In his memoir of his brother, Mr. William Michael Rossetti thus makes
mention of a ballad left by the poet which still remains unpublished:—
“It [the ballad] is most fully worthy of publication, but has not
been included in Rossetti’s ‘Collected Works,’ because he gave the
MS. to his devoted friend Mr. Theodore Watts, with whom alone now
rests the decision of presenting it or not to the public.”
And he afterwards mentions certain sonnets on the Sphinx, also in my
possession.
With the most generous intentions my dear and loyal friend William
Rossetti has here brought me into trouble.
Naturally such an announcement as the above has excited great curiosity
among admirers of Rossetti, and I am frequently receiving letters—some of
them cordial enough, but others far from cordial—asking, or rather
demanding, to know the reason why important poems of Rossetti’s have for
so long a period been withheld from the public. In order to explain the
delay I must first give two extracts from Mr. Hall Caine’s picturesque
‘Recollections of Rossetti,’ published in 1882:—
“The end was drawing near, and we all knew the fact. Rossetti had
actually taken to poetical composition afresh, and had written a
facetious ballad (conceived years before), of the length of ‘The
White Ship,’ called ‘Jan Van Hunks,’ embodying an eccentric story of
a Dutchman’s wager to smoke against the devil. This was to appear in
a miscellany of stories and poems by himself and Mr. Theodore Watts,
a project which had been a favourite one of his for some years, and
in which he now, in his last moments, took a revived interest,
strange and strong.”
“On Wednesday morning, April 5th, I went into the bedroom to which he
had for some days been confined, and wrote out to his dictation two
sonnets which he had composed on a design of his called ‘The Sphinx,’
and which he wished to give, together with the drawing and the ballad
before described, to Mr. Watts for publication in the volume just
mentioned. On the Thursday morning I found his utterance thick, and
his speech from that cause hardly intelligible.”
As the facts in connexion with this project exhibit, with a force that
not all the words of all his detractors can withstand, the splendid
generosity of the poet’s nature, I only wish that I had made them public
years ago, Rossetti (whose power of taking interest in a friend’s work
Mr. Joseph Knight has commented upon) had for years been urging me to
publish certain writings of mine with which he was familiar, and for
years I had declined to do so—declined for two simple reasons: first,
though I liked writing for its own sake—indulged in it, indeed, as a
delightful luxury—to enter formally the literary arena, and to go through
that struggle which, as he himself used to say, “had never yet brought
comfort to any poet, but only sorrow,” had never been an ambition of
mine; and, secondly, I was only too conscious how biased must the
judgment be of a man whose affections were so strong as his when brought
to bear upon the work of a friend.
In order at last to achieve an end upon which he had set his heart, he
proposed that he and I should jointly produce the volume to which Mr.
Hall Caine refers, and that he should enrich it with reproductions of
certain drawings of his, including the ‘Sphinx’ (now or lately in the
possession of Mr. William Rossetti) and crayons and pencil drawings in my
own possession illustrating poems of mine—those drawings, I mean, from
that new model chosen by me whose head Leighton said must be the
loveliest ever drawn, who sat for ‘The Spirit of the Rainbow,’ and that
other design which William Sharp christened ‘Forced Music.’
In order to conquer my most natural reluctance to see a name so unknown
as mine upon a title-page side by side with a name so illustrious as his,
he (or else it was his generous sister Christina, I forget which)
italianized the words Walter Theodore Watts into “Gualtiero Teodoro
Gualtieri”—a name, I may add in passing, which appears as an inscription
on one at least of the valuable Christmas presents he made me, a rare old
Venetian Boccaccio. My portion of the book was already in existence, but
that which was to have been the main feature of the volume, a ballad of
Rossetti’s to be called ‘Michael Scott’s Wooing’ (which had no relation
to early designs of his bearing that name), hung fire for this reason:
the story upon which the ballad was to have been based was discovered to
be not an old legend adapted and varied by the Romanies, as I had
supposed when I gave it to him, but simply the Ettrick Shepherd’s
novelette ‘Mary Burnet’; and the project then rested in abeyance until
that last illness at Birchington painted so graphically and pathetically
by Mr. Hall Caine.
For some reason quite inscrutable to the late John Marshall, who attended
him, and to all of us, this old idea seized upon his brain; so much so,
indeed, that Marshall hailed it as a good omen, and advised us to foster
it, which we did with excellent results, as will be seen by referring to
the very last entry in his mother’s touching diary as lately printed by
Mr. W. M. Rossetti: “March 28, Tuesday. Mr. Watts came down. Gabriel
rallied marvellously.”
Though the ballad, in Rossetti’s own writing, has ever since remained in
my possession, as have also the two sonnets in the MS. of another friend
who has since, I am delighted to know, achieved fame for himself, no one
who enjoyed the intimate friendship of Rossetti need be told that his
death took from me all heart to publish.
Time, however, is the suzerain before whom every king, even Sorrow
himself, bows at last. The rights of Rossetti’s admirers can no longer
be set at nought, and I am making arrangements to publish within the
present year ‘Jan Van Hunks’ and the ‘Sphinx Sonnets,’ the former of
which will show a new and, I think, unexpected side of Rossetti’s genius.