However, there was likeness enough in the features of each manner, to favour Lucian’s attempt in compounding his new Dialogue. He was not displeased, one may suppose, to turn the comic art of Socrates against himself; though he could not but know that the ablest masters of the Socratic school employed it sparingly; and that, when the illustrious Roman came to philosophize in the way of Dialogue, he disdained to make any use of it at all.
In a word, as it was taken up, to serve an occasion, so it was very properly laid aside with it. And even while the occasion lasted, this humorous manner was far enough, as I observed, from being pushed to a Scenic license; the great artists in this way knowing very well, that, when Socrates brought Philosophy from Heaven to Earth, it was not his purpose to expose her on the stage, but to introduce her into good company.
And here, to note it by the way, what has been observed of the Ironic manner of the Socratic Dialogue, is equally true of its subtle questioning dialectic genius. This, too, had its rise from the circumstances of the time, and the views of its author, who employed it with much propriety and even elegance to entrap, in their own cobweb nets, the minute, quibbling captious sophists. How it chanced that this part of its character did not, also, cease with its use, but was continued by the successors in that school, and even carried so far as to provoke the ridicule of the wits, till, at length, it brought on the just disgrace of the Socratic Dialogue itself, all this is the proper subject of another inquiry.
Our concern, at present, is with Lucian’s Dialogue; whether he were indeed the inventor of this species, or, after Socrates, only the espouser of it.
The account, given above, that it unites and incorporates the several virtues of the Comic and Philosophic manner, is in Lucian’s own words[6]. Yet his Dialogue does not, as indeed it could not, correspond exactly to this idea. Cicero thought it no easy matter to unite Philosophy with Politeness and Good-humour[7]; what then would he have said of incorporating Philosophy, with Comic Ridicule?
To do him justice, Lucian himself appears sensible enough of the difficulty. I have presumed, says he, to connect and put together two things, not very obsequious to my design, nor disposed by any natural sympathy to bear the society of each other[8]. And therefore we find him on all occasions more solicitous for the success of this hazardous enterprise, than for the credit of his invention. Every body was ready to acknowledge the novelty of the thing; but he had some reason to doubt with himself, whether it were gazed at as a monster, or admired as a just and reasonable form of composition. So that not being able to resolve this scruple to his satisfaction, he extricates himself, as usual, from the perplexity, by the force of his comic humour, and concludes at length, that he had nothing left for it but to persevere in the choice he had once made; that is, to preserve the credit of his own consistency at least, if he could not prevail to have his Dialogue accepted by the judicious reader, under the idea[9] of a consistent composition.
The ingenious writer had, surely, no better way to take, in his distress. For the two excellencies he meant to incorporate in his Dialogue cannot, in a supreme degree of each, subsist together. The one must be sacrificed to the other. Either the philosophic part must give place to the dramatic; or the dramatic must withdraw, or restrain itself at least, to give room for a just display of the philosophic.
And this, in fact, as I observed, is the case in Lucian’s own Dialogues. They are highly dramatic, in which part his force lay; while his Philosophy serves only to edge his wit, or simply to introduce it. They have, usually, for their subject, not a QUESTION DEBATED; but, a TENET RIDICULED, or a CHARACTER EXPOSED. In this view, they are doubtless inimitable: I mean when he kept himself, as too frequently he did not, to such tenets or characters, as deserve to be treated in this free manner.
But after all, the other species, the serious, philosophic Dialogue, is the noblest and the best. It is the noblest, in all views; for the dignity of its subject, the gravity of its manner, and the importance of its end. It is the best, too; I mean, it excels most in the very truth and art of composition; as it governs itself entirely by the rules of decorum, and gives a just and faithful image of what it would represent: whereas the comic Dialogue, distorting, or, at least, aggravating the features of its original, pleases at some expence of probability; and at length attains its end but in part, for want of dramatic action, the only medium through which humour can be perfectly conveyed.
Thus the serious Dialogue is absolute in itself; and fully obtains its purpose: the humorous or characteristic, but partially; and is, at best, the faint copy of a higher species, the Comic Drama.