Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 1.djvu/26

xviii a mind which, in itself, was so pure and wholesome, that I will quote it:—

“All great dramatic poets are endowed with the power of creating beings who seem to act and speak with perfect independence, so that the poet is nothing more than the relator of what takes place. When Goethe had conceived Faust and Margarete, Mephistopheles and Wagner, they moved and had their being without any exercise of his will. But in the peculiar power which Petronius exercises, in its application to every scene, to every individual character, in everything, noble or mean, which he undertakes, I know of but one who is fully equal to the Roman, and that is Diderot. Trimalchio and Agamemnon might have spoken for Petronius, and the nephew Rameau and the parson Papin for Diderot, in every condition and on every occasion inexhaustibly, out of their own nature; just so the purest and noblest souls, whose kind was, after all, not entirely extinct in their day.

“Diderot and a contemporary, related to him in spirit, Count Gaspar Gozzi, are marked with the same cynicism which disfigures the Roman; their age, like his, had become shameless. But as the two former were in their heart noble, upright, and benevolent men, and as in the writings of Diderot genuine virtue