The Saints Tragedy | Page 5

to its
ultimate practice, is the main object of my Poem. That a most
degrading and agonising contradiction on these points must have
existed in the mind of Elizabeth, and of all who with similar characters
shall have found themselves under similar influences, is a necessity that
must be evident to all who know anything of the deeper affections of
men. In the idea of a married Romish saint, these miseries should
follow logically from the Romish view of human relations. In
Elizabeth's case their existence is proved equally logically from the
acknowledged facts of her conduct.

I may here observe, that if I have in no case made her allude to the
Virgin Mary, and exhibited the sense of infinite duty and loyalty to
Christ alone, as the mainspring of all her noblest deeds, it is merely in
accordance with Dietrich's biography. The omission of all Mariolatry is
remarkable. My business is to copy that omission, as I should in the
opposite case have copied the introduction of Virgin-worship into the
original tale. The business of those who make Mary, to women
especially, the complete substitute for the Saviour--I had almost said,
for all Three Persons of the Trinity--is to explain, if they can, her
non-appearance in this case.
Lewis, again, I have drawn as I found him, possessed of all virtues but
those of action; in knowledge, in moral courage, in spiritual attainment,
infinitely inferior to his wife, and depending on her to be taught to pray;
giving her higher faculties nothing to rest on in himself, and leaving the
noblest offices of a husband to be supplied by a spiritual director. He
thus becomes a type of the husbands of the Middle Age, and of the
woman-worship of chivalry. Woman- worship, 'the honour due to the
weaker vessel,' is indeed of God, and woe to the nation and to the man
in whom it dies. But in the Middle Age, this feeling had no religious
root, by which it could connect itself rationally, either with actual
wedlock or with the noble yearnings of men's spirits, and it therefore
could not but die down into a semi-sensual dream of
female-saint-worship, or fantastic idolatry of mere physical beauty,
leaving the women themselves an easy prey to the intellectual
allurements of the more educated and subtle priesthood.
In Conrad's case, again, I have fancied that I discover in the various
notices of his life a noble nature warped and blinded by its unnatural
exclusions from those family ties through which we first discern or
describe God and our relations to Him, and forced to concentrate his
whole faculties in the service, not so much of a God of Truth as of a
Catholic system. In his character will be found, I hope, some implicit
apology for the failings of such truly great men as Dunstan, Becket, and
Dominic, and of many more whom, if we hate, we shall never
understand, while we shall be but too likely, in our own way, to copy
them.

Walter of Varila, a more fictitious character, represents the 'healthy
animalism' of the Teutonic mind, with its mixture of deep earnestness
and hearty merriment. His dislike of priestly sentimentalities is no
anachronism. Even in his day, a noble lay- religion, founded on faith in
the divine and universal symbolism of humanity and nature, was
gradually arising, and venting itself, from time to time, as I conceive,
through many most unsuspected channels, through chivalry, through
the minne-singers, through the lay inventors, or rather importers, of
pointed architecture, through the German school of painting, through
the politics of the free towns, till it attained complete freedom in Luther
and his associate reformers.
For my fantastic quotations of Scripture, if they shall be deemed
irreverent, I can only say, that they were the fashion of the time, from
prince to peasant--that there is scarcely one of them with which I have
not actually met in the writings of the period--that those writings
abound with misuse of Scripture, far more coarse, arbitrary, and
ridiculous, than any which I have dared to insert-- that I had no right to
omit so radical a characteristic of the Middle Age.
For the more coarse and homely passages with which the drama is
interspersed, I must make the same apology. I put them there because
they were there--because the Middle Age was, in the gross, a coarse,
barbarous, and profligate age--because it was necessary, in order to
bring out fairly the beauty of the central character, to show 'the crooked
and perverse generation' in which she was 'a child of God without
rebuke.' It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness of the time which,
by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time the Apostolic
holiness and the Manichean asceticism of the Mediaeval