t, reproducing
with the variety and perfection of art a whimsical figure that struck
his fancy and stirred the creative impulse. Ethics, aesthetics, manners,
satire, are all indeed to be found in the dialogue, but they are only
there as incident to the central figure of the sketch, the prodigy of
parasites. Diderot had no special fondness for these originals. Yet he
had a keen and just sense of their interest. "Their character stands out
from the rest of the world, it breaks that tiresome uniformity which our
bringing up, our social conventions, and our arbitrary fashions have
introduced. If one of them makes his appearance in a company, he is like
leaven, fermenting and restoring to each person present a portion of his
natural individuality. He stirs people up, moves them, provokes to
praise or blame: he is a means of bringing out reality; gives honest
people a chance of showing what they are made of, and unmasks the
rogues."[296]

Hearing that the subject of Diderot's dialogue is the Parasite, the
scholar will naturally think of that savage satire in which Juvenal
rehearses the thousand humiliations that Virro inflicts on Trebius: how
the wretched follower has to drink fiery stuff from broken crockery,
while the patron quaffs of the costliest from splendid cups of amber and
precious stones; how the host has fine oil of Venafrum, while the guest
munches cabbage that has been steeped in rancid lamp-oil; one plays
daintily with mullet and lamprey, while the other has his stomach turned
by an eel as long as a snake, and bloated in the foul torrent of the
sewers; Virro has apples that might have come from the gardens of the
Hesperides, while Trebius gnaws such musty things as are tossed to a
performing monkey on the town wall. But the distance is immeasurable
between Juvenal's scorching truculence and Diderot's half-ironical,
half-serious sufferance. Juvenal knows that Trebius is a base and abject
being; he tells him what he is; and in the process blasts him. Diderot
knows that Rameau too is base and abject, but he is so little willing to
rest in the fat and easy paradise of conventions, that he seems to be
all the time vaguely wondering in his own mind how far this genius of
grossness and paradox and bestial sophism is a pattern of the many, with
the mask thrown off. He seems to be inwardly musing whether it can after
all be true, that if one draws aside a fold of the gracious outer robe
of conformity, there is no comelin