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I tried to convey the impression that I was not without due familiarity with and appreciation of my Rossetti; but I began to feel myself getting into deeper water than I had expected.
"There's a lot of fine things in poetry and in paint we'd never have had if it hadn't been for those fellows," the old man went on. "Of course there's a lot of minds so calloused over with the things of the past that they can't see the beauty in anything that takes 'em out of a rut, even if it's really old and only seems to be new. That's always the way with any new movement, and the fellow that starts in at the head of the procession gets a lot of abuse. Take poor old Rossetti, for instance, how the critics did hand it to him, especially Buchanan the idea of a man like Robert Buchanan even daring to criticize Rossetti's 'Blessed Damozel'! It's preposterous! It's like an elephant trying to handle a cobweb to find out how any living thing could make a home of it. Of course the elephant couldn't!"
I quite agreed that the average elephant of my acquaintance would have found the average cobweb a rather insecure retreat in which to stretch his weary length.
"Do you remember," he went on, "what Buchanan said about those lines?
I think I may truthfully say that from that point on I listened to the old man breathlessly. Buchanan's monograph on "The Fleshly School of Poetry" though wholly out of sympathy with my own views has long been a favorite bit of literary excoriation with me, comparable to Victor Hugo's incisive flaying of Napoleon III, and to have it spring up at me thus out of the alkali desert, through the medium of this beloved vagabond, was indeed an experience. Instead of conversing with my friend, I turned myself into what theatrical people call a "feeder" for the time being, putting questions, and now and then venturing a remark sufficiently suggestive to keep him going. His voice as he ran on gathered in strength, and waxed tuneful and mellow, until, if I had closed my eyes, I could almost have brought
myself to believe that it was our much-loved Mark Twain who was speaking with that musical drawl of his, shot through and through with that lyrical note which gave his voice such rare sweetness.
From Rossetti my new-found friend jumped to Whistler to whom he referred as "Jimmy" thence to Watts, and from Watts to Ruskin; from Ruskin he ran on to Burne-Jones, and then harked back to Rossetti again.
Rossetti now seemed to become an obsession with him; only it was Rossetti the poet instead of Rossetti the painter to whom he referred. In a few moments the stillness of that sordid coach was echoing to the sonnet of "Lost Days":
"Pretty good stuff, that, eh?" he said, at length.
"Fine!" said I, suddenly afflicted with a poverty of language quite comparable to his own in the way of worldly goods.
"Takes you here, however," said he, tapping his forehead. "Makes you think and somehow or other I I don't like to think. I'd rather feel and when it comes to that it's Christina Rossetti that takes you here." He tapped his left breast over his heart. "She's got all the rest of 'em skinned a mile, as far as I'm concerned. I love that 'Up Hill' thing of hers remember it?