Kitabı oku: «A History of American Literature», sayfa 28

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.

 
Come where my stubbly hillside slowly dries,
And fond adhesive tarweeds gently shade,
 

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.