"
Nor need I dwell on the stories of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, or
the epic _Dionysiaca_ of Nonnus, as they yield us no new points of
view. The romance of Longus, however, calls for some remarks, as it is
the best known of the Greek novels and has often been pronounced a
story of refined love worthy of a modern writer.
DAPHNIS AND CHLOE
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.
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