THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE; (continued 2)

"'The terminating object of the landscape is the remains of Barden Tower, interesting from their form and situation, and still more so from the recollections which they excite.'"

The White Doe of Rylstone has been assigned chronologically to the year 1808; although part of it—probably the larger half—was written during the autumn of the previous year, and it remained unfinished in 1810, while the Dedication was not written till 1815. In the Fenwick note, Wordsworth tells us that the "earlier half" was written at Stockton-on-Tees "at the close" of 1807, and "proceeded with" at Dove Cottage, after his return to Grasmere, which was in April 1808. But on the 28th February, 1810, Dorothy Wordsworth, writing from Allan Bank to Lady Beaumont, says, "Before my brother turns to any other labour, I hope he will have finished three books of The Recluse. He seldom writes less than 50 lines every day. After this task is finished he hopes to complete The White Doe, and proud should we all be if it should be honoured by a frontispiece from the pencil of Sir George Beaumont. Perhaps this is not impossible, if you come into the north next summer."

A frontispiece was drawn by Sir George Beaumont for the quarto edition of 1815.

When part of the poem was finished, Wordsworth showed it to Southey; and Southey, writing to Walter Scott, in February 1808, said,—

"Wordsworth has just completed a most masterly poem upon the fate of the Nortons; two or three lines in the old ballad of The Rising of the North gave him the hint. The story affected me more deeply than I wish to be affected; younger readers, however, will not object to the depth of the distress, and nothing was ever more ably treated. He is looking, too, for a narrative subject, pitched in a lower key."

One of the most interesting letters of S. T. Coleridge to Wordsworth is an undated one, sent from London in the spring of 1808, containing a characteristic criticism of The White Doe. The Wordsworth family had asked Coleridge to discuss the subject of the publication of the poem with the Longmans' firm. It is more than probable that it was Coleridge's criticism of the structural defects in the poem, that led Wordsworth to postpone its publication. The following is part of the letter:—

"... In my reperusals of the poem, it seemed always to strike on my feeling as well as judgment, that if there were any serious defect, it consisted in a disproportion of the Accidents to the spiritual Incidents; and, closely connected with this,—if it be not indeed the same,—that Emily is indeed talked of, and once appears, but neither speaks nor acts, in all the first three-fourths of the poem. Then, as the outward interest of the poem is in favour of the old man's religious feelings, and the filial heroism of his band of sons, it seemed to require something in order to place the two protestant malcontents of the family in a light that made them beautiful as well as virtuous. In short, to express it far more strongly than I mean or think, in order (in the present anguish of my spirits) to be able to express it at all, that three-fourths of the work is everything rather than Emily; and then, the last—almost a separate and doubtless an exquisite poem—wholly of Emily. The whole of the rest, and the delivering up of the family by Francis, I never ceased to find, not only comparatively heavy, but to me quite obscure as to Francis's motives. On the few, to whom, within my acquaintance, the poem has been read, either by yourself or me (I have, I believe, read it only at the Beaumonts'), it produced the same effect.

"Now I have conceived two little incidents, the introduction of which, joined to a little abridgment, and lyrical precipitation of the last half of the third, I had thought would have removed this defect, so seeming to me, and bring to a finer balance the business with the action of the tale. But after my receipt of your letter, concerning Lamb's censures, I felt my courage fail, and that what I deemed a harmonizing would disgust you as a materialization of the plan, and appear to you like insensibility to the power of the history in the mind. Not that I should have shrunk back from the mere fear of giving transient pain, and a temporary offence, from the want of sympathy of feeling and coincidence of opinions. I rather envy than blame that deep interest in a production, which is inevitable perhaps, and certainly not dishonourable to such as feel poetry their calling and their duty, and which no man would find much fault with if the object, instead of a poem, were a large estate or a title. It appears to me to become a foible only when the poet denies, or is unconscious of its existence, but I did not deem myself in such a state of mind as to entitle me to rely on my own opinion when opposed to yours, from the heat and bustle of these disgusting lectures.

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"From most of these causes I was suffering, so as not to allow me any rational confidence in my opinions when contrary to yours, which had been formed in calmness and on long reflection. Then I received your sister's letter, stating the wish that I would give up the thought of proposing the means of correction, and merely point out the things to be corrected, which—as they could be of no great consequence—you might do in a day or two, and the publication of the poem—for the immediacy of which she expressed great anxiety—be no longer retarded. The merely verbal alteranda did appear to me very few and trifling. From your letter on L——, I concluded that you would not have the incidents and action interfered with, and therefore I sent it off; but soon retracted it, in order to note down the single words and phrases that I disliked in the books, after the two first, as there would be time to receive your opinion of them during the printing of the two first, in which I saw nothing amiss, except the one passage we altered together, and the two lines which I scratched out, because you yourself were doubtful. Mrs. Shepherd told me that she had felt them exactly as I did—namely, as interrupting the spirit of the continuous tranquil motion of The White Doe."

It will be seen from this letter that Wordsworth had gone over the poem with Coleridge, and that they had altered some passages "together"; that Coleridge had read a copy of it sent to the Beaumonts, doubtless at Dunmow in Essex; that he had thought of a plan by which the poem could be immensely improved, both by addition and subtraction; but that hearing from Wordsworth, or more probably from his sister Dorothy, that Charles Lamb had also criticised its structure, he gave up his intention of sending to his friend suggestions, which evidently implied a radical alteration of "the incidents and action" of the tale. It would have been extremely interesting to know how the author of Christabel and The Ancient Mariner proposed to recast The White Doe of Rylstone. It is, alas! impossible for posterity to know this, although it is not difficult to conjecture the line which the alterations would take. Wordsworth's genius was not great in construction, as in imagination; and he valued a story only as giving him a "point of departure" for a flight of fancy or of idealization. Early in 1808 he wrote to Walter Scott asking him for facts about the Norton family. Scott supplied him with them, and the following was Wordsworth's reply.

"Grasmere, May 14, 1808.

"My dear Scott—Thank you for the interesting particulars about the Nortons. I like them much for their own sakes; but so far from being serviceable to my poem, they would stand in the way of it, as I have followed (as I was in duty bound to do) the traditionary and common historic account. Therefore I shall say, in this case, a plague upon your industrious antiquarians, that have put my fine story to confusion."

From the "advertisement" which Wordsworth prefixed to his edition of 1815, I infer that the larger part of the poem was written at Stockton. In it he says that "the Poem of The White Doe was composed at the close of the year" (1807). This is an illustration of the vague manner in which he was in the habit of assigning dates. The Fenwick note, and the evidence of his sister's letter, is conclusive; although the fact that The Force of Prayer—written in 1807—is called in the Fenwick note "an appendage to The White Doe," is further confirmation of the belief that the principal part of the latter poem was finished in 1807. All things considered, The White Doe of Rylstone may be most conveniently placed after the poems belonging to the year 1807, and before those known to have been written in 1808; while The Force of Prayer naturally follows it.

The poem—first published in quarto in 1815—was scarcely altered in the editions of 1820, 1827, and 1832. In 1837, however, it was revised throughout, and in that year the text was virtually settled; the subsequent changes being few and insignificant, while those introduced in 1837 were numerous and important. A glance at the foot-notes will show that many passages were entirely rewritten in that year, and that a good many lines of the earlier text were altogether omitted. All the poems were subjected to minute revision in 1836-37; but few, if any, were more thoroughly recast, and improved, in that year than The White Doe of Rylstone. As a sample of the best kind of changes—where a new thought was added to the earlier text with admirable felicity—compare the lines in canto vii., as it stood in 1815, when the Lady Emily first saw the White Doe at the old Hall of Rylstone, after her terrible losses and desolation—

with the additional thought conveyed in the version of 1837—

In the "Reminiscences" of Wordsworth—written by the Hon. Mr. Justice Coleridge for the late Bishop of Lincoln's Memoirs of his uncle—the following occurs. (See vol. ii. p. 311.) "His conversation was on critical subjects, arising out of his attempts to alter his poems. He said he considered The White Doe as, in conception, the highest work he had ever produced. The mere physical action was all unsuccessful: but the true action of the poem was spiritual—the subduing of the will, and all inferior fancies, to the perfect purifying and spiritualizing of the intellectual nature; while the Doe, by connection with Emily, is raised as it were from its mere animal nature into something mysterious and saint-like. He said he should devote much labour to perfecting the execution of it in the mere business parts, in which, from anxiety 'to get on' with the more important parts, he was sensible that imperfections had crept in which gave the style a feebleness of character."

From this conversation—which took place in 1836—it will be seen that Wordsworth knew very well that there were feeble passages in the earlier editions; and that, in the thorough revision which he gave to all his poems in 1836-37, this one was specially singled out for "much labour." The result is seen by a glance at the changes of the text.

The notes appended by Wordsworth to the edition of 1815 explain some of the historical and topographical allusions in the poem. To these the following editorial notes may be added—

In 1153, the canons of the Augustinian Priory at Embsay, near Skipton, were removed to Bolton, by William Fitz Duncan, and his wife, Cecilia de Romillé, who granted it by charter in exchange for the Manors of Skibdem and Stretton. The establishment at Bolton consisted of a prior and about 15 canons, over 200 persons (including servants and lay brethren) being supported at Bolton. During the Scottish raids of the fourteenth century, the prior and canons had frequently to retreat to Skipton for safety. In 1542 the site of the priory and demesnes were sold to Harry Clifford, first Earl of Cumberland. From the last Earl of Cumberland it passed to the second Earl of Cork, and then to the Devonshire family, to which it still belongs. The following is part of the excellent account of the Priory, given in Murray's Yorkshire:—

"The chief relic of the Priory is the church, the nave of which after the Dissolution was retained as the chapel of this so-called 'Saxon-Cure.' This nave remains perfect, but the rest of the church is in complete ruin. The lower walls of the choir are Trans-Norman, and must have been built immediately after (if not before) the removal from Embsay. The upper walls and windows (the tracery of which is destroyed) are decorated. The nave is early English, and decorated; and the original west front remains with an elaborate Perpendicular front of excellent design, intended as the base of a western tower, which was never finished.... The nave (which has been restored under the direction of Crace)—the

is Early English on the south side, and Decorated on the north.... At the end of the nave aisle, enclosed by a Perpendicular screen, is a chantry, founded by the Mauleverers; and below it is the vault, in which, according to tradition, the Claphams of Beamsley and their ancestors the Mauleverers were interred upright—

"Whitaker, however, could never see this 'griesly sight' through the chink in the floor; and it is perhaps altogether traditional. The ruined portion of the church is entirely Decorated, with the exception of the lower walls of the choir. The transepts had eastern aisles. The north transept is nearly perfect: the south retains only its western wall, in which are two decorated windows. The piers of a central tower remain; but at what period it was destroyed, or if it was ever completed, is uncertain. The choir is long and aisleless. Some fragments of tracery remain in the south window, which was a very fine one. Below the window runs a Transitional Norman arcade. Some portions of tomb-slabs remain in the choir.... The church-yard lies on the north side of the ruins. This has been made classic ground by Wordsworth's poem."

Compare the poem The Force of Prayer, or the Founding of Bolton Priory, p. 204. Whitaker writes thus of the district of Upper Wharfedale at Barden. "Grey tower-like projections of rock, stained with the various hues of lichens, and hung with loose and streaming canopies of ling, start out at intervals." Before the restoration of Henry Clifford, the Shepherd-lord, to the estates of his ancestors—on the accession of Henry VII.—there was only a keeper's lodge or tower at Barden, "one of six which existed in different parts of Barden Forest. The Shepherd-lord, whose early life among the Cumberland Fells led him to seek quiet and retirement after his restoration, preferred Barden to his greater castles, and enlarged (or rather rebuilt) it so as to provide accommodation for a moderate train of attendants."

The circumstances which led to the Rising in the North, and the chief incidents of that unfortunate episode in English history, are traced in detail by Mr. Froude, in the fifty-third chapter of his History of England. They are also summarized, in a lecture on The White Doe of Rylstone, by the late Principal Shairp, in his Aspects of Poetry, from which the following passage is an extract (pp. 346-48).

"The incidents on which the White Doe is founded belong to the year 1569, the twelfth of Queen Elizabeth.

"It is well known that as soon as Queen Mary of Scotland was imprisoned in England, she became the centre around which gathered all the intrigues which were then on foot, not only in England but throughout Catholic Europe, to dethrone the Protestant Queen Elizabeth. Abroad, the Catholic world was collecting all its strength to crush the heretical island. The bigot Pope, Pius V., with the dark intriguer, Philip II. of Spain, and the savage Duke of Alva, were ready to pour their forces on the shores of England.

"At home, a secret negotiation for a marriage between Queen Mary and the Duke of Norfolk had received the approval of many of the chief English nobles. The Queen discovered the plot, threw Norfolk and some of his friends into the Tower, and summoned Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, immediately to appear at court. These two earls were known to be holding secret communications with Mary, and longing to see the old faith restored.

"On receiving the summons, Northumberland at once withdrew to Brancepeth Castle, a stronghold of the Earl of Westmoreland. Straightway all their vassals rose, and gathered round the two great earls. The whole of the North was in arms. A proclamation went forth that they intended to restore the ancient religion, to settle the succession to the crown, and to prevent the destruction of the old nobility. As they marched forward they were joined by all the strength of the Yorkshire dales, and, among others, by a gentleman of ancient name, Richard Norton, accompanied by eight brave sons. He came bearing the common banner, called the Banner of the Five Wounds, because on it was displayed the Cross with the five wounds of our Lord. The insurgents entered Durham, tore the Bible, caused mass to be said in the cathedral, and then set forward as for York. Changing their purpose on the way, they turned aside to lay siege to Barnard Castle, which was held by Sir George Bowes for the Queen. While they lingered there for eleven days, Sussex marched against them from York, and the earls, losing heart, retired towards the Border, and disbanded their forces, which were left to the vengeance of the enemy, while they themselves sought refuge in Scotland. Northumberland, after a confinement of several years in Loch Leven Castle, was betrayed by the Scots to the English, and put to death. Westmoreland died an exile in Flanders, the last of the ancient house of the Nevilles, earls of Westmoreland. Norton, with his eight sons, fell into the hands of Sussex, and all suffered death at York. It is the fate of this ancient family on which Wordsworth's poem is founded."

This statement as to the fate of Norton's sons, however, is not borne out by the historians. Mr. Froude says (History of England, chap. 53), "Two sons of old Norton and two of his brothers, after long and close cross-questioning in the Tower, were tried and convicted at Westminster. Two of these Nortons were afterwards pardoned. Two, one of whom was Christopher, the poor youth who had been bewildered by the fair eyes of the Queen of Scots at Bolton, were put to death at Tyburn, with the usual cruelties."

Little now remains of Rylstone Hall but the site. "Some garden flowers still, as when Whitaker wrote, mark the site of the pleasaunce. The house fell into decay immediately after the attainder of the Nortons; and, with the estates here, remained in the hands of the Crown until the second year of James I., when they were granted to the Earl of Cumberland. Although Wordsworth makes the Nortons raise their famous banner here, they assembled their followers in fact at Ripon (November 18, 1569), but their Rylstone tenants rose with them."

Naworth Castle, at the head of the vale of Llanercort, in the Gilsland district of Cumberland, was the seat of the Dacres from the reign of Edward III. George, Lord Dacre, the last heir-male of that family, was killed in 1559; and Lord William Howard (the third son of Thomas, Duke of Norfolk), who was made Warden of the Borders by Queen Elizabeth, and did much to introduce order and good government into the district, married the heiress of the Dacre family, and succeeded to the castle and estate of Naworth. The arms over the entrance of the castle are the Howard's and Dacre's quartered.

The Battle of the Standard was fought in 1137.

"One gleam of national glory broke the darkness of the time. King David of Scotland stood first among the partizans of his kinswoman Matilda, and on the accession of Stephen his army crossed the border to enforce her claim. The pillage and cruelties of the wild tribes of Galloway and the Highlands roused the spirit of the north; baron and freeman gathered at York round Archbishop Thurstan, and marched to the field of Northallerton to await the foe. The sacred banners of St. Cuthbert of Durham, St. Peter of York, St. John of Beverley, and St. Wilfrid of Ripon, hung from a pole fixed in a four-wheeled car, which stood in the centre of the host. 'I who wear no armour,' shouted the chief of the Galwegians, 'will go as far this day as any one with breastplate of mail;' his men charged with wild shouts of 'Albin, Albin,' and were followed by the Norman knighthood of the Lowlands. The rout, however, was complete; the fierce hordes dashed in vain against the close English ranks around the Standard, and the whole army fled in confusion to Carlisle." (J. R. Green's Short History of the English People, p. 99.)

"Some mounds near the tower are thought to have been used as butts for archers; and there are traces of a strong wall, running from the tower to the edge of a deep glen, whence a ditch runs to another ravine. This was once a pond, used by the Nortons for detaining the red deer within the township of Rylstone, which they asserted was not within the forest of Skipton, and consequently that the Cliffords had no right to hunt therein. The Cliffords eventually became lords of all the Norton lands here."

In January 1816, Wordsworth wrote thus to his friend Archdeacon Wrangham.

"Of The White Doe I have little to say, but that I hope it will be acceptable to the intelligent, for whom alone it is written. It starts from a high point of imagination, and comes round, through various wanderings of that faculty, to a still higher—nothing less than the apotheosis of the animal who gives the first of the two titles to the poem. And as the poem thus begins and ends with pure and lofty imagination, every motive and impetus that actuates the persons introduced is from the same source; a kindred spirit pervades, and is intended to harmonise, the whole. Throughout objects (the banner, for instance) derive their influence, not from properties inherent in them, not from what they are actually in themselves, but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with, or affected by, these objects. Thus the poetry, if there be any in the work, proceeds, as it ought to do, from the soul of man, communicating its creative energies to the images of the external world."

The following is from a letter to Southey in the same year:—"Do you know who reviewed The White Doe in the 'Quarterly'? After having asserted that Mr. W. uses his words without any regard to their sense, the writer says that on no other principle can he explain that Emily is always called 'the consecrated Emily.' Now, the name Emily occurs just fifteen times in the poem; and out of these fifteen, the epithet is attached to it once, and that for the express purpose of recalling the scene in which she had been consecrated by her brother's solemn adjuration, that she would fulfil her destiny, and become a soul,

The point upon which the whole moral interest of the piece hinges, when that speech is closed, occurs in this line,—

And to bring back this to the reader, I repeated the epithet."

In a letter to Wordsworth about The Waggoner, Charles Lamb wrote, June 7, 1819, "I re-read The White Doe of Rylstone; the title should be always written at length, as Mary Sabilla Novello, a very nice woman of our acquaintance, always signs hers at the bottom of the shortest note.... Manning had just sent it home, and it came as fresh to me as the immortal creature it speaks of. M. sent it home with a note, having this passage in it: 'I cannot help writing to you while I am reading Wordsworth's poem.... 'Tis broad, noble, poetical, with a masterly scanning of human actions, absolutely above common readers.'" (See The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. ii. pp. 25, 26.)

Henry Crabb Robinson's judgment, as given in his Diary, June 1815, is interesting. (See vol. i. p. 484.)

The following is from Principal Shairp's estimate of The White Doe of Rylstone in his Oxford Lectures, Aspects of Poetry (chapter xii. pp. 373-76). "What is it that gives to it" (the poem) "its chief power and charm? Is it not the imaginative use which the poet has made of the White Doe? With her appearance the poem opens, with her re-appearance it closes. And the passages in which she is introduced are radiant with the purest light of poetry. A mere floating tradition she was, which the historian of Craven had preserved. How much does the poet bring out of how little! It was a high stroke of genius to seize on this slight traditionary incident, and make it the organ of so much. What were the objects which he had to describe and blend into one harmonious whole. They were these:

"1. The last expiring gleam of feudal chivalry, ending in the ruin of an ancient race, and the desolation of an ancestral home.

"2. The sole survivor, purified and exalted by the sufferings she had to undergo.

"3. The pathos of the decaying sanctities of Bolton, after wrong and outrage, abandoned to the healing of nature and time.

"4. Lastly, the beautiful scenery of pastoral Wharfdale, and of the fells around Bolton, which blend so well with these affecting memories.

"All these were before him—they had melted into his imagination, and waited to be woven into one harmonious creation. He takes the White Doe, and makes her the exponent, the symbol, the embodiment of them all. The one central aim—to represent the beatification of the heroine—how was this to be attained? Had it been a drama, the poet would have made the heroine give forth in speeches, her hidden mind and character. But this was a romantic narrative. Was the poet to make her soliloquise, analyse her own feelings, lay bare her heart in metaphysical monologue? This might have been done by some modern poets, but it was not Wordsworth's way of exhibiting character, reflective though he was. When he analyses feelings they are generally his own, not those of his characters. To shadow forth that which is invisible, the sanctity of Emily's chastened soul, he lays hold of this sensible image—a creature, the purest, most innocent, most beautiful in the whole realm of nature—and makes her the vehicle in which he embodies the saintliness which is a thing invisible. It is the hardest of all tasks to make spiritual things sensuous, without degrading them. I know not where this difficulty has been more happily met; for we are made to feel that, before the poem closes, the Doe has ceased to be a mere animal, or a physical creature at all, but in the light of the poet's imagination, has been transfigured into a heavenly apparition—a type of all that is pure, and affecting, and saintly. And not only the chastened soul of her mistress, but the beautiful Priory of Bolton, the whole Vale of Wharfe, and all the surrounding scenery, are illumined by the glory which she makes; her presence irradiates them all with a beauty and an interest more than the eye discovers. Seen through her as an imaginative transparency, they become spiritualized; in fact, she and they alike become the symbol and expression of the sentiment which pervades the poem—a sentiment broad and deep as the world. And yet, any one who visits these scenes, in a mellow autumnal day, will feel that she is no alien or adventitious image, imported by the caprice of the poet, but altogether native to the place, one which gathers up and concentrates all the undefined spirit and sentiment which lie spread around it. She both glorifies the scenery by her presence, and herself seems to be a natural growth of the scenery, so that it finds in her its most appropriate utterance. This power of imagination to divine and project the very corporeal image which suits and expresses the image of a scene, Wordsworth has many times shown....

"And so the poem has no definite end, but passes off, as it were, into the illimitable. It rises out of the perturbations of time and transitory things, and, passing upward itself, takes our thoughts with it to calm places and eternal sunshine."—Ed.

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