404 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE unintelligent reader or a morbid translator to find harm in his History of Daphnis and Chloe. But a feeling of discouragement pervades all his work, a wish to shut out the world, to shrink from ambitions and problems, to live for innocent and unstrenuous things. He re- minds one of a tired Theocritus writing in prose. Some of the later novelists, like Achilles Tatius and Chariton, wrote romances which, judged by vulgar standards, will rank above that of Longus, They are stronger, better constructed, more exciting ; some of them are immoral. But there is no such poet as Longus among them. He is the last man, unless the present writer's know- ledge is at fault, who lives for mere Beauty with the old whole-hearted devotion, as Plotinus lived for specu- lative Truth, as Julian for the "great city of gods and men." Of these three ideals, to which, beyond all others, Greece had opened the eyes of mankind, that of Political Freedom and Justice had long been relegated from prac- tical life to the realm of thought, and those who had power paid no heed to it. The search for Truth was finally made hopeless when the world, mistrusting Reason, weary of argument and wonder, flung itself passionately under the spell of a system of authoritative Revelation, which acknowledged no truth outside itself, and stamped free inquiry as sin. And who was to preach the old Beauty, earnest and frank and innocent, to generations which had long ceased to see it or to care for it ? The intellect of Greece died ultimately of that long discouragement which works upon nations like slow poison. She ceased to do her mission because her mission had ceased to bear fruit. And the last great pagans, men like Plotinus, Longus, and Julian, pro-
