some
of the references, have been revised after 1773. The two young men who
had tried to palm off their retranslation from Goethe as Diderot's own
text, at once had the effrontery to accuse Briere and Diderot's daughter
of repeating their own fraud. A vivacious dispute followed between the
indignant publisher and his impudent detractors. At length Briere
appealed to the great Jove of Weimar. Goethe expressed his conviction
that Briere's text was the genuine text of the original, and this was
held to settle the question. Yet Goethe's voucher for its correspondence
with the copy handed to him by Schiller was not really decisive
evidence. He admits that he executed the translation very rapidly, and
had no time to compare it closely with the French. An identification
nearly twenty years afterwards of verbal resemblances and minute
references, in a work that had been only a short time in his hands,
cannot be counted testimony of the highest kind. We have thus the
extraordinary circumstance that for a great number of years, down almost
to the present decade, the text of the one masterpiece of a famous man
who died so recently as 1784 rested on a single manuscript, and that a
manuscript of disputed authenticity.[295]

Critics differ extremely in their answers to the question of the subject
or object of Diderot's singular "farce-tragedy." One declares it to be
merely a satirical picture of contemporary manners. Another insists that
it is meant to be an ironical _reductio ad absurdum_ of the theory of
self-interest, by exhibiting a concrete example of its working in all
its grossness. A third holds that it was composed by way of rejoinder to
Palissot's comedy _(Les Philosophes_), 1760, which had brought the
chiefs of the rationalistic school upon the stage, and presented them as
enemies of the human race. A fourth suspects that the personal and
dramatic portions are no more than a setting for the discussion of the
comparative merits of the French and Italian schools of music. The true
answer is that the dialogue is all of these things, because it is none
of them. It is neither more nor less than the living picture and account
of an original, drawn by a man of genius who was accustomed to observe
human nature and society with a free unblinking vision, and to meditate
upon them deeply and searchingly.

Diderot goes to work with Rameau in some sort and to a certain extent
as Shakespeare went to work with Falstaff. He is the artis