their modes of intermixture, genesis, and inheritance are far
different; but if an allegory is to possess any meaning at all, we must
surely apply it wherever it will fit most easily and completely; and the
beautiful allegory prepared by the tradition of the sixteenth century
for the elaborating genius of Goethe, can have a real meaning only if we
explain Faust as representing the Middle Ages, Helena as Antiquity, and
Euphorion as that child of the Middle Ages, taking life and reality from
them, but born of and curiously nurtured by the spirit of Antiquity, to
which significant accident has given the name of Renaissance.

After Euphorion I have therefore christened this book; and this not from
any irrational conceit of knowing more (when I am fully aware that I
know infinitely less) than other writers about the life and character of
this wonderful child of Helena and Faustus, but merely because it is
more particularly as the offspring of this miraculous marriage, and with
reference to the harmonies and anomalies which therefrom resulted, that
Euphorion has exercised my thoughts.

The Renaissance has interested and interests me, not merely for what it
is, but even more for what it sprang from, and for the manner in which
the many things inherited from both Middle Ages and Renaissance, the
tendencies and necessities inherent in every special civilization, acted
and reacted upon each other, united in concord or antagonism; forming,
like the gases of the chemist, new things, sometimes like and sometimes
unlike themselves and each other; producing now some unknown substance
of excellence and utility, at other times some baneful element, known
but too well elsewhere, but unexpected here. But not the watching of the
often tragic meeting of these great fatalities of inherited spirit and
habit only: for equally fascinating almost has been the watching of the
elaboration by this double-natured period of things of little weight,
mere trifles of artistic material bequeathed to it by one or by the
other of its spiritual parents. The charm for me--a charm sometimes
pleasurable, but sometimes also painful, like the imperious necessity
which we sometimes feel to see again and examine, seemingly uselessly,
some horrible evil--the charm, I mean the involuntary compulsion of
attention, has often been as great in following the vicissitudes of a
mere artistic item, like the Carolingian stories or the bucolic element,
as it has been in looki