Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics) (20 page)

Post-scriptum
. I’d love to read the commentary on Horace by Abbé Galiani, if you own it.
*
Some time when you have a free moment I wish you’d read the third Ode of Book III,
Justum et tenacem propositi virum
,
*
and then explain to me the role of the verse:
Aurum irrepertum et sic melius situm
,
*
which has nothing to do with what precedes it, or with what follows it, and spoils everything.

As to the two lines of the tenth Epistle in Book I,
Imperat aut [servit] collecta pecunia cuique, Tortum digna sequi, potius quam ducere funem
,
*
this is how I interpret them:

The outlying areas of towns are frequented by poets seeking solitude, and by rope-makers who find plenty of room there for making rope.
Collecta pecunia
, that’s the tow they collect in their apron. The tow is, in turn, controlled by the rope-maker, and then is itself in control of the action of the
chariot
. It’s controlled when it’s being spun, it’s in control when it’s being twisted. For the second operation, one end of the spun cord is attached to the swivel hook on the spinning wheel, and the other to the swivel hook on the
chariot
, an object rather like a small sled. This sled carries a heavy weight to slow it down as it moves in the opposite direction to the rope-maker, who, as he spins, walks backwards away from the spinning wheel. Meanwhile the
chariot
, as it twists, moves towards the spinning wheel. As the spun cord is twisted by the action of the spinning wheel it grows shorter, and in so doing pulls the sled towards the wheel. In this manner Horace makes us see that money, like tow, must do the work of the
chariot
and not of the rope-maker, must follow the twisted rope and not spin it, must render our life more stable, more vigorous, but not control it. The choice and placing of the words that the poet employs indicate that, metaphorically, he was borrowing from a process he had actually watched, and rescued from the pedestrian by his exquisite taste.

BY CHRISTOPHER WELLS

G
OETHE
is not merely the first translator of
Rameau’s Nephew
, he is one of the work’s first readers, and its first critic. The following selection is taken from his extensive writings about the work.

The full edited text of Goethe’s translation together with all his writings on the text and extensive commentary may be found in Johann Wolfgang Goethe,
Sämtliche Werke
, Volume II,
Benvenuto Cellini, Übersetzungen I
, ed. H.-G. Dewitz and W. Pross (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998). All page references below are to this edition. Goethe’s translation is broadly accurate, though he tones down some idioms and phrases to produce a more classically restrained effect; for example, he omits entirely the scabrous anecdote of the man nearly suffocated by his mistress’s enthusiastic love-making. For a detailed list of Goethe’s alterations to the text, see pp. 1320–5.

Goethe’s extensive notes to the text appear following the translation itself. While these are meant to explicate references perhaps unfamiliar to his contemporary audience, Goethe also uses them to interpret his text, and the following excerpts give some examples of this. Goethe sees the intricately constructed dialogue as a masterpiece in which morality and talent are contrasted; both proponents, the philosopher ‘Me’ and the parasitical musician ‘Him’, emerge as characters whose attitudes are at odds with the ideas they express. The ruthless candour of the nephew unmasks his own hypocrisy, but also that of the philosopher whose lofty moral detachment is undermined from the outset by the erotic metaphor of his thoughts as little tarts. Goethe, taking the text as, among other things, a satire on Diderot’s rival Palissot, argues that it is not legitimate to judge talent that is innate by the standards of morality: talent belongs on the wider stage of society, functions at a universal level, and, he seems to be saying, transcends the individual. The yardsticks for measuring it are acquired through application and study. On the other hand, every individual is born with a conscience and his actions are to be judged
only by his immediate entourage—his wife and family, his neighbours and the authorities where he lives, that is, people who know him intimately. Since Goethe also contrasts his more provincial and ‘homely’ Germans in their fragmented and decentralized states with the more sophisticated French whose great (and at the time oppressive) state is represented by Parisian high society, we might also detect in this overtones of Weimar and echoes of censure directed at Goethe’s own private life. But the separation of morality and art which Goethe places at the centre of his observations also shows Diderot in a partisan position against Palissot, whereas Goethe, in his note on the latter, regards him as mediocre but worthy, striving for higher things without managing always to leave the banal behind, but essentially a man to be counted among the better minds of his day. It serves Goethe’s purpose, of course, not to diminish Palissot’s achievements on moral grounds, since he is arguing against the legitimacy of doing so. However, it is music which lends structure and dignity to this text, in Goethe’s view, and consequently his observations on French music and taste may be helpful in understanding his contemporary appreciation of
Rameau’s Nephew
.

The observations on taste form the starting point for a compressed discussion of appropriateness and an argument in favour of difference in nations, societies, and individuals:
Rameau’s Nephew
provides the stimulus, but not the substance, of Goethe’s ‘note’. On several occasions Goethe embarks on the distinction between the free man of genius and the limiting, ‘mediocre’ conventions required by society, and in the process he sketches cultural and intellectual differences between French and German literary audiences, and hints at the links between literatures, of which the transmission of Diderot’s dialogue is an interesting and not everyday example. At one point Goethe states that the French Revolution has so changed France and French society that his notes are all the more necessary in order to help his German audience appreciate French literary and intellectual life in the pre-Revolutionary 1760s. Goethe himself, on the other hand, had had early acquaintance with French literature and had followed avidly the progressive appearance of some of the major works, since excerpts from them had been sent to reading circles in Gotha during his childhood. He was
au fait
with the major players and consequently able to savour the dialogue. Goethe is keen to compare French with German culture. As part of the attempts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to
create a German national identity, it was useful to identify a recognizable centralist, French model, as opposed to the fragmented absolutist states. This was something which Wilhelm von Humboldt admired in the work; he wrote to Goethe on 12 April 1806:’
Rameau’s Nephew
provides the occasion, and for the Nation the material, for many interesting observations on national differences’ (see pp. 1370–1).

________

1804: A French manuscript, Diderot’s
Nephew
, was put into my hands by Schiller with the wish that I might translate the same. I had always been quite particularly taken with Diderot, not, indeed, for his attitudes and way of thinking, but for his mode of writing as an author, and I found the slim notebook lying in front of me to be of the most exciting excellence. I had scarcely encountered anything more impertinent and more controlled, wittier and bolder, more moral in an immoral fashion; so I decided to undertake the translation with the utmost willingness, whereupon I summoned forth the treasures of literature I had read before, for the sake of my own and other people’s better understanding, and so there came into being what I appended to the work in the form of notes, and finally I published it with G͎schen. The German translation was meant to appear first, and the original was to be printed shortly afterwards. Convinced that this would happen, I neglected to take a copy of the original, from which, as will be narrated later, some very odd circumstances arose [see Section III below]. (p. 1341)

Preamble

The translator had set himself the task of shedding more light on the persons and matters mentioned and discussed in the present dialogue and on their situations and relationships by setting down these alphabetically arranged notes for the convenience of the reader. Many hindrances set themselves in the way of this undertaking which
could only partially be carried out. Nevertheless, since even through this his aim could still be achieved, to some extent, it seemed expedient not to hold back what has been done at present in the expectation of a more extensive treatment at some future date. (p. 755)

The major text which we are presenting to the German public under this title must in all probability be counted among the most accomplished of all Diderot’s works. His nation, even his friends indeed, reproached him for being able to pen excellent pages readily enough, while not being capable of producing an excellent work as a whole. Such bons mots get repeated and propagate themselves, and the reputation of an excellent individual is reduced through this without any further questioning. Those people who make this sort of judgement had probably not read
Jacques the Fatalist
; and the present text also bears witness to Diderot’s felicitous capacity to combine the most disparate elements of reality into a conceptual whole. Incidentally, whatever people might think of him as a writer, both his friends and his enemies were in complete agreement that in spoken conversation nobody outdid him in vivacity, power, wit, ingenuity, and elegance.

So, by choosing a dialogue form for the present text, he was putting himself at his natural advantage, and in the process he produced a masterpiece that one admires more and more, the more one becomes familiar with it. Its rhetorical and moral purpose is complex. First, he deploys all his intellectual powers to portray flatterers and spongers in the full extent of their vileness, and in the process he does not let their patrons off lightly either. At the same time, the author is at pains to lump together all his literary enemies as just such a pack of hypocrites and toadies, and furthermore he takes the opportunity of saying exactly what he thinks and feels about French music.

However heterogeneous this last ingredient—music—may appear in the context of the others, it is notwithstanding the element that lends structure and dignity to the whole: for, while a decidedly independent character manifests itself in the person of Rameau’s nephew, one capable of any baseness at the merest prompting of some external stimulus, and hence one arousing our contempt, and even hatred, these feelings are nevertheless considerably mitigated by the man’s revealing himself as an imaginative and resourceful musician
not entirely devoid of talent. Also, this innate talent of the main protagonist lends a considerable advantage in respect of the poetic composition itself, since the person portrayed as the representative of all flatterers and sycophants, of a whole category, now lives and acts as an individual, as a separately drawn being, a Rameau, as a nephew of the great Rameau.

How splendidly these threads essential to the design from the outset have been interwoven, what delightful diversity of entertainment springs from the fabric of this text, how the whole work, despite the banality of confronting a rascal and an honest man, seems to be composed of real Parisian details we leave to the discerning reader and rereader to discover for himself. For the work has been as successfully thought out and thought through as it is in its very conception. Yes, even its extreme heights of frivolity, where we were not at liberty to follow, it attains with a calculated intentionality. May it please the owner of the French original to share it with the public with the utmost speed; so that this classic by a dead, major literary figure may then appear in its entirety in complete and untouched form.

An investigation of when the work was most probably written might not be out of place at this point. Palissot’s comedy
The Philosophers
is spoken of as having just appeared, or being in the process of appearing. This play was staged for the first time on 2 May 1760 in Paris. The effect of such a public, personal satire will have been great enough on friends and enemies alike in that most lively city.

In Germany, too, we have cases where ill-disposed individuals, partly through pamphlets and partly from the stage, set out to do damage to other people. But anyone who is not stung by the anguish of the moment only needs to stay calm for a while, and in a short time everything is back on its old course, as though nothing had happened. In Germany only presumptuousness and false achievement have anything to fear from personal satirical attack. Everything genuine, however much attacked it may be, remains as a rule dear to the nation, and after the clouds of dust have passed over the steady man is still visible, proceeding on his way as before.

So the German need only increase his merit through serious application and honesty for him to be appreciated by his nation, sooner or later; and he can afford to wait for this to happen with all the more equanimity, given that, with the present uncoordinated state of our fatherland each man can live and work away undisturbed in his town,
in his neighbourhood, in his house, in his own room, and that, incidentally, however much storms may rage outside and elsewhere. However, in France things were quite different. The Frenchman is a sociable animal, he lives and acts, stands and falls, in the company of his fellows. How could a French high society in Paris which so many had joined, which exercised such important influence, how could a society like that permit several of its members, indeed society itself, to be so scandalously exhibited, made ludicrous, dubious, and contemptible in the very place of its living and being? A violent reaction on its part was only to be expected.