Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/286

 ported by messenger in The Persians. Hardy's manner of portraying battles is essentially the same, except that he lets the stage directions or "dumb show" tell the story which the Athenians would have heard narrated by the messenger. In both dramatists these descriptions are intensely vivid and effective. In The Dynasts there is nothing which surpasses the following passage, dealing with the close of the Battle of Waterloo:

The reds disappear from the sky, and the dusk grows deeper. The action of the battle degenerates into a hunt, and recedes further and further into the distance southward. When the tramplings and shouts of the combatants have dwindled, the lower sounds are noticeable that come from the wounded: hopeless appeals, cries for water, elaborate blasphemies, and impotent execrations of Heaven and hell. In the vast and dusky shambles black slouching shapes begin to move, the plunderers of the dead and dying.

The night grows clear and beautiful, and the moon shines musingly down. But instead of the sweet smell of green herbs and dewy rye as at her last shining upon these fields, there is now the stench of gunpowder and a muddy stew of crushed crops and gore.

Who could wish to exchange this terrible and pitiful picture for even the most beautiful stage-set that can be contrived? The reader is reminded of a few lines in The Persians whose similarity, in idea and expression, to the close of many of Hardy's battle-scenes is unmistakable. Both poets seem to have been acutely affected by the mingled horror and beauty of a moonlight night following a battle. The very words of Æschylus cannot fail to associate the two authors together immediately: