The Many Faces of Helen, A Myth in Perpetual Motion

“ The character and history of Helen of Troy have been conceived of in very different ways by poets and mythologists. In attempting to trace the chief current of ancient traditions about Helen, we cannot really get further back than the Homeric poems, the Iliad and Odyssey. Philological conjecture may assure us that Helen, like most of the characters of old romance, is “merely the Dawn,” or Light, or some other bright being carried away by Paris, who represents Night, or Winter, or the Cloud, or some other power of darkness. ”

“ The message of Iris renews in Helen’s heart “a sweet desire for her lord and her own city, and them that begat her;” so, draped in silvery white, Helen goes with her three maidens to the walls. There, above the gate, like some king in the Old Testament, Paris sits among his counsellors, and they are all amazed at Helen’s beauty; “no marvel is it that Trojans and Achaeans suffer long and weary toils for such a woman, so wondrous like to the immortal goddesses.” Then Priam, assuring Helen that he holds her blameless, bids her name to him her kinsfolk and the other Achaean warriors. ”

“ The old men break off their talk as the beautiful stranger draws near. They had seen her often enough before; the fatal face and form must have been well known in the streets and palaces of Troy, however retired a life Helen might well have thought it becoming in her unhappy position to lead. But the fair vision comes upon their eyes with a new and ever-increasing enchantment. ”

“ Women seldom mention her, in the epic, but with horror and anger; men never address her but in gentle courtesy. What is her secret? How did she leave her home with Paris—beguiled by love, by magic, or driven by the implacable Aphrodite? Homer is silent on all of these things; these things, doubtless, were known by his audience. In his poem Helen moves as a thing of simple grace, 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 romance of Helen ”

“ They tell of unnatural crime and of deeds of horror such as he never mentions; and they give us, too, a very different interpretation of the story of Helen. Homer puts aside all these vestiges of a primitive past. He is composing lays for a people who have a keen sense of honour, a supreme ideal of beauty and a love of home; who have a religious feeling strong enough to reverence the gods, despite their many hieratic quarrels, and who hold womanhood in high esteem. So when we come to him to hear about Helen, we find a very sweet and gracious figure, quite unlike the Helen of the later poets. ”

“ The Helen who lives and breathes for us is the Helen of Homer, fair and sweet, more sinned against than sinning, pitying the sorrows she cannot cure, but saved by her matchless charm from the chilling frost of mortal censure. ”

“ Helen is not merely a figure of voluptuous beauty, which captivates the senses; she bears in her the experience of complete humanity; she has erred, she has transformed her error, she has been restored to that ethical order which she had violated. ”

“ In Greek tragedy the representation of women is strikingly different from that in comedy. Whereas in this respect the latter reacted to the usage of contemporaneous society, tragedy reverted to the practice of Homer. In the Iliad women like Helen and Andromache, suitably attended, not only traverse the Trojan streets but appear on the walls and among the men [280] without losing caste or being regarded as immodest; and though Helen’s elopement with his brother was the source of all Troy’s present woes, Hector addresses her with far more consideration than he shows the wayward Paris. ”

“ Nay, go thyself and sit down by Paris, and forswear the paths of the Gods, but ever lament for him and cherish him, till he make thee his wife, yea, or perchance his slave, but to him will I never go.” But this anger of Helen is soon overcome by fear, when the Goddess, in turn, waxes wrathful, and Helen is literally driven by threats—“for the daughter of Zeus was afraid,”—into the arms of Paris. Yet even so she taunts her lover with his cowardice, a cowardice which she never really condones. In the sixth book of the Iliad she has been urging him to return to the war. ”

“ Save the white lady with the cherries in her hat, who perhaps resembled, who doubtless resembled, some far-away picture of his past, he greeted women the most frankly in the world and never made any remark about them. When, several years later, one evening at school, I read the famous passage of the Iliad about the old men of Troy being disposed to forgive Helen because of her beauty, like that of the immortal goddesses, while my comrades were dozing over their Homer, I was seeing myself once more at my grandfather’s side on the [Pg 168] road by which the lady in white came to us. ”

“ In Troy the elders were seated on the wall to watch the conflict, Priam among them. Warned by Iris, Helen came forth to witness the single combat. As she moved among them the elders bore their testimony to her beauty; its nature is suggested but not described, for the poet felt he was unable to paint her as she was.
"Little wonder," they exclaimed, "that the Trojans and Achaeans should suffer woe for many a year for such a woman. ”

“ Thus, in the Helen of Virgil, we have splendid personal beauty combined with an accumulation of the most profoundly odious moral features. She is lost in sensuality, a traitress alike to Greece and to Troy, willing to make miserable victims of others in the hope of purchasing her own immunity: all her deep remorse and sorrow, all her tenderness and modesty, are blotted out from her character, and the void places in the picture are filled by the detestation, with which both Greeks and Trojans regarded, as indeed they might well regard, such a monster. ”

“ In the second book of the Aeneid, the pious one finds Helen hiding in the shrine of Vesta, and determines to slay “the common curse of Troy and of her own country.” There is no glory, he admits, in murdering a woman:—
Extinxisse nefas tamen et sumpsisse merentis
Laudabor poenas, animumqne explesse juvabit
Ultricis flammae, et cineres satiasse meorum.
But Venus appears and rescues the unworthy lover of Dido from the crowning infamy which he contemplates. Hundreds of years later, Helen found a worthier poet in Quintus Smyrnaeus, who in a late age sang the swan-song of Greek epic minstrelsy. ”

“ Just as the later chansons de geste of France, the poems written in an age of feudal opposition to central authority, degraded heroes like Charles, so rhetorical, republican, and sophistical Greece put its quibbles into the lips of Agamemnon and Helen, and slandered the stainless and fearless Patroclus and Achilles.
The Helen of Euripides, in the “Troades,” is a pettifogging sophist, who pleads her cause to Menelaus with rhetorical artifice. In the “Helena,” again, Euripides quite deserts the Homeric traditions, and adopts the late myths which denied that Helen ever went to Troy. ”

“ The viewless neighbours of our world she strips
The veil and shrieketh Troy's apocalypse:
"Woe to thee, Ilios! The fire, the fire! And rain,
Rain like to blood and tears to drown the plain
And cover all the earth up in a shroud,
One great death-clout for thee, Ilios the proud!
Touch not, handle not——" Outraged then she turned
To Helen—"O thou, for whom Troy shall be burned,
O ruinous face, O breasts made hard with gall,
Now are ye satisfied? Ye shall have all,
All Priam's sons and daughters, all his race
Gone quick to death, hailing thee, ruinous face!" ”

“ Upon those words, called law or love, or mother or king, man hath with patience labored. The word wife or mother is so rich to-day as to make Homer's ideal, Helen, seem poor and almost contemptible. The girl was very beautiful, but very painful the alacrity with which she passes from the arms of Menelaus to the arms of Paris, from the arms of Paris to those of Deiphobus, his conqueror. If one hour only was required for this lovely creature to pack her belongings preparatory to moving to the tent of her new lord, one day fully sufficed for transferring her affections from one prince to another. ”

“ Even so soon as in the time of the Cyclical writers the character of Helen had begun to be altered. In Homer she is the victim of Paris, carried off from her home and country, and only then yielding to his lust. In the Κύπρια ἔπη, as we have that poem reported by Proclus, she begins by receiving his gifts, that is to say, his bribes; she is an adulteress under her husband’s roof; and she joins in plundering him, in order to escape with her paramour. ”

“ To soothe us, sleep more terrible than day,
Where dead delights, and fair lost faces stray,
To make us weary at our wakening;
And of that long lost path to the Divine
We dream, as some Greek shepherd erst might sing,
Half credulous, of easy Proserpine,
And of the lands that lie ‘beneath the day’s decline.’
p. 79THE SHADE OF HELEN.
Some say that Helen went never to Troy, but abode in Egypt; for the gods, having made in her semblance a woman out of clouds and shadows, sent the same to be wife to Paris. For this shadow then the Greeks and Trojans slew each other. ”

“ Both versions have affected Euripides here. And his Helen has just the magic of the Helen of legend. That touch of the supernatural which belongs of right to the Child of Heaven—a mystery, a gentleness, a strange absence of fear or wrath—is felt through all her words. One forgets to think of her guilt or innocence; she is too wonderful a being to judge, too precious to destroy. This supernatural element, being the thing which, if true, separates Helen from other women, and in a way redeems her, is for that reason exactly what Hecuba denies. ”

“ Scruples have arisen in his mind respecting violations of the laws of nature: the poets [p. 403] are unworthy of trust, and their narratives must be brought into conformity with historical and ethical conditions, before they can be admitted as truth. To accomplish this conformity, Herodotus is willing to mutilate the old legend in one of its most vital points: he sacrifices the personal presence of Helena in Troy, which ran through every one of the ancient epic poems belonging to the Trojan cycle, and is indeed, under the gods, the great and present moving force throughout. ”

“ I am Helen; where is Troy?
Do they deem that thus the story of my life will pass away?
Troy betrayed, and all who loved me slain upon that fatal day,
Shall but make the memory of me evermore with men to stay.
I am Helen; where is Troy?
Fools! to dream that time can ever make the tale of Troy grow old;
Buried now is every hero, and the grass green o'er the mould,
But of her they fought and died for, every age shall yet be told.
I am Helen; where is Troy? ”

“ It is time. I wait.
[The storm drops suddenly. In the hush the fire grows brighter, and the figure of Helen suddenly becomes a glow of light.]
Fritz
Look! Lo! She moves—her hands are raised—she speaks.
Helen
Yea, I am she whom men call Helen, maid
Of Troy. Long years the beauty Paris loved
Has been a stir of corn-flowers by that sea
Where memory is a tide and summers fade
Into the past like shadows.
Faustus
⁠'Tis a trick!
A dream! A phantasy! The dead are dead.
These are no words! A shadow—
Helen
⁠I am she
Whose flesh is dust, whose flesh can never die ”

“ Helen were a forgotten sin, Troy a fleck of white dust—all the heroes of that deathless romance only the vanished marshalling of an ant-hill; for what are we after our lives have gone unless the poet or the novelist creates us afresh and gives us actions that will not die? What is our pain or our pleasure to the partner of it all? We cannot feel theirs, they cannot know ours. ”

“ Each of these women was reputed to be exquisitely beautiful; yet each fell short of beauty's highest standards. They are alike remembered in song and story because of qualities that are far more powerful than any physical charm can be. They impressed the imagination of their own contemporaries just as they had impressed the imagination of all succeeding ages, by reason of a strange and irresistible fascination which no one could explain, but which very few could experience and resist. ”

“ And eyes incensed with love for all they see,
A wonder more to be adored than wooed,
On whom the grace of conscious womanhood
Adorning every little thing she does
Sits like enchantment, making glorious
A careless pose, a casual attitude;
Around her lovely shoulders mantle-wise
Hath come the realm of those old fabulous queens
Whose storied loves are Art's rich heritage,
To keep alive in this our latter age
That force that moving through sweet Beauty's means
Lifts up Man's soul to towering enterprise. ”

“ The reader, too, has at this point to bid good-bye to Homer's Helen, the most lasting creation of a woman that has yet appeared upon our planet. A power she has, too, of continuous re-embodiment; every poet seeks to call her up afresh, that is, if he be a poet. It may be said that each age has some incarnation of Helen; the Greek myth for two thousand years, Medieval legend, even Teutonic folk-lore have caught up her spirit and incorporated it in new forms. The last great singer of the ages has in our own time, evoked her ghost once more in the shining palace of Menelaus at Sparta. ”

“ In her secret heart, woman holds her unchanging ideal of her own possible perfection. Sometimes a man suspects this, and loves her all the more for the sweet guardian angel which is thus enthroned. Other men, less fine, consider an ideal a sort of disease—and they are usually a certain specific.
But, after all, men are as women make them. [Pg 21] Cleopatra and Helen of Troy swayed empires and rocked thrones. There is no woman who does not hold within her little hands some man's achievement, some man's future, and his belief in woman and God. ”

“ These exalted ideals, so bravely tender, so patiently enduring, were the victims of adverse des­tiny or of their own devotion. But the world held for them no reward in the masculine heart. There were many women in classic story who died for men, but only one for whom men were willing to die, and this was Helen, whose divine beauty appealed to the senses and the imagination. ”

“ But the most adequate mythology is mythology still; it does not, like science, set things before us in the very terms they will wear when they are gradually revealed to experience. Myth is expression, it is not prophecy. For this reason myth is something on which the mind rests; it is an ideal interpretation in which the phenomena are digested and transmuted into human energy, into imaginative tissue. ”

“ But between myths and phantasmagoria there is a great gulf. The structural possibilities of the myth depend upon its intelligibility. The child knows upon what drama, played in what world, the curtain will rise when he hears the trumpet-note: 'Of man's first disobedience....' And, even when the poet turns from legend and history to create his own myth, he must make one whose validity is visible, if he is not to be condemned to the sterility of a coterie. The lawless and fantastic shapes of his own imagination need, even for their own perfect embodiment, the discipline of the common perception. ”