With Homer's treatment of a battle-field, and as illustrating the conclusion which we argue from it, we are tempted to draw parallels from two modern poets—one a German, who was taken away in the morning of his life; the other, the most gifted of modern Englishmen. Each of these two has attempted the same subject, and the treatment in each case embodies, in a similar manner, modern ways of thinking about it.
The first is from the 'Albigenses' of young Lenau, who has since died lunatic, we have heard, as he was not unlikely to have died with such thoughts in him. It is the eve of one of those terrible struggles at Toulouse, and the poet's imagination is hanging at moon-rise over the scene. 'The low broad field scattered over thick with corpses, all silent, dead,—the last sob spent,'—the priest's thanksgiving for the Catholic victory having died into an echo, and only the 'vultures crying their Te Deum laudamus.'
Hat Gott der Herr den Körperstoff erschaffen,
Hat ihn hervorgebracht ein böser Geist,
Darüber stritten sie mit allen Waffen
Und werden von den Vögeln nun gespeist,
Die, ohne ihren Ursprung nachzufragen,
Die Körper da sich lassen wohl behagen.
'Was it God the Lord who formed the substance of their bodies? or did some evil spirit bring it forth? It was for this with all their might they fought, and now they are devoured there by the wild birds, who sit gorging merrily over their carrion, without asking from whence it came.'
In Homer, as we saw, the true hero is master over death—death has no terror for him. He meets it, if it is to be, calmly and proudly, and then it is over; whatever offensive may follow after it, is concealed, or at least passed lightly over. Here, on the contrary, everything most offensive is dwelt upon with an agonising intensity, and the triumph of death is made to extend, not over the body only, but over the soul, whose heroism it turns to mockery. The cause in which a man dies, is what can make his death beautiful; but here nature herself, in her stern, awful way, is reading her sentence over the cause itself as a wild and frantic dream. We ought to be revolted—doubly revolted, one would think, and yet we are not so; instead of being revolted, we are affected with a sense of vast, sad magnificence. Why is this? Because we lose sight of the scene, or lose the sense of its horror, in the tragedy of the spirit. It is the true modern tragedy; the note which sounds through Shakespeare's 'Sonnets,' through 'Hamlet,' through 'Faust;' all the deeper trials of the modern heart might be gathered out of those few lines; the sense of wasted nobleness—nobleness spending its energies upon what time seems to be pronouncing no better than a dream—at any rate, misgivings, sceptic and distracting; yet the heart the while, in spite of the uncertainty of the issue, remaining true at least to itself. If the spirit of the Albigensian warriors had really broken down, or if the poet had pointed his lesson so as to say, Truth is a lie; faith is folly; eat, drink, and die,—then his picture would have been revolting; but the noble spirit remains, though it is borne down and trifled with by destiny, and therefore it is not revolting, but tragic.