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Page 15
HERMES: Two hundred pounds.
PURCHASER: I will write you a cheque for the money. Come home, Pessimist, and
begin your lessons without more ado.
HERMES: Attention! Here is a magnificent article--the Positive Life, the
Scientific Life, the Enthusiastic Life. Who bids for a possible place in the
Calendar of the Future?
PURCHASER: What does he call himself? he has a very French air.
HERMES: Put your own questions.
PURCHASER: What's your pedigree, my Philosopher, and previous performances?
POSITIVIST: I am by Rousseau out of Catholicism, with a strain of the
Evolution blood.
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
ahvays 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 Perigrinus, and our Perigrina 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 manuscripts '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. Hale'vy 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 Hale'vy'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_.' (1)
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