Hence the probabilities, or, what is called the decorum, of this composition. We ask, “Who the persons are, that are going to converse before us?” “where and when the conversation passed?” and “by what means the company came together?” If we are let into none of these particulars, or, rather if a way be not found to satisfy us in all of them, we take no interest in what remains; and give the speakers, who in this case are but a sort of Puppets, no more credit, than the opinion we chance to entertain of their Prompter demands from us.
On the other hand, when such persons are brought into the scene as are well known to us, and are entitled to our respect, and but so much address employed in shewing them as may give us a colourable pretence to suppose them really conversing together, the writer himself disappears, and is even among the first to fall into his own delusion. For thus Cicero himself represents the matter:
“This way of discourse,” says he, “which turns on the authority of real persons, and those the most eminent of former times, is, I know not how, more interesting than any other: in so much that in reading my own Dialogue on old age, I am sometimes ready to conclude, in good earnest, it is not I, but Cato himself, who is there speaking[2].”
So complete a deception, as this, requires the hand of a master. But such Cicero was; and had it been his design to make the highest encomium of his own Dialogues, he could not, perhaps, have done it so well by any other circumstance.
But now this advantage is wholly lost by the introduction of fictitious persons. These may do in Comedy; nay, they do the best there, where character only, or chiefly, is designed. In Dialogue, we must have real persons, and those only: for character here is but a secondary consideration; and there is no other way of giving weight and authority to the conversation of the piece.
And here, again, Cicero may instruct us; who was so scrupulous on this head that he would not put his discourse on old age into the mouth of Tithonus, although a Greek writer of name had set him the example, because, as he observes, a fabulous person would have had no great authority[3]. What then would he have said of merely fancied and ideal persons, who have not so much as that shadowy existence, which the plausibility of a current tale bestows?
When I say that character is but a secondary consideration in Dialogue, the reader sees I confine myself to that species only, which was in use among the ancients, properly so called; and of which Plato and Cicero have left us the best models.
It is true, in later times, a great wit took upon him to extend the province of Dialogue, and, like another Prometheus[4], (as, by an equivocal sort of compliment, it seems, was observed of him) created a new species; the merit of which consists in associating two things, not naturally allied together, The severity of Philosophic Dialogue, with the humour of the Comic.
But as unnatural as the alliance may seem, this sort of composition has had its admirers. In particular, Erasmus was so taken with Lucian’s Dialogue, that he has transfused its highest graces into his own; and employed those fine arms to better purpose against the Monks, than the forger of them had done, against the Philosophers.
It must further be confessed, that this innovation of the Greek writer had some countenance from the genius of the old Socratic Dialogue; such I mean as it was in the hands of Socrates himself[5]; who took his name of Ironist from the continued humour and ridicule which runs through his moral discourses. But, besides that the Athenian’s modest Irony was of another taste, and better suited to this decorum of conversation, than the Syrian’s frontless buffoonery, there was this further difference in the two cases. Socrates employed this method of ridicule, as the only one by which he could hope to discredit those mortal foes of reason, the Sophists: Lucian, in mere wantonness, to insult its best friends, the Philosophers, and even the parent of Philosophy, himself. The Sage would have dropped his Irony, in the company of the good and wise: The Rhetorician is never more pleased than in confounding both, by his intemperate Satire.