Few American books have been received by the English press, or any press for that matter, with such unanimous enthusiasm. Miller was the literary discovery of the year. The London Times declared the book the "most remarkable utterance America has yet given"; the Evening Standard called it poetry "the most original and powerful." The pre-Raphaelite brotherhood counted its author as one of their own number, and gave him a dinner. Browning hailed him as an equal, and the press everywhere celebrated him as "the Oregon Byron." The reason for it all can be explained best, perhaps, in words that W. M. Rossetti used in his long review of the poet in the London Academy: "Picturesque things picturesquely put ... indicating strange, outlandish, and romantic experiences." The same words might have been used by a reviewer of Byron's first Eastern romance on that earlier morning when he too had awakened to find himself famous. The book, moreover, was felt to be the promise of stronger things to come. "It is a book," continued Rossetti, "through whose veins the blood pulsates with an abounding rush, while gorgeous subtropical suns, resplendent moons, and abashing majesties of mountain form ring round the gladiatorial human life."
II
Of Miller's subsequent career, his picturesque travels, his log cabin life in Washington, D. C., his Klondike experiences and the like, it is not necessary to speak. There was always an element of the sensational about his doings and his equipment. To the majority of men he was a poseur and even a mountebank. At times indeed it was hard for even his friends to take him with seriousness. How was one, for instance, to approach in serious mood As It Was in the Beginning, 1903, a book twelve inches by five, printed on coarse manila wrapping stock, bound in thin yellow paper, and having on the cover an enormous stork holding in his bill President Roosevelt as an infant? Those who were closest to him, however, are unanimous in declaring that all this eccentricity was but the man himself, the expression of his own peculiar individuality, and that he was great enough to rise above the conventionalities of life and be himself. C. W. Stoddard, who of all men, perhaps, knew him most intimately in his earlier period, maintained that
People who knew him wondered but little at his pose, his Spanish mantle and sombrero, his fits of abstraction or absorption, his old-school courtly air in the presence of women—even the humblest of the sex. He was thought eccentric to the last degree, a bundle of affectations, a crank—even a freak. Now I who have known Joaquin Miller as intimately as any man could know him, know that these mannerisms are natural to him; they have developed naturally; they are his second nature.[64]
Hamlin Garland, Charles F. Lummis, and many others who have known the poet intimately have spoken in the same way. His mannerisms and his eccentric point of view arose from the isolation in which his formative years were passed, his ignorance of life, his long association with highly individualized men in the mines and the camps and the mountains, and his intimate knowledge of the picturesque Spanish life of Mexico and Central America. His education had been peculiar, even unique. "All that I am," he declares in My Own Story,[65] "or ever hope to be I owe them [the Indians]. I owe no white man anything at all." He had never been a boy, he was utterly without sense of humor, and he had a native temperament aside from all this, that was all his own—need we say more?
III
When one approaches the poetry of Joaquin Miller, one is at first confused by the lavishness of it, the strength, and then swiftly the dreary weakness of it. It is like his own landscapes, abounding in vast barrens and flats, with here and there glimpses of glittering peaks and vast ranges, and now and then oases full of marvelous revel of color and strange birds and tropic flowers. Three-fourths of all he wrote is lifeless and worthless, but the other quarter is to American poetry what the Rockies are to the American landscape. Few poets have so needed an editor with courage to reject and judgment to arrange. Miller himself has edited his poems with barbarous savageness. He has not hesitated to lop off entire cantos, to butcher out the whole trunk of a poem, leaving only straggling and unrelated branches, to add to work in his early manner stanzas after his later ideals, and to revamp and destroy and cast utterly away after a fashion that has few precedents. He has done the work with a broad-ax when a lancet was needed. His editings are valuable, indeed, only in the new prose matter that he has added as foot-note and introduction.
The key to Miller's poetry is an aphorism from his own pen: "We must, in some sort, live what we write if what we write is to live." The parts of his work that undoubtedly will live are those poems that deal most closely with the material from which he sprang and of which his early life was molded. He is the poet of the frontier and of the great mid-century exodus across the Plains. Poems like "The Heroes of Oregon," and "Exodus for Oregon," are a part of the national history. They thrill at every point with reality and life.
The Plains! the shouting drivers at the wheel;
The crash of leather whips; the crush and roll
Of wheels; the groan of yokes and grinding steel
And iron chain, and lo! at last the whole
Vast line, that reach'd as if to touch the goal,
Began to stretch and stream away and wind
Toward the west, as if with one control;
Then hope loom'd fair, and home lay far behind;
Before, the boundless plain, and fiercest of their kind.