Primitive Love and Love-Stories eBook

Henry Theophilus Finck
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,176 pages of information about Primitive Love and Love-Stories.

Primitive Love and Love-Stories eBook

Henry Theophilus Finck
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,176 pages of information about Primitive Love and Love-Stories.
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].

[333] See Rehde, 345; on Musaeus, 472, 133.

[334] Lucii Apulei Metamorphoseon, Libri XI., Ed. van der Vliet (Teubner), IV., 89-135.

[335] See the remarks on Tristan and Isolde in my Wagner and his Works, II., 138.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEX OF AUTHORS

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Abercromby, J. Folk-Lore.  London, 1890.

Abrahams, Israel:  Jewish Life in the Middle Ages.

Achilles Tatius.

Acosta, Jos. d’:  Natural and Moral History of the Indies.

Adair, J.:  History of the American Indians.  London, 1775.

Aeschylus.

Agassiz, L. and Mrs.:  A Journey in Brazil.  Boston, 1868.

Alberti, J.C.:  Die Kaffern.

Albertis, L.M.D.:  New Guinea.

American Anthropologist.

Anacreon.

Anderson, J.W.:  Travel in Fiji and New Caledonia.  London, 1880.

Andersson, C.J.: 
     The Okavango River.  London, 1861. 
     Lake Ngami.  London, 1856.

Angas, G.F.:  Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand. 
     London, 1850.

Anthon, C.:  Classical Dictionary.

Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, Journal of

Anthropologische Gesellschaft.  Ber.  Wien, 1887.

Anthropological Society, Journal, London.

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Project Gutenberg
Primitive Love and Love-Stories from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.