id much against the common tendency towards transporting on to
a work of art an interest not originally due to it, because, by this
means, we are apt to lose the interest which does belong to the work
of art. But, if only each could get its due, each exert its power
unimpaired, there could be nothing more delightful than thus to enjoy
the joint effect of several works of art; not, according to the notion
of certain aesthetic visionaries--who do not see that singers cannot be
living Greek statues nor librettists poets, nor scene-painters
Poussins--in one clumsy ambiguous monster spectacle, but in our minds,
in our fancy; if, conscious of the difference between them, we could
unite in one collection the works of various arts: people the glades
and dingles of Keats with the divinities we have seen in marble, play
upon the reed of the Praxitelian Faun the woodland melodies of Mozart's
Tamino. It would thus be the highest reward for self-scrutinising
aesthetic humility, for honest appreciation of each art for itself, for
brave sacrifice of our own artistic whimsies and vanities, to enable us
to bring up simultaneously the recollection of Virgil's nobly pathetic
lines, of the exquisitely simple and supple forms of the bas-relief, of
the grand and tender music of Gluck, and to unite them in one noble
pageant of the imagination, evoked by the spell of those two names:
Orpheus and Eurydice.

FAUSTUS AND HELENA.

NOTES ON THE SUPERNATURAL IN ART.

There is a story, well-known throughout the sixteenth century, which
tells how Doctor Faustus of Wittemberg, having made over his soul to the
fiend, employed him to raise the ghost of Helen of Sparta, in order that
she might become his paramour. The story has no historic value, no
scientific meaning; it lacks the hoary dignity of the tales of heroes
and demi-gods, wrought, vague, and colossal forms, out of cloud and
sunbeam, of those tales narrated and heard by generations of men deep
hidden in the stratified ruins of lost civilisation, carried in the
races from India to Hellas, and to Scandinavia. Compared with them,
this tale of Faustus and Helena is paltry and brand-new; it is not a
myth, nay, scarcely a legend; it is a mere trifling incident added by
humanistic pedantry to the ever-changing mediaeval story of the man who
barters his soul for knowledge, the wizard, alchemist, philosopher,
printer, Albertus, Bacon, or Faustus. It is a part, an unessential,
subordinate fragm