Imaginary Conversations and Poems: A Selection
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 gods (he tells us) that delay. Ah! the gods 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 pronounced.
_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 multitude 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 niggardly old gods 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 gods, 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-fashioned 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
mass 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 gods.
'Open your mouth, and shut your eyes, and see what Zeus shall
send you,'
says Aristophanes in his favourite metre. In this helpless condition
of closed optics and hanging jaw, we find the followers of Plato. It
is by shutting their eyes that they see, and by opening their mouths
that they apprehend. Like certain broad-muzzled dogs, all stand
equally stiff and staunch, although few scent the game, and their lips
wag, and water, at whatever distance from the net. We must leave them
with their hands hanging down before them, confident that they are
wiser than we are, were it only for this attitude of humility. It is
amusing to see them in it before the tall, well-robed Athenian, while
he mis-spells the charms, and plays clumsily the tricks, he acquired
from the conjurors here in Egypt. I wish you better success with the
same materials. But in my opinion all philosophers should speak
clearly. The highest things are the purest and brightest; and the best
writers are those who render them the most intelligible to the world
below. In the arts and sciences, and particularly in music and
metaphysics, this is difficult: but the subjects not being such as lie
within the range of the community, I lay little stress upon them, and
wish authors to deal with them as they best may, only beseeching that
they recompense us, by bringing within our comprehension the other
things with which they are entrusted for us. The followers of Plato
fly off indignantly from any such proposal. If I ask them the meaning
of some obscure passage, they answer that I am unprepared and unfitted
for it, and that his mind is so far above mine, I cannot grasp it. I
look up into the faces of these worthy men, who mingle so much
commiseration with so much calmness, and wonder at seeing them look no
less vacant than my own.
_Timotheus._ You have acknowledged his eloquence, while you derided
his philosophy and repudiated his morals.
_Lucian._ Certainly there was never so much eloquence with so little
animation. When he has heated his oven, he forgets to put the bread
into it; instead of which, he throws in another bundle of faggots. His
words and sentences are often too large for the place they occupy. If
a water-melon is not to be placed in an oyster-shell, neither is a
grain of millet in a golden salver. At high festivals a full band may
enter: ordinary conversation goes on better without it.
_Timotheus._ There is something so spiritual about him, that many of
us Christians are firmly of opinion he must have been partially
enlightened from above.
_Lucian._ I hope and believe we all are. His entire works are in our
library. Do me the favour to point out to me a few of those passages
where in poetry he approaches the spirit of Aristophanes, or where in
morals he comes up to Epictetus.
_Timotheus._ It is useless to attempt it if you carry your prejudices
with you. Beside, my dear cousin, I would not offend you, but really
your mind has no point about it which could be brought to contact or
affinity with Plato's.
_Lucian._ In the universality of his genius there must surely be some
atom coincident with another in mine. You acknowledge, as everybody
must do, that his wit is the heaviest and lowest: pray, is the
specimen he has given us of history at all better?
_Timotheus._ I would rather look to the loftiness of his mind, and the
genius that sustains him.
_Lucian._ So would I. Magnificent words, and the pomp and procession
of stately sentences, may accompany genius, but are not always nor
frequently called out by it. The voice ought not to be perpetually nor
much elevated in the ethic and didactic, nor to roll sonorously, as if
it issued from a mask in the theatre. The horses in the plain under
Troy are not always kicking and neighing; nor is the dust always
raised in whirlwinds on the banks of Simois and Scamander; nor are the
rampires always in a blaze. Hector has lowered his helmet to the
infant of Andromache, and Achilles to the embraces of Briseis. I do
not blame the prose-writer who opens his bosom occasionally to a
breath of poetry; neither, on the contrary, can I praise the gait of
that pedestrian who lifts up his legs as high on a bare heath as in a
cornfield. Be authority as old and obstinate as it may, never let it
persuade you that a man is the stronger for being unable to keep
himself on the ground, or the weaker for breathing quietly and softly
on ordinary occasions. Tell me, over and over, that you find every
great quality in Plato: let me only once ask you in return, whether he
ever is ardent and energetic, whether he wins the affections, whether
he agitates the heart. Finding him deficient in every one of these
faculties, I think his disciples have extolled him too highly. Where
power is absent, we may find the robes of genius, but we miss the
throne. He would acquit a slave who killed another in self-defence,
but if he killed any free man, even in self-defence; he was not only
to be punished with death, but to undergo the cruel death of a
parricide. This effeminate philosopher was more severe than the manly
Demosthenes, who quotes a law against the striking of a slave: and
Diogenes, when one ran away from him, remarked that it would be
horrible if Diogenes could not do without a slave, when a slave could
do without Diogenes.
_Timotheus._ Surely the allegories of Plato are evidences of his
genius.
_Lucian._ A great poet in the hours of his idleness may indulge in
allegory: but the highest poetical character will never rest on so
unsubstantial a foundation. The poet must take man from God's hands,
must look into every fibre of his heart and brain, must be able to
take the magnificent work to pieces, and to reconstruct it. When this
labour is completed, let him throw himself composedly on the earth,
and care little how many of its ephemeral insects creep over him. In
regard to these allegories of Plato, about which I have heard so much,
pray what and where are they? You hesitate, my fair cousin Timotheus!
Employ one morning in transcribing them, and another in noting all the
passages which are of practical utility in the commerce of social
life, or purify our affections at home, or excite and elevate our
enthusiasm in the prosperity and glory of our country. Useful books,
moral books, instructive books are easily composed: and surely so
great a writer should present them to us without blot or blemish: I
find among his many volumes no copy of a similar composition. My
enthusiasm is not easily raised indeed; yet such a whirlwind of a poet
must carry it away with him; nevertheless, here I stand, calm and
collected, not a hair of my beard in commotion. Declamation will find
its echo in vacant places: it beats ineffectually on the
well-furnished mind. Give me proof; bring the work; show the passages;
convince, confound, overwhelm me.
_Timotheus._ I may do that another time with Plato. And yet, what
effect can I hope to produce on an unhappy man who doubts even that
the world is on the point of extinction?
_Lucian._ Are there many of your association who believe that this
catastrophe is so near at hand?
_Timotheus._ We all believe it; or rather, we all are certain of it.
_Lucian._ How so? Have you observed any fracture in the disk of the
sun? Are any of the stars loosened in their orbits? Has the beautiful
light of Venus ceased to pant in the heavens, or has the belt of Orion
lost its gems?
_Timotheus._ Oh, for shame!