Euphorion

Vernon Lee

Description

The female writer and critic born Violet Paget rose to prominence using the pen name Vernon Lee. Over time, she came to be regarded as one of the foremost experts on the Italian Renaissance, and the engaging essays collected in Euphorion amply demonstrate her knowledge of and insight into Italian art and literature.

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776582297
• Langue: English

Extrait

EUPHORION
BEING STUDIES OF THE ANTIQUE AND THE MEDIAEVAL IN THE RENAISSANCE
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VERNON LEE
 
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Euphorion Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance First published in 1887 Epub ISBN 978-1-77658-229-7 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77658-230-3 © 2013 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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Introduction The Sacrifice The Italy of the Elizabethan Dramatists I II The Outdoor Poetry I II Symmetria Prisca I II Endnotes
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WALTER PATER, IN APPRECIATION OF THAT WHICH, IN EXPOUNDING THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS OF THE PAST, HE HAS ADDED TO THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS OF THE PRESENT.
Introduction
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Faustus is therefore a parable of the impotent yearnings of the Middle Ages—its passionate aspiration, its conscience-stricken desire, its fettered curiosity amid the tramping limits of imperfect knowledge and irrational dogmatism. The indestructible beauty of Greek art,—whereof Helen was an emblem, became, through the discovery of classic poetry and sculpture, the possession of the modern world. Mediævalism took this Helen to wife, and their offspring, the Euphorion of Goethe's drama, is the spirit of the modern world. —J.A. Symonds, "Renaissance In Italy," vol. ii. p. 54.
Euphorion is the name given by Goethe to the marvellous child born ofthe mystic marriage of Faust and Helena. Who Faust is, and who Helena,we all know. Faust, of whom no man can remember the youth or childhood,seems to have come into the world by some evil spell, already old andwith the faintness of body and of mind which are the heritage of age;and every additional year of mysterious study and abortive effort hasmade him more vacillating of step and uncertain of sight, but only morehungry of soul. Postponed and repressed by reclusion from the world, anddesperate tension over insoluble problems; diverted into the channels ofmere thought and vision; there boils within him the energy, the passion,of retarded youth: its appetites and curiosities, which, cramped by theintolerant will, and foiled by many a sudden palsy of limb and mind,torment him with mad visions of unreal worlds, mock him with dreams ofsuperhuman powers, from which he awakes in impotent and apatheticanguish. But these often-withstood and often-baffled cravings are notthose merely of scholar or wizard, they are those of soldier and poetand monk, of the mere man: lawless desires which he seeks to divert, butfails, from the things of the flesh and of the world to the things ofthe reason; supersensuous desires for the beautiful and intangible,which he strives to crush, but in vain, with the cynical scepticism ofscience, which derides the things it cannot grasp. In this strangeFaustus, made up of so many and conflicting instincts; in this old manwith ever-budding and ever-nipped feelings of youthfulness, muddling thehard-won secrets of nature in search after impossibilities; in him soall-sided, and yet so wilfully narrowed, so restlessly active, yet sooften palsied and apathetic; in this Faustus, who has laboured so muchand succeeded in so little, feeling himself at the end, when he hassummed up all his studies, as foolish as before—which of us has notlearned to recognize the impersonated Middle Ages? And Helena, we knowher also, she is the spirit of Antiquity. Personified, but we darescarcely say, embodied; for she is a ghost raised by the spells ofFaustus, a simulacrum of a thing long dead; yet with such continuingsemblance of life, nay, with all life's real powers, that she seems thereal, vital, living one, and Faustus yonder, thing as he is of thepresent, little better than a spectre. Yet Helena has been ages beforeFaust ever was; nay, by an awful mystery like those which involve thebirth of Pagan gods, she whom he has evoked to be the mother of his onlyson has given, centuries before, somewhat of her life to make thisself-same Faust. A strange mystery of Fate's necromancy this, and withstrange anomalies. For opposite this living, decrepit Faust, Helena, thelong dead, is young; and she is all that which Faust is not. Knowingmuch less than he, who has plunged his thoughts like his scalpel intoall the mysteries of life and death, she yet knows much more, can tellhim of the objects and aims of men and things; nay, with little morethan the unconscious faithfulness to instinct of the clean-limbed,placid brute, she can give peace to his tormented conscience; and, whilehe has suffered and struggled and lashed himself for every seemingbaseness of desire, and loathed himself for every imagined microscopicsoiling, she has walked through good and evil, letting the vileness ofsin trickle off her unhidden soul, so quietly and majestically that allthought of evil vanishes; and the self-tormenting wretch, with maceratedflesh hidden beneath the heavy garments of mysticism and philosophy,suddenly feels, in the presence of her unabashed nakedness, that he,like herself, is chaste.
Such are the parents, Faustus and Helena; we know them; but who is thisson Euphorion? To me it seems as if there could be but one answer—theRenaissance. Goethe indeed has told us (though, with his rejuvenation ofFaustus, unknown to the old German legend and to our Marlowe, in howbungling a manner!) the tale of that mystic marriage; but Goethe couldnot tell us rightly, even had he attempted, the real name of itsoffspring. For even so short a time ago, the Middle Ages were onlybeginning to be more than a mere historical expression, Antiquity wasbeing only then critically discovered; and the Renaissance, but vaguelyseen and quite unformulated by the first men, Gibbon and Roscoe, whoperceived it at all, was still virtually unknown. To Goethe, therefore,it might easily have seemed as if the antique Helena had only just beenevoked, and as if of her union with the worn-out century of his birth, areal Euphorion, the age in which ourselves are living, might have beenborn. But, at the distance of additional time, and from the undreamed-ofheight upon which recent historical science has enabled us to stand, wecan easily see that in this he would have been mistaken. Not only is ourmodern culture no child of Faustus and Helena, but it is the complexdescendant, strangely featured by atavism from various sides, of manyand various civilizations; and the eighteenth century, so far from beinga Faustus evoking as his bride the long dead Helen of Antiquity, was initself a curiously varied grandchild or great-grandchild of such amarriage, its every moral feature, its every intellectual movementproclaiming how much of its being was inherited from Antiquity. Noallegory, I well know, and least of all no historical allegory, can everbe strained to fit quite tight—the lives of individuals and those ofcenturies, their modes of intermixture, genesis, and inheritance are fardifferent; but if an allegory is to possess any meaning at all, we mustsurely apply it wherever it will fit most easily and completely; and thebeautiful allegory prepared by the tradition of the sixteenth centuryfor the elaborating genius of Goethe, can have a real meaning only if weexplain Faust as representing the Middle Ages, Helena as Antiquity, andEuphorion as that child of the Middle Ages, taking life and reality fromthem, but born of and curiously nurtured by the spirit of Antiquity, towhich significant accident has given the name of Renaissance.
After Euphorion I have therefore christened this book; and this not fromany irrational conceit of knowing more (when I am fully aware that Iknow infinitely less) than other writers about the life and character ofthis wonderful child of Helena and Faustus, but merely because it ismore particularly as the offspring of this miraculous marriage, and withreference to the harmonies and anomalies which therefrom resulted, thatEuphorion has exercised my thoughts.
The Renaissance has interested and interests me, not merely for what itis, but even more for what it sprang from, and for the manner in whichthe many things inherited from both Middle Ages and Renaissance, thetendencies and necessities inherent in every special civilization, actedand reacted upon each other, united in concord or antagonism; forming,like the gases of the chemist, new things, sometimes like and sometimesunlike themselves and each other; producing now some unknown substanceof excellence and utility, at other times some baneful element, knownbut too well elsewhere, but unexpected here. But not the watching of theoften tragic meeting of these great fatalities of inherited spirit andhabit only: for equally fascinating almost has been the watching of theelaboration by this double-natured period of things of little weight,mere trifles of artistic material bequeathed to it by one or by theother of its spiritual parents. The charm for me—a charm sometimespleasurable, but sometimes also painful, like the imperious necessitywhich we sometimes feel to see again and examine, seemingly uselessly,some horrible evil—the charm, I mean the involuntary compulsion ofattention, has often been as great in following the vicissitudes of amere artistic item, like the Carolingian stories or the bucolic element,as it has been in looking on at the dissolution of moral and socialelements. And in this, that I have tried to understand only where mycuriosity was awakened, tried to reconstruct only where my fancy wastaken; in short, studied of this Renaissance civilization only as muchor as little as I cared, depends all the incomple