Dark with transmitted tendencies of race
And blind mischance; all crude mistakes of will
And tendency unbalanced by due weight
Of favouring circumstance; all passion blown
By wandering winds; all surplusage of force
Piled up for use, but slipping from its base
Of law and order.
This is the very realm in which the poet and the artist find their pure-veined quarries, whence arise the forms transfigured in their vision.
To evoke Helena, Faust, as we have seen, must repair to the Mothers. But who may these be? They shine from Goethe’s page in such opalescent tints one cannot transfix their sense. They seemed to me just now the primal conditions, by fulfilling which anything might be attained, without which, nothing. But now (yet perhaps the difference is not great) I see the Mothers to be the ancient healthy instincts and ideals of our race. These took shape in forms of art, whose evolution had been man’s harmony with himself. Christianity, borrowing thunder of one god, hammer of another, shattered them—shattered our Mothers! And now learned travellers go about in many lands saying, ‘Saw ye my beloved?’ Amid cities ruined and buried we are trying to recover them, fitting limb to limb—so carefully! as if half-conscious that we are piecing together again the fragments of our own humanity.