which he directed against French national art strike home to the fine unity that had been realised in the music of Europe. But is that the only sphere in which all that is done against France is done against Europe?
Rousseau at the time of this quarrel was involved in the Encyclopaedic group, if not by the basis of his ideas, at any rate by his personal friendships, and above all by the presence of his name among the collaborators in that work. Party spirit (that scourge of letters) was very strong and uncompromising in the group which was obliged to defend its enterprise and its very existence against powerful enemies. "One for all, and all for one," an excellent principle as long as no one says or does anything foolish.
But with a Rousseau on the list it would have been idle to expect this discretion. Diderot, who had himself judged Rameau very justly in a passage of the Bijoux indiscrets (1748), where he compares him with Lulli, sang in chorus with Jean-Jacques, and did so with his customary thoroughness. It is true that the work from which I quote the following criticism is posthumous; it is the celebrated Rameau's Nephew, that farrago so much admired in Germany; its first ten pages are dazzling, and the remainder utterly wearisome. But it shews us the tone and drift of the opinions which this indefatigable talker must have aired in Paris when war was declared on the musician:
"It was Rameau (the nephew) pupil of the celebrated Rameau who delivered us from the plainsong that we had been droning for more than a century, who wrote so many unintelligible visions and apocalyptic truths on the theory of music whereof neither he nor anyone else could make out the meaning, and from whom we have a certain number of operas containing harmony,
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