A leading Review lately contained a contribution entitled ‘The Old School of Classics and the New.’ It was, as regards its literary form, a ‘Dialogue of the Dead’—a discussion supposed to take place between the famous scholars Bentley and Madvig, with a brief intervention on the part of Euripides and Shakespeare. It was written with much smartness, and one could wish that such lucubrations were more common nowadays than they are. Not that they are by any means rare. It was only the other day that Mr. Marion Crawford published a work which had the conventional shape of fiction, but which was really little more than a series of colloquies in which some famous men of the past took part, talking throughout with a In the less immediate past, dialogue-writing after the fashion of the witty and audacious Syrian was not very frequently adventured. Just twenty years ago some writer or writers supplied to a weekly miscellany a few imaginative conversations between deceased worthies; but these were not particularly brilliant. They were in verse—in the heroic couplet, to which a good deal of point might have been imparted; but advantage was not taken of the opportunity. There was one ‘dialogue’ in which Shakespeare, Thackeray, and a critic were supposed to be engaged, and in the course of which Thackeray was made to say to the critic: ‘Don’t crack your jokes, but flit.’ To which the critic: To which Thackeray again: ‘Did you, indeed? Then, compliments to pass, But this, which one hesitates to pronounce Thackerayan, was surely even trite. However, these dialogues at least remind us of what English society was saying and doing in the year of grace 1868. Thus, Thackeray tells Shakespeare that his dramas are played but scarcely acted: ‘For I won’t deny Again, in another colloquy, Meyerbeer informs Mozart that ‘The “Traviata” and the “Trovatore” He who dips into Colburn’s New Monthly for the year 1822 or thereabouts will be rewarded (or otherwise) by coming across a ‘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 FÉnelon, 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 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’:
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 FÉnelon 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. |