stinct of the clean-limbed,
placid brute, she can give peace to his tormented conscience; and, while
he has suffered and struggled and lashed himself for every seeming
baseness of desire, and loathed himself for every imagined microscopic
soiling, she has walked through good and evil, letting the vileness of
sin trickle off her unhidden soul, so quietly and majestically that all
thought of evil vanishes; and the self-tormenting wretch, with macerated
flesh hidden beneath the heavy garments of mysticism and philosophy,
suddenly feels, in the presence of her unabashed nakedness, that he,
like herself, is chaste.

Such are the parents, Faustus and Helena; we know them; but who is this
son Euphorion? To me it seems as if there could be but one answer--the
Renaissance. Goethe indeed has told us (though, with his rejuvenation of
Faustus, unknown to the old German legend and to our Marlowe, in how
bungling a manner!) the tale of that mystic marriage; but Goethe could
not tell us rightly, even had he attempted, the real name of its
offspring. For even so short a time ago, the Middle Ages were only
beginning to be more than a mere historical expression, Antiquity was
being only then critically discovered; and the Renaissance, but vaguely
seen and quite unformulated by the first men, Gibbon and Roscoe, who
perceived it at all, was still virtually unknown. To Goethe, therefore,
it might easily have seemed as if the antique Helena had only just been
evoked, and as if of her union with the worn-out century of his birth, a
real Euphorion, the age in which ourselves are living, might have been
born. But, at the distance of additional time, and from the undreamed-of
height upon which recent historical science has enabled us to stand, we
can easily see that in this he would have been mistaken. Not only is our
modern culture no child of Faustus and Helena, but it is the complex
descendant, strangely featured by atavism from various sides, of many
and various civilizations; and the eighteenth century, so far from being
a Faustus evoking as his bride the long dead Helen of Antiquity, was in
itself a curiously varied grandchild or great-grandchild of such a
marriage, its every moral feature, its every intellectual movement
proclaiming how much of its being was inherited from Antiquity. No
allegory, I well know, and least of all no historical allegory, can ever
be strained to fit quite tight--the lives of individuals and those of
centuries,