ns of Marlowe
and of Goethe; it is because in these definite and imperfect artistic
forms, there yet remains the suggestion of the subject with all its
power over the imagination. We forget Marlowe, and we forget Goethe, to
follow up the infinite suggestion of the legend. We cease to see the
Elizabethan and the pseudo-antique Helen; we lift our imagination from
the book and see the mediaeval street at Wittemberg, the gabled house of
Faustus, all sculptured with quaint devices and grotesque forms of apes
and cherubs and flowers; we penetrate through the low brown rooms,
filled with musty books and mysterious ovens and retorts, redolent with
strange scents of alchemy, to that innermost secret chamber, where the
old wizard hides, in the depths of his mediaeval house, the immortal
woman, the god-born, the fatal, the beloved of Theseus and Paris and
Achilles; we are blinded by this sunshine of Antiquity pent up in the
oaken-panelled chamber, such as Duerer might have etched; and all around
we hear circulating the mysterious rumours of the neighbours, of the
burghers and students, whispering shyly of Dr. Faustus and his strange
guest, in the beer-cellars and in the cloisters of the old university
town. And gazing thus into the fantastic intellectual mist which has
risen up between us and the book we were reading, be it Marlowe or
Goethe, we cease, after a while, to see Faustus or Helena, we perceive
only a chaotic fluctuation of incongruous shapes; scholars in furred
robes and caps pulled over their ears, burghers wives with high
sugar-loaf coif and slashed boddices, with hands demurely folded over
their prayer-books, and knights in armour and immense plumes, and
haggling Jews, and tonsured monks, descended out of panels of Wohlgemuth
and the engravings of Duerer, mingling with, changing into processions of
naked athletes on foaming short-maned horses, of draped Athenian maidens
carrying baskets and sickles, and priests bearing oil-jars and torches,
all melting into each other, indistinct, confused, like the images in a
dream; vague crowds, phantoms following in the wake of the spectre woman
of Antiquity, beautiful, unimpassioned, ever young, luring to Hell the
wizard of the Middle Ages.

Why does all this vanish as soon as we once more fix our eyes upon the
book? Why can our fancy show us more than can the artistic genius of
Marlowe and of Goethe? Why does Marlowe, believing in Helen as a satanic
reality, and Goethe, strivin