—­and so, was slain.... and the chiefs of both armies gathered round and mourned for him.—­Now it seems to me that the poets who viewed sympathetically the magnanimity of Bhishma, which meets you on the plane of simple human action and character, would not have viewed sympathetically, or perhaps conceived, the strategem advised by Krishna,—­which you have to meet, to find it acceptable, on the planes of metaphysics and symbolism.

There is a quality in it you do not find in the Illiad. Greek and Trojan champions, before beginning the real business of their combats, do their best to impart to each other a little valuable self-knowledge:  each reveals carefully, in a fine flow of hexameters, the weak points in his opponent’s character.  They are equally eloquent about their own greatnesses, which stir their enthusiasm highly;—­but as to faults, neither takes thought for his own; each concentrates on the other’s; and a war of words is the appetiser for the coming banquet of deeds.  Before fighting Hector, Achilles reviled him; and having killed him, dragged his corpse shamefully round the walls of Troy.  But Bhishma, in his victorious career, has nothing worse to cry to his enemies than—­Valiant are ye, noble princes! and if you think of it on the unsymbolic plane, there is a certain nobility in the Despondency of Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita.

Says the Encyclopaedia Brittanica:

“To characterize the Indian Epics in a single word:  though often disfigured by grotesque fancies and wild exaggerations, they are yet noble works, abounding in passages of remarkable descriptive power; and while as works of art they are far inferior to the Greek epics, in some respects they appeal far more strongly to the romantic mind of europe, namely, by the loving appreciation of natural beauty, their exquisite delineation of womanly love and devotion, and their tender sentiment of mercy and forgiveness.”

—­Precisely because they come from a much higher civilization that the Greek.  From a civilization, that is to say, older and more continuous.  Before Rome fell, the Romans were evolving humanitarian and compassionate ideas quite unlike their old-time callousness.  And no, it was not the influence of Christianity; we see it in the legislation of Hadrian for example, and especially in the anti-Christian Marcus Aurelius.  These feeling grow up in ages unscarred by wars and human cataclysms; every war puts back their growth.  The fall of Rome and the succeeding pralaya threw Europe back into ruthless barbarity.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries humanism began to grow again; and has been gaining ground especially since H. P. Blavatsky began her teaching.  But not much more than a century ago they were publicly hanging, drawing, and quartering people in England; crowds were gathering at Tyburn or before the Old Bailey to enjoy an execution.  We have hardly had four generations in Western Europe in which men have not