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

person. This interest is hardly new, for he had hinted at it twenty years earlier, in his article ‘Encyclopedia’ in the
Encyclopédie
(vol. 5, 1755):
    It is important sometimes to mention absurd things, but it must be done lightly and in passing, simply for the history of the human soul,which reveals itself better in certain odd incidents than in some eminently reasonable action. These incidents are for moralists what the dissection of a monster is for the natural historian: it is more useful to him than the study of a hundred identical individuals. There are certain words which describe more powerfully and more completely than an entire speech.
    Such ‘words of character’ make up the substantial part of the
First Satire
, and at the same time pave the way for
Rameau’s Nephew, Second Satire
, in which they recur as a constituent part of the characterization of ‘Him’. Diderot’s interest in these forms of expression goes beyond his liking for a good story; they are central to his philosophy of man and to his attempt to bring together ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic concerns.
    When considering Aristotle’s ‘sociable animal’ from the standpoint of the Enlightenment, we tend to focus, naturally enough, on sociability. Such is Montesquieu’s emphasis in the
Persian Letters
(letter 87). Diderot, almost uniquely among his contemporaries (but in the best tradition of satire), invites us to focus also on the other side of the coin, that is to say, on animality. The
First Satire
begins with a bravura account of a human bestiary: in the manner of classical satire, all men can be classified by animal types. The overt treatment of this theme here makes us reread the
Second Satire
in a different light, for it is one of the striking characteristics of the Nephew that he uses forceful animal imagery throughout. He likens himself and others to dogs, he is ‘cock of the roost’ in the Bertin household, and a worm when he is expelled from it; on other occasions he compares himself and his like to wolves and to tigers, while he describes others as monkeys, geese, and so forth. For the Nephew, the world is a jungle, and ‘in nature all the species prey on one another; in society all the classes do the same’ (p. 31)—this does not sound much like Addison’s ‘sociable animal’. Addison was taking his cue from Locke, for whom man is by nature social. But Diderot has in mind perhaps an earlier English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who held a mechanistic view of life as simply the movements of the organism; since man was a selfishly individualisticanimal at constant war with all other men, society could exist only by the power of the state. In the clash between ‘Me’ and ‘Him’, Addison’s comfortable view of man as sociable animal is exploded as Diderot stages for us the clash between Locke and Hobbes.
    These allusions to animals take us to the heart of the satirical tradition. At one point in the
First Satire
the narrator excuses himself for writing almost in the manner of the Roman satirist Persius, whose poems had a hard edge, rather than explaining a passage of Horace, whose milder satire was tinged with epicureanism. Both of Diderot’s
Satires
begin with epigraphs from the
Satires
of Horace; and the ‘post-scriptum’ to the
First Satire
, which is a discussion of certain passages in Horace, seems to be the continuation in print of a debate which Diderot was conducting with his friend Naigeon, a learned Latinist. The epigraph of the
First Satire
is taken from Horace,
Satires
, 11. i: the line in question, ‘For every thousand living souls, there are as many thousand tastes’, straightforwardly sets the tone for what is to follow. But the dedication to Naigeon which comes after, and which quotes the opening lines of the poem, seems to suggest that Diderot is also alluding to the poem as a whole. Horace opens his second book of
Satires
with a reflection on the nature of satire itself; his opening poem is