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Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 346, August, 1844
While the English are still in their camp, little dreaming of surprise, the maiden rushes on them, conquers and disperses them. Here passes a scene between Johanna and Montgomery, a young Welsh knight, who begs for his life in a truly Homeric manner—pleading his youth, the anguish of his mother, and the sweet bride he had left upon the Severn. It is quite Homeric, professedly and successfully so, and therefore quite out of place. The Welsh knight speaks in a most unknightly strain. And the change of metre that is adopted assists in giving to the whole the air of a mere poetical exercise. The scene is not, however, without its purpose in the development of the character of the maid, because it shows how utterly she is at this time engrossed in her warlike mission; she is not a moment affected by the entreaties of Montgomery, and dooms him to death without pity.
The war still continues fatal to the English. Talbot is slain. In the next scene, the ghost of this warrior appears to Johanna, under the form of a black knight with the visor closed. The apparition lures her away from the heat of the contest, and then addresses to her this solemn warning:—
"Johanna d'Arc! Up to the gates of Rheims hast thou been borne Upon the wings of victory. Now pause. Content thee with the fame that thou hast won. Let fortune go, whom thou hast held in bonds, Ere it in anger shall break loose from thee; For never is it constant to the end."Johanna, however, who can hear of nothing, and think of nothing, but of fighting for her country, and who has a particular detestation for this black knight, strikes at it with her sword. It vanishes with the appropriate accompaniments of thunder and lightning.
The apparition of the black knight has occasioned some embarrassment and discussion among the critics. It was at first quite plain that it was the ghost of Talbot; and when there was no longer any doubt on this head, it was not easy to decide what brought the ghost of Talbot there, and why he should give what, knowing as we do the history of Johanna, has the appearance of very sound advice. But in that lay the very snare of Satan. It was wise counsel that the devil, through this ghost, gave to Johanna; but it was worldly wise. It was well suited to some ambitious person engaged in a career of conquest. Had such a black knight appeared, for example, to Napoleon, on the eve of entering on his war with Russia, and warned him to furl his banner of conquest, it would have been a friendly and intelligent ghost, though we do not believe it would have been listened to for a moment. A human passion is stronger than a whole regiment of ghosts. But such advice addressed to Johanna, the missionary of heaven, who fought from duty, not ambition, could have no other effect than to infuse into her mind ideas of vain-glory and love of fame, a selfish regard to personal consequences, and a distrust of the protection of her divine mistress. The ghost of Talbot, therefore, was evidently in league with her enemies, the devils, in the insidious counsel it gave. But the counsel was rejected with disdain, and Johanna went on still victorious over all.
But the maiden next encounters a more pernicious apparition than the black knight. She contends with the gallant Lionel. Here, as elsewhere, she is the victor; she raises her sword to strike, but, fatally for her peace, she looks twice before she deals the blow. She cannot strike.
Now follows—but in vain for Johanna—the full accomplishment of her glorious enterprise, in the coronation of the king at Rheims. Contrary to the obligation of her high mission, she has received into her heart a human passion. Her peace is gone. Here the poet, in order to express the rapid alternations of feeling to which she is a prey, breaks from the even tenor of blank verse into a lyrical effusion of remarkable beauty and pathos. She is sought for to take her part in the ceremony of the coronation; it is now with a feeling of horror that she receives into her hands the sacred banner, which she had borne triumphantly to so many victories.
Amongst the crowd who have flocked from all parts to witness the ceremony, are the family of Johanna, and her old lover Raimond. Her father Thibaut is also there. He has come to save, if yet possible, his child from perdition, whom he still persists in thinking under the influence of wicked spirits, and to have wrought all her wonders by the aid of diabolic enchantments. Now, therefore, when the king, after his coronation, turns towards Johanna, and, in the presence of all his nobility, addresses her as the deliverer of France, this melancholy father rushes forward to reproach and to blaspheme his child. She, heartstricken, and conscious of a secret error, though of a quite different kind from what is laid to her charge, receives in submissive silence, as the chastisement of heaven, the strange inculpations of her parent:—
"Thibaut, to the King. Thou deem'st thyself deliver'd by God's power. Thou art abused—this people of France are blinded! Thou art deliver'd by the devil's craft!
Dunois. Does this man rave?
Thibaut. Not I, but thou art raving; All these, the wise archbishop at their head, Rave, in believing that the voice of heaven Speaks in this wicked girl. Mark, if she dare Maintain, before her father's face, the juggle With which she cheats the people and her king. In the name of the Holy Trinity! Speak! I conjure thee! Dost thou serve with saints, And with the pure in heart?
[A universal silence. Every eye is strained towards Johanna, who stands motionless.
Sorel. God! she is mute!
Thibaut. So must she be before that awful name Which, in the depth of hell itself, is fear'd. She—she a saint! she sent from God! No, in a cursed spot—our magic tree Where devils from of yore their Sabbath keep—Has all this been contrived; there did she sell Her soul to the eternal Fiend, to be With brief vain-glory honour'd in this world. Bid her stretch forth her arm, and ye will see The punctures by which hell has mark'd its own.
Burgundy. Horrible! Yet must the father be believed Who thus against his own child testifies.
Dunois. No, no, the madman shall not be believed Who in his own child vilifies himself.
Sorel to Johanna. O speak! break this disastrous silence! we Believe in thee. We have firm trust in thee. One word from thy own mouth, one only word, Shall be enough. But speak! Denounce, confound This hideous accusation. Do but say That thou art innocent, and we believe it.
[Johanna remains motionless. Agnes Sorel steps back with horror.
La Hire. She is amazed! Astonishment and terror Have closed her mouth. Before such hellish charge Must purity itself recoil with fright.
[Approaches her.
Take courage! Be thyself! The innocent Have their own proper language, and their look Is lightning to consume foul calumny. In noble scorn, arouse thyself—look up—Confound with shame this most unworthy doubt, Which wrongs thy sacred virtue.
[Johanna remains motionless. La Hire steps back. The general horror increases.
Dunois. What scares the people? What dismays the king? Oh, she is innocent! I pledge myself, I pledge for her my honour as a prince. Here do I throw my gauntlet down. Who dares To slander her with guilt?
[A violent peal of thunder is heard. All start back terrified.
Thibaut. God answers! God, Who thunders from above. Pronounce thyself, Child of perdition, guiltless, if thou dar'st—
[A second peal of thunder is heard. The people fly on all sides.
Burgundy. God shield us! What an awful signal!
Du Chatel. Come, come, my sovereign, let us fly this place!
Archbishop to Johanna. In the name of God, I speak to thee. Art silent From pride of innocence, or shame of guilt? If now this voice of thunder testify For thee,—in sign thereof embrace this cross.
[Johanna remains motionless. Repeated peals of thunder. All leave the church except Dunois.
Dunois. Thou art my own bride, Johanna! I Have from the first believed, and still believe. Thee will I rather trust than all these signs, Than even this thunder speaking from above. 'Tis noble pride withholds thee, thou disdain'st Wrapt in thy sacred innocence, these mad Outrageous charges to refute. Disdain so still; confide alone in me, Who of thy purity have doubted never, I ask no word; place but thy hand in mine, In token that thou wilt confide in me, In this arm and thy own good cause.[He extends his hand. She turns away with convulsive start.
(Du Chatel re-enters, and afterwards Raimond.)
Du Chatel. Johanna d'Arc! The king permits That undisturb'd you quit the town of Rheims. The gates stand open; no man shall molest you. Count Dumois, follow me—you gain no honour in lingering here.[Du Chatel and Dunois leave
Raimond. Seize on this moment! The streets are empty—give me your hand.
[Johanna looks upwards to heaven, then hastily taking his hand, goes out.
Under the guidance of Raimond, the prophetess and champion, deserted it seems by man and heaven, enters a wood, where she is taken prisoner by a party of English. She is sent a captive to Lionel. But adversity has now reinstated her in all the primitive austerity of her heart; the weakness she has so severely expiated, has left her; she has no heart now but for her country. In vain Lionel promises all—for Lionel, as well as Dunois, loves her; she answers only by denouncing the enemies of France.
A battle is joined under the walls of the tower in which she is imprisoned; she has been bound in fetters of threefold strength; Lionel has gone forth to lead his army, and the fierce Isabeau is her jailer. She holds a drawn dagger over her head. If the king of France conquers, Johanna dies. Nevertheless, she ceases not to pray for his success; and when she hears that the king is so closely beset by his enemies that he is in danger of his life, she implores heaven with such fervour, that power is given her to rend asunder her chains. Snatching a sword from one of her guards, she makes from the tower, and appears on the field of battle in time to rescue her monarch. But she herself has received a mortal wound; she sinks on the ground, and expires in the moment of victory. They cover her with the banners of the victorious army. The curtain falls.
Now, this violent departure from history, in the latter part of the play, is what we chiefly regret in the tragedy of Schiller. The melancholy fate of Joan d'Arc is so inseparably connected with her memory, that we cease to identify the portrait of Schiller with the personage of history. As the tragedy proceeds, we feel that it is no longer our Joan d'Arc that it concerns—so impossible is it for us to forget, that the village maiden of Dom Remi expiated her pious and visionary patriotism in the flames at Rouen. Only half her tragedy has been written; the other half remains for some future Schiller. Nor can we conceive of a better opportunity for the display of the peculiar powers of this poet, than would have been afforded by that catastrophe he has chosen to alter. Was the opportunity felt to be too great? Had the poet become wearied and exhausted with his theme, and did he feel indisposed to nerve himself afresh for scenes which called for the strenuous efforts of his genius? We know that it was not his original intention to make this violent departure from history, and that he came to the determination with regret.
We wish to state distinctly on what grounds we make our objection; because there is current among a class of critics a censure for the mere departure from historical truth—made, it would seem, out of a sensitive regard for history—in which we by no means acquiesce. We have no desire to bind a poet to history, merely because it is history. He has his own ends to accomplish, and by those shall he be judged. As, assuredly, we should not accept it as the least excuse for the least measure of dulness, on the part of the poet, that he had followed faithfully the historical narrative, so neither do we impose upon him a very close adherence to it. We censure the course which Schiller has here pursued, not because he has marred history, but because he has marred his own poem. The objection lies entirely within the boundary of his own art. He has selected a personage for his drama with whom a certain fate is so indissolubly associated, that it is impossible to think of her without recalling it to mind; and this ineffaceable trait in her history he has attempted, for the time, to obliterate from our memory. By this procedure, the imagination of the reader is divided and distracted. The picture presented by the poet is and is not a portrait of the historical figure which lives in our recollection. There are many points of resemblance; but the chief is omitted. And we always feel that it is omitted; for history here is too strong for the poet: he cannot expel her from the territory he wishes to enclose for himself. As well might one describe a Socrates who did not drink the hemlock—as well a Napoleon who did not die at St Helena, as a Joan d'Arc who did not suffer in the flames of Rouen.
Von Hinrich, in his critical work upon Schiller, gives a curious defence of this departure from history:—"The martyrdom," he says, "of the forlorn maiden could hardly satisfy us on the stage. In history it is different; we see these events in their connexion with the past and the future, and we do not abstract some single fact, and judge of it apart from all others. The history of the world is the tribunal of the world. It has justified Johanna; posterity has restored to her the fame and honour of which a malicious fate had for a season deprived her. The poet was obliged to change his catastrophe, in order to introduce, in his own epoch, that finger of justice which, in reality, revealed itself only at a subsequent period." 55
But who sees not that, in all such cases, the poet sufficiently and completely reverses the unjust sentence of contemporaries, by representing the sufferer as undeserving of it?—that, by depicting her as innocent, he anticipates and introduces the equitable judgment of posterity? When Schiller had described the Maid of Orleans as pious in heart—as the chosen of Heaven, he had at once reversed the sentence of the court of Rouen. It was assuredly not necessary that he should conceal the fact of any such sentence having been passed, in order to exculpate Johanna: and to exculpate, or to spare, the august judges, was no part of the business of the poet. Socrates dies in prison, denounced as a corrupter of youth. He himself is sufficiently vindicated when he is shown to be no corrupter of youth. Is there any sentiment of equity that would prompt us to suppress the fact, that he died by the public executioner of Athens? Or would it be doing honour to history—to this great tribunal of appeal—to stifle our indignation against the unjust and criminal sentences which she has had to repeal?
No doubt the poet would have had difficulties to contend with, in following the course of history. In particular, as he had chosen to represent Johanna as veritably inspired, he would have been tasked to reconcile this severity of her fate, on the one hand, with the justice of Heaven towards its own missionary; or on the other, with the unblemished character of his heroine. Either Heaven must appear forgetful of Johanna, or Johanna must be represented as having forfeited a right to its protection. But this difficulty Schiller has not entirely escaped in his own plot, and he has shown how it may be encountered. Johanna might well yield to the tenderness of a human passion without forfeiting our sympathy, or incurring a stain upon her moral character; and yet this aberration of heart—this dereliction from the austere purity required by her sacred mission—might, in a theological point of view, be supposed to have forfeited her claim to the miraculous interposition of Heaven in her behalf. So that, in the closing scenes, though Johanna might have no claim on the miraculous favours of Heaven, she would still be a saint at heart, and entitled to our deepest sympathy; and Heaven would receive back, if not its prophetess and champion, yet a noble child of earth, still further purified by more than expiatory sufferings.
This species of difficulty meets us, in one instance, in the tragedy of Schiller, in an unexpected and unnecessary manner. How are we to understand the thunder which is heard in apparent confirmation of the cruel accusation of Thibaut? As a mere coincidence, as a mere natural phenomenon, we can hardly view it; appearing as it does in this atmosphere of wonders. The archbishop seems to think that possibly the thunder might testify for Johanna. But as the effect is to produce her condemnation, it is impossible it could have been intended by Heaven for her acquittal. And yet, if we are to look upon it as corroborating the accusation of the father, it not only passes a very severe sentence upon Johanna, but it sanctions the gross falsehood of this atrabilious parent.
Amongst the continental critics, Schiller's Maid of Orleans has been especially commended as a vindication of the character of Johanna from the vile representation it had endured from the hands of Voltaire. But here, in England, La Pucelle was never more popular than it deserved to be—was never popular at all; no one had taken his impression of Joan d'Arc from this tawdry performance; and we find a difficulty in understanding how Schiller, writing to Wieland, could represent the poem of Voltaire as a great obstacle in his way. As little had we received our impression of Joan d'Arc from Shakspeare's tragedy of the First Part of Henry VI., where she is represented as a mere witch and courtesan, represented, in fact, in the vulgar aspect in which she still probably appeared to an English populace. The subject was with us, when Schiller wrote, new and open; we had received our impression only from history, and history had spoken well of Johanna.56
Madame de Staël, after applauding Schiller's tragedy for the restoration it effected of the character of the French heroine, adds:—"The French alone have consented to this degradation of the character of the maiden; even an Englishman, Shakspeare, represents her in the beginning as inspired by Heaven, and afterwards led astray by the demons of ambition." The delineation of the Maid of Orleans, in the first Part of Henry VI., is associated with the greatest name in our literature, and therefore, we presume, must be treated with respect; but it is the only title to respect we can discover in it. We cannot, with Madame de Staël, trace the inspired maid in any part of the play. La Pucelle gives us, it is true, in the commencement, a very good account of herself; as she was playing the part of an impostor, it was not probable she would do otherwise: but her own manner very soon betrays the courtesan; and, when alone, we find her in the Company of no other spirits than such as witches are accustomed to raise.
We were still more surprised to find Schlegel describing the Maid of Orlean of Henry VI. as more historical than the portraiture of Schiller. There is the same amount of fable in both. In Henry VI., we have an echo of the coarse superstition and vulgar scandal of the English camp—in Schiller, the fable is beautiful, and assists to develop a character of exquisite purity.
THE STOLEN CHILD
A TRUE TALE OF THE BACK-WOODSIt was towards the commencement of the month December 1825, that I was going down the Mississippi in the steam-boat Feliciana. We had arrived in the neighbourhood of Hopefield, Hampstead county, when one of our paddles struck against a sawyer,57 and was broken to pieces. We were obliged in consequence to cast anchor before the town.
Hopefield is a small town on the west bank of the river, about six hundred miles above New Orleans, and five hundred below the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi. It consisted, at the time of which I speak, of about fifteen houses, two of which were taverns and shops of the usual kind found in such places—their stock in trade consisting of a cask or two of whisky, a couple of dozen knives and forks, a few coloured handkerchiefs, some earthenware, lead, powder, and the like. Our party was composed of ten ladies, the same number of young men, and several elderly gentlemen. Nothing appears so desirable, during a long voyage in a river steam-boat, as a stroll upon shore; and, as there was nothing to be done at Hopefield, the proposal of one of our number to take a ramble in the forest, was met with unqualified approbation by all the young men. We equipped ourselves each with a rifle, and a bottle of wine or brandy, to keep the vapours of the swamps out of our throats; the son of one of the tavern-keepers, who offered himself for a guide, was loaded with a mighty ham and a bag of biscuits, which we procured from the steam-boat; and, thus provided, we sallied forth on our expedition, attended by the good wishes of the ladies, who accompanied us a few hundred yards into the wood, and then left us to pursue our march.
I have often had the occasion to notice, that the first entrance into one of our vast American forests is apt to reduce the greatest talker to silence. In the present instance, I found the truth of this remark fully confirmed. Whether it was the subdued half-light of the luxuriant wilderness through which we were passing, the solemn stillness, only broken by the rustling of the dead leaves under our feet, or the colossal dimensions of the mighty trees, that rose like so many giants around us, that wrought upon the imagination, I cannot say; but it is certain that my companions, who were mostly on the northern states, and had never before been beyond Albany or the Saratoga springs, became at once silent, and almost sad. The leaves of the cotton-tree, that giant of the south-western forests, had already assumed the tawny hues of latter autumn; only here and there a streak of sunbeam, breaking through the canopy of branches that spread over our heads, brought out the last tints of green now fast fading away, and threw a strange sparkling ray, a bar of light, across our path. Here was a magnolia with its snow-white blossoms, or a catalpa with its long cucumber-shaped fruit, amongst which the bright-hued red birds and paroquets glanced and fluttered.
We walked for some time through the forest, amused more than once by the proceedings of two young clerks from Boston, who saw a wild animal in every thicket, and repeatedly leveled their guns at some bear or panther, which turned out to be neither more nor less than a bush or tree-stump. They pestered our guide with all sorts of simple questions, which he, with a true backwoodsman's indifference, left for the most part unanswered. After about an hour, we found ourselves on the borders of a long and tolerably wide swamp, formed by the overflowings of the river, and which stretched for some five miles from north to south, with a broad patch of clear bright-green water in the centre. The western bank was covered with a thick growth of palmettos, the favourite cover of deer; bears, and even panthers; and this cover we resolved to beat. We divided ourselves into two parties, the first of which, consisting of the New Englanders, and accompanied by the guide, was to go round the northern extremity of the swamp, while we were to take a southerly direction, and both to meet behind the marsh, on a certain path which led through a thicket of wild plum-trees and acacias. Our guide's instructions were not of the clearest, and the landmarks he gave us were only intelligible to a thorough backwoodsman; but as too many questions would probably have puzzled him, without making matters clearer to us, we set off, trusting to our eyes and ears, and to the pocket-compasses with which several of us were provided.
