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 (755) 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 (516) 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
naïveté 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 naïveté 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]