ent, valued in its day neither more nor less than any
other part of the history of Doctor Faustus, narrated cursorily by the
biographer of the wizard, overlooked by some of the ballad rhymers,
alternately used and rejected by the playwrights of puppet-shows; given
by Marlowe himself no greater importance than the other marvellous
deeds, the juggling tricks and magic journeys of his hero.

But for us, the incident of Faustus and Helena has a meaning, a
fascination wholly different from any other portion of the story; the
other incidents owe everything to artistic treatment: this one owes
nothing. The wizard Faustus, awaiting the hour which will give him over
to Hell, is the creation of Marlowe; Gretchen is even more completely
the creation of Goethe; the fiend of the Englishman is occasionally
grand, the fiend of the German is throughout masterly; in all these
cases we are in the presence of true artistic work, of stuff rendered
valuable solely by the hand of the artist, of figures well defined and
finite, and limited also in their power over the imagination. But the
group of Faustus and Helena is different; it belongs neither to Marlowe
nor to Goethe, it belongs to the legend. It does not give the complete
and limited satisfaction of a work of art; it has the charm of the
fantastic and fitful shapes formed by the flickering firelight or the
wreathing mists; it haunts like some vague strain of music, drowsily
heard in half-sleep. It fills the fancy, it oscillates and transforms
itself; the artist may see it, attempt to seize and embody it for
evermore in a definite and enduring shape, but it vanishes out of his
grasp, and the forms which should have inclosed it are mere empty
sepulchres, haunted and charmed merely by the evoking power of our own
imagination. If we are fascinated by the Lady Helen of Marlowe, walking,
like some Florentine goddess, with embroidered kirtle and madonna face,
across the study of the old wizard of Wittemberg; if we are pleased
by the stately pseudo-antique Helena of Goethe, draped in the drapery
of Thorwaldsen's statues, and speaking the language of Goethe's own
Iphigenia, as she meets the very modern Faust, gracefully masqued in
mediaeval costume; if we find in these attempts, the one unthinking and
imperfect, the other laboured and abortive, something which delights
our fancy, it is because our thoughts wander off from them and evoke a
Faustus and Helena of our own, different from the creatio