We have now reached that part of Faust which is known as the Helena. It was written before the rest of Part II, though doubtless when he wrote it Goethe had already conceived the general outline of the whole poem. Of the wonderful versatility of Goethe's genius no more striking example can be given than the sudden and complete change of scene, and not only scene but ideas and feelings, by which we are transported from the age of Luther and the court of a German Kaiser and the laboratory of a modern scientist back—some 3500 years or so—to the age of the Trojan war.
Instead of extravagance and grotesqueness, instead of the diversity, the rich ornamentation, the heaven-soaring pinnacles and spires of Gothic imagination—we have in the Helena sculpturesque repose, simplicity, dignity and proportion. It is as if we had been suddenly transported from some Gothic cathedral to the Parthenon, or to Paestum.
I know no poet who in any modern language has reproduced as Goethe has done in his Iphigenie and in the Helena not only the external form but also the spirit of Hellenic literature. While reading the Helena we feel ourselves under the cloudless Grecian sky; we breathe the Grecian air with Helen herself.
The scene is laid before the palace of Menelaus at Sparta. Helen, accompanied by a band of captive Trojan maidens, has been disembarked at the mouth of the river Eurotas by Menelaus, on his return from Troy, and has been sent forward to Sparta to make preparation for the arrival of her husband and his warriors. Once more after those long eventful years since she had fled to Troy with Paris she stands as in a dream before her own palace-home, dazed and wearied, her mind distraught with anxious thoughts; for during the long wearisome return across the Aegean sea her husband Menelaus has addressed no friendly word to her, but seemed gloomily revolving in his heart some deed of vengeance. She knows not if she is returning as queen, or as captive, doomed perhaps to the fate of a slave.
She enters the palace alone. After a few moments she reappears, horror-struck and scarce able to tell what she has seen. Crouching beside the central hearth she has found a terrible shape—a ghastly haggard thing, like some phantom of hell. It has followed her. It stands there before her on the threshold of her palace. In terrible accents this Gorgon-like monster denounces her, recounting all the ruin that by her fatal beauty she had wrought, interweaving into the story the various legends connected with her past life—those mysterious legends that connect Helen not only with Paris and Menelaus but with Theseus and Achilles and with Egypt—legends of a second phantom-Helen, the 'double' of that Helen whom Menelaus has carried home from Troy—until alarmed and distracted, doubting her own identity, overwhelmed by anxiety about the future and by terror at the grisly apparition, she seems herself to be in truth fading away into a mere phantom, and sinks senseless to the ground. After a fierce altercation between the chorus of captive maidens and the Gorgon-shape (in whom you will have recognized our old friend Mephistopheles) Helen returns to consciousness. Then the Phorkyad-Mephistopheles tells her that the preparations which she has been ordered to make are in view of a sacrifice to be performed on the arrival of Menelaus and that she herself (Helen) is the destined victim.
In despair Helen appeals to the Gorgon for advice, who bids her take refuge in the neighbouring mountains of Arcadia, where a robber chieftain has his stronghold. Under the guidance of Mephisto, who raises a thick mist, she and her maidens escape. They climb the mountain; the mists rise and they find themselves before the castle of a medieval bandit-prince, and it is Faust himself who comes forth to greet her and to welcome her as his queen and mistress. Faust, the symbol of the Renaissance and modern art, welcomes to his castle the ideal of Greek art and beauty.
The stately Greek measures now give way to the love-songs of Chivalry and Romance—to the measures of the Minnesinger and the Troubadour. Faust kneels in homage before the impersonation of ideal beauty, and Helen feels that she is now no longer a mere ideal, a mere phantom. She clings to her new, unknown lover, as to one who will make her realize her own existence. It is an allegory of modern art—the art of Dante, Giotto, Raphael, Shakespeare and Goethe—receiving as its queen the ideal of Greek imagination and inspiring, as it were, the cold statue with the warm vitality of a higher conception of chivalrous love and perfect womanhood.
I have mentioned how the stately Greek measures in the Helena give way to the metres of Romance and Chivalry. Perhaps it may be well to explain some of these various metres.
The scene opens, as you know, with Helen's dignified and beautiful speech:
Bewundert viel und viel gescholten Helena.