



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 creeds, which belong as much to one generation as another, and
which have survived amid all changes and convulsions, should raise
him especially above the temptation to exalt the fashion of his own
time, or of any past one; above the affectation of the obsolete,
above slavery to the present, and above that strange mixture of both
which some display, who weep because the beautiful visions of the
Past are departed, and admire themselves for being able to weep over
them--and dispense with them.  His reverence for the Bible should
make him feel that we most realise our own personality when we most
connect it with that of our fellow-men; that acts are not to be
contemplated apart from the actor; that more of what is acceptable
to the God of Truth may come forth in men striving with infinite
confusion, and often uttering words like the east-wind, than in
those who can discourse calmly and eloquently about a righteousness
and mercy, which they know only by hearsay.  The belief which a
minister of God has in the eternity of the distinction between right
and wrong should especially dispose him to recognise that
distinction apart from mere circumstance and opinion.  The
confidence which he must have that the life of each man, and the
life of this world, is a drama, in which a perfectly Good and True
Being is unveiling His own purposes, and carrying on a conflict with
evil, which must issue in complete victory, should make him eager to
discover in every portion of history, in every biography, a divine
'Morality' and 'Mystery'--a morality, though it deals with no
abstract personages--a mystery, though the subject of it be the
doings of the most secular men.

The subject of this Play is certainly a dangerous one, it suggests
questions which are deeply interesting at the present time.  It
involves the whole character and spirit of the Middle Ages.  A
person who had not an enthusiastic admiration for the character of
Elizabeth would not be worthy to speak of her; it seems to me, that
he would be still less worthy, if he did not admire far more
fervently that ideal of the female character which God has
established, and not man--which she imperfectly realised--which
often exhibited itself in her in spite of her own more confused,
though apparently more lofty, ideal; which may be manifested more
simply, and therefore more perfectly, in the England of the
nineteenth century, than in the Germany of the thirteenth.  To enter
into the meaning of self-sacrifice--to sympathise with any one who
aims at it--not to be misled by counterfeits of it--not to be unjust
to the truth which may be mixed with those counterfeits--is a
difficult task, but a necessary one for any one who takes this work
in hand.  How far our author has attained these ends, others must
decide.  I am sure that he will not have failed from forgetting
them.  He has, I believe, faithfully studied all the documents of
the period within his reach, making little use of modern narratives;
he has meditated upon the past in its connection with the present;
has never allowed his reading to become dry by disconnecting it with
what he has seen and felt, or made his partial experiences a measure
for the acts which they help him to understand.  He has entered upon
his work at least in a true and faithful spirit, not regarding it as
an amusement for leisure hours, but as something to be done
seriously, if done at all; as if he was as much 'under the Great
Taskmaster's eye' in this as in any other duty of his calling.  In
certain passages and scenes he seemed to me to have been a little
too bold for the taste and temper of this age.  But having written
them deliberately, from a conviction that morality is in peril from
fastidiousness, and that it is not safe to look at questions which
are really agitating people's hearts merely from the outside--he
has, and I believe rightly, retained what I should from cowardice
have wished him to exclude.  I have no doubt, that any one who wins
a victory over the fear of opinion, and especially over the opinion
of the religious world, strengthens his own moral character, and
acquires a greater fitness for his high service.

Whether Poetry is again to revive among us, or whether the power is
to be wholly stifled by our accurate notions about the laws and
conditions under which it is to be exercised, is a question upon
which there is room for great differences of opinion.  Judging from
the past, I should suppose that till Poetry becomes less self-
conscious, less self-concentrated, more _dramatical_ in spirit, if
not in form, it will not have the qualities which can powerfully
affect Englishmen.  Not only were the Poets of our most national age
dramatists, but there seems an evident dramatical tendency in those
who wrote what we are wont to call narrative, or epic, poems.  Take
away the dramatic faculty from Chaucer, and the Canterbury Tales
become indeed, what they have been most untruly called, mere
versions of French or Italian Fables.  Milton may have been right in
changing the form of the Paradise Lost,--we are bound to believe
that he was right; for what appeal can there be against his genius?
But he could not destroy the essentially dramatic character of a
work which sets forth the battle between good and evil, and the Will
of Man at once the Theatre and the Prize of the conflict.  Is it not
true, that there is in the very substance of the English mind, that
which naturally predisposes us to sympathy with the Drama, and this
though we are perhaps the most untheatrical of all people?  The love
of action, the impatience of abstraction, the equity which leads us
to desire that every one may have a fair hearing, the reserve which
had rather detect personal experience than have it announced--
tendencies all easily perverted to evil, often leading to results
the most contradictory, yet capable of the noblest cultivation--seem
to explain the fact, that writers of this kind should have
flourished so greatly among us, and that scarcely any others should
permanently interest us.

These remarks do not concern poetical literature alone, or chiefly.
Those habits of mind, of which I have spoken, ought to make us the
best _historians_.  If Germany has a right to claim the whole realm
of the abstract, if Frenchmen understand the framework of society
better than we do, there is in the national dramas of Shakespeare an
historical secret, which neither the philosophy of the one nor the
acute observation of the other can discover.  Yet these dramas are
almost the only satisfactory expression of that historical faculty
which I believe is latent in us.  The zeal of our factions, a result
of our national activity, has made earnest history dishonest:  our
English justice has fled to indifferent and sceptical writers for
the impartiality which it sought in vain elsewhere.  This resource
has failed,--the indifferentism of Hume could not secure him against
his Scotch prejudices, or against gross unfairness when anything
disagreeably positive and vehement came in his way.  Moreover, a
practical people demand movement and life, not mere judging and
balancing.  For a time there was a reaction in favour of party
history, but it could not last long; already we are glad to seek in
Ranke or Michelet that which seems denied us at home.  Much, no
doubt, may be gained from such sources; but I am convinced that
_this_ is not the produce which we are meant generally to import;
for this we may trust to well-directed native industry.  The time
is, I hope, at hand, when those who are most in earnest will feel
that therefore they are most bound to be just--when they will
confess the exceeding wickedness of the desire to distort or
suppress a fact, or misrepresent a character--when they will ask as
solemnly to be delivered from the temptation to this, as to any
crime which is punished by law.

The clergy ought especially to lead the way in this reformation.
They have erred grievously in perverting history to their own
purposes.  What was a sin in others was in them a blasphemy, because
they professed to acknowledge God as the Ruler of the world, and
hereby they showed that they valued their own conclusions above the
facts which reveal His order.  They owe, therefore, a great amende
to their country, and they should consider seriously how they can
make it most effectually.  I look upon this Play as an effort in
this direction, which I trust may be followed by many more.  On this
ground alone, even if its poetical worth was less than I believe it
is, I should, as a clergyman, be thankful for its publication.

F. D. M.



INTRODUCTION



The story which I have here put into a dramatic form is one familiar
to Romanists, and perfectly and circumstantially authenticated.
Abridged versions of it, carefully softened and sentimentalised, may
be read in any Romish collection of Lives of the Saints.  An
enlarged edition has been published in France, I believe by Count
Montalembert, and translated, with illustrations, by an English
gentleman, which admits certain miraculous legends, of later date,
and, like other prodigies, worthless to the student of human
character.  From consulting this work I have hitherto abstained, in
order that I might draw my facts and opinions, entire and unbiassed,
from the original Biography of Elizabeth, by Dietrich of Appold, her
contemporary, as given entire by Canisius.

Dietrich was born in Thuringia, near the scene of Elizabeth's
labours, a few years before her death; had conversed with those who
had seen her, and calls to witness 'God and the elect angels,' that
he had inserted nothing but what he had either understood from
religious and veracious persons, or read in approved writings, viz.
'The Book of the Sayings of Elizabeth's Four Ladies (Guta,
Isentrudis, and two others)'; 'The Letter which Conrad of Marpurg,
her Director, wrote to Pope Gregory the Ninth' (these two documents
still exist); 'The Sermon of Otto' (de Ordine Praedic), which begins
thus:  'Mulierem fortem.'

'Not satisfied with these,' he 'visited monasteries, castles, and
towns, interrogated the most aged and veracious persons, and wrote
letters, seeking for completeness and truth in all things;' and thus
composed his biography, from which that in Surius (Acta Sanctorum),
Jacobus de Voragine, Alban Butler, and all others which I have seen,
are copied with a very few additions and many prudent omissions.

Wishing to adhere strictly to historical truth, I have followed the
received account, not only in the incidents, but often in the
language which it attributes to its various characters; and have
given in the Notes all necessary references to the biography in
Canisius's collection.  My part has therefore been merely to show
how the conduct of my heroine was not only possible, but to a
certain degree necessary, for a character of earnestness and piety
such as hers, working under the influences of the Middle Age.

In deducing fairly, from the phenomena of her life, the character of
Elizabeth, she necessarily became