Page:Americans (1922).djvu/247

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tarian sentiment, stirred up old memories, and aroused the imagination. He had, as we have seen, in at least one of his "campaigns," fought against them; but now, as a poet and Utopian, he is all on their side, he embraces their cause, he speaks from their point of view, he makes himself one of them.

In the introduction to the Bear Edition, he gives this brief account of the origin of the book: "Haying met the Prince, on a visit from Nicaragua at the time, he helped me to recall our life among the Modocs, adding such romance of his own as he chose." Elsewhere he acknowledges the collaboration of Prentice Mulford. How much is due to the influence of these collaborators one cannot say, but there is a continuity of narrative and dramatic and idyllic interest in the tale unequalled in Miller's other prose fiction. The authors enter with genuine enthusiasm into the exhibition of the white man's inhumanity, the virtues of the "noble savage," the chivalry of the Prince, the heroic fidelity of Paquita, the yellow-haired poetic renegade and his dusky bride, and the romantic and melancholy charm of life on the forested slopes of Mt. Shasta. There is a wavering thread of autobiographical fact running through the romance, but the romance is here far more significant than the thread of fact; all that Miller, as a poetic dreamer, longed to have been, all that he could not be, inextricably fused with what he was, is here projected, beautifully, by his