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GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
to have left Stevenson out of this argument. Morris would have supplied you with a better example, for men fight and love and wander in his poems as they do in Homer.
Moore: The visible world was enough for the Greek and the English poet, and all that you say in praise of Morris I will applaud, hat in hand. A greater poet than Stevenson, I grant you; still— But let us not wrangle, but agree that ancient literature was happier than modern. Homer's fighting, though heavy-handed, is always light-hearted. The wanderings of Odysseus are untouched by melancholy, and Virgil, too, and Horace are free from this bane.
Freeman: Your chronicle runs too fast, for we have come to imperial Rome, overlooking Sicily.
Moore: Yes; you are quite right. I had forgotten Sicily, and thank you for reminding me. How the very name of Theocritus brings up before our eyes sunny hillsides, with shepherds gathered under tamarisk trees, and for single ornament a torrent dashing over the face of the high rock. More real, more true are these than George Eliot's Norfolk farms. The shepherds and shepherdesses have come down to us from more than two thousand years, gaining in every generation, it would seem, a new and more intense life. Battus is clearer to us now than he was, perhaps, to his creator, certainly more real than Tom Tulliver is to me, or his sister Maggie. And the incident of the thorn that Corydon plucked from Battus' foot under the ankle we would not exchange for the story of the flood.
Freeman: I would certainly not give up Amaryllis for Maggie Tulliver.
Moore: All her walks with the cripple in the pine wood are not worth the verses in which we read that Battus goes to Amaryllis' cave to plead his love, saying that if she refuses him he will die at her feet. He says some lovely things to her: Lo, ten apples I bring thee, plucked from that very place where thou didst bid me pluck them, and others to-morrow I will bring thee. Ah, regard my heart's deep sorrow! ah, would I were that humming bee, and to thy cave might come dipping beneath the fern that hides thee, and the ivy leaves!
Freeman: In such words as these we reach immortality.
Moore: Ah, lovely as thou art to look upon, ah heart of stone, ah dark-browed maiden, embrace me, thy true goatherd, that I may
