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."[1]

[1] Part II., p. 183.

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 corru