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 gods: 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 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!
_Lucian._ Rather should I be ashamed of indifference on so important
an occasion.
_Timotheus._ We know the fact by surer signs.
_Lucian._ These, if you could vouch for them, would be sure enough for
me. The least of them would make me sweat as profusely as if I stood
up to the neck in the hot preparation of a mummy. Surely no wise or
benevolent philosopher could ever have uttered what he knew or
believed might be distorted into any such interpretation. For if men
are persuaded that they and their works are so soon about to perish,
what provident care are they likely to take in the education and
welfare of their families? What sciences will they improve, what
learning will they cultivate, what monuments of past ages will they be
studious to preserve, who are certain that there can be no future
ones? Poetry will be censured as rank profaneness, eloquence will be
converted into howls and execrations, statuary will exhibit only
Midases and Ixions, and all the colours of painting will be mixed
together to produce one grand conflagration: _flammantia moenia
mundi_.
_Timotheus._ Do not quote an atheist; especially in Latin. I hate the
language; the Romans are beginning to differ from us already.
_Lucian._ Ah! you will soon split into smaller fractions. But pardon
me my unusual fault of quoting. Before I let fall a quotation I must
be taken by surprise. I seldom do it in conversation, seldomer in
composition; for it mars the beauty and unity of style, especially
when it invades it from a foreign tongue. A quoter is either
ostentatious of his acquirements or doubtful of his cause. And
moreover, he never walks gracefully who leans upon the shoulder of
another, however gracefully that other may walk. Herodotus, Plato,
Aristoteles, Demosthenes, are no quoters. Thucydides, twice or thrice,
inserts a few sentences of Pericles: but Thucydides is an emanation of
Pericles, somewhat less clear indeed, being lower, although at no
great distance from that purest and most pellucid source. The best of
the Romans, I agree with you, are remote from such originals, if not
in power of mind, or in acuteness of remark, or in sobriety of
judgment, yet in the graces of composition. While I admired, with a
species of awe such as not Homer himself ever impressed me with, the
majesty and sanctimony of Livy, I have been informed by learned Romans
that in the structure of his sentences he is often inharmonious, and
sometimes uncouth. I can imagine such uncouthness in the goddess of
battles, confident of power and victory, when part of her hair is
waving round the helmet, loosened by the rapidity of her descent or
the vibration of her spear. Composition may be too adorned even for
beauty. In painting it is often requisite to cover a bright colour
with one less bright; and, in language, to relieve the ear from the
tension of high notes, even at the cost of a discord. There are urns
of which the borders are too prominent and too decorated for use, and
which appear to be brought out chiefly for state, at grand carousals.
The author who imitates the artificers of these, shall never have my
custom.
_Timotheus._ I think you judge rightly: but I do not understand
languages: I only understand religion.
_Lucian._ He must be a most accomplished, a most extraordinary man,
who comprehends them both together. We do not even talk clearly when
we are walking in the dark.
_Timotheus._ Thou art not merely walking in the dark, but fast asleep.
_Lucian._ And thou, my cousin, wouldst kindly awaken me with a red-hot
poker. I have but a few paces to go along the corridor of life:
prithee let me turn into my bed again and lie quiet. Never was any man
less an enemy to religion than I am, whatever may be said to the
contrary: and you shall judge of me by the soundness of my advice. If
your leaders are in earnest, as many think, do persuade them to
abstain from quarrelsomeness and contention, and not to declare it
necessary that there should perpetually be a religious as well as a
political war between east and west. No honest and considerate man
will believe in their doctrines, who, inculcating peace and good-will,
continue all the time to assail their fellow-citizens with the utmost
rancour at every divergency of opinion, and, forbidding the indulgence
of the kindlier affections, exercise at full stretch the fiercer. This
is certain: if they obey any commander, they will never sound a charge
when his order is to sound a retreat: if they acknowledge any
magistrate, they will never tear down the tablet of his edicts.
_Timotheus._ We have what is all-sufficient.
_Lucian._ I see you have.
_Timotheus._ You have ridiculed all religion and all philosophy.
_Lucian._ I have found but little of either. I have cracked many a
nut, and have come only to dust or maggots.
_Timotheus._ To say nothing of the saints, are all philosophers fools
or impostors? And, because you cannot rise to the ethereal heights of
Plato, nor comprehend the real magnitude of a man so much above you,
must he be a dwarf?
_Lucian._ The best sight is not that which sees best in the dark or
the twilight; for no objects are then visible in their true colours,
and just proportions; but it is that which presents to us things as
they are, and indicates what is within our reach and what is beyond
it. Never were any three writers, of high celebrity, so little
understood in the main character, as Plato, Diogenes, and Epicurus.
Plato is a perfect master of logic and rhetoric; and whenever he errs
in either, as I have proved to you he does occasionally, he errs
through perverseness, not through unwariness. His language often
settles into clear and most beautiful prose, often takes an imperfect
and incoherent shape of poetry, and often, cloud against cloud, bursts
with a vehement detonation in the air. Diogenes was hated both by the
vulgar and the philosophers. By the philosophers, because he exposed
their ignorance, ridiculed their jealousies, and rebuked their pride:
by the vulgar, because they never can endure a man apparently of their
own class who avoids their society and partakes in none of their
humours, prejudices, and animosities. What right has he to be greater
or better than they are? he who wears older clothes, who eats staler
fish, and possesses no vote to imprison or banish anybody. I am now
ashamed that I mingled in the rabble, and that I could not resist the
childish mischief of smoking him in his tub. He was the wisest man of
his time, not excepting Aristoteles; for he knew that he was greater
than Philip or Alexander. Aristoteles did not know that he himself
was, or knowing it, did not act up to his knowledge; and here is a
deficiency of wisdom.
_Timotheus._ Whether you did or did not strike the cask, Diogenes
would have closed his eyes equally. He would never have come forth and
seen the truth, had it shone upon the world in that day. But,
intractable as was this recluse, Epicurus, I fear, is quite as
lamentable. What horrible doctrines!
_Lucian._ Enjoy, said he, the pleasant walks where you are: repose and
eat gratefully the fruit that falls into your bosom: do not weary your
feet with an excursion, at the end whereof you will find no
resting-place: reject not the odour of roses for the fumes of pitch
and sulphur. What horrible doctrines!
_Timotheus._ Speak seriously. He was much too bad for ridicule.
_Lucian._ I will then speak as you desire me, seriously. His smile
was so unaffected and so graceful, that I should have thought it very
injudicious to set my laugh against it. No philosopher ever lived with
such uniform purity, such abstinence from censoriousness, from
controversy, from jealousy, and from arrogance.
_Timotheus._ Ah, poor mortal! I pity him, as far as may be; he is in
hell: it would be wicked to wish him out: we are not to murmur against
the all-wise dispensations.
_Lucian._ I am sure he would not; and it is therefore I hope he is
more comfortable than you believe.
_Timotheus._ Never have I defiled my fingers, and never will I defile
them, by turning over his writings. But in regard to Plato, I can have
no objection to take your advice.
_Lucian._ He will reward your assiduity: but he will assist you very
little if you consult him principally (and eloquence for this should
principally be consulted) to strengthen your humanity. Grandiloquent
and sonorous, his lungs seem to play the better for the absence of the
heart. His imagination is the most conspicuous, buoyed up by swelling
billows over unsounded depths. There are his mild thunders, there are
his glowing clouds, his traversing coruscations, and his shooting
stars. More of true wisdom, more of trustworthy manliness, more of
promptitude and power to keep you steady and straightforward on the
perilous road of life, may be found in the little manual of Epictetus,
which I could write in the palm of my left hand, than there is in all
the rolling and redundant volumes of this mighty rhetorician, which
you may begin to transcribe on the summit of the Great Pyramid, carry
down over the Sphinx at the bottom, and continue on the sands half-way
to Memphis. And indeed the materials are appropriate; one part being
far above our sight, and the other on what, by the most befitting
epithet, Homer calls the _no-corn-bearing_.
_Timotheus._ There are many who will stand against you on this ground.
_Lucian._ With what perfect ease and fluency do some of the dullest
men in existence toss over and discuss the most elaborate of all
works! How many myriads of such creatures would be insufficient to
furnish intellect enough for any single paragraph in them! Yet '_we
think this_', '_we advise that_', are expressions now become so
customary, that it would be difficult to turn them into ridicule. We
must pull the creatures out while they are in the very act, and show
who and what they are. One of these fellows said to Caius Fuscus in my
hearing, that there was a time when it was permitted him to doubt
occasionally on particular points of criticism, but that the time was
now over.
_Timotheus._ And what did you think of such arrogance? What did you
reply to such impertinence?
_Lucian._ Let me answer one question at a time. First: I thought him a
legitimate fool, of the purest breed. Secondly: I promised him I would
always be contented with the judgment he had rejected, leaving him and
his friends in the enjoyment of the rest.
_Timotheus._ And what said he?