



Produced by Marc D'Hooghe




EUPHORION:

BEING STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDIAEVAL IN THE RENAISSANCE

BY

VERNON LEE

_Author of "Studies of the 18th Century in Italy," "Belcaro" etc._


VOL. I.

                WALTER PATER,
IN APPRECIATION OF THAT WHICH, IN EXPOUNDING THE
  BEAUTIFUL THINGS OF THE PAST, HE HAS ADDED TO
      THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS OF THE PRESENT.



TABLE OF CONTENTS.


Introduction
The Sacrifice
The Italy of the Elizabethan Dramatists
The Out-Door Poetry
Symmetria Prisca



INTRODUCTION.


     _Faustus is therefore a parable of the impotent yearnings of the
     Middle Ages--its passionate aspiration, its conscience-stricken
     desire, its fettered curiosity amid the tramping limits of
     imperfect knowledge and irrational dogmatism. The indestructible
     beauty of Greek art,--whereof Helen was an emblem, became, through
     the discovery of classic poetry and sculpture, the possession of
     the modern world. Mediaevalism took this Helen to wife, and their
     offspring, the Euphorion of Goethe's drama, is the spirit of the
     modern world._--J.A. Symonds, "Renaissance In Italy," vol. ii. p.
     54.


Euphorion is the name given by Goethe to the marvellous child born of
the mystic marriage of Faust and Helena. Who Faust is, and who Helena,
we all know. Faust, of whom no man can remember the youth or childhood,
seems to have come into the world by some evil spell, already old and
with the faintness of body and of mind which are the heritage of age;
and every additional year of mysterious study and abortive effort has
made him more vacillating of step and uncertain of sight, but only more
hungry of soul. Postponed and repressed by reclusion from the world, and
desperate tension over insoluble problems; diverted into the channels of
mere thought and vision; there boils within him the energy, the passion,
of retarded youth: its appetites and curiosities, which, cramped by the
intolerant will, and foiled by many a sudden palsy of limb and mind,
torment him with mad visions of unreal worlds, mock him with dreams of
superhuman powers, from which he awakes in impotent and apathetic
anguish. But these often-withstood and often-baffled cravings are not
those merely of scholar or wizard, they are those of soldier and poet
and monk, of the mere man: lawless desires which he seeks to divert, but
fails, from the things of the flesh and of the world to the things of
the reason; supersensuous desires for the beautiful and intangible,
which he strives to crush, but in vain, with the cynical scepticism of
science, which derides the things it cannot grasp. In this strange
Faustus, made up of so many and conflicting instincts; in this old man
with ever-budding and ever-nipped feelings of youthfulness, muddling the
hard-won secrets of nature in search after impossibilities; in him so
all-sided, and yet so wilfully narrowed, so restlessly active, yet so
often palsied and apathetic; in this Faustus, who has laboured so much
and succeeded in so little, feeling himself at the end, when he has
summed up all his studies, as foolish as before--which of us has not
learned to recognize the impersonated Middle Ages? And Helena, we know
her also, she is the spirit of Antiquity. Personified, but we dare
scarcely say, embodied; for she is a ghost raised by the spells of
Faustus, a simulacrum of a thing long dead; yet with such continuing
semblance of life, nay, with all life's real powers, that she seems the
real, vital, living one, and Faustus yonder, thing as he is of the
present, little better than a spectre. Yet Helena has been ages before
Faust ever was; nay, by an awful mystery like those which involve the
birth of Pagan gods, she whom he has evoked to be the mother of his only
son has given, centuries before, somewhat of her life to make this
self-same Faust. A strange mystery of Fate's necromancy this, and with
strange anomalies. For opposite this living, decrepit Faust, Helena, the
long dead, is young; and she is all that which Faust is not. Knowing
much less than he, who has plunged his thoughts like his scalpel into
all the mysteries of life and death, she yet knows much more, can tell
him of the objects and aims of men and things; nay, with little more
than the unconscious faithfulness to instinct 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