



Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




THE SAINT'S TRAGEDY




PREFACE BY THE REV. F. D. MAURICE, M.A. (1848)



The writer of this play does not differ with his countrymen
generally, as to the nature and requirements of a Drama.  He has
learnt from our Great Masters that it should exhibit human beings
engaged in some earnest struggle, certain outward aspects of which
may possibly be a spectacle for the amusement of idlers, but which
in itself is for the study and the sympathy of those who are
struggling themselves.  A Drama, he feels, should not aim at the
inculcation of any definite maxim; the moral of it lies in the
action and the character.  It must be drawn out of them by the heart
and experience of the reader, not forced upon him by the author.
The men and women whom he presents are not to be his spokesmen; they
are to utter themselves freely in such language, grave or mirthful,
as best expresses what they feel and what they are.  The age to
which they belong is not to be contemplated as if it were apart from
us; neither is it to be measured by our rules; to be held up as a
model; to be condemned for its strangeness.  The passions which
worked in it must be those which are working in ourselves.  To the
same eternal laws and principles are we, and it, amenable.  By
beholding these a poet is to raise himself, and may hope to raise
his readers, above antiquarian tastes and modern conventions.  The
unity of the play cannot be conferred upon it by any artificial
arrangements; it must depend upon the relation of the different
persons and events to the central subject.  No nice adjustments of
success and failure to right and wrong must constitute its poetical
justice; the conscience of the readers must be satisfied in some
deeper way than this, that there is an order in the universe, and
that the poet has perceived and asserted it.

Long before these principles were reduced into formal canons of
orthodoxy, even while they encountered the strong opposition of
critics, they were unconsciously recognised by Englishmen as sound
and national.  Yet I question whether a clergyman writing in
conformity with them might not have incurred censure in former
times, and may not incur it now.  The privilege of expressing his
own thoughts, sufferings, sympathies, in any form of verse is easily
conceded to him; if he liked to use a dialogue instead of a
monologue, for the purpose of enforcing a duty, or illustrating a
doctrine, no one would find fault with him; if he produced an actual
Drama for the purpose of defending or denouncing a particular
character, or period, or system of opinions, the compliments of one
party might console him for the abuse or contempt of another.

But it seems to be supposed that he is bound to keep in view one or
other of these ends:  to divest himself of his own individuality
that he may enter into the working of other spirits; to lay aside
the authority which pronounces one opinion, or one habit of mind, to
be right and another wrong, that he may exhibit them in their actual
strife; to deal with questions, not in an abstract shape, but mixed
up with the affections, passions, relations of human creatures, is a
course which must lead him, it is thought, into a great
forgetfulness of his office, and of all that is involved in it.

No one can have less interest than I have in claiming poetical
privileges for the clergy; and no one, I believe, is more thoroughly
convinced that the standard which society prescribes for us, and to
which we ordinarily conform ourselves, instead of being too severe
and lofty, is far too secular and grovelling.  But I apprehend the
limitations of this kind which are imposed upon us are themselves
exceedingly secular, betokening an entire misconception of the
nature of our work, proceeding from maxims and habits which tend to
make it utterly insignificant and abortive.  If a man confines
himself to the utterance of his own experiences, those experiences
are likely to become every day more narrow and less real.  If he
confines himself to the defence of certain propositions, he is sure
gradually to lose all sense of the connection between those
propositions and his own life, or the life of man.  In either case
he becomes utterly ineffectual as a teacher.  Those whose education
and character are different from his own, whose processes of mind
have therefore been different, are utterly unintelligible to him.
Even a cordial desire for sympathy is not able to break through the
prickly hedge of habits, notions, and technicalities which separates
them.  Oftentimes the desire itself is extinguished in those who
ought to cherish it most, by the fear of meeting with something
portentous or dangerous.  Nor can he defend a dogma better than he
communes with men; for he knows not that which attacks it.  He
supposes it to be a set of book arguments, whereas it is something
lying very deep in the heart of the disputant, into which he has
never penetrated.

Hence there is a general complaint that we 'are ignorant of the
thoughts and feelings of our contemporaries'; most attribute this to
a fear of looking below the surface, lest we should find hollowness
within; many like to have it so, because they have thus an excuse
for despising us.  But surely such an ignorance is more inexcusable
in us, than in the priests of any nation:  we, less than any, are
kept from the sun and air; our discipline is less than any contrived
merely to make us acquainted with the commonplaces of divinity.  We
are enabled, nay, obliged, from our youth upwards, to mix with
people of our own age, who are destined for all occupations and
modes of life; to share in their studies, their enjoyments, their
perplexities, their temptations.  Experience, often so dearly
bought, is surely not meant to be thrown away:  whether it has been
obtained without the sacrifice of that which is most precious, or
whether the lost blessing has been restored twofold, and good is
understood, not only as the opposite of evil, but as the deliverance
from it, we cannot be meant to forget all that we have been
learning.  The teachers of other nations may reasonably mock us, as
having less of direct book-lore than themselves; they should not be
able to say, that we are without the compensation of knowing a
little more of living creatures.

A clergyman, it seems to me, should be better able than other men to
cast aside that which is merely accidental, either in his own
character, or in the character of the age to which he belongs, and
to apprehend that which is essential and eternal.  His acceptance of
fixed