The first name in romance, the most ancient and the most enduring, is
that of Argive Helen. During three thousand years fair women have been
born, have lived, and been loved, "that there might be a song in the ears
of men of later time," but, compared to the renown of Helen, their glory
is dim. Cleopatra, who held the world's fate in her hands, and lay in
the arms of Caesar; Mary Stuart (_Maria Verticordia_), for whose sake, as
a northern novelist tells, peasants have lain awake, sorrowing that she
is dead; Agnes Sorel, Fair Rosamond, la belle Stuart, "the Pompadour and
the Parabere," can still enchant us from the page of history and
chronicle. "Zeus gave them beauty, which naturally rules even strength
itself," to quote the Greek orator on the mistress of them all, on her
who, having never lived, can never die, the Daughter of the Swan.
While Helen enjoys this immortality, and is the ideal of beauty upon
earth, it is curious to reflect on the _modernite_ of her story, the
oldest of the love stories of the world. In Homer we first meet her, the
fairest of women in the song of the greatest of poets. It might almost
seem as if Homer meant to justify, by his dealing with Helen, some of the
most recent theories of literary art. In the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" the
tale of Helen is without a beginning and without an end, like a frieze on
a Greek temple. She crosses the stage as a figure familiar to all, the
poet's audience clearly did not need to be told who Helen was, nor
anything about her youth.
The famous judgment of Paris, the beginning of evil to Achaeans and Ilian
men, is only mentioned once by Homer, late, and in a passage of doubtful
authenticity. Of her reconciliation to her wedded lord, Menelaus, not a
word is said; of her end we are told no more than that for her and him a
mansion in Elysium is prepared--
"Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow."
We leave her happy in Argos, a smile on her lips, a gift in her hands, as
we met her in Troy, beautiful, adored despite her guilt, as sweet in her
repentance as in her unvexed Argive home. Women seldom mention her, in
the epic, but with horror and anger; men never address her but in gentle
courtesy. What is her secret? How did she leave her home with
Paris--beguiled by love, by magic, or driven by the implacable Aphrodite?
Homer is silent on all of these things; these things, doubtless, were
known by his audience. In his poem Helen moves as a thing of simple
grace, courtesy, and kindness, save when she rebels against her doom,
after seeing her lover fly from her husband's spear. Had we only Homer,
by far our earliest literary source, we should know little of the romance
of Helen; should only know that a lawless love brought ruin on Troy and
sorrow on the Achaeans; and this is thrown out, with no moral comment,
without praise or blame. The end, we learn, was peace, and beauty was
reconciled to life. There is no explanation, no _denouement_; and we
know how much _denouement_ and explanations hampered Scott and
Shakespeare. From these trammels Homer is free, as a god is free from
mortal limitations.
All this manner of telling a tale--a manner so ancient, so original--is
akin, in practice, to recent theories of what art should be, and what art
seldom is, perhaps never is, in modern hands.
Modern enough, again, is the choice of a married woman for the heroine of
the earliest love tale. Apollonius Rhodius sings (and no man has ever
sung so well) of a maiden's love; Virgil, of a widow's; Homer, of love
that has defied law, blindly obedient to destiny, which dominates even
Zeus. Once again, Helen is not a very young girl; ungallant
chronologists have attributed to her I know not what age. We think of
her as about the age of the Venus of Milo; in truth, she was "ageless and
immortal." Homer never describes her beauty; we only see it reflected in
the eyes of the old men, white and weak, thin-voiced as cicalas: but hers
is a loveliness "to turn an old man young." "It is no marvel," they say,
"that for her sake Trojans and Achaeans slay each other."
She was embroidering at a vast web, working in gold and scarlet the
sorrows that for her sake befell mankind, when they called her to the
walls to see Paris fight Menelaus, in the last year of the war. There
she stands, in raiment of silvery white, her heart yearning for her old
love and her own city. Already her thought is far from Paris. Was her
heart ever with Paris? That is her secret. A very old legend, mentioned
by the Bishop of Thessalonica, Eustathius, tells us that Paris magically
beguiled her, disguised in the form of Menelaus, her lord, as Uther
beguiled Ygerne. She sees the son of Priam play the dastard in the
fight; she turns in wrath on Aphrodite, who would lure her back to his
arms; but to his arms she must go, "for the daughter of Zeus was afraid."
Violence is put upon beauty; it is soiled, or seems soiled, in its way
through the world. Helen urges Paris again into the war. He has a heart
invincibly light and gay; shame does not weigh on him. "Not every man is
valiant every day," he says; yet once engaged in battle, he bears him
bravely, and his arrows rain death among the mail-clad Achaeans.
What Homer thinks of Paris we can only guess. His beauty is the bane of
Ilios; but Homer forgives so much to beauty. In the end of the "Iliad,"
Helen sings the immortal dirge over Hector, the stainless knight, "with
thy loving kindness and thy gentle speech."
In the "Odyssey," she is at home again, playing the gracious part of
hostess to Odysseus's wandering son, pouring into the bowl the magic herb
of Egypt, "which brings forgetfulness of sorrow." The wandering son of
Odysseus departs with a gift for his bride, "to wear upon the day of her
desire, a memorial of the hands of Helen," the beautiful hands, that in
Troy or Argos were never idle.
Of Helen, from Homer, we know no more. Grace, penitence in exile, peace
at home, these are the portion of her who set East and West at war and
ruined the city of Priam of the ashen spear. As in the strange legend
preserved by Servius, the commentator on Virgil, who tells us that Helen
wore a red "star-stone," whence fell gouts of blood that vanished ere
they touched her swan's neck; so all the blood shed for her sake leaves
Helen stainless. Of Homer's Helen we know no more.
The later Greek fancy, playing about this form of beauty, wove a myriad
of new fancies, or disinterred from legend old beliefs untouched by
Homer. Helen was the daughter of the Swan--that is, as was later
explained, of Zeus in the shape of a swan. Her loveliness, even in
childhood, plunged her in many adventures. Theseus carried her off; her
brothers rescued her. All the princes of Achaea competed for her hand,
having first taken an oath to avenge whomsoever she might choose for her
husband. The choice fell on the correct and honourable, but rather
inconspicuous, Menelaus, and they dwelt in Sparta, beside the Eurotas,
"in a hollow of the rifted hills." Then, from across the sea, came the
beautiful and fatal Paris, son of Priam, King of Troy. As a child, Paris
had been exposed on the mountains, because his mother dreamed that she
brought forth a firebrand. He was rescued and fostered by a shepherd; he
tended the flocks; he loved the daughter of a river god, OEnone. Then
came the naked Goddesses, to seek at the hand of the most beautiful of
mortals the prize of beauty. Aphrodite won the golden apple from the
queen of heaven, Hera, and from the Goddess of war and wisdom, Athena,
bribing the judge by the promise of the fairest wife in the world. No
incident is more frequently celebrated in poetry and art, to which it
lends such gracious opportunities. Paris was later recognised as of the
royal blood of Troy. He came to Lacedaemon on an embassy, he saw Helen,
and destiny had its way.
Concerning the details in this most ancient love-story, we learn nothing
from Homer, who merely makes Paris remind Helen of their bridal night in
the isle of Cranae. But from Homer we learn that Paris carried off not
only the wife of Menelaus, but many of his treasures. To the poet of the
"Iliad," the psychology of the wooing would have seemed a simple matter.
Like the later vase-painters, he would have shown us Paris beside Helen,
Aphrodite standing near, accompanied by the figure of Peitho--Persuasion.
Homer always escapes our psychological problems by throwing the weight of
our deeds and misdeeds on a God or a Goddess, or on destiny. To have
fled from her lord and her one child, Hermione, was not in keeping with
the character of Helen as Homer draws it. Her repentance is almost
Christian in its expression, and repentance indicates a consciousness of
sin and of shame, which Helen frequently professes. Thus she, at least,
does not, like Homer, in his chivalrous way, throw all the blame on the
Immortals and on destiny. The cheerful acquiescence of Helen in destiny
makes part of the comic element in _La Belle Helene_, but the mirth only
arises out of the incongruity between Parisian ideas and those of ancient
Greece.
Helen is freely and bitterly blamed in the "Odyssey" by Penelope, chiefly
because of the ruinous consequences which followed her flight. Still,
there is one passage, when Penelope prudently hesitates about recognising
her returned lord, which makes it just possible that a legend chronicled
by Eustathius was known to Homer,--namely, the tale already mentioned,
that Paris beguiled her in the shape of Menelaus. The incident is very
old, as in the story of Zeus and Amphitryon, and might be used whenever a
lady's character needed to be saved. But this anecdote, on the whole, is
inconsistent with the repentance of Helen, and is not in Homer's manner.
The early lyric poet, Stesichorus, is said to have written harshly
against Helen. She punished him by blindness, and he indited a palinode,
explaining that it was not she who went to Troy, but a woman fashioned in
her likeness, by Zeus, out of mist and light. The real Helen remained
safely and with honour in Egypt. Euripides has made this idea, which was
calculated to please him, the groundwork of his "Helena," but it never
had a strong hold on the Greek imagination. Modern fancy is pleased by
the picture of the cloud-bride in Troy, Greeks and Trojans dying for a
phantasm. "Shadows we are, and shadows we pursue."
Concerning the later feats, and the death of Paris, Homer says very
little. He slew Achilles by an arrow-shot in the Scaean gate, and
prophecy was fulfilled. He himself fell by another shaft, perhaps the
poisoned shaft of Philoctetes. In the fourth or fifth century of our era
a late poet, Quintus Smyrnaeus, described Paris's journey, in quest of a
healing spell, to the forsaken OEnone, and her refusal to aid him; her
death on his funeral pyre. Quintus is a poet of extraordinary merit for
his age, and scarcely deserves the reproach of laziness affixed on him by
Lord Tennyson.
On the whole, Homer seems to have a kind of half-contemptuous liking for
the beautiful Paris. Later art represents him as a bowman of girlish
charms, wearing a Phrygian cap. There is a late legend that he had a
son, Corythus, by OEnone, and that he killed the lad in a moment of
jealousy, finding him with Helen and failing to recognise him. On the
death of Paris, perhaps by virtue of the custom of the Levirate, Helen
became the wife of his brother, Deiphobus.
How her reconciliation with Menelaus was brought about we do not learn
from Homer, who, in the "Odyssey," accepts it as a fact. The earliest
traditional hint on the subject is given by the famous "Coffer of
Cypselus," a work of the seventh century, B.C., which Pausanias saw at
Olympia, in A.D. 174. Here, on a band of ivory, was represented, among
other scenes from the tale of Troy, Menelaus rushing, sword in hand, to
slay Helen. According to Stesichorus, the army was about to stone her
after the fall of Ilios, but relented, amazed by her beauty.
Of her later life in Lacedaemon, nothing is known on really ancient
authority, and later traditions vary. The Spartans showed her sepulchre
and her shrine at Therapnae, where she was worshipped. Herodotus tells
us how Helen, as a Goddess, appeared in her temple and healed a deformed
child, making her the fairest woman in Sparta, in the reign of Ariston.
It may, perhaps, be conjectured that in Sparta, Helen occupied the place
of a local Aphrodite. In another late story she dwells in the isle of
Leuke, a shadowy bride of the shadowy Achilles. The mocking Lucian, in
his _Vera Historia_, meets Helen in the Fortunate Islands, whence she
elopes with one of his companions. Again, the sons of Menelaus, by a
concubine, were said to have driven Helen from Sparta on the death of her
lord, and she was murdered in Rhodes, by the vengeance of Polyxo, whose
husband fell at Troy. But, among all these inventions, that of Homer
stands out pre-eminent. Helen and Menelaus do not die, they are too near
akin to Zeus; they dwell immortal, not among the shadows of heroes and of
famous ladies dead and gone, but in Elysium, the paradise at the world's
end, unvisited by storms.
"Beyond these voices there is peace."
It is plain that, as a love-story, the tale of Paris and Helen must to
modern readers seem meagre. To Greece, in every age, the main interest
lay not in the passion of the beautiful pair, but in its world-wide
consequences: the clash of Europe and Asia, the deaths of kings, the ruin
wrought in their homes, the consequent fall of the great and ancient
Achaean civilisation. To the Greeks, the Trojan war was what the
Crusades are in later history. As in the Crusades, the West assailed the
East for an ideal, not to recover the Holy Sepulchre of our religion, but
to win back the living type of beauty and of charm. Perhaps, ere the sun
grows cold, men will no more believe in the Crusades, as an historical
fact, than we do in the siege of Troy. In a sense, a very obvious sense,
the myth of Helen is a parable of Hellenic history. They sought beauty,
and they found it; they bore it home, and, with beauty, their bane.
Wherever Helen went "she brought calamity," in this a type of all the
famous and peerless ladies of old days, of Cleopatra and of Mary Stuart.
Romance and poetry have nothing less plausible than the part which
Cleopatra actually played in the history of the world, a world well lost
by Mark Antony for her sake. The flight from Actium might seem as much a
mere poet's dream as the gathering of the Achaeans at Aulis, if we were
not certain that it is truly chronicled.
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.