Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Sir Hall Caine

We reached Penrith as the grey of dawn had overspread the sky. It was six o’clock as we got into the carriage that was to drive us through the vale of St. John to our destination at the Legberthwaite end of it. The morning was now calm, the mountains looked loftier, grander, and yet more than ever precipitous from the road that circled about their base. Nothing could be heard but the calls of the awakening cattle, the rumble of cataracts far away, and the rush and surge of those that were near. Rossetti was all but indifferent to our surroundings, or displayed only such fitful interest in them as must have been affected out of a kindly desire to please me. He said the chloral he had taken daring the journey was upon him, and he could not see. At length we reached the house that was for some months to be our home. It stood at the foot of a ghyll, which, when swollen by rain, was majestic in volume and sound. The little house we had rented was free from all noise other than the occasional voice of a child or bark of a dog. Here at least he might bury the memory of the distractions of the city that vexed him. Save for the ripple of the river that flowed at his feet, the bleating of sheep on Golden Howe, the echo of the axe of the woodman who was thinning the neighbouring wood, and the morning and evening mail-coach horn, he might delude himself into forgetfulness that he belonged any longer to this noisy earth.

Next day Rossetti was exceptionally well, and astounded me by the proposal that we should ascend Golden Howe together—a little mountain of some 1000 feet that stands at the head of Thirlmere. With never a hope on my part of our reaching the summit, we set out for that purpose, but through no doubt the exhilarating effect of the mountain air, he actually compassed the task he had proposed to himself, and sat for an hour on that highest point from whence could be seen the Skiddaw range to the north, Haven’s Crag to the west, Styx Pass and Helvellyn to the east, and the Dunmail Raise to the south, with the lake below. Rossetti was struck by the variety of configuration in the hills, and even more by the variety of colour. But he was no great lover of landscape beauty, and the majestic scene before us produced less effect upon his mind than might perhaps have been expected. He seemed to be almost unconscious of the unceasing atmospheric changes that perpetually arrest and startle. the observer in whom love of external nature in her grander moods has not been weakened by disease. The complete extent of the Vale of St. John could be traversed by the eye from the eminence upon which we sat. The valley throughout its three-mile length is absolutely secluded: one has only the hills for company, and to say the truth they are sometimes fearful company too. Usually the landscape wears a cheerful aspect, but at times long fleecy clouds drive midway across the mountains, leaving the tops visible. The scenery is highly awakening to the imagination. Even the country people are imaginative, and the country is full of ghostly legend. I was never at any moment sensible that these environments affected Rossetti: assuredly they never agitated him, and no effort did he make to turn them to account for the purposes of the romantic ballad he had spoken of as likely to grow amidst such surroundings.

Being much more than ordinarily cheerful during the first evenings of our stay in the North, he talked sometimes of his past life and of the men and women he had known in earlier years. Carlyle’s Reminiscences had not long before been published. Mrs. Carlyle, therein so extravagantly though naturally belauded, he described as a bitter little woman, with, however, the one redeeming quality of unostentatious charity: “The poor of Chelsea,” he said, “always spoke well of her.” “George Eliot,” whose genius he much admired, he had ceased to know long before her death, but he spoke of the lady as modest and retiring, and amiable to a fault when the outer crust of reticence had been broken through. Longfellow had called upon him whilst he was painting the Dante’s Dream. The old poet was Courteous and complimentary in the last degree; he seemed, however, to know little or nothing about painting as an art, and also to have fallen into the error of thinking that Rossetti the painter and Sossetti the poet were different men; in short, that the Dante of that name was the painter, and the William the poet. Upon leaving the house, Longfellow had said: “I have been glad to meet you, and should like to have met your brother; pray, tell him how much I admire his beautiful poem, The Blessed Damozel” Giving no hint of the error, Rossetti said he had answered, “I will tell him.” He painted a little during our stay in the North, for it was whilst there that he began the beautiful replica of his Proserpina, now the property of Mr. Valpy. I found it one of my best pleasures to watch a picture growing under his hand, and thought it easy to see through the medium of his idealised heads, cold even in their loveliness, unsubstantial in their passion, that to the painter life had been a dream into which nothing entered that was not as impalpable as itself. Tainted by the touch of melancholy that is the blight that clings to the purest beauty, his pictured faces were, in my view, akin to his poetry, every line of which, as he sometimes recited it, seemed as though it echoed the burden of a bygone sorrow—the sorrow of a dream rather than that of a life, or of a life that had been itself a dream. I also then realised what Mr. Theodore Watts has said in a letter just now written to me from Sark, 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.”

On one occasion the talk turned on the eccentricities and affectations of men of genius, and I did my best to-ridicule them unsparingly, saying they were a purely modern extravagance, the highest intellects of other times being ever the sanest, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Coleridge, Wordsworth; the root of the evil had been Shelley, who was mad, and in imitation of whose madness, modern men of genius must many of them be mad also, until it had come to such a pass-that if a gifted man conducted himself throughout life with probity and propriety we instantly began to doubt the value of his gifts. Rossetti evidently thought that in all this I was covertly hitting out at himself, and cut short the conversation with an unequivocal hint that he had no affectations, and could not account himself an authority with respect to them.

With such talk a few of our evenings were spent, but too soon the insatiable craving for the drug came with renewed force, and then all pleasant intercourse was banished. Night after night we sat up until eleven, twelve, and one o’clock, watching the long hours go by with heavy steps; waiting, waiting, waiting for the time at which he could take his first draught, and drop into his pillowed place and snatch a dreamless sleep of three or four hours’ duration.

In order to break the monotony of nights such as I describe I sometimes read from Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne, but more frequently induced Rossetti to recite. Thus, with failing voice, he would again and again attempt, at my request, his Cloud Confines, or passages from The King’s Tragedy, and repeatedly, also, Poe’s Ulalume and Raven. I remember that, touching the last-mentioned of these poems, he remarked that out of his love of it while still a boy his own Blessed Damozel originated. “I saw,” he said, “that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven.” At that time of the year the night closed in as early as seven or eight o’clock, and then in that little house among the solitary hills his disconsolate spirit would sometimes sink beyond solace into irreclaimable depths of depression.

It was impossible that such a condition of things should last, and it was with unspeakable relief that I heard Rossetti express a desire to return home. Mr. Watts, who at that time was at Stratford-upon-Avon, had promised to join us, but now wrote to say that this was impossible. Had it been otherwise, Rossetti would willingly have remained, but now he longed to get back to London. His life had lost its joys. The success of his Liverpool picture was almost as nothing to him, and the enthusiastic reception given to his book gave him not more than a passing pleasure, though he was deeply touched by the sympathetic and exhaustive criticism published by Professor Dowden in The Academy, as well as by Professor Colvin’s friendly monograph in The World. At length one night, a month after our arrival, we set out on our return, and well do I remember the pathos of his words as I helped him (now feebler than ever) into his house. “Thank God! home at last, and never shall I leave it again!”

Very natural was the deep concern of his friends, especially of his brother and Mr. Shields, at finding him return even less well than he had set out. With deeper reliance on past knowledge of the man, Mr. Watts still took a hopeful view, attributing the physical prostration to hypochondriasis, which might, in common with all similar nervous ailments, impose as much pain upon the victim as if the sufferings complained of had a real foundation in positive disease, but might also give way at any moment when the victim could be induced to take a hopeful view of life. The cheerfulness of Mr. Watts’s society, after what I well know must have been the lugubrious nature of my own, had at first its usual salutary effect upon Rossetti’s spirits, and I will not forbear to say that I, too, welcomed it as a draught of healing morning air after a month-long imprisonment in an atmosphere of gloom. But I was not yet freed of my charge. The sense of responsibility which in the solitude of the mountains had weighed me down, was now indeed divided with his affectionate family and the friends who were Rossetti’s friends before they were mine, and who came at this juncture with willing help, prompted chiefly, of course, by devotion to the great man in sore trouble, but also—I must allow myself to think—in one or two cases by desire to relieve me of some of the burden of the task that had fallen so unexpectedly upon me. Foremost among such disinterested friends was of course the friend I have spoken of so frequently in these pages, and for whom I now felt a growing regard arising as much out of my perception of the loyalty of his comradeship as the splendour of his gifts. But after him in solicitous service to Rossetti, at this moment of great need, came Frederick Shields (the fine tissue of whose highly-strung nature must have been sorely tried by the strain to which it was subjected), Mr. W. B. Scott, whose visits were never more warmly welcomed by Rossetti than at this season, the good and gifted Miss Boyd, and of course Rossetti’s brother, sister, and mother, to each of whom he was affectionately attached. Strange enough it seemed that this man who, for years had shunned the world and chosen solitude when he might have had society, seemed at last to grow weary of his loneliness. But so it was. Rossetti became daily more and more dependent upon his friends for company that should not fail him, for never for an hour now could he endure to be alone. Remembering this, I almost doubt if by nature he was at any time a solitary. There are men who feel more deeply the sense of isolation amidst the busiest crowds than within the narrowest circle of intimates, and I have heard from Rossetti reminiscences of his earlier life that led me to believe that he was one of the number. Perhaps, after all, he wandered from the world rather from the dread than with the hope of solitude. In such pleasant intercourse as the visits of the friends I have named afforded, was the sadness of the day in a measure dissipated, but when night came I never failed to realise that no progress whatever had been made. I tried to check the craving for chloral, but I could as easily have checked the rising tide: and where the lifelong assiduity of older friends had failed to eradicate a morbid, ruinous, and fatal thirst, it was presumptous if not ridiculous to imagine that the task could be compassed by a frail creature with heart and nerves of wax. But the whole scene was now beginning to have an interest for me more personal and more serious than I have yet given hint of. The constant fret and fume of this life of baffled effort, of struggle with a deadly drug that had grown to have an objective existence in my mind as the existence of a fiend, was not without a sensible effect upon myself. I became ill for a few days with a low fever, but far worse than this was the fact that there was creeping over me the wild influence of Rossetti’s own distempered imaginings.

Once conscious of such influence I determined to resist it, but how to do so I knew not without flying utterly away from an atmosphere in which my best senses seemed to stagnate, and burying the memory of it for ever.

The crisis was pending, and sooner than we expected it came. A nurse was engaged. One evening Dr. Westland Marston and his son Philip Bourke Marston came to spend a few hours with Rossetti, For a while he seemed much cheered by their bright society, but later on he gave those manifestations of uneasiness which I had learned to know too well. Removing restlessly from seat to seat, he ultimately threw himself upon the sofa in that rather awkward attitude which I have previously described as characteristic of him in moments of nervous agitation. Presently he called out that his arm had become paralysed, and, upon attempting to rise, that his leg also had lost its power. We were naturally startled, but knowing the force of his imagination in its influence on his bodily capacity, we tried playfully to banish the idea. Raising him to his feet, however, we realised that from whatever cause, he had lost the use of the limbs in question, and in the utmost alarm we carried him to his bedroom, and hurried away for Mr. Marshall It was found that he had really undergone a species of paralysis, called, I think, loss of co-ordinative power. The juncture was a critical one, and it was at length decided by the able medical adviser just named, that the time had come when the chloral, which was at the root of all this mischief, should be decisively, entirely, and instantly cut off. To compass this end a young medical man, Mr. Henry Maudsley, was brought into the house as a resident to watch and manage the case in the intervals of Mr. Marshall’s visits. It is not for me to offer a statement of what was done, and done so ably at this period. I only know that morphia was at first injected as a substitute for the narcotic the system had grown to demand; that Rossetti was for many hours delirious whilst his body was passing through the terrible ordeal of having to conquer the craving for the former drug, and that three or four mornings after the experiment had been begun he awoke calm in body, and clear in mind, and grateful in heart. His delusions and those intermittent suspicions of his friends which I have before alluded to, were now gone, as things in the past of which he hardly knew whether in actual fact they had or had not been. Christmas Day was now nigh at hand, and, still confined to his room, he begged me to promise to spend that day with him; “otherwise,” he said, “how sad a day it must be for me, for I cannot fairly ask any other.” With a tenderness of sympathy I shall not forget, Mr. Scott had asked me to dine that day at his more cheerful house; but I reflected that this was to be my first Christmas in London and it might be Rossetti’s last, so I put by pleasanter considerations. We dined alone, but, somewhat later, William Rossetti, with true brotherly affection, left the guests at his own house, and ran down to spend an hour with the invalid. We could hear from time to time the ringing of the bells of the neighbouring churches, and I noticed that Rossetti was not disturbed by them as he had been formerly. Indeed, the drug once removed, he was in every sense a changed man. He talked that night brightly, and with more force and incisiveness, I thought, than he had displayed for months. There was the ring of affection in his tone as he said he had always had loyal friends; and then he spoke with feeling of Mr. Watts’s friendship, of Mr. Shields’s, and afterwards he spoke of Mr. Burne Jones who had just previously visited him, as well as of Mr. Madox Brown, and his friendship of a lifetime; of Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Morris, Mr. Stephens, Mr. Boyce, and other early friends. He said a word or two of myself which I shall not repeat, and then spoke with emotion of his mother and sister, and of his sister who was dead, and how they were supported through their sore trials by religious resignation. He asked if I, like Shields, was a believer, and seemed altogether in a softer and more spiritual mood than I remember to have noticed before.