Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Sir Hall Caine

“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. The same thing occurred with regard to the omission of the sonnet Nuptial Sleep from the new edition of the Poems in 1881. Mr. Watts took the view (to Rossetti’s great vexation at first) that this sonnet, howsoever perfect in structure and beautiful from the artistic point of view, was “out of place and altogether incongruous in a group of sonnets so entirely spiritual as The House of Life,” and Rossetti gave way: but upon the subject of Wordsworth in his relations to Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, he was quite inflexible to the last.

In a letter treating of other matters, Rossetti asked me if I thought “Christabel” really existed as a mediæval name, or existed at all earlier than Coleridge. I replied that I had not met with it earlier than the date of the poem. I thought Coleridge’s granddaughter must have been the first person to bear the name. The other names in the poem appear to belong to another family of names,—names with a different origin and range of expression,—Leoline, Géraldine, Roland, and most of all Bracy. It seemed to me very possible that Coleridge invented the name, but it was highly probable that he brought it to England from Germany, where, with Wordsworth, he visited Klopstock in 1798, about the period of the first part of the poem. The Germans have names of a kindred etymology and, even if my guess proved wide of the truth, it might still be a fact that the name had German relations. Another conjecture that seemed to me a reasonable one was that Coleridge evolved the name out of the incidents of the opening passages of the poem. The beautiful thing, not more from its beauty than its suggestiveness, suited his purpose exactly. Rossetti replied:

Resuming the thread of my letter, I come to the question of
the name Christabel, viz.:—as to whether it is to be found
earlier than Coleridge. I have now realized afresh what I
knew long ago, viz.:—that in the grossly garbled ballad of
Syr Cauline, in Percy’s Reliques, there is a Ladye
Chrystabelle, but as every stanza in which her name appears
would seem certainly to be Percy’s own work, I suspect him
to be the inventor of the name, which is assuredly a much
better invention than any of the stanzas; and from this
wretched source Coleridge probably enriched the sphere of
symbolic nomenclature. However, a genuine source may turn
up, but the name does not sound to me like a real one. As to
a German origin, I do not know that language, but would not
the second syllable be there the one accented? This seems to
render the name shapeless and improbable.

I mentioned an idea that once possessed me despotically. It was that where Coleridge says

Her silken robe and inner vest
Dropt to her feet, and full in view
Behold! her bosom and half her side—
A sight to dream of and not to tell,. . .
Shield the Lady Christabel!

he meant ultimately to show eyes in the bosom of the witch. I fancied that if the poet had worked out this idea in the second part, or in his never-compassed continuation, he must have electrified his readers. The first part of the poem is of course immeasurably superior in witchery to the second, despite two grand things in the latter—the passage on the severance of early friendships, and the conclusion; although the dexterity of hand (not to speak of the essential spirit of enchantment) which is everywhere present in the first part, and nowhere dominant in the second, exhibits itself not a little in the marvellous passage in which Géraldine bewitches Christabel. Touching some jocose allusion by Rossetti to the necessity which lay upon me to startle the world with a continuation of the poem based upon the lines of my conjectural scheme, I asked him if he knew that a continuation was actually published in Coleridge’s own paper, The Morning Post. It appeared about 1820, and was satirical of course—hitting off many peculiarities of versification, if no more. With Coleridge’s playful love of satirising himself anonymously, the continuation might even be his own. Rossetti said:

I do not understand your early idea of eyes in the bosom
of Géraldine. It is described as “that bosom old,” “that
bosom cold,” which seems to show that its withered character
as combined with Geraldine’s youth, was what shocked and
warned Christabel. The first edition says—
A sight to dream of, not to tell:—
And she is to sleep with Christabel!
I dare say Coleridge altered this, because an idea arose,
which I actually heard to have been reported as Coleridge’s
real intention by a member of contemporary circles (P. G.
Patmore, father of Coventry P. who conveyed the report to
me)—viz., that Géraldine was to turn out to be a man!! I
believe myself that the conclusion as given by Gillman from
Coleridge’s account to him is correct enough, only not
picturesquely worded. It does not seem a bad conclusion by
any means, though it would require fine treatment to make it
seem a really good one. Of course the first part is so
immeasurably beyond the second, that one feels Chas. Lamb’s
view was right, and it should have been abandoned at that
point. The passage on sundered friendship is one of the
masterpieces of the language, but no doubt was written quite
separately and then fitted into Christabel. The two lines
about Roland and Sir Leoline are simply an intrusion and an
outrage. I cannot say that I like the conclusion nearly so
well as this. It hints at infinite beauty, but somehow
remains a sort of cobweb. The conception, and partly the
execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by
fascination the serpent-glance of Géraldine, is magnificent;
but that is the only good narrative passage in part two. The
rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling, at
the heels whereof followed Scott.

There are, I believe, many continuations of Christabel. Tupper did one! I myself saw a continuation in childhood, long before I saw the original, and was all agog to see it for years. Our household was all of Italian, not English environment, and it was only when I went to school later that I began to ransack bookstalls. The continuation in question was by one Eliza Stewart, and appeared in a shortlived monthly thing called Smallwood’s Magazine, to which my father contributed some Italian poetry, and so it came into the house. I thought the continuation spirited then, and perhaps it may have been so. This must have been before 1840 I think.

The other day I saw in a bookseller’s catalogue—Christabess, by S. T. Colebritche, translated from the Doggrel by Sir Vinegar Sponge (1816). This seems a parody, not a continuation, in the very year of the poem’s first appearance! I did not think it worth two shillings,—which was the price.... Have you seen the continuation of Christabel in European Magazine? of course it might have been Coleridge’s, so far as the date of the composition of the original was concerned; but of course it was not his.