The Maid of Orleans
Die Schönheit ist für ein glückliches Geschlecht; ein unglückliches
musz man erhaben zu rühren suchen.--_Letter of July 26, 1800_.
It was well observed by Wilhelm von Humboldt that Schiller's plays are
not repetitions of the same thing, such as talent is wont to produce
when it has once met with a success, but the productions of a spirit
that ever kept wrestling anew with the demands of art. With each fresh
attempt he essayed a really new theme, and taken as a whole his works
exhibit a remarkable variety of substance. Each one has its own
individuality, its own atmosphere. And he himself wished that this
should be so; it was a part of his study to avoid repeating himself.
'One must not become the slave of any general concept',--so he wrote to
Goethe in July, 1800,--'but have the courage to invent a new form for
each new matter and keep the type-idea flexible in one's mind.'
These words were penned with direct reference to 'The Maid of Orleans',
which was begun very soon after the completion of 'Mary Stuart'. Whether
Schiller then had in mind all those elements which subsequently led to
the sub-title, 'a romantic tragedy', is not at all certain; it would be
natural to surmise that he may have thought at first of a drama within
the lines of authentic tradition. However, we know very little in detail
about the genesis of this particular play. The letter just quoted tells
of the usual initial difficulty in concentrating the action, the
interesting occurrences being so widely separated in time and place.
Later letters hardly do more than occasionally to report progress; they
do not discuss artistic questions, nor give any information as to books
read. Three acts were finished by mid-winter, and the whole on the 15th
of April, 1801. Schiller had now learned his routine; he felt confidence
in himself and went ahead in his own way, with but little discussion
of his plans. What he finally gave to the world is a tragedy
in which he proceeds still further along the path of romantic
idealization,--proceeds indeed so far that one can no longer follow him
without some rather serious misgivings.
The French peasant girl becomes an ambassadress of heaven, gifted with
second sight and the power of working miracles. She not only leads the
French troops in battle, but she herself fights with a magic sword and
kills English soldiers with the ruthlessness of a veteran in slaughter.
Through it all, however, she is supposed to remain a tender-hearted and
lovable maiden, such as the highest officers of France may wish to
marry. By the command of the Holy Virgin, from whom her mission and
power derive, she is bound to refrain from all earthly love. A momentary
tenderness for the English general, Lionel, which leads her to spare his
life, presents itself to her conscience as an infraction of the divine
command. She is overwhelmed with remorse and loses all her power. Arm
and soul are paralyzed. Taxed by her superstitious father with
witchcraft, she cannot find speech to defend herself and imagines that a
thunder-clap is heaven's testimony against her. Then she wanders about
as a helpless and disgraced fugitive and is captured by English
soldiers. With fettered hands she is compelled to witness a new battle,
in which her countrymen, deprived of her aid, are about to be worsted.
But through adversity she has been purged of her sin. Her
self-confidence returns, and with it her miraculous power. By the
efficacy of prayer she breaks her chains and rushes into the fray. Her
reappearance brings victory to the French arms, but she herself is
mortally wounded and dies in glory on the battle-field.
It is evident that such a conception carries us back into the dreamland
of pious romance. It presupposes a world in which things did not happen
as they happen now; in which the incredible is assumed to be real and
the course of events is shaped by miracle. To be sure, miracle is but
sparingly used in the dramatic action itself, and the totality of the
play is only a little more wonderful than the Maid's actual history as
given by authentic records. Johanna's vision of the Virgin is merely
described retrospectively and is parallel to the Voices of the
historical Joan. So too her recognition of the King, whom she has never
seen before; her reading of his mind; her wonderful influence over the
French army, and much more of the kind, are part of a well-authenticated
tradition with which the skeptical mind must make its peace as best it
can. And the feat is not altogether easy. The modern rationalist will
say, and is no doubt right in saying, that if we knew all the pertinent
facts accurately from first to last, the Maid's story would fit
perfectly into our scheme of scientific knowledge and would appear no
more mysterious than other stories of obsession, genius and devotion.
Still the fact remains that upon ordinary human nature, without regard
to religious prepossessions, the record of the Maid's life, as brought
out at her trial, makes an impression of the marvelous. This is quite
enough for the purposes of a dramatic poet. But when Schiller introduces
a magic sword; when he makes his heroine talk with a ghost upon the
battle-field, and break her heavy fetters by the power of prayer; and
when we not merely hear these things reported, but see them,--then we
are clearly in the realm of pure miracle.
Schiller's ultra-romantic treatment of the Maid's story has often been
sharply criticised, even by those who are in the main friendly to his
genius; while those who are not friendly have always seen in it the
complete flowering of his worst tendencies. Critics have debated at
great length the question whether he was 'justified' in introducing the
supernatural at all. They have fallen back upon the ghost in 'Hamlet'
for a precedent and have tried to illuminate the subject with the light
of Lessing's famous comparison of Shakspere's ghost with Voltaire's in
'Semiramis'. Others have been shocked by Schiller's bold departure from
history at the close. On a first reading of 'The Maid of Orleans',
Macaulay recorded in his journal an opinion that "the last act was
absurd beyond description. Schiller might just as well have made
Wallenstein dethrone the emperor and reign himself over Germany--or Mary
become Queen of England and cut off Elizabeth's head--as make Joan fall
in the moment of victory."[123]
Now opinions of this kind have a certain interest for the student of
literature, but it is best not to take them too seriously. A dramatist
is 'justified' if his intention is good and he succeeds in it. The proof
of the pudding is not in the cook's recipe. If any dramatist in the wide
world chooses, for reasons of his own, to experiment with an imaginary
reversal of the verdict of history, there is no abstract reason why he
should not do so. It is just as well, as Schiller said, to 'keep the
type-idea flexible in one's mind',--especially when we know that his
experiment was received with ecstasy at its first performance and has
ever since held its place in the affection of German play-goers. They
are not troubled by its irrationalities, but receive them with pious
awe, as Schiller intended. For the reader, too, 'The Maid of Orleans'
has a deep and perennial fascination. Theorize about it as we may, it is
a great popular classic, which has exerted an enormous educative
influence and proves how thoroughly its author knew the heart of the
German people.
It is perfectly safe to conjecture, even without documentary evidence,
that when Schiller began to think of Joan the Maid as the possible
heroine of a tragedy, his first perplexity related to the question of
her 'guilt'. This was for him an indispensable ingredient of the tragic,
whatever later theorists may think of it.
Although, as we have seen, he contemned the bondage of general concepts,
he never came to the point of imagining a tragedy without 'tragic
guilt'. But the story of Joan offers no suggestion of guilt in any sense
whatever,--she was the innocent victim of groveling superstition playing
into the hands of insane political hate. For modern sentiment, Catholic
and Protestant alike, and quite independently of the view one may take
of her claims to divine illumination, her death at the stake was simply
a horrible and revolting wrong. In comparison with those who put her to
death she was an angel of light. To follow the lines of history here was
for Schiller unthinkable, since the end would have been a mad fatality,
leaving no room for any feeling of acquiescence in the wise ordering of
the world. If the story of Joan was to yield a tragedy at all, it was
necessary to have recourse to some bold invention which should bring her
fate into harmony with the central tightness of things.[124]
Schiller solves the problem in the terms of religious mysticism: he
endows his Johanna with a supernatural power dependent upon her
renunciation of earthly love, and then makes her fall in love contrary
to the divine command. In one of her lonely vigils under the 'holy oak'
the Virgin appears to her and bids her go forth and destroy the enemies
of her country and crown the king at Rheims. When Johanna asks how a
gentle girl can hope to accomplish such a work, Mary replies,
A maiden chaste
Can bring to pass all glorious things on earth
If only she renounces earthly love.
Thus far we are close enough to tradition; for the historical Joan, who
habitually called herself the Maid, knew very well that love and
marriage would be fatal to her mission. Moreover, the idea of a
non-natural power attaching to the state of virginity is sufficiently
familiar both to Christian and to Pagan story. From this conception it
is no very far cry to the idea that the very thought of love, bringing
with it a sense of guilt, might cause an impairment of the maiden's
divinely bestowed strength. These are mystical ideas, but the mysticism
is of a kind familiar to the imagination of medieval Europe and
therefore quite permissible to a poet who had set out to romanticize.
If, therefore, Schiller had made his heroine fall in love in human
fashion, and had then connected this lapse from virginal ideality a
little more clearly with the final catastrophe, there could be no
reasonable objection to his fundamental idea, and we should have,
probably, the best imaginative basis for a romantic tragedy on the story
of Joan of Arc. One has no right to play the rationalist in such a
matter and argue that falling in love is no sin and cannot be felt as a
sin by the modern mind. It can be so felt by the modern imagination, and
that is quite enough.
As the play stands, however, it must be allowed that the demand made
upon the imagination is quite too severe. The love-incident is
preposterous in itself and a mere episode at that, serving no purpose
finally but that of a picturesque contrast. It is a sort of thing which
one can put up with very well in a romantic opera, but not so well in a
serious drama. To begin with, Schiller makes his heroine a supernatural
being. His Johanna is not a peasant girl who imagines herself the bearer
of a divine mission, and by the human qualities of purity, bravery,
devotion and self-confidence, exerts a _seemingly_ magic influence upon
the French army,--but she is actually endowed with superhuman powers.
She carries a charmed sword which, against her will, guides itself
miraculously in her hand to the work of slaughter. No enemy can
withstand her. To all Englishmen she is incarnate Death. In the full
frenzy of combat she meets Lionel--for the first time. They fight and
she strikes his sword from his hand. Then, as he closes with her, she
seizes his plume from behind, lifts his helmet and draws her sword to
cut off his head. As his comely face is bared her heart fails her, her
arm sinks and the whole mischief is done. No wonder that an early critic
objected to a tragedy turning thus upon the weak fastening of a helmet!
It is difficult to justify such a scene upon any theory of poetic art.
The romantic drama since Schiller's time has served up many a greater
marvel than this; but it produces a truly poetic effect only by keeping
within the limits of tradition. The poet who deals with Siegfried and
Brunhilde, or with Lohengrin or Faust, may very properly require us to
accept the miracles which pertain in each case to the saga. But such a
being as Schiller's Johanna is found in no saga; she is a purely
arbitrary creation. A very thoughtful German critic, Bellermann,
attempts to defend our love-episode by showing how Schiller took good
care in the preceding scenes to depict his heroine as susceptible to the
tender emotions of her sex; in other words, to depict her as a maiden
who might conceivably love and be loved. But earthly maidens do not
suddenly fall in love with their mortal enemies upon the battle-field;
and when a celestial amazon like Johanna does so, one can only imagine
that she has been mysteriously forsaken by her Protectress in the skies.
In that case, however, the fault lies with heaven. It is really quite
futile to discuss the artistic reasonableness of this scene, since
Johanna's supernatural character takes her outside the range of human
psychology. If one likes it and is touched by it, very well; but a
prudent poet might well have had some regard for the very large number
of people who would find such a scene ridiculous rather than touching.
One could wish, in fine, that Schiller had omitted his disturbing
supernaturalism altogether. If it was necessary that his heroine fall
in love, one could wish that he had let her affections fasten humanly
upon the good Raimond or some other honest Frenchman. And he might well
have spared us the Black Knight,--that revenant ghost of Talbot, who
comes to frighten Johanna but does not succeed, and whose function in
the economy of the play remains in the end somewhat mysterious. Had he
left out these things, the real greatness of the play would have
suffered not a whit, and the artistic idea which kindled his
imagination would have found a no less noble expression. That idea was
to reproduce the spirit of the epoch which saw the birth of French
patriotism. He wished to bring before his rationalizing contemporaries
a picture of the Middle Ages as a time when, to quote the words of a
recent American writer, "life was lived passionately and imaginatively
under haunted heavens ".[125]
What thoughts were agitating him at the very time when 'The Maid of
Orleans' was taking shape in his mind can be seen from an interesting
letter which he wrote to a certain Professor Süvern, who had favored him
with a critique of 'Wallenstein'. Schiller answered under date of July
26, 1800, and one paragraph of his reply runs as follows:
I share your unconditional admiration of the Sophoclean tragedy, but
it was a phenomenon of its time, which cannot come again. It was the
living product of a definite, individual present; to force it as a
standard and a pattern upon an entirely different epoch would be to
kill rather than to quicken art, which must always come into being
and do its work as a living dynamic influence. Our tragedy, if we
had such a thing, has to wrestle with the time's impotence, laziness
and lack of character, and with a vulgar mental habit. It must
therefore exhibit force and character. It must endeavor to stir and
uplift the feelings, but not to resolve them into calm. Beauty is
for a happy race; an unhappy race one must seek to move by
sublimity.
These words, which contain implicitly the whole Romantic confession of
faith, give the right point of view from which to judge 'The Maid of
Orleans'. Schiller felt that the need of the hour was to escape from the
banality of conventional ideas and feel the thrill of sympathy with
great, overmastering emotions. To-day this seems a very simple and
obvious matter, because we have learned to think of the imaginative
appeal of poetry as the corner-stone of the temple. But a hundred years
ago the outlook was different. Notwithstanding the revolt which Goethe
and Schiller had themselves led against the self-complacent rationalism
of the century, the old spirit was still potent even in Germany, where
the reaction first gathered force. Among the intellectual classes
religion had well-nigh ceased to be reckoned with as a mystic passion of
the soul. Several decades of tolerance,--practically an excellent method
for keeping the sectaries from one another's throats,--had produced a
public sentiment which looked with mild contempt upon all religious
fervors. When Schleiermacher published his famous 'Discourses on
Religion', in the year 1799, he addressed them 'to the cultivated among
its despisers',--which was only his phrase for what we should call the
general public.
Nor was the case very different with respect to another mystic passion,
which derives from the tribal instinct of the primitive savage and which
the civilized man calls patriotism. The lesson of Frederick the Great
had not been entirely forgotten, but it was lying inert,--waiting to be
kindled into fiery zeal by the humiliations of Jena and Tilsit and
Wagram. Schiller was no mystic, nor was he, in our narrow sense, a
patriot; but he had a poet's feeling for the sublimity of great and
passionate devotion. He was a man of the eighteenth century, and as
thinker he understood full well its imperishable claims to honor; but as
poet it was not for him to fall into that cynical, vulgarizing drift
which had led the greatest Frenchman of his day to make Joan of Arc the
butt of his lewd wit. Voltaire saw in her one of the pious frauds of
that Infamous he was bent on crushing; for her national mission he had
little feeling, because of his fixed idea that nothing good could have
come from the ages of superstition.[126] Schiller saw in her, and was
the first great poet to see what all the world sees now, the heroic
deliverer of her country from a hated foreign invader. And so he threw
down the gauntlet to his century and lifted the _ludibrium_ of the
French wits to the pedestal of an inspired savior of France. It was a
great deed of poetry; in the presence of which a right-minded critic,
after duly airing his little complaints, as critics must, will be
disposed to doff his hat and say Bravo! Well might Schiller declare in
the stanzas entitled 'The Maid of Orleans':
The world brooks not nobility,--disdaining,
Defaming, smirching, goes its vulgar gait;--
But fear thou not, true hearts are still remaining,
To love thee for the heart that made thee great.
In its inmost essence, then, 'The Maid of Orleans' is a drama of
patriotism. It is Johanna's love of country that gives her a measure of
human interest, in spite of the supernaturalism that invests her. Were
she not thus the representative of a passion that is intensely real, and
that has come to be regarded, for better or for worse, as preëminently
noble, she would now possess but very languid interest for the sublunary
mind. Her mystical attributes and her unthinkable love-affair would
place her beyond the range of natural sympathy. As it is, one is made to
forget, or at least to pass lightly over, everything else but her love
for France. She wins favor by her patriotic devotion, and when the end
comes one thinks of her under the familiar rubric of the hero dying for
his country. The episode with Lionel and the humiliation of the
Cathedral scene have all been forgotten, and one does not mentally
connect these things with Johanna's death in any way whatsoever. Her
death is sufficiently provided for from the beginning in her own
fatalistic prevision:
Johanna goes and never shall return.
It must be admitted that a heroine who excites interest chiefly by
virtue of her patriotic sentiments and the bravery of her conduct does
not represent the highest type of poetic creation. The muse will always
lend virtue and bravery to any common poetaster for the mere asking; but
she does not so readily vouchsafe a convincing semblance of complex
human nature. A distinctly human Johanna, with a definite girlish
individuality and a character all her own,--such as Goethe might have
given us had he turned his thoughts in that direction,--would have been
a higher and a more difficult achievement than the schematic creature of
Schiller's imagination. Such a Johanna, however, would hardly be
thinkable on the stage: the final horror of her fate would be
intolerable in the visible representation, while to leave it
unrepresented would be to admit the reasonableness of Schiller's
departure from history. Shall we then take refuge in the position that
the Maid's story is not adapted to dramatic treatment at all? Such a
position is at once rendered absurd by the perennial popularity and
effectiveness of Schiller's play. Until some great realistic poet shall
prove the contrary by deeds, the mere critic is certainly justified in
holding that, whatever may be thought of his love-episode, the ghost and
the miraculous escape from bondage, the general requirements of the
theme are best met by Schiller's romantic treatment.
Turning from the heroine to the other characters, one finds but little
that invites discussion. Johanna is the central sun of the system, and
in the romantic light that goes out from her the others seem rather pale
and uninteresting. Father Thibaut impresses one in the Prologue as a
little too refined, intelligent and far-sighted for the rôle of besotted
superstition and misunderstanding which he subsequently plays in the
cathedral scene. La Hire and the Duke of Burgundy and the Bastard of
Orleans, who preserves only a suggestion of the rugged soldier that once
bore his name, are there only to illustrate the divine magic of the
Maid. Two of them wish to marry her, and when we add the Englishman,
Lionel, and the French peasant, Raimond, we have a quartet of lovers.
Verily the little god Cupido would seem to be something too prominent
and ubiquitous for a military drama. History required that the Dauphin
should be a weakling, and such he is in the play; but he too is
romanticized through his devotion, to the tender and soulful Agnes. More
strongly drawn, if not exactly more lifelike, than any of these, are the
sensual old fury, Isabeau, and the English general, Talbot, whose fierce
valedictory to this folly-ridden earth is deservedly famous:
Soon it is over, and to earth go back--
To earth and the eternal sun--the atoms
Erstwhile combined in me for pain and joy.
And of the mighty Talbot, whose renown
But now filled all the world, nothing remains
Except a handful of light dust. So ends
The life of man--and all we bear away,
As booty from the battle of existence,
Is comprehension of its nothingness
And sovereign contempt of all the ends
That seemed exalted and desirable.
In short, the characters of 'The Maid of Orleans' leave much to be
desired on the score of verisimilitude. One has the feeling all along,
as in the case of Goethe's 'Helena', of being in an artificial world
made to order by an imaginative fiat. To enjoy the play it is necessary
to put aside one's rationalism and surrender oneself to the illusion one
knows that the author wishes to produce. 'The Maid of Orleans' does not
compel the surrender like 'Wallenstein'; one must meet the poet
half-way. That done, however, everything is in order, for the technique
of the play is faultless. It is not easy to point to a better piece of
dramatic exposition than the scenes which precede the appearance of
Johanna in the French army. The Prologue is perhaps a trifle too long,
but serves admirably to give the tragic keynote, by picturing the
shepherd-girl of Dom Remi leading a life apart from that of her family,
given to strange brooding, and at last receiving the sign from Heaven,
which she prophetically feels to be the call of death. And then the
desperate plight of France; the helpless weakness of the king; the
disgust and discouragement of the generals; and after this the news of a
long unwonted victory, followed quickly by the appearance of Johanna and
the magic change of the military situation,--how vividly it is all
brought before one! And what a fine scene is that at the end of the
second act, in which Burgundy is won over! One who is not touched by
this portion of the play; who does not return to it with ever-renewed
pleasure after each sojourn in the choking air of naturalism, is--to
state the case as gently as possible--unfortunately endowed.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 123: Trevelyan, "The Life and Letters of Lord
Macaulay", II, 249.]
[Footnote 124: According to Böttiger, whose statements are not always
trustworthy in matters of detail, Schiller said to him in November,
1801, that he had at one time planned three different plays on the
subject of the Maid of Orleans, and that he would have executed all
three if he had had time. One of these was to have been a historical
tragedy, with Johanna dying at the stake in Rouen.--This can hardly
mean anything more than that Schiller was in doubt for a while as to
the best treatment of his theme. The idea of his actually making three
different plays on the same subject is quite too preposterous. His
promise, in a letter of March 1, 1802, that _if_ he should write a
second 'Maid of Orleans', Göschen should publish it, is only an
author's playful 'jollying' of a friendly publisher. The passage from
Böttiger is quoted at length by Boxberger in his Introduction to 'The
Maid of Orleans' (Kürschners Deutsche National-Litteratur, Vol. CXXII,
second part, page 211).]
[Footnote 125: Lewis E. Gates, "Studies and Appreciations."]
[Footnote 126: Compare Morley's "Voltaire", Chapter III.]