Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

cast in the form of a dialogue between the poet and a famous lawyer. Horace pretends to ask for legal advice about how to write satire, the lawyer unhelpfully advises him to write something safer, like epic (the same advice would have held good for Diderot in the eighteenth century). Horace accepts that it would be illegal to publish libellous verses; and the lawyer accepts that even libellous verses, if they are well written and win Caesar’s approval, are safe from prosecution. Horace, secure in his position as a writer, can afford to be ironical, but beneath the surface is a serious discussion about the freedom of speech which a poet can legitimately enjoy; this is a theme which is all too pertinent for Diderot and his fellow philosophes writing in the shadow of the
ancien régime’s
arcane censorship practices.
    The epigraph at the beginning of
Rameau’s Nephew
is taken from Horace,
Satires
, 11. vii. Again, the specific reference to Vertumnus, the god who could assume any shape he chose, alludes to the chameleon personality of the Nephew, and seems obvious enough. But to readers steeped in Horace’s poetry (as all educated eighteenth-century readers were), it is hard not to think that Diderot also wants us to bear in mind the poem as a whole. Satire 11. vii is one of two (the other is 11. iii) which Horace sets in Rome during the period of Saturnalia, the annual three-day feast in commemoration of the golden age of Saturn, when the usual proprieties were turned upside-down and all men were treated as equal, thus the very epigraph establishes the theme of carnival. In Lucian’s
Saturnalia
, for example, a poor man writes to the king asking to be allowed to sup at the table of a rich man during the period of the festival—a request which anticipates the Nephew’s presence in the Bertin household. Horace’s slave Davus makes use of this temporary state of grace to tell his master openly about his faults; the satire is again in dialogue form, and it is the slave here who speaks wisdom as he shows that the master is no freer than his slave, and who goes on to reveal mankind’s follies.
    Diderot’s works largely defy easy generic classification, and his description of these two pieces as satires is untypically precise. In signalling the generic link to Horace, he gives us vital clues as to how to read these texts. The term ‘satire’ means etymologically a pot-pourri, a mixture of different things, and it is easy—perhaps too easy—to dismiss the seeming confusion of
Rameau’s Nephew
as nothing more than satire’s habitual disorderly mix. In this spirit, the French critic Taine in the nineteenth century described
Rameau’s Nephew
as ‘an incomparable monster and an immortal document’. On the one hand, these two satires are works that satirize the literary world of their day, products of a moment in the 1760s that was one of the tensest in Louis XV’s reign, when the arguments over the censorship of the
Encyclopédie
were taking place against the backdrop of the Damiens affair (a bungled and amateurish attempt to assassinate the King) and the Seven YearsWar with England. On the other hand, these literary works are timeless in the way they can be enjoyed even by readers without particular knowledge of the French
ancien régime
. Many of the specific references in Diderot’s two
Satires
remain hermetic even now; but it is worth remembering that the same is true of Horace’s work. In neither case does this prevent us from admiring their literary achievement. What makes Diderot’s satires such seminal Enlightenment texts is that they both express the enlightened values of reason and civility and at the same time question them. In their exploration of the ‘sociable animal’ they probe, more than other texts of the period, both man’s social and animal nature.
    Above all, we continue to relish these texts because they repeatedly force us to question our own assumptions, and this must surely explain both