g after her as an artistic vision, equally
fail to satisfy us? The question is intricate: it requires a threefold
answer, dependent on the fact that this tale of Faustus and Helena is in
fact a tale of the supernatural--a weird and colossal ghost-story, in
which the actors are the spectre of Antiquity, ever young, beautiful,
radiant, though risen from the putrescence of two thousand years; and
the Middle Ages, alive, but toothless, palsied, and tottering. Why
neither Marlowe nor Goethe have succeeded in giving a satisfactory
artistic shape to this tale is explained by the necessary relations
between art and the supernatural, between our creative power and our
imaginative faculty; why Marlowe has failed in one manner and Goethe in
another is explained by the fact that, as we said, for the first the
tale was a supernatural reality, for the second a supernatural fiction.

What are the relations between art and the supernatural? At first sight
the two appear closely allied: like the supernatural, art is born of
imagination; the supernatural, like art, conjures up unreal visions.
The two have been intimately connected during the great ages of the
supernatural, when instead of existing merely in a few disputed
traditional dogmas, and in a little discredited traditional folklore, it
constituted the whole of religion and a great part of philosophy. Gods
and demons, saints and spectres, have afforded at least one-half of the
subjects for art. The supernatural, in the shape of religious mythology,
had art bound in its service in Antiquity and the Middle Ages; the
supernatural, in the shape of spectral fancies, regained its dominion
over art with the advent of romanticism. From the gods of the _Iliad_
down to the Commander in _Don Giovanni_, from the sylvan divinities of
Praxiteles to the fairies of Shakespeare, from the Furies of AEschylus
to the Archangels of Perugino, the supernatural and the artistic have
constantly appeared linked together. Yet, in reality, the hostility
between the supernatural and the artistic is well-nigh as great as the
hostility between the supernatural and the logical. Critical reason
is a solvent, it reduces the phantoms of the imagination to their
most prosaic elements; artistic power, on the other hand, moulds and
solidifies them into distinct and palpable forms: the synthetical
definiteness of art is as sceptical as the analytical definiteness of
logic. For the supernatural is necessarily essentially