It is along this line of reflection that we must seek the explanation of Schiller's Catholicizing tendency in 'Mary Stuart'. Her creed, if reduced to dogma, would have offended his intellect, just as her political claims would have been rejected by his historical judgment. But he saw in her character that which could be poetically transmuted into a type of the noble sufferer, burdened with remorse, fated to contend with injustice, and betrayed by her own rebellious nature; but triumphing at last in the peaceful assurance that her death is the divinely appointed expiation of her sins. The drama was to represent a process of inward purification,--the attainment, after fierce storms and buffetings, of a calm haven for the soul. Queen Mary was to appear at last as the embodiment of all the qualities that seem most noble and enviable in one who "feels the winnowing wings of death". And of this idea what better dramatic setting can be imagined than the ceremony of confession and absolution in accordance with the forms of the Catholic Church? The solemn searching of the heart gives to Mary's character a saintly dignity, as of one already beatified, and invests the whole scene with an incomparable pathos.[122] Swinburne makes his Mary declare, in angry scorn of woman's weakness, that
Even in death, As in the extremest evil of all our lives, We can but curse or pray, but prate and weep, And all our wrath is wind that works no wreck, And all our fire as[*] water.
Schiller's Mary meets her fate in a nobler mood. She sees in death the 'solemn friend' who comes to lift the ancient burden from her soul. Not only does she forgive and bless her enemies, but she sees in the very injustice of her death a part of the divine benediction:
God deems me fit, through this unmerited death, To expiate my heavy guilt of yore.
Such a sentiment, it must be admitted, is rather too sublimated to harmonize perfectly with the political complications that precede. We seem to have come suddenly into another world; and so we have in truth,--the world of medieval mysticism. That which begins as a drama of conflicting political passions, ends as a drama of mystical edification. The rationalist does not see how the divine order can be vindicated by the triumph of gross injustice; nevertheless he recognizes that the ways of God are inscrutable, and he knows that such ideas, of the winning of peace through blood-atonement, were once intensely real to the Christian world. Schiller requires the rationalist to return in his imagination to this time and place himself in the emotional _milieu_ of the medieval church.