Part 11
The soliloquies too are as artless and simple as this talk. At some emotional crisis the youngsters bemoan to themselves their lot. Chloe, falling in love with Daphnis when she sees him bathe in the cave of the Nymphs, laments the pain in her heart that is worse than a bee-sting.[241] After Daphnis has been recognized as the son of the great Dionysophanes, Chloe weeps at being forgotten, is sure Daphnis is breaking his oath of faithfulness and bids him farewell since she will surely die.[242] Daphnis makes moan more often. When the kiss of Chloe has set him on fire, he complains that his heart leaps up; his soul is weakened; he will waste away with his strange malady.[243] Over the sleeping Chloe he murmurs a soft rhapsody.[244] Shut in alone by winter he takes counsel with himself on what excuse to end their separation.[245] And when he hears that Lampis has carried Chloe off, he seeks solitude in the garden and rails at his bitter loss.[246] Even the court-room speeches in the prosecution of Daphnis by the Methymnaeans for the loss of their ship are reduced to short and simple arguments since a herdsman sat as judge.[247] The trial of course ends happily for Daphnis as must inevitably the whole story. Of all the love romances this springtime love in the country is the most joyous.
As we read this pastoral romance, the unknown author becomes to us a real personality. His delight in the country is spontaneous and real. He is a cultured person with genuine appreciation of art, music and literature. Their influence enriches his story. Longus in his preface tells how a painting which he chanced to see in the grove of the Nymphs gave the inspiration for the writing of his novel, for the painting pictured a history of love and he longed to write something that would correspond to the picture. Paintings again he mentions in his description of a shrine of Dionysus, paintings telling all the myths of the god.[248] The images of the Nymphs in the cave are described carefully by him: cut out of the rock they were, feet unshod, arms bare to the shoulders, hair falling on their necks, their garments belted, a smile in their eyes.[249] A statue of Pan stood under his sacred pine until at the end Daphnis and Chloe built him a shrine.[250] Over and over these representations are referred to as symbols of very present gods.
The music that fills the romance is the sound of the shepherds’ pipes and the voice of song. Daphnis makes a pipe of reeds and teaches Chloe how to play on it.[251] So well did she learn that on Dorco’s pipe she could call the cattle back from the raiders’ ship.[252] When spring brought them out-doors, both Daphnis and Chloe challenged the nightingales with their piping and the birds answered.[253] Philetas the old herdsman outdid all in playing on the great organ-pipe of his father. He played special strains for cows and oxen, for goats, for sheep. He played too the melody of Dionysus and to it Dryas footed the dance of the vintage. Daphnis too played on Philetas’ pipe a love-song and danced with Chloe the story of the origin of the pipe, Pan’s wooing of the maid Syrinx.[254]
Daphnis displayed his art for his own father and mother, before he was recognized as their son, to do them pleasure. He blew the call of the goats; he blew their soft lullaby; he blew their grazing tune; he blew the alarm for a wolf; he blew the recall. And the goats responded to all his different strains.[255] After the wedding the shepherds piped the bride and groom to bed and sang outside their door a rude, harsh song, no Hymenaeus, but such as they were wont to sing when with their picks they broke the earth.[256] For country people sang at all their tasks: the boatman on the river,[257] the herdsman in the pastureland.
More pervasive than all other influences in the romance is the literary. Theocritus colors the whole story. There are a few reminiscences of Bion[258] and Moschus,[259] but it was the Sicilian goatherd par excellence who instructed Longus as he did Lamo in his story.[260] Calderini shows the various traces of the inspiration which Longus received from the Alexandrian idyl. There is a continuous alternation of descriptions of nature with descriptions of emotion all composed with a certain serenity and restraint. The pain is not too violent; the descriptions of nature are not too detailed or pedantic. There are many special similar motives: the descriptions of paintings and statues; the fear and the protection of Pan and the Nymphs; the vengeance of Eros on those who scorn him; the young lovers who frequent the gymnasia and the palestra; love which is born on the day of a festival; the woe of love; the violent, brutal love of a scorned shepherd; the patron who lives at a distance.[261] The pastoral name Daphnis is taken from the ideal shepherd of Theocritus and Vergil. Pastoral setting and pastoral narrative have the flavor of Theocritus. Episodes are identical: Chloe plaits a tiny cage for a grasshopper as did the young lad carved on the bowl of ivy-wood.[262] Daphnis and Chloe as they sit kissing each other on the hill see a fisherman’s boat passing on the sea and listen to his song.[263] So in Theocritus lovers on the land embracing look out at the far distant sea.[264] But above all, Longus saw as Theocritus did that in the lives of herdsmen lay true romance, and while Theocritus sang his short lays, closely affiliated with the mimes in their use of the comic, Longus lifted the love of goatherd and shepherd to the realm of pure fiction by idealization and tenderness. His originality was in making young love grow with the seasons to maturity. The name of his heroine, Chloe, a young green shoot, is symbolic of this growing life.[265] His awareness of his unique contribution to romance perhaps appears in his title: _The Lesbian Pastorals of Daphnis and Chloe_.
Sappho too was known and cherished by Longus. There is a possible reminiscence in the description of Daphnis turning paler than grass in its season.[266] There is a sure reminiscence of Sappho’s hyacinth on the mountains crushed by the feet of the passing shepherds in Lamo’s pity for his flowers trodden down by a marauder.[267] And to Sappho Longus owes the climax of Daphnis’ wooing at the end of Book III when he pulls “the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough,” saved by Fortune for a shepherd in love, and putting it in Chloe’s bosom makes it a symbol of her beauty and his prize.[268]
Drama too had a definite influence on Longus, indeed the word δρᾶµα or δραµατικόν is applied to these romances by Photius.[269] The two recognition scenes in which Daphnis and Chloe find parents through the tokens placed with them when they were exposed as babies are copied from tragedy. New Comedy furnished at least three characters to the romance, Gnatho the parasite, Sophrone the nurse who exposed the baby Daphnis[270] and the city wench, Lycaenium. Elegiac poetry furnished Philetas, the father perhaps of erotic elegiacs. Echo repeating the name of Amaryllis suggests Vergil.[271] And Ovid perhaps contributed three names: Astylus, Dryas and Nape.[272] The influence of the rhetorical schools is slighter than in the other romances, but appears in the court-room scene with its speeches and in the use of parallelism and contrast. Parallelism, as Calderini says,[273] includes all the plot of the romance and proceeds from the number and selection of the characters to the variety of the secondary episodes and to the description of the smallest details. Daphnis and Chloe are both exposed, both rescued by shepherds. Both are kidnapped. An attack on Chloe is made by Dorco, on Daphnis by Gnatho. Chloe touches Daphnis when he is bathing and falls in love. Daphnis kisses Chloe and his heart rises to his lips. Astylus, the city son of Dionysophanes, is sophisticated, Daphnis is virginal. The oath of Daphnis is matched by the oath of Chloe. On and on proceeds this balancing. And the parallelism appears not only in plot, but in details of phrase and sentence structure: balanced rhythmical phrases set off by rhymes or alliterations; bipartite or tripartite periods, elaborate in their rhetorical structure. Sometimes indeed Longus’ Pastorals seem written in modern verse, indeed they are written in poetic prose.[274]
Out of all these interests in art, music and literature and beyond them Longus has created a style peculiarly his own and suited to his pastoral romance. His sentence structure is simple and paratactic. His comparisons are drawn from the life of shepherds. Chloe is as restive as a heifer.[275] Dorco claims he is as white as milk but Daphnis says Dorco is as red as a fox.[276] Daphnis and Chloe run about like dogs freed from their leashes.[277] Chloe plunders from Daphnis’ mouth a bit of cake as though she were a young bird being fed.[278]
Description and narration are as vivid as these little similes. We are made to see Daphnis at his bath: his hair black and thick, his body sun-burned dark as though colored by the shadow of his hair;[279] the coming of spring with flowers covering the valleys and the mountains, bees humming, birds warbling, lambs gamboling; the vintage scene with the peasants all busy in the vineyard with the wine-presses, the hogsheads, the baskets, and the grapes;[280] the winter landscape with the deep snow, the rushing torrents, the ice, the laden trees;[281] the country wedding with the feast on beds of green boughs before the cave of the Nymphs, the songs of the reapers and the vintners, the dancing to the pipes, the goats sharing the feast, the bridal procession with its piping and singing.[282]
Longus’ art of narration is employed as skillfully as are his descriptions. This art appears not only in the pattern of the whole romance, but in the skillful use of stories within the story to diversify and enliven the longer narrative. After the feast of Dionysus, the old men, their tongues loosed with wine, fell into reminiscence and told tales to each other:
“how bravely in their youth they had administered the pasturing of their flocks and herds, how in their time they had escaped very many invasions and inroads of pirates and thieves. Here one bragged that he had killed a wolf, here another that he had bin second to Pan alone in the skill and art of piping.”[283]
That last was Philetas, the wise old shepherd who told Daphnis and Chloe the story of the gay little Eros whom he had found playing in his garden flying like a nightingale from bough to bough of the myrtles, a lovely story with a point for Philetas’ _ars amatoria_.[284] The other inset stories are mostly short myths. So Daphnis tells Chloe how the mourning dove was once a maid, very proud of her singing and by her song alone she kept the cows she tended near her in the wood. But a shepherd lad rivalled her music and piped off eight of her finest cows to his own herd. And the girl in despair prayed to become a bird. The gods consented and left her that sweet voice so still she calls the cattle home.[285]
At the feast of Dionysus Lamo tells a myth which a Sicilian goatherd had sung to him, a tiny tale of how the girl Syrinx fleeing Pan’s embraces was changed into a reed and then made by Pan into his pipe, with reeds of unequal lengths to symbolize their ill-matched love.[286] All these stories are very short and simple, bits of folk-lore such as peasants might relate at their feasts or in the open.
Much of the whole narrative is colored by a humor that is as playful and tender as the spirit of Philetas’ merry child Eros. In the vintage scene both Daphnis and Chloe are beset with childish jealousy at the attentions that each other receives.[287] The author’s humor plays around them from the time when they first herded their flocks together to the day of their rural wedding. And the plot is set with humor, which as Wolff observes, turns on “the incongruity between the children’s innocence and the piquancy of their experiments.”[288]
It is not strange that Longus’ Pastorals with all their charm of plot, setting and style were the forerunners of much later literature. Todd has a paragraph which is a sign-post to the line of his successors.[289]
“Longus invented the pastoral romance, and his influence is found throughout the pastorals of the modern European literatures: already, perhaps, at the end of the fifteenth century, in the _Arcadia_ of the ‘Neapolitan Virgil’ Jacopo Sannazaro; in the _Aminta_ of Tasso, in the _Astrée_ of D’Urfé, in the _Gentle Shepherd_ of Ramsay, in the _Paul et Virginie_ of Saint-Pierre, and in other writings almost countless.”
S. L. Wolff’s elaborate study of _The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction_ analyzes in detail Longus’ influence on Robert Greene in _Manaphon_ and _Pandost_ and Shakespeare’s use of Longus in the pastoral setting, the hunt scene, the exposure motif in _The Winter’s Tale_. There is rich material still left in the study of the Greek Romances for the young scholar working in Comparative Literature. By them, by all students of literature _Daphnis and Chloe_ deserves to be read and reread. For Longus, just as Theocritus did in the Idyl, immortalized in the realm of fiction the loves and woes of shepherds.
It is strange that a pastoral romance of such honest and simple charm should have played a dramatic part in a melodrama of the early nineteenth century. Yet it did, for it almost caused an international literary warfare; it almost had a French officer shot for desertion; and it created serious political complications for him with the Bonaparte family.
Paul Louis Courier (1773-1825) led a bizarre life as a vine-grower, an officer in the artillery, a liberal pamphleteer, a member of the Legion of Honor, a prisoner in Sainte-Pélagie, a traveller, a poet, a Hellenist. Throughout his checkered career, he anticipated Byron in his romantic passion for the antiquities, the ruins, the beauty of Greece. In 1811 he wrote from Rome: “The fact is that I wish before I die to see the lantern of Demosthenes and drink the water of the Ilissus.”
It was this passion combined with his disgust at the butcheries of Wagram that made him forget that he was a soldier so that in 1809, though he was the head of a squadron of artillery, he slipped out of military life and in Italy devoted all his time to those literary studies to which before he had given his leisure.
Reared in the country (at Méré in Touraine), he had early become fascinated with the pastoral romance _Daphnis and Chloe_ and now he was determined to work on a Thirteenth Century Greek manuscript of it which was in the Laurentian Library. After some difficulty he obtained permission from the librarian, Francesco Furia, and his work started happily. It was to meet with the greatest success and the greatest disaster. Courier, amateur that he was, discovered that the Laurentian manuscript contained the text of the great lacuna in Book I (cc. 12-17). These chapters were lacking in all other manuscripts. Furia who had worked for years on the manuscript, which was in parts nearly illegible, had never noticed these hitherto unknown chapters. They contain the episode of Daphnis tumbling into the trap-ditch, Chloe’s falling in love with him thereafter, and the contest of Daphnis and Dorco for Chloe’s kiss.
Close on Courier’s great discovery followed a most unfortunate episode, for after carefully copying the new chapters Courier obliterated them by a black ink stain. It was natural that the jealous Furia should believe that Courier had intentionally upset his ink-pot over them. Courier himself in a letter to Renouard declared that inadvertently he had used as a marker some paper which was soaked in ink on the under side, and that made the blot.
The rage of Furia might itself have hindered the publication of Courier’s discovery and now a political complication arose as a new obstacle. Since the fame of his work was spreading, Elisa Bonaparte, the sister of Napoleon, wished to have Courier’s publication dedicated to her and the prefect of Florence, the Baron Fauchet, announced her gracious wish at a formal dinner-party! Courier, who by now hated all Bonapartes, cut his Gordian knot by rushing out at Florence a Greek edition in fifty-two copies before the French edition which he was publishing at Paris appeared in 1810. The deed was done and neither Furia nor la Bonaparte could undo it.
The fame and scandal of Courier’s work of course came to the ears of the Ministry of War and orders were sent to General Sorbier, commandant of the artillery in Italy, to demand from Courier explanations of his absence from his squadron. Fortunately the general accepted Courier’s affirmation that he had never thought of deserting so that the Hellenist escaped being shot then, but fate pursued him.
On April 11, 1825, the body of Paul Louis Courier was found in a wood near his country home at Véretz. He had been assassinated. It was long believed that this was a political crime, “a kind of epilogue of secret vengeance in party politics” as Edmond Pilon puts it.[290] It might also have been the revenge of a philologist. Actually the shooting was the result of an embroglio with certain servants on his estate. Courier in 1814 had married Mlle Herminie Clavier, who managed his estate in his absence. She seems to have betrayed him both in business matters and affairs of the heart so that Courier separated from her and made new plans for the management of the estate. Five years after the murder the Department of Justice found that the assassins were certain servitors of Courier who had been dismissed because of their connivance with Madame Courier in her iniquities. Courier, whose dearest dream had been the pastoral life of Daphnis and Chloe, escaped the dangers of war and of prison only to be shot in the country he loved for petty personal spite.
Paul Louis Courier would, I am sure, have been happy to have part of his fame rest on his precious new chapters of the Pastorals, and to know that his beautiful translation of their four books lives on in one new edition after another.
VII _LUCIAN AND HIS SATIRIC ROMANCES: THE_ TRUE HISTORY _AND_ LUCIUS OR ASS
“Lucian of Samosata [was] surnamed ‘The blasphemer,’ because in his dialogues he alleges that the things told of the gods are absurd.... He was at first an advocate in Antioch, but, having ill success in that, he turned to the composition of discourses, and his writings are innumerable. He is said to have been killed by dogs, he having been rabid against the truth. For in his ‘Life of Peregrinus’ he attacks Christianity and, wicked man, blasphemes against Christ himself. Wherefore for his madness he suffered meet punishment in this life, and hereafter with Satan he will be inheritor of the everlasting fire.”[291]
This is the meagre biography by Suidas of the great satirist who through nearly all of the second century held up the mirror of his frankness to reflect images of the Greek and Roman world. Suidas’ misrepresentation of Lucian’s allusions to the Christians and his fanciful picture of the sophist’s end vilify much of this traditional vita. From Lucian’s own writings more facts may be assembled.
Syrian by birth, he wrote in Greek and became a master of an Attic prose style. As a boy he was apprenticed to a sculptor uncle, but quickly left work with his hands for work with his tongue, studied rhetoric and oratory, practiced as an advocate at Antioch, became a professional sophist and travelled in Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece, Italy, Gaul; about A.D. 165 settled at Athens where he lived twenty years, then near the end of his life took an official post in Egypt under the Emperor and wrote an Apology for so doing. Suidas’ description of his writings as “innumerable” seems justified by the eighty-two prose works extant to say nothing of two mock tragedies and fifty-three epigrams, now considered spurious.
Though the great bulk of Lucian’s writings consists of Platonic and satiric dialogues, he enters into the scope of this book as a writer of the satiric or parody romance. For two of his writings, the _True History_ and _Lucius or Ass_, establish for us this new type of Greek romance. His _True History_ is a parody of all travellers’ tales from Odysseus’ to such as those of Antonius Diogenes in _The Wonderful Things beyond Thule_. Probably this work of Lucian had more literary influence than any of his other writings. His other romance, of which we have only an epitome, _Lucius or Ass_, is, I believe, a parody of the romance motivated mainly by religion. Its greatest value in its present syncopated form is that it outlines a contemporary Greek counterpart of the famous Latin novel, Apuleius’ _Metamorphoses_, and furnishes us with a touchstone for testing the pure gold of Apuleius’ originality.
Before, however, we can discuss Lucian’s art of narration in his two romances, we must reconstruct from his own writings his literary autobiography and his conceptions of his literary art. Only then when we have met the critic self-criticized will we be competent to appreciate his brilliant imaginative flights in his novels.
A dangerous temptation at once assails any one who starts to write on any subject connected with Lucian. That is to attempt to cover the whole field of his life and works because of the brilliancy of the many-sided facets of his genius. A forcible deterrent is the fact that a masterly appreciation of _La vie et les œuvres de Lucien_ has already been written by Maurice Croiset in his _Essai_[292] which in richness and style alike is worthy of its great theme. All subsequent studies of Lucian are inevitably founded on M. Croiset’s appreciation.
Gildersleeve, following Croiset, pointed out that Lucian’s life must be reconstructed from his own writings. And this within the scope of a brief essay Gildersleeve did brilliantly for English readers fifty years ago.[293] From another angle I am attempting to do this same thing now in order to make us acquainted before we read his stories with Lucian the story-teller.[294]
Lucian’s early life is pictured in a brief speech called _The Dream_. This was probably delivered in his native Syria on his return after his European lecture-tour which made him famous as a Sophist. In a whimsical mixture of fact and fancy he describes his choice of a career. As a young lad when he had just finished school, Lucian was apprenticed to his mother’s brother, a sculptor, to learn to be “a good stone-cutter, mason and sculptor.” On his first day he struck a slab of marble so hard that he shattered it. Whereat his uncle gave him such a violent beating that he ran home to his mother for comfort. That night he had a vision. Two women were struggling to get possession of him. They were vastly different in appearance and in the appeals they made to him, for they were Sculpture and Education. Sculpture, unkempt, speaking haltingly and like a barbarian, told Lucian that if he came to her, he would live well, have strong shoulders, would never go abroad, but would gain such fame as surrounded Phidias, Polyclitus, Myron, Praxiteles. Education in her turn assured him that even if he became a famous sculptor, he would be only a mechanic, living by his hands; she herself has much more to offer him.