Marlowe, as was natural, contented himself with an external handling of the Faust legend. Goethe allegorized the whole, and turned the episode of Helen into a parable of modern poetry. When Lynkeus, the warder, is reprimanded for not having duly asked Helen into the feudal castle, he defends himself thus;
Harrend auf des Morgens Wonne,
Oestlich spähend ihren Lauf,
Ging auf einmal mir die Sonne
Wunderbar im Süden auf.
Zog den Blick nach jener Seite,
Statt der Schluchten, statt der Höh'n,
Statt der Erd-und Himmelsweite,
Sie, die Einzige, zu spähn.[23]
The new light that rose upon the Middle Ages came not from the East, but from the South, no longer from Galilee, but from Greece.
Thus, after living her long life in Hellas as the ideal of beauty, unqualified by moral attributes, Helen passed into modern mythology as the ideal of the beauty of the pagan world. True to her old character, she arrives to us across the waters of oblivion with the cestus of the goddess round her waist, and the divine smile upon her lips. Age has not impaired her charm, nor has she learned the lesson of the Fall. Ever virginal and ever fair, she is still the slave of Aphrodite. In Helen we welcome the indestructible Hellenic spirit.
Penelope is the exact opposite to Helen. The central point in her character is intense love of her home, an almost cat-like attachment to the house where she first enjoyed her husband's love and which is still full of all the things that make her life worth having. Therefore, when at last she thinks that she will have to yield to the suitors and leave it, these words are always on her lips:
δῶμα
κουρίδιον μάλα καλὸν ἐνίπλειον βιότοιο,
τοῦ ποτε μεμνήσεσθαι ὀΐομαι ἔνπερ ὀνείρῳ.[24]
We can scarcely think of Penelope except in the palace of Ithaca, so firmly has this home-loving instinct been embedded in her by her maker. Were it not that the passion for her home is controlled and determined by a higher and more sacred feeling, this Haushälterischness of Penelope would be prosaic. Not only, however, has Homer made it evident in the Odyssey that the love of Ithaca is subordinate in her soul to the love of Odysseus, but a beautiful Greek legend teaches how in girlhood she sacrificed the dearest ties that can bind a woman to her love for the hero who had wooed and won her. Pausanias says that when Odysseus was carrying her upon his chariot forth to his own land, her father, Icarius, followed in their path and besought her to stay with him. The young man was ready busked for the long journey. The old man pointed to the hearth she had known from childhood. Penelope between them answered not a word, but covered her face with her veil. This action Odysseus interpreted rightly, and led his bride away, willing to go where he would go, yet unwilling to abandon what she dearly loved. No second Odysseus could cross the woman's path. Among the suitors there was not one like him. Therefore she clung to her house-tree in Ithaca, the olive around which Odysseus had built the nuptial chamber; and none, till he appeared, by force or guile might win her thence. It is precisely this tenacity in the character of Penelope which distinguishes her from Helen, the daughter of adventure and the child of change, to whom migration was no less natural than to the swan that gave her life. Another characteristic of Penelope is her prudence. Having to deal with the uproarious suitors camped in her son's halls, she deceives them with fair words, and promises to choose a husband from their number when she has woven a winding-sheet for Laertes. Three years pass, and the work is still not finished. At last a maiden tells the suitors that every night Penelope undoes by lamplight what she had woven in the daytime. This ruse of the defenceless woman has passed into a proverb; and has become so familiar that we forget, perhaps, how true a parable it is of those who, in their weakness, do and undo daily what they would fain never do at all, trifling and procrastinating with tyrannous passions which they are unable to expel from the palace of their souls. The prudence of Penelope sometimes assumes a form which reminds us of the heroines of Hebrew story; as when, for example, she spoils the suitors of rich gifts by subtle promises and engagements carefully guarded. Odysseus, seated in disguise near the hall-door, watches her success and secretly approves. The same quality of mind makes her cautious in the reception of the husband she has waited for in widowhood through twenty years. The dog Argus has no doubt. He sees his master through the beggar's rags, and dies of joy. The handmaid Eurycleia is convinced as soon as she has touched the wound upon the hero's foot and felt the well-remembered scar. Not so Penelope. Though the great bow has been bent and the suitors have been slain, and though Eurycleia comes to tell her the whole truth, the queen has yet the heart to seat herself opposite Odysseus by the fire, and to prove him with cunningly devised tests. There is something provocative of anger against Penelope in this cross-questioning. But our anger is dissolved in tears, when at last, feeling sure that her husband and none other is there verily before her eyes, she flings her arms around him in that long and close embrace. Homer even in this supreme moment has sustained her character by a trait which however delicate, can hardly escape notice. Her lord is weary and would fain seek the solace of his couch. But he has dropped a hint that still more labors are in store for him. Then Penelope replies that his couch is ready at all times and whensoever he may need; no hurry about that. Meanwhile, she would like to hear the prophecy of Teiresias. Helen, the bondwoman of dame Aphrodite, would not have waited thus upon the edge of love's delight, long looked for with strained widow's eyes. Yet it would be unfair to Penelope to dwell only on this prudent and somewhat frigid aspect of her character. She is, perhaps, most amiable when she descends among the suitors and prays Phemius to cease from singing of the heroes who returned from Troy. It is more than she can bear to sit weaving in the silent chamber mid her damsels, listening to the shrill sound of the lyre and hearing how other men have reached their homes, while on the waves Odysseus still wanders, and none knows whether he be alive or dead. It may be noticed that just as Helen is a mate meet for easily persuaded Menelaus and luxurious Paris, so Penelope matches the temper of the astute, enduring, persevering Odysseus. As a creature of the fancy, she is far less fascinating than Helen; and this the poet seems to have felt, for side by side with Penelope in the Odyssey he has placed the attractive forms of Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa. The gain is double. Not only are the hearers of the romance gladdened by the contrast of these graceful women with the somewhat elegiac figure of Penelope, but the character of Odysseus for constancy is greatly enhanced. How fervent must the love of home have been in the man who could quit Calypso, after seven years' sojourn, for the sake of a wife grown gray with twenty widowed years! Odysseus tells Calypso to her face that she is far fairer than his wife:
οἶδα καὶ αὐτὸς
πάντα μάλ', οὕνεκα σεῖο περίφρων Πηνελόπεια
εἶδος ἀκιδνοτέρη, μέγεθός τ', εἰς ὄμμα ἰδέσθαι.[25]
"As far as looks go, Penelope is nothing beside thee." But what Odysseus leaves unsaid—the grace of the first woman who possessed his soul—constrains him with a deeper, tenderer power than any of Calypso's charms. Penelope, meanwhile, is pleading that her beauty in the absence of her lord has perished: