Longus

Eventually when criticism takes the much-travelled story into consideration, widely differing recensions of it are found, and it is sometimes no easy matter to say which is the original form.

Has it been expanded by a Syrian translator or cut down by a Greek? Many of the tales with which we have to deal describe an almost entirely artificial world and offer nothing beyond their style as a guide to the critic who will date them, and in some cases this is hardly any help at all, so that a novel like that of Longus is loosely dated as of the 2nd to the 4th century.

Others conceal the date of their creation of set purpose and flaunt a false one, and though the falsehood may be readily detected, the true date can often only be determined by long and tiresome critical processes, with the result that critics come to very different conclusions.

If, however, we bear in mind that while the dates of the first appearances of the particular books to which we have to refer are in many cases highly conjectural, these works yet represent the popular taste for long after as well as before the period with which we are dealing, and that their kind, if not themselves, has profoundly influenced actual productions of our period, we may without material error draw some real advantage from our study.

Yet Paul is agitated by questions that Daphnis never dreamt of, and which he himself could hardly have dreamt of if he had not been created in the age of Rousseau, to say nothing of his creator's friendship with Rousseau.

Again, though the work has been pronounced to be in some degree even anti-Christian in its quiet ignoring of such matters as original sin and any necessity for redemption, and its implication that man is born good, if only society will not corrupt him, yet the difference between Paul and Daphnis, between Virginia and Chloe, is not explained without Christianity.

We thus see that Longus, Defoe, Rousseau, and the Catholic Church have all contributed to this book.

But perhaps, after all, we must recognize that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre contributed to it, or else we may have to pronounce Shakespeare a second-hand dramatist.

Eventually when criticism takes the much-travelled story into consideration, widely differing recensions of it are found, and it is sometimes no easy matter to say which is the original form.

Has it been expanded by a Syrian translator or cut down by a Greek? Many of the tales with which we have to deal describe an almost entirely artificial world, and offer nothing beyond their style as a guide to the critic who will date them, and in some cases this is hardly any help at all, so that a novel like that of Longus is loosely dated as of the second to the fourth century.

Others conceal the date of their creation of set purpose and flaunt a false one, and though the falsehood may be readily detected, the true date can often only be determined by long and tiresome critical processes, with the result that critics come to very different conclusions.

If, however, we bear in mind that while the dates of the first appearances of the particular books to which we have to refer are in many cases highly conjectural, these works yet represent the popular taste for long after as well as before the period with which we are dealing, and that their kind, if not themselves, has profoundly influenced actual productions of our period, we may without material error draw some real advantage from our study.

Yet Paul is agitated by questions that Daphnis never dreamt of, and which he himself could hardly have dreamt of if he had not been created in the age of Rousseau, to say nothing of his creator's friendship with Rousseau.

Again, though the work has been pronounced to be in some degree even anti-Christian in its quiet ignoring of such matters as original sin and any necessity for redemption, and its implication that man is born good, if only society will not corrupt him, yet the difference between Paul and Daphnis, between Virginia and Chloe, is not explained without Christianity.

We thus see that Longus, Defoe, Rousseau, and the Catholic Church have all contributed to this book, but perhaps after all we must recognize that Bernardine de Saint-Pierre contributed to it, or else we may have to pronounce Shakespeare a second-hand dramatist.

We need not, however, write the history of literature to interpret Xanthippe and Polyxena, or the life of Antony, and their contemporary rivals.

Is, like most other literary forms, Greek in origin.

It goes back at least to the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus, the Byzantine romancer of the 5th century AD.

Longus represents the romantic spirit in expiring classicism, the longing of a highly artificial society for primitive simplicity, and the endeavor to create a corresponding ideal.

Indeed, the pastoral has always been a product of a highly artificial age.

Naturally, therefore, it has always been written by men of the city rather than by men of the country.

The Christianity of the East and the romance of the North were already beginning to modify the grosser realism of the Mediterranean world, and towards the end of the second century the reaction came when the Greek genius gave to the world the last, and perhaps the most fruitful, of all its gifts in literature, the romantic novel.

Longus, in the Daphnis and Chloe, strikes a new note, and his hero is, perhaps, the first gentleman in matters of the affections that we find in ancient literature.

The barbarian invasions soon came to devastate the land, but Longus had sown the seed, and he is the true father of all the love romances of medieval chivalry.

As Nausicaa is the first, so Chloe is almost the last of ancient heroines, and Greek literature, by a curious turn of fate, ironical enough considering its general tendency, ends as it begins, with the praise of the perfect maiden.

End of introduction.

Is, like most other literary forms, Greek in origin.

It goes back at least to the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus, the Byzantine romancer of the 5th century AD.

Longus represents the romantic spirit in expiring classicism, the longing of a highly artificial society for primitive simplicity, and the endeavor to create a corresponding ideal.

Indeed, the pastoral has always been a product of a highly artificial age.

Naturally, therefore, it has always been written by men of the city rather than by men of the country.