I remember, however, a circumstance which makes me hopeful as to the progress of feeling; knowledge may come hereafter. I remember about twenty years ago proposing the figure and story of Lady Godiva as beautiful subjects for sculpture and painting. There were present on that occasion, among others, two artists and a poet. The two artists laughed outright, and the poet extemporised an epigram upon Peeping Tom. If I were to propose Lady Godiva as a subject now[4], I believe it would be received with a far different feeling even by those very men. If I were Queen of England I would have it painted in Fresco in my council chamber. There should be seen the palfrey with its rich housings, and near it, as preparing to mount, the noble lady should stand, timid, but resolved: her veil should lie on the ground; the drapery just falling from her fair limbs and partly sustained by one hand, while with the other she loosens her golden tresses. A bevy of waiting-maids, with averted faces, disappear hurriedly beneath the massive porch of the Saxon
palace, which forms the background, with sky and trees seen through openings in the heavy architecture. This is the picturesque version of the story; but there are many others. As a single statue, the figure of Lady Godiva affords an opportunity for the legitimate treatment of the undraped female form, sanctified by the purest, the most elevated associations;—by woman’s tearful pride and man’s respect and gratitude.
JOAN OF ARC.
Shakspeare, who is so horribly unjust to Joan of Arc, has put a sublime speech into her mouth where she answers Burgundy who had accused her of sorcery,—
| “Because you want the grace that others have. You judge it straight a thing impossible To compass wonders but by help of devils!” |
The whole theory of popular superstition comprised in three lines!
But Joan herself—how at her name the whole heart seems to rise up in resentment, not so much against her cowardly executioners as against those who have so wronged her memory! Never was a character, historically pure, bright, definite, and perfect in every feature and outline, so abominably treated in poetry and fiction,—perhaps for this reason, that she was in herself so exquisitely wrought, so complete a specimen of the heroic, the poetic, the romantic, that she could not be touched by art or modified by fancy, without being in some degree profaned. As to art, I never saw yet any representation of “Jeanne la grande Pastoure,” (except, perhaps, the lovely statue by the Princess of Wurtemburg,) which I could endure to look at—and even that gives us the contemplative simplicity, but not the power, intellect, and energy, which must have formed so large a part of the character. Then as to the poets, what shall be said of them? First Shakspeare, writing for the English stage, took up the popular idea of the character as it prevailed in England in his own time. Into the hypothesis that the greater part of Henry VI. is not by Shakspeare, there is no occasion to enter here; the original conception of the character of Joan of Arc may not be his, but he has left it untouched in its principal features. The English hated the memory of the French Heroine because she had caused the loss of France and had humiliated us as a nation; and our chroniclers revenged themselves and healed their wounded self-love by imputing her victories to witchcraft. Shakspeare, giving her the attributes which the historians of his time assigned to her, represents her as a warlike, arrogant sorceress—a “monstrous woman”—attended and assisted by demons. I pass over the depraved and perverse spirit in which Voltaire profaned this divine character. A theme which a patriot poet would have approached as he would have approached an altar, he has made a vehicle for the most licentious parody that ever disgraced a national literature. Schiller comes next, and hardly seems to me more excusable. Not only has he missed the character, he has deliberately falsified both character and fact. His “Johanna” might have been called by any other name; and the scene of his tragedy might have been placed anywhere in the wide world with just the same probability and truth. Schiller and Goethe held a principle that all considerations were to yield before the proprieties of art. But Milton speaks somewhere of those “faultless proprieties of nature” which never can be violated with impunity: and Art can never move freely but in the domain of nature and of truth. All the fine writing in Schiller’s “Maid of Orleans” can never reconcile me to its absolute and revolting falsehood. The sublime, simple-hearted girl who to the last moment regarded herself as set apart by God to do His work, he makes the victim of an insane passion for a young Englishman. In the love-sick classical heroines of Corneille and Racine there is nothing more Frenchified, more absurd, more revolting. Then he makes her die victorious on the field of battle defending the oriflamme;—far, far more glorious as well as more pathetic her real death—but it offended against Schiller’s æsthetic conception of the dignity of tragedy.
Lastly, we have Southey’s epic: what shall be said of it?—even what he said of the Lusiad of Camoens, “that it is read with little emotion, and remembered with little pleasure.” No. I do not wish to see Joan turned into a heroine of tragedy or tale, because, as it seems to me, the whole life and death of this martyred girl is too near us, and too historically distinct, and, I will add, too sacred, to be dressed out in romantic prose or verse. What Walter Scott might have made of her I do not know—something marvellously picturesque and life-like, no doubt—and yet I am glad he did not try his hand on her. But she remains a legitimate and most admirable subject for representative art; and as yet nothing has been done in sculpture to fix the ideal and heroic in her character, nor in painting, worthy of her exploits. There exists no contemporary portrait of her except in the brief description of her in the old French Chronicle of the Siege of Orleans, where it is said that her figure was tall and slender, her bust fine, her hair and eyes black; that she wore her hair short, and could never be persuaded to put on a head-piece, and farther (and in this respect both Schiller and Southey have wronged her), that she had never slain a man, using her consecrated sword merely to defend herself. I should like to see a fine equestrian statue of her by one of our best English sculptors, set up in a conspicuous place among us, as a national expiation.