The best on it is, the jaundice is only in his own eyes, which makes Lucian look yellow to him. All mankind will exclaim against him for preaching this doctrine; and be of opinion when they read his Lucian, that he looked in a glass when he drew his picture. I wish I had the liberty to lash this frog-land wit as he deserves; but when a speech is not seconded in parliament, it falls of course; and this author has the whole senate of the learned to pull him down: incipient omnes pro Cicerone loqui.
It is to be acknowledged, that his best translator, Ablancourt, thinks him not a profound master in any sort of philosophy; but only that he skimmed enough from every sect, to serve his turn in rhetoric, which was his profession. This he gathers from his superficial way of arguing. But why may not another man reply in his defence, that he made choice of those kinds of reasons which were most capable of being made to shine in his facetious way of arguing; and those undoubtedly were not the most knotty, nor the deepest, but the most diverting by the sharpness of the raillery. Dr Mayne, so often praised, has another opinion of Lucian’s learning, and the strength of his witty arguments, concluding on that subject in these words, or near them: “For my part, I know not to whose writings we owe more our Christianity, where the true God has succeeded a multitude of false,—whether to the grave confutation of Clemens Alexandrinus, Arnobius, Justin Martyr, St. Augustin, Lactantius, &c. or the facetious wit of Lucian.”—I cannot doubt but the treacherous translator would have given his hand to what the Englishman has said of their common author. The success has justified his opinion in the sight of all the world. Lucian’s manner of convincing, was certainly more pleasant than that of the Christian writers, and we know the effect was full as powerful; so easily can the Eternal Wisdom draw good out of evil, and make his enemy subservient to the establishment of his faith.
I will not enlarge on the praises of his oratory. If we compare his style with the Greek historians, his contemporaries, or near his time, we shall find it much more pure than that of Plutarch, Dion, or Appian, though not so grave; because his subjects and theirs required to be treated after a different manner. It was not of an uniform web, says Mayne, like Thucydides, Polybius, and some others whom he names, but was somewhat peculiar to himself; his words well chosen, his periods round, the parts of his sentences harmoniously divided, a full flood or even a torrent of persuasion, without inequalities or swellings; such as might be put in equal comparison with the best orations of Demosthenes or Isocrates; not so dry as the first, nor so flowery as the last. His wit, says Ablancourt, was full of urbanity, that attic salt, which the French call, fine raillery; not obscene, not gross, not rude, but facetious, well mannered, and well bred: only he will not allow his love the quality last mentioned, but thinks it rustical, and according either to his own genius, or that of the age in which he lived.
If wit consists in the propriety of thoughts and words, (which I imagined I had first found out, but since am pleasingly convinced that Aristotle has made the same definition in other terms,) then Lucian’s thoughts and words are always proper to his characters and his subject. If the pleasure arising from comedy and satire be either laughter, or some nobler sort of delight, which is above it, no man is so great a master of irony as our author. That figure is not only a keen, but a shining weapon in his hand; it glitters in the eyes of those it kills; his own gods, his greatest enemies, are not butchered by him, but fairly slain: they must acknowledge the hero in the stroke, and take the comfort which Virgil gives to a dying captain:
Æneæ magni dextrâ cadis.
I know not whom Lucian imitated, unless it might be Aristophanes; (for you never find him mentioning any Roman wit, so much the Grecians thought themselves superior to their conquerors;) but he, who has best imitated him in Latin, is Erasmus; and in French, Fontenelle, in his “Dialogues of the Dead,” which I never read but with a new pleasure.
Any one may see, that our author’s chief design was to dis-nest heaven of so many immoral and debauched deities; his next, to expose the mock philosophers; and his last, to give us examples of a good life in the persons of the true.
The rest of his discourses are on mixed subjects, less for profit than delight; and some of them too libertine.
The way which Lucian chose of delivering these profitable and pleasing truths, was that of dialogue: a choice worthy of the author; happily followed, as I said above, by Erasmus, and Fontenelle particularly, to whom I may justly add a triumvir of our own,—the reverend, ingenious, and learned Dr Eachard,[48] who, by using the same method, and the same ingredients of raillery and reason, has more baffled the philosopher of Malmesbury, than those who assaulted him with blunt heavy arguments, drawn from orthodox divinity; for Hobbes foresaw where those strokes would fall, and leaped aside before they could descend; but he could not avoid those nimble passes, which were made on him by a wit more active than his own, and which were within his body, before he could provide for his defence.
I will not here take notice of the several kinds of dialogue, and the whole art of it, which would ask an entire volume to perform. This has been a work long wanted, and much desired, of which the ancients have not sufficiently informed us; and I question whether any man now living can treat it accurately. Lucian, it seems, was very sensible of the difficult task, which he undertook in writing dialogues, as appears in his discourse against one who had called him Prometheus. He owns himself, in this particular, to be like to him, to whom he was resembled, to be the inventor of a new work, attempted in a new manner,—the model of which he had from none before him; but adds withal, that if he could not give it the graces which belong to so happy an invention, he deserves to be torn by twelve vultures, instead of one, which preys upon the heart of that first man-potter. For, to quit the beaten road of the ancients, and take a path of his own choosing, he acknowledges to be a bold and ridiculous attempt, if it succeed not. “The mirth of dialogue and comedy in my work,” says he, “is not enough to make it pleasing, because the union of two contraries may as well produce a monster as a miracle; as a centaur results from the joint natures of a horse and man. It is not but that from two excellent beings a third may arise of perfect beauty; but it is what I dare not promise to myself; for dialogue being a solemn entertainment of grave discourse, and comedy the wit and fooling of a theatre, I fear that through the corruption of two good things, I have made one bad. But whatever the child be, it is my own at least; I beg not with another’s brat upon my back. From which of the ancients should I have stolen or borrowed it? My chimeras have no other being than my own imagination; let every man produce who can; and whether this be a lawful birth, or a misshapen mass, is left for the present age, and for posterity, to judge.”