The World s Desire

Most of the novel was written, and the apparently “un-Greek” marvels attributed to Helen had been put on paper, when a part of Furtwängler’s recent great lexicon of Mythology appeared, with the article on Helen. The authors of The World’s Desire read it with a feeling akin to amazement. Their wildest inventions about the Daughter of the Swan, it seemed, had parallels in the obscurer legends of Hellas. There actually is a tradition, preserved by Eustathius, that Paris beguiled Helen by magically putting on the aspect of Menelaus. There is a mediaeval parallel in the story of Uther and Ygerne, mother of Arthur, and the classical case of Zeus and Amphitryon is familiar. Again, the blood-dripping ruby of Helen, in the tale, is mentioned by Servius in his commentary on Virgil (it was pointed out to one of the authors by Mr. Mackail). But we did not know that the Star of the story was actually called the “Star-stone” in ancient Greek fable. The many voices of Helen are alluded to by Homer in the Odyssey: she was also named Echo, in old tradition. To add that she could assume the aspect of every man’s first love was easy. Goethe introduces the same quality in the fair witch of his Walpurgis Nacht. A respectable portrait of Meriamun’s secret counsellor exists, in pottery, in the British Museum, though, as it chances, it was not discovered by us until after the publication of this romance. The Laestrygonian of the Last Battle is introduced as a pre-historic Norseman. Mr. Gladstone, we think, was perhaps the first to point out that the Laestrygonians of the Odyssey, with their home on a fiord in the Land of the Midnight Sun, were probably derived from travellers’ tales of the North, borne with the amber along the immemorial Sacred Way. The Magic of Meriamun is in accordance with Egyptian ideas; her resuscitation of the dead woman, Hataska, has a singular parallel in Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), where the spell “by the silence of the Night” is not without poetry. The general conception of Helen as the World’s Desire, Ideal Beauty, has been dealt with by M. Paul de St. Victor, and Mr. J. A. Symonds. For the rest, some details of battle, and of wounds, which must seem very “un-Greek” to critics ignorant of Greek literature, are borrowed from Homer...FROM THE BOOKS.