Lord Lyttelton - Dialogues of the Dead

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DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD.

BY
LORD LYTTELTON.

CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
_LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_.
1889.

INTRODUCTION.

George, Lord Lyttelton, was born in 1709, at Hagley, in Worcestershire.
He was educated at Eton and at Christchurch, Oxford, entered Parliament,
became a Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1757
he withdrew from politics, was raised to the peerage, and spent the last
eighteen years of his life in lettered ease. In 1760 Lord Lyttelton
first published these "Dialogues of the Dead," which were revised for a
fourth edition in 1765, and in 1767 he published in four volumes a
"History of the Life of King Henry the Second and of the Age in which he
Lived," a work upon which he had been busy for thirty years. He began it
not long after he had published, at the age of twenty-six, his "Letters
from a Persian in England to his Friend at Ispahan." If we go farther
back we find George Lyttelton, aged twenty-three, beginning his life in
literature as a poet, with four eclogues on "The Progress of Love."

To the last Lord Lyttelton was poet enough to feel true fellowship with
poets of his day. He loved good literature, and his own works show that
he knew it. He counted Henry Fielding among his friends; he was a friend
and helper to James Thomson, the author of "The Seasons;" and when acting
as secretary to the king's son, Frederick, Prince of Wales (who held a
little court of his own, in which there was much said about liberty), his
friendship brought Thomson and Mallet together in work on a masque for
the Prince and Princess, which included the song of "Rule Britannia."

Before Lord Lyttelton followed their example, "Dialogues of the Dead" had
been written by Lucian, and by Fenelon, and by Fontenelle; and in our
time they have been written by Walter Savage Landor. This half-dramatic
plan of presenting a man's own thoughts upon the life of man and
characters of men, and on the issues of men's characters in shaping life,
is a way of essay writing pleasant alike to the writer and the reader.
Lord Lyttelton was at his best in it. The form of writing obliged him to
work with a lighter touch than he used when he sought to maintain the
dignity of history by the style of his "History of Henry II." His calm
liberality of mind enters into the discussion of many topics. His truths
are old, but there are no real truths of human life and conduct, worth
anything at all, that are of yesterday. Human love itself is called "the
old, old story;" but do we therefore cease from loving, or from finding
such ways as we can of saying that we love. Dr. Johnson was not at his
wisest when he found fault with Lord Lyttelton because, in his "Dialogues
of the Dead," "that man sat down to write a book, to tell the world what
the world had all his life been telling him." This was exactly what he
wished to do. In the Preface to his revised edition Lord Lyttelton said,
"Sometimes a new dress may render an old truth more pleasing to those
whom the mere love of novelty betrays into error, as it frequently does
not only the wits, but the sages of these days. Indeed, one of the best
services that could now be done to mankind by any good writer would be
the bringing them back to common sense, from which the desire of shining
by extraordinary notions has seduced great numbers, to the no small
detriment of morality and of all real knowledge."

At any rate, we now find it worth while to know what the world had been
telling all his life to an enlightened, highly-educated man, who was an
active politician in the days of Walpole and of the elder Pitt, who was a
friend of Pope's and of the best writers of the day, and who in his
occasional verse added at least one line to the household words of
English literature when in his warm-hearted Prologue to Thomson's play of
_Coriolanus_, produced after its writer's death, he said of that poet
what we may say of Lord Lyttelton himself, that he gave to the world

"Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,
One line which, dying, he could wish to blot."

H. M.

DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD.

DIALOGUE I.

LORD FALKLAND--MR. HAMPDEN.

_Lord Falkland_.--Are not you surprised to see me in Elysium, Mr.
Hampden?

_Mr. Hampden_.--I was going to put the same question to your lordship,
for doubtless you thought me a rebel.

_Lord Falkland_.--And certainly you thought me an apostate from the
Commonwealth, and a supporter of tyranny.

_Mr. Hampden_.--I own I did, and I don't wonder at the severity of your
thoughts about me. The heat of the times deprived us both of our natural
candour. Yet I will confess to you here, that, before I died, I began to
see in our party enough to justify your apprehensions that the civil war,
which we had entered into from generous motives, from a laudable desire
to preserve our free constitution, would end very unhappily, and perhaps,
in the issue, destroy that constitution, even by the arms of those who
pretended to be most zealous for it.

_Lord Falkland_.--And I will as frankly own to you that I saw, in the
court and camp of the king, so much to alarm me for the liberty of my
country, if our arms were successful, that I dreaded a victory little
less than I did a defeat, and had nothing in my mouth but the word peace,
which I constantly repeated with passionate fondness, in every council at
which I was called to assist.

_Mr. Hampden_.--I wished for peace too, as ardently as your lordship, but
I saw no hopes of it. The insincerity of the king and the influence of
the queen made it impossible to trust to his promises and declarations.
Nay, what reliance could we reasonably have upon laws designed to limit
and restrain the power of the Crown, after he had violated the Bill of
Rights, obtained with such difficulty, and containing so clear an
assertion of the privileges which had been in dispute? If his conscience
would allow him to break an Act of Parliament, made to determine the
bounds of the royal prerogative, because he thought that the royal
prerogative could have no bounds, what legal ties could bind a conscience
so prejudiced? or what effectual security could his people obtain against
the obstinate malignity of such an opinion, but entirely taking from him
the power of the sword, and enabling themselves to defend the laws he had
passed?

_Lord Falkland_.--There is evidently too much truth in what you have
said. But by taking from the king the power of the sword, you in reality
took all power. It was converting the government into a democracy; and
if he had submitted to it, he would only have preserved the name of a
king. The sceptre would have been held by those who had the sword; or we
must have lived in a state of perpetual anarchy, without any force or
balance in the government; a state which could not have lasted long, but
would have ended in a republic or in absolute dominion.

_Mr. Hampden_.--Your reasoning seems unanswerable. But what could we do?
Let Dr. Laud and those other court divines, who directed the king's
conscience, and fixed in it such principles as made him unfit to govern a
limited monarchy--though with many good qualities, and some great
ones--let them, I say, answer for all the mischiefs they brought upon him
and the nation.

_Lord Falkland_.--They were indeed much to blame; but those principles
had gained ground before their times, and seemed the principles of our
Church, in opposition to the Jesuits, who had certainly gone too far in
the other extreme.

_Mr. Hampden_.--It is a disgrace to our Church to have taken up such
opinions; and I will venture to prophesy that our clergy in future times
must renounce them, or they will be turned against them by those who mean
their destruction. Suppose a Popish king on the throne, will the clergy
adhere to passive obedience and non-resistance? If they do, they deliver
up their religion to Rome; if they do not, their practice will confute
their own doctrines.

_Lord Falkland_.--Nature, sir, will in the end be sure to set right
whatever opinion contradicts her great laws, let who will be the teacher.
But, indeed, the more I reflect on those miserable times in which we both
lived, the more I esteem it a favour of Providence to us that we were cut
off so soon. The most grievous misfortune that can befall a virtuous man
is to be in such a state that he can hardly so act as to approve his own
conduct. In such a state we both were. We could not easily make a step,
either forward or backward, without great hazard of guilt, or at least of
dishonour. We were unhappily entangled in connections with men who did
not mean so well as ourselves, or did not judge so rightly. If we
endeavoured to stop them, they thought us false to the cause; if we went
on with them, we ran directly upon rocks, which we saw, but could not
avoid. Nor could we take shelter in a philosophical retreat from
business. Inaction would in us have been cowardice and desertion. To
complete the public calamities, a religious fury, on both sides, mingled
itself with the rage of our civil dissensions, more frantic than that,
more implacable, more averse to all healing measures. The most
intemperate counsels were thought the most pious, and a regard to the
laws, if they opposed the suggestions of these fiery zealots, was
accounted irreligion. This added new difficulties to what was before but
too difficult in itself, the settling of a nation which no longer could
put any confidence in its sovereign, nor lay more restraints on the royal
authority without destroying the balance of the whole constitution. In
those circumstances, the balls that pierced our hearts were directed
thither by the hands of our guardian angels, to deliver us from horrors
we could not support, and perhaps from a guilt our souls abhorred.

_Mr. Hampden_.--Indeed, things were brought to so deplorable a state,
that if either of us had seen his party triumphant, he must have lamented
that triumph as the ruin of his country. Were I to return into life, the
experience I have had would make me very cautious how I kindled the
sparks of civil war in England; for I have seen that, when once that
devouring fire is lighted, it is not in the power of the head of a party
to say to the conflagration, "Thus far shalt thou go, and here shall thy
violence stop."

_Lord Falkland_.--The conversation we have had, as well as the
reflections of my own mind on past events, would, if I were condemned to
my body again, teach me great moderation in my judgments of persons who
might happen to differ from me in difficult scenes of public action; they
would entirely cure me of the spirit of party, and make me think that as
in the Church, so also in the State, no evil is more to be feared than a
rancorous and enthusiastical zeal.

DIALOGUE II.

LOUIS LE GRAND--PETER THE GREAT.

_Louis_.--Who, sir, could have thought, when you were learning the trade
of a shipwright in the dockyards of England and Holland, that you would
ever acquire, as I had done, the surname of "Great."

_Peter_.--Which of us best deserved that title posterity will decide. But
my greatness appeared sufficiently in that very act which seemed to you a
debasement.

_Louis_.--The dignity of a king does not stoop to such mean employments.
For my own part, I was careful never to appear to the eyes of my subjects
or foreigners but in all the splendour and majesty of royal power.

_Peter_.--Had I remained on the throne of Russia, as my ancestors did,
environed with all the pomp of barbarous greatness, I should have been
idolised by my people--as much, at least, as you ever were by the French.
My despotism was more absolute, their servitude was more humble. But
then I could not have reformed their evil customs; have taught them arts,
civility, navigation, and war; have exalted them from brutes in human
shapes into men. In this was seen the extraordinary force of my genius
beyond any comparison with all other kings, that I thought it no
degradation or diminution of my greatness to descend from my throne, and
go and work in the dockyards of a foreign republic; to serve as a private
sailor in my own fleets, and as a common soldier in my own army, till I
had raised myself by my merit in all the several steps and degrees of
promotion up to the highest command, and had thus induced my nobility to
submit to a regular subordination in the sea and land service by a lesson
hard to their pride, and which they would not have learnt from any other
master or by any other method of instruction.

_Louis_.--I am forced to acknowledge that it was a great act. When I
thought it a mean one, my judgment was perverted by the prejudices
arising from my own education and the ridicule thrown upon it by some of
my courtiers, whose minds were too narrow to be able to comprehend the
greatness of yours in that situation.

_Peter_.--It was an act of more heroism than any ever done by Alexander
or Caesar. Nor would I consent to exchange my glory with theirs. They
both did great things; but they were at the head of great nations, far
superior in valour and military skill to those with whom they contended.
I was the king of an ignorant, undisciplined, barbarous people. My
enemies were at first so superior to my subjects that ten thousand of
them could beat a hundred thousand Russians. They had formidable navies;
I had not a ship. The King of Sweden was a prince of the most intrepid
courage, assisted by generals of consummate knowledge in war, and served
by soldiers so disciplined that they were become the admiration and
terror of Europe. Yet I vanquished these soldiers; I drove that prince
to take refuge in Turkey; I won battles at sea as well as land; I new-
created my people; I gave them arts, science, policy; I enabled them to
keep all the powers of the North in awe and dependence, to give kings to
Poland, to check and intimidate the Ottoman emperors, to mix with great
weight in the affairs of all Europe. What other man has ever done such
wonders as these? Read all the records of ancient and modern times, and
find, if you can, one fit to be put in comparison with me!

_Louis_.--Your glory would indeed have been supreme and unequalled if, in
civilising your subjects, you had reformed the brutality of your own
manners and the barbarous vices of your nature. But, alas! the
legislator and reformer of the Muscovites was drunken and cruel.

_Peter_.--My drunkenness I confess; nor will I plead, to excuse it, the
example of Alexander. It inflamed the tempers of both, which were by
nature too fiery, into furious passions of anger, and produced actions of
which our reason, when sober, was ashamed. But the cruelty you upbraid
me with may in some degree be excused, as necessary to the work I had to
perform. Fear of punishment was in the hearts of my barbarous subjects
the only principle of obedience. To make them respect the royal
authority I was obliged to arm it with all the terrors of rage. You had
a more pliant people to govern--a people whose minds could be ruled, like
a fine-managed horse, with an easy and gentle rein. The fear of shame
did more with them than the fear of the knout could do with the Russians.
The humanity of your character and the ferocity of mine were equally
suitable to the nations over which we reigned. But what excuse can you
find for the cruel violence you employed against your Protestant
subjects? They desired nothing but to live under the protection of laws
you yourself had confirmed; and they repaid that protection by the most
hearty zeal for your service. Yet these did you force, by the most
inhuman severities, either to quit the religion in which they were bred,
and which their consciences still retained, or to leave their native
land, and endure all the woes of a perpetual exile. If the rules of
policy could not hinder you from thus depopulating your kingdom, and
transferring to foreign countries its manufactures and commerce, I am
surprised that your heart itself did not stop you. It makes one shudder
to think that such orders should be sent from the most polished court in
Europe, as the most savage Tartars could hardly have executed without
remorse and compassion.

_Louis_.--It was not my heart, but my religion, that dictated these
severities. My confessor told me they alone would atone for all my sins.

_Peter_.--Had I believed in my patriarch as you believed in your priest,
I should not have been the great monarch that I was. But I mean not to
detract from the merit of a prince whose memory is dear to his subjects.
They are proud of having obeyed you, which is certainly the highest
praise to a king. My people also date their glory from the era of my
reign. But there is this capital distinction between us. The pomp and
pageantry of state were necessary to your greatness; I was great in
myself, great in the energy and powers of my mind, great in the
superiority and sovereignty of my soul over all other men.

DIALOGUE III.

PLATO--FENELON.

_Plato_.--Welcome to Elysium, O thou, the most pure, the most gentle, the
most refined disciple of philosophy that the world in modern times has
produced! Sage Fenelon, welcome!--I need not name myself to you. Our
souls by sympathy must know one another.

_Fenelon_.--I know you to be Plato, the most amiable of all the disciples
of Socrates, and the philosopher of all antiquity whom I most desired to
resemble.

_Plato_.--Homer and Orpheus are impatient to see you in that region of
these happy fields which their shades inhabit. They both acknowledge you
to be a great poet, though you have written no verses. And they are now
busy in composing for you unfading wreaths of all the finest and sweetest
Elysian flowers. But I will lead you from them to the sacred grove of
philosophy, on the highest hill of Elysium, where the air is most pure
and most serene. I will conduct you to the fountain of wisdom, in which
you will see, as in your own writings, the fair image of virtue
perpetually reflected. It will raise in you more love than was felt by
Narcissus, when he contemplated the beauty of his own face in the
unruffled spring. But you shall not pine, as he did, for a shadow. The
goddess herself will affectionately meet your embraces and mingle with
your soul.

_Fenelon_.--I find you retain the allegorical and poetical style, of
which you were so fond in many of your writings. Mine also run sometimes
into poetry, particularly in my "Telemachus," which I meant to make a
kind of epic composition. But I dare not rank myself among the great
poets, nor pretend to any equality in oratory with you, the most eloquent
of philosophers, on whose lips the Attic bees distilled all their honey.

_Plato_.--The French language is not so harmonious as the Greek, yet you
have given a sweetness to it which equally charms the ear and heart. When
one reads your compositions, one thinks that one hears Apollo's lyre,
strung by the hands of the Graces, and tuned by the Muses. The idea of a
perfect king, which you have exhibited in your "Telemachus," far excels,
in my own judgment, my imaginary "Republic." Your "Dialogues" breathe
the pure spirit of virtue, of unaffected good sense, of just criticism,
of fine taste. They are in general as superior to your countryman
Fontenelle's as reason is to false wit, or truth to affectation. The
greatest fault of them, I think, is, that some are too short.

_Fenelon_.--It has been objected to them--and I am sensible of it
myself--that most of them are too full of commonplace morals. But I
wrote them for the instruction of a young prince, and one cannot too
forcibly imprint on the minds of those who are born to empire the most
simple truths; because, as they grow up, the flattery of a court will try
to disguise and conceal from them those truths, and to eradicate from
their hearts the love of their duty, if it has not taken there a very
deep root.

_Plato_.--It is, indeed, the peculiar misfortune of princes, that they
are often instructed with great care in the refinements of policy, and
not taught the first principles of moral obligations, or taught so
superficially that the virtuous man is soon lost in the corrupt
politician. But the lessons of virtue you gave your royal pupil are so
graced by the charms of your eloquence that the oldest and wisest men may
attend to them with pleasure. All your writings are embellished with a
sublime and agreeable imagination, which gives elegance to simplicity,
and dignity to the most vulgar and obvious truths. I have heard, indeed,
that your countrymen are less sensible of the beauty of your genius and
style than any of their neighbours. What has so much depraved their
taste?

_Fenelon_.--That which depraved the taste of the Romans after the ago of
Augustus--an immoderate love of wit, of paradox, of refinement. The
works of their writers, like the faces of their women, must be painted
and adorned with artificial embellishments to attract their regards. And
thus the natural beauty of both is lost. But it is no wonder if few of
them esteem my "Telemachus," as the maxims I have principally inculcated
there are thought by many inconsistent with the grandeur of their
monarchy, and with the splendour of a refined and opulent nation. They
seem generally to be falling into opinions that the chief end of society
is to procure the pleasures of luxury; that a nice and elegant taste of
voluptuous enjoyments is the perfection of merit; and that a king, who is
gallant, magnificent, liberal, who builds a fine palace, who furnishes it
well with good statues and pictures, who encourages the fine arts, and
makes them subservient to every modish vice, who has a restless ambition,
a perfidious policy, and a spirit of conquest, is better for them than a
Numa or a Marcus Aurelius. Whereas to check the excesses of luxury--those
excesses, I mean, which enfeeble the spirit of a nation--to ease the
people, as much as is possible, of the burden of taxes; to give them the
blessings of peace and tranquillity, when they can he obtained without
injury or dishonour; to make them frugal, and hardy, and masculine in the
temper of their bodies and minds, that they may be the fitter for war
whenever it does come upon them; but, above all, to watch diligently over
their morals, and discourage whatever may defile or corrupt them--is the
great business of government, and ought to be in all circumstances the
principal object of a wise legislature. Unquestionably that is the
happiest country which has most virtue in it; and to the eye of sober
reason the poorest Swiss canton is a much nobler state than the kingdom
of France, if it has more liberty, better morals, a more settled
tranquillity, more moderation in prosperity, and more firmness in danger.

_Plato_.--Your notions are just, and if your country rejects them she
will not long hold the rank of the first nation in Europe. Her
declension is begun, her ruin approaches; for, omitting all other
arguments, can a state be well served when the raising of an opulent
fortune in its service, and making a splendid use of that fortune, is a
distinction more envied than any which arises from integrity in office or
public spirit in government? Can that spirit, which is the parent of
national greatness, continue vigorous and diffusive where the desire of
wealth, for the sake of a luxury which wealth alone can support, and an
ambition aspiring, not to glory, but to profit, are the predominant
passions? If it exists in a king or a minister of state, how will either
of them find among a people so disposed the necessary instruments to
execute his great designs; or, rather, what obstruction will he not find
from the continual opposition of private interest to public? But if, on
the contrary, a court inclines to tyranny, what a facility will be given
by these dispositions to that evil purpose? How will men with minds
relaxed by the enervating ease and softness of luxury have vigour to
oppose it? Will not most of them lean to servitude, as their natural
state, as that in which the extravagant and insatiable cravings of their
artificial wants may best be gratified at the charge of a bountiful
master or by the spoils of an enslaved and ruined people? When all sense
of public virtue is thus destroyed, will not fraud, corruption, and
avarice, or the opposite workings of court factions to bring disgrace on
each other, ruin armies and fleets without the help of an enemy, and give
up the independence of the nation to foreigners, after having betrayed
its liberties to a king? All these mischiefs you saw attendant on that
luxury, which some modern philosophers account (as I am informed) the
highest good to a state! Time will show that their doctrines are
pernicious to society, pernicious to government; and that yours, tempered
and moderated so as to render them more practicable in the present
circumstances of your country, are wise, salutary, and deserving of the
general thanks of mankind. But lest you should think, from the praise I
have given you, that flattery can find a place in Elysium, allow me to
lament, with the tender sorrow of a friend, that a man so superior to all
other follies could give into the reveries of a Madame Guyon, a
distracted enthusiast. How strange was it to see the two great lights of
France, you and the Bishop of Meaux, engaged in a controversy whether a
madwoman was a heretic or a saint!

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