The dialogue form has long been used as a vehicle for the expression of ideas. It is especially cherished by authors eager to eschew the forbidding tone of formality that often accompanies the expression of serious thought. The writer of a dialogue does not directly address his public, but instead revels in the multiple facets of ideas. By playing this dialectical game he can appear to present contrary views as their respective proponents might and then expose the errors of those he opposes, leading the readers to accept his own conclusions. The advantages of the dialogue are clear: ideas that might have remained abstruse and abstract become concrete and alive. They assume dramatic force. A constant element in the dialogue is irony; etymologically, the term derives from a form of interrogation in which the answer is known beforehand by the questioner. The earliest models of the genre, by the ancient Greeks Plato and Lucian, have never been excelled. Sophistry is another element of the dialogue. In Plato and in the dialogues of Pascal’s Provinciales (1656–57; “Provincial Letters”), the protagonist plays with the naiveté of his opponents, who always end by surrendering. The writer of a dialogue cannot affect the same casual and self-indulgent attitude as the author of a personal essay since the characters and their statements must be plausible. Nor can he pursue an argument consistently, as he might in a critical, historical, or philosophical essay. Something must persist in the dialogue of the spontaneity and the versatility of an actual conversation among witty and thoughtful people.

There was much seriousness and occasionally some pedantry in early dialogues in several literatures. The dialogues of Bardesanes (154–222) in Syriac, rendered into English as On Fate, are on the subject of the laws of the country. A hundred years earlier, Lucian, who was also Syrian, proved himself a master of flowing and ironical Greek prose in his satirical dialogues. The Italian Renaissance writer Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) proved himself the equal of Lucian in verve in his Dialogues using the same mold and the same title as Lucian. Others who used the dialogue form included Castiglione and Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) in Italy; and in Spain Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), León Hebreo (1460–c. 1521), and Juan de Valdés (c. 1500–41), who treated questions of faith and of languages in dialogues. The genre flourished in the 18th century: Lessing, Diderot, and the Irish philosopher George Berkeley. Diderot’s works largely consist of sprightly, rambling, and provocative discussions between the various aspects of his own remarkable mentality. Bold conjectures, determined onslaughts on prejudices, insights into physiology and biology, and erotic fantasies all enter into his dialogues. In the 19th century a number of complex literary personalities, who were capable of accepting the most diverse, and even conflicting points of view, such as Renan and Valéry, had a predilection for the dialogue. Among the devices used by authors of dialogue—many of whom lacked the sustained inventiveness required by fiction—was to attribute their words to the illustrious dead. The French prelate Fénelon, for example, composed Dialogues des morts (1700–18), and so did many others, including the most felicitous master of that prose form, the English poet Walter Savage Landor, in his Imaginary Conversations (1824) and Pentameron (1837).

Travel and epistolary literature

The literature of travel has declined in quality in the age when travel has become most common—the present. In this nonfictional prose form, the traveller himself has always counted for more than the places he visited, and in the past, he tended to be an adventurer or a connoisseur of art, of landscapes, or of strange customs who was also, occasionally, a writer of merit. The few travel books by ancient Greek geographers, such as Strabo and Pausanias of the 1st and 2nd centuries ad, are valuable as a storehouse of remarks on ancient people, places, and creeds. Travel writing of some literary significance appears in the late-13th-century writings of Marco Polo. Works of a similar vein appeared in the 17th century in the observations of Persia two French Huguenots, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Jean Chardin, whose writings were lauded by Goethe. Many books of documentary value were later written by English gentlemen on their grand tour of the Continent. The 18th-century Italian egotist Casanova and his more reliable and sharper compatriot Giuseppe Baretti (1719–89) also produced significant travel writings.

The form comprises many of the finest writings in prose during the Romantic age. Not only were the Romantics more alive to picturesqueness and quaintness but also they were in love with nature. They were eager to study local colours and climates and to depict them in the settings for their imaginative stories. Also, travel gave the Romantic writer the illusion of flight from his wearied self. The leisurely record of Goethe’s journey to Italy in 1786–88 counts more readers than most of his novels. Pismo russkogu puteshestvennika (1791–92; Eng. trans., Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789–1790, 1957) by Nikolay Karamzin is one of the earliest documents in the development of Russian Romanticism. Ivan Goncharov (1812–91), the Russian novelist who stubbornly limited his fiction to his own geographical province, recorded in Frigate Pallas his experience of a tour around the world. Nowhere else in the whole range of literature is there anything comparable to Peterburg (1913–14), by a virtuoso of poetic style, Andrey Bely; it is a travel fantasy within a city that is both real and transfigured into a myth. Neither James Joyce’s Dublin nor Balzac’s Paris is as vividly recreated as the former Russian capital in Bely’s book. Other travel writers of note include the multinational Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), who interpreted Japan with sensitivity and insight. Earlier, two other Westerners wrote on Asia, the English historian Alexander W. Kinglake (1809–91), in Eothen (1844), and, more incisively, the French diplomat Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau (1816–82); both blended a sense of the picturesqueness of the East with shrewdness in the interpretation of the people. One of the most thoughtful and, in spite of the author’s excessive self-assurance, most profound books on Asia is Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen (1919; Travel Diary of a Philosopher), by the German thinker Hermann Keyserling (1880–1946). With an insatiable interest in countries, Keyserling also interpreted the soul of South America and, less perceptively, analyzed the whole spectrum of European nations. Among the thousands of travel books on Italy, there are a few masterpieces of rapturous or humorous prose: in English, the writings of D.H. Lawrence on Sardinia, on Etruscan Italy, and on the Italian character are more lucid and less strained than other of his prose cogitations. Venice, “man’s most beautiful artifact,” as Bernard Berenson called it, inspired Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Maurice Barrès, Anatole France, and hundreds of other Frenchmen to write some of their finest pages of prose. After World War I, there was a distinct yearning for new possibilities of salvation among war-ridden Europeans, dimly descried in Asia, in Russia, or in America, and travel literature assumed a metaphysical and semireligious significance. The mood of the writers who expressed this urge was somewhat Byronic; they were expert at poetizing the flight from their own selves. Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) in his novel Emmène-moi au bout du monde (1956; “Take Me Away to the End of the World”), epitomizes the urge to seek adventures and a rediscovery of oneself through strange travels. The very theme of travel, of the protagonist being but a traveller on this earth, has been, from Homer’s Odyssey onward, one of the most laden with magical, and symbolical, associations in literature. Countless authors have played moving and delicate variations on it.

Of all the branches of nonfictional prose, none is less amenable to critical definition and categorization than letter writing. The instructions of the ancient grammarians, which were repeated a thousand times afterward in manuals purporting to teach how to write a letter, can be reduced to a few very general platitudes: be natural and appear spontaneous but not garrulous and verbose; avoid dryness and declamatory pomp; appear neither unconcerned nor effusive; express emotion without lapsing into sentimentality; avoid pedantry on the one hand and banter and levity on the other. Letters vary too much in content, however, for generalizations to be valid to all types. What is moving in a love letter might sound indiscreet in a letter of friendship; an analysis of the self may fascinate some readers, while others prefer anecdotes and scandal. La Bruyère, at the end of the 17th century, remarked that women succeed better than men in the epistolary form. It has also been claimed that a feminine sensibility can be seen in the letters of the most highly acclaimed male masters of this form, such as Voltaire, Mirabeau, Keats, and Baudelaire. Advice to practitioners of the art of letter writing usually can be expressed in the often-quoted line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “To thine own self be true.” The English biographer Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), a copious and versatile letter writer himself, wrote: “No good letter was ever written to convey information, or to please its recipient: it may achieve both those results incidentally; but its fundamental purpose is to express the personality of the writer.” There are, however, numerous and even contradictory ways of expressing that personality.

Although critics have issued endless disquisitions on the craft of fiction and other genres, they have generally remained silent on the epistolary genre, though it has sometimes been the form of prose that outlives all others. Ever since the expression of the writer’s personality became one of the implicit purposes of writing in the 18th century, the letters of such eminent authors as Diderot, Rousseau, Byron, and Flaubert have probably offered at least as much delight as any of their other writings. Impressive monuments of scholarship have been erected on the presentation of the complete letters of Thackeray, George Eliot, Swinburne, and Henry James. The literatures of France and England are notably richer in letter writing of the highest order than are the literatures of the United States and Germany. Contrary to many pessimistic predictions regarding the effect on letter writing of modern means of communication, such as the telephone, together with an apparently increasing penchant for haste, some of the richest, most revealing, and most thoughtful letters of all times were written in the 20th century; those of the English writers Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence are paramount among them.