ess of life shining underneath, but
only this horror of the skeleton and the worm. He restrains exasperation
at the brilliant effrontery of his man, precisely as an anatomist would
suppress disgust at a pathological monstrosity, or an astonishing
variation in which he hoped to surprise some vital secret. Rameau is not
crudely analysed as a vile type: he is searched as exemplifying on a
prodigious scale elements of character that lie furtively in the depths
of characters that are not vile. It seems as if Diderot unconsciously
anticipated that terrible, that woful, that desolating saying,--_There
is in every man and woman something which, if you knew it, would make
you hate them_. Rameau is not all parasite. He is your brother and mine,
a product from the same rudimentary factors of mental composition, a
figure cast equally with ourselves in one of the countless moulds of the
huge social foundry.

Such is the scientific attitude of mind towards character: It is not
philanthropic nor pitiful: the fact that base characters exist and are
of intelligible origin is no reason why we should not do our best to
shun and to extirpate them. This assumption of the scientific point of
view, this change from mere praise and blame to scrutiny, this
comprehension that mere execration is not the last word, is a mark of
the modern spirit. Besides Juvenal, another writer of genius has shown
us the parasite of an ancient society. Lucian, whose fertility, wit,
invention, mockery, freshness of spirit, and honest hatred of false
gods, make him the Voltaire of the second century, has painted with all
his native liveliness more than one picture of the parasite. The great
man's creature at Rome endures exactly the same long train of affronts
and humiliations as the great man's creature at Paris sixteen centuries
later, beginning with the anguish of the mortified stomach, as savoury
morsels of venison or boar are given to more important guests, and
ending with the anguish of the mortified spirit, as he sees himself
supplanted by a rival of shapelier person, a more ingenious versifier, a
cleverer mountebank. The dialogue in which Lucian ironically proves
that Parasitic, or the honourable craft of Spunging, has as many of the
marks of a genuine art as Rhetoric, Gymnastic, or Music, is a spirited
parody of Socratic catechising and Platonic mannerisms. Simo shows to
Tychiades, as ingeniously as Rameau shows to Diderot, that the Spunger
has a far better