--
The wine-dark wave with its foam of wool--
his Byronic heroes and overdrawn heroines; his diction excessive in
alliteration and adjectives; his barbarous profusion of color; his
overworking of the word "tawney"; his inability to tell a story; his
wordiness and ramblings; his lack of distinctness and dramatic power.
One sweeps away the whole of this, however, when one admits that
three quarters of all that Miller wrote should be thrown away before
criticism begins.
The very faults of the poet serve as arguments that he _was_ a
poet--a poet born, not a poet made from study of other poets. He was
not classic: he was romantic--a poet who surrendered himself to the
music within him and did not care. "To me," he declared in his defense
of poesy, "the savage of the plains or the negro of the South is a
truer poet than the scholar of Oxford. They may have been alike born
with a love of the beautiful, but the scholar, shut up within the
gloomy walls, with his eyes to a dusty book, has forgotten the face
of Nature and learned only the art of utterance."[67] This is one of
the keys to the new era that opened in the seventies. It explains the
new laughter of the West, it explains the Pike balladry, it explains
the new burst of democratic fiction, the studies of lowly life in
obscure environments. "To these poets," he continues; "these lovers of
the beautiful; these silent thinkers; these mighty mountaineers, far
away from the rush and roar of commerce; these men who have room and
strength and the divine audacity to think and act for themselves--to
these men who dare to have heart and enthusiasm, who love the beautiful
world that the Creator made for them, I look for the leaven of our
loaf."
Miller comes nearer to Mark Twain than to any other writer, unless
it be John Muir. True, he is wholly without humor, true he had never
been a boy, and in his mother's words had "never played, never had
playthings, never wanted them"; yet notwithstanding this the two men
are to be classed together. Both are the recorders of a vanished era of
which they were a part; both emerged from the material which they used;
both wrote notable prose--Miller's _Life Among the Modocs_ and his
other autobiographic picturings rank with _Life on the Mississippi_;
both worked with certainty in one of the great romantic areas of human
history. There is in the poems of Miller, despite all their crudity,
a sense of adventure, of glorious richness, of activity in the open
air, that is all his own. His Byronism and his Swinburneism were but
externals, details of manner: the song and the atmosphere about it were
his own, spun out of his own observation and colored by his own unique
personality.
His own definition of poetry determines his place among the poets and
explains his message: "To me a poem must be a picture," and it must,
he further declared, be drawn always from Nature by one who has seen
and who knows. "The art of poetry is found in books; the inspiration
of poetry is found only in Nature. This book, the book of Nature, I
studied in the wilderness like a monk for many years." The test of
poetry, he maintained, is the persistence with which it clings in the
memory, not the words but the picture. Judged by this standard, _Songs
of the Sierras_, which is a succession of gorgeous pictures that cling
in the imagination, must rank high.
It was his ideal to draw his generation away from their pursuit of gold
and their slavery in the artificial round of the cities, their worship
of European culture, European architecture, European books, and show
them the beauties of their own land, the glories of the life out of
doors, the heroism and sacrifice of the pioneers who made possible the
later period.
"Grateful that I was born in an age of active and mighty enterprise,
and exulting, even as a lad, in the primitive glory of nature, wild
woods, wild birds, wild beasts, I began, as my parents pushed west
through the wilderness, to make beauty and grandeur the god of my
idolatry, even before I yet knew the use of words. To give expression
to this love and adoration, to lead others to see grandeur, good, glory
in all things animate or inanimate, rational or irrational, was my
early and has ever been my one aspiration."
He would be the prophet of a new era. To the bards who are to come he
flings out the challenge: "The Old World has been written, written
fully and bravely and well.... Go forth in the sun, away into the
wilds, or contentedly lay aside your aspirations of song. Now, mark
you distinctly, I am not writing for nor of the poets of the Old
World or the Atlantic seaboard. They have their work and their way of
work. My notes are for the songless Alaskas, Canadas, Californias,
the Aztec lands and the Argentines that patiently await their coming
prophets."[68]
VI
The treatment of Miller by his own countrymen has never been so
laudatory as that accorded him by other lands, notably England, but
his complaint that his own people neglected him is groundless. All the
leading magazines--the _Atlantic_, _Scribner's_, the _Independent_,
and the rest--opened their columns to him freely. That reviews of his
work and critical estimates of him generally were more caustic on this
side the Atlantic came undoubtedly from the fact that the critic who
was to review him approached his book always in a spirit of irritation
at the British insistence that an American book to be worth the reading
must be redolent of the wild and the uncouth, must deal with Indians,
and buffaloes, and the various extremes of democracy. Miller has been
the chief victim of this controversy--a controversy, indeed, which
was waged through the whole period. The eccentricities of the man and
his ignorance and his picturesque crudeness, set over against the
extravagant claims of British writers, aroused prejudices that blinded
the American critic to the poet's real worth.
On the whole the English have been right. Not that American literature
to be of value must be shaggy and ignorant, a thing only of Pikes and
slang and dialect. It means rather that the new period which opened
in the seventies demanded genuineness, reality, things as they are,
studies from life rather than studies from books; that it demanded not
the reechoing of outworn ideals and measures from other lands, but the
spirit of America, of the new Western world, of the new soul of the new
republic. And what poet has caught more of this fresh new America than
the singer of the Sierras, the singer of the great American deserts,
and the northern Yukon?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
JOAQUIN MILLER. (1841-1913.) _Specimens_, 1868; _Joaquin et
al_, 1869; _Pacific Poems_, 1870; _Songs of the Sierras_, 1871;
_Songs of the Sunlands_, 1873; _Unwritten History: Life Amongst
the Modocs_ (with Percival Mulford), 1874; _The Ship in the
Desert_, 1875; _First Families of the Sierras_, 1875; _Songs of
the Desert_, 1875; _The One Fair Woman_, 1876; _The Baroness of
New York_, 1877; _Songs of Italy_, 1878; _The Danites in the
Sierras_, 1881; _Shadows of Shasta_, 1881; _Poems, Complete
Edition_, 1882; _Forty-nine: a California Drama_, 1882; _'49: or,
the Gold-seekers of the Sierras_, 1884; _Memorie and Rime_, 1884;
_The Destruction of Gotham_, 1886; _Songs of the Mexican Seas_,
1887; _In Classic Shades and Other Poems_, 1890; _The Building of
the City Beautiful, a Poetic Romance_, 1893; _Songs of the Soul_,
1896; _Chants for the Boer_, 1900; _True Bear Stories_, 1900; _As
It Was in the Beginning_, 1903; _Light: a Narrative Poem_, 1907;
_Joaquin Miller's Poetry_, Bear Edition, 1909.