 could make a journey to
the West, followed by another, the next year, to Canada. In 1881, the
sale of his works allowed him to settle, at Camden, in a home of his
own. Here he lived in comparative comfort, the object of a good deal of
curiosity, receiving visitors, some of them very distinguished, and, as
his strength allowed, adding to his stock of verse. In 1888, he had a
second stroke of paralysis, but he lived on, preserving his courage and
mental alertness, until 1892. He died on March 26th of that year. If we
can credit his statement made in 1890, he was probably survived by four
out of six children that were not born in wedlock.

In many ways, Whitman corresponds to the ideal presented in the
“natural man” of Rousseau; if space allowed, a profitable comparison
might be made between “the good grey poet” and the French forerunner
of American democracy. At the outset, the excessive sentimentalism of
Rousseau would constitute a patent difference. But Whitman’s assumption
of equality among individuals, in so far as they are not spoiled by
what he deems a false and artificial education, is nothing new to the
reader of Rousseau; and his preference of the “powerful, uneducated,”
raw material of humanity has its counterpart in the sympathetic
attitude of Rousseau toward the burgher and peasant classes which
formed the part of society that he really understood. Moreover, both of
these authors demand an individual standard--which is no standard--of
judgment. Both desire to be appreciated, yet refuse to be appraised
according to standards which the cumulative wisdom of mankind in the
past, of the greatest democracy, has attained to and approved. Both try
to regard organisation and the subordination of one person or thing to
another as unnatural. In the case of Whitman at least, it is for want
of philosophical standards, and for want of a consistent effort to
determine what is meant by _nature_ and _natural_, that the so-called
literature of democracy has been so hard to measure.

In the first place, then, if we are to measure Whitman at all, we must
make certain postulates. For example, we must postulate that restraint
in literature, as in life, is a law of nature. This, Whitman is not
disposed to admit. In private life, it is true, he was more temperate
and continent than certain passages in “Leaves of Grass” led casual
readers to surmise. But he saw fit to beget children, out of wedlock,
without assuming the responsibility of their nurture and education. Are
the duties which modern society lays upon parents less natural than the
alleged practice of Rousseau, or are they more? Again, Whitman decides
to address the public in the guise of a poet. Now in practice, be it
observed, he is much truer to the demands of a poetic ear than are many
of our conventional versifiers; and though he has a predilection for
colloquial diction and syntax, he is in his own way not unscrupulous
in the matter of technique. The changes that he made in successive
editions of his main work, “Leaves of Grass,” are of deep interest to
the student of poetic art. At the same time, he repudiates literary
convention, and recognizes no law as binding upon one who contracts to
write for his fellow men, save the law of his individual being. There
is, however, no law, or science, or art, of the individual as such.
Poetry, according to the deepest thinkers on this subject, is the
rhythmical utterance of the individual in harmony with universal law;
and criticism has for its province the recognition of that universal
law in the particular poet. In so far, then, as Whitman’s irregularly
trained personality succeeds in expressing what is true for all men, or
for many, or for representative and typical men, uttering that truth in
terms that are both choice and generally intelligible,--in so far as he
actually conforms to the best conventions--he is a great poet, perhaps
our greatest native poet. He succeeds often. It is to be noted that
he is most successful when, as in his lament for Lincoln, he adopts a
regular metrical form.

On Whitman’s achievement as spokesman of modern democracy perhaps
too much stress has already been laid. Following his own lead, his
interpreters have been inclined to associate his idiosyncrasies, his
departures from the normal, his lapses from good taste in referring to
the physiology of sex, too closely with the nature of this achievement.
In dealing with the “poetry of democracy,” it seems to have escaped
observation that an age of popular freedom and republican ideals may
produce a literature of high refinement and perfect balance between
literary tradition and the impulses of the individual author. It is
well to remember that the masterpieces of art which ennobled Athens
under Pericles were the expression of--for Greece--an age of democracy;
and that the epics of Milton, however conventional in one sense, were
the outpourings of a nobler champion of liberty than Whitman. Referring
to the practice of studying his illustrious predecessors, Whitman
has said: “Now, if eligible, O that the great masters might return
and study me!” Something like this is sure to take place. In order
to appreciate him rightly, we must confront him, full of the spirit
of those authors, Sophocles, Dante, Milton, and their peers, by the
standard of whom one is bound to estimate poetry. If thus confronted,
Whitman’s lustre, so bright in the eyes of his cult, begins to
wane; still, the tributes paid him by W. M. Rossetti, Freiligrath,
Dowden, Björnson, Symonds, may not lightly be set aside. Taken at its
best, his poetry, as Emerson said, “has the best merits, namely, of
fortifying and encouraging.” His prose works ought not to be dismissed
so summarily as must here be the case; being less subject to suspicious
innovation than his verse, conforming naturally to expected canons, his
prose, in particular his prose criticism, is well worth study. It is
direct. Genius, said Whitman, is almost one hundred per cent directness.


_Bret Harte_, _Joaquin Miller_, _Edward Rowland Sill_.--We turn to the
poetry of the Far West. Francis Bret Harte (1839-1902), born at Albany,
New York, after a varied youth in California won a sudden renown
through his “Heathen Chinee” and “Condensed Novels.” His later success
as a prolific writer of short stories tended to obscure his talent as a
humourist in verse; and even in the present decade, when his death has
called fresh attention to the value of his literary work as a whole,
his poetry is hardly known as it should be. Probably in the course of
years his “East and West Poems” (1871) and “Echoes of the Foothills”
(1874) will entertain more readers than they now do in comparison with
“The Luck of Roaring Camp.” There is likely to come a time when pioneer
life among the gold-mines will appeal less than it does to the present
generation; whereas the permanent aspects of external nature, as Harte
has caught them in “Crotalus,” can never cease to interest. The details
of his life are recounted in another part of this volume.

Cincinnatus Hiner Miller (born 1841), another celebrity of the West,
was reared in a log-cabin in Indiana. After a few years of life on a
farm in Oregon, he went to the gold-fields of California. When he had
met almost every kind of experience imaginable, he studied law, and
practised in Oregon. In 1870 he brought out a small volume of poems,
one of them entitled “Joaquin,” the name of a Mexican brigand, Joaquin
Murietta, in whose defence he had already written, and henceforth his
pen-name. His volume, “Songs of the Sierras,” for which he at first
vainly tried to find a publisher, produced, when finally accepted and
issued, a sensation that recalled the days of Byron. His vogue has
since declined, though he is still read, a collective edition of his
poems having been published in 1897.

Much less famous than either Harte or Miller, not having the virility
of the former, yet possessing a finer sensibility than the latter,
was Edward Rowland Sill (1841-1887), a third poet of the Far West.
Sprung from a family in Connecticut, a teacher in Cuyahoga Falls,
Ohio, finally professor of English literature in the University of
California, Sill, in “Hermione, and Other Poems,” “The Hermitage, and
Later Poems” (1867), “The Venus of Milo, and Other Poems,” published
(1888) after his death, sent forth a rill of poetry, slender but pure.
In the opinion of his friends and many besides