her lover fly from her husband’s spear.  Had we only Homer, by far our earliest literary source, we should know little of the romance of Helen; should only know that a lawless love brought ruin on Troy and sorrow on the Achaeans; and this is thrown out, with no moral comment, without praise or blame.  The end, we learn, was peace, and beauty was reconciled to life.  There is no explanation, no denouement; and we know how much denouement and explanations hampered Scott and Shakespeare.  From these trammels Homer is free, as a god is free from mortal limitations.

All this manner of telling a tale—­a manner so ancient, so original—­is akin, in practice, to recent theories of what art should be, and what art seldom is, perhaps never is, in modern hands.

Modern enough, again, is the choice of a married woman for the heroine of the earliest love tale.  Apollonius Rhodius sings (and no man has ever sung so well) of a maiden’s love; Virgil, of a widow’s; Homer, of love that has defied law, blindly obedient to destiny, which dominates even Zeus.  Once again, Helen is not a very young girl; ungallant chronologists have attributed to her I know not what age.  We think of her as about the age of the Venus of Milo; in truth, she was “ageless and immortal.”  Homer never describes her beauty; we only see it reflected in the eyes of the old men, white and weak, thin-voiced as cicalas:  but hers is a loveliness “to turn an old man young.”  “It is no marvel,” they say, “that for her sake Trojans and Achaeans slay each other.”

She was embroidering at a vast web, working in gold and scarlet the sorrows that for her sake befell mankind, when they called her to the walls to see Paris fight Menelaus, in the last year of the war.  There she stands, in raiment of silvery white, her heart yearning for her old love and her own city.  Already her thought is far from Paris.  Was her heart ever with Paris?  That is her secret.  A very old legend, mentioned by the Bishop of Thessalonica, Eustathius, tells us that Paris magically beguiled her, disguised in the form of Menelaus, her lord, as Uther beguiled Ygerne.  She sees the son of Priam play the dastard in the fight; she turns in wrath on Aphrodite, who would lure her back to his arms; but to his arms she must go, “for the daughter of Zeus was afraid.”  Violence is put upon beauty; it is soiled, or seems soiled, in its way through the world.  Helen urges Paris again into the war.  He has a heart invincibly light and gay; shame does not weigh on him.  “Not every man is valiant every day,” he says; yet once engaged in battle, he bears him bravely, and his arrows rain death among the mail-clad Achaeans.

What Homer thinks of Paris we can only guess.  His beauty is the bane of Ilios; but Homer forgives so much to beauty.  In the end of the “Iliad,” Helen sings the immortal dirge over Hector, the stainless knight, “with thy loving kindness and thy gentle speech.”