Dialogues Of The Dead

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Title:     Dialogues Of The Dead
Author: William Davenport Adams [More Titles by Adams]

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 characteristic flavour which did the author considerable credit. Dialogues of the dead, pure and simple, have also been written of recent years by Mr. H. D. Traill, some of the best of whose efforts were republished in a volume called 'The New Lucian.'

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:

'Your pardon, sir; I took you for a wit.'

To which Thackeray again:

'Did you, indeed? Then, compliments to pass,
I took you just for what you are--an ass.'

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
That people now are tickled through the eye.
No one to thought a deep attention lends,
And if a play's successful it depends
Far less upon the language than the scene.'

Again, in another colloquy, Meyerbeer informs Mozart that

'The "Traviata" and the "Trovatore"
Of "Il Barbiere" have eclipsed the glory.
As Margarita Patti fills the stage,
And Marta sung by Nilsson is the rage.'

He who dips into Colburn's New Monthly for the year 1822 or thereabouts will be rewarded (or otherwise) by coming across a 'Dialogue of the Dead' in prose, and there may be other such fugitive lucubrations. But so far as the English literature of the past is concerned, 'dialogues of the dead' were written by only two persons worthy of celebration--Walter Savage Landor and George, Lord Lyttelton, the author of 'Letters from a Persian in England to his friend in Ispahan.' Landor's 'Imaginary Conversations' are among those numerous works which everybody is supposed to have read, and, having read them, to admire. And unfortunate indeed would be he who could not recognise and appreciate the varied beauty and charm of these prose masterpieces. Here Menelaus and Helen, AEsop and Rhodope, Tiberius and Vipsania, Leofric and Godiva, Roger Ascham and Jane Grey, and a hundred other heroes and heroines of the past, converse not only with dramatic appropriateness, but with rhetorical force--with amplitude of thought and spontaneity of image. By the side of such a wonderful flower-show (as one of our poets said of a selection from a brother poet's lyrics), Lyttelton's trim parterre shows, no doubt, but dimly; nevertheless, to that accomplished nobleman there is due something more than the small credit of having been Landor's predecessor in this form of English composition. Of that form Lyttelton says, in the preface to his 'Dialogues,' that

'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 Fenelon, 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 Lucian,' but it proved to be nothing more edifying than a few 'modern dialogues' between a vintner and his wife, between 'a reformer of manners,' his wife and a captain of the guards, and between a Master of Arts and 'a lady's woman.' Of the humorous satire of Lucian himself there was no jot or tittle.

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':

'Wherein his meaning further is
To take away th' authorities
Of lies and fables, which did pigeon
The rabble into false religion.'

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 Fenelon 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.

[The end]
William Davenport Adams's essay: Dialogues Of The Dead

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