Rochester and the Generation Op Wit

ROCHESTER AND THE GENERATION OP WIT DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By JUDSON BLAIR JEROME, M.A. The Ohio State University 1955 Approved by: Adviser Department of English TABLE 0 P CONTENTS Introduction, 1 \ I. A PULL ANSWER, 13 II. PROPRIETY OP THOUGHT AND WORDS, 36 III. NATURE'S NOTHING,. 65 IV. THE MIND'S RIGHT OBJECT, 99 V. CORRUPTION OP REASON, 127 Bibliography, 163 -ii- INTRODUCTION 1660. Most of England was delirious with joy at the return of Charles II from "his travels,11 an enforced and des titute tour of the continent, a fourteen year exile, while Cromwell ruled in place of a king. At Wadham College, Oxford, a twelve year old proper and precocious student labored over an ode of greeting for the returned monarch. He must have shared the general joy at the restoration of the old order and the end of a period of chaos. But the boy no doubt had another motive as well. His father, Henry Wilmot, first Earl of Rochester, had rendered the king noble service during the difficult years of exile. Now the young second Earl, John Wilmot, saw material advantage in reminding Charles of his father's name. If one sat down in 1660 to write an ode of welcome, how would he contemplate his task? What form would it take? "What ideas, what diction, what emotional effects would be appro priate? Consider for the moment these questions as they occur -1- -2- to the young nobleman. He is fairly well-read in the poetry of the day. He considers Donne, if he knows him at all, old hat. Shakespeare is a giant of the past, but too recent to be divine. He knows that the poetry of the first half of the century had been excessive, sentimental, obscure, unpolished. Now there is a New Criticism and a New Poetry claiming the dutiful admiration of sophisticated undergraduates. Nodding regally over the realms of poetry (much as T. S. Eliot looms large in the middle of the twentieth century) is the splendid name of Cowley. Abraham Cowley, a universal man of letters, the finest product of the old days and the herald of the new, was setting the fashion and providing the examples for such apprentice poets as John Wilmot and John Dryden. But there were lesser gods who also promised a new era for poetry. Denham, for instance, had shown how a tight couplet was ex cellently suited to didactic poetry, how it gave strength and finality to moral thought, condensed, balanced, and tied off in heroic verse. And DavenantJ What young poet could ignore the remarkable achievement of Davenant in defining the role of poetry in an age of reason. No more clap-trap and nonsense, Davenant had told them. There is no reason why poetry couldn't be as sensible as prose I And he had shown that even the beloved Cowley was guilty of metaphysical excesses. But perhaps more important than either Denham or Davenant was Waller, sweet Waller, who taught poets to combine the severest formal disci pline with a limpidity and softness and delicacy which was the highest achievement of civilized poetry, final triumph over the rudeness, the barbaric indulgence in fancy and cleverness and emotionalism which almost all former English poets had been guilty of. France was the center of civilization, and the great poets, Cowley, Davenant, Denham, Waller, had during the exile been able to drink at the fountainhead. So this ode he is about to write will surely be in heroic couplets, end-stopped, with carefully balanced sounds and ideas. And it will undoubtedly ring with the voice of Cowley, above all, but will be shaped by the whole direction of the new way of wit. He begins: Virtue's Triumphant Shrine! who do'st engage At once three Kingdoms in a Pilgrimage; Which in extatick duty strive to come Out of themselves, as well as from their home: Yes. Cowley would like this. Notibe how the first couplet is held together with the reference to religion— begun with shrine and ended with pilgrimage. Notice the subtle paradox of one ("at once") and three, just distantly suggesting the three in one concept in Christianity. Notice the paradox in "extatick duty" and the brief but witty elaboration of "come out": the people literally come out of their homes and figuratively come out of themselves. But on with it: Whilst England grows one Camp, and London is It self the Nation, not Metropolis; And Loyal Kent renews her Arts agen, Fencing her ways with moving Groves of Men; Local reference, Denham has taught us, enriches poetry and ties it to common sense. Charles would know that Kent had been one of the last counties to be subdued by Cromwell, and that -there had been an unsuccessful loyalist uprising there inI6I4.8 . But perhaps he is particularly pleased with these lines: Forgive this distant homage, which does meet Your blest approach on sedentary feet: The vowel sounds are carefully modulated from the four re petitions of the short i_ in the first line to the high vowel in the rhyme words. The balance of m and d on either side of the late caesura of the first line plays into the s_Ts of the second. Really exquisite lines, he might think to himself as he reads them back, carefully working tongue and lips. But the greatest achievement, of course, is the final paradox: the sedentary feet. Cowley himself might be proud of those words, with the gentle pun on metrical feet, the suppressed image of seated feet (an engaging extravagance of fancy), and the contrast in ideas between approaching and not moving. Yes, exquisite. And he finishes the short poem with an apology for his youth, promises of service, and a final climactic reference to the name of Wilmot. We may be sure that on the occasion of his Restoration Charles received worse verses. But do the religious references have any organic relation ship to the content of the poem? Isn’t "sedentary feet" a somewhat forced sort of cleverness? Isn’t the poem rather devoid of ideas? Does it stir the imagination or the emotions Is it sincere? Does it translate abstract idea into sense images? Does it probe experience and objectify a complex and deeply personal attitude? Isn't the form rather monotonous, -5- the separate units of thought breaking apart like poorly joined bricks in a flat wall? These questions would never have occurred to John Wilmot any more than it would have occurred to T. S. Eliot, writing The Dove Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, to ask himself if every couplet was a complete and interesting organization in itself, not slopping over into odd lines or disappearing in the larger tapestry of the poem, or whether each line had balance and equilibrium of sense and sound, or whether the communication was always reasonable and direct, the imagination always carefully under control so as t o decorate but not interfere with the poem’s core of statement. Great art does emerge from the maelstrom of changing taste, but the wide difference in the questions poets have asked themselves in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries is some indication of the tremendous effect revolutions of taste have upon particular aesthetic judgments. We have to remember that as late as Johnson’s hives of the English Poets Cowley was still important enough to eclipse Donne. Dr. Johnson mentions Donne almost in passing as he writes his larger diatribe against the metaphysicals, whom he takes up under i the name of Cowley. The preoccupations of the young Rochester as he wrote that ode must have been approximately those of the poets for the next hundred and forty years. This juvenile poem is bad by any standards; but the im portant thing to see in understanding the seventeenth century isthat it is bad according to the mature standards of Rochester himself. He was later to reject the cuteness, the vapidity, -6- the contrived rhymes and redundant, awkward phrasing which offend us today; but, more importantly, he was to learn to do more skilfully much that he was attempting in this poem. His couplets would become neater, have a more convincing rhythm; his antitheses would become sharper and more meaning ful; the balance would become at the same time more subtle and more definite. Above all, he would have something to say. To see this poem as inadequate in its own terms, to s ee it as a low point in the continuum which was to have at its other end Dryden and Pope, is quite a different judgment from one which would regard it as a repulsive oddity which turned up somehow in the sacred realms of Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas. This study is an attempt to provide some insight into the climate of literary opinion in the Restoration. I have chosen Rochester as a central figure because he, in his po etry and in his life, more or less defines the term wit as it is used in ibis period. As Rochester is central to the concept of wit, so wit is, I think, central to literary judg ment, indeed to intellectual history, in the period. My only aesthetic premise is that understanding is the basis of appreciation. I would ask a reader, for the time being, to suspend evaluation in favor of interest. The abominable can be quite as interesting as the excellent and can teach us quite as much about poetry.

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