o Marlowe and his contemporaries,
was not a romance but a reality, the episode of the evoking of Helen
is extremely secondary in interest. To raise a dead woman was not more
wonderful than to turn wisps of straw into horses, and it was perhaps
considered the easier of the two miracles; the sense of the ordinary
ghostly is absent, and the sense that Helen is the ghost of a whole
long-dead civilisation, that sense which is for us the whole charm of
the tale, could not exist in the sixteenth century. Goethe's Faust
feels for Helen as Goethe himself might have felt, as Winckelmann felt
for a lost antique statue, as Schiller felt for the dead Olympus: a
passion intensely imaginative and poetic, born of deep appreciation of
antiquity, the essentially modern, passionate, nostalgic craving for
the past. In Marlowe's play, on the contrary, Faustus and the students
evoke Helen from a confused pedantic impression that an ancient lady
must be as much superior to a modern lady as an ancient poem, be it
even by Statius or Claudian, must be superior to a modern poem--it is
a humanistic fancy of the days of the revival of letters. But, by a
strange phenomenon, Marlowe, once realising what Helen means, that she
is the fairest of women, forgets the scholarly interest in her. Faustus,
once in presence of the wonderful woman, forgets that he had summoned
her up to gratify his and his friends' pedantry; he sees her, loves her,
and bursts out into the splendid tirade full of passionate fancy:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
Her lips suck forth my soul! See, where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for Heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
Oh! thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appeared to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azure arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.

This is real passion for a real woman, a woman very different from the
splendid semi-vivified statue