Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Sir Hall Caine

Rossetti was mistaken in supposing that I possessed the latest and best edition of his Poems, but I had seen the latest of all English editions, and had noted in it several valuable emendations which, in subsequent quotation, I had been careful to employ. One of these seemed to me to involve an immeasurable gain. A stanza of Sister Helen, in its first form, ran:

Oh, the wind is sad in the iron chill,
Sister Helen,
And weary sad they look by the hill;
But Keith of Ewern ‘s sadder still,
Little brother.—etc. etc.

In the later edition the fourth line of this stanza ran:

But he and I are sadder still.

The change adds enormously to one’s estimate of the characterisation. All through the ballad one wants to feel that, despite the bitterness of her speech, the heart of the relentless witch is breaking. Like The Broken Heart of Ford, the ballad with the amended line was a masterly picture of suppressed emotion. I hoped the new incident touched the same chord. Rossetti replied:

Thanks for your present letter, which I will answer with
pleasurable care. At present I send you the Tauchnitz
edition of my things. The bound copy is hideous, but more
convenient—the other pretty. You will find a good many
things bettered (I believe) even on the latest English
edition. I did not remember that the line you quote from
Sister Helen appeared in the new form at all in an English
issue. I am greatly pleased at your thinking it, as I do,
quite a transfiguring change... The next point I have marked
in your letter is that about the additions to Sister
Helen. Of course I knew that your hair must arise from your
scalp in protest. But what should you say if Keith of Ewern
were a three days’ bridegroom—if the spell had begun on the
wedding-morning—and if the bride herself became the last
pleader for mercy? I fancy you will see your way now. The
culminating, irresistible provocation helps, I think, to
humanize Helen, besides lifting the tragedy to a yet sterner
height.

If I had felt (as Rossetti predicted I should) an uneasy sensation about the roots of the hair upon hearing that he was making important additions to the ballad which seemed to me to be the finest of his works, the sensation in that quarter was not less, but more, upon learning the nature of those additions. But I mistook the character of the new incidents. That Sister Helen should be herself the abandoned bride of Ewern (for so I understood the poet’s explanation), and, as such, the last pleader for mercy, pointed, I thought, in the direction of the humanizing emendation (“But he and I are sadder still “) which had given me so much pleasure. That Keith of Ewern should be a three-days’ bridegroom, and that the spell should begin on the wedding morning, were incidents that seemed to intensify every line of the poem. In this view of Rossetti’s account of the additions, there were certainly difficulties out of which I could see no way, but I seemed to realise that Helen’s hate, like Macbeth’s ambition, had overleaped itself, and fallen on the other side, and that she would undo her work, if to return were not harder than to go on; her initiate sensibility had gained hard use, but even as hate recoils on love, so out of the ashes of hate love had arisen. In this view of the characterisation of Helen, the parallel with Macbeth struck me more and more as I thought of it. When Macbeth kills Duncan, and hears the grooms of the chamber cry in their sleep—“God bless us,” he cannot say “Amen,”

I had most need of blessing, and Amen
Stuck in my throat.

Helen pleading too late for mercy against the potency of the spell she herself had raised, seemed to me an incident that raised her to the utmost height of tragic creation. But Rossetti’s purpose was at once less ambitious and more satisfying.

Your passage as to the changes in Sister Helen could not
well (with all its fine suggestiveness) be likely to meet
exactly a reality which had not been submitted to your eye
in the verses themselves. It is the bride of Keith who is
the last pleader—as vainly as the others, and with a yet
more exulting development of vengeance in the forsaken
witch. The only acknowledgment by her of a mutual misery is
still found in the line you spotted as so great a gain
before, and in the last line she speaks. I ought to have
sent the stanzas to explain them properly, but have some
reluctance to ventilate them at present, much as I should
like the opportunity of reading them to you. They will meet
your eye in due course, and I am sure of your approval also
as regards their value to the ballad.... Don’t let the
changes in Helen get wind overmuch. I want them to be new
when published. Answer this when you can. I like getting
your epistles.