The Italy of the Elizabethan Dramatists
Faustus is therefore a parable of the impotent yearnings of the Middle Ages—itspassionate aspiration, its conscience-stricken desire, its fettered curiosity amid thetramping limits of imperfect knowledge and irrational dogmatism. The indestructiblebeauty of Greek art,—whereof Helen was an emblem, became, through thediscovery of classic poetry and sculpture, the possession of the modern world.Mediævalism took this Helen to wife, and their offspring, the Euphorion ofGoethe's drama, is the spirit of the modern world.—J.A. Symonds, "RenaissanceIn Italy," vol. ii. p. 54.
Euphorion is the name given by Goethe to themarvellous child born of the mystic marriage of Faustand Helena. Who Faust is, and who Helena, we allknow. Faust, of whom no man can remember theyouth or childhood, seems to have come into theworld by some evil spell, already old and with thefaintness of body and of mind which are the heritageof age; and every additional year of mysterious studyand abortive effort has made him more vacillating ofstep and uncertain of sight, but only more hungry ofsoul. Postponed and repressed by reclusion from theworld, and desperate tension over insoluble problems;diverted into the channels of mere thought and vision;there boils within him the energy, the passion, ofretarded youth: its appetites and curiosities, which,cramped by the intolerant will, and foiled by many asudden palsy of limb and mind, torment him withmad visions of unreal worlds, mock him with dreamsof superhuman powers, from which he awakes inimpotent and apathetic anguish. But these often-withstood and often-baffled cravings are not thosemerely of scholar or wizard, they are those of soldierand poet and monk, of the mere man: lawless desireswhich he seeks to divert, but fails, from the things ofthe 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 cynicalscepticism of science, which derides the things it cannotgrasp. In this strange Faustus, made up of so manyand conflicting instincts; in this old man with ever-budding and ever-nipped feelings of youthfulness,muddling the hard-won secrets of nature in searchafter impossibilities; in him so all-sided, and yet sowilfully narrowed, so restlessly active, yet so often palsiedand apathetic; in this Faustus, who has labouredso much and succeeded in so little, feeling himself atthe end, when he has summed up all his studies, asfoolish as before—which of us has not learned torecognize the impersonated Middle Ages? AndHelena, 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 ofFaustus, a simulacrum of a thing long dead; yet withsuch continuing semblance of life, nay, with all life'sreal powers,