She has become the ideal type of a fatal, faithless, dissolute woman; but according to the Greek myth, she is _predestined_,—at once the instrument and the victim of that fiat of the gods which had long before decreed the destruction of Troy, and _her_ to be the cause. She must not only be supremely beautiful,—“a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair!”—but as the offspring of Zeus (the title by which she is so often designated in the Iliad), as the sister of the great twin demi-gods Castor and Pollux, she should have the heroic lineaments proper to her Olympian descent, touched with a pensive shade; for she laments the calamities which her fatal charms have brought on all who have loved her, all whom she has loved:— “Ah! had I died ere to these shores I fled, False to my country and my nuptial bed!” She shrinks from the reproachful glances of those whom she has injured; and yet, as it is finely intimated, wherever she appears her resistless loveliness vanquishes every heart, and changes curses into blessings. Priam treats her with paternal tenderness; Hector with a sort of chivalrous respect. “If some proud brother eyed me with disdain, Or scornful sister with her sweeping train, Thy gentle accents softened all my pain; Nor was it e’er my fate from thee to find A deed ungentle or a word unkind.” Helen, standing on the walls of Troy, and looking sadly over the battle plain, where the heroes of her forfeited country, her kindred and her friends, are assembled to fight and bleed for her sake, brings before us an image full of melancholy sweetness as well as of consummate beauty. Another passage in which she upbraids Venus as the cause of her fault—not as a mortal might humbly expostulate with an immortal, but almost on terms of equality, and even with bitterness,—is yet more characteristic. “For what,” she asks, tauntingly, “am I reserved? To what new countries am I destined to carry war and desolation? For what new lover must I break a second vow? Let me go hence! and if Paris lament my absence, let Venus console him, and for his sake ascend the skies no more!” A regretful pathos should mingle with her conscious beauty and her half-celestial dignity; and, to render her truly, her Greek elegance should be combined with a deeper and more complex sentiment than Greek art has usually sought to express. I am speaking here of Homer’s Helen—the Helen of the Iliad, not the Helen of the tragedians—not the Helen who for two thousand years has merely served “to point a moral;” and an artist who should think to realise the true Homeric conception, should beware of counterfeits, for such are abroad.[2]