From the earliest times, even from times before Homer (whose audience is supposed to know all about Helen), the imagination of Greece, and later, the imagination of the civilised world, has played around Helen, devising about her all that possibly could be devised. She was the daughter of Zeus by Nemesis, or by Leda; or the daughter of the swan, or a child of the changeful moon, brooding on "the formless and multi-form waters." She could speak in the voices of all women, hence she was named "Echo," and we might fancy that, like the witch of the Brocken, she could appear to every man in the likeness of his own first love. The ancient Egyptians either knew her, or invented legends of her to amuse the inquiring Greeks. She had touched at Sidon, and perhaps Astaroth is only her Sidonian name. Whatever could be told of beauty, in its charm, its perils, the dangers with which it surrounds its lovers, the purity which it retains, unsmirched by all the sins that are done for beauty's sake, could be told of Helen.
Like a golden cup, as M. Paul de St. Victor says, she was carried from lips to lips of heroes, but the gold remains unsullied and unalloyed. To heaven she returns again, to heaven which is her own, and looks down serenely on men slain, and women widowed, and sinking ships, and burning towns. Yet with death she gives immortality by her kiss, and Paris and Menelaus live, because they have touched the lips of Helen. Through the grace of Helen, for whom he fell, Sarpedon's memory endures, and Achilles and Memnon, the son of the Morning, and Troy is more imperishable than Carthage, or Rome, or Corinth, though Helen "Burnt the topless towers of Ilium."In one brief passage, Marlowe did more than all poets since Stesichorus, or, at least since the epithalamium of Theocritus, for the glory of Helen. Roman poets knew her best as an enemy of their fabulous ancestors, and in the "AEneid," Virgil's hero draws his sword to slay her. Through the Middle Ages, in the romances of Troy, she wanders as a shining shadow of the ideally fair, like Guinevere, who so often recalls her in the Arthurian romances. The chivalrous mediaeval poets and the Celts could understand better than the Romans the philosophy of "the world well lost" for love.
Modern poetry, even in Goethe's "Second part of Faust," has not been very fortunately inspired by Helen, except in the few lines which she speaks in "The Dream of Fair Women.""I had great beauty; ask thou not my name."Mr. William Morris's Helen, in the "Earthly Paradise," charms at the time of reading, but, perhaps, leaves little abiding memory.
The Helen of "Troilus and Cressida" is not one of Shakespeare's immortal women, and Mr. Rossetti's ballad is fantastic and somewhat false in tone--a romantic pastiche. Where Euripides twice failed, in the "Troades" and the "Helena," it can be given to few to succeed. Helen is best left to her earliest known minstrel, for who can recapture the grace, the tenderness, the melancholy, and the charm of the daughter of Zeus in the "Odyssey" and "Iliad"?
The sightless eyes of Homer saw her clearest, and Helen was best understood by the wisdom of his unquestioning simplicity.
As if to prove how entirely, though so many hands paltered with her legend, Helen is Homer's alone, there remains no great or typical work of Greek art which represents her beauty, and the breasts from which were modelled cups of gold for the service of the gods. We have only paintings on vases, or work on gems, which, though graceful, is conventional and might represent any other heroine, Polyxena, or Eriphyle. No Helen from the hands of Phidias or Scopas has survived to our time, and the grass may be growing in Therapnae over the shattered remains of her only statue.
As Stesichorus fabled that only an eidolon of Helen went to Troy, so, except in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," we meet but shadows of her loveliness, phantasms woven out of clouds, and the light of setting suns.
