as the
victim of fate, she might be unruffled, spotless, majestic; but to the
man of the sixteenth century she was merely frail and false. The rolling
hawk's eye and the wanton smile of the old legend-monger would have
perplexed Homer, but they were necessary for Marlowe; his Helen was
essentially modern, he had probably no inkling that an antique Helen as
distinguished from a modern could exist. In the paramour of Faustus he
saw merely the most beautiful woman, some fair and wanton creature,
dressed not in chaste and majestic antique drapery, but in fantastic
garments of lawn, like those of Hero in his own poem:

The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn;
Her wide sleeves green, and bordered with a grove
Where Venus, in her naked glory strove
To please the careless and disdainful eyes
Of proud Adonis, that before her lies;
Her kirtle blue....
Upon her head she wore a myrtle wreath
From whence her veil reached to the ground beneath;
Her veil was artificial flowers and leaves
Whose workmanship both man and beast deceives.

Some slim and dainty goddess of Botticelli, very mortal withal, long and
sinuous, tightly clad in brocaded garments and clinging cobweb veils,
beautiful with the delicate, diaphanous beauty, rather emaciated and
hectic, of high rank, and the conscious, elaborate fascination of a
woman of fashion--a creature whom, like the Gioconda, Leonardo might
have spent years in decking and painting, ever changing the ornaments
and ever altering the portrait; to whom courtly poets like Bembo and
Castiglione might have written scores of sonnets and canzoni to her
hands, her eyes, her hair, her lips, a fanciful inventory to which she
listened languidly under the cypresses of Florentine gardens. Some such
being, even rarer and more dubious for being an exotic in the England
of Elizabeth, was Marlowe's Helen; such, and not a ghostly figure,
descended from a pedestal, white and marble-like in her unruffled
drapery, walking with solid step and unswerving, placid glance through
the study, crammed with books, and vials, and strange instruments, of
the mediaeval wizard of Wittenberg. Marlowe deluded himself as well as
Faustus, and palmed off on to him a mere modern lady. To raise a real
spectre of the antique is a craving of our own century; Goethe attempted
to do it and failed, for what reasons we have seen; but we have all
of us the charm wherewith to evoke for ourselves a real Helena, on
cond