Chapter X
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
Thou knowest that island, far away and lone,
Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break
In spray of music and the breezes shake
O’er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,
While that sweet music echoes like a moan
In the island’s heart, and sighs around the lake,
Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,
A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.Life’s ocean, breaking round thy senses’ shore,
Struck golden song, as from the strand of Day:
For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay—
Pain’s blinking snake around the fair isle’s core,
Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play
Around thy lovely island evermore.
I am now brought to a portion of my study which may well give me pause—the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Rossetti. The latest remarks upon them are, I think, the best; they are by Mr. A. C. Benson in his monograph on Rossetti in the ‘English Men of Letters’:—
“It would be impossible to exaggerate the value of his friendship for Rossetti. Mr. Watts-Dunton understood him, sympathized with him, and with self-denying and unobtrusive delicacy shielded him, so far as any one can be shielded, from the rough contact of the world. It was for a long time hoped that Mr. Watts-Dunton would give the memoir of his great friend to the world, but there is such a thing as knowing a man too well to be his biographer. It is, however, an open secret that a vivid sketch of Rossetti’s personality has been given to the world in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s well-known romance ‘Aylwin,’ where the artist D’Arcy is drawn from Rossetti. . . . Though singularly independent in judgment, it is clear that, at all events in the later years of his life, Rossetti’s taste was, unconsciously, considerably affected by the critical preferences of Mr. Watts-Dunton. I have heard it said by one [139] who knew them both well that it was often enough for Mr. Watts-Dunton to express a strong opinion for Rossetti to adopt it as his own, even though he might have combated it for the moment. . . .
At the end of each part [of ‘Rose Mary’] comes a curious lyrical outburst called the Beryl-songs, the chant of the imprisoned spirits, which are intended to weld the poem together and to supply connections. It is said that Mr. Watts-Dunton, when he first read the poem in proof, said to Rossetti that the drift was too intricate for an ordinary reader. Rossetti took this to heart, and wrote the Beryl-songs to bridge the gaps; Mr. Watts-Dunton, on being shown them, very rightly disapproved, and said humorously that they turned a fine ballad into a bastard opera. Rossetti, who was ill at the time, was so much disconcerted and upset at the criticism, that Mr. Watts-Dunton modified his judgment, and the interludes were printed. But at a later day Rossetti himself came round to the opinion that they were inappropriate. They are curiously wrought, rhapsodical, irregular songs, with fantastic rhymes, and were better away. . . .
Then he began to settle down into the production of the single-figure pictures, of which Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote that ‘apart from any question of technical shortcomings, one of Rossetti’s strongest claims to the attention of posterity was that of having invented, in the three-quarter length pictures painted from one face, a type of female beauty which was akin to none other, which was entirely new, in short—and which, for wealth of sublime and mysterious suggestion, unaided by complex dramatic design, was unique in the art of the world.”
It is well known that Rossetti wished his life—if written at all—to be written by Mr. Watts-Dunton, unless his brother should undertake it. It is also well known that the brother himself wished it, but pressure of other matters prevented Mr. Watts-Dunton from undertaking it. I expected difficulties in approaching with regard to the delicate subject of his relations with Rossetti, but I was not prepared to find them so great as they have proved to be. When I wrote to him and asked him whether the portrait of D’Arcy in ‘Aylwin’ was to be accepted as a portrait of Rossetti, and when I asked him to furnish me with some materials and facts to form the basis of this chapter, I received from him the following letter:—
“My dear Mr. Douglas,—I have never myself affirmed that D’Arcy was to be taken as an actual portrait of Rossetti. Even if I thought that a portrait of him could be given in any form of imaginative literature, I have views of my own as to the propriety of giving actual portraits of men with whom a novelist or poet has been brought into contact. It is quite impossible for an imaginative writer to avoid the imperious suggestions of his memory when he is conceiving a character. Thousands of times in a year does one come across critical remarks upon the prototypes of the characters of such great novelists as Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and the rest. And I believe that every one of these writers would confess that his prominent characters were suggested to him by living individuals or by individuals who figure in history—but suggested only. And as to the ethics of so dealing with friends and acquaintances I have also views of my own. These are easily stated. The closer the imaginative writer gets to the portrait of a friend, or even of an acquaintance, the more careful must he be to set his subject in a genial and even a generous light. It would be a terrible thing if every man who has been a notable figure in life were to be represented as this or that at the sweet will of everybody who has known him. Generous treatment, I say, is demanded of every writer who makes use of the facets of character that have struck him in his intercourse with friend or acquaintance. I will give you an instance of this. When I drew De Castro in ‘Aylwin’ I made use of my knowledge of a certain individual. Now this individual, although a man of quite extraordinary talents, brilliance, and personal charm, bore not a very good name, because he was driven to live upon his wits. He had endowments so great and so various that I cannot conceive any line of life in which he was not fitted to excel—but it was his irreparable misfortune to have been trained to no business and no profession, and to have been thrown upon the world without means, and without useful family connections. Such a man must either sink beneath the oceanic waves of London life, or he must make a struggle to live upon his wits. This individual made that struggle—he struck out with a vigour that, as far as I know, was without example in London society. He got to know, and to know intimately, men like Ruskin, G. F. Watts, D. G. Rossetti, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, William Morris, Mr. Swinburne, Sir Edward Burne Jones, Cruikshank, and I know not what important people besides. When he was first brought into touch with the painters, he knew nothing whatever of art; in two or three years, as I have heard Rossetti say, he was a splendid ‘connoisseur.’ If he had been brought up as a lawyer he must have risen to the top of the profession. If he had been brought up as an actor he must, as I have heard a dramatist say, have risen to the top. But from his very first appearance in London he was driven to live upon his wits. And here let me say that this man, who was a bitter unfriend of my own, because I was compelled to stand in the way of certain dealings of his, but whom I really could have liked if he had not been obliged to live upon his wits at the expense of certain friends of mine, formed the acquaintance of the great men I have enumerated, not so much from worldly motives, as I believe, as from real admiration. But being driven to live upon his wits, he had not sufficient moral strength to afford a conscience, and the queerest stories were told—some of them true enough—of his dealings with those great men. Whistler’s anecdotes of him at one period set many a table in a roar; and yet so winsome was the man that after a time he became as intimate with Whistler as ever. If he had possessed a private income, and if that income had been carefully settled upon him, I believe he would have been one of the most honest of men; I know he would have been one of the most generous. His conduct to the late Treffry Dunn, from whom he could not have expected the least return except that of gratitude, was proof enough of his generosity. Of course to make use of so strange a character as this was a great temptation to me when I wrote ‘Aylwin.’ But in what has been called my ‘thumb-nail portrait of him,’ I treated the peccadilloes attributed to him in a playful and jocose way. It would have been quite wrong to have painted otherwise than in playful colours a character like this. Like every other man and woman in this world, he left behind him people who believed in him and loved him. It would have been cruel to wound these, and unfair to the man; and yet because I gave only a slight suggestion of his sublime quackery and supreme blarney, a writer who also knew something about him, but of course not a thousandth part of what I knew, said that I had tried my hand at depicting him in ‘Aylwin,’ but with no great success. As a matter of fact, I did not attempt to give a portrait of him: I simply used certain facets of his character to work out my story, and then dismissed him. On the other hand, where the character of a friend or acquaintance is noble, the imagination can work more freely—as in the case of Philip Aylwin, Cyril Aylwin, Wilderspin, Rhona Boswell, Winifred Wynne, Sinfi Lovell. And as to Rossetti, whom I have been charged by certain critics with having idealized in my picture of D’Arcy, all I have to say on that point is this—that if the noble and fascinating qualities which Rossetti showed had been leavened with mean ones I should not, in introducing his character into a story, have considered it right or fair or generous to dwell upon those mean ones. But as a matter of fact, during my whole intercourse with him he displayed no such qualities. The D’Arcy that I have painted is not one whit nobler, more magnanimous, wide-minded, and generous, than was D. G. Rossetti. As I have said on several occasions, he could and did take as deep an interest in a friend’s work as in his own. And to benefit a friend was the greatest pleasure he had in life. I loved the man so deeply that I should never have introduced D’Arcy into the novel had it not been in the hope of silencing the misrepresentations of him that began as soon as ever Rossetti was laid in the grave at Birchington, by depicting his character in colours as true as they were sympathetic. It has been the grievous fate of Rossetti to be the victim of an amount of detraction which is simply amazing and inscrutable. I cannot in the least understand why this is so. It is the great sorrow of my life. There is a fatality of detraction about his name which in its unreasonableness would be grotesque were it not heartrending. It would turn my natural optimism about mankind into pessimism were it not that another dear friend of mine—a man of equal nobility of character, and almost of equal genius, has escaped calumny altogether—William Morris. This matter is a painful puzzle to me. The only great man of my time who seems to have shared something of Rossetti’s fate, is Lord Tennyson. There seems to be a general desire to belittle him, to exaggerate such angularities as were his, and to speak of that almost childlike simplicity of character which was an ineffable charm in him as springing from boorishness and almost from loutishness. On the other hand, another great genius, Browning, for whom I had and have the greatest admiration, seems to be as fortunate as Morris in escaping the detractor. But I am wandering from Rossetti. I do not feel any impulse to write reminiscences of him. Too much has been written about him already—of late a great deal too much. The only thing written about him that has given me comfort—I may say joy, is this—it has been written by a man who knew him before I did, who knew him at the time he lost his wife. Mr. Val Prinsep, R.A., has declared that in Rossetti’s relations with his wife there was nothing whatever upon which his conscience might reasonably trouble him. I do not remember the exact words, but this was the substance of them. Mr. Val Prinsep is a man of the highest standing, and he knew Rossetti intimately, and he has declared in print that Rossetti could have had no qualms of conscience in regard to his relations with his wife. This, I say, is a source of great comfort to me and to all who loved Rossetti. That he was whimsical, fanciful, and at times most troublesome to his friends, no one knows better than I do.
No one, I say, is more competent to speak of the whims and the fancies and the troublesomeness of Rossetti than I am; and yet I say that he was one of the noblest-hearted men of his time, and lovable—most lovable.”
It would be worse than idle to enter at this time of day upon the painful subject of the “Buchanan affair.” Indeed, I have often thought it is a great pity that it is not allowed to die out. The only reason why it is still kept alive seems to be that, without discussing it, it is impossible fully to understand Rossetti’s nervous illness, about which so much has been said. I remember seeing in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s essay on Congreve in ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia’ a definition of envy as the ‘literary leprosy.’ This phrase has often been quoted in reference to the case of Buchanan, and also in reference to a recent and much more ghastly case between two intimate friends. Now, with all deference to Mr. Watts-Dunton, I cannot accept it as a right and fair definition. It is a fact no doubt that the struggle in the world of art—whether poetry, music, painting, sculpture, or the drama—is unlike that of the mere strivers after wealth and position, inasmuch as to praise one man’s artistic work is in a certain way to set it up against the work of another. Still, one can realize, without referring to Disraeli’s ‘Curiosities of Literature,’ that envy is much too vigorous in the artistic life. Now, whatever may have been the good qualities of Buchanan—and I know he had many good qualities—it seems unfortunately to be true that he was afflicted with this terrible disease of envy. There can be no question that what incited him to write the notorious article in the ‘Contemporary Review’ entitled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry,’ was simply envy—envy and nothing else. It was during the time that Rossetti was suffering most dreadfully from the mental disturbance which seems really to have originated in this attack and the cognate attacks which appeared in certain other magazines, that the intimacy between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Rossetti was formed and cemented. And it is to this period that Mr. William Rossetti alludes in the following words: “‘Watts is a hero of friendship’ was, according to Mr. Caine, one of my brother’s last utterances, easy enough to be credited.”
That he deserved these words I think none will deny; and that the friendship sprang from the depths of the nature of a man to whom the word ‘friendship’ meant not what it generally means now, a languid sentiment, but what it meant in Shakespeare’s time, a deep passion, is shown by what some deem the finest lines Mr. Watts-Dunton ever wrote—I mean those lines which he puts into the mouth of Shakespeare’s Friend in ‘Christmas at the Mermaid,’ lines part of which have been admirably turned into Latin by Mr. E. D. Stone, [147] and published by him in the second volume of that felicitous series of Latin translations,’ Florilegium Latinum’:—
‘MR. W. H.’
To sing the nation’s song or do the deed
That crowns with richer light the motherland,
Or lend her strength of arm in hour of need
When fangs of foes shine fierce on every hand,
Is joy to him whose joy is working well—
Is goal and guerdon too, though never fame.
Should find a thrill of music in his name;
Yea, goal and guerdon too, though Scorn should aim
Her arrows at his soul’s high citadel.But if the fates withhold the joy from me
To do the deed that widens England’s day,
Or join that song of Freedom’s jubilee
Begun when England started on her way—
Withhold from me the hero’s glorious power
To strike with song or sword for her, the mother,
And give that sacred guerdon to another,
Him will I hail as my more noble brother—
Him will I love for his diviner dower.Enough for me who have our Shakspeare’s love
To see a poet win the poet’s goal,
For Will is he; enough and far above
All other prizes to make rich my soul.
Ben names my numbers golden. Since they tell
A tale of him who in his peerless prime
Fled us ere yet one shadowy film of time
Could dim the lustre of that brow sublime,
Golden my numbers are: Ben praiseth well.