O, wär ich nimmer über Meer hieher geschifft, Ich unglücksel'ger! Eitler Wahn bethörte mich, Wohlfeilen Ruhm zu suchen in dem Frankenkrieg, Und jetzo führt mich das verderbliche Geschick In diese blut'ge Mordschlacht. Wär ich weit von hier Daheim noch an der Savern' bluhendem Gestad Im sichern Vaterhause, we die Mutter mir. In Gram zurückblieb und die zarte süsse Braut.[24] Expressions such as these are unmanly, and make the figure of this knight neither fit for the genuine Epos nor the tragic drama, are in fact rather suggestive of comedy. And when Joan, after exclaiming, Du bist des Todes! Eine britt'sche Mutter zeugte dich![25] advances towards him, he throws away sword and shield and pleads at her feet for his life. The reasons he gives at length in order to arouse her sympathy: his defencelessness; the wealth of his father, who would ransom him with gold; the gentleness of the sex to which Joan belongs as maid; the love of his sweet bride, who waits for his return home in tears; the grief of the parents whom he has left at home; the grievous fate of death unwept for in a foreign land--all these motives are themselves, in one aspect of them, essentially objective conditions, effective and of value as such, and on the other hand, the tranquil exposition of them is itself in the epic vein. In the same way the poet motives the condition, that Joan must hearken to him, through the external circumstance of the defencelessness of the pleader, although from the dramatic point of view she ought without delay and at the bare sight to have slain him, being as she was the relentless foe of all Englishmen, and in fact expresses such destructive hatred with every resource of rhetoric, justifying her action by the statement that she is bound with most fearful vow to the spirit-world. Mit dem Schwert zu tödten alles Lebende, das ihr Der Schlachten Gott verhängnissvoll entgegenschickt.[26] If the point of importance to the maid were merely that Montgomery ought not to die defenceless, he possessed apparently an excellent means in his grasp of retaining his life; in other words he had merely to refuse to take up his weapons. This view is supported by the fact that Joan has already listened to him so long. Yet when she demands that he should fight for his life with her, of mortal flesh like himself, he again takes up his sword and falls by her hand. Such a _development_ of the scene had been more in keeping with the drama had it dispensed with all this varied epic exposition.