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."
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?
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.
And 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:
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:
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 preëminently 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:
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:
The wild freedom of the Western air beats and surges in his lines:
Or again this magnificent apostrophe to the Missouri River:
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":
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]
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,
And again
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.
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.
It is easy to find defects in Miller's work. Even the sophomore can point out his indebtedness to Byron and to Swinburne—
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]
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 reëchoing 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?
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.
The second generation of poets in America, those later singers born during the vital thirties in which had appeared the earliest books of the older school, began its work during the decade before the Civil War. It was not a group that had been launched, as were the earlier poets of the century, by a spiritual and moral cataclysm, or by a new strong tide in the national life. It was a school of deliberate art, the inevitable classical school which follows ever upon the heels of the creative epoch.
It came as a natural product of mid-century conditions. America, hungry for culture, had fed upon the romantic pabulum furnished so abundantly in the thirties and the forties. It looked away from the garish daylight of the new land of its birth into the delicious twilight of the lands across the sea, with their ruins and their legends and their old romance.
We have seen how it was an age of sugared epithet, of adolescent sadness and longing, of sentiment even to sentimentality. Its dreams were centered in the East, in that old world over which there hung the glamour of romance. "I hungrily read," writes Bayard Taylor of this epoch in his life, "all European books of travel, and my imagination clothed foreign countries with a splendid atmosphere of poetry and art.... Italy! and Greece! the wild enthusiasm with which I should tread those lands, and view the shrines 'where young Romance and Love like sister pilgrims turn'; the glorious emotions of my soul, and the inspiration I should draw from them, which I now partly feel. How my heart leaps at the sound of:
The isles of Greece! hallowed by Homer and Milton and Byron! My words are cold and tame compared with my burning thoughts."[69]
The increasing tide of translations that marked the thirties and the forties, the new editions of English and continental poets—Shelley, Keats, Heine; the early books of the Victorians—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the young Tennyson—came across the sea to these sensitive souls like visitants from another planet. "I had the misfortune," Taylor writes in 1848, "to be intoxicated yesterday—with Tennyson's new poem, 'The Princess.'... For the future, for a long time at least, I dare not read Tennyson. His poetry would be the death of mine. His intense perception of beauty haunts me for days, and I cannot drive it from me."[70]
Poetry was a thing to be spoken of with awed lips like love or the deeper longings of the soul. It was an ethereal thing apart from the prose of life; it was beauty, melody, divinest art—a thing broken into harshly by the daily round, a thing to be stolen away to in golden hours, as Stoddard and Taylor stole away on Saturday nights to read their poets and their own poems, and to lose themselves in a more glorious world. "My favorite poet was Keats, and his was Shelley, and we pretended to believe that the souls of these poets had returned to earth in our bodies. My worship of my master was restricted to a silent imitation of his diction; my comrade's worship of his master took the form of an ode to Shelley.... It is followed in the volume before me by an airy lyric on 'Sicilian Wine,' which was written out of his head, as the children say, for he had no Sicilian wine, nor, indeed, wine of any other vintage."[71]
It explains the weakness of the whole school. All too often did these young poets of the second generation write from out their heads rather than their hearts. They were practitioners of the poetic art rather than eager workers in the stuff that is human life. They were inspired not by their times and the actual life that touched elbows with theirs in their toil from day to day; they were inspired by other singers. Poetry they wove from poetry; words from words. Song begotten from other song perishes with its singer. To endure, poetry must come from "that inexpressible aching feeling of the heart"—from the impact of life upon life; it must thrill with the deepest emotions of its creator's soul as he looks beyond his books and all the printed words of others into the yearning, struggling world of men.
The members of this second generation of poets fall into two distinct groups: first, those who caught not at all the new note that came into American life and American literature after the war, and so, like the survivors of the earlier school, went on to the end only echoing and reëchoing the earlier music; and, secondly, those transitional poets who yielded to the change of times and retuned their instruments to the new key. Of the first group four only may be mentioned: Thomas Buchanan Read (1822–1872), George Henry Boker (1823–1890), Bayard Taylor (1825–1878), and Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903). None of these may be called a poet of the transition; none of these, not even Taylor, caught the new spirit of recreated America; none of them added to poetry any notes that have influenced the song or the life or the spirit of later years. They were poets of beauty without a message, and they caught no new vision of beauty.
The work of the group began early, only a few years later than that of the major singers. Taylor's Ximena appeared in 1844; Boker's Lesson of Life and Read's Poems in 1847; and Stoddard's Footprints in 1849. By 1870 they had settled into their final manner. It was theirs to strike the last notes, ineffective and all too often decadent, of that mid-century music that had begun with Bryant and Poe, with Emerson and Whittier, with Willis and Longfellow.
We may pause a moment with Taylor. His personality in the early seventies undoubtedly was more potent in America than that of any other poet. His was the leading poetic voice of the Centennial of 1876, that great national gathering that marks in a way the birth of the new American spirit.
But Taylor was not at all an original force. His power lay in his picturesque personality. His Macaulay-like memory charged with enormous store of literature from all lands and at instant command; his bluff and hearty manner; and the atmosphere of romance which surrounded him, made him a marked man wherever he went. He appealed to the imagination of adolescent America. Like Byron, he had traveled far in the mysterious East; there was the sensuousness and dreaminess of the Orient about him; he had "ripened," as he expressed it, "in the suns of many lands."
The weakness of Taylor was the weakness of Stoddard, of Aldrich, of the early Stedman, of all the poets of beauty. They had drunk like the young Tennyson of the fatal draft of Keats. To them beauty concerned itself with the mere externals of sense. Keats is the poet of rich interiors, of costly hangings, and embroidered garments. To read him is to come into the presence of rare wines, of opiates that lap one in long forgetfulness, of softly whispering flutes and viols, of rare tables heaped with luscious dainties brought from far, of all the golden East can bring of luxury of furnishings and beauty of form and color. "A thing of beauty," he sings, "is a joy forever," but beauty to Keats is only that which brings delight to the senses. Of beauty of the soul he knows nothing. His women are Greek goddesses: nothing more. In Keats, and later in his disciples, Taylor and Stoddard and Aldrich, we never come face to face with souls in conflict for eternal principles. Shelley looked at life about him and reacted upon it. He showed us Prometheus bound to the rock for refusal to yield to tyrannic law, and then liberated by the new soul of human love. He believed that he had a vision of a new heaven and earth with Reason as its god and Love its supreme soul, and he beat out his life in eagerness to bring men into this new heaven in the clouds. Keats reacted upon nothing save the material which he found in books: translations from the Greek, Spenser, Shakespeare, that earlier adolescent dreamer Marlowe, Milton, Coleridge. With the exception of hints from "Christabel" which we find worked into "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "Lamia," Keats never got nearer his own century than Milton's day. He turned in disgust from the England about him—that England with its Benthamite individualism, inheritance from the French Revolution, which even then was culminating in all the misery and riot and civil strife that later we find pictured in the novels of Dickens and Kingsley—he turned from it to the world of merely sensuous delight, where selfishly he might swoon away in a dream of beauty.
Taylor and Stoddard and the early Aldrich reacted not at all on the America that so sadly needed them. They added sentiment to the music of Keats and dreamed of the Orient with its life of sensuous surfeit:
"Taylor, Boker, Stoddard, Read, Story, and their allies," confessed Stedman in his later years, "wrote poetry for the sheer love of it. They did much beautiful work, with a cosmopolitan and artistic bent, making it a part of the varied industry of men of letters; in fact, they were creating a civic Arcadia of their own."[72]
But in making this civic Arcadia of their own they deliberately neglected the opportunity of reacting upon the actual civic life of their own land in their own and later times. They lived in one of the great germinal periods in the history of the race and they deliberately chose to create a little Arcadia of their own.
No man of the century, save Lowell, was given the opportunity to react upon the new world of America at a critical moment such as was given to Taylor at the Centennial in 1876. Subject and occasion there were worthy of a Milton. A new America had arisen from the ashes of the war, eager and impetuous. A new era had begun whose glories we of a later century are just beginning to realize. Who was to voice that era? The land needed a poet, a seer, a prophet, and in Taylor it had only a dreamer of beauty, gorgeous of epithet, musical, sensuous. "The National Ode," when we think of what the occasion demanded, must be classed as one of the greatest failures in the history of American literature. Freneau's "The Rising Glory of America," written in 1772, is an incomparably better ode. There are no lines in Taylor's poem to grip the heart and send the blood into quicker beat; there are no magnificent climaxes as in Lowell's odes:
There is excessive tinkling of rimes; there is forcing of measures that could have come only of haste; there is lack of incisiveness and of distinctive poetic phrases that cling in the memory and become current coin; there is lack of vision and of message. The poet of beauty was unequal to his task. There was needed a prophet and a creative soul, and the lack of such a leader at the critical moment accounts in part perhaps for the poetic leanness of the period that was to come.
The poets of the second group, the transition poets, for the most part were born during the thirties. Like Taylor and Stoddard, they were poets of beauty who read other poets with eagerness and wrote with deliberation. Their early volumes are full of exquisitely finished work modeled upon Theocritus and Heine, upon Keats and Shelley. They reacted but little upon the life about them; they railed upon America as crude and raw, a land without adequate art, and were content to fly away into the world of beauty and forget.
Then suddenly the war crashed in their ears. For the first time they caught a vision of life, of their country, of themselves, and for the first time they burst into real song. "For eight years," wrote the young Stedman in 1861, "I have cared nothing for politics—have been disgusted with American life and doings. Now for the first time I am proud of my country and my grand heroic brethren. The greatness of the crisis, the Homeric grandeur of the contest, surrounds and elevates us all.... Henceforth the sentimental and poetic will fuse with the intellectual to dignify and elevate the race."[73]
Edmund Clarence Stedman was of old New England stock. He had inherited with his blood what Howells termed, in words that might have emanated from Dr. Holmes himself, "the quality of Boston, the honor and passion of literature." He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, October 8, 1833. Bereft of his father when he was but two years of age, and later, when he was a mere child, forced to leave his mother and live with an uncle who could little supply the place that only father and mother can fill in a boy's life, he grew into a headstrong, moody youth who resented control. He was a mere lad of fifteen when he entered Yale, the youngest member indeed of his class, and his rustication two years later was only a natural result. Boyishness and high spirits and impetuous independence of soul are not crimes, however, and the college in later years was glad to confer upon him his degree.
Returning to Norwich, the home of his uncle, he pursued for a time the study of law. Later he connected himself with the local newspaper, and in 1853, at the age of twenty, he was married. Two years later, he left newspaper work to become the New York representative of a firm which was to engage in the manufacture and sale of clocks. Accordingly in the summer of 1855 he took up for the first time his residence in the city that was to be so closely connected with the rest of his life.
The clock factory made haste to burn and Stedman again was out of employment, this time in the great wilderness of New York. For a time he was a real estate and commission broker, later he was a clerk in a railroad office. Still later he attracted wide attention with his ephemeral poem "The Diamond Wedding," and on the strength of this work became a correspondent of the Tribune. In 1861 he went to the front as war correspondent of the Washington World, and his letters during the early years of the struggle were surpassed by those of no other correspondent. In 1862 he was given a position in the office of the Attorney-General and a year later he began his career as a broker in Wall Street, a career that was to hold him in its grip for the rest of his life.
Pan and Wall Street are far from synonymous. There was poetry in Stedman's soul; there were within him creative powers that he felt were able to place him among the masters if he could but command time to study his art. He worshiped beauty and he was compelled to keep his eye upon the stock-ticker. He read Keats and Tennyson, Moschus and Theocritus, but it was always after the freshness of his day had been given to the excitement of the market place. Time and again he sought to escape, but the pressure of city life was upon him. He had a growing family now and there were no resources save those that came from his office. It was a precarious business in which he engaged; it was founded upon uncertainty; failure might come at any moment through no fault of his own. Several times during his life he was on the brink of ruin. Time and again his health failed him, but he still struggled on. The financial chapter of his biography is one of the most pathetic in literary annals. But through toil and discouragement, amid surroundings fatal to poetic vision, he still kept true to his early literary ideals, and his output when measured either in volumes or in literary merit is remarkable.
The first period of Stedman's poetic life produced little save colorless, passionless lyrics, the echoes of a wide reading in other poets. He went, like all of his clan, to books rather than life. He was early enamoured of the Sicilian idylists. It was a dream that never quite deserted him, to make "a complete, metrical, English version of the idyls of Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion"—an idle dream indeed for a vigorous young poet in a land that needed the breath of a new life. Why dawdle over Theocritus when fields are newly green and youth is calling? Stedman himself seems to have misgivings. "When the job [the collecting of the various texts] was nearly ended, I reflected that one's freshest years should be given to original work, and such excursions might well be deferred to the pleasures of old age. My time seemed to have been wasted."[74]
During this earlier period poetry was to him an artistic thing to be judged coldly from the standpoint of art and beauty. He worked with extreme care upon his lines. For a time he considered that he had reached his highest level in "Alcetryon," and he waited eagerly for the world to discover it. William Winter, his fellow poet of beauty, hailed it as "not unworthy of the greatest living poet, Tennyson"; Professor Hadley of Yale pronounced it "one of the most successful modern-antiques that I have ever seen." Then Lowell, with one of his flashes of insight, told the whole truth: "I don't believe in these modern antiques—no, not in Landor, not in Swinburne, not in any of 'em. They are all wrong. It is like writing Latin verses—the material you work in is dead." It was the voice of an oracle to the young poet. Twenty-three years later he wrote of his chagrin when Lowell had praised his volume in the North American Review and had said nothing of his pièce de résistance "Alectryon." "Finally I hinted as much to him. He at once said that it was my 'best piece of work,' but no 'addition to poetic literature,' since we already have enough masterpieces of that kind—from Landor's Hamadryad and Tennyson's Œnone down to the latest effort by Swinburne or Mr. Fields.... Upon reflection, I thought Lowell right. A new land calls for new song."[75]
The episode is a most significant one. It marks the passing of a whole poetic school.
To the war period that followed this era in the poet's life belong the deepest notes of Stedman's song. In his Alice of Monmouth, he is no longer the mere poet of beauty, he is the interpreter of the thrill, the sacrifice, the soul of the great war. The poem has the bite of life in it. "The Cavalry Song" thrills with the very soul of battle: