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.
CHAPTER XIII: ENCHANTED CIGARETTES
To dream over literary projects, Balzac says, is like "smoking enchanted
cigarettes," but when we try to tackle our projects, to make them real,
the enchantment disappears. We have to till the soil, to sow the seed,
to gather the leaves, and then the cigarettes must be manufactured, while
there may be no market for them after all.
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