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Galsworthy's Apple Tree and the Longus Tradition

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SOURCE: "Galsworthy's Apple Tree and the Longus Tradition," in Studies in the Twentieth Century, No. 9, Spring, 1972, pp. 83-8.

[Gesner is a Panamanian-born American educator and critic. In the following essay, she determines the influence of classical Greek and Renaissance literature on Galsworthy's short story "The Apple Tree. "]

Galsworthy leaves his reader in little doubt of his intention to cast a Greek mood over his finest short story, "The Apple Tree." As the story opens, the dominant Greek chord is introduced. Ashurst, the leading character, is alone near a country roadside reading of the Cyprian (Aphrodite) in Murray's translation of the Hippolytus of Euripides, and meditating on the unachievable elysium of "the Apple Tree, the singing, and the gold," the elysium which may be perceived for brief moments of a human life, but which in reality may never be captured and held except in art. This reading announces the major theme of the story: the inexorable power and vengence of Aphrodite, and the helplessness of man to control his emotions and order his life against the will of the goddess. When the story has closed, the reader infers that the Cyprian's balm and bale underlay all of the action, all of the passion, all of the tragedy, which has been unfolded. He is assured of the correctness of his conclusion by the quotation of lines from the Hippolytus which serve as a restatement of the theme and, by repetition of the initial reference to the Hippolytus and to the Cyprian, bring the story to a closed circle, a device which is a common feature in the Greek novel. [The critic provides examples of Greek novels in a footnote: the Chaereas and Callirhoe of Chariton, the Ephesiaca of Xenophon of Ephesus, and Daphnis and Chloe of Longus.]

Pastoral details and allusions to Greek literature amplify the Greek mood: As Ashurst reads and muses on the Cyprian and the fleeting moments of beauty which taunt us, never to be captured ".. . as the face of Pan, which looks round the corner of a rock, vanishes at your stare," he recognizes the location as the scene of a major experience of his youth and he recalls the episode with Megan. At once we plunge into the past, into the pastoral setting of farm and farmhouse, brook and meadow, which was Megan's home. Here Ashurst is received with traditional pastoral offerings of cream, cakes, and cider, bathes in the stream, and thinks of Theocritus. A few days after he has joined the farm family Ashurst is in love with Megan and musing on the golden age in the garden of Hesperides, the fauns, the dryads, and the nymphs which dwell under the apple tree. When the story shifts from the rapture of love with Megan—Ashurst has been reading the Odyssey before their first assignation—to the cool propriety of Stella, we find that Stella is described as a "young Diana." In the second movement when Ashurst, already under the spell of Stella, sees Megan once more he wants her again "with a horrible intensity, as the faun wants the nymph."

Quite as Greek as these details and the theme is the plot structure. The overall parallel with the Hippolytus is immediately obvious: Hippolytus flouts the Cyprian

. . . and seeks no woman's kiss
But great Apollo's sister, Artemis,
He holds of all most high.

[Europedes, trans. by Gilbert Marray, 1915]

The tragic consequences—the suicide of Phaedra and the death of Hippolytus—are the Cyprian's revenge. Similarly, when Ashurst denies his passion for Megan and turns to the cool arms of Stella, the "young Diana" (Artemis), he too has flouted the dictates of the Cyprian. Megan's suicide and his own mediocre marriage (" . . . he has learned not to be a philosopher in the bosom of his family") are the revenge of the goddess. Similarly obvious is the traditional argument over the relative advantages of town and country living found frequently in the classical pastoral. This is supplied by the strong contrast in the pastoral and urban episodes.

More obscure is the traditional Greek character of the pastoral scenes between Ashurst and Megan, the details of which can be traced to Daphnis and Chloe, a second or third century pastoral romance attributed to Longus, a romance which embodies in prose all of the pastoral traditions and moods which Moschus, Theocritus, and Bion embody in poetry. The essentials of the Daphnis and Chloe plot have been recognized as the source of the chief elements of a plot which evolved as traditional pastoral material during the Renaissance, and was used by Sidney in the Arcadia; by Spenser in Book VI of The Faerie Queene; by Shakespeare in As You Like It, The Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline; as well as by a host of lesser writers [Edwin Greenlaw, "Shakespeare's Pastorals," Studies in Philology, Vol. XIII, 1916. The same plot has also been related to The Tempest by Carol Gesner, "The Tempest as Pastoral Romance," The Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. X, 1959]. From a study of these Renaissance sources, Edwin Greenlaw delineated what he described as a composite pastoral plot derived ultimately from Longus:

1) A child of unknown parentage, usually a girl, is brought up by shepherds or country folk. As a variant, she may be living among them in seclusion, her parentage a secret. Her superiority to her fellows is obvious.

2) A lover, who may be a foundling or a man of high birth in guise of a shepherd or a forester, is introduced.

3) The love story is complicated by a rival shepherd, usually a rude, bumbling, or cowardly person who serves as a contrast and foil to the hero.

4) Melodramatic incidents—the attack of a lion or a bear, etc.—give the hero opportunity to prove his prowess.

5) A captivity episode is introduced. The heroine is abducted; the hero comes to the rescue.

6) It finally develops that the heroine is of high birth and may marry the hero.

It is easy to see that in "The Apple Tree" Galsworthy has turned this ancient stock situation to good advantage, utilizing the traditional Greek plot, but at the same time modifying it to suit twentieth-century realities. First, Megan fills the role of the beautiful girl of shadowy origin living humbly among rude country folk, her obvious superiority unmistakable. In line with twentieth-century realism, Galsworthy could not make aristocratic parents suddenly materialize to lift her to the social rank of her lover. Instead, he sets her apart in a way that will convince the modern reader: She is related to the farm family, simple Devonshire folk, only by marriage. She originated in Wales; thus she is "a daughter of the bards," lovely and sensitive, a Celtic spirit imprisoned in the rudeness of a Devon farm. "Her shoes were split, her hands rough; but—what was it? Was it really her Celtic blood, . . . she was a lady born, a jewel," her lover muses.

The highborn lover who comes to disturb the pastoral calm of the twentieth-century heroine is Ashurst, the scholarly college man of poetic tastes and independent income in whom people found "a certain lordliness." Unlike his Renaissance counterpart, he can not in our century wear a disguise, but he appears in the informal gear of a hiker, not his conventional upper-class dress. This corresponds roughly to the garb of a shepherd or a forester conventionally worn by the pastoral lover.

The traditional rival shepherd, the rude bumpkin who loses to the courtly manners of the stranger, is supplied in the person of Megan's cousin Joe "in his soiled brown velvetcards, muddy gaiters, and blue shirt; red-armed, the sun turning his hair from tow to flax; . . . ashamed not to be slow and heavy-dwelling on each leg." His inarticulate love is expressed by the traditional sexual attack on the maid, which is repulsed by the hero, giving him opportunity to prove that his superiority is physical as well as social and intellectual. Although Joe is certainly a foil to Frank, the reader never thinks of him as a rival, and were he dropped from the story the plot would be virtually unaltered. His presence and the episode of the attack can be explained as a convention of the pastoral tradition.

Twentieth-century realism demanded the omission of the last three stock points: thus no wild beasts attack the lovers; Megan is not held in captivity; and since no amount of magic can turn overnight a beautiful peasant girl into a lady of gentle rank, Galsworthy realistically, if tragically, does not let the lovers wed.

Other plot elements raise the question of whether Galsworthy's model was the source plot, Daphnis and Chloe, or the Renaissance adaptations. Of first importance is the matter of supernatural direction, an element which Greenlaw has not recognized in the Renaissance versions. Eros deliberately instigates the love of Daphnis and Chloe, and Pan and the nymphs assist his work and in motivating and manipulating other plot details. Similarly, the tragic love of Ashurst and Megan is attributed to the Cyprian, Venus-Aphrodite. "Was it just Love seeking a victim!" The role of Pan and the nymphs in Daphnis and Chloe is filled in "The Apple Tree" by the gipsy bogle, a local spirit described as hairy and fiddle-playing, thus as Pan-like in effect. Megan and her family firmly believe in the bogle and fear his appearance as a forecast of death. Similarly, Daphnis and Chloe have a deep fear of Pan, but the fear relates more to his awesome power than to a specific superstition. Further, the Daphnis and Chloe plot also features an elderly, philosophic shepherd who observes the youthful lovers with understanding sympathy. Frequently he guides or comments on their affairs. In "The Apple Tree" the elderly, lame workman fills this role. He tells Ashurst of Megan's unusual abilities with flowers and animals and of her tender and sensitive nature. He observes the ripening love and Megan's dejection at the loss of Ashurst. The old workman seems to have been the only one on the farm who understood what happened. It is his sensitive observation that interprets to Ashurst Megan's last days and death. The philosophic shepherd, Philetas, of Daphnis and Chloe has a close relative in Galsworthy's lame workman. His vestigial relatives in the Renaissance plots—such intellectual characters as Jacques in As You Like It and Philisides of the Arcadia—have departed too far from Longus for us to consider them in relation to the Galsworthy story. But here the problem takes another turn in the character of Ashurst.

In the Renaissance plot the lover may be a foundling or a man of high birth in guise of a shepherd, but in the more obvious examples, the Arcadia, The Winter's Tale, The Faerie Queene, we find young men of courtly sophistication playing the hero's role—men of Ashurst stamp. But Daphnis, the progenitor of them all, although in the end he proves to have aristocratic parents, is in every way characterized as childish and naive; especially is his role as lover.

It would seem then that Longus as well as Euripides has cast his shadow on "The Apple Tree," and his shade might well be called double, strong and clear in its classical outline and somewhat present in its Renaissance manifestation.

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