The Madox Brown connection led to an invitation to Westland Marston’s less “precious” Sunday receptions, and to those of Lady Duffus Hardy. At the latter house I met for the first time Joaquin Millar, the poet of the Sierras. Millar and I were to become great friends later on, but on first meeting him my feeling was one of frank dislike. At the time his pose was that of the wild man of the illimitable plains. He kept his hair in curling cataracts down his shoulders. He wore great jack-boots over his trousers, and was accustomed to appear in the Park mounted on a hack harnessed with a Mexican saddle, blinkers, and other absurd accoutrements. The rider wore a white sombrero, and gilt spurs six inches long. If his object was to attract attention, he undoubtedly succeeded. In the drawing-room of the Hardys he struck the sublimest attitudes, and, when he crossed the room, did it with a limp—because he had heard that Byron limped.
His utterances were studied with a view of occasioning surprise. He had then lately returned from a tour in Italy.
“What struck you most about Venice?” inquired one of his fair admirers.
“The bugs!” he replied with entire gravity, and stroking his golden beard.
“Oh, Mr. Millar!” exclaimed the lady, in shocked reproof.
“But,” he proceeded calmly, “the bugs in Venice are not the mild domestic animals you cultivate in this country. A Venetian bug has a beard and moustache as big as the King of Italy’s.”
It was during this stay in England that Millar met a lady to whom he became engaged, and the poet would have married her had her parents not discovered in time that the wild man of the illimitable plains had already a wife and child stranded somewhere on the South Pacific Coast.
Joaquin Millar became in time quite a civilized Christian, and I reflect, with some natural satisfaction, that I was the humble means in the hands of Providence that, some years after our first frigid meeting, succeeded in inducing him to get his hair cut. An immense social and moral rehabilitation followed this sacrifice on the part of a poet who had his share of the Divine afflatus. What he lost in picturesqueness he gained in self-respect, and during his brief sojourns in London he figured as a Bohemian observant of the conventions, and possessed of a certain subtle humour, which rendered his society very agreeable to his club mates at the Savage.
The travelling American millionaire is a strange portent in his way; but to me a far more wonderful thing is the American who on a small and irregular pay, often derived from correspondence with some third-rate newspaper, supplemented by the proceeds of a few magazine articles, manages to travel all over the habitable globe. You will meet them—cultivating literature on a little oatmeal—in London, in Paris, in Rome, in St. Petersburg, in Tokio, in Honolulu. They are always waiting for remittances, and they are always on the move. One of these wanderers I met at Millar’s rooms in Bloomsbury. She was a fine woman—robust, large-eyed, sentimental, but with a certain saving sense of humour. Her sole means were derived from a weekly letter written for a San Francisco newspaper. Yet she was setting out to do what she called “the grand tower.” She was not so lucky as the others. I met her at the same rooms a year afterwards. She had just returned from “the grand tower.” She looked awfully worn and ill, and she was accompanied by a gigantic brigand, who had not a word of any language save his own incommunicable patois. He breathed hard and scowled and shrugged his shoulders while he rolled his eyes and smoked innumerable cigarettes. His name, even when gently broken to us by his fair introducer, was a wholly impossible thing. But he was a Count—or so he said. And the infatuated correspondent of the Californian paper was “my lady,” for she had married the brute. The Count had probably been a Neapolitan luggage-porter, or something of the kind, and my own private opinion is that he beat the poor woman and otherwise ill-treated her.
Charles Warren Stoddard is another name which pleasantly connects itself with those days of emergence. There are few parts of the civilized globe over which “dear Charlie”—as his intimates called him—has not trotted. He lived the absolutely “natural life” in the South Seas. The result of that enervating experience may be seen in two very delightful books, “South Sea Idylls,” published over thirty years ago, and “The Island of Tranquil Delights,” published in this country a couple of years since. He travelled all over Europe, joining a monastic brotherhood at Rome. This he quitted after a few years’ experience, his memories of tropical islands, perhaps, engendering a hankering after the fleshpots. On one of the Pyramids he met Williamson the actor—to become in the fulness of time Williamson the successful Australian manager—and on the tomb of the Pharaohs he gave Williamson an introduction to me, which led to a very delightful acquaintanceship. From a Japanese poet named Noguki, who recently produced a wonderful book of verse in London, I heard that he had met Stoddard in Tokio, and that he was then on his way to take up a Chair of English Literature at a University in Washington. But he must have wandered away from that place of safety, for I next heard of him as having escaped by the skin of his teeth from the awful seismic disaster in San Francisco. You don’t want much money in a monastery, and you probably get enough to live on while teaching English literature to the youth of the United States. But, deducting these two brief periods of retirement from wandering, Stoddard must have moved around, surveying the wonders of the world, on an income entirely derived from fugitive articles in the papers of California.