It seems to me to be needful to bear in mind these lines, and the extremely close intimacy between these two poet-friends in order to be able to forgive entirely the unexampled scourging of Buchanan in the following sonnet if, as some writers think, Buchanan was meant:—
THE OCTOPUS OF THE GOLDEN ISLES
‘what! will they even strike at me?’Round many an Isle of Song, in seas serene,
With many a swimmer strove the poet-boy,
Yet strove in love: their strength, I say, was joy
To him, my friend—dear friend of godlike mien!
But soon he felt beneath the billowy green
A monster moving—moving to destroy:
Limb after limb became the tortured toy
Of coils that clung and lips that stung unseen.“And canst thou strike ev’n me?” the swimmer said,
As rose above the waves the deadly eyes,
Arms flecked with mouths that kissed in hellish wise,
Quivering in hate around a hateful head.—
I saw him fight old Envy’s sorceries:
I saw him sink: the man I loved is dead!
Here we get something quite new in satire—something in which poetry, fancy, hatred, and contempt, are mingled. The sonnet appeared first in the ‘Athenæum,’ and afterwards in ‘The Coming of Love.’ If Buchanan or any special individual was meant, I doubt whether any man has a moral right to speak about another man in such terms as these.
All the friends of Rossetti have remarked upon the extraordinary influence exercised upon him by Mr. Watts-Dunton. Lady Mount Temple, a great friend of the painter-poet, used to tell how when she was in his studio and found him in a state of great dejection, as was so frequently the case, she would notice that Rossetti’s face would suddenly brighten up on hearing a light footfall in the hall—the footfall of his friend, who had entered with his latch-key—and how from that moment Rossetti would be another man. Rossetti’s own relatives have recorded the same influence. I have often thought that the most touching thing in Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s beautiful monograph of his brother is the following extract from his aged mother’s diary at Birchington-on-Sea, when the poet is dying:—
‘March 28, Tuesday. Mr. Watts came down; Gabriel rallied marvellously.
This is the last cheerful item which it is allowed me to record concerning my brother; I am glad that it stands associated with the name of Theodore Watts.’
Here is another excerpt from the brother’s diary:—
‘Gabriel had, just before Shields entered the drawing-room for me, given two violent cries, and had a convulsive fit, very sharp and distorting the face, followed by collapse. All this passed without my personal cognizance. He died 9.31 p.m.; the others—Watts, mother, Christina, and nurse, in room; Caine and Shields in and out; Watts at Gabriel’s right side, partly supporting him.’
That Mr. Watts-Dunton’s influence over Rossetti extended even to his art as a poet is shown by Mr. Benson’s words already quoted. I must also quote the testimony of Mr. Hall Caine, who says, in his ‘Recollections’:—
“Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts’ influence in his critical estimates; and the case instanced was perhaps the only one in which I knew him to resist Mr. Watts’s opinion upon a matter of poetical criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to me, printed in Chapter VIII of this volume, will show. I had a striking instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I had heard and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius of his day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read out to me an additional stanza to the beautiful poem ‘Cloud Confines.’ As he read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently was very fond of it himself. But he surprised me by saying that he should not print it. On my asking him why, he said:
‘Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better without it.’
‘Well, but you like it yourself,’ said I.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but in a question of gain or loss to a poem I feel that Watts must be right.’
And the poem appeared in ‘Ballads and Sonnets’ without the stanza in question.”
Here is another beautiful passage from Mr. Hall Caine’s ‘Recollections’—a passage which speaks as much for the writer as for the object of his enthusiasm:—