And yet he loved life, in all its multiform and multiplex aspects and with no desire or tendency to sniff, reform or improve anything.  It was good just as he found it, excellent.  Life to Peter was indeed so splendid that he was always very much wrought up about it, eager to live, to study, to do a thousand things.  For him it was a workshop for the artist, the thinker, as well as the mere grubber, and without really criticizing any one he was “for” the individual who is able to understand, to portray or to create life, either feelingly and artistically or with accuracy and discrimination.  To him, as I saw then and see even more clearly now, there was no high and no low.  All things were only relatively so.  A thief was a thief, but he had his place.  Ditto the murderer.  Ditto the saint.  Not man but Nature was planning, or at least doing, something which man could not understand, of which very likely he was a mere tool.  Peter was as much thrilled and entendered by the brawling strumpet in the street or the bagnio as by the virgin with her starry crown.  The rich were rich and the poor poor, but all were in the grip of imperial forces whose ruthless purposes or lack of them made all men ridiculous, pathetic or magnificent, as you choose.  He pitied ignorance and necessity, and despised vanity and cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and the miserly hoarding of anything.  He was liberal, material, sensual and yet spiritual; and although he never had more than a little money, out of the richness and fullness of his own temperament he seemed able to generate a kind of atmosphere and texture in his daily life which was rich and warm, splendid really in thought (the true reality) if not in fact, and most grateful to all.  Yet also, as I have said, always he wished to seem the clown, the scapegrace, the wanton and the loon even, mouthing idle impossibilities at times and declaring his profoundest faith in the most fantastic things.

Do I seem to rave?  I am dealing with a most significant person.

In so far as I knew he was born into a mid-Western family of Irish extraction whose habitat was southwest Missouri.  In the town in which he was reared there was not even a railroad until he was fairly well grown—­a fact which amused but never impressed him very much.  Apropos of this he once told me of a yokel who, never having seen a railroad, entered the station with his wife and children long before train time, bought his ticket and waited a while, looking out of the various windows, then finally returned to the ticket-seller and asked, “When does this thing start?” He meant the station building itself.  At the time Peter had entered upon art work he had scarcely prosecuted his studies beyond, if so far as, the conventional high or grammar school, and yet he was most amazingly informed and but little interested in what any school or college had to offer.  His father, curiously enough, was an educated Irish-American, a lawyer by profession, and a Catholic.  His mother