of Goethe, the Helen with only the cold,
bloodless, intellectual life which could be infused by enthusiastic
studies of ancient literature and art, gleaming bright like marble
or a spectre. This Helena of Marlowe is no antique; the Elizabethan
dramatist, like the painter of the fifteenth century, could not conceive
the purely antique, despite all the translating of ancient writers, and
all the drawing from ancient marbles. One of the prose versions of the
story of Faustus, contains a quaint account of Helen, which sheds much
light on Marlowe's conception:

This lady appeared before them in a most rich gowne of purple
velvet, costly imbrodered; her haire hanged downe loose, as faire
as the beaten gold, and of such length that it reached downe to her
hammes; having most amorous cole-black eyes, a sweet and pleasant
round face, with lips as red as a cherry; her cheeks of a rose
colour, her mouth small, her neck white like a swan; tall and
slender of personage; in summe, there was no imperfect place in her;
she looked around about with a rolling hawk's eye, a smiling and
wanton countenance, which neerehand inflamed the hearts of all the
students, but that they persuaded themselves she was a spirit, which
make them lightly passe away such fancies.

This fair dame in the velvet embroidered gown, with the long, hanging
hair, this Helen of the original Faustus legend, is antique only in
name; she belongs to the race of mediaeval and modern women--the Lauras,
Fiammettas, and Simonettas of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Lorenzo dei
Medici; she is the sister of that slily sentimental coquette, the Monna
Lisa of Leonardo. The strong and simple women of Homer, and even
of Euripides, majestic and matronly even in shame, would repudiate
this slender, smiling, ogling beauty; Briseis, though the captive of
Achilles' spear, would turn with scorn from her. The antique woman has
a dignity due to her very inferiority and restrictedness of position;
she has the simplicity, the completeness, the absence of everything
suggestive of degradation, like that of some stately animal, pure in
its animal nature. The modern woman, with more freedom and more ideal,
rarely approaches to this character; she is too complex to be perfect,
she is frail because she has an ideal, she is dubious because she is
free, she may fall because she may rise. Helen deserted Menelaus and
brought ruin upon Troy, therefore, in the eyes of Antiquity, she w