CHAPTER XII: PARIS AND HELEN
The first name in romance, the most ancient and the most enduring, isthat of Argive Helen. During three thousand years fair women have beenborn, have lived, and been loved, "that there might be a song in the earsof men of later time," but, compared to the renown of Helen, their gloryis dim. Cleopatra, who held the world's fate in her hands, and lay inthe arms of Caesar; Mary Stuart (_Maria Verticordia_), for whose sake, asa northern novelist tells, peasants have lain awake, sorrowing that sheis dead; Agnes Sorel, Fair Rosamond, la belle Stuart, "the Pompadour andthe Parabere," can still enchant us from the page of history andchronicle. "Zeus gave them beauty, which naturally rules even strengthitself," to quote the Greek orator on the mistress of them all, on herwho, having never lived, can never die, the Daughter of the Swan.
While Helen enjoys this immortality, and is the ideal of beauty uponearth, it is curious to reflect on the _modernite_ of her story, theoldest of the love stories of the world. In Homer we first meet her, thefairest of women in the song of the greatest of poets. It might almostseem as if Homer meant to justify, by his dealing with Helen, some of themost recent theories of literary art. In the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" thetale of Helen is without a beginning and without an end, like a frieze ona Greek temple. She crosses the stage as a figure familiar to all, thepoet's audience clearly did not need to be told who Helen was, noranything about her youth.
The famous judgment of Paris, the beginning of evil to Achaeans and Ilianmen, is only mentioned once by Homer, late, and in a passage of doubtfulauthenticity. Of her reconciliation to her wedded lord, Menelaus, not aword is said; of her end we are told no more than that for her and him amansion 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, aswe met her in Troy, beautiful, adored despite her guilt, as sweet in herrepentance as in her unvexed Argive home. Women seldom mention her, inthe epic, but with horror and anger; men never address her but in gentlecourtesy. What is her secret? How did she leave her home withParis--beguiled by love, by magic, or driven by the implacable Aphrodite?Homer is silent on all of these things; these things, doubtless, wereknown by his audience. In his poem Helen moves as a thing of simplegrace, 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 romanceof Helen; should only know that a lawless love brought ruin on Troy andsorrow on the Achaeans; and this is thrown out, with no moral comment,without praise or blame. The end, we learn, was peace, and beauty wasreconciled to life. There is no explanation, no _denouement_; and weknow how much _denouement_ and explanations hampered Scott andShakespeare. From these trammels Homer is free, as a god is free frommortal limitations.
All this manner of telling a tale--a manner so ancient, so original--isakin, in practice, to recent theories of what art should be, and what artseldom is, perhaps never is, in modern hands.
Modern enough, again, is the choice of a married woman for the heroine ofthe earliest love tale. Apollonius Rhodius sings (and no man has eversung so well) of a maiden's love; Virgil, of a widow's; Homer, of lovethat has defied law, blindly obedient to destiny, which dominates evenZeus. Once again, Helen is not a very young girl; ungallantchronologists have attributed to her I know not what age. We think ofher as about the age of the Venus of Milo; in truth, she was "ageless andimmortal." Homer never describes her beauty; we only see it reflected inthe eyes of the old men, white and weak, thin-voiced as cicalas: but hersis 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 thesorrows that for her sake befell mankind, when they called her to thewalls to see Paris fight Menelaus, in the last year of the war. Thereshe stands, in raiment of silvery white, her heart yearning for her oldlove and her own city. Already her thought is far from Paris. Was herheart ever with Paris? That is her secret. A very old legend, mentionedby the Bishop of Thessalonica, Eustathius, tells us that Paris magicallybeguiled her, disguised in the form of Menelaus, her lord, as Utherbeguiled Ygerne. She sees the son of Priam play the dastard in thefight; she turns in wrath on Aphrodite, who would lure her back to hisarms; 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 waythrough the world. Helen urges Paris again into the war. He has a heartinvincibly light and gay; shame does not weigh on him. "Not every man isvaliant every day," he says; yet once engaged in battle, he bears himbravely, and his arrows rain death among the mail-clad Achaeans.
What Homer thinks of Paris we can only guess. His beauty is the bane ofIlios; but Homer forgives so much to beauty. In the end of the "Iliad,"Helen sings the immortal dirge over Hector, the stainless knight, "withthy loving kindness and thy gentle speech."
In the "Odyssey," she is at home again, playing the gracious part ofhostess to Odysseus's wandering son, pouring into the bowl the magic herbof Egypt, "which brings forgetfulness of sorrow." The wandering son ofOdysseus departs with a gift for his bride, "to wear upon the day of herdesire, a memorial of the hands of Helen," the beautiful hands, that inTroy or Argos were never idle.
Of Helen, from Homer, we know no more. Grace, penitence in exile, peaceat home, these are the portion of her who set East and West at war andruined the city of Priam of the ashen spear. As in the strange legendpreserved by Servius, the commentator on Virgil, who tells us that Helenwore a red "star-stone," whence fell gouts of blood that vanished erethey touched her swan's neck; so all the blood shed for her sake leavesHelen stainless. Of Homer's Helen we know no more.
The later Greek fancy, playing about this form of beauty, wove a myriadof new fancies, or disinterred from legend old beliefs untouched byHomer. Helen was the daughter of the Swan--that is, as was laterexplained, of Zeus in the shape of a swan. Her loveliness, even inchildhood, plunged her in many adventures. Theseus carried her off; herbrothers rescued her. All the princes of Achaea competed for her hand,having first taken an oath to avenge whomsoever she might choose for herhusband. The choice fell on the correct and honourable, but ratherinconspicuous, Menelaus, and they dwelt in Sparta, beside the Eurotas,"in a hollow of the rifted hills." Then, from across the sea, came thebeautiful and fatal Paris, son of Priam, King of Troy. As a child, Parishad been exposed on the mountains, because his mother dreamed that shebrought forth a firebrand. He was rescued and fostered by a shepherd; hetended the flocks; he loved the daughter of a river god, OEnone. Thencame the naked Goddesses, to seek at the hand of the most beautiful ofmortals the prize of beauty. Aphrodite won the golden apple from thequeen 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. Noincident is more frequently celebrated in poetry and art, to which itlends such gracious opportunities. Paris was later recognised as of theroyal 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 nothingfrom Homer, who merely makes Paris remind Helen of their bridal night inthe isle of Cranae. But from Homer we learn that Paris carried off notonly 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 ofour deeds and misdeeds on a God or a Goddess, or on destiny. To havefled from her lord and her one child, Hermione, was not in keeping withthe character of Helen as Homer draws it. Her repentance is almostChristian in its expression, and repentance indicates a consciousness ofsin and of shame, which Helen frequently professes. Thus
she, at least,does not, like Homer, in his chivalrous way, throw all the blame on theImmortals and on destiny. The cheerful acquiescence of Helen in destinymakes part of the comic element in _La Belle Helene_, but the mirth onlyarises out of the incongruity between Parisian ideas and those of ancientGreece.
Helen is freely and bitterly blamed in the "Odyssey" by Penelope, chieflybecause of the ruinous consequences which followed her flight. Still,there is one passage, when Penelope prudently hesitates about recognisingher returned lord, which makes it just possible that a legend chronicledby Eustathius was known to Homer,--namely, the tale already mentioned,that Paris beguiled her in the shape of Menelaus. The incident is veryold, as in the story of Zeus and Amphitryon, and might be used whenever alady's character needed to be saved. But this anecdote, on the whole, isinconsistent with the repentance of Helen, and is not in Homer's manner.
The early lyric poet, Stesichorus, is said to have written harshlyagainst 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 inher likeness, by Zeus, out of mist and light. The real Helen remainedsafely and with honour in Egypt. Euripides has made this idea, which wascalculated to please him, the groundwork of his "Helena," but it neverhad a strong hold on the Greek imagination. Modern fancy is pleased bythe picture of the cloud-bride in Troy, Greeks and Trojans dying for aphantasm. "Shadows we are, and shadows we pursue."
Concerning the later feats, and the death of Paris, Homer says verylittle. He slew Achilles by an arrow-shot in the Scaean gate, andprophecy was fulfilled. He himself fell by another shaft, perhaps thepoisoned shaft of Philoctetes. In the fourth or fifth century of our eraa late poet, Quintus Smyrnaeus, described Paris's journey, in quest of ahealing spell, to the forsaken OEnone, and her refusal to aid him; herdeath on his funeral pyre. Quintus is a poet of extraordinary merit forhis age, and scarcely deserves the reproach of laziness affixed on him byLord Tennyson.
On the whole, Homer seems to have a kind of half-contemptuous liking forthe beautiful Paris. Later art represents him as a bowman of girlishcharms, wearing a Phrygian cap. There is a late legend that he had ason, Corythus, by OEnone, and that he killed the lad in a moment ofjealousy, finding him with Helen and failing to recognise him. On thedeath of Paris, perhaps by virtue of the custom of the Levirate, Helenbecame the wife of his brother, Deiphobus.
How her reconciliation with Menelaus was brought about we do not learnfrom Homer, who, in the "Odyssey," accepts it as a fact. The earliesttraditional hint on the subject is given by the famous "Coffer ofCypselus," a work of the seventh century, B.C., which Pausanias saw atOlympia, in A.D. 174. Here, on a band of ivory, was represented, amongother scenes from the tale of Troy, Menelaus rushing, sword in hand, toslay Helen. According to Stesichorus, the army was about to stone herafter the fall of Ilios, but relented, amazed by her beauty.
Of her later life in Lacedaemon, nothing is known on really ancientauthority, and later traditions vary. The Spartans showed her sepulchreand her shrine at Therapnae, where she was worshipped. Herodotus tellsus how Helen, as a Goddess, appeared in her temple and healed a deformedchild, making her the fairest woman in Sparta, in the reign of Ariston.It may, perhaps, be conjectured that in Sparta, Helen occupied the placeof a local Aphrodite. In another late story she dwells in the isle ofLeuke, a shadowy bride of the shadowy Achilles. The mocking Lucian, inhis _Vera Historia_, meets Helen in the Fortunate Islands, whence sheelopes with one of his companions. Again, the sons of Menelaus, by aconcubine, were said to have driven Helen from Sparta on the death of herlord, and she was murdered in Rhodes, by the vengeance of Polyxo, whosehusband fell at Troy. But, among all these inventions, that of Homerstands out pre-eminent. Helen and Menelaus do not die, they are too nearakin to Zeus; they dwell immortal, not among the shadows of heroes and offamous ladies dead and gone, but in Elysium, the paradise at the world'send, unvisited by storms.
"Beyond these voices there is peace."
It is plain that, as a love-story, the tale of Paris and Helen must tomodern readers seem meagre. To Greece, in every age, the main interestlay not in the passion of the beautiful pair, but in its world-wideconsequences: the clash of Europe and Asia, the deaths of kings, the ruinwrought in their homes, the consequent fall of the great and ancientAchaean civilisation. To the Greeks, the Trojan war was what theCrusades are in later history. As in the Crusades, the West assailed theEast for an ideal, not to recover the Holy Sepulchre of our religion, butto win back the living type of beauty and of charm. Perhaps, ere the sungrows cold, men will no more believe in the Crusades, as an historicalfact, 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 thefamous and peerless ladies of old days, of Cleopatra and of Mary Stuart.Romance and poetry have nothing less plausible than the part whichCleopatra actually played in the history of the world, a world well lostby Mark Antony for her sake. The flight from Actium might seem as much amere poet's dream as the gathering of the Achaeans at Aulis, if we werenot certain that it is truly chronicled.
From the earliest times, even from times before Homer (whose audience issupposed to know all about Helen), the imagination of Greece, and later,the imagination of the civilised world, has played around Helen, devisingabout her all that possibly could be devised. She was the daughter ofZeus by Nemesis, or by Leda; or the daughter of the swan, or a child ofthe changeful moon, brooding on "the formless and multi-form waters." Shecould speak in the voices of all women, hence she was named "Echo," andwe might fancy that, like the witch of the Brocken, she could appear toevery man in the likeness of his own first love. The ancient Egyptianseither knew her, or invented legends of her to amuse the inquiringGreeks. She had touched at Sidon, and perhaps Astaroth is only herSidonian name. Whatever could be told of beauty, in its charm, itsperils, the dangers with which it surrounds its lovers, the purity whichit 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 fromlips to lips of heroes, but the gold remains unsullied and unalloyed. Toheaven she returns again, to heaven which is her own, and looks downserenely on men slain, and women widowed, and sinking ships, and burningtowns. Yet with death she gives immortality by her kiss, and Paris andMenelaus live, because they have touched the lips of Helen. Through thegrace of Helen, for whom he fell, Sarpedon's memory endures, and Achillesand Memnon, the son of the Morning, and Troy is more imperishable thanCarthage, 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 ofHelen. Roman poets knew her best as an enemy of their fabulousancestors, and in the "AEneid," Virgil's hero draws his sword to slayher. Through the Middle Ages, in the romances of Troy, she wanders as ashining shadow of the ideally fair, like Guinevere, who so often recallsher in the Arthurian romances. The chivalrous mediaeval poets and theCelts could understand better than the Romans the philosophy of "theworld well lost" for love. Modern poetry, even in Goethe's "Second partof Faust," has not been very fortunately inspired by Helen, except in thefew 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 timeof reading, but, perhaps, leaves little abiding memory. The Helen of"Troilus and Cressida" is not one of Shakespeare's immortal women, andMr. 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 herearliest known minstrel, for who can recapture the grace, the tenderness,the melancholy, and the cha
rm of the daughter of Zeus in the "Odyssey"and "Iliad"? The sightless eyes of Homer saw her clearest, and Helen wasbest understood by the wisdom of his unquestioning simplicity.
As if to prove how entirely, though so many hands paltered with herlegend, Helen is Homer's alone, there remains no great or typical work ofGreek art which represents her beauty, and the breasts from which weremodelled cups of gold for the service of the gods. We have onlypaintings on vases, or work on gems, which, though graceful, isconventional and might represent any other heroine, Polyxena, orEriphyle. No Helen from the hands of Phidias or Scopas has survived toour time, and the grass may be growing in Therapnae over the shatteredremains 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 herloveliness, phantasms woven out of clouds, and the light of setting suns.