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.
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