'The "Traviata" and the "Trovatore"
Of "Il Barbiere" have eclipsed the glory.
As Margarita Patti fills the stage,
And Marta sung by Nilsson is the rage.'
He who dips into _Colburn's New Monthly_ for the year 1822 or
thereabouts will be rewarded (or otherwise) by coming across a
'Dialogue of the Dead' in prose, and there may be other such fugitive
lucubrations. But so far as the English literature of the past is
concerned, 'dialogues of the dead' were written by only two persons
worthy of celebration--Walter Savage Landor and George, Lord Lyttelton,
the author of 'Letters from a Persian in England to his friend in
Ispahan.' Landor's 'Imaginary Conversations' are among those numerous
works which everybody is supposed to have read, and, having read them,
to admire. And unfortunate indeed would be he who could not recognise
and appreciate the varied beauty and charm of these prose masterpieces.
Here Menelaus and Helen, AEsop and Rhodope, Tiberius and Vipsania,
Leofric and Godiva, Roger Ascham and Jane Grey, and a hundred other
heroes and heroines of the past, converse not only with dramatic
appropriateness, but with rhetorical force--with amplitude of thought
and spontaneity of image. By the side of such a wonderful flower-show
(as one of our poets said of a selection from a brother poet's lyrics),
Lyttelton's trim parterre shows, no doubt, but dimly; nevertheless, to
that accomplished nobleman there is due something more than the small
credit of having been Landor's predecessor in this form of English
composition. Of that form Lyttelton says, in the preface to his
'Dialogues,' that
'It sets before us the history of all times and all nations,
presents to the choice of a writer all characters of remarkable
persons which may be best opposed to, or compared with, each other;
and is, perhaps, one of the most agreeable methods that can be
employed of conveying to the mind any critical, moral, or political
observations.'
Lyttelton brings together in his work such people as Plato and Fenelon,
Lucian and Rabelais, Addison and Swift, Boileau and Pope; and, if he
scarcely has the power to make these masters talk as we know they wrote,
still he puts into their mouths much which it might be worth the while
of the modern reader to assimilate.
Early in the eighteenth century there appeared a little _brochure_
called 'English Lucian,' but it proved to be nothing more edifying than
a few 'modern dialogues' between a vintner and his wife, between 'a
reformer of manners,' his wife and a captain of the guards, and between
a Master of Arts and 'a lady's woman.' Of the humorous satire of Lucian
himself there was no jot or tittle.
The works of Lucian have, in various ways, found many translators in
England--notably Dr. Thomas Francklin, who prefaced his version with a
dialogue (in prose) in which Lucian and Lyttelton, after an exchange of
compliments, proceed to discuss the writings of the former at some
length and with much dulness. Dulness is certainly not the
characteristic of the rhyming paraphrases of certain dialogues of Lucian
which Charles Cotton wrote and published late in the seventeenth century
under the title of 'Burlesque upon Burlesque, or the Scoffer Scoft.' 'We
bring you here,' said Cotton, 'a fustian-piece, Writ by a merry Wag of
Greece'--'a piece of raillery writ,' as he went on to say, 'when
Paganism was in fashion':
'Wherein his meaning further is
To take away th' authorities
Of lies and fables, which did pigeon
The rabble into false religion.'
Herein the mission and the achievement of Lucian--first and greatest of
the writers of 'Dialogues of the Dead'--are not inaptly stated.
Fontenelle and Fenelon both derived inspiration for their 'Dialogues'
from the brilliant pages of the Syrian, and within recent years his
abounding merits have been sung in eloquent prose by Mr. Froude. There
is yet room, however, for someone who shall prove himself the 'new
Lucian' indeed, by writing dialogues in which the illustrious dead shall
be made to express themselves (as they have not yet been made to do in
English colloquy) with superlative sarcasm and inimitable scorn.