The fact is, West was a Pennsylvania Quaker, though he became King George’s court artist, and at last got buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
I went often to the Vatican, not to see the palace itself, for that impressed me not at all, or only as a great and miscellaneous pile, but to see a certain picture there. The artist who made it was but thirty-seven years old when he died. Yet, it has been said that in the “Transfiguration” one sees “the last perfection of art.” This picture seems to be one of those things that no one ever thinks to try to emulate. Like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, nothing of their kind came before them, and nothing is looked for to follow them.
One morning I was drinking my coffee in a little den in the Via Condotti. A very singular-looking man came in and sat down at the little table next to mine. Hearing me speak English with a friend, he addressed me. “You are the Consul at Zurich, are you not? You were pointed out to me the other day in the street. I am Joaquin Miller of California. Let us get acquainted.” I moved my chair and coffee over to his table. I was greatly gratified at meeting a poet who seemed to me to have some of the genius of Byron. His “Songs of the Sierras” have the ring of the master. Last summer I read them in Switzerland. Their freshness, their flavor of the prairie and the mountain, their passionate utterance, took me by storm. What the English said of him, in their extravagant joy at “discovering” a live genius in the wilds of the United States, did not affect me, it was the stirring passion of the verse itself. The buffalo, the Indian scout, the burning prairie, the people of the desert, the women with bronzed arms and palpitating hearts, the men in sombreros, with brave lives, and love worth the dying for--that was what he was writing about, and they were all alive before me.
Sitting here at the little white marble table of an Italian café, he seemed all out of place. There was nothing in the surroundings of which this half-wild looking poet-scout of the prairies was a part. His yellow locks, flashing blue eyes, stormy face, athletic form, careless dress, and broad-brimmed hat on the floor by his feet, all told of another kind of life.
Much of his talk was cynical in the extreme. He was ridiculing everything, everybody, even himself, and he looked about him as if constantly thinking to grab his hat, bound for the door, and rush over the Tiber with a yell. He hated restraint of any kind whatever--dress, custom, language.
Miller was now writing in some little attic in Rome, but none of his friends knew where. He would not tell them; he wanted to be alone.
A boy brought us the morning journal, and we talked of newspapers. I asked him what English and American papers he read. He smiled, and answered ironically: “When I want seriousness, I read the London Punch, and for truth, I take the New York Herald.”
There was no talk that morning with him about poetry, but he was jocose and cynical.
He asked me what I was doing. I told him I was getting ready to try my hand at a drama. “Don’t do it--all damned nonsense!” he cried. “Dramas worth anything are not wanted, and if you write in blank verse, as you say you propose, not one actor in five hundred knows how to recite the lines. It must be mighty plain prose for these wind sawyers.”
Just then a tall, fine looking young man came and sat down by our table. Mr. Miller nudged me, and whispered, “Bingen on the Rhine.” “That is young Norton, son of the woman who wrote ‘Bingen on the Rhine.’” I looked at him with interest; but he was English, and I was a stranger, so conversation at that particular table suddenly stopped.