Imaginary Conversations and Poems Part 42

_Lucian._ We take it for granted that what is not true must be false.

_Timotheus._ Surely we do.

_Lucian._ This is erroneous.

_Timotheus._ Are you grown captious? Pray explain.

_Lucian._ What is not true, I need not say, must be untrue; but that alone is false which is intended to deceive. A witness may be mistaken, yet would not you call him a false witness unless he a.s.serted what he knew to be false.

_Timotheus._ Quibbles upon words!

_Lucian._ On words, on quibbles, if you please to call distinctions so, rests the axis of the intellectual world. A winged word hath stuck ineradicably in a million hearts, and envenomed every hour throughout their hard pulsation. On a winged word hath hung the destiny of nations. On a winged word hath human wisdom been willing to cast the immortal soul, and to leave it dependent for all its future happiness.

It is because a word is unsusceptible of explanation, or because they who employed it were impatient of any, that enormous evils have prevailed, not only against our common sense, but against our common humanity. Hence the most pernicious of absurdities, far exceeding in folly and mischief the wors.h.i.+p of threescore G.o.ds; namely, that an implicit faith in what outrages our reason, which we know is G.o.d's gift, and bestowed on us for our guidance, that this weak, blind, stupid faith is surer of His favour than the constant practice of every human virtue. They at whose hands one prodigious lie, such as this, hath been accepted, may reckon on their influence in the dissemination of many smaller, and may turn them easily to their own account. Be sure they will do it sooner or later. The fly floats on the surface for a while, but up springs the fish at last and swallows it.

_Timotheus._ Was ever man so unjust as you are? The abominable old priesthoods are avaricious and luxurious: ours is willing to stand or fall by maintaining its ordinances of fellows.h.i.+p and frugality. Point out to me a priest of our religion whom you could, by any temptation or entreaty, so far mislead, that he shall reserve for his own consumption one loaf, one plate of lentils, while another poor Christian hungers. In the meanwhile the priests of Isis are proud and wealthy, and admit none of the indigent to their tables. And now, to tell you the whole truth, my Cousin Lucian, I come to you this morning to propose that we should lay our heads together and compose a merry dialogue on these said priests of Isis. What say you?

_Lucian._ These said priests of Isis have already been with me, several times, on a similar business in regard to yours.

_Timotheus._ Malicious wretches!

_Lucian._ Beside, they have attempted to persuade me that your religion is borrowed from theirs, altering a name a little and laying the scene of action in a corner, in the midst of obscurity and ruins.

_Timotheus._ The wicked dogs! the h.e.l.lish liars! We have nothing in common with such vile impostors. Are they not ashamed of taking such unfair means of lowering us in the estimation of our fellow-citizens?

And so, they artfully came to you, craving any spare jibe to throw against us! They lie open to these weapons; we do not: we stand above the malignity, above the strength, of man. You would do justly in turning their own devices against them: it would be amusing to see how they would look. If you refuse me, I am resolved to write a Dialogue of the Dead, myself, and to introduce these hypocrites in it.

_Lucian._ Consider well first, my good Timotheus, whether you can do any such thing with propriety; I mean to say judiciously in regard to composition.

_Timotheus._ I always thought you generous and open-hearted, and quite inaccessible to jealousy.

_Lucian._ Let n.o.body ever profess himself so much as that: for, although he may be insensible of the disease, it lurks within him, and only waits its season to break out. But really, my cousin, at present I feel no symptoms: and, to prove that I am ingenuous and sincere with you, these are my reasons for dissuasion. We believers in the Homeric family of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, believe also in the locality of Tartarus and Elysium. We entertain no doubt whatever that the pa.s.sions of men and demiG.o.ds and G.o.ds are nearly the same above ground and below; and that Achilles would dispatch his spear through the body of any shade who would lead Briseis too far among the myrtles, or attempt to throw the halter over the ears of any chariot horse belonging to him in the meads of asphodel. We admit no doubt of these verities, delivered down to us from the ages when Theseus and Hercules had descended into Hades itself. Instead of a few stadions in a cavern, with a bank and a bower at the end of it, under a very small portion of our diminutive h.e.l.las, you Christians possess the whole cavity of the earth for punishment, and the whole convex of the sky for felicity.

_Timotheus._ Our pa.s.sions are burnt out amid the fires of purification, and our intellects are elevated to the enjoyment of perfect intelligence.

_Lucian._ How silly then and incongruous would it be, not to say how impious, to represent your people as no better and no wiser than they were before, and discoursing on subjects which no longer can or ought to concern them. Christians must think your Dialogue of the Dead no less irreligious than their opponents think mine, and infinitely more absurd. If indeed you are resolved on this form of composition, there is no topic which may not, with equal facility, be discussed on earth; and you may intersperse as much ridicule as you please, without any fear of censure for inconsistency or irreverence. Hitherto such writers have confined their view mostly to speculative points, sophistic reasonings, and sarcastic interpellations.

_Timotheus._ Ha! you are always fond of throwing a little pebble at the lofty Plato, whom we, on the contrary, are ready to receive (in a manner) as one of ourselves.

_Lucian._ To throw pebbles is a very uncertain way of showing where lie defects. Whenever I have mentioned him seriously, I have brought forward, not accusations, but pa.s.sages from his writings, such as no philosopher or scholar or moralist can defend.

_Timotheus._ His doctrines are too abstruse and too sublime for you.

_Lucian._ Solon, Anaxagoras, and Epicurus, are more sublime, if truth is sublimity.

_Timotheus._ Truth is, indeed; for G.o.d is truth.

_Lucian._ We are upon earth to learn what can be learnt upon earth, and not to speculate on what never can be. This you, O Timotheus, may call philosophy: to me it appears the idlest of curiosity; for every other kind may teach us something, and may lead to more beyond. Let men learn what benefits men; above all things, to contract their wishes, to calm their pa.s.sions, and, more especially, to dispel their fears. Now these are to be dispelled, not by collecting clouds, but by piercing and scattering them. In the dark we may imagine depths and heights immeasurable, which, if a torch be carried right before us, we find it easy to leap across. Much of what we call sublime is only the residue of infancy, and the worst of it.

The philosophers I quoted are too capacious for schools and systems.

Without noise, without ostentation, without mystery, not quarrelsome, not captious, not frivolous, their lives were commentaries on their doctrine. Never evaporating into mist, never stagnating into mire, their limpid and broad morality runs parallel with the lofty summits of their genius.

_Timotheus._ Genius! was ever genius like Plato's?

_Lucian._ The most admired of his Dialogues, his _Banquet_, is beset with such puerilities, deformed with such pedantry, and disgraced with such impurity, that none but the thickest beards, and chiefly of the philosophers and the satyrs, should bend over it. On a former occasion he has given us a specimen of history, than which nothing in our language is worse: here he gives us one of poetry, in honour of Love, for which the G.o.d has taken ample vengeance on him, by perverting his taste and feelings. The grossest of all the absurdities in this dialogue is, attributing to Aristophanes, so much of a scoffer and so little of a visionary, the silly notion of male and female having been originally complete in one person, and walking circuitously. He may be joking: who knows?

_Timotheus._ Forbear! forbear! do not call this notion a silly one: he took it from our Holy Scriptures, but perverted it somewhat. Woman was made from man's rib, and did not require to be cut asunder all the way down: this is no proof of bad reasoning, but merely of misinterpretation.

_Lucian._ If you would rather have bad reasoning, I will adduce a little of it. Farther on, he wishes to extol the wisdom of Agathon by attributing to him such a sentence as this:

'It is evident that Love is the most beautiful of the G.o.ds, _because_ he is the youngest of them.'

Now, even on earth, the youngest is not always the most beautiful; how infinitely less cogent, then, is the argument when we come to speak of the Immortals, with whom age can have no concern! There was a time when Vulcan was the youngest of the G.o.ds: was he, also, at that time, and for that reason, the most beautiful? Your philosopher tells us, moreover, that 'Love is of all deities the most _liquid_; else he never could fold himself about everything, and flow into and out of men's souls.'

The three last sentences of Agathon's rhapsody are very harmonious, and exhibit the finest specimen of Plato's style; but we, accustomed as we are to hear him lauded for his poetical diction, should hold that poem a very indifferent one which left on the mind so superficial an impression. The garden of Academus is flowery without fragrance, and dazzling without warmth: I am ready to dream away an hour in it after dinner, but I think it insalutary for a night's repose. So satisfied was Plato with his _Banquet_, that he says of himself, in the person of Socrates, 'How can I or any one but find it difficult to speak after a discourse so eloquent? It would have been wonderful if the brilliancy of the sentences at the end of it, and the choice of expression throughout, had not astonished all the auditors. I, who can never say anything nearly so beautiful, would if possible have made my escape, and have fairly run off for shame.' He had indeed much better run off before he made so wretched a pun on the name of Gorgias. 'I dreaded,' says he, 'lest Agathon, _measuring my discourse by the head of the eloquent Gorgias, should turn me to stone_ for inability of utterance.'

Was there ever joke more frigid? What painful twisting of unelastic stuff! If Socrates was the wisest man in the world, it would require another oracle to persuade us, after this, that he was the wittiest.

But surely a small share of common sense would have made him abstain from hazarding such failures. He falls on his face in very flat and very dry ground; and, when he gets up again, his quibbles are well-nigh as tedious as his witticisms. However, he has the presence of mind to throw them on the shoulders of Diotima, whom he calls a prophetess, and who, ten years before the plague broke out in Athens, obtained from the G.o.ds (he tells us) that delay. Ah! the G.o.ds were doubly mischievous: they sent her first. Read her words, my cousin, as delivered by Socrates; and if they have another plague in store for us, you may avert it by such an act of expiation.

_Timotheus._ The world will have ended before ten years are over.

_Lucian._ Indeed!

_Timotheus._ It has been p.r.o.nounced.

_Lucian._ How the threads of belief and unbelief run woven close together in the whole web of human life! Come, come; take courage; you will have time for your Dialogue. Enlarge the circle; enrich it with a variety of matter, enliven it with a mult.i.tude of characters, occupy the intellect of the thoughtful, the imagination of the lively; spread the board with solid viands, delicate rarities, and sparkling wines; and throw, along the whole extent of it, geniality and festal crowns.

_Timotheus._ What writer of dialogues hath ever done this, or undertaken, or conceived, or hoped it?

_Lucian._ None whatever; yet surely you yourself may, when even your babes and sucklings are endowed with abilities incomparably greater than our n.i.g.g.ardly old G.o.ds have bestowed on the very best of us.

_Timotheus._ I wish, my dear Lucian, you would let our babes and sucklings lie quiet, and say no more about them: as for your G.o.ds, I leave them at your mercy. Do not impose on me the performance of a task in which Plato himself, if he had attempted it, would have failed.

_Lucian._ No man ever detected false reasoning with more quickness; but unluckily he called in Wit at the exposure; and Wit, I am sorry to say, held the lowest place in his household. He sadly mistook the qualities of his mind in attempting the facetious; or, rather, he fancied he possessed one quality more than belonged to him. But, if he himself had not been a worse quibbler than any whose writings are come down to us, we might have been gratified by the exposure of wonderful acuteness wretchedly applied. It is no small service to the community to turn into ridicule the grave impostors, who are contending which of them shall guide and govern us, whether in politics or religion. There are always a few who will take the trouble to walk down among the seaweeds and slippery stones, for the sake of showing their credulous fellow-citizens that skins filled with sand, and set upright at the forecastle, are neither men nor merchandise.

_Timotheus._ I can bring to mind, O Lucian, no writer possessing so great a variety of wit as you.

_Lucian._ No man ever possessed any variety of this gift; and the holder is not allowed to exchange the quality for another. Banter (and such is Plato's) never grows large, never sheds its bristles, and never do they soften into the humorous or the facetious.

_Timotheus._ I agree with you that banter is the worst species of wit.

We have indeed no correct idea what persons those really were whom Plato drags by the ears, to undergo slow torture under Socrates. One sophist, I must allow, is precisely like another: no discrimination of character, none of manner, none of language.

_Lucian._ He wanted the fancy and fertility of Aristophanes.

_Timotheus._ Otherwise, his mind was more elevated and more poetical.

_Lucian._ Pardon me if I venture to express my dissent in both particulars. Knowledge of the human heart, and discrimination of character, are requisites of the poet. Few ever have possessed them in an equal degree with Aristophanes: Plato has given no indication of either.

_Timotheus._ But consider his imagination.

_Lucian._ On what does it rest? He is nowhere so imaginative as in his _Polity_. Nor is there any state in the world that is, or would be, governed by it. One day you may find him at his counter in the midst of old-fas.h.i.+oned toys, which crack and crumble under his fingers while he exhibits and recommends them; another day, while he is sitting on a goat's bladder, I may discover his bald head surmounting an enormous ma.s.s of loose chaff and uncleanly feathers, which he would persuade you is the pleasantest and healthiest of beds, and that dreams descend on it from the G.o.ds.