Part 4 (1/2)
III.
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 William Michael Rossetti thus makes mention of a ballad left by the poet which still remains unpublished:-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 s.h.i.+p,' 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 ill.u.s.trating 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 t.i.tle-page side by side with a name so ill.u.s.trious 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 pa.s.sing, 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 friends.h.i.+p 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.
IV.
It is a sweet and comforting thought for every poet that, whether or not the public cares during his life to read his verses, it will after his death care very much to read his letters to his mistress, to his wife, to his relatives, to his friends, to his butcher, and to his baker. And some letters are by that same public held to be more precious than others. If, for instance, it has chanced that during the poet's life he, like Rossetti, had to borrow thirty s.h.i.+llings from a friend, that is a circ.u.mstance of especial piquancy. The public likes-or rather it demands-to know all about that borrowed cash. Hence it behoves the properly equipped editor who understands his duty to see that not one allusion to it in the poet's correspondence is omitted. If he can also show what caused the poet to borrow those thirty s.h.i.+llings-if he can by learned annotations show whether the friend in question lent the sum willingly or unwillingly, conveniently or inconveniently-if he can show whether the loan was ever repaid, and if repaid when-he will be a happy editor indeed. Then he will find a large and a grateful public to whom the mood in which the poet sat down to write 'The Blessed Damosel' is of far less interest than the mood in which he borrowed thirty s.h.i.+llings.
We do not charge the editor of this volume {104} with exhibiting unusual want of taste. On the whole, he is less irritating to the poetical student than those who have laboured in kindred ”fields of literature.”
Indeed, we do not so much blame the editors of such books as we blame the public, whose coa.r.s.e and vulgar mouth is always agape for such pabulum.
The writer of this review possesses an old circulating-library copy of a book containing some letters of Coleridge. One page, and one only, is greatly disfigured by thumb marks. It is the page on which appears, not some precious hint as to the conclusion of 'Christabel,' but a domestic missive of Coleridge's ordering broad beans for dinner.
If, then, the name of those readers who take an interest in broad beans is legion compared with the name of those who take an interest in 'Kubla Khan,' is not the wise editor he who gives all due attention to the poet's favourite vegetable? Those who will read with avidity Rossetti's allusion to his wife's confinement in the letter in which he tells Allingham that ”the child had been dead for two or three weeks” will laugh to scorn the above remarks, and as they are in the majority the laugh is with them.
The editor of this volume laments that Allingham's letters to Rossetti are beyond all editorial reach. But who has any right to ask for Allingham's private letters? Rossetti, who was strongly against the printing of private letters, had the wholesome practice of burning all his correspondence. This he did at periodical holocausts-memorable occasions when the coruscations of the poet's wit made the sparks from the burning paper seem pale and dull. He died away from home, or not a sc.r.a.p of correspondence would have been left for the publishers.
Although the ”public” acknowledges no duties towards the man of literary or artistic genius, but would shrug up its shoulders or look with dismay at being asked to give five pounds in order to keep a poet from the workhouse, the moment a man of genius becomes famous the public becomes aware of certain rights in relation to him. Strangely enough, these rights are recognized more fully in the literary arena than anywhere else, and among them the chief appears to be that of reading an author's private letters. One advantage-and surely it is a very great one-that the ”writing man” has over the man of action is this: that, while the portrait of the man of action has to be painted, if painted at all, by the biographer, the writing man paints his own portrait for himself.
And as, in a deep sense, every biographer is an inventor like the novelist-as from the few facts that he is able to collect he infers a character-the man of action, after he is dead, is at the mercy of every man who writes his life. Is not Alexander the Great no less a figment of another man's brain than Achilles, or Macbeth, or Mr. Pickwick? But a poet, howsoever artistic, howsoever dramatic, the form of his work may be, is occupied during his entire life in painting his own portrait. And if it were not for the intervention of the biographer, the reminiscence writer, or the collector of letters for publication, our conception of every poet would be true and vital according to the intelligence with which we read his work.
This is why, of all English poets, Shakespeare is the only one whom we do thoroughly know-unless perhaps we should except his two great contemporaries Webster and Marlowe. Steevens did not exaggerate when he said that all we know of Shakespeare's outer life is that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, married, went to London, wrote plays, returned to Stratford, and died. Owing to this circ.u.mstance (and a blessed one it is) we can commune with the greatest of our poets undisturbed. We know how Shakespeare confronted every circ.u.mstance of this mysterious life-we know how he confronted the universe, seen and unseen-we know to what degree and in what way he felt every human pa.s.sion. There is no careless letter of his, thank G.o.d! to give us a wrong impression of him. There is no record of his talk at the Mermaid, the Falcon, or the Apollo saloon to make readers doubtful whether his printed utterances truly represent him.
Would that the will had been destroyed! then there would have been no talk about the ”second-best bed” and the like insane gabble. Suppose, by ill chance, a batch of his letters to Anna Hathaway had been preserved.