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.”