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_ Goethe found in _Daphnis and Chloe_ "a delicacy of feeling which cannot be excelled." Professor Murray backs up the morals of Longus: "It needs an unintelligent reader or a morbid translator," he writes (403), "to find harm in the _History of Daphnis and Chloe_;" and an editorial writer in the New York _Mail and Express_ accused me, as before intimated, of unexampled ignorance for not knowing that _Daphnis and Chloe_ is "as sweet and beautiful a love-story as ever skipped in prose." This, indeed, is the prevalent opinion. How it ever arose is a mystery to me. Fiction has always been the sphere of the most unrestrained license, yet Dunlop wrote in his _History of Fiction_ that there are in this story "particular passages so extremely reprehensible that I know nothing like them in almost any work whatever." In collecting the material for the present volume I have been obliged to examine thousands of books referring to the relations of men and women, but I declare that of all the books I have seen only the Hindoo _K[=a]masutr[=a]m_, the literal version of the _Arabian Nights_, and the American Indian stories collected by Dr. Boas, can compare with this "sweet and beautiful" romance of Longus in downright obscenity or deliberate laciviousness. I have been able, without going beyond the latitude permissible to anthropologists, to give a fairly accurate idea of the love-affairs of savages and barbarians; but I find it impossible, after several trials, to sum up the story of Daphnis and Chloe without going beyond the limits of propriety. Among all the deliberate pictures of _moral depravity_ painted by Greek and Roman authors not one is so objectionable as this "idyllic" picture of the _innocent_ shepherd boy and girl. Pastoral love is coarse enough, in all truth: but this story is infinitely more immoral than, for instance, the frank and natural sensualism of the twenty-seventh Idyl of Theocritus. Professor Anthon described the story of _Daphnis and Chloe_ as
"the romance, _par excellence_, of physical love. It is a history of the senses rather than of the mind, a picture of the development of the instincts rather than of the sentiments.... _Paul and Virginia_ is nothing more than _Daphnis and Chloe_ delineated by a refined and cultivated mind, and spiritualized and purified by the influence of Christianity."
This is true; but Anthon erred decidedly in saying that in the Greek story "vice is advocated by no sophistry." On the contrary, what makes this romance so peculiarly objectionable is that it is a master work of that kind of fiction which makes vice alluring under the sophistical veil of innocence. Longus knew very well that nothing is so tempting to libertines as purity and ignorant innocence; hence he made purity and ignorant innocence the pivot of his prurient story. Professor Rohde has rudely torn the veil from his sly sophistry:
"The way in which Longus excites the sensual desires of the lovers by means of licentious experiments going always only to the verge of gratification, betrays an abominably hypocritical _raffinement_[331] which reveals in the most disagreeable manner that the naivete of this idyllist is a premeditated artifice and he himself nothing but a sophist. It is difficult to understand how anyone could have ever been deceived so far as to overlook the sophistical character of this pastoral romance of Longus, or could have discovered genuine naivete in this most artificial of all rhetorical productions. No attentive reader who has some acquaintance with the ways of the Sophistic writers will have any difficulty in apprehending the true inwardness of the story... As this sophist, in those offensively licentious love-scenes, suddenly shows the cloven foot under the cloak of innocence, so, on the other hand, his eager desire to appear as simple and childlike as possible often enough makes him cold, finical, trifling, or utterly silly in his affectation."[332]
[FOOTNOTE 331: He refers in a footnote to such scenes as are painted in I., 32, 4; II., 9, 11; III., 14, 24, 3; IV., 6, 3--scones and hypocritically naive experiments which he justly considers much more offensive than the notorious scene between Daphnis and Lykainion (III., 18).]
[FOOTNOTE 332: Rohde tries to excuse Goethe for his ridiculous praise of this romance (Eckermann, II., 305, 318-321, 322) because he knew the story only in the French version of Amyot-Courier. But I find that this version retains most of the coarseness of the original, and I see no reason for seeking any other explanation of Goethe's attitude than his own indelicacy and obtuseness which, as I noted on page 208, made him go into ecstacies of admiration over a servant whom lust prompted to attempt rape and commit murder. As for Professor Murray, his remarks are explicable only on the assumption that he has never read this story in the original. This is not a violent assumption. Some years ago a prominent professor of literature, ancient and modern, in a leading American university, hearing me say one day that _Daphnis and Chloe_ was one of the most immoral stories ever written, asked in a tone of surprise: "Have you read it in the original?" Evidently _he_ never had! It is needless to add that translations never exceed the originals in impropriety and usually improve on them. The Rev. Rowland Smith, who prepared the English version for Bohn's Library, found himself obliged repeatedly to resort to Latin.
Apart from his coarseness, there is nothing in Longus's conception of love that goes beyond the ideas of the Alexandrians. Of the symptoms of true love--mental or sentimental, esthetic and sympathetic, altruistic and supersensual, he knows no more than Sappho did a thousand years before him. Indeed, in making lovers become indolent, cry out as if they had been beaten, and jump into rivers as if they were afire, he is even cruder and more absurd than Sappho was in her painting of sensual passion. His whole idea of love is summed up in what the old shepherd Philetas says to Daphnis and Chloe (II., 7): [Greek: _Egvov d' ego kai tauron erasthenta kai hos oistro plaegeis emukato, kai tragon philaesanta aiga kai aekolouthei pantachou. Autos men gar aemaen neos kai aerasthen Amarullidos_].] _
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