THE ABBEY CLASSICS.*

Now had winter come on, a winter, says Longus,' more bitter than war to Daphnis and Chloe because of the snow which blinded all the paths, stopped the ways, and shut up all the shepherds of Mitylene. The shepherds were delivered to idleness, and thus poor Daphnis, snow-immured, suffered at once from leisure and his thoughts of Chloe, whom he might no longer see ; while Chloe, void of all counsel, was perplexed with the twattling of her reputed mother about the timeliness of marriage.

The most that Daphnis could do to while away the savage hours, we may suppose, was to stumble over the hills to a neighbour, a landed man, Chromis by name, whose wife Lycaenium was buxom, fair and delicate, and perhaps better known than esteemed among the little colonies of the hills. Lycaenium was away at this time, visiting, no one but Chromis guessed where, and prevented from returning by the same wintry rigours as kept Daphnis and Chloe miserably apart. Daphnis had often talked to Chromis but had scarcely noticed Lycaenium nor she him (her lover occupying all her thoughts), and so his visits now were not for her sake but for his own relief. Talking to Chromis meant listening to Chromis and his termless stories of a world only a little larger than Daphnis knew, but nevertheless strange and alluring. But more than this, far more, was the pleasure of plunging one day into a chest which the elder man showed him a little shyly and reluctantly—for domesticity had made Chromis morose— containing sundry antique trifles : spearheads, a battered flat bell, the toothed jaw of an almost fabulous wolf, a twist of bright-hued wools, splendid in dye, delicate in texture ; and vestiges of linen flecked with bloodstains that time had darkened, suggesting violent battles in old fatal quarrels. When Daphnis asked how had he come by such a curious collection Chromis did not answer, but sucked his lips into secretive puckers ; and remembering then that the old man —old, he seemed, though scarcely beyond forty—was sup- posed to have wandered far off and conversed with immortal spirits, Daphnis forbore to press his freezing question but waited till the other's tongue should be loosed again. The time was soon to come when the young shepherd was to receive what Longus, through his translator, calls wanton information from Lycaenium ; but now he was receiving a thousand impressions, other lessons in good and evil, from one who knew something beyond the instincts and appetites of the body. Sitting childlike at Chromis's feet, while the snow oozed and froze and oozed again, he drank in stories of things that had happened to his host or others—stories of rocky waters, piracies, wolf hunts, of the changes of fortune by which Chromis had gained as others had lost ; and such other stories as have been told by the old to the young since the' beginning of time.

Longus has related nothing of this in his tale, nor has George Thornley in the translation with which in 1657 he followed that of Angel Day seventy years before. Daphnis and Chloe is mere romance. Not the most ingenious of metaphysicals could find anything more than story in the story—no allegory, no heavenly meaning in this very earthly tale. It is pure of doctrine, being pure of intellect. Such a subtilizing of simple themes as we all look for now, and which Mr. George Moore in his promised retelling of the tale may be trusted to refrain from, was not the mode of the seventeenth century adapter or of the author in the third or fourth century. Thornlcy calls it, with a somewhat conscious innocence, a most sweet and • (1) Daphnis and Chloe. By Longus. Translated by George Thornley.— (2) Zadig, or Destiny; an Oriental History. By Voltaire. (3) Thoughts on Hunting. By Peter Beektord.—(4) The Letters of Runnymede. By Benjamin Disraeli.— -- (5) Mardi and a Voyage TMMer. By Herman Melville. 2 vols. London : Chapman and Dodd. pa. Bd. per vol.]

pleasant pastoral romance for young ladies, dedicating " this little pleasant Laundschip of Love " to " young beauties " ; and with less innocence than impudence he taunts his dedicatees, saying, you do not know what we mean when we speak as plain as day. The plain speaking will find what- ever defence it needs in the introduction by Mr. Saintsbury, who thinks it needs none. He is at more pains to discuss the accepted commonplaces about Greek Romance (as that character is its weak point), but he does not attempt to cloud the story with comment and is satisfied to thrust the boughs aside as we enter the newly green thicket. In that thicket the reader will hear the rustling of Syrinx and Pan, or at least " this Organ, joyned together imparil, or unequal quits, because their love was so imparil. So she who then was a fair Maid is now become a Musical Pipe." Philetas plays a loud or lusty tune on a pipe which seemed to be that very pipe which Pan himself first made :—

" One would not have thought that he had heard but one Pipe, the Sound was so high, the consort so full. But by little and little remitting that vehemence, he changed it to a softer and sweeter tone ; and playing with all the dexterousnesse of the art of Musick, he shewed upon the Pipe, what notes were fit for the herds of Cowes and Oxen, what agreed with the flocks of Goats, what was pleasing to the sheep. The tones for the sheep were soft and sweet, those of the herds were vehement ; and for the Goats were sharp and shrill. In summe, that single Pipe of his exprest even all the Shepherds pipes. Therefore the rest in deep silence sate still, delighted and charmed with that Musick."

Then he sounded a Dionysiac, and the listeners danced the dance of the wine-press, until at length the notes changed and Daphnis and Chloe danced together, acting the tale of Pan and Syrinx. The whole passage is a joy to read in the new volume of the Abbey Classics, a series which avoids the too- familiar and rescues delightful literature from neglect.

Strangely jostling this romance is Voltaire's Zadig,2of which a modern Daphnis would make nothing. The brain that filled Voltaire's heart would bewilder the eternal shepherd, for irony, the last infirmity or the last excellence of the civilized mind, can hardly please primitive senses. But it pleases Mr. A. B. Walkley, who remarks in his introduction that Voltaire has no peer in mocking save Anatole France. Voltaire writes :— " He was the friend of the king, and the king was then the only monarch on earth that had a friend. The little mute was not forgotten. A fine house was given to the fisherman, Orcan was condemned to pay him a large sum, and to restore his wife ; but the fisherman had obtained wisdom ; he took only the money."

How difficult it is to be happy ! was Zadig's reiterated cry in his wanderings through the desert that man has made of Eden ; at one time finding himself on the point of happiness and asking why all men were not happy, and then seeing the answer in every encounter with his kind. For, it seems, it is man and not the nature of things that makes un- happiness. The divine or fatal Scheme to which man is subdued escapes Voltaire's impeachment in Zadig. His survey of man's perplexing zig-zagging gives no hint of appalling sights and apprehensions, and no hint of blissful redemption. What appals or at least astonishes his rational mind is that men should persecute one another for righteousness' sake, and burn or be burned for a fierce miscreed. And still he remembers, even in the gaiety of his mockery, that happiness is what men seek but cannot endure.

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mock on, mock on ; 'tis all in vain ! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again "- cried Blake, who would not see that Voltaire's exaltation of reason was itself an intellectual mysticism, that yet enabled him with an amused sigh to conclude that it would be un- reasonable to destroy the world since, if all is not well with it, all is yet passable. A moment of emotion would be fatal, says Mr. Walkley of Candide. Zadig is sparklingly tranquil.

But the new Daphnis, though he might not understand it all, would be far more at home with the next revival in the Abbey Classics, Peter Beckford's Thoughts on Hunting.' He would be amused, one may hope, at the author's candid avowal that he would have written in verse but for the time wanted, prose being so much easier and better suited to the subject.

" Didactic essays should be as little clogged as possible : they should proceed regularly and clearly : should be easily written, and as easily understood; having less to do with words than things. The game of smith° is out of fashion, to the no small prejudice of the rhyming tribe ; and before I could find a rhyme to porringer, I should hope to finish a. great part of these Letters. I shall, therefore, without further delay, proceed upon them :— this, however, I must desire to be first understood between us— that when, to save trouble to us both, I say a thing is, without tacking a salvo to the tail of it, such as, in my opinion—to the best of my judgment, cbc., &c.—you shall not call my humility in question, as the assertion is not meant to be mathematically certain. When I have any better authority than my own, such as Somerville, for instance (who, by the bye, is the only one that has written intelligibly on this subject), I shall take the liberty of giving it you in his own words, to save the trouble of turning to him."

He would be willing to take for sufficient proof of Beckford's verse (so much less vigorous and agile than his prose) such a passage as :--

" One pound of native sulphur,

One quart of train-oil, One pint of oil of turpentine, One pound of soap " —an unlooked for and unconscious anticipation of the modern rhymeless quatrain. Beckford is fond enough of whatever verse touches his beloved hunting, and quotes Somerville so freely that the most literal of minds will delight in a sonorous treatise in blank verse on the minute economy of the kennel— Milton subdued to the exhortation of the whipper-in and feeder :—

" Let no offensive smell

Invade thy wide enclosure, but admit The nitrous air and purifying breeze."

Beckford writes with the happy dogmatism of a man who enjoys living and is sure that the fox must enjoy dying :-

" How musical their tongues and as they get nearer to him, how the chorus fills ! Hark, he is found! Now, where are all your sorrows, and your cares, ye gloomy souls ! or where your pains and aches, ye complaining ones ! one halloo has dispelled them all. What a crash they make ! and echo seemingly takes pleasure to repeat the sound. The astonished traveller forsakes his road, lured by its melody : the listening ploughman now stops his plough ; and every distant shepherd neglects his flock, and runs to see him break—what jOy, what eagerness, in every face ! "

The perfect sportsman is, he thinks, as rare as a good Prime Minister ; and perhaps a lesser confidence would be shameful in a foxhunter, and certainly impossible in Peter Beckford.

It is idle to ask whether the wandering shepherd would endure, with the sullen fortitude of the reviewer, a reading of Disraeli's Letters of Runnymede,' first published a year before the accession of Queen Victoria. Their rhetoric is dismaying, their abuse tedious, their sentiment insincere ; they are vulgarly violent, nauseously virtuous. Disraeli, serene in his pseudonym, denounces the Pope and the rampant Papacy, pleads for " our National Church," calls Lord. John Russell an insect and Spring Rice a flea, and never fails in effrontery. Upon such unstable hidden foundations was the spectacular reputation of Disraeli upreared, from such iridescence exhaled. Here and there he is effectively fantastic and elaborately grotesque. The writer of the interesting introduction, Mr. Francis Bickley, seems to think that the violence and oddity of Disraeli's attack is excused by its insincerity. I leave the political question aside in turning from this volume, hands clapped to ears, and merely wonder how literature is served by putting on this execrably loud and coarse record. " As for the polished Palmerston and the pious Grant," says the imma- ture satirist, " and the other trading statesmen of easy virtue --for them it would be advisable, I think, at once to erect a political Magdalen Hospital. Solitude and spare diet and some salutary treatises of the English. constitution may, after a considerable interval, capacitate them for re-entering public life."

In Herman Melville's Mardi,' which occupies two volumes of the Abbey Classics, English readers are given a chance of reading a novel for many years almost out of their reach. It was published in 1849 and shared in the general neglect which swelled round and over Melville's work until his scarcely noted death in 1891. That work, that makes fanatics of its lovers now, has lately received its tribute in these columns, and Mardi needs no further welcome at this moment as it re- emerges into final recognition.

JOILN FREEKear.