In what bower, oh Lucian, of your rediscovered Islands Fortunate are you
now reclining; the delight of the fair, the learned, the witty, and the
brave? In that clear and tranquil climate, whose air breathes of 'violet
and lily, myrtle, and the flower of the vine,'
Where the daisies are rose-scented,
And the Rose herself has got
Perfume which on earth is not,
among the music of all birds, and the wind-blown notes of flutes hanging
on the trees, methinks that your laughter sounds most silvery sweet,
and that Helen and fair Charmides are still of your company. Master of
mirth, and Soul the best contented of all that have seen the world's
ways clearly, most clear-sighted of all that have made tranquillity
their bride, what other laughers dwell with you, where the crystal and
fragrant waters wander round the shining palaces and the temples of
amethyst?
Heine surely is with you; if, indeed, it was not one Syrian soul that
dwelt among alien men, Germans and Romans, in the bodily tabernacles of
Heine and of Lucian. But he was fallen on evil times and evil tongues;
while Lucian, as witty as he, as bitter in mockery, as happily dowered
with the magic of words, lived long and happily and honoured, imprisoned
in no 'mattress-grave.' Without Rabelais, without Voltaire, without
Heine, you would find, methinks, even the joys of your Happy Islands
lacking in zest; and, unless Plato came by your way, none of the
ancients could meet you in the lists of sportive dialogue.
There, among the vines that bear twelve times in the year, more
excellent than all the vineyards of Touraine, while the song-birds bring
you flowers from vales enchanted, and the shapes of the Blessed come
and go, beautiful in wind-woven raiment of sunset hues; there, in a land
that knows not age nor winter, midnight, nor autumn, nor noon, where the
silver twilight of summer-dawn is perennial, where youth does not wax
spectre-pale and die; there, my Lucian, you are crowned the Prince of
the Paradise of Mirth.
Who would bring you, if he had the power, from the banquet where Homer
sings: Homer, who, in mockery of commentators, past and to come, German
and Greek, informed you that he was by birth a Babylonian? Yet, if
you, who first wrote Dialogues of the Dead, could hear the prayer of
an epistle wafted to 'lands indiscoverable in the unheard-of West,' you
might visit once more a world so worthy of such a mocker, so like the
world you knew so well of old.
Ah, Lucian, we have need of you, of your sense and of your mockery!
Here, where faith is sick and superstition is waking afresh; where gods
come rarely, and spectres appear at five shillings an interview; where
science is popular, and philosophy cries aloud in the market-place,
and clamour does duty for government, and Thais and Lais are names of
power--here, Lucian, is room and scope for you. Can I not imagine a
new 'Auction of Philosophers,' and what wealth might be made by him who
bought these popular sages and lecturers at his estimate, and vended
them at their own?
HERMES: Whom shall we put first up to auction?
ZEUS: That German in spectacles; he seems a highly respectable man.
HERMES: Ho, pessimist, come down and let the public view you.
ZEUS: Go on, put him up and have done with him.
HERMES: Who bids for the Life Miserable, for extreme, complete, perfect,
unredeemable perdition? What offers for the universal extinction of the
species, and the collapse of the Conscious?
A PURCHASER: He does not look at all a bad lot. May one put him through
his paces?
HERMES: Certainly; try your luck.
PURCHASER: What is your name?
PESSIMIST: Hartmann.
PURCHASER: What can you teach me?
PESSIMIST: That Life is not worth Living.
PURCHASER: Wonderful! Most edifying! How much for this lot?
HERMES: Two hundred pounds.
PURCHASER: I will write you a cheque for the money. Come home,
Pessimist, and begin your lessons without more ado.
HERMES: Attention! Here is a magnificent article--the Positive Life, the
Scientific Life, the Enthusiastic Life. Who bids for a possible place in
the Calendar of the Future?
PURCHASER: What does he call himself? he has a very French air.
HERMES: Put your own questions.
PURCHASER: What's your pedigree, my Philosopher, and previous
performances?
POSITIVIST: I am by Rousseau out of Catholicism, with a strain of the
Evolution blood.
PURCHASER: What do you believe in?
POSITIVIST: In Man, with a large M.
PURCHASER: Not in individual Man?
POSITIVIST: By no means; not even always in Mr. Gladstone. All men, all
Churches, all parties, all philosophies, and even the other sect of our
own Church, are perpetually in the wrong. Buy me, and listen to me, and
you will ahvays be in the right.
PURCHASER: And, after this life, what have you to offer me?
POSITIVIST: A distinguished position in the Choir Invisible: but not, of
course, conscious immortality.
PURCHASER: Take him away, and put up another lot.
Then the Hegelian, with his Notion, and the Darwinian, with his
notions, and the Lotzian, with his Broad Church mixture of Religion and
Evolution, and the Spencerian, with that Absolute which is a sort of
a something, might all be offered with their divers wares; and cheaply
enough, Lucian, you would value them in this auction of Sects. 'There is
but one way to Corinth,' as of old; but which that way may be, oh master
of Hermotimus, we know no more than he did of old; and still we find, of
all philosophies, that the Stoic route is most to be recommended. But
we have our Cyrenaics too, though they are no longer 'clothed in
purple, and crowned with flowers, and fond of drink and of female
flute-players.' Ah, here too, you might laugh, and fail to see where the
Pleasure lies, when the Cyrenaics are no 'judges of cakes' (nor of
ale, for that matter), and are strangers in the Courts of Princes. 'To
despise all things, to make use of all things, in all things to follow
pleasure only:' that is not the manner of the new, if it were the secret
of the older Hedonism.
Then, turning from the philosophers to the seekers after a sign, what
change, Lucian, would you find in them and their ways? None; they are
quite unaltered. Still our Perigrinus, and our Perigrina too, come to
us from the East, or, if from the West, they take India on their
way--India, that secular home of drivelling creeds, and of religion in
its sacerdotage. Still they prattle of Brahmins and Buddhism; though,
unlike Peregrinus, they do not publicly burn themselves on pyres, at
Epsom Downs, after the Derby. We are not so fortunate in the demise of
our Theosophists; and our police, less wise than the Hellenodicae, would
probably not permit the Immolation of the Quack. Like your Alexander,
they deal in marvels and miracles, oracles and warnings. All such bogy
stories as those of your 'Philopseudes,' and the ghost of the lady who
took to table-rapping because one of her best slippers had not been
burned with her body, are gravely investigated by the Psychical Society.
Even your ignorant Bibliophile is still with us--the man without a tinge
of letters, who buys up old manuscripts 'because they are stained and
gnawed, and who goes, for proof of valued antiquity, to the testimony
of the book-worms.' And the rich Bibliophile now, as in your satire,
clothes his volumes in purple morocco and gay _dorures_, while their
contents are sealed to him.
As to the topics of satire and gay curiosity which occupy the lady known
as 'Gyp,' and M. Halévy in his 'Les Petites Cardinal,' if you had not
exhausted the matter in your 'Dialogues of Hetairai,' you would be
amused to find the same old traits surviving without a touch of change.
One reads, in Halévy's French, of Madame Cardinal, and, in your Greek,
of the mother of Philinna, and marvels that eighteen hundred years
have not in one single trifle altered the mould. Still the old shabby
light-loves, the old greed, the old luxury and squalor. Still the
unconquerable superstition that now seeks to tell fortunes by the
cards, and, in your time, resorted to the sorceress with her magical
'bull-roarer' or '_turndun_.' (1)
(1)The Greek _rombos_ [transliterated], mentioned by Lucian
and Theocritus, was the magical weapon of the Australians--
the _turndun_.
Yes, Lucian, we are the same vain creatures of doubt and dread, of
unbelief and credulity, of avarice and pretence, that you knew, and at
whom you smiled. Nay, our very 'social question' is not altered. Do
you not write, in 'The Runaways,' 'The artisans will abandon their
workshops, and leave their trades, when they see that, with all the
labour that bows their bodies from dawn to dark, they make a petty and
starveling pittance, while men that toil not nor spin are floating in
Pactolus'?
They begin to see this again as of yore; but whether the end of their
vision will be a laughing matter, you, fortunate Lucian, do not need to
care. Hail to you, and farewell!