Letters To Dead Authors LETTER--To Lucian of Samosata byLang, Andrew
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 always 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 Peregrinus, and our Peregrina
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. Halevy 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 Halevy'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}
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!
{1} The Greek [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], mentioned by
Lucian and Theocritus, was the magical weapon of the Australians--
the turndun.
