We watch the very classes from which, as we have been so often told, the regeneration of France would have come, if only demagogues and rabble had not violently interposed.  There is no gaiety in the style; none of that laughter which makes such a delineation of the manners of the time as we find in Colle’s play of Truth in Wine, naif, true to nature, and almost exhilarating.  In Rameau we are afflicted by the odour of deadly taint.

As the dialogue is not in every hand—­nor could any one wish that it should be—­I have thought it worth while to print an English rendering of a considerable part of it in an appendix.  Mr. Carlyle told us long ago that it must be translated into English, and although such a piece of work is less simple than it may seem, it appears right to give the reader an opportunity of judging for himself of the flavour of the most characteristic of all Diderot’s performances.  Only let no reader turn to it who has any invincible repugnance to that curious turn for wildbret, which Goethe has described as the secret of some arts.

    Dixeris haec inter varicosos centuriones,
    Continuo crassum ridet Pulfenius ingens
    Et centum Graecos curto centusse licebit.

As I have already said, it must be judged as something more than a literary diversion.  “You do not suspect, Sir Philosopher,” says Rameau, “that at this moment I represent the most important part of the town and the court.”  As the painter of the picture says, Rameau confessed the vices that he had, and that most of the people about us have; but he was no hypocrite.  He was neither more nor less abominable than they; he was only more frank and systematic and profound in his depravity.  This is the social significance of the dialogue.  This is what, apart from other considerations, makes Rameau’s Nephew so much more valuable a guide to the moral sentiment of the time than merely licentious compositions like those of Louvet or La Olos.  Its instructiveness is immense to those who examine the conditions that prepared the Revolution.  Rameau is not the [Greek:  akolastos] of Aristotle, nor the creature of [Greek:  aponoia] described by Theophrastus—­the castaway by individual idiosyncrasy, the reprobate by accident.  The men whom he represented, the courtiers, the financiers, the merchants, the shopkeepers, were immoral by formula and depraved on principle.  Vice was a doctrine to them, and wretchlessness of unclean living was reduced to a system of philosophy.  Any one, I venture to repeat, who realises the extent to which this had corroded the ruling powers in France, will perceive that the furious flood of social energy which the Jacobins poured over the country was not less indispensable to France than the flood of the barbarians was indispensable for the transformation of the Roman Empire.