book iv

. ]. The wicked old rector perhaps chuckled to think that here was one who bade fair to love Lucian one day as well as he did himself.

For Lucian too was one who asked questions—spent his life doing little else; if one were invited to draw him with the least possible expenditure of ink, one's pen would trace a mark of interrogation. That picture is easily drawn; to put life into it is a more difficult matter. However, his is not a complex character, for all the irony in which he sometimes chooses to clothe his thought; and materials are at least abundant; he is one of the self-revealing fraternity; his own personal presence is to be detected more often than not in his work. He may give us the assistance, or he may not, of labelling a character _Lucian_ or _Lycinus_; we can detect him, _volentes volentem_, under the thin disguise of _Menippus_ or _Tychiades_ or _Cyniscus_ as well. And the essence of him as he reveals himself is the questioning spirit. He has no respect for authority. Burke describes the majority of mankind, who do not form their own opinions, as 'those whom Providence has doomed to live on trust'; Lucian entirely refuses to live on trust; he 'wants to know.' It was the wish of _Arthur Clennam_, who had in consequence a very bad name among the _Tite Barnacles_ and other persons in authority. Lucian has not escaped the same fate; 'the scoffer Lucian' has become as much a commonplace as '_fidus Achates_,' or 'the well-greaved Achaeans,' the reading of him has been discountenanced, and, if he has not actually lost his place at the table of Immortals, promised him when he temporarily left the Island of the Blest, it has not been so 'distinguished' a place as it was to have been and should have been. And all because he 'wanted to know.'

His questions, of course, are not all put in the same manner. In the _Dialogues of the Gods_, for instance, the mark of interrogation is not writ large; they have almost the air at first of little stories in dialogue form, which might serve to instruct schoolboys in the attributes and legends of the gods—a manual charmingly done, yet a manual only. But we soon see that he has said to himself: Let us put the thing into plain natural prose, and see what it looks like with its glamour of poetry and reverence stripped off; the Gods do human things; why not represent them as human persons, and see what results? What did result was that henceforth any one who still believed in the pagan deities might at the cost of an hour's light reading satisfy himself that his gods were not gods, or, if they were, had no business to be. Whether many or few did so read and so satisfy themselves, we have no means of knowing; it is easy to over-estimate the effect such writing may have had, and to forget that those who were capable of being convinced by exposition of this sort would mostly be those who were already convinced without; still, so far as Lucian had any effect on the religious position, it must have been in discrediting paganism and increasing the readiness to accept the new faith beginning to make its way. Which being so, it was ungrateful of the Christian church to turn and rend him. It did so, partly in error. Lucian had referred in the _Life of Peregrine_ to the Christians, in words which might seem irreverent to Christians at a time when they were no longer an obscure sect; he had described and ridiculed in _The Liar_ certain 'Syrian' miracles which have a remarkable likeness to the casting out of spirits by Christ and the apostles; and worse still, the _Philopatris_ passed under his name. This dialogue, unlike what Lucian had written in the _Peregrine_ and _The Liar_, is a deliberate attack on Christianity. It is clear to us now that it was written two hundred years after his time, under Julian the Apostate; but there can be no more doubt of its being an imitation of Lucian than of its not being his; it consequently passed for his, the story gained currency that he was an apostate himself, and his name was anathema for the church. It was only partly in error, however. Though Lucian might be useful on occasion ('When Tertullian or Lactantius employ their labours in exposing the falsehood and extravagance of Paganism, they are obliged to transcribe the eloquence of Cicero or the wit of Lucian' [Footnote: Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_, cap. xv.]), the very word heretic is enough to remind us that the Church could not show much favour to one who insisted always on thinking for himself. His works survived, but he was not read, through the Middle Ages. With the Renaissance he partly came into his own again, but still laboured under the imputations of scoffing and atheism, which confined the reading of him to the few.

The method followed in the _Dialogues of the Gods_ and similar pieces is a very indirect way of putting questions. It is done much more directly in others, the _Zeus cross-examined_, for instance. Since the fallen angels

reasoned high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate— Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute— And found no end, in wandering mazes lost,

these subjects have had their share of attention; but the questions can hardly be put more directly, or more neatly, than in the _Zeus cross-examined_, and the thirtieth _Dialogue of the Dead_.

He has many other interrogative methods besides these, which may be left to reveal themselves in the course of reading. As for answering questions, that is another matter. The answer is sometimes apparent, sometimes not; he will not refrain from asking a question just because he does not know the answer; his _role_ is asking, not answering. Nor when he gives an answer is it always certain whether it is to be taken in earnest. Was he a cynic? one would say so after reading _The Cynic_; was he an Epicurean? one would say so after reading the _Alexander_; was he a philosopher? one would say Yes at a certain point of the _Hermotimus_, No at another. He doubtless had his moods, and he was quite unhampered by desire for any consistency except consistent independence of judgement. Moreover, the difficulty of getting at his real opinions is increased by the fact that he was an ironist. We have called him a self-revealer; but you never quite know where to have an ironical self-revealer. Goethe has the useful phrase, 'direct irony'; a certain German writer 'makes too free a use of direct irony, praising the blameworthy and blaming the praiseworthy—a rhetorical device which should be very sparingly employed. In the long run it disgusts the sensible and misleads the dull, pleasing only the great intermediate class to whom it offers the satisfaction of being able to think themselves more shrewd than other people, without expending much thought of their own' (_Wahrheit und Dichtung_,