; there boils within him the energy, the passion,
of retarded youth: its appetites and curiosities, which, cramped by the
intolerant will, and foiled by many a sudden palsy of limb and mind,
torment him with mad visions of unreal worlds, mock him with dreams of
superhuman powers, from which he awakes in impotent and apathetic
anguish. But these often-withstood and often-baffled cravings are not
those merely of scholar or wizard, they are those of soldier and poet
and monk, of the mere man: lawless desires which he seeks to divert, but
fails, from the things of the flesh and of the world to the things of
the reason; supersensuous desires for the beautiful and intangible,
which he strives to crush, but in vain, with the cynical scepticism of
science, which derides the things it cannot grasp. In this strange
Faustus, made up of so many and conflicting instincts; in this old man
with ever-budding and ever-nipped feelings of youthfulness, muddling the
hard-won secrets of nature in search after impossibilities; in him so
all-sided, and yet so wilfully narrowed, so restlessly active, yet so
often palsied and apathetic; in this Faustus, who has laboured so much
and succeeded in so little, feeling himself at the end, when he has
summed up all his studies, as foolish as before--which of us has not
learned to recognize the impersonated Middle Ages? And Helena, we know
her also, she is the spirit of Antiquity. Personified, but we dare
scarcely say, embodied; for she is a ghost raised by the spells of
Faustus, a simulacrum of a thing long dead; yet with such continuing
semblance of life, nay, with all life's real powers, that she seems the
real, vital, living one, and Faustus yonder, thing as he is of the
present, little better than a spectre. Yet Helena has been ages before
Faust ever was; nay, by an awful mystery like those which involve the
birth of Pagan gods, she whom he has evoked to be the mother of his only
son has given, centuries before, somewhat of her life to make this
self-same Faust. A strange mystery of Fate's necromancy this, and with
strange anomalies. For opposite this living, decrepit Faust, Helena, the
long dead, is young; and she is all that which Faust is not. Knowing
much less than he, who has plunged his thoughts like his scalpel into
all the mysteries of life and death, she yet knows much more, can tell
him of the objects and aims of men and things; nay, with little more
than the unconscious faithfulness to in