Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 346, August, 1844

by Various

Perhaps there is no play of Schiller's which is read with more general pleasure than the Maid of Orleans, nor one against which so many critical objections have been raised. Some of these we wish to examine, in order either to remove, or with greater accuracy to re-state them. It will be seen at once that we have no intention of entering into any general review or estimate of this great dramatic poet. Too much has been written, and especially in this place, on Schiller, to permit us to be tempted into any such design. We shall not wander from the single play we have selected for our criticism.

On recalling to mind the story of Joan d'Arc, what is the point of view in which that singular person presents herself to us? Joan d'Arc—whom we shall call, after her title in the play, Johanna—a village maiden, and a fugitive from her home, turned the tide of victory in the great war which, in her time, was raging in France. As she effected this through the influence which a belief in her supernatural power and celestial inspiration exerted upon the army of Charles; and as, on the other hand, the cruel fate she herself personally encountered from her enemies, was the consequence of an opposite belief in her witchcraft, or possession by the devil; the unhappy maiden presents herself to us, in a strictly historical point of view, as one of those wild visionaries whom solitude occasionally rears, become suddenly the sport of the tumultuous feelings of two rival hosts, elevated by the one to a saint and the companion of angels, and by the other blackened into a witch and the associate of demons. History has relieved her moral character from the aspersions thrown upon it, and philosophy has quite denuded her of the least claims to supernatural power, whether derived from above or from below: nothing remains but the enthusiast and the visionary, and the strange position into which circumstances conducted her. And this position of the thought-bewildered maid is rendered the more striking, when we consider that it was her own countrymen who judged of her in so contradictory a manner; for the war which raged around her was rather a civil war, in which one of the parties had formed an alliance with England, than a national war between France and England. It was by Frenchmen that she was extolled and reverenced, and by Frenchmen that she was condemned and executed: it was under the auspices, and with the blessings, of the church that she conquered; it was the church that execrated her, and sent her as an abomination to the stake.

This point of view is not only historically true, but replete, we think, with poetic interest. The maiden is not, indeed, invested with any supernatural attributes; we see her here neither more nor less than the pious and day-dreaming enthusiast; but an enthusiast for her country—an enthusiast for a young prince whom she has been taught to honour, and whose reverse of fortune has deeply affected her. We see this young enthusiast—her imagination swarming with visions, her heart beating with generous aspirations—thrown out from her village retirement upon the tumult of war; we see her snatched up, as by a whirlwind, by the fanaticism of the multitude, who bear her, as she bears her banner, onwards in their career, and conquer under this new standard they have reared. We see her arriving at a success which, notwithstanding her own prophecies, must have astonished herself. When the king has been crowned at Rheims, something whispers to her that she ought now to retreat into her native village, or, what was the only fitting termination for her course, into some religious house, and find there a harbour from the tempest on which she is tossing. But the selfish men around her will not let her go. She may guide them a little yet. They bear the torch while there is an ember left. Then comes the changeful fortune of war, defeat and imprisonment; and now we see the same poor human heart, its visions soiled and clouded, its courage beaten down, surrounded only by enemies and scoffers, beginning even to suspect itself of imposture and impiety. She who had felt as a saint, hears herself exorcised as a sorcerer; and, by and by, a crowd of men, churchmen and civilians, stand round in triumph to see her burnt and consumed as a thing unholy and impure, whose life had been, not, as she had deemed, a perpetual devotion, but a perpetual blasphemy.

But although it appears to us that this, which is the true historical point of view, is also the most replete with poetic interest, it may not be an interest so well adapted to the drama as to other species of poetry. The heroine is here made the prey of the two rival factions, who appear to contend, not only for the possession of her person, but for the domination over her mind; not enough is attributed to her individual will and character; the action of the piece does not immediately flow from her; and the people, with its strange faiths and monstrous caprices, becomes the veritable hero. It was for this reason, we presume, that Schiller rejected what, in our days, is the simple and natural manner of considering his subject, and adopted a different point of view. Designating his play as a romantic tragedy, he resolved to represent the maid as really inspired by Heaven—as veritably commissioned by the Virgin—as endowed, bonâ fide, with miraculous powers. She is thus the living centre of the action. Whatever is effected by the appearance of the Maid of Orleans, is effected by her individual prowess, or the aid of heaven administered through her.

This was a bold attempt, and very boldly has Schiller executed it. He has stopped at no middle point. He has not scrupled to represent the fabulous miracles of a superstitious age as actually taking place before us. Johanna gives proofs of her faculty of second-sight; she sees, while at the camp of the Dauphin, the death of Salisbury before Orleans; she performs in our presence those miracles by which she is said to have first established her reputation at the court—recognising the Dauphin at once, although he had purposely resigned his post of dignity to another, and reciting to him the secret prayer which he had, the night before, offered up to God in the solitude of his own chamber. And not only are the fables, which the chronicles of the times have handed down to us, enacted as veritable facts, but the poet has added miracles and prodigies of his own invention; and in particular, a certain spectre of a black knight—who appears to us to have been introduced as much for the sake of supporting the supernatural character of the piece as for any other purpose.

This hardihood of the poet has by some critics been censured. For ourselves, we have a lingering and obstinate regret that Schiller ever thought it necessary to forsake the true for the fabulous; that he did not restrict himself to representing the faith of the age in the dialogue of his personages; that he did not content himself with marvels related only in the imitated conversation of superstitious persons. The most sceptical of men admit the reality and fervour of superstitious beliefs; and in depicting them in all their vitality, the poet is still adhering rigidly to truth: it is for the reader to sympathize with them or not at his pleasure. But Schiller having resolved to represent as fact the superstitious faith of the times, instead of building upon that faith as his fact; having determined that Johanna should be verily inspired, and see visions, and be the champion of the Holy Virgin for the salvation of France—we think he was quite right in casting aside all timidity, all remaining scruples of reason, and freely giving up his scene to prodigies and marvels. If you must lie, lie boldly—is a good maxim for poets as well as rogues. Above all, do we dislike that dubious and pitiful position which a narrator of supernatural events sometimes falls into, where the reader is perpetually asking himself whether the author seriously intends to task his credulity or not.

We must here, however, remark that, even when the poet represents the supernatural as the faith only of others, he must still, in order to do this effectively, awaken some degree of superstitious feeling in ourselves. To understand the belief or delusion of another without more or less participating in it, is a state of mind in which the philosopher might be very well content to place us, but which by no means suits the purposes of the poet. We must be made to partake for the moment, to some slight degree, in the superstitious feelings of the past age which is brought before us, or we can no longer feel that sympathetic interest which the poet seeks to create. The spectacle presented to us becomes one of mere curiosity. As well might we look through a microscope, and watch the world of animalculae it reveals. Very curious that little world; but we take no part in any of its proceedings, violent as they evidently are. And here lies the reason, we apprehend, why dramatic representations of insanity are so generally unsuccessful. We cannot participate in the capricious delusions of the maniac, who becomes, therefore, a mere object of wonder or curiosity. The moment when the lunatic affects us most deeply is, when he approaches nearest to the ordinary current of human thought—it is the moment when he comes back to reason, and its too frequent companion, the sense of pain.

We make this observation, because it probably had its weight in determining the poet in the course he pursued. Schiller probably reflected that, whether he related his marvels in the dialogue of his personages, or represented them as facts in his drama, he must in both cases depend, for the impression he should produce, on a successful appeal to the superstitious feelings of his contemporaries. In whatever era a poet may find his materials, his authority for using them must lie in the age he writes for—in the interest they are capable of exciting in that age. His success as a dramatic poet required that he should kindle the love of the marvellous; and he may have thought that, in an artistical point of view, the question resolved itself into one of policy, of means to an end—whether it were better to assail our credulity by open force, and so take it by storm, or to content himself with a less advantage, gained by more insidious but surer approaches.

With all his boldness, and all his genius, has Schiller succeeded in his treatment of the miraculous? We hesitate to reply. There is a peculiar difficulty in deciding how far a poet has been successful in an appeal to superstitious feelings; it is this, that in such cases every intelligent reader feels that he must be aidant and assistant in the subjection of his own rebellious reason, prompt at every moment to turn with impatience and derision from the utterly incredible. This necessity to be a party concerned in the business, leaves him in doubt how far he has been compelled by the poet, and how far he has, or ought to have, voluntarily surrendered. After all, the use of the marvellous in poetry is not so much itself to impress us with awe and astonishment, as to supply novel and striking situations for the display of human feelings. When Johanna, for instance, describes the visitation by the Virgin, and declares her sacred mission, we listen unmoved. Not so, when, having felt the touch of human passion, she sighs to re-enter into the common rank of mortals, and laments the dreadful honour that has been imposed upon her. Yet this latter sentiment, so natural and so affecting, could not be separated from the previous fable. In this lies the difference between the poetry of a rude and a cultivated age. In the first, the supernatural is for itself sought for and admired; in the second, it is admitted for the sake of the singular opportunities it affords for the display of natural and powerful emotions.

There is another point in the tragedy of The Maid of Orleans, on which we feel no hesitation whatever in expressing a decisive opinion— namely, the violent departure from history in the catastrophe. But in order to make our remarks on this and some other points intelligible, we must enter a little further into the plot of the drama. Our detail shall be as brief as possible.[1]