He died of angina pectoris in 1910.

Mark Twain’s reputation was built on his humor. He came to his maturity in a fruitful decade just after the Civil War, when a crop of newspaper men were coming out with a recklessly fresh, informal jocularity which was related to the old American humor, but a great departure from it. They were all unconscious of making any contribution to American literature. They never could have written books which would have won the attention of Irving’s readers and the perusers of the old Annuals and the admirers of the Knickerbocker courtliness. They wrote for the world of Horace Greeley and the elder James Gordon Bennett, caring nothing for beauty of style or for any kind of literary tradition. They wrote under odd pen names like “John Phœnix,” who preceded them by ten years—“Petroleum V. Nasby,” “Artemus Ward,” “Orpheus C. Kerr,” “Max Adler,” and “M. Quad” serving as fancy dress for Locke, Browne, Newell, Clark, and Lewis. They drew their material from the common people, as Lincoln had done with all his anecdotes, putting it in the idiom of the common people and frequently distorting it into illiterate spelling, as Lowell had done in “The Biglow Papers.” This disturbed and shocked the lovers of a refined literature—men like Stedman, for example, who wrote to Bayard Taylor, “The whole country, owing to contagion of our American newspaper ‘exchange’ system, is flooded, deluged, swamped, beneath a muddy tide of slang, vulgarity, inartistic [bathos], impertinence, and buffoonery that is not wit.” But it was an irresistible tide that threw up on its waves something more than froth or flotsam, in the shape of a few real treasures from the deep—and the rarest was Mark Twain.

Had there been no such journalistic tide this original genius would still have gone on his original way. What these other men did was much more to put the public into a humor for Mark Twain than to lead Mark Twain in his approach to the public. He started as the others did, allowing an undercurrent of seriousness to appear now and then in the flow of his extravagance. His platform experience taught him by the immediate response of the audience what were the most effective methods.

He was quite deliberate in the employment of them. His essay on “How to Tell a Story” is an evidence of what he knew about structure, and his letter to the young London editorial assistant (see Paine’s “Mark Twain” pp. 1091–1093) is only the best of many passages which show his scrupulous regard for diction. He did not indulge in the usual vagaries of spelling; he had, to paraphrase his own words, “a singularly fine and aristocratic respect for homely and unpretending English”; and he treated punctuation as a “delicate art” for which he had the highest respect. People who carelessly think of Mark Twain as a kind of literary swashbuckler can disabuse themselves by an attentive reading of any few pages.

While they are doing it, they can discover in addition to the points just mentioned that he was essentially clean-minded. Vulgar he was, to be sure, at times, in the sense of not indulging always in drawing-room talk or displaying drawing-room manners, as, for instance, in his repeated references to spitting,—to use the homely and unpretending word,—but he never partook of the nature of his rough and ready human subjects to quite the extent that Franklin or Lincoln did. His pages are utterly free from filth. He drew a line, no doubt assisted by Mrs. Clemens, between what he wrote for the public and his private speech and correspondence. “He had,” Mr. Howells wrote, “the Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one ought not to call coarse, without calling one’s self prudish; and I was always hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not quite bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian.”

His humor relied on his never-failing and often extravagant use of the incongruous and the irrelevant. Often this came out in his similes and metaphors. “A jay hasn’t got any more principles than a Congressman.” “His lectures on Mont Blanc ... made people as anxious to see it as if it owed them money.” It emerged in his impertinent personalities, as in the instance of his first meeting with Grant, when he said after a moment of awkwardness: “General, I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are you?” or as in the case of his reply to a query as to why he always carried a cotton umbrella in London, that it was the only kind he could be sure would not be stolen there. It appeared too in his sober misuse of historical facts with which he and his readers or auditors were well acquainted. And it was developed most elaborately in “hoax” passages where, in his violation of both fact and reason, the canny author looked like the innocent flower but was the serpent under it.

A particular charm attached to his work because it was so apparently uncalculated and spontaneous. What he wrote seemed to be for his own delectation, and what he spoke to be the casual improvisation of the moment. At times, of course, he did improvise—with all the art of a musician whose mastery of technique is no less the result of great labor because he has it completely in hand; but often the utterance which his hearers took for an extempore speech had been composed to the last syllable and then delivered with an art that concealed its own artistry. No doubt for the multitudes who bought up the editions of “Innocents Abroad” the salient feature of Mark Twain’s writing was its jovial extravagance. The first feeling of the public was that he had out-Phœnixed “Phœnix” and beaten “Petroleum Nasby” at his own game. Beyond question he literally “enjoyed himself” when he was giving hilarious enjoyment to others; the free play of his antic fancy was a kind of self-indulgence. The best evidence is offered in “Joan of Arc.” The story is approached, pursued, and concluded in a spirit of admiration often amounting to reverence. Yet in the character of “The Paladin,” Edmond Aubrey, the old miles gloriosus of Roman comedy, and in Joan’s uncle, the historian reverted to his broadest jocosities. There are interpolated pages of pure farce. There are scenes in “Joan” that are companion pieces with portions of the sardonic “Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg.” On his seventy-third birthday he wrote, “I like the ‘Joan of Arc’ best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.” Yet this serious chronicle, with its occasional outbursts of fun, was of a piece with his best-known book of nearly thirty years earlier, the laugh-invoking “Innocents Abroad.” The books are not alien to each other; the difference is simply in the prevailing moods.

For under all the frolicsome gayety and beneath the surface ironies of this log of “The Quaker City” there is a solid sense of the realities of human life. Over against the pure fun of such episodes as the Fourth of July celebration on the high seas is a steady run of satire at the traditionalized affectations of the American who pretended to enjoy the things that he ought and attempted to shake off the manners of Bird City when he registered in his Paris hotel. His gibes at cultural insincerity, however, did not degenerate into a fusillade of cheap cynicisms at everything old. Whatever contempt he felt for the antiques of the tradesmen was overshadowed by the solemnity with which the evidence of the passing centuries impressed him. He may not have rendered the “old masters” their full deserts, but he entered a cathedral with respect, walked in reverent silence among the ruins of the Holy Land, and felt in the Alps the presence of the Most High. “Notwithstanding it is only the record of a picnic,” he wrote in the preface, “it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East, if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him.” So he wrote this book out of the fullness of his heart as well as out of the abundance of his humor. There was in him a natural acumen which for want of a better name we may call wisdom. His instinctive perceptions were usually right.

The fundamental Mark Twain was an increasingly serious man. Before he was fifty years old his precocious daughter had written in her journal, “He is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous.” And again: “Whenever we are all alone at home nine times out of ten he talks about some very earnest subject (with an occasional joke thrown in), and he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than upon the other kind. He is as much a philosopher as anything, I think.” There were many external reasons for his turn of mind. His romantic passage through life from obscure poverty to wealth and fame, with the depressing chapters of his temporary business reverses, heightened his native respect for the few blessings that are really worth while. His repeated travels, culminating with his trip around the world, the honors that came to him, the social distinctions that were showered on him, his friendships with thinking men, his bereavements, all contributed to the same end of making him consider the ways of the world and of the maker thereof. In a further comment his astute little daughter went near to the heart of the matter when she wrote quaintly, “I think he could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which have made him famous.” “If he had studied while young” Mark Twain might have gained a knowledge of the progressions in philosophic thought that would have steadied him in his own thinking. Yet possibly it would have made little difference, for his thinking was at the same time all his own and altogether in the drift of nineteenth-century thought.

With an initial distrust of conventionalized thinking he came to his own analysis of the prevailing religious views. His reason was alert to challenge theology wherever it was at odds with science. He found nothing in the Bible to question the assumption that Man was the crowning triumph of his Creator, but everything in evolutionary doctrine to suggest that Man was only a link in a far-evolving succession of higher forms. He found a God in the Old Testament who was “an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master,” though in the ordering of the material universe he appeared to be steadfast, beneficent, and fair. His reason thus unseated his faith in the Scriptures and thereby his confidence in the creeds founded upon them. He lost the God of the Hebrews only to find his own “in the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps,” ... “a spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them; and would judge a million more—and still be there, watching unchanged and unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation.”

For the after-life he could find no such assurance as he could for a Creator. For many men of his generation, and the one just before, the solution when they found themselves in such a quandary was to take refuge in the authority of the dogmas they had set out to question; many of the most radical came back with relief to the protection of the Roman Catholic faith; but Mark Twain could not find his way into the harbor, glad as he might have been for the anchorage. There is a deep pathos in the many passages of which the following is a type:

In spite of all his yearnings he never could achieve for himself the assurance “of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”; so that his most clearly formulated profession of faith was in reality a pathetic profession of doubts:

Here again, as in his discrimination between “antiques” and antiquity, Mark Twain kept clear of a despairing cynicism and held to the distinction between what Emerson called “historical Christianity” and the ideals from which its adherents have fallen away. He judged the religion of his countrymen by its social and national fruits, and he was filled with wrath at the indignity of an Episcopal rector’s refusal to perform the burial service of the actor George Holland and at the extortionate demands of the missionaries for indemnities after the Boxer Rebellion in China. On the national ideals of Christendom he spoke in bitter prophecy in 1908:

Such doubts as to the future and depression at surrounding events have led many an inquirer to a relaxation in his moral standards and in his personal conduct; but in Mark Twain his rectitude was as deeply grounded as his humor—both, indeed, flowing from the same source. Throughout his books he upheld the simple virtues—common honesty; fidelity to the family; kindness to brutes, to the weak or suffering, and to the primitive peoples. His ironies and his satires were always directed at unworthy objects, the varied forms of selfishness and insincerity; and his answer to “What is Happiness?” is contained in the admonition, “Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward, toward a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and the community.”

Not until the last years of his life did readers begin to take Mark Twain seriously; now they are coming to appreciate him. He has been fortunate in his literary champions—biographers, critics, and expositors—and incomparably so in the loving interpretation, “My Mark Twain,” by his intimate friend, William Dean Howells. This concludes: “Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any that I have ever known, the material given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation of clear and solid truth.... It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then left trying.... Next I saw him dead.... I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it; something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes—I knew them all—and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.”

BOOK LIST

Individual Authors

Bret Harte. Works. Standard Library Edition. 20 vols. During his lifetime his works were issued in forty-nine successive volumes between 1867 and 1902. Of these seven were poetry, and of the prose works two were novels. The remainder were made up of short units, mostly narrative.

Biographies

Mark Twain/ Works. Writings of Mark Twain. 1910. 25 vols. (These have been supplemented by various posthumous articles in Harper’s Magazine which have been published, and will doubtless be further added to, in supplementary volumes.) His works appeared in book form originally as follows: The Jumping Frog, 1867; The Innocents Abroad, 1869; Autobiography and First Romance, 1871; Roughing It, 1872; The Gilded Age (with C. D. Warner), 1873; Sketches New and Old, 1875; Tom Sawyer, 1876; The Stolen White Elephant, 1878; A Tramp Abroad, 1880; The Prince and the Pauper, 1881; Life on the Mississippi, 1883; Huckleberry Finn, 1884; A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur, 1889; The American Claimant, 1891; Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894; Joan of Arc, 1896; Tom Sawyer Detective, and Other Stories, 1896; Following the Equator, 1897; Christian Science, 1907; Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, 1907; Is Shakespeare Dead, 1908.

Bibliography

Biography and Criticism

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Note, as you read any one of Mark Twain’s longer stories, passages which are evidently autobiographical. Do these throw any light on the history of his neighborhoods and his period or are they purely personal in their interest?

Read the essay “How to tell a Story” and test it by Mark Twain’s method in one of his shorter stories and in one of his after-dinner speeches as printed in the appendix to Vol. III of A. B. Paine’s “Life.”

Read a few pages at random for observations on Mark Twain’s diction. Is it more like Emerson’s or Lowell’s, more like Whitman’s or Longfellow’s?

Does Mark Twain’s consistent interest in history appear in his writing through the use of allusion and comparison?

Read for the employment of unexpected humor. Are passages in which it suddenly appears the result of forethought or merely the result of whim?

Read for Mark Twain’s resort to serious satire. To what objects of satire does he most frequently revert?

Do you find a distinction between Mark Twain’s attitude toward religion and his attitude toward religious people?

Mark Twain is held up as an example of Americanism. Do his writings give evidence of patriotism in the usual sense of the word?

CHAPTER XXVI
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.

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,

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.

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.

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:

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:

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”: