attained to expression so translucent that the thought shines through, undimmed. Though these conversations have too little dramatic quality to be among the first of dialogues, we are ready to agree with Huxley that a man may well learn from Berkeley and Hume not only how to think, but also how great masters of the English language have used it with power and force.'1

With Shaftesbury, Berkeley, and Hume the eighteenth century philosophical dialogue had run its course. But another eighteenth-century writer who was not of the direct line of these philosophers, though a critic of Shaftesbury and Berkeley, left behind him a series of Moral and Political Dialogues,2 and two Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel. This was Bishop Hurd, a pleasant writer whose Letters on Chivalry and Romance helped to strengthen the romantic movement. His dialogues offended Johnson by their 'wofully whiggish cast,' but were much admired by others. Having decided that the essential fault in English philosophical dialogues consisted in their use of fictitious speakers, he himself naturally avoided that fault by introducing into his conversations men well known in literature or statesmanship or ecclesiastical authority. In the preface to his third edition, he theorized at some length about this, and other matters connected with the dialogue. The dramatic and philosophic elements cannot exist in equal measure, he believed; hence he would reduce the character-element. Character should be suggested only in general, not in its finer and more minute particularities. In writing his own dialogues, his method was argumentative, but his subjects often such as could not be settled by argument. Hence the difficulty in classifying these 1 Huxley, Hume, p. xii. 2 London, 1759. London, 1764.

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dialogues; for they are often expository rather than philosophic, yet have a more or less philosophic aim. In the third and fourth of The Moral and Political Dialogues, for instance, entitled On the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth, Digby, Arbuthnot, and Addison, wandering about near the ruins of Kenilworth, fall into talk of the age when the castle was in its glory. The talk soon becomes an argument as to the relative values of that age and their own—a matter almost as difficult to settle as the question whether winter or summer is best for the world. Two other dialogues On the Constitution of the English Government are mainly didactic and expository; those On the Uses of Foreign Travel are perhaps the most nearly philosophical.

Bishop Hurd's practice was consistent with his theory in making the characterization of his speakers a matter of fairly slight importance; for we do not recognize the living accents of men like Addison or the philosopher Locke; hence they have not gained greatly in casting off the Greek names so objectionable to their author. Hurd has followed after Lucian as well as Plato and Cicero; he has, indeed, some of the lightness of Lucian's manner, but with far less grace and sparkle and humor; and so the qualities that pleased his own age have not been sufficient to insure him Lucian's perennial charm.

The writers already mentioned are the most typical as well as the most important of those who have written philosophical dialogues in England, and they serve to suggest the difficulties of the form, as well as the excellence it sometimes attained. The difficulties were inherent in the very nature of the subjectmatter, for a search after philosophic truth must ever make considerable demands upon the reader's power of thought. But through the use of the dialogue-form

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the eighteenth-century philosophers always added, in some measure, a human interest that helped to overcome these difficulties. The excellence of their work, best exemplified by that of Berkeley and Hume, and especially by Berkeley's Alciphron, showed that dialogues, closely imitative in their nature, and lacking in the highest dramatic qualities, could give in conversational guise so clear and lucid a statement of philosophic thought, with such distinction of style, that the dialogue-form must remain inseparable from our thought of eighteenth-century philosophy in England.

VI.

THE DIALOGUE IN THE NINE

TEENTH CENTURY

Those who have written English dialogues in modern times have tended, in general, to take freer advantage than earlier writers of the possibilities of the dialoguemethod, and, especially of late years, to assimilate their dialogues more completely to the conditions of the life from which they have sprung. The nineteenth century, in its use of the dialogue, stands with relation to preceding times in England very much as did the age of Lucian with respect to the ages that preceded it. Lucian saw that the dialogues of feeble philosophers, lacking the divine spark of the master, followed him from so distant a point that they were like him merely in the outer shells of their expression, and that they had but imitated what was least significant in him. And therefore when Lucian himself chose the dialogue as his means of expression, he made it a new thing in literature.

The greater freedom of the nineteenth-century dialogues is probably due less to the actual influence of Lucian than to a spirit like his animating a later age. He was certainly known-well known-to Landor, whose Imaginary Conversations form the most notable contribution to dialogue-writing within recent times; but the very essence of his spirit is such that direct imitation of him is more than difficult. Moreover, his various forms are as numerous as those of Proteus, and no single dialogue could therefore reproduce his

characteristics.1 Yet, in general, whenever the narrative and descriptive elements are strong in the dialogue, whenever the dramatic qualities in it exist for the purpose of showing character for its own sake, whether or not the satirical spirit be combined with these characteristics, we can recognize the kinship of such a dialogue with those of Lucian.

The livelier dialogues that had been used for polemical purposes in the sixteenth century had become more sober and conventional as time went on; the eighteenth-century expository dialogues were apt to be dull of tone; and the philosophical dialogues, whatever their ease or charm of manner, were necessarily of a serious nature. The attempted liveliness of Hurd or of Lyttelton had not the keenest intellectual vigor or dramatic ability to sustain it, and thus had not availed to change the current of English dialogues. But the French had adopted the lighter manner of dialogue-writing earlier than the nineteenth century. Not only Fontenelle and Fénelon, but Diderot and Voltaire, among others, had written dialogues that had some of the lightness and grace one would expect from a nation that has prized social development, and has, accordingly, encouraged the art of conversation. Voltaire had found the satiric spirit of Lucian especially akin to his own, and had written, with perhaps more sting than either Lucian or Erasmus, in such a dialogue as L'Empereur de la Chine et le Frère Rigolet; he had even pictured these

1 His influence is suggested in such dialogues as two entitled: A dialogue between the ghost of General Montgomery just arrived from the Elysian fields, and an American delegate, in a wood near Philadelphia, 1776 (by Thomas Paine?); and A Dialogue between the Devil and a Socinian Divine, on the Confines of the other World, Edinburgh, 1791 (by John Jamieson ?).