Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Sir Hall Caine

Much older than any history
That is written in any book,

and lastly, to gather about her an overwhelming sense of infinite solace for the wronged and lost, and of the retributive justice with which man’s transgressions will be visited—this is, indeed, to hazard all things in the certainty of an upright purpose and true reward.

Shall no man hold his pride forewarn’d
Till in the end, the Day of Days,
At Judgment, one of his own race,
As frail and lost as you, shall rise,—
His daughter with his mother’s eyes!

Yet Rossetti made no treaty with puritanism, and in this respect his Jenny has something in common with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter—than which nothing, perhaps, that is so pure, without being puritanical, has reached us even from the land that gave Evangeline to the English tongue. The guilty love of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is never for an instant condoned, but, on the other hand, the rigorous severity of the old puritan community is not dwelt upon with favour. Relentless remorse must spend itself upon the man before the whole measure of his misery is full, and on the woman the brand of a public shame must be borne meekly to the end. But though no rancour is shown towards the austere and blind morality which puts to open discharge the guilty mother whilst unconsciously nourishing the yet more guilty father, we see the tenderness of a love that palliates the baseness of the amour, and the bitter depths of a penitence that cannot be complete until it can no longer be concealed. And so with Jenny. She may have transient flashes of remorseful consciousness, such as reveal to her the trackless leagues that separate what she was from what she is, but no effort is made to hide the plain truth that she is a courtesan, skilled only in the lures and artifices peculiar to her shameful function. No reformatory promptings fit her for a place at the footstool of the puritan. Nothing tells of winter yet; on the other hand, no virulent diatribes are cast forth against the society that shuts this woman out, as the puritan settlement turned its back on Hester Prynne. But we see her and know her for what she is, a woman like unto other women: desecrated but akin.

This dramatic quality of sitting half-passively above their creations and of leaving their ethics to find their own channels (once assured that their impulses are pure), the poet and the romancer possess in common. If there is a point of difference between their attitudes of mind, it is where Rossetti seems to reserve his whole personal feeling for the impeachment of lust;—

Like a toad within a stone
Seated while Time crumbles on;
Which sits there since the earth was cursed
For Man’s transgression at the first;
Which, living through all centuries,
Not once has seen the sun arise;
Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,
The earth’s whole summers have not warmed;
Which always—whitherso the stone
Be flung—sits there, deaf, blind, alone;—
Ay, and shall not be driven out
Till that which shuts him round about
Break at the very Master’s stroke,
And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,
And the seed of Man vanish as dust:—
Even so within this world is Lust.

Sister Helen was written somewhat later than The Blessed Damozel and the first draft of Jenny, and probably belonged to the poet’s twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year. The ballad involves a story of witchcraft A girl has been first betrayed and then deserted by her lover; so, to revenge herself upon him and his newly-married bride, she burns his waxen image three days over a fire, and during that time he dies in torment In Sister Helen we touch the key-note of Rossetti’s creative gift. Even the superstition which forms the basis of the ballad owes something of its individual character to the invention and poetic bias of the poet. The popular superstitions of the Middle Ages were usually of two kinds only. First, there were those that arose out of a jealous Catholicism, always glancing towards heresy; and next there were those that laid their account neither with orthodoxy nor unbelief, and were purely pagan. The former were the offspring of fanaticism; the latter of an appeal to appetite or passion, or fancy, or perhaps intuitive reason directed blindly or unconsciously towards natural phenomena. The superstition involved in Sister Helen partakes wholly of neither character, but partly of both, with an added element of demonology. The groundwork is essentially catholic, the burden of the ballad showing that the tragic event lies between Hell and Heaven:—

(O Mother, Mary Mother,
Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)

But the superstructural overgrowth is totally undisturbed by any animosity against heresy, and is concerned only with a certain ultimate demoniacal justice visiting the wrongdoer. Thus far the elemental tissue of the superstition has something in common with that of the German secret tribunal of the steel and cord; with this difference, however, that whereas the latter punishes in secret, even as the deity, the former makes conscious compact with the powers of evil, that whatever justice shall be administered upon the wicked shall first be purchased by sacrifice of the good. Sister Helen may burn, alive, the body and soul of her betrayer, but the dying knell that tells of the false soul’s untimely flight, tolls the loss of her own soul also:—

“Ah! what white thing at the door has cross’d,
Sister Helen?
Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost!”
“A soul that’s lost as mine is lost,
Little brother!”
(O Mother, Mary Mother,
Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)