THE WEST IN SILL AND MILLER
In the development of a Western literature Sill and Miller, like Bret
Harte and Mark Twain and like all the other adult Californians in
the pioneer period, were imported from the East, but they were not
such temporary sojourners as the two prose writers. Sill, after an
Eastern education, enjoyed two prolonged residences in California, and
in his journeyings back and forth became a kind of cultural medium,
bringing something of Eastern tradition to the Pacific coast and
interpreting the West to the East. Of the four men Joaquin Miller was
the most completely and continuously Western. He went out almost as
early as Mark Twain did, lived during boyhood in far more primitive
circumstances, and, after varied travels in the East and in Europe and
intimate association with the world of letters, returned to the West
for his old age, dying "on the heights" in sight of the Golden Gate.
EDWARD ROWLAND SILL (1841-1887)
Sill was born in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1841. In 1861 he was
graduated from Yale, where he had developed more clearly than anything
else a dislike for narrowly complacent orthodoxy of thought and conduct
and had acquired a strain of mild misanthropy which characterized him
for the next several years. His health sent him West, by sailing-vessel
around Cape Horn, and he stayed in California occupied in a variety
of jobs until 1866. A winter's study satisfied him that he should not
enter the ministry, and a shorter experiment that he could not succeed
in New York journalism. In 1868 he published the only volume of poems
during his lifetime, the little duodecimo entitled "The Hermitage."
From this year to 1882 he was occupied in teaching--first in the high
schools at Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and Oakland, California, and from 1874
on in the department of English in the University of California. Here
he had the double distinction of serving under President Daniel C.
Gilman and over Josiah Royce, whom he secured as assistant. A letter
of 1882 gives as the reason for his resignation that his "position
had become intolerable for certain reasons that are not for pen and
ink," in spite of which ill health is usually assigned as the cause.
In 1883 a second volume, "The Venus of Milo, and Other Poems" was
privately printed. For the rest of his life he lived at Cuyahoga Falls
again, writing frequently under the name of Andrew Hedbrook for the
_Atlantic_, whose pages were opened to his prose and verse through the
appreciative interest of the editor, his fellow-poet, Thomas Bailey
Aldrich. He died in 1887.
During his last thirty years, from his entrance to Yale in 1857 to
his death in 1887, Edward Rowland Sill experienced American life in a
variety of ways which were not exactly paralleled in the career of any
of his contemporaries. He did not belong to any literary group. Because
of a certain timidity, which was probably more artistic than social, he
did not even become acquainted with the well-known authors who were his
neighbors while he was in Cambridge and New York City; but his natural
inclination to find his proper place and do his proper work led him to
partake of the life on both coasts and in the Mississippi Valley and
to contribute richly to the leading periodicals of the East and the
West--the _Atlantic_ and the _Overland Monthly_.
By inclination he was from the outset a cultured radical. He loved the
best that the past had to offer, he wanted to make the will of God
prevail, and he was certain that between lethargy and crassness the
millennium was being long delayed. It was lethargy which characterized
Yale and New Haven for him.[37] The curriculum was dull in itself
and little redeemed by any vital teaching or by reference to current
thought. The faculty, wrote one of his classmates, "gave us a rare
example of single-hearted, self-sacrificing, and unswerving devotion
to duty, as they saw it. But they had not the gift to see much of
it, and so their example lacked inspiration. It is astounding that
so much knowledge (one-sided though it was) and so much moral worth
could have existed side by side with so much obtuseness." The natural
consequence was that Sill picked up what crumbs of comfort he could
from miscellaneous reading, was "rusticated" for neglect of his routine
duties, wrote Carlylesque essays of discontent, and went out from
graduation with a deep feeling of protest against what he supposed
was the world. "Morning" and "The Clocks of Gnoster Town, or Truth by
Majority" are the chief poetical results of this experience.
[37] See chap. ii, "His Life at College," in W. B. Parker's Life.
California offered him a relief, but too much of a relief. He was
always loyal to his closest college friends and to his ideals for Yale.
The license of a frontier mining country did not in any sense supply
the freedom which New Haven had denied him. His greatest pleasure out
there was in the companionship of an intellectual and music-loving
"Yale" family. And so his revolt from the world and his return to
it, which are motivated in "The Hermitage" by the charms of a lovely
blonde, had a deeper cause in the facts of his spiritual adolescence.
All this pioneering was in the nature of self-discovery. For a while he
inclined to the study of law because he thought the discipline of legal
training would lead him toward the truth. Then after returning to the
East he came by way of theological study and journalism to his final
work: "... only the great schoolmaster Death will ever take me through
these higher mathematics of the religious principia--this side of his
schooling, in these primary grades, I never can preach.--I shall teach
school, I suppose."
Now that he had left it, however, the charm of California was upon him.
Although he was later to write in sardonic comment on the dry season,
Come where my stubbly hillside slowly dries,
And fond adhesive tarweeds gently shade,
he was really in love with the great open vistas, the gentleness of the
climate, and with the Californians' "independence of judgment; their
carelessness of what a barbarian might think, so long as he came from
beyond the border; their apparent freedom in choosing what manner of
men they should be; their ready and confident speech." "Christmas in
California," "Among the Redwoods," and "The Departure of the Pilot" are
examples of much more California verse and of the spirit of many and
many of his letters. Yet for this radical thinker institutional life
was somewhat cramping even here. It is an unhappy fact that colleges
and universities, devised as systems for educating the average by the
slightly more than average, have rarely been flexible enough in their
management to give fair harborage for creative genius either in front
of or behind the desk. Sill's experience was not unusual; it only went
to prove that in academic America East was West and West was East and
that the two had never been parted. So finally the young poet, still
young after two periods of residence on each coast, settled down again
to quiet literary work in the little Ohio town. There were only five
years left him.
Throughout his work, but increasingly in these later years, there
is a fine and simple clarity of execution. The something in him
which withheld him from calling on Longfellow and the others when in
Cambridge, or even on his fellow-collegian Stedman in New York, made
him slow to publish, rigorous in self-criticism, and eager to print
anonymously or under a pseudonym. He wrote painstakingly, followed his
contributions to the editors with substituted versions, and revised
even in the proof. Although he was a wide reader, he was usually
independent of immediate models, and always so in his later work. He
avoided the stock phrases of poetry, but often equaled the best of them
himself: "the whispering pine, Surf sound of an aërial sea," "Struck
through with slanted shafts of afternoon," "When the low music makes a
dusk of sound," are representatives of his own fresh coinage.
A reading of Sill's poetry would reveal much of his life story without
other explanation. An acquaintance with his biography makes most of the
rest clear. The poems relate in succession to his college experience,
his lifelong search for truth, his Western voyage, his revolt against
the world and his return to it, his residence in California. They
show in parts of "The Hermitage" and in "Five Lives" his rebellion at
the incursions of science. They show, however, that in his own mind
a greater conflict than that between science and religion was the
conflict, as he saw it, between religion and the church.
For my part I long to "fall in" with somebody. This picket duty is
monotonous. I hanker after a shoulder on this side and the other.
I can't agree in belief (or expressed belief--Lord knows what the
villains really think, at home) with the "Christian" people, nor
in spirit with the Radicals, etc.... Many, here and there, must be
living the right way, doing their best, hearty souls, and I'd like
to go 'round the world for the next year and take tea with them in
succession.
The tone of this letter, written in 1870, was to prevail more and
more in his later years. He had passed out from the rather desperate
seriousness of young manhood. He had found that on the whole life was
good. He was no less serious at bottom than before, but in the years
approaching the fullness of his maturity he let his natural antic humor
play without restraint. As a consequence the poems after 1875 tend as a
group to deal more often with slighter themes and in lighter vein. The
human soul did not cease to interest him, but the human mind interested
Sill the husband and the teacher more than they had interested Sill
the youthful misanthrope. Thus the confidence in "Force," the subtlety
in "Her Explanation," the mockery in "The Agile Sonneteer," and the
whimsical truth of "Momentous Words" were all recorded after he was
forty years of age.
It is impossible not to feel the incompleteness of his career. It was
cut off without warning while Sill was in a state of happy relief from
the perplexities of earlier years. He was gaining in ease and power of
workmanship. There was a modest demand, in the economic sense, for his
work. There was everything to stimulate him to authorship and much to
suggest that in time he would pass beyond this genial good humor into
a period of serene and broadening maturity. Possibly in another decade
he would have come into some sense of nationalism which would have
illuminated for him the wide reaches of America which he had passed and
repassed. The Civil War had meant nothing to him: "What is the grandeur
of serving a state, whose tail is stinging its head to death like a
scorpion!" Since war times he had passed out of hermitage into society,
and with the Spanish War he might have seen America and the larger
human family with opened eyes. But at forty-six the arc of his life was
snapped off short.
JOAQUIN MILLER (1841-1913)
Cincinnatus Hiner Miller was born in 1841. "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." His
father was born of Scotch immigrant stock--a natural frontiersman, but
a man with a love of books and a teacher among his fellow-wanderers.
In 1852, moved by the same restlessness that had taken the Clemens
family to Missouri seventeen years earlier, the Millers started on the
three-thousand-mile roundabout journey to Oregon, finding their way
without roads over the plains and mountains in a trip lasting more than
seven months. It was from this that the boy gained his lasting respect
for the first pioneers.
O bearded, stalwart, westmost men,
So tower-like, so Gothic built!
A kingdom won without the guilt
Of studied battle, that hath been
Your blood's inheritance.... Your heirs
Know not your tombs: The great plough-shares
Cleave softly through the mellow loam
Where you have made eternal home,
And set no sign. Your epitaphs
Are writ in furrows.
After two years in the new Oregon home the coming poet ran away with a
brother to seek gold. They seem to have separated, and in the following
years the one who came to celebrity survived a most amazing series of
primitive experiences and primitive hardships among the Indians. Part
of his time, however, with "Mountain Joe" preserved his contact with
books, for this man, a graduate of Heidelberg, helped him with his
Latin. The boy returned to Oregon early enough to earn a diploma at
Columbia University in 1859,--an institution in which the collegiate
quality was doubtless entirely restricted to its name. According to
Miller the eagerness of study there was no less intense than the
zest for every other kind of experience among the early settlers. In
the next decade he had many occupations. For a while he was express
messenger, carrying gold dust, but safe from the Indians, who had
become his trusted friends. "Those matchless night-rides under the
stars, dashing into the Orient doors of dawn before me as the sun burst
through the shining mountain pass,--this brought my love of song to
the surface." Later he was editor of a pacifist newspaper which was
suppressed for alleged treason. But the largest proportion of his time
was spent at the law. From 1866 to 1870 he held a minor judgeship.
Throughout all this time--he was now nearly thirty--Miller's primary
passion had been for poetry and for casting in poetic form something
of the rich, vivid romance of the great West and Southwest. In 1868
a thin booklet, "Specimens," was issued and in San Francisco, in
1869, "Joaquin et al." For naming his book in this fashion instead of
"Joaquin and Other Poems," his legal friends repaid him with a derisive
nickname that finally became the one by which the world knows him. Bret
Harte, then in an influential editorship, gave the book a fair review,
but in general it was slightingly treated.
Impulsive in mood and accustomed to little respect for the hardships of
travel, Miller started East, and three months later, as he records, was
kneeling at the grave of Burns with a definite resolve to complete his
life in the country of his forefathers. In the volume of poems of his
own selection he wrote of "Vale! America," "I do not like this bit of
impatience nor do I expect anyone else to like it, and only preserve it
here as a sort of landmark or journal in my journey through life." But
for the moment in his sensitiveness he doubtless wrote quite truly:
I starve, I die,
Each day of my life. Ye pass me by
Each day, and laugh as ye pass; and when
Ye come, I start in my place as ye come,
And lean, and would speak,--but my lips are dumb.
He had, of course, no reputation in London, where he soon settled near
the British Museum, and the period was an unpropitious one for poetry.
A descendant and namesake of the John Murray who had refused to deal
with "The Sketch Book" (see p. 118) gave a like response to Miller's
offer of his "Pacific Poems." But Miller carried the risk-taking spirit
of the pioneer to the point of privately printing one hundred copies
and sending them broadcast for review, with the result of an immediate
and enthusiastic recognition. The "Songs of the Sierras" were soon
regularly published in London, and the poet was received in friendliest
fashion as a peer of Dean Stanley, Lord Houghton, Robert Browning, and
all the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.
The period from 1873 to 1887 is distinctly a middle zone in Miller's
career. The restless eagerness of his formative years still dominated
him, but it led him for the most part to rapid changes, most of which
were in the world of men and many of which were in the largest cities.
His moves on both continents are difficult to follow and have not been
clearly unraveled by any biographer. One can get a fairly clear idea of
their nature if not of their order by an attentive reading of his poems
and particularly of the chatty footnotes with which he accompanied the
collections he edited. He continued to use the frontier experience
of the early days. His most characteristic poems were stories of
thrilling experience in the open. In "My Own Story," "Life Amongst the
Modocs," "Unwritten History, Paquita," and "My Life Among the Indians"
he recorded the same material in prose. In certain other poems,
particularly the "Isles of the Amazons" and "The Baroness of New York,"
he set in contrast the romance of the forest with the petty conventions
of the metropolis, and in "The Song of the South" he attempted--not to
his own satisfaction--to do for the Mississippi what he had done for
the mountains. Shorter lyrics show his response to world events such as
the death of Garfield and the American war with Spain. In two poems of
1901 he wrote in withering condemnation of England's policy toward the
Boers.
In all the material of this middle period the dominant feature is his
praise of the elemental forces of nature. Nature itself for him was
always dynamic. The sea and the forest at rest suggested to him their
latent powers. His best scenes deal with storm, flood, and fire, and
when occasionally he painted a calm background, as in the departure of
"The Last Taschastas," the burnished beauty of the setting is in strong
contrast with the violence of the episode. In human experience he most
admired the exertion of primitive strength. It is this which endeared
the early pioneers to him. Man coping with nature thrilled him, but
for human conflict he had little sympathy. His women were Amazonian
in physique and character--a singularly consistent type, almost a
recurrence of one woman of various complexions. In the judgment of
Whitman--his Washington intimate of two years--he must have fallen
from grace in his treatment of love. If he did not vie (to paraphrase
Burroughs) "with the lascivious poets in painting it as the forbidden"
passion, he did compete with the fleshly school in depicting all its
charms. Yet even here in that strange concluding romance "Light" he
struggled to overcome the sensuous with the spiritual element.
The form of all this mid-period work was quite conventional and, in
view of the content, smacked strangely of the library and the drawing
room. He ran as a rule to four-stressed lines, indulged in insistent
riming, rarely missing a chance, and cast his stanzas into a jogging
and seldom-varied rhythm. In their assault on the ear his verses have
little delicacy of appeal. They blare at the reader like the brasses
in an orchestral fortissimo. They clamor at him with the strident
regularity of a Sousa march. This dominant measure accords well with
the rude subject matter of his poems,--the march of the pioneer, the
plod of oxen yoked to the prairie schooner, the roar of prairie fire or
of the wind through the forest; and, with a difference, the hoof-beat
of galloping horses or of stampeding buffalo. And it expresses the
rhetorical magniloquence which is the natural fruit of life in a
country of magnificent distances. At the same time Miller found a
poetical justification for his style in the narrative rhythms of Scott
and Byron and Coleridge, by whom he was often and evidently influenced.
Until he was well past mid-career he was boyishly open to direct
literary influences. He had no theory of prosody; his originality was
inherent in the harmony between himself and his wild material; so he
tried his hand at writing in the manner of this, that, and the other
man.
In his final revisions, however, he was ruthless in rejecting his
imitative passages and in his reduction of earlier work to what was
unqualifiedly his own. This is best illustrated by what he did to "The
Baroness of New York" before he had done with it. In its original
form of 1877 it filled a whole volume, a poem--not a novel, as often
erroneously stated--in two parts. The former is a sea-island romance
of love and desertion after the manner of Scott; the sequel presents
Adora in New York as the Baroness du Bois, where she lives in scornful
indifference until the original lover turns up with a title of his own
and carries her off in triumph; this second part is in the manner of
Byron. When Miller included this poem in his collected edition of 1897,
he dropped all the Byronic, metropolitan portion and reduced the rest
to less than half--the fraction that was quite his own.
Such a revision was in the fullest sense the work of matured judgment.
Miller was now in his last long period of picturesque retirement on
"The Heights," looking back over his prolific output of former years,
recognizing the good in it, and depending upon the public to reject
what had no right to a long life. At times he still wrote poem-stories
located in settings of tumultuous abundance, but he supplemented these
with more and more frequent short lyrics, and he studied continually
to achieve that simplicity which is seldom the result of anything but
perfected artistry. In 1902 he wrote:
Shall we ever have an American literature? Yes, when we leave sound
and words to the winds. American science has swept time and space
aside. American science dashes along at fifty, sixty miles an hour;
but American literature still lumbers along in the old-fashioned
English stage-coach at ten miles an hour; and sometimes with a
red-coated outrider blowing a horn. We must leave all this behind us.
We have not time for words. A man who uses a great, big, sounding
word, when a short one will do, is to that extent a robber of time. A
jewel that depends greatly on its setting is not a great jewel. When
the Messiah of American literature comes, he will come singing, so
far as may be, in words of one syllable.
In the main his hope now was to pass from objective poetry to "the
vision of worlds beyond,"--a vision which he more nearly approached in
"Sappho and Phaon" than in any other poem, and a vision for which the
motive is stated in the second stanza of "Adios":
Could I but teach man to believe--
Could I but make small men to grow,
To break frail spider-webs that weave
About their thews and bind them low;
Could I but sing one song and slay
Grim Doubt; I then could go my way
In tranquil silence, glad, serene,
And satisfied, from off the scene.
But ah, this disbelief, this doubt,
This doubt of God, this doubt of good,--
The damned spot will not out.
In the meanwhile, by way of a practical application of his ideals,
Miller was attempting to lead his life sanely and, by an association
that suggests the old Greek academy, to point the way for the younger
generation of poets. In his final note to the 1902 edition he described
himself as living on "a sort of hillside Bohemia." No lessons were
taught there except, by example, the lesson of living. Three or four
"tenets or principles of life" were insisted upon: that man is good;
that there is nothing ugly in nature; that man is immortal; that nature
wastes no thing and no time; and that man should learn the lesson of
economy. So in a way he returned to the simple conditions in which his
earliest life had grounded his affections.
Miller naturally invites comparison with Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.
The likeness starts with the simple origins of all three and with the
rough-and-ready circumstances of their upbringing. It continues with
their resultant sympathetic feeling for the common men and women who
make up the mass of humankind. It is maintained in their conscious
personal picturesqueness: Whitman gray-bearded, open-collared, wearing
his hat indoors or out; Mark Twain in his white serge, regardless
of season; and Miller with long hair, velvet jacket, and high
boots,--evidence of the humanizing personal vanity in each which was
quite apart from the genuine bigness of their characters. It follows
in the high seriousness of all three. And it is confirmed in the
fact of their early recognition in England and their less respectful
reception at home (see pp. 293 and 367). Miller, like these others,
was in the 70's what the Old World chose to think the typical American
ought to be. He was fresher to them than those other Americans whom
their countrymen were eagerly describing as "the American Burns,"
"the American Wordsworth," "the American Scott," and "the American
Tennyson"; and to this degree--though he was not a representative of
the prevailing American literature--he was actually a representative
of the country itself and especially of the vast stretch from the
Mississippi to the Pacific. For Miller and the America he knew best
were both full of natural vigor, full of hope and faith, conscious of
untold possibilities in the nearer and the remoter future, and, withal,
relatively naïve and unformed.
BOOK LIST
=_Individual Authors_=
EDWARD ROWLAND SILL. Works. The Political Works of. 1906. 1 vol. His
works appeared in book form originally as follows: The Hermitage
and Other Poems, 1867; Venus of Milo, and Other Poems, 1883;
Poems, 1887; The Hermitage, and Later Poems, 1889; Christmas in
California: a Poem, 1898; Hermione, and Other Poems, 1899; Prose,
1900; Poems (Special Edition), 1902; Poems (Household Edition),
1906.
=Biography and Criticism=
The best biographical study is Edward Rowland Sill: his Life
and Work, by W. B. Parker. 1915. See also Modern Poets and
Christian Teaching (Gilder, Markham, Sill), by D. G. Downey.
1906.
JOAQUIN MILLER. Works. Bear Edition. 1909-1910. 6 vols. A
single-volume "complete" edition was published in 1892, 1897,
and 1904. These appeared in book form originally as follows:
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.
=Biography and Criticism=
There is no adequate biography or even biographical study. Of
the historians of American literature only Churton Collins, C.
F. Richardson, G. E. Woodberry, and F. L. Pattee ("American
Literature since 1870") accord Miller serious attention. The
autobiographical preface to the Bear Edition and the same
material scattered through the one-volume editions are the raw
stuff for interpretation of Miller's character and aim. These
can be supplemented by his own article in the _Independent_ on
"What is Poetry?" See also _Current Literature_, Vol. XLVIII,
p. 574.
See the historians above mentioned and the following review
articles: _Academy_, Vol. II, p. 301; Vol. LIII, p. 181;
_Arena_, Vol. XII, p. 86; Vol. IX, p. 553; Vol. XXXVII, p.
271; _Current Opinion_, Vol. LIV, p. 318; _Dial_, Vol. LIV, p.
165; _Fraser's_, Vol. LXXXIV, p. 346; _Godey's_, Vol. XCIV, p.
52; _Lippincott's_, Vol. XXXVIII, p. 106; _Munsey's_, Vol. IX,
p. 308; _Nation_, Vol. XXVII, p. 336; Vol. XIII, p. 196; Vol.
XVIII, p. 77; Vol. XCVI, pp. 169, 187, 230, 544.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Compare the use of California and California life by Sill with use of
the same material by Joaquin Miller or Bret Harte or Mark Twain.
Compare Sill's "Hermitage" with Robert Frost's "A Boy's Will." What is
the likeness in the general drift of the two and what are the essential
differences in the treatments of the theme?
Read W. B. Parker's "Life of Sill" with especial reference to Sill's
letters and the degree to which they reveal his humor and his
seriousness. Note poems which correspond in spirit or in content with
given letters.
Compare the treatment of primitive Western life and adventure by Miller
with use of the same material by Mark Twain or Bret Harte.
Read Miller for evidences of literary influence upon him of Scott or
Byron or Coleridge or Browning.
Read Miller's "Song of the South" and his explanatory remarks on it and
compare Longfellow's treatment of the Mississippi; or compare Masters's
preface to his volume "Toward the Gulf" and his poems on the same
subject.
Note the insistence of Miller on the idea that life is power and in his
later poems the increasing respect for reflection.
Compare Miller's "Columbus" with Lowell's "Columbus" and Lanier's
"Sonnets on Columbus."