The old cries were heard in a shriller key than before.
Pamphlets, broadsheets, sarcasms flew over Paris from every side.
Was music only to flatter the ear, or was it to paint the passions in all their energy, to harrow the soul, to raise men's courage, to form citizens and heroes?
The coffee-houses were thrown into dire confusion, and literary societies were rent by fatal discord.

Even dinner-parties breathed only constraint and mistrust, and the intimacies of a lifetime came to cruel end.

_Rameau's Nephew_ was composed in the midst of the first part of this long campaign of a quarter of a century, and its seems to have been revised by its author in the midst of the second great episode.

Diderot declares against the school of Rameau and Lulli.
That he should do so was a part of his general reaction in favour of what he called the natural, against the artifice and affectation.

Goethe has pointed out the inconsistency between Diderot's sympathy for the less expressive kind of music, and his usual vehement passion for the expressive in art.