on light ones. than: "It seems becoming,' said Glauco, that we should stay.' Then, if it do seem so,' said Can anything be flatter and duller | standing, that in the same succession they present I, We ought to stay.' The Greek language, more courteous than the Roman or the French or ours, and resembling in this property the Italian, in addressing a person, had ready among other terms, & avμárie and & BÉATIOTE. Socrates meets an orderly good man, who, from respect to the laws, is going to accuse his own father of a capital crime, as he imagines it to be; and, doubting if he understood him, asks & oòs, & BéλTIOTE. Aristoteles, in the eighth book of his Ethics, gravely says that children ought to see no indecent statue or picture, unless it represents some god committing the obscenity. Such are the two best pieces of wit in the two authors: and I suspect that Plato was as unaware in this place of being witty as he was in others of not being so. In regard to their philosophy, and indeed to that of the ancients in general, there was little of sound and salutary which they did not derive from Democritus or from Pythagoras: from the former Aristoteles drew most, from the latter Plato. Cicero says improperly of Socrates, what is repeated every day in schools and colleges, that he first drew down Philosophy into private houses: Pythagoras had done it more systematically and more extensively. Upon his tenets and his discipline were founded many institutions of the earlier and quieter converts to Christianity. Chesterfield. There is, I remember, a very dangerous doctrine attributed to this Democritus, whom you mentioned before him he said that governments should have two supporters, rewards and punishments. Now twelve hangmen, and even twelve judges, may be paid but Mansfield, I suspect, would commit any man to Bridewell or the pillory, who had broached a declaration so seditious, as that people of ordinary business, unhired for it, should be paid for doing their duty. National debts, he would inform the jury, are not to be aggravated by such idle and superfluous expenditure, increased at any man's option. Chatham. I know not what my lord Mansfield, a worse enemy to our constitution than even that degraded and despicable prince for whose service he was educated, may think or dictate on the subject: but among all the books I ever read in which rewards and punishments are mentioned, I never found one where the words come in any other order than this: rewards first, then punishments. A plain evidence and proof to my humble under | Chesterfield. In the pleadings of Mansfield, in his charges, in his decisions, in his addresses to parliament, I have heard nothing so strikingly true as these observations of your lordship, and I wish I had heard nothing so novel. Chatham. I, in the name of our country, unite with you, my lord, in this wish. Let us trace again the more innocent wanderings of a greater man, I know not whether less prejudiced, but certainly less profligate and corrupt. Socrates in the Gorgias is represented as saying that he believes the soul and body both to exist in another state, although separately; the body just as it was in life, with its infirmities, wounds, and distortions. This would be great injustice; for hence a long life, rendered so by frugality and temperance, would acquire, in part of its recompense, the imbecility of age, with deafness, blindness, and whatever else is most afflictive and oppressive in that condition. The soul carries upon its back, he says, the marks of floggings and bruises and scars, contracted by perjuries upon earth, and by the delivery in court of unjust sentences; such I believe, in this place, is the meaning of adicía, and not merely any common acts of injustice. The utility of exposures in another life, he says, arises from example to others. But in what manner can they profit by this example? From what wickedness can they be deterred by these scenes of terror? Ideas as idly fanciful and childishly silly are in his description of the infernal rivers, which he derived from the poets, and which, without line or level, he led over places just as unfruitful afterward as before. Returning to this strange body of his, it cannot be supposed an inert substance: the words after death mean after this life upon earth. If he would say that it is inert, he must suppose it to be motionless: when did it become so? Strange that it should have motion to reach Tartarus and should then lose it. If so, of what use could it be? He does not say it, nor mean it, I imagine. Chesterfield. On some occasions, it appears, he leaves off meaning very abruptly. Men leap awkwardly in long flowing dressing-gowns, and, instead of clearing the thorns and stakes, expose God knows what. Chatham. It is not wonderful or strange that Aristoteles should ridicule his vagaries. Nothing can be more puerile and contemptible than the ideas he attributes to Socrates on future punishments: among the rest, that the damned appeal by name to those whom they have slain or wronged, and are dragged backward and forward from Tartarus to Cocytus and Periphlegethon, until the murdered or injured consent to pardon them. So the crime is punished, not according to its heinousness, but according to the kindness or severity of those who suffered by it. Now the IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. greater crime is committed in having slain or sity and extravagance of feeling, and teach us Chesterfield. Does he inform us also that the Chatham. No. Chesterfield. What other passage amuses your Chatham. Nothing peculiar to this author. It is very amusing to trace the expressions of different nations for the same thing. What we, half a century ago, called to banter, and what, if I remember the word, I think I have lately heard called to quiz, gives no other idea than of coarseness and inurbanity. The French convey one of buz and bustle in persiffler; the Italians, as naturally, one of singing, and amusing and misleading the judgment, by canzonare, or, as Boccaccio speaks, uccellare; the Athenians knew that the Graces and childhood had most power of this kind upon the affections, and their expressions were χαριεντίζειν and παιδεύειν. In manifestoes or remonstrances we English say to draw up, from our love of conciseness; the Frenchman says dresser, very characteristically; and the Italian, the most verbose of men, stendere. Many words have degenerated. imagine that a singer or tippler should derive his Who would appellation from Jupiter? his fellows call him jovial. Our northern gods are respected as little. The vilest of prose or poetry is called balderdash: now Balder was among the Scandinavians the presiding god of poetry. Braga was the goddess of eloquence: and she has left us brag and braggart. I am reminded by the mention of poetry, that Plato is offended in the Iliad at the undignified grief of Achilles and of Priam. To clasp the knee is going too far and to roll in the dust is beastly. I am certain that he never was a father or a friend not that among us the loss of friends is accompanied by such violence of affliction, but because I have observed that grief is less often in proportion to delicacy, and even to tenderness, than to the higher energies of our nature and the impetuosity of our nobler passions. The intemperate and wild resentment of Achilles at the injustice of Agamemnon, and his self-devotion, certain as he was of his fate, prepare us for inten that in such a character diversity is not incon- copy of the poet's own conception of things; and : image or archetype is God's: he impresses it on | lessness. Nothing can be more absurd than his things the poet represents the things as they are impressed on his mind by the hand of the Creator. Now, if this is done, the distance from truth is not remote. But there is a truth, accommodated to our nature, which poetry best conveys. There is a truth for the reason; there is a truth for the passions; there is a truth for every cha racter of man. Shakspeare has rendered this clear and luminous, over all the stumps and stumbling-blocks and lighter brush-wood and briars thrown across the path by the puerile trickery of Plato. regulations for the order of succession to property. Even those of a certain Irish lord are more provident, who, about to die childless, ordered that his money should go to the elder son of his brother, and, if he had no elder son, to the second. As for marriages, on the outset he would appoint a judge to examine the males stark-naked, in order to decide on their fitness for that condition; females only to a certain point. Chesterfield. I am astonished at the enormous proportion of fancy to philosophy, of folly to fancy, and of impudence to folly, in this moralist, theologian, and legislator. Chatham. You are not then disposed to look at the other places marked. Chesterfield. In truth, no. Chesterfield. I have reason to think that poetry like religion levels the intellects of men, the wise talking on that subject as absurdly as the ignorant. Great poets are the only judges of great poets and their animosities and prejudices I will Chatham. He was fond of puns too, and the not say pervert their judgment, but blot, inter- silliest and commonest, those on names. "Hperev line, and corrupt the copies we receive of it. οὖν μοι καὶ ἐν τῷ μύθῳ ὁ Προμηθεὺς μᾶλλον τοῦ have as little faith in Plato's love as you have in | Επιμηθέως ᾧ χρώμενος ἐγὼ καὶ προμηθούμενος, his philosophy. Chatham. In his disquisition on love is a receipt to cure the hiccup. "If you will hold your breath a little, it will go: if that should be disagreeable, take a good draught of water: but if the hiccup is very vehement, tickle your nose to sneezing, and when that has happened once or twice, be the hiccup obstinate as it may, it will be removed." Chesterfield. Who would buy a village cookery book, or a twopenny almanack, if the author stuffed into it such silliness as this? Chatham. In the same dialogue is a piece of sophistry more trivial than the receipt. "If all pleasures are weaker than love, they are the conquered, he the conqueror: Love then, who predominates over lusts and pleasures, is temperate to a wonderful degree." It is fair however to remark, that Agatho, here introduced as the speaker, says a part of what is spoken is serious, a part is joke. I wish Plato had left some indication by which we might distinguish the one from the other; but neither he nor the acutest of his commentators has done it. Sound sense, in my opinion, is preferable to bodiless incomprehensible vagaries: and if ever I become an author and am praised at all, I trust it will be not because I am so sublime an intelligence as to be unreadable without help, or without a controversy of clever and acute men about my meaning. He has here also given us a sort of dithyrambic, than which, as it appears to me, nothing is more redundantly verbose; yet Socrates is introduced as praising it to the skies. His knowledge of poetry, I suspect, did not carry him beyond a fable. To stick there is better than to follow (as Plato exhibits him doing) an old woman, and to relate as his own opinion that the business of genii or demons is to carry prayer and sacrifice from men to the Gods, and precepts from the Gods again to men. I am not so idle as to run far into his theories, and to examine what never has been and never will be brought into use; which alone is a sufficient proof of utter worth &c., and below ἀλλὰ Καλλίᾳ τῷ καλῷ, &c. The worst is, that he attributes the vainest of sophistry and the basest of malignity to Socrates. A wise and virtuous man may have the misfortune to be at variance with a single great author among his contemporaries, but neither a virtuous nor a wise one can be drawn into hostilities against all the best: he to whom this happens must be weak or wicked. Impudence may prompt some to asseverate that, with prodigious manliness and self-devotion, they hazard to cut their feet and break their shins by stemming the cur rent; that the perilous state of literature calls aloud on them, and that they encounter it equally for the public good and the correction of the faulty writer. But the public good, in my opinion, is ill promoted by telling men that all their other teachers are worth nothing, and that to be contented is to be dull, to be pleased is to be foolish; nor have I remarked or heard of any instance where morals have been improved by scurrility, diffidence calmed, encouraged, sustained, led forth, by violence, or genius exalted by contempt. I am sorry that a great man should have partaken the infirmities of the least, in their worst propensities. This principally has induced me to show you that, within the few pages you see between my fingers, he has committed as grave faults in style and sentiment, not only as Prodicus, but (I must believe) as Polus. We hear from the unprejudiced that Prodicus, like our Locke, was exact in his definitions; we know that he arrived at the perfection of style; and our gratitude is due to him for one of the most beautiful works delivered down to us from antiquity. Chesterfield. Your lordship has proved to me that a divine man, even with a swarm of bees from nose to chin, may cry aloud and labour hard, and lay his quarter-staff about him in every direction, and still be an indifferent buffoon. Chatham. Buffoonery is hardly the thing wherein a man of genius would be ambitious to excell; but, of all failures, to fail in a witticism is IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. the worst; and the mishap is the more calamit- Chesterfield. So much the worse for both parHe often fails in a contrary extreme. The there is full as much of weakness as of merit; so ties. Compliments are in their place only where soundest of those great critics whom we call that when I express my admiration to your lordgrammarians, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, cen- ship, all idea of compliment must vanish. Permit sures him for bringing bombast into philosophical me then to say that I have always been gratified disquisitions and Dr. Hurd, neither a severe at this among your other noble qualities, that, judge nor an incompetent one, quoting the pass-possessing more wit than perhaps any man living, age, adds "The Phædrus, though the most re- you have the moderation to use it rarely, and markable, is not the only example." oftener in friendship than in enmity. Chesterfield. Reflections such as these induced Fontaine to other kinds: it is more harmless, me long ago to prefer the wit of Addison and La more gay, and more insinuating. Chesterfield. Better a little idle play with bubbles and bladders, than cut and dry dogmas and may fairly and reasonably be exposed; light peChatham. Profligate men and pernicious follies indigestible sophisms. Plato falls over his own culiarities may also be exhibited; but only in sword; not by hanging it negligently or loosely, such a manner that he who gave the prototype but by stepping with it awkwardly; and the deri- would willingly take the copy. But in general he sion he incurs is proportionate to the gravity of who pursues another race of writers, is little his gait. Half the pleasure in the world arises better than a fox-hunter who rides twenty miles from malignity; and little of the other half is free from home for the sport: what can he do with his from its encroachments. Those who enjoyed his game when he has caught it? As he is only the smartness and versatility of attack, laugh as hear- servant of the dogs, so the satirist is only a caterer tily at him as with him, demonstrate that a great to the ferocious or false appetites of the most man upon the ground is lower than a little man indiscriminating and brutal minds. upon his legs, and conclude that the light of pretend that no exercise else is good for him? imagination leads only to gulfs and precipices. Does he Chatham. We however, with greater wisdom part. He confesses then an unsoundness in a vital and higher satisfaction, may survey him calmly and reverentially, as one of lofty, massy, comprehensive mind, whose failings myriads have partaken, whose excellences few; and we may consider him as an example, the more remarkable and striking to those we would instruct, greater quantity and a greater variety of wit and Chatham. Our own language contains in it a for that very inequality and asperity of charac- humour, than all the rest of all ages and counter, which many would exaggerate, and some tries; closing only Cervantes, the Homer of irony, conceal. Let us however rather trust Locke and not only of sharper and better-tempered wit and Bacon: let us believe the one to be a than he who lies before me, but even of an imawiser man, and the other both a wiser and gination more vivid and poetical, a sounder too better. There is as much difference between and shrewder philosopher. The little volume of Plato and Bacon as there is between a pliant Bacon's Essays, in my opinion, exhibits not only luxuriant twig, waving backward and forward more strength of mind, not only more true philoon the summit of a tree, and a sound stiff sophy, but more originality, more fancy, more well-seasoned walking-stick, with a ferule that imagination, than all these volumes of Plato; supsticks as far as is needful into the ground and posing even that he drew nothing from others; makes every step secure. Hearing much of the whereas we must receive the authority of antipoetry that is about him, I looked for it in vainquity, and believe that he owed to them the greater and I defy any man to fill with it, pure and im- part, and almost the whole. Without this authopure, a couple of such pages as are usually meted rity, we should perceive it in the absence of fixed out, with honest exactness and great marginal principles, and in the jarring of contradictory liberality, three hundred to the volume. Florid prose-writers are never tolerable poets. Jeremy Taylor is an example among many: his poetry is even worse, if possible, than the austere Hobbes'. Chesterfield. It is generous in you to countenance the persecuted Locke; and to examine the skull of Bacon, undeterred by a heart so putrid. Chatham. I declare to you, I should have the courage to say the same thing if they were living, and expelled from court and Christchurch. Chesterfield. We think more advantageously of artificial dignities while the bearers are living, more advantageously of real when they are dead. Chatham. The tomb is the pedestal of greatness. I make a distinction between God's great and the king's great. "Non bene conveniunt nec in unâ sede morantur." positions. It must be conceded that we moderns 80 Chesterfield. I never have found anyone unprejudiced and so unprepossessed on Plato. entirely. Chatham. My lord, I do not know that I am Chesterfield. How! my lord. is just and incontrovertible, and that I could add Chatham. I know that everything I have said ten times as much and as fairly; but I can not take to myself a praise that does not belong to Chatham. I believe you are right, my lord. What is superficial in politeness, what we see oftenest and what people generally admire most, must be laid upon a cold breast or will not stand: so far we agree but whatever is most graceful in it can be produced only by the movements of the heart. me, any more than I could a purse. I dislike, | by hearing that what I have written on politeness not to say detest, the character of Plato, as I col- meets in some degree your approbation. lect it from his works, and the worst part of it I conceive to be his coldness and insincerity in friendship. He pretended to have been sick during the imprisonment of Socrates: was he so very sick that he could not have been carried to receive the last words of his departing friend? the last counsels of a master so affectionate and impressive? He was never sick when a prince was to be visited on his throne, insolent and tyrannical as that prince might be. Chesterfield. These movements, I contend, are to be imitated, and as easily as those of the feet; and that good actors must beware of being moved Chesterfield. A throne is to few so frightful a too much from within. My lord, I do not inthing as a death-bed. quire of you whether that huge quarto is the Bible: for I see the letters on the back. Permit me. Chatham. I did not imagine your Lordship was such an enthusiast in religion: I am heartily glad to witness your veneration for a book, which, to say nothing of its holiness or authority, contains more specimens of genius than any other volume in existence. Chatham. My lord, it is a more frightful thing to any man who knows it well, than the death-couch of Socrates was to himself, or to those who from their hearts could reason as he did on it. Chesterfield. I am happy, my lord, and grateful to you, that the conversation has taken a different turn from what I had expected. I came to receive some information from you on what might be profitable in the education of the young, and you have given me some which would be greatly so in that of the old. My system, I know, can not be quite according to your sentiments; but as no man living hath a nobler air or a more dignified demeanour than your Lordship, I shall be flattered | Greek and philosophy. Chesterfield. I kissed it from no such motive: I kissed it preparatorily to swearing on it, as your Lordship's power and credit is from this time forward at my mercy, that I never will divulge the knowledge I possess of your reading ARISTOTELES AND CALLISTHENES. Aristoteles. I rejoice, O Callisthenes, at your return; and the more as I see you in the dress of your country; while others, who appear to me of the lowest rank by their language and physiognomy, are arrayed in the Persian robe, and mix the essence of rose with pitch. Callisthenes. I thank the Gods, O Aristoteles, that I embrace you again; that my dress is a Greek one and an old one; that the conquests of Alexander have cost me no shame and have encumbered me with no treasures. Aristoteles. Jupiter! what then are those tapestries, for I will not call them dresses, which the slaves are carrying after you, in attendance (as they say) on your orders? Callisthenes. They are presents from Alexander to Xenocrates; by which he punishes, as he declared to the Macedonians, both me and you. And I am well convinced that the punishment will not terminate here, but that he, so irascible and vindictive, will soon exercise his new dignity of godship, by breaking our heads, or, in the wisdom of his providence, by removing them an arm's length from our bodies. Aristoteles. On this subject we must talk again. Xenocrates is indeed a wise and virtuous man; and although I could wish that Alexander had rather sent him a box of books than a bale of woollen, I acknowledge that the gift could hardly have been better bestowed. Callisthenes. You do not appear to value very highly the learning of this philosopher. Aristoteles. To talk and dispute are more the practices of the Platonic school than to read and meditate. Talkative men seldom read. This is among the few truths which appear the more strange the more we reflect upon them. For what is reading but silent conversation? People make extremely free use of their other senses; and I know not what difficulty they could find or apprehend in making use of their eyes, particularly in the gratification of a propensity which they indulge so profusely by the tongue. The fatigue, you would think, is less; the one organ requiring much motion, the other little. Added to which, they may leave their opponent when they please, and never are subject to captiousness or personality. In open contention with an argumentative adversary, the worst brand a victor imposes is a blush. The talkative man blows the fire himself for the reception of it; and we can not deny that it may likewise be suffered by a reader, if his conscience lies open to reproach: yet even in this case, the stigma is illegible on his brow; no one triumphs in his defeat, or even freshens his wound, as may sometimes happen, by the warmth of sympathy. All men, you and I among the rest, are more desirous of conversing with a great philosopher, or other celebrated man, than of reading his works. There are several reasons for this; some of which it would be well if we could deny or palliate. In justice to ourselves and him, we ought to prefer his writings to his speech; for even the wisest say many things inconsiderately; ♦ |
