PURCHASER:What do you believe in?
POSITIVIST:In Man,with a large M.
PURCHASER:Not in individual Man?
POSITIVIST:By no means;not even always in Mr.Gladstone.All men,all Churches,all parties,all philosophies,and even the other sect of our own Church,are perpetually in the wrong.Buy me,and listen to me,and you will always be in the right.
PURCHASER:And,after this life,what have you to offer me?
POSITIVIST:A distinguished position in the Choir Invisible;but not,of course,conscious immortality.
PURCHASER:Take him away,and put up another lot.
Then the Hegelian,with his Notion,and the Darwinian,with his notions,and the Lotzian,with his Broad Church mixture of Religion and Evolution,and the Spencerian,with that Absolute which is a sort of a something,might all be offered with their divers wares;and cheaply enough,Lucian,you would value them in this auction of Sects."There is but one way to Corinth,"as of old;but which that way may be,oh master of Hermotimus,we know no more than he did of old;and still we find,of all philosophies,that the Stoic route is most to be recommended.But we have our Cyrenaics too,though they are no longer "clothed in purple,and crowned with flowers,and fond of drink and of female flute-players."Ah,here too,you might laugh,and fail to see where the Pleasure lies,when the Cyrenaics are no "judges of cakes"(nor of ale,for that matter),and are strangers in the Courts of Princes."To despise all things,to make use of all things,in all things to follow pleasure only:"that is not the manner of the new,if it were the secret of the older Hedonism.
Then,turning from the philosophers to the seekers after a sign,what change,Lucian,would you find in them and their ways?None;they are quite unaltered.Still our Peregrinus,and our Peregrina too,come to us from the East,or,if from the West,they take India on their way--India,that secular home of drivelling creeds,and of religion in its sacerdotage.Still they prattle of Brahmins and Buddhism;though,unlike Peregrinus,they do not publicly burn themselves on pyres,at Epsom Downs,after the Derby.We are not so fortunate in the demise of our Theosophists;and our police,less wise than the Hellenodicae,would probably not permit the Immolation of the Quack.Like your Alexander,they deal in marvels and miracles,oracles and warnings.All such bogy stories as those of your "Philopseudes,"and the ghost of the lady who took to table-rapping because one of her best slippers had not been burned with her body,are gravely investigated by the Psychical Society.
Even your ignorant Bibliophile is still with us--the man without a tinge of letters,who buys up old manus "because they are stained and gnawed,and who goes,for proof of valued antiquity,to the testimony of the book-worms."And the rich Bibliophile now,as in your satire,clothes his volumes in purple morocco and gay dorures,while their contents are sealed to him.
As to the topics of satire and gay curiosity which occupy the lady known as "Gyp,"and M.Halevy in his "Les Petites Cardinal,"if you had not exhausted the matter in your "Dialogues of Hetairai,"you would be amused to find the same old traits surviving without a touch of change.One reads,in Halevy's French,of Madame Cardinal,and,in your Greek,of the mother of Philinna,and marvels that eighteen hundred years have not in one single trifle altered the mould.Still the old shabby light-loves,the old greed,the old luxury and squalor.Still the unconquerable superstition that now seeks to tell fortunes by the cards,and,in your time,resorted to the sorceress with her magical "bull-roarer"or turndun.{6}
Yes,Lucian,we are the same vain creatures of doubt and dread,of unbelief and credulity,of avarice and pretence,that you knew,and at whom you smiled.Nay,our very "social question"is not altered.
Do you not write,in "The Runaways,""The artisans will abandon their workshops,and leave their trades,when they see that,with all the labour that bows their bodies from dawn to dark,they make a petty and starveling pittance,while men that toil not nor spin are floating in Pactolus"?
They begin to see this again as of yore;but whether the end of their vision will be a laughing matter,you,fortunate Lucian,do not need to care.Hail to you,and farewell!
