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

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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. At any rate, interest gives us

an approach to the period which is more apt to result in

understanding. Evaluation must come later, and I hope that -7- a reader will evaluate somewhat differently after reading what follows, that he will be persuaded to like things he

couldn't have liked before. Nor, in the process, am I fearful of undermining good taste. I intend to stretch it to include more, but in this there can be no harm; appreciation, like love, has an intrinsic value. The more of it in the world, the better.

Why Rochester? What became of the adolescent poet of

Wadham College which gives him the central importance I have ascribed to him? Probably part of his legend is familiar to every student of Restoration literature: how still in his teens he went to Whitehall and quickly became a favorite drinking companion of the urbane and libertine king; how his brilliance soon helped him become the most notorious debauchee in a court where that was some distinction; how he wrote poetry which embarrassed even the earthy Samuel Pepys, and satires upon king and commonwealth so cutting that he was forced to spend a good deal of his time ir. Europe or in the country to avoid the royal wrath; and how, at 3 3 , dying of a venereal disease, he accepted the pious and pragmatic ministrations of a former court chaplain, Gilbert Burnet, and died repentant in the arms of the Church of England.

Beyond these lurid dramatic outlines his story is not widely known. The anthologies ordinarily reprint an expurgated version of Upon Drinking in a Bowl, half a dozen innocuous songs, and, always, the Satyr Against Mankind. The histories generally mention him as one of the group of court wits who -8- apparently lay claim to a place in English poetry by virtue of charming, superficial, immoral songs and occasional satires of contemporary manners.

Some may have noticed a greater competence in the work of Rochester than in that of Sedley, Dorset or Etherege, who are usually classed with him. Or perhaps it bothers some that the Satyr Against Mankind is of quite a different order of poetry than the tired and decadent flowers of song which surround it in the anthologies. The violent energy of that poem, its philosophical overtones, the expert sharpness of some of its lines, make it in many ways unique in English poetry. What produced this odd wild white rage, disturbing, as it does, the Augustan calm as it was to be disturbed again only by Swift in the last voyage of Gulliver's Travels and by Pope in the final furious lines of the Dunciad?

Unfortunately it has been almost impossible until recent­ ly for most students to satisfy their curiosity, if they had any, about Rochester. The bawdry in his poetry, particu­ larly in some of his best poems, is so extreme and so perva­ sive that Rochester has been seldom reprinted, and the skimpy anthology selections are such as to misrepresent his princi­ pal accomplishments. In 1950 James Thorpe prepared for Prince­ ton University Press a reprint of the Huntington library copy of the notorious 1680 edition of Poems on Several Occasions, making available the bulk of Rochester's poetry in the unex­ purgated form which is probably nearest what the author put down on paper. In 1953 Vivian de Sola Pinto edited a more or leas complete edition, Poems by John Wilmot Earl of

Rochester, for the Muses' Library, Routledge and Kegan

Paul, London, giving adequate reference to the Thorpe

edition for those poems which he was unable to print in

Great Britain, Thus with these two volumes substantially

all the Rochester canon is easily available.^-

With the whole (if narrow) sweep of his poetry before

us, we can see that Rochester had first of all a sure and penetrating satiric talent, in some ways superior to that

of Dryden himself. Secondly, he was the nearest thing to

a lyric poet produced by the Restoration, The lyric was,

it must be remembered, not even recognized as a genre by

Restoration critics; the songs of the period tended to be

trite, impersonal and ephemeral, Efochester alone seems to have regarded poetry as an appropriate means for expression of personality and for honest probing of emotional attitudes.

Thirdly, not because he was a.philosopher but because he was an intelligent and learned person who was emotionally con­ cerned with ideas, his poetry uniquely reflects the philoso­ phic turmoil of his day. Dryden and Milton, among others, wrote philosoptical poetry, but Rochester is somewhat dif­ ferent In that his speculations about the nature and purpose of man and the universe are almost always throbbing with per-

^The notable exception is Rochester's one complete play, an adaptation of Fletcher's Valentinian, which was most recent­ ly printed in John Hayward's ed.i'tion of The Collected Works of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, Nonesuch, '1926', Qne should see the remarkable Rochester-Savile Letters, 1671-1680, ed. J. H, Wilson, (Columbus, Ohio State University, l^l). -10- sonal involvement, does not tell us his ideas: he shows us himself as he lives them. This last quality is unusual in the neo-classic period, and perhaps accidental in terms of the ends that Rochester's age taught him to pursue in poetry. But the personal involvement is useful in helping us understand the emotional significance of historical detail.

I must emphasize again that I am not undertaking a systematic critical study of Rochester. I am using Roches­ ter as a central figure in the study of wit, and using wit, in turn, as a means of access to at least a large part of

Restoration literature. In other words I am attempting to contribute to an understanding of Absalom and Achitophel and The Country Wife as well as to an evaluation of Rochester.

I have permitted myself to be discursive, to follow suggestions through the reaches of seventeenth century literature in a somewhat helter-skelter fashion on the assumption that such longitudinal wandering will serve better than an orderly his­ tory to convey some sense of the tradition and the range of reference playing into particular poems. I spend a good deal of time here and there on Donne, whose wit, like Rochester's, is definitive for Its time and is a complex way of looking at life. Donne's wit is in some ways sharply different from and In some ways the source of Rochester's own--although there is no reason to believe that Rochester ever read Donne or regarded him as an important poet. I have used a few plays to illustrate ideas and attitudes which were in thB aiir in -li­

the Restoration. I have, on the whole, attempted to avoid

the frequently reprinted nuggets, believing that X could

do the reader better service by supplying him with back­

ground he is not likely to come by in an ordinary survey

of the literary highlights of the period.

Finally, 1 have not limited myself to what I can

safely say. This is a warning to the reader that I suggest

a great deal which i can't prove, and which very likely

can never be proved. Most of history is not recorded, and

we are apt to have strangely proportioned interpretations

of the past if we rely out of proportion upon the odd

selection of information time has seen fit to preserve.

By this measure, a record of baptism in a parish register

is the most significant detail of many poets* lives. Al­

though there is never an excuse for ignoring what information

can be uncovered, I feel that particularly in a work that

attempts to cope with the imagination and thought of the

past, imagination and thought are at least as valuable as

research. I have given free range to speculation, leaving

at perhaps an outrageous distance the little island which

can be verified, finding here as elsewhere that the more one

sees the less he can be sure of anyway.

It is amusing to think of secure verification when one

is following '’wit’s wild dancing light." That light thrives

on the unexpected and the treacherous. Early in the century

wit threw: off its connotations of learning and became that

"smile of the mind" which enchants as it kills. Throughout -12- the century the meaning of the word was never constant and never simple. At times the word described a sudden and frightening ambiguity, a vision that all truth is built on sand. At times it described the sharp scalpel which analyzes reality into its bleeding essentials. At times it described the crust over tenderness, the hard scab erected to protect soft wounds. Late in the century it became a word for a kind of frantic despair that the only reality was dullness and that dullness would in time absorb us all. When, not long after the turn of the eighteenth century--in the crotchety temperament of

Wycherley and in Swift and Pope--the light raged its last and sputtered and died, dullness indeed had won.

An offended society retrenched its solid lines. Domes­ ticated wit became a kind of amusement. There was, the world sighed comfortably, no longer any need to take it seriously. I . A PULL ANSWER

When John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, died in 1680 he was given a Christian burial. His life had been an of­ fense to the church, but his death was quite another thing.

By choice he had undertaken, in his last few weeks, a long religious debate with an important Anglican clergyman, the

Scottish Gilbert Burnet. As a result, according to Burnet,

Rochester, in clear possession of his faculties, had com­ pletely repented, dying with nothing but shame and scorn for his past friends and his past life, ordering all his licentious writings to be destroyed.

Hardly had his funeral sermon, preached by the Rever­ end Robert Parsons, stopped echoing in the ears of London­ ers when a pirated and secretly printed volume appeared bearing on its title page, Poems on Several Occasions By the Right Honourable, the E. of R , containing not only many of the "licentious writings" of the Earl, but the 11-

-13- -li­

centious writings of several other people as well, er­ roneously attributed to Rochester. Thus his soul in two

separate ways sought immortality. The Reverend Parsons,

in his funeral service, found some praise for the poet who had lived as well as for the repentant who died:

A Wit he had, so rare and fruitful in its In­ vention and withal so choice and delicate in Its Judgment, that there is nothing wanting in his Composures to give a full answer to that Question, What and Where Wit Is? except the Purity and Choice of Sub jject.

Parsons was sure that had such seeds fallen upon better ground "Instead of pitching upon a Beast or a Lust"

Rochester would have been an excellent writer of "Psalms, and Hymns, and Spiritual Songs."

The quality which Parsons singles out in Rochester’s

"composures" is wit. Indeed, he tells us that Rochester's work is full answer to one who would know about wit, that this poetry is the definition of wit. Since most of the men of intellect and creativity in the seventeenth century were called wits, this statement is more remarkable than it may at first seem: we may be inclined to discount it a3 an example of such hyperbole as frequently infects the honest tongues of men of God when they deliver funeral orations. It is even more remarkable when one rids himself of twentieth century reactions to the word. Today wit or­ dinarily refers to a vaguely decadent and thin-voiced sense of humor by which some otherwise undesirable people make themselves welcome at cocktail parties. In the seventeenth century wit was a more general term for powers of the

intellect.

Parsons himself gives us a more exact indication of

what he means by the word. To know "What and Where Wit

is/ 1 he tells us, we need not look beyond the "Composures,

the writing, of Rochester. In the composures we will find

evidence of two qualities, invention and judgment, which

make up wit. These terms refer to the major concepts in

the history of wit. Invention, or fancy, or creative

imagination, the synthetic faculty of mind, genius as op­

posed to learning, all this may be subsumed under the

first quality. Notice that Parsons refers to Rochester's

invention as "rare and fruitful." We might take "rare"

to mean ingenious, surprising, original, and "fruitful"

to mean not only abundant but generative, rich, provoca­

tive. The second quality is judgment, which has two prin­

cipal sets of connotations. In the first place judgment

tends toward reason, analysis, observation of the real

world; secondly, it implies taste and restraint, which is

selective and subtle, which grasps reality firmly without

crushing it. We may take these terms as describing the

ideal function of a certain kind of mind in 1680, with one

qualification which Parsons expresses. These terms refer

to form of thought, not its subject matter. And Parsons feels that, in his writing, Rochester leaves something to be desired in regard to "Purity and Choice of Subject."

This distinction between the form and content of wit is basic to what I have to say here. Wit as a term to describe a mental faculty was not a stable concept. If we can imagine wit as a clinically pure term of psycho­

logical jargon in the seventeenth century, we must suppose

that its most general meaning was something like Intelli­ gence, one’s general faculties for knowing, imagining, 1 learning, expressing, judging. But the emphasis on one

or another cluster of mental faculties shifts throughout the century, and the history of the word is winding and confusing. At times it means the whole intelligence, then fancy almost alone, then fancy plus judgment, then judgment alone, until its meaning finally decays into the immoral and the clever. The word is never translatable because while its denotation was shifting and vague, its connota­ tions were even more complicated, reflecting the whole blaze of the intellectual concerns, of the century. But notice that the reflection is of content, not form. It was the content of wit, rather than the form, which changed the things, in other words, which men were witty about.

And here Parsons was, because of his ecclesiastical scruples, dead wrong. In.l680 the content of wit was im­ pure and indelicate. The content of Rochester’s wit was even more definitive than its form. This, I think, will be clear in its place. At the end of the seventeenth cen-

^■"Originally the five senses, later the five internal senses .. (usually communis sensus, imaginatio, phantasia, aestimatio, memoria). ” Murray • ¥. Bundy, hWi't, Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T. Shipley (Philosophical Library, New York: 1953), P» 62JLj_. -17- tury there was a violent reaction against wit in all quar­ ters, and the reaction makes little sense if one thinks of

England taking up arms against judgment or fancy or any combination of the two. Rochester and his "Composures11 are a concrete embodiment of what Blackmore and Collier and an outraged citizenry reacted against: not form but matter] and it was matter which dragged the word wit after it through all the swirl of neoclassic terminology.

I shall return to that swirl in the next chapter, but I think it may be well at this point to contrast Par­ sons' external description of Rochester's wit with a state­ ment by Rochester himself which, apparently, describes with great frankness his own conception of the creative process.

The poem is cryptically entitled An Epistolary Essay from

M. G. to 0. B. upon their Mutual Poems, and was probably addressed by Rochester to the Earl of Mulgrave between

May and November of 1669» shortly before these two wits fell into one of the most ridiculous and violent quarrels 2 to rock this society of ridiculous and violent quarrels.

p The estimate of the date and an account of the spec­ ulation about the meaning of the initials may be found in the notes of Vivian de Sola Pinto, ed., Poems by John Wil­ mot Earl of Rochester (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953)» referred to hereafter as Pinto, and the notes of James Thorpe, ed., Rochester's Poems on Several Occasions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), referred to hereafter as Thorpe. Since my concern is interpretive, rather than pri­ marily textual or biographical, I refer the reader in general to the excellent textual discussions in Pinto and Thorpe and to the following biographical accounts: Pin­ to's somewhat outdated but still valuable biography and criticism, Rochester, Portrait of a Restoration Poet (Lon- -18-

The unexplained initials in the title and Rochester's re­ lations with Mulgrave do not seem to be involved in the poem, which stands alone as an interesting and sharply written personal statement.

Rochester is now twenty-two. It has been nearly ten years since he wrote the poem greeting Charles II f quoted in the Introduction. And he has learned a great deal about poetry. The epistolary form gives him the op­ portunity for conversational directness, and he begins with an unorthodox couplet (a line of tetrameter joined to one of pentameter) which leaps into the poem with a dashing and impatient air:

Dear Friend. I Hear this Town does so abound With sawcy Censurers, that faults are found With what of late we (in Poetique rage) Bestowing, threw away on the dull Age;

The hasty appearance must not be mistaken for carelessness. don: John Lane, 1935)» the useful summary in the Introduc­ tion to Pinto's edition of the poems, and J. H. Wilson, The Court Wits of the Restoration (Princeton: Princeton Univer­ sity Press, 19I4-S). For instance, for an account of the con­ troversy between Rochester and Mulgrave, see Wilson, pp. 117-19• Pinto and Wilson have done a great deal to punc­ ture many of the gaseous stories which were circulated un­ critically about Rochester in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A reader must be extremely cautious of the var­ ious biographical accounts which swallow every piece of gossip whole— such as the, recent Rake Rochester by Charles Norman. An example may be drawn from the Mulgrave-Roches­ ter controversy. The two Earls arranged' a duel because of a silly and incidental Insult; the duel never came off. In the eighteenth century, the aging Mulgrave, inveterate ego­ tist, gave an account of a ludicrous meeting on the field of battle during which Rochester, by one dodge and another, showed his unwillingness to fight. Norman mistakes Mul­ grave' s Memoirs for history and .passes on the little story intact. Pinto, p. xxiii, reports evidence that the duel was actually averted by personal intervention of the king and that the charges of cowardice based on Mulgrave's account are un­ warranted. -19- Upon closer examination a steady and controlling art may

be seen. The salutation, of course fills out the beat of

the short first line, but the line nevertheless has a

tetrameter organization, with a near rhyme, Town and abound,

ending each of its halves. This organization is neatly

opposed to the alliterative pattern of the second line,

with sawcy Censurers and faults . . . found balanced on

either side of the caesura. I will not continue imposing

purely prosodlcal analysis upon the reader, but I feel

obliged to point out that Rochester had learned as much as

anyone about the manipulation of the closed couplet. As

a poet he was a gentleman amateur, but not such an amateur

as to lack the sensitivity and skill which equip the pro­

fessionals .

Directly we are made aware that we are in the age of

reason. None of this nonsense about poetic fury and divine

inspiration for Rochester:

I'm none of those who think themselves inspir’d, Nor write with the vain hope to be admir’d; But from a Rule I have (upon long tryal) T 1avoid with care all sort of self denyal. Which way so ’ere desire, and fancy lead, (Contemning Fame) that Path I boldly tread; And if exposing what I take for wit, To my dear self a pleasure I beget, No matter tho the cens’ring Criticks fret.

This is the day of Hobbes. For that crusty old man there were no "immaterial substances" speaking through a poet's

divine lips. The self is the final determinant of pleasure

and pain,(and of good and bad, which are but words for pleasure and pain.) While there is an ironic smile in these -20-

solipsistic lines, there is a strong element of honesty as well. Why should one write except for pleasure? And if

one desires to write, why should he deny himself? To put

the argument in the terms of John Dewey, in Art as Exper­ ience. if the organism gets out of adjustment with its environment, it attempts to regain harmony. If it is hungry, it eats. If it has a need of expelling heroic / couplets, it does so. The significant thing which dis­ tinguishes this kind of aesthetics, whether spoken by

Rochester or Dewey, from others is that It puts the impulse to produce art on a level with all other impulses. This equation of the need to write poetry with other needs will become embarrassingly evident as the poem continues.

Another principle hinted at in these lines which will be expanded elsewhere is thfe curious kind of integ­ rity which solipsism involves. If one secures his own ease with contempt for the opinions of others he has at / least the virtue of truth to himself. The importance, em­ phasized by the Romantic poets, of expression of self, of disregard, at least in poetry, of any external control of behavior, is, of course, not usually a part of neoclassic doctrine. The tone in which Rochester handles the ques­ tion is an interesting combination of what we might call

Romanticism and Classicism. He makes no attempt to dis­ guise the unfavorable connotations of what he is sayingi in fact, he laughs at himself a little, and goes on to say what he pleases anyway. The Romanticist might be expected -21-

to take himself more seriously. The Classicist might be expected to ridicule the idea in others.

It is interesting, also, that Rochester fully recog­ nizes the inseparability of himself and his poetry which

the preceding principle implies.

These whom my Muse displeases, are at strife, With equal spleen against my course of life, The least delight of which, I'll not forgo, For all the flatt'ring praise, Man can bestow. If I design'd to please, the way were then, To mend my Manners, rather than my Fen: The first's unnatural, therefore unfit, And for the second, I despair of it, Since Grace Is not so hard to get as Wit.

Perhaps it is overdignifying this apology to translate it to more familiar critical terms, but I can't believe that

Rochester wasn’t following through an inescapable logic.

The poet’s duty is to represent nature. Since the only

"nature" that we can know is ourselves, the poet’s business is to represent himself, express himself, as truly as he can. To distort the unfettered self would be a failure of the first order, hence "unfit." Implied here is the phil­ osophical premise of libertinism (which will be discussed more fully In Chapter IV) that goodness and truth lie in the"natural11 state of man, untarnished by the artificial restraints of society. Since "Grace" (a pun on the reli­ gious term plus social grace. In a word, the approval of

God and society) is difficult to achieve, and "Wit" (ap­ parently the word means here writing which meets critical approval) is even more difficult, why bother trying to please others? Since It is neither honest nor easy to be -22- other-directed, to use David Rie.sman's terms, why not be inner-directed?

Well, one might answer, inner-direction might result in socially harmful action. Rochester, anticipating this objection, reduces it to absurdity:

Perhaps ill Verses, ought to be confin'd In meer good breeding like unsav'ry Wind: Were reading forc'd, I shou'd be apt to think, Men might no more write scurvily than stink: But 'tis your choice, whether you'll read, or: no, If likewise of your smelling it were so. I'd fart just as I write for my own ease, Nor shou'd you be concern'd unless you please.

The argument is incontrovertible, and constitutes a strong­ ly worded declaration of independence for poetry. If you don't like lines like these, don’t read them, for reading, unlike smelling, is a willful act. The pungent metaphor has two strong implications beyond what it states. First, poetry is no more sacred than any other, even the meanest, human activity. Second, poetry is something like a form of self-therapy by which one rids himself of what he can­ not absorb. I am reminded of a painting' class in the pub­ lic park, as the assumptions are present in both cases that art is better off without its halo of preciousness which separates it from everyday life, and that the im­ portant thing about art is not the quality of the finished product but what you are able to "get out of your system" in the process of producing it. I don't mean to sound snobbish about either Rochester or the painting class in the public park. I simply want: to point out that the aes­ thetics here is both different from the aesthetics of the -23- salon and quite at odds with the customary assumptions of

the neoclassic period.

Rochester is insistent upon the democratic nature

of art. He continues;

I'll own, that you write better than I do, But I have as much need to write as you. What though the Excrements of my dull Brain, Flows in a harsh insipid strain; Whilst your rich head, eases itself of Wit, Must none but Civet Cats have leave to shit?

Besides a not too subtle suggestion that Mulgrave is a polecat, these lines tell us that skill doesn't really

count in art. H© has told us before that adherence to

critical standards doesn’t count, either. What does count?

What standards are possible if we accept these premises?

Exactly those which the instructor of the painting class

in the public park gives voice to: honesty, fidelity to

self, individuality. Is this, he says, the way you really

see it? Is this the way you really feel?

In all I write, shou'd Sense, and Wit, and Rhyme, Fail me at once, yet something so sublime, Shall stamp my Poem, that the World may see, It could have been produced my none but me; And that's my end, for Man can wish no more, Than so to write, as none e're writ before.

I think we mustn't read this in too simple-minded a fashion.

Rochester was no great experimenter in form or even in ideas. In fact, many of his poems are outright and acknow­ ledged imitations of the classics. But they bear his stamp, nonetheless, and I think it is remarkable that he should,

In 1669, have been able to isolate so finely this indivi­ dual characteristic of art. The real sublimity, the use -2l|.-

his term, of art Is its reflection of self; its validity

and strength are ultimately the products of the very kind

of integrity he has, in a clever and half-serious way,

described. We might expand upon Rochester's statement to

say that the great poet has a voice of his own, so marked

that is hardly matters whether he takes his style, his

plots, his ideas, his forms, from others; whatever he takes

he makes his own In a way that is sublime because it is

linked to the whole universal mystery of individuality:

how is it possible that any particular measure of proto­

plasm, so inconstant that not only its mind and moods but

the very cells of its body are not two minutes the same,

how is it possible for this thing shaped by the laws of matter, the laws of society, b y its experience, its en­

vironment, the very state of.its digestion, to be said to have a self? And how is it that the self of a great poet

is so strong and pervasive,a phenomenon that it leaves its mark indelibly upon whatever it touches? With his phrase,

’’something so sublime” Rochester suggests here a great deal to which Hobbes, for instance, was entirely Insen­

sitive.

Prom this point he moves into a satire of’the super­ ficiality of critical thought of his time, ending with

a slap at the foolish aspect of solipsism, vanity:

Yet why am I no Poet of the times? I have Allusions, Similies and Rhymes, And Wit, or else 'tis hard that I alone, Of all the Race of Mankind shou'd have none. Unequally the partial hand of Heav’n, -25- Has all but this One only blessing giv'n. The World appears like a great Family, Whose Lord opprest with Pride and Poverty. (That to a few great bounty he may show) Is fain to starve the num'rous Train below. Just so seems Providence, as poor, and vain, Keeping more Creatures than it can maintain. Here 'tis profuse, and there it meanly saves, And for One Prince, it makes Ten thousand Slaves. In Wit, alone 't has been Magnificent, Of which so just a share to each is sent, That the most Avaricious are content. For none e're thought (the due divisions such) His own too little, or his Friends too much.

This picture of the universe, tarnished as it is with a local kind of cynicism, states a theme he returns to in other poems: life would be intolerable except for our delusions. Here the delusion which vanity creates, the ridiculous situation in which each man measures his own intelligence by his neighbor's and finds his neighbor's wanting, is the only equality possible in a viciously unequal world. Of course all this is incidental innuendo; \ the main point is that the excrements of Rochester's bfain are no less worthy than those of other poets, that

Rochester is no more puffed with his importance than any­ one who might criticize his poetry.

Yet most Men shew, or find great want of Wit Writing themselves, or judging what is writ. But I, who am of sprightly vigour full, Look on Mankind, as envious and dull. Born to myself, my self I like alone, And must conclude my judgment good, or none. For cou'd my sense be naught, how shou'd I know, Whether another Mans were good or no? Thus I resolve of my own Poetry, That 'tis the best, and there's a Fame for me. If then I'm happy, what does it advance, Whether to merit due, or Arrogance? -26-

There ia rebellious defiance in the way he heaps on his own head the worst judgments the world might fling at him. I'm an ass like all the rest of you, he says, and

like any ass I think I ’m the barnyard's brightest creature.

I’ve proved that no judgments matter except one’s own, any-

t way; if I judge myself the best, and it pleases me to do so,

then virtually I am the best, and to hell with everyone.

This is arrogance? Call it what you will. If there is such a thing as merit, who’s to determine it in this world of fools blinded by their own noses? He is cursing himself, pitching himself headlong into the oblivion of insignifi­ cance, but is dragging the rest of us down with him.

OhI but the World will take offense hereby, Why then the World shall suffer for’t, not I. Did e ’re this sawcy World, and I agree To let it have its beastly Will on me? Why shou’d my prostituted sense be drawn, To ev’ry Rule their musty Customes spawn? But Men, will censure you, 'tis Two to One, When e ’re they censure, they'll be in the wrong. There’s not a thing on Earth, that I can name, So foolish and so false, as common Fame. It calls the Courtier Knave, the plain Man rude, Haughty the grave, and the delightful lew'd. Impertinent the brisk, Moross the sad, Mean the familiar, the reserv’d one mad. Poor helpless Woman, is not favour'd more, She’s a sly Hypocrite, or publick Whore. Then who the Devil, would give this— to be free Prom th' innocent reproach of infamy. These things consider'd, make me (in despight Of idle Rumour) keep at home and write.

The world, the world, the world I This word had particular­ ly tawdry connotations among the circle of courtiers around

Charles II, for it meant themselves. The adolescent Earl had swallowed the steel bright hook of this society and had learned, in little more than four year's among them, -27-

that the wit, the gossip, the manners, the splendid

clothes, of this thin group were the excrements of fools, and that the finest that his day seemed to offer was a life of wallowing in such excrements.

How can this stupid world have a will, and why

should I obey it? To feel his indignation deeply one must savor the word Rule. Particularly in regard to poetry, the bias of the neoclassic period was to redis­ cover the rules which the Ancients had determined pro­ duced excellence. For Rochester, the rules, the rules of Aristotle or of Calvin or of Charles, were the imple­ ments of the world's will. To obey them was, at best, to secure the world's approval. And in view of the limitations of the world's wisdom, who would give this—

(we may imagine a snap of the fingers or a more obscene gesture) for the approval of the world, to escape the

"innocent," that is, helpless and ignorant,"reproach of infamy." In spite, he says, of the idle rumors that my whole life is spent in carousing, my greatest pleasure

Is to remain peacefully in retirement, pleasing myself by writing.

These are stout sentiments, and to fully appreciate them will require a much wider examination of the intel­ lectual context in which they occurred. But It Is worth­ while to point out a couple of implications of the poem which must bear hard on the twentieth century reader. In the first place, men are scum. Their world is a rotting pool of insubstantial garbage, and men and their -28-

achievements are poisonous froth upon it. -Poetry, law, religion, society, all the flowers of civilization are hit here as the blossoming mold of corruption, and Roches­

ter laughingly commits himself to the cesspool. What had happened to the lusty affirmation of the world of Shakes­ peare to so besmudge humanity?

Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment. Of course

I am oversimplifying, but in its outlines the history of

Western Civilization from Shakespeare to Rochester was a wild binge in which, inebriated with his own possibil­ ity, man flung scruples to the wind and lived. The morning after of cold Calvin was a grey and chilly day. Indul­ gence had bred excess, and excess bred pain. The clear afternoon of this imagined day was filled with torturing sunlight. His head out of the clouds, man turned his xvobbling stare to hard bright earth, and, cautiously, took bites of the hair of the dog that bit him. And here is

Rochester, born to a Puritan mother and a Cavalier father; trained early in the conflicting but equally glistening idealisms of purity and romance, diaillusioned in regard to both. The purity of the ideal his mother had fostered produced the joyless authoritarianism of Cromwell. The extravagance of the ideal his father had fostered produced the ineffectual dalliance of Charles. The ideal withered sickeningly away as the young man grew Into the actual.

And this was a Classical age. The Classical view had always separated widely the ideal and the actual; and -29- re formed Christianity had reinforced the same separation.

In the one view, the classic, the ideal, was a combination of the best of all, the defects of none. Reality was the ideal, the pure form separated from any defect of actuality. Imagine a wife and then marry one. The ac­ tual may please you more or less than your ideal, but at any rate she is different from the wife you had imagined.

For the Classicist, the ideal was always better than the actual, always either the perfection from which man had fallen or the perfection toward which he tended. And here is the community of Classicism and Christianity.

Christianity, too, provides a magnificent Paradise lost behind us and, in the distant future, a magnificent

Paradise to be regained, the two ideal states in strong contrast to the depraved, actual, present condition of man.

With Hobbes and a dozen others telling a young in­ tellectual that not the ideal but the actual was reality, that what we had was all we were to have, and that think as we may, not our thoughts but our meager senses told us the truth, it is not surprising that Rochester viewed his world dimly. The Classicist or the Christian could recon­ cile himself to the unpleasant actual by remembering that ultimate reality resided in the ideal. But the Enlighten­ ment undercut the ideal: immaterial substances were non­ sense. All man had left was the worst part of experience, the actuality he lived with. -30-

The more closely one looks at the period, the more exceptions he finds to the generalizations I have been ma­ king, but I think that a large part of the disgust for man in this poem and in other works of the period grows out of the pain of disillusionment, the distrust of the ideal and distaste for the actual, the faithless morning- after in which fragments of the visions of the binge per­ sist mockingly in the memory. This view will be more fully illustrated in succeeding chapters.

Another characteristic of this poem which is apt to disturb a twentieth century reader is that it seems un- poetic or even antipoetic, if poetic is taken to mean lofty or beautiful or sensuous or imaginative or intense or highly figurative or any of the other vague, emotional qualities associated with the word, particularly in the nineteenth century. I would recommend reading the poetry of Rochester, or of anyone else for that matter, for what it is--that one not let his understanding or enjoyment be obstructed initially by a preconception of what poetry ought to be. This is itself a Restoration-like injunction, and I hope it won't be confused with the notion that there is no way of defining what is and is not desirable in po­ etry. My plea is only that one attend the preliminary questions: what _is this poetry? and, why is it that way?

As we will see later, there is a good deal of conscious rejection by the court wits of the 'lpoetic,, qualities I have listed above. They had had a bellyful of the lovely -31- illusions handed down to them by poets of the past;

the trance was broken and they wanted it no more. They

felt that they were speaking with the voice of reason,

and that the rigors of the closed couplet gave the reason

they were speaking an arbitrary but controlled order,

satisfying in the way mathematics is satisfying: it

was some achievement in our disparate and various world

to create a system which made sense at least within its

own terms.

But in this great reasonableness, where is the

"rare and fruitful" Invention, the "choice and delicate"

Judgment, which Parsons refers to? And if poetry is tote

as independent of critics and the public as Rochester wants it to be, what standards are possible? Why isn't

one poem as good as the next? Rochester might answer

that a poem's value to its author and its value to the world of literature are two quite different things. When we turn from his consideration of the creative process

to his practical criticism of the works of his times, we find that Rochester had a surprisingly clear set of values and a surprisingly valid perception of the merits of other writers. Unlike Dryden, unlike most of the writers of his day, he was able to exercise critical judgment which did not become embroiled in justification of his own writing practice, perhaps because as a gentleman amateur he felt no great stake in his own literary reputation. -32-

Skipping six years from An Epistolary Essay to 1675#

we see Rochester, now about 28, sitting in judgment upon

the literary life he has been a part of for the past ten

years. In a poem called An Allusion to Horace. The 10th

Satyr of the 1st Book, he makes explicit some critical

standards which are fairly representative of the Neoclassic

temper and applies them in a mature way to specific writers.

Except for the general form of the satire, he derived little

from Horace. By comparison, Rochester’s version is longer,

less mild and considerably more concrete. Because of the

importance of the stage in Restoration England, Rochester

spends a large portion of his time on dramatic criticism.

As Horace begins by a criticism of Lucilius, the master

from whom he had learned satire, Rochester attempts to weigh

soberly the man who taught satire to the world of Charles II:

Dryden. He finds Dryden’s poetry "stoln, unequal, nay dull

many times." He has no desire to dispute Dryden1s right

to the "Lawrel, which he best deserves to wear," but he

insists upon his right to object to the master's weaknesses.

\ . Dryden is long-winded, turning out a "heavy Mass, / That

Stuffs up his loose Volumns," too much and too dull:

Five Hundred Verses, ev'ry Morning writ, Proves you no more a Poet, than a Wit;

Dryden, of course, was writing for his bread, and it is possible that to a certain extent Rochester was chastising

Dryden for mimicking his betters, for turning aristocratic,

verse to gross employment. -33- D/ryden7, in vain try'd this nice way of wit, For he to be a tearing Blade, thought fit, But when he wou'd be sharp:; he still was blunt, To frisk his frolligue fancy, he'd cry C— t. Wou'd give the Ladies, a dry Bawdy bob, And thus he got the name of Poet Squab.

The idea of the stammering, conventional Bayes (as he was dubbed in The Rehearsal) attempting to travel with the free-wheeling members of Charles' inner circle must have been ridiculous to Rochester, but, I'm sure, his criticism is not all snobbery. Dryden was verbose and dull very often particularly in his heroic dramas— and his attempts in comedy at "this nice way of wit," were discernibly more coarse and more blunt than the carefully modulated in­ directions of a writer like Etherege.

Rochester also berates Dryden for finding Jonson,

Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shakespeare incompetant--"dull,"

"uncorrect, and full,/ 0 lewd Lines," "stiff and affected"— while absolving himself of these faults. As this is the same Rochester who, six years earlier, had written, "my self I like alone," it may seem hypocritical for him now to be accusing Dryden of arrogance. However, it is one thing to. be happy with one's own work and another to demean others in order to enhance personal reputation, to attempt to generalize rules of literary practice from one's own practice.

His remarks on other writers are, like his remarks on Dryden, temperings of good and bad. In view of the later reputations of the writers he assesses, his accuracy is -3k- surprising. °tway, whom he slights, had not yet written the plays which were to make him the period's outstanding writer of tragedy, ^e probably overrates his friends

Dorset and Sedley, although nothing he says about their songs is unjustified. Had it not been for Dryden's extravagant denunciation of Shadwell in MacFlecknoe, the twentieth century opinion might more nearly agree with

RochesterT s:

Of all our Modern Wits, none seems to me Once to have toucht, upon true Comedy, But hasty Shadwel, and slow Wicherley

Congreve and Farquhar, of course, had not yet appeared.

That Rochester could have such high regard for Shadwell, a professional writer, a man separated by class, politics and religion from the Earl, may suggest that there is little ground for the accusation of snobbishness in, regard to his criticism of Dryden.

Taking his cue from Horace, but choosing an illustra­ tion which, like the fart in An Epistolary Essay, vulgar­ izes the poetic process, Rochester, in closing, announces that he will

. . . say with Betty M/orice/, hertofore. When a Court Lady, call'd her B/uckley1s/ Whore; I please one Man of Wit, am proud-on't too, het all the Coxcombs, dance to Bed to you.

• ♦ # • I loath the Rabble, 'tis enough for me,_ _ If S/edley/, S/hadwell/, Sheppard/, Wicherley/, Gf/o'dolphin/, B7utler/7 B/aokhursi/, s/uckingham/, And some few more, whom I omit to name, Approve my sense, I count their censure Fame. -35- The self of An Epistolary Essay is thus expanded to include

others of similar taste. These few, himself and a handful

of others, are the sole judges of literary excellence,

and the populace be damned. Ultimately, wit writes its

own laws.

As we will see, this principle applies to witty be­

havior as it does to witty poetry. The intellectual, the

bohemian, prides himself upon a clear vision at odds with

the public delusion. The habit of mind which values such

perception is by definition revolutionary, and doomed to

the condemnation of church and state and hearth and mother.

Rochester probably gave church and state and hearth

and mother more cause for condemnation than most intellectuals

or bohemians ever do--which is not necessarily an indica­

tion that he was the man of clearest vision. The antagonism between all that Rochester stood for and public opinion

is definitive. However Parsons may have liked to think

so, Rochester could not have written "Psalms, and Hymns,

and Spiritual Songs," and, at the same time, have been

a Wit. I I . PROPRIETY OP THOUGHT

AND WORDS

If wit was necessarily as shocking and revolutionary as I have said, it is curious to hear Dryden defining it as '‘propriety of thought and words; or, in other terms, thoughts and words elegantly adapted to the subject."^

The. definition seems to be of a mild and reasonable qual­ ity which we would sum up under something like appropriate­ ness . The simplicity of this definition, which has, possibly, caused it to be repeated so often, is misleading.

The simplicity of the term appropriateness is misleading; the question It leaves unanswered is, appropriate to what?

And suddenly you are no longer talking about a standard of form but one of content.

^Essays, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1926), I, 190, 296

-36- -37- This is continually the problem with definitions of

wit. It was one of the ceremonials of criticism in the

seventeenth century to define wit; but always the discussion

was of form, not of content. Each writer consciously

placed the emphasis differently, and each used his concept

of wit as a means to defend a larger philosophical position.

Consequently the definitions of Davenant and Hobbes and Dry­

den and Locke and Addison are bewildering. I think they

tell you little about what a wrfcer was apt to mean when he

used the word wit, but they tell a great deal ab'out the

various philosophical systems in which they occur.

I do not wish to explore in detail the distinctions made by these writers, but I would like to pass on at least

some sense of the complexity of the various controversies

and contradictions which this word crystallizes. Finally,

I will contrast with the concepts of wit held by the critics,

a poem illustrating powerfully the emotional meanings of

the word wit which the critics never mention. The poem,

A Letter fancy’df r o m Artemisa in the Town, to Cloe in the

Country, is, however, a logical and practical consequence

of the same philosophic temper which produced the formal

definitions.

c The components of wit are fancy and judgment. The first of these counters, fancy, is a coin with two sides.

Fancy, imagination, invention, these terms are s ometimes

the occasion for very careful distinction, sometimes are -38- 2 lumped together, "but in general they refer to two kinds

of mental activity. The first is a creative force, a

kind of elan vital of poetry. It puts together diverse

sense impressions into new Ideas, and, as such, was a

means toward truth. The empiricists, such a s Hobbes

and Locke, respected It, but regarded it as a secondary

faculty, a "decaying sense" which quickly loses its hold

on direct perceptions and is thus easily misled into

error. The ambiguity in the empirical attitude toward

the imagination is illustrated by Dryden, who spanks it

now and again, as an unruly child, but maintains withal 3 a respect for its mystery and vitality.

The other side of the coin of fancy is its relation

to the imaginary, as distinct from the imaginative. Pico

della Mirandola had furnished Europe with a pathology of

the imagination which viewed this faculty as the source

of aberration in'the poet, lunatic and lover--an Idea Bur­

ton had repeated in English. We have both senses of imagin­

ation today— one, a rather pleasant, sometimes highly valuable

See, for instance, John Bullitt and W, J. Bate, "Dis­ tinctions Between Fancy and Imagination In Eighteenth ■ Century English Criticism," MLN, LX (19l|-5), 8-15? and Earl R. Wasserman, "Another Eighteenth Century'Distinction Between Fancy and Imagination," MLR, LXIV (194-9), 23-5* Particular­ ly useful for its comments on the Restoration is G. Watson, "Contributions to a Dictionary of Critical Terms: Imagina­ tion and Fancy," EC, III (1953), 201-lIj.. 3 -\A. pair of articles by Donald F. Bond provides an excellent summary and analysis of seventeenth century recog­ nition of the creative force. They are " ’Distrust1, of Imagin­ ation in English Neoclassicism," PQ, XI? (1935) , 5)j--69, and "The Neoclassical Psychology of the Imagination," ELH, IV (1937), 2l|5-61j.. -39-

ability to put together ideas in an entertaining, some­

times meaningful, way; and two, a tendency of the mind to

create delusions, which are ’'untrue1' or "unreasonable"

and therefore dangerous. During the later seventeenth

century the rationalists, following any of several Pla­

tonic or Cartesian philosophies, tended to oppose imagina­

tion or fancy to reason. Reason was the means of dis­

covering truth, therefore imagination led one into the

snares of passion (enthusiasm) or error.

There still persists a feeling that imagination is

more appropriate to fiction or poetry than to "intellectual"

writing which engages in exposition of facts or ideas;

and we make an artificial cleavage between "fiction" and

"non-fictlon" with the popular prejudice that the first

is devoted to entertainment and the second to truth. Now

as in the seventeenth century there is a widespread dis­

trust of imagination when it steps over the boundary into

"non-fiction."

The second component of wit is judgment, and judgment,

like fancy, has within it contradictory shades of meaning.

In general judgment may be thought of as that which restrains

or limits or governs fancy, but this is a negative defini­

tion which completely misses the period’s feeling for judg­ ment as a positive force. Judgment, like reason, seems to be man’s grasp on nature. Now we have two more terms, - i p -

reason and nature, two of the most bewildering concepts

of Neoclassicism.^

If "nature” is taken to mean the underlying struc­

ture of reality, a set of principles or universal laws

available to all men everywhere, but notably and most

clearly perceived by the ancients, judgment is the faculty by which man discovers and conforms to those principles. This view of nature, then, gives judgment

the function of detecting the permanent among the changing, the universal among the chaotic many. Judgment requires one to attend the rules, which represent perceptions of nature tested by the centuries since Aristotle and Virgil.

Judgment may demand rejection of the superficial or tem­ porary in language or detail. Judgment may prefer moral or heroic sentiments to vivid presentation of the concrete.

The characteristic virtue of judgment is strength. Denham is celebrated for strong lines, or for masculinity, or, paradoxically, for pregnancy. Jonson is praised for strength of judgment. In both cases the word is associated with much meaning in few words— specifically moral meaning, di­ dacticism. It Is this density of thought which produces the "pregnancy" or "closeness" or "darkness" summarized by the epithet "strong lines.

^See particularly A. 0. Love joy, "'Nature1 as Aesthetic Norm," MLN, XLII (1927).

-^George Williamson, "Strong Lines," English Studies, XVIII (1936), 1^2-9. -41- Ordinarily for the Neoclassicist, judgment and nature

were used in the way I have indicated in the preceding

paragraph. But side by side with this formulation there

existed in the seventeenth century a second and opposite

set of meanings. Instead of the permanent, one might

take as the norm those aspects of reality untarnished by art or social convention. Nature is thus not an ideal

toward which man is developing but an ideal he has left behind, his primeval, untutored happiness; and the judg­ ment which perceives this kind of nature is related to naturalistic observation. Judgment restrains speculation

and irresponsible fiction and entails an escape from the restraint of artificial civilization, of scholastic rationalism, the ,!mind-forged manacles" which bind the

senses and the instinct. An anti-Petrachan love poem exhibits this kind of judgment In that it appeals to common sense and "natural” drives in defiance of the sterile complexities of formalized love. This is the

judgment of the "natural philosopher" who Ignores Aris­ totle and counts the legs on the spider. This is the

judgment of Hobbes, who regards good as appeasement of appetite.

Critical judgment, which we would call taste, is an aspect of either of the two kinds of judgment I have de­ scribed. It is the ability to know whether a work of art conforms to nature (whichever kind of nature the writer may have in mind). Rochester uses the word in a generalized -k2-

sense of taste in An Allusion to Horace:

’Tis therefore not enough, when your false sense, Hits the false Judgment, of an Audience:

or

And may not I, have leave impartially, To search, and censure Dryden’s Works, and try, If those gross faults, his choice Pen does commit, Proceed from want of Judgment, or of Wit?

Fancy and .judgment, then, vary widely in meaning,

according to the philosophical orientation of whoever uses

them. The complexity is compounded when the ideas em- £ braced by these words are c ombined into the word wit.

As I have said, the word at various times referred to

the whole intelligence or to some specialized function

of it. Particularly, for our purposes, it often meant

the mental faculty concerned with the production of

literature. But even this specialized faculty--the

creative intelligence--was not at all times understood

to mean the same mental operation as it meant at other

times.

As a critical term before the Eestoration, wit seems to have most often been synonymous with fancy (French

6 There are many formal studies of the shifting meaning of wit. For example, see Bundy's article, cited above, In Dictionary of World Literature, the Introduction to J. E. Spingarn’s edition of Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (London: Oxford, 1908-9), Robert Lathrop Sharp, From Donne to Dryden (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 194-0), PP* 1 2 7 f f and passim, W. Lee Ustick and Hoyt H. Hudson, MWit, 'Mixt Wit,’ and the Bee in Amber," HLQ,, No. 8, October, 193$> PP. 103-30, and the notes in E, N. Booker's edition of the critical works of John Dennis.

( -k-3- esprit, Italian ingegno, Spanish ingenio), and as such

it referred to the producing (genius) as opposed to the

accumulating (learning) activity of the mind. But in

the l6f?0 's fancy began to be discredited, for a number of

reasons which will become apparent in the next chapter.

A writer like Hobbes, for instance, preferring Davenant

to Donne, tended to emphasize the element of judgment in wit. In other words, wit is what produces the poetry I

like. Fancy does not produce the poetry I like. There­ fore, wit is largely judgment. Hobbes preferred sense to

the "decaying sense," imagination, therefore sense per­

ception, logic, reasonableness, were the connotations he felt were important in wit.

Dryden’s "propriety of thought and words" definition was purely on the side of judgment. Locke, writing later

in the century, was a throwback: he clearly differentiated wit and judgment, preferring the latter. Addison, in the early eighteenth century, reacted to Dryden’s definition,

thinking it too severely limited to judgment, and Insisted that wit had to contain surprise ( a quality given it by fancy). Thus teetered the see-saw, and each new definition introduced new terms which are themselves as difficult to untangle as wit Itself. 7

7 See note 1 above. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), 2. 11. 2. Addison, Spectator, May 11, 1711. It is important to remember in all this that none of these writers was attempting to give a usage defini­ tion. Each was saying not what the word was commonly used to mean but what he thought wit should be. Wit applied to literature might mean literary production, literary excellence, literary weakness, and the defini­ tion was in each case an exposition of what the writer felt literary production or excellence or weakness was-- an exposition of his own literary theory and standards.

Therefore the definitions cannot be taken out of the context of larger critical theories.

For instance, let us examine the word propriety in Dryden's definition. It can branch in two possible directions (related to the two kinds of nature described above.) In one sense propriety means decency or decorum, terms associated with verisimilitude and the Aristotelian doctrine of imitation. In this sense, propriety is achieved when the thought and words refer to what ought to be or ideally can be. In another sense propriety means accuracy— proper relation between the word and the thing meant— the word which catches the curve of observed nature is the proper word. We retain something of the same am­ biguity. Spitting is not within the bounds of propriety

(good manners, decorum, ideal behavior), yet it is alto­ gether fitting (that is, now, accurate, true to observed reality) for a Kentucky farmer to sit on his door stoop and spit tobacco juice, at the sunflowers. - k $ ‘ After Rochester's death, his adaptation of Fletcher's

tragedy Valentinian was published with a preface by a friend, one Robert Wolseley. Wolseley took the occasion

to praise all of Rochester's poetry highly, and, in par­

ticular, to defend the poet's indecency (or lack of decorum) against an attack by the perhaps equally in­ decent Earl of Mulgrave. He quoted Dryden in support of his argument. If, he said, wit is propriety of thought and words, there is no more proper, and therefore witfcy, way of referring to things than by their plain and common names, and if this involves the use of words which refer to bodily organs or functions, it is wit to name them as bluntly as possible. This is an amusing notion In view of what propriety usually means today and also, probably, in view of what Dryden meant by the word.

We can be fairly certain Dryden meant decorum. In the Preface to State of Innocence, where his famous def­ inition occurs, he goes on to explain, "in other terms, thoughts and words elegantly adapted to the subject," and elegance is historically associated with decorum.

Besides., he is using the definition to justify the ex­ travagance of heroic poetry, which has nothing to do with observed reality. And in the Preface to Albion and Albanius he repeats the definition to defend his description of the fantastic behavior of gods--when, as he says, "second causes are out of doors," when the facts of sense experience are simply irrelevant. The -116- appeal is clearly to the classic and the ideal.

But propriety is not so simple. If it meant merely proper conformance to the ideal, to the rules, merely appropriateness in terms of classic perception of the underlying principles of nature, we could at least put

Dryden into a file drawer. But in the Preface to Annus

Mlrabilis he further confuses the issue by explaining it more fully. He distinguishes between wit the faculty and wit the product. The first is the "nimble spaniel" of the imagination beating through the field of memory for its quarry. The product is "some lively /lifelike/ and apt /proper, decorous/ description, dressed in such colours of speech, that It sets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly and more delightfully than nature." Thus propriety--or, at any rate, wit— implies not only conformance to the ideal, but to the actual.

And not only these, but the pleasurable, the delightful, products of fancy, seem to be inherent in wit.

So then the first happiness of the poet's imagination is properly invention, or finding of the thought; the second is fancy, or the variation, deriving, or moulding, of that thought, as the judgment represents it proper to the subject; the third is elocution, or the art of clothing and adorning that thought, so found and varied, in apt, significant, and sounding wordsi the quickness of the imagin­ ation is seen in the invention, the fertility in the fancy, and the accuracy in the ex­ pression.

Thus he lays out the whole creative process as it was understood by the classical rhetoricians, by the English -ij.7- critics from Ben Jonson to his own day, and the problems presented by propriety and wit are compounded by invention, variation, elocution, sounding, and a half dozen other interweaving terms.

But is Dryden telling us anything about the creative energy behind the poetry of Rochester? Let us see what form wit takes in A Letter from Artemisa. In this poem, a sort of dramatic monologue in which Rochester speaks through a young lady of the town, we have, as it were, the problem of wit viewed from the outside, by women.

The comments this form permits Rochester to make about his own way of life are penetratingly objective.

Having been asked, she says, by her country friend,

Cloe, to write In verse, Artemisa begins by a contemplation of the dangers of poetry itself. She says that many ’’Me n of Wit11 who had attempted ’’dangerous poetry". . .

Who durst that stormy Pathless World explore, Were soon dasht back, Sc wreckt on the dull shore,

A "dull shore" is a frequent Image in Rochester's poetry.

Perhaps it has overtones of "common shore" or prostitute, but the word dull, the direct antithesis of witty, couples the idea of oblivion with that of prostitution. Artemisa* s half-serious remarks about the pitfalls of poetry set the tone of the poem. She addresses herself with a wagging finger:

Dear Artemisa, Poetry1s a Snare, Bedlam, has many Mansions; have a care. Your Muse diverts you, makes the Reader, sad, You think your self inspir'd, he thinks you mad. -1+8-

She tells herself that poetry is a shameful occupation,

the worst thing she can do, "That Whore, is scarce a more reproachful name/ Than Poetess." But it is the forbidden

employment of our wit which seduces us. /Like "an Arrant

Woman, ”

Pleas’d with the contradiction; and the Sin, Methinks I stand on Thornes till I begin.

She knows that Cloe will be anxious to hear the gossip of the latest intrigues, but the thought of love

inspires a digression.

But how (my dearest Cloe) shou'd I set My Pen to write, what I wou'd fain forget? Or name the lost thing Love, without a Tear, Since so debauch'd by ill-bred Customes here? Love, the most generous passion of the Mind, ■ The softest refuge innocence can find, The safe director of unguided Youth, Fraught with kind wishes and secur'd by truth; That Cordial drop, Heav'n in our Cup has thrown, To make the naus'ous draught of life go down; On which one only blessing, God, might raise, In Lands of Atheists, Subsidies of praise; For none did, e're so dull, and stupid prove, But felt a God,■and blest his pow'r in love; This only joy, for which poor we were made, Is grown like play, to be an Arrant Trade; The Rookes creep in, and it has got of late, As many little Cheats, and tricks as that:

These lines, which constitute what Vivian de Sola Pinto has called one of the "most significant" passages in 8 Rochester, are one of the few strong affirmations in his poetry.

^Rochester: Portrait of a Restoration Poet (London, 1935), pp. 136-1(4. -49- The underlying assumptions are, as will be explained in Chapter IV, libertine: the "natural" state of man is good; evil arises from the corruption of restraining laws and artificial civilization, of "Ill-bred Customes." The adjective generous, which is applied here to love, was frequently used in the period and was to assume a central importance in the early eighteenth century, It is a quiet pun combining the ideas of generosity and generation, of goodness and fecundity. The same sort of pun is involved in Restoration use of the word kindness, which besides meaning beneficence takes from its etymology connotations of naturalness, specifically sexual freedom. Both kind and generous, thus, have two faces, one of innocence, one of smut. The "kind wishes" with which love is fraught, then, are in a double sense appropriate to "the most gen­ erous passion of the Mind." These words, kind and gen­ erous , seem to me to beautifully crystallize the ambiguity of society's attitude toward sex. Never a wedding without a sneer: never do white veils and flowers and mother's fond tears quite succeed in dispelling the vision of a chimpanzee under the splendid gown; never do the ruddy cheeks of hand-in-hand young lovers on a country lane put out of our minds speculation about grunting in the high grass. Rochester has a dirty mind, which is to say he cannot even in his most passionate enthusiasm blind himself to the ugly. Unlike less honest writers, he says so. -5o-

Por this _is passionate enthusiasm. Love is "secur'd by truth," it is elemental, it is validity in an untrust­ worthy universe, it is the only sweetening in life's vile medicine, it is the one part of creation for which even atheists thank God. » And this apotheosis is tied off with a crack at the vanity even the most insensate have in their potency.

This jibe, which seems in the context cheap and out of tone, is characteristic of Rochester’s wit: he undercuts whatever he builds; he so violently distrusts the struc­ tures of reason, of poetry, even of pleasure, that, as though against his will, he explodes his own arguments.

I I will refer to this characteristic again, with other examples, but this "most significant" passage, this strong affirmation of the value of love, is a particularly ef­ fective illustration of how all affirmation turns sour and corrupt in his mouth. Is this evidence of Rochester's own corruption or is it a valid indictment of the things men believe in? The question is continually raised as we read his poetry; and, of course, our instincts of self- preservation lead us to take the first choice.

Finally, in the quoted passage, we have a discussion of love in terms of gambling. The professionals, Artemisa complains, have taken over in gambling and love; the sharpers have infected love, spoiling it with such cheats and tricks as spoil the other games of risk. Discussion of heretofore revered concepts of love, religion, friendship, in terms of gambling, money transaction, real estate, inheritance, dowry, is a notable phenomenon in Restoration literature. Por instance, there is the classic example of witty lovemaking in Etherege1s The Man of Mode when

Dorimant and Harriet sidle slant-eyed up to one another on the Mall for their first conversational engagement:

Dorimant. You were talking of play, madam. Pray, what may be your stint?

Harriet. A little harmless discourse in public walks, or at most an appointment in a box, bare faced, at the play­ house. You are for masks and private meetings, where women engage for all they are worth, I hear.

Dorimant. I have been used to deep play, but I can make one at small game when I like my gamester well.

Harriet. And be so unconcerned you'll ha 1 no pleasure in't.

Dorimant. When there is a considerable sum to be won, the hope of drawing people in makes every trifle con­ siderable .

Dorimant is said to have been intended as a portrait of

Rochester, but it is not only because he is Rochester that he speaks in these terms. The tone pervades the times. A similar note is struck in this same passage of

A Letter from Artemisa when reference is made to God's raising “Subsidies of praise."

I don’t believe we can accuse Rochester or Etherege or Dryden or Wycherley of having merely mercenary minds on this evidence. Rochester's greatest contempt was spent on the Gits, the businessmen of the city, who to him -52-

appeared to be bleak-faced, hypocritical money-grubbers.

Rather, I think there was a deliberate intention, in these financial references, to reduce everything to its

lowest terms. Of course a joke is involved in such delib­ erate inversions of value; but beyond the joke is a deadly serious bias: the conviction that the true is the lowest common denominator, that the way to understand men is by studying rats, and the way to understand human relations is to find the human relations which are most explicitly selfish, tawdry and unambiguous.

Artemisa next blames the forlorn condition of love upon her own sex, and as she does so the poem bears more directly upon the problem of wit:

Oh silly Sexl though born like Monarchs free, Turn Gipsies, for a meaner liberty, And hate restraint, though but from infamy. They call what ever is not common, nice, And deaf to Natures Rule, or Loves advice, Forsake the pleasure, to pursue the Vice. To an exact perfection they have brought, The action Love, the passion is forgot; ’ Tis below Wit, they say, if we admire, And ev’n without approving, they desire: Their private wish, obeys the publique voice, Twixt good, and bad, whimsey decides, not choice; Fashion’s grown up to taste, at formes they strike, They know what they wou’d have, not what they like.

Women cross the line from freedom to license. Like gypsies, they are unsatisfied with the free and equal status, to which every human being is born, and prefer the roving, promiscuous, irresponsible and illegal liberty of wander­ ing thieves— which demeans both themselves and the concept of freedom. They hate any restraint, even that which keeps them out of trouble with society. -53- Nice, we must remember, is a bad word, meaning overly

fastidious, prudish, affected. In their consuming desire

to avoid the condemnation of those who would call them

precious prudes, women wallow in the "common." Truth

is in the common denominator; honest, unaffected behavior

may be achieved only by deliberate grossness. Thus vice

has the almost religious value of an ideal which must be

pursued even at the expense of pleasure; because vice is

true and honest and real and common, it must take pre­

cedence even over "natural" inclinations, even over love.

What has happened is that "nature" has been unnaturally

pursued, that naturalness has become itself an affectation.

Then suddenly we find that it is not only women

Artemisa is talking about, but wit. Women have sunk to

these deplorable depths at least partly because they have

desired to be witty. And it is below their concept of

wit to admire, to appreciate, to wonder at, to enjoy.

By definition wit is, for them, an attitude of disdain

for anything which commands respect or veneration, any­

thing, even, which gives pleasure. It requires them to

want what they dislike. How, then, do they know what to

want? Public whimsey, expressed in the fashions of the

coterie, determines taste, which once determined fashion.

Such a life is a meaningless, empty flailing of "formes,"

the mere names of things. It Is revolution for the s ake

of revolution, empty of any belief or preference, hoping for no reward. -51*- To illustrate all this, Artemisa gets dowi to cases.

She gives us a portrait of a witty woman, executed with the nimble malice which characterizes the high style of classical satire:

Where I was visiting the other Might, Comes a fine Lady, with her humble Knight; lilho had prevail'd with her, through her own skill, At his request, though much against his will To come to London------

The horns of the antitheses pitch back and forth the help­ less Kight who, in this case, knows what he would have, not what he likes. Artemisa hears the coach stop in the street below and the Lady tell her Knight, in a voice louder "Than a great Bellied Womans, in a Crowd" that his services are not needed and that he can attend to his pre­ tended business— which, she knows, is really a bottle.

She longs to smell him stinking of wine for a change, as she is nearly dead of the "Sowre Ale" he drinks in the country. With that "The necessary thing, bows, and is gone," and the Lady ascends the stairs fluttering and bursting into speech. She says she feels "ridiculously grown,/ Embarrast, with my being out of Town," and immedi­ ately wants to hear the latest about love, particularly about the "Men most worn of late."

But before she can be answered, she volunteers an impromptu summary of the state of affairs:

When I was marry'd, Pools, were All-a-mode, The Men of Wit, were then held incommode, Slow of belief, and fickle in desire, Who e're they'le be perswaded, must enquire, As if they came to spye, not to admire. -55-

With searching wisdome, fatal to their ease, They find out why, what may, and shou’d not please. Nay take themselves for injur'd, when we dare, Make 'em think better of us than we are:

In the first place, it is apparent that all this discussion of love, whether by Artemisa or her voluble visitor, quick­ ly takes on larger significance than gossip of the latest intrigues. Love seems to be a kind of symbolic battle­ ground where whole ways of life are opposed, where freedom and restraint, self and society, knowledge and ignorance, are in heroic turmoil. Secondly, Rochester seems to be using these women, with their talk of love, as a deliberate means to define the attitudes summarized by the term wit.

His method involve-g some extremely complicated problems of point-of-view (as here he is speaking through the visitor, through Artemisa), and understanding him re­ quires remembering who is talking, then sorting out his own probable attitudes. But the dramatic characters per­ mit him to, as it were, view wit objectively and say, in total, something more profound about it than Artemisa or the Lady or Rochester himself could say, speaking alone.

Artemisa, then, summarized for us the disastrous effects that wit has upon women. To illustrate, she brought In the Lady, who not only exemplifies wit as it operates upon the female but provides, in her turn, a summary of the disastrous effects that wit, in men, has upon a love affair. What has she to say? In her day, at least, fools made better husbands than men of wit. -£6-

The latter think too much. They probe. They insist upon answers, even when such persistence is "fatal to

their ease." Wit is not simply intelligence. There

are intelligent divines, intelligent statesmen; Evelyn

is intelligent; Boyle is intelligent; Andrew Marvell is

intelligent. But we may be sure that it is none of

these the Lady means when she refers to "Men of Wit."

The question is, what are they intelligent about, and it is apparent that, at least in her view, the Men of

Wit are intelligent about romance, about women, about the mysteries with which their ancestors were content to be bemused. Not only that. They are not simply preoccupied with these mysteries. They are not simply searching for answers. They are expecting and finding the worst.

Their knowledge is their curse, and they seek it painfully but unflinchingly. They damn those who would obstruct them:

And if we hide our frailties from their sights, Call us deceitful Jilts and Hypocrites; They little guess (who"at our Arts are griev'd) The perfect joy of being w&l deceiv'd: Inquisitive, as jealous Cuckolds grow. Rather than not be knowing, they will know, What being known, creates their certain woe. Women, shou’d these of all Mankind avoid, For wonder by clear knowledge is destroy’d, Woman, who is an Arrant Bird of Night, Bold in the duske, before a Fools dull sight, Must fly, when Reason brings the blazing light.

Woman is traditionally the object of marl’s faith, respect, reverence and love, and woman here fears the scrutiny of reason. The words admire and wonder suggest the Fool's -57- rapture— a rapture that is all that remains of the ideas of faith, respect, reverence and love. "Wonder by clear knowledge is destroy’d" might be taken as one of the major slogans of the Enlightenment: the new alchemy turned gold into lead. Rochester, the Man of Wit whom the Lady fears, is continually ripping off lacy outer garments and finding the linen underneath befouled. In an obscene song he cries:

Fair nasty Hymph, be clean and kind, And all my joys restore; By using Paper still behind, And spunges for before.

The same note is struck hysterically by Swift in the next century when the bean looks into Celia's dressing room.

He gags on reality: the ideal tumbles down the lubric age as he screams, "Celia, Celia, Celia, Shitsl" D. H.

Lawrence oversimplifies when he says that Swift porno- graphically confuses the excremental with the sexual.

It is not Celia or the nymph of Rochester who is being maligned but life itself--anything which seems delicate, fresh, beautiful, mysterious, good, but turns out to be poisonous when subjected to Enlightenment. Small wonder that the Lady damns the Men of Wit--not for being coarse but for refusing to be blind to coarseness. "Wonder" certainly Is impossible for one who insists upon examining underwear.

But what a thin, sick, despairing view of life the

Lady is reduced to I She knows there are no mysteries, -58-

really--no virtue, no beauty, no constant love. But dis­

illusion is intolerable; she thinks men will be much hap­

pier if they foolishly believe that virtue, beauty, con­

stancy, exist. We are much happier if we are unaware of

reality; but to be unaware, we must be stupid.

It is the Pool who emerges here as the ideal man, an

ideal purchased at great expense:

But the kind easle Fool, apt to admire Himself, trusts us; his follyes all conspire, To flatter his, and favor our desire: Vain of his proper merit, he with ease, Believes we love him best, who best can please: On him our gross, dull, common, flatteries, pass, Ever most happy, when most made an Ass; Heavy to apprehend, though all Mankind Perceive us false, the Pop himself, is blind, Who doating on himself------Thinks ev'ry one that sees him of his Mind. These are true Womens Men

Pleasure is built on folly, on vanity, deception, and in

our nasty existence, pleasure is all we have. The mutual

satisfaction of desire which is possible between woman,

the "Arrant Bird of Night," and Pool, the dusky visioned,

dull, foppish egotist, this is all the world offers. The

Man of Wit knows it; this is ;the reality he sees, and

perversely he insists upon looking, under the bandage,

under the scab, insists upon bringing the pus to his lips

and writhing in his knowledge. The Woman of Wit knows it,

too, and, being of strong stomach, is willing to take this

reality as she finds it, to be no better than she knows

she is, to deceive what fools she can and glut herself with the one miserable pleasure that is possible. -59-

Prom the Pool the Lady runs to a monkey:

here forced to cease, Through want of breath, not will to hold her peace; She to the Window runs, where she had spi'd, Her much esteem'd dear Friend, the Monkey ey'd. With Forty smiles, as many Antick bows, As if't had been the Lady of the House, The dirty chatt'ring Monster, she embrac'd; And made it this fine tender Speech at last. Kiss me I thou curious Miniature of Man. How odd thou arti how pretty! how japan! Oh I cou'd live and dye with thee! then on For half an hour in Complements she ran.

The progression is logical. If she prefers a Fool to a man of wit, she no doubt prefers this "chatt'ring Monster" to a Fool.

Artemisa muses:

I took this time to think what Nature meant, When this raixt thing into the World she sent, So very wise, yet so impertinent. One that knows ev'ry thing; that God thought fit, Shou’d be an Ass, through choice, not want of wit. Whose Foppery, without the help of sense, Cou'd ne're have rise to such an excellence. Nature1s as lame in making a true Fop, As a Philosopher; the very top. And dignity of folly, we attain, By studious search, and labor of the Brain; By observation, Councel, and deep thought, God, never made a Coxcomb, worth a Groat; We owe that Name to Industry, and Arts, An eminent Fool, must be a man of parts: And such a one was she, who had turn'd o're As many Books, as Men, lov'd much, read more; Had a discerning Wit, to her was known, Ev'ry ones fault, or merit, but her own: All the good Qualities, that ever blest, A Woman, so distinguish-.’d from the rest, Except discretion only, she possest.

The Lady has every virtue but discretion, taste, judg­ ment. She is one of those who, Artemisa said, desire without approving, who have no standards, no values, who have corrupted love through, a total sacrifice of choice. Can we trust this Lady who is now fussing over the mon­ key? How much strength can we give to her analysis of wit? If we believe with Artemisa that she is wise,

that she sees others clearly, that she is broadly read

and broadly experienced, that she is weak only in regard

to taste, I think we might assume that Artemisa would

agree with what she said of Men of Wit, disagreeing only

in the final judgment. I think Artemisa would prefer wit, at whatever pain, to dimness.

The Lady, dropping the monkey, perceives that in this respect at least Artemisa disagrees:

You smile to see me, whom the World perchance Mistakes to have some wit, so far advance. The interest of Fools, that I approve, Their merit more, than Mens of wit, and love. But in our Sex; too many proofs there are, Of such whom Wits undoe, and Fools repair; This in my time, was so observ'd a Rule, Hardly a Wench, in Town, but had her Fool; The meanest common Slut, who long was grewn, The jeast, and scorn of ev’ry Pit Buffoone; Had yet left charmes enough, to have subdu’d, Some Fop, or other, fond to be thought lewd.

Her cards are on the table. She connects love and wit, and dismisses them both--perfect proof of Artemisa's contention that love has fallen into a corrupted state.

But the Lady has a pint, too, which although unpleasant, is quite as convincing as Artemisa’s complaint of the depravity of her age. Artemisa would have things other­ wise; her visitor has an eye for reality and is interested

In making the best of a world in which manipulation works better than love and deceit better than honesty. She says -6 1 -

A Womans ne're so ruin'd, but she can, Be still reveng'd, on her undoer Man. How lost soe're, she'le find some hover more, A more abandon'd Pool, than she a Whore.

She supports her argument with a long satiric por­

trait, in the manner of the clasd.cal satirists, of Corinna,

"who has run/ Through all the several ways of being undone."

After an early seduction, Corinna learned to turn the

"too dear-bought-cheat on Men," to get back at them with their own weapon. "Gay were the hours, and wing'd with

joy they flew," as she rode the tide of the Town's adoration, until fate was so cruel as

To make her doat upon a Man of Wit, Who found 'twas dull to love above a Day, Made his ill natur'd jeast, and went away:

Suddenly she found herself scorned and forgotten and poor--

And want she must endure a whole half year, That for one Month, she Tawdry may appear:

However, her Easter gown is sufficient to mend her for­ tunes, for that is just the time

When my young Masters Worship comes to Town: Prom Pedagogue, and Mother, just set free, The hopeful Heir, of a great Family; Who with strong Beer, and Beef, the Country rules, And ever since the Conquest, have been Pools. And still with careful prospect, to maintain, This Character, least crossing of the Strain, Shou'd mend the Booby Breed, his Friends provide, A Couzen of his own to be his Bride. And thus set out------With an Estate, no Wit, and a young Wife. The solid comforts, of a Coxcomb's life; Dunghil, and Peas, forsook, he comes to Town, Turns Spark, learns to be lewd, and is undone. Nothing sutes worse with Vice, than want of sense, Pools are still wicked, at their own expence. -62-

Corinna insures the total ruin of the "o're grown School

Boy.11 She tells him how she appreciates innocence in

men, how she prefers fresh, young men who are healthy,

faithful, and who adore women too much to libel them.

She secures his sympathy by railing at the wits and

atheists, and tells him that she prefers to sense, power

and wealth, the wholesome virtues of "a Blood, untainted,

youth, and health." His worship, "The ill-bred Puppy,"

swallows unsuspecting--"Believes, then falls in love,

and then in debt." After Corinna has seen him mortgage

his estate and rob his wife to keep her in house, plate,

and jewels, she poisons him.

Thus meeting in her common Arms his .Fate, He leaves her Bastard, Heir to his Estate; And as the Race of such an Owl, deserves His own dull lawful Progeny he starves Nature, who never made a thing in vain, But does each Insect, to some end ordain. Wisely provides kind-keeping Fools, no doubt To patch up Vices, Men of Wit, wear out.

No one wins in the story of Corinna. It is as much

an attack upon her as upon the Man of Wit and upon the

Fool. Of course Artemisa's visitor sympathizes with

Corinna because she is a woman, the victim and the product

of social attitudes toward her sex. But the sympathy does not blind her to Corinna's evil. Is this the reason that the visitor is a witty woman--that she recognizes evil and embraces it? Is this what she has in common with the

Men of Wit she damns--an ability to see through the charming deceits of life to the ugly underneath, a -6 3 - willingness to pursue and accept the ugly because It is more"real" than the beautiful?

As we read this poem with some sense of its full resonance of intellectual torment we see how sharply it poses the dilemma of wit: intelligence withers pleasure, wonder, respect; honesty destroys happiness; awareness undercuts desire. Enlightenment had enabled men not only to see but to see through; rightly or wrongly it had destroyed their ability to see beyond.

How is Rochester's own wit evidenced in this poem?

His poetic material is, first, Artemisa herself, who

"Pleas'd with the contradiction, and the Sin," knowingly

s consigns herself to the way of wit and poetry as to a bawdy house; second, the valueless Lady who comes to visit; finally, the whore and murderess, Corinna, winning the game the only way she can. His wit might be said to consist of a monumental distaste for life coupled eternally with an unrelenting observation of it--all contained in the knuckled frankness of neat antitheses, delivered with a metallic voice and a fixed smile. He describes himself through his characters. He, definitively, is the Man of

Wit who makes "his ill natur'd jeast," and goes away. The biggest joke of all is what he says of himself, and it is a joke that annihilates.

If this is wit, if this is fancy and judgment incar­ nate with Restoration flesh, what relation has it to the critical terminology examined at the beginning of this -6^-

chapter? The fancy provides no escape from the hell of

experience: the letter is "fancy*d," and in the sense

that Artemisa and Cloe and the Lady and Corinna are

fictional, the poem is a product of fancy. It is judg­ ment which dominates the poem, judgment which not only

perceives reality but selects from it the tormenting,

ugly details which degrade and disillusion. The bias

of the wit of this poem is toward the welter of the

actual, unrelieved by any vision of better things ex­

cept in Artemisa*s brief and unsteady praise of love.

The terms themselves, fancy, judgment, wit, convey

little of the dynamics of that bias; however, it is plain that the wit Rochester recognized and produced and lived was a destructive blaze. III. NATURE'S NOTHING

The blaze burns at its brightest, perhaps, in the all-consuming conflagration of A Satyr Against Mankind.

But as an approach to that poem I think it is wise to look for the first evidences of this particularly de­ structive kind of wit back in the early years of the seventeenth century, among the crumbling bastions of medieval thought. What does intelligence do there? How does it appear in the Duchess of Malfi, in Urn Burial, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, in Volpone, or in the

Anniversaries of Donne? These are the products of wit.

It is wit that explores sensation, dwells upon death, excoriates man and weeps for him. Specifically, it is

Donne who crystallizes early seventeenth century wit. He was regarded in his day as a witty poet; and in his own use of the word wit he shows a fearful awareness of its destructive implications. -6^- —66—

Samuel Johnson, in his life of Cowley, defined meta­ physical wit as a discordia concors by which "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together."

This generalization about the poetic method of the meta­ physicals, says George Williamson in The Donne Tradition, really does "not differ from a description of the operation of the poetic mind," which may be only to say that what

Johnson meant as attack would be widely accepted today 1 as applause. In both Donne's day and ours the violent yoke has been regarded as an essential element of poetry.

Like Donne's audience, we delight in a method which incor­ porates surprise, conceits, rough metrics, colloquial and technical language, varied and "unpoetic" images. We like libertine, hard-boiled, anti-Petrarchan love lyrics; we consider speculation, introspection, morbidity and torment of soul as suitable material for poetry. More important, there is increasing acceptance among modern readers of the metaphysical premise that knowledge of the spiritual may be approached through the physical--or that the abstract and the concrete can live on domestic terms in the same mind. And all these characteristics of the form and content of metaphysical verse were connoted by the term wit. Twentieth century interest in wit has

^Besides Williamson's discussion of Johnson's criticism of Donne, one should consult W. R. Keast, "Johnson's Criticism of the Metaphysical Poets," ELH, XVII (1950), 59-70 and David Perkins, "Johnson on Wit & Metaphysical Poetry," ELH, XX (1953), 200-17. -67- reflected an interest not in Rochester, hardly in Dryden 2 or Pope or Swift, hut in Donne.

It is interesting, then, in view of the central place wit has in the intellectual tangle of the seven­ teenth century, to see what Donne meant by the term when he used it himself. In one of his best poems,

Canonization, for instance, a lover compares himself and his mistress to burning tapers, to an eagle and a dove, and then says:

The Phoenix ridle hath more wit By us, we two being one, are it. So to one neutrall thing both sexes fit, Wee dye and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love.

2 The recent interest in metaphysical poetry has brought forth a number of excellent analyses of metaphysical wit which contribute almost as much to an understanding of twentieth century poetry as of seventeenth century poetry. The basic article is T. S. Eliot's well-known discussion of Andrew Marvell, printed in Selected Essays $Tew York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932) pp. 251-63. E. M, W. Tillyard regards wit as an aspect of "plot in the method of what he calls oblique poetry; see his Poetry Direct and Oblique (London: Chatto & Windus, 193^4-)- Cleanth Brooks has an essay, "Wit and High Seriousness," in Modern Poetry and the-Tradition (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1939)> defending wit against Cole­ ridge and Arnold. Sona Raiziss, "Wit and the Objective Equivalent," in The Metaphysical Passion (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1952), gives a useful sum­ mary of discussions of meta^tgSIeal wit, both in Donne's day and our own. To an extent the defense of metaphysical wit has been accompanied by new interest in Augustan wit. The work of Maynard Mack has seemed to me parti­ cularly incisive in re-establishing the reputation of Pope. An article by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr*"The Augustan Mode in English Poetry," ELH, XX (1953)> 1-lij., states the argument with new insight, and there are several more recent studies. -68-

Why is it wittier for the lovers to compare them­ selves to the phoenix than to tapers or to the eagle and the dove? For wit we might, for instance, read appro­ priateness. The phoenix image may be more exact--this comparison might show more judgment. On the other hand, the image may be more extravagant--more inapproprlate-- may require a freer imagination, more fancy. In other words, the phoenix image may have more wit because it is more like the startling, fanciful images of witty poetry.

Cleanth Brooks, In his essay on this poem in

The Well-Wrought Urn, suggests how the phoenix in the context is both more fitting and more fantastic:

"Call us what you will,” the lover says, and rattles off in his desperation the first com­ parisons that occur to him. The comparison to the phoenix seems thus merely another out­ landish one, the most outrageous one of all. But it is this most fantastic one, stumbled over apparently in his haste, that the poet goes on to develop. It really describes the lovers best and justifies their renunciation. For the phoenix Is not two but one, "we two being one, are it”; and It burns, not like the taper at its own cost, but to live again...

Or, on a different tack, we might take the lines to mean that we give the riddle more significance, more profundity, because we are it. We make the fantastic, the mythological, real.

For all the word's ambiguity we can see how essential­ ly it is related to the complex problems of truth and appearance and art which it brings to mind. We might go -69- so far as to take these lines as a touchstone of meta­ physical wit: the phoenix image appears strained and exorbitant, but, upon closer examination, it emerges as amazingly precise and fitting. The strictest re­ quirements of judgment are met by the wildest soaring of fancy. A clever, light mythological reference conveys ironically a profound and penetrating message.

In Donne's Selfe Love we have wit used with over­ tones of heartlessness and cruel humor. The poet loves himself (or herself? The poem sounds as though it were written from a woman's point-of-view) because he cannot love anyone else; he can't love one for one reason and can't love another for the opposite reason--the plight of a fugitive caught in the crisscrossing searchlight beams of relativistic values:

Nor he that loves none but faire, For such by all are sought; Nor he that can for foul ones care, For his Judgement then is nought: Nor he that hath wit, for he Will make me his jest or slave;

Wit apparently uproots the traditional values of trust, friendship, constancy; it suggests an unpredietable viciousness. After the Restoration, when the Wits, leaving a play or visit at Whitehall, in their lace and rocking plumes, gather to walk along the Mall to rail at hapless Cits who come their way, wit will be seen to imply something of the same disregard for human feelings.

Or wit, the temper of new thought, can, in being anti-scholastic, be cheaply anU-intellectual. Donne -70- here discredits it, the kind of wit which carps at learn­ ing and speculation has its day of triumph to come.

The accumulation of these meanings suggests that to

Donne wit is a tremendous and ambivalent force, teetering between the divine and the satanic. It may give access to transcendent truth, or it can, by preoccupation with

"Natures nothing," distort the intelligence into empti­ ness and malevolence. In Stanza XXVII of the Litany he prays:

That learning, thine Ambassador, Prom thine allegeance wee never tempt, That beauty, paradises flower For physicke made, from poison be exempt, That wit, borne apt high good to doe, By dwelling lazily On Natures nothing, be not nothing too, That our affections kill us not, nor dye, Heare us, weake ecchoes, 0 thou eare, and cry.

He prays that learning, beauty, wit, not be corrupted, that our "affections," our loves of all kinds, not con­ sume us and, at the same time, not consume themselves.

But despair with us, oh Lord, for you made us this way: we are the weak echoes of your voice. It is your double function to create and to listen to our agony, oh Ear, and mourn our failure.

This seems to me a moving stanza--either in its his­ torical context or out of it— but perhaps it has its most shattering implications when heard as the voice of fearful anticipation at the dawn of the Enlightenment.

Here was the vision of perfection; here was potential beauty and learning and intelligence, and many were to -71- feel it rot and spoil in their hands. A preoccupation

with ’’Natures nothing” was to eat a slow progress through

the core of the thought of the next age, and the divine

gifts were to tend surely away from purity. Love of a

certain kind of truth was to give wit its virility and,

in turn, to kill and damn it.

For mankind could not stomach the most violent de­

nunciation of humanity wit was to produce in the seven­

teenth century, Rochester's Satyr Against Mankind. When

intelligence turned from the ideal to the actual, to

’’Natures nothing,” the, for Donne, unreal or meaningless

things of the created world, it found man a sickeningly

vain, weak, cowardly and cruel creature. Rochester rose

to the occasion. He took it upon himself to act as

spokesman for man stripped nude by reason, man left by

the Enlightenment shivering in the sun, far from master

of the universe, one of its most pitiable accidents.

Without ideals, faith, love, strength or even uniqueness

to sustain him, man collapses. His fall is no dramatic

expulsion from Eden, merely a shriveling and crumbling, and the angry voice of Rochester blasts his insubstantial remains.

This poem is somewhat parallel in structure and theme to Boileau's Satire VIXI, but is ideologically dependent much less upon Boileau than upon the whole skeptical 3 tradition from classical times to Montaigne. Although 3 S. P. Crocker, "Certain Aspects of the Background -72-

many of the ideas are derived from others, they are in­

tegrated into an intensely personal statenent lit with the

fire of individual vision.

First we turn human values upside down:

Were I (who to my cost already am One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man,) A Spirit free, to choose for my own share, What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleased to weare, I’d be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear. Or any thing but that vain Animal, Who is so proud of being rational.

The idea that beasts are better than men (theriophiljfy)

was frequently enough repeated In the seventeenth cen- i{- tury to amount to the Identifying feature of a cult.

of Rochester's Satyr Against Mankind,” West Virginia University Studies, III, Philological.Papers, Vol. II, May"1937» finds ^scarcely an idea" in Rochester's poem which is not present in Montaigne. In partial rebuttal, John F. Moore, "The Originality of Rochester’s Satyr Against Mankind," PMLA, LVII (19^3), 393-i|-01, points out that many of even the close verbal parallels which Crocker finds in Montaigne are as closely or more close­ ly paralleled in classical writers. He establishes that there is hardly an Idea from Boileau which was not sig­ nificantly altered by Rochester, and that the sources are so varied that Rochester "must be credited with the same degree of eclectic originality accorded to other writers who absorb ideas from extensive reading and develop them into an essentially original synthesis."

^See George Boas, The Happy Beast in French Thought of the XVIIth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1933)> who regards theriophily. as a branch of primitivism, based on the notion that "beasts— like savages— are more ’natural' than man, and hence man's superior." Descartes, in opposition, took a position much like,that of St. Thomas, that beasts lack reason and soul. The principle theriophilist of the early seven­ teenth century was Charron, a disciple of Montaigne. However the closest parallel for these particular lines of Rochester which John F, Moore finds (op. cit.) are In the Greek comedian Menander, a passage which Rochester might have encountered "in several Renaissance writers." -73- Rochester himself expresses the idea elsewhere, par­

ticularly in an earlier satire, Tunbridge-Wells, which

closes with the following wry inversion of the sentiments

of Hamlet:

Bless meI thought I, what Thing is Man, that thus In all his Shapes, he is ridiculous. Our selves with noise of Reason we do please In vain, Humanity’s our worst Disease: Thrice happy Beasts are, who, because they be Of Reason void, are so of Foppery. Faith, I was so asham’d that with Remorse I u s ’d the Insolence to mount my Horse; For he, doing only Things fit for his Nature, Did seem to me by much the wiser Creature. about which J. Harold Wilson comments, "This is a pre- view of Gulliver, with a Yahoo astride a Houyhnhnm."

The reasoning of Rochester and others is partly ethical: that nature Is good, that primitive man and, above all, the beasts are good, but the operation of man's mind has through the centuries taken him further and further from nature and goodness to his present depraved state. But

I don’t think it is stretching the point to see here an epistemological bias as well as an ethical one. The modern world finds the truth by looking down. Since the seventeenth century we have sought to understand man by comparing him to machines, to animals, to explain his most complicated manifestations of mind and will by reference

£ Court Wits of the Restoration, p. 133* Wilson also, pp. 136-7, points to the significant portrait Rochester had painted in which he is putting the bays on a grinning monkey and a letter to Savile in which he re­ gards it as "a Fault to laugh at the Monkey we have here, when I compare his Condition with Mankind." -7h- to simpler processes. As modern science practices this

methodical degradation it is expressly without judgment,

the scientist professing no interest in what is better

or worse or even truer— only' in explanations which enable

him to make satisfactory predictions. But it was im­

possible for Rochester to make the comparison without

judging it— without feeling the twinge of insult, without

painfully resigning himself to relative insignificance in

the universal scheme of things, and, finally, without

gleefully turning his own shame as a weapon upon his vain

brothers who still imagine themselves rather special

imitations not of lower reality--savages, beasts--but of

higher reality--G-od. Again, the fallacy of the common

denominator. His model of the true and good was not

above him but was the stinking beast under his nose.

The nose tells man more than the mind. Reality is related to him by his senses; whereas it is his vain de­

lusion that

The senses are too gross, and he'll contrive A Sixth, to contradict the other Five; And before certain instinct, will preferr Reason, which Fifty times for one does err. Reason, an Ignis Fatuus, in the Mind, Which leaving light of Nature, sense behind; Pathless and dang'rous wandring w^ays it takes, Through errors, Fenny-Boggs, and Thorny Brakes; Whilst the misguided follower, climbs with pain, Mountains of Whimseys, heap'd in his own Brains Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down, Into doubts boundless Sea, where like to drown. Books bear him up awhile, and makes him try, To swim with Bladders of Philosophy; In hopes still t'oretake th1escaping light, The Vapour dances in his dazling sight, Till spent, It leaves him to eternal Night. -75- Then Old Age, and experience, hand in hand, Lead him to death, and make him understand, After a search so painful, and so long, That all his Life he has been in the wrong;

The five senses constitute “certain instinct” which operates

according to "nature.” Man has contrived a sixth sense, reason, which opposes rather than aids instinct, which

contradicts "nature” and leads man into error. The golden promise of the Age of Reason had already tar­ nished for Rochester: he compares it to a will-o'-the- wisp glowing foolishly over the sodden marsh, misleading travelers. Reason creates its own obstacles, "Mountains of Whimseys," the "laborinths of Schooles," to which

Donne referred. But worst of all, it leads one to fall into "doubts boundless Sea”: reason destroys certainty and knowledge, it confuses, torments and finally drowns the man who trusts it. It is sense, the "light of Nature," man has left behind which can alone provide the certainty and security man needs. For Rochester, sense. For Dry- den, echoing this line of thought in Rellgio Laici after

Rochester's death, the answer is faith:

Dim, as the borrow’d beams of Moon and Stars To lonely, weary, wandring Travellers, Is Reason to the Soul: And as on high, Those rowling Fires discover but the Sky Not light us here; so Reason's glimmering Ray Was lent, not to assure our doubtfull way, But guide us upward to a better Day. And as those nightly Tapers disappear When Day's bright Lord ascends our Hemisphere So pale grows Reason at Religions sight; So dyes, and so dissolves in Supernatural Light.

For both men reason is inadequate and misleading; for both skepticism, the rejection of the possibility of certain -76- knowledge, is but a stage in arriving at the means to internal peace. But they differ widely in what they arrive at. For Dryden reason doesn't reach far enough; for Rochester it reaches too far. One poet arrives at the Supernatural, one at the super-natural, the surreal­ istic world perceived by instinctual levels of the mind below the consciousness. A little observation on the part of Copernicus, a little frankness on the part of

Hobbes, and what was left of man, lead by his ignis fatuus reason to believe that he was master of an im­ portant world and cast in the image of God?

Hudled in dirt, the reas'ning Bngine lyes, Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise.

As an engine, as a clock-like microcosm of the universe, man was a wretched failure. Perhaps he can have better success as an animal.

He can return to the warm fold of nature only by resigning his pride, his wisdom and his wit— but that is no expense:

Pride drew him in, as Cheats, their Bubbles catch, And makes him venture, to be made a Wretch, His wisdom did his happiness destroy, Aiming to know what World he shou'd enjoy; And Wit, was his vain frivolous pretence, Of pleasing others, at his own expence. For Witts are treated just like common Whores, First they're enjoy'd, and then kickt out of Poores: The pleasure past, a threatning doubt remains, That frights th' enjoyer, with succeeding pains: Women and Men of Wit, are dang'rous Tools, And ever fatal to admiring Fools. Pleasure allures, and when the Fopps escape, 'Tis not that they're belov'd, but fortunate, And therefore what they fear, at least they hate. -77- Pride blinds him and makes him gullible; wisdom leaves

him puzzling about what should be self-evident; wit, by

which he pretends to please others, only enrages them at

last. The digression upon wit indulges in more sympathy

than does the outright condemnation of pride and wisdom.

"Admiring Fools" first enjoy the company of the Wits, who

seem to be pleasing others at their own expense. But

after the Fool enjoys the Wit "a threatnihg doubt remains,"

for wit is always unsettling, always dangerous to Fools,

and even Fools perceive eventually that they themselves

are the butt of the joke.

But now methinks some formal Band, and Beard, Takes me to task, come on Sir I'm prepar'd.

The clergyman, interrupting the speaker, has perceived

that what started out as a wholesale damnation has gotten

sidetracked on wit. And what appears to be a condemnation

of wit, along with the other qualities, shows more sym­ pathy than wit warrants. He says to the speaker:

Then by your favour, any thing that's writ Against this gibeing jingling knack call'd Wit, Likes me abundantly, but you take care, Upon this point, not to be too severe.

Rochester, in putting these words in the mouth of the

"formal Band, and Beard," shows a humorous awareness of his own prejudice. In spite of the thoroughness of his attack upon the intellect of man he can't, he knows, damn

the very quality which is producing the poem.

The clergyman thinks that he himself should take up the cudgels against wit: -78-

Perhaps my Muse, were fitter for this part, For I profess, I can be very smart On Wit, which I abhor with all my heart: I long to lash it in some sharp Essay, But your grand indiscretion bids me stay, And turns my Tide of Ink another way.

The polish of these lines is notably brighter than

Rochester usually gives his verse. The p's and s's and then w's and h's in the first triplet; the l's, s's sh's, b's and t's of the second triplet, climaxed by the nd's in the central and lofty "grand indiscretion"; all this intricate sound play is organically suited to the for­ mality and pompousness of the clergyman. As he con­ tinues his voice squeaks with indignation:

What rage ferments in your degen'rate mind, To make you rail at Reason, and Mankind? Blest glorious ManI to whom alone kind Heav'n, An everlasting Soul has freely giv'n; Whom his great Maker took such care to make, That from himself he did. the Image take; And this fair frame, in shining Reason drest, To dignifie his Nature, above Beast. Reason, by whose aspiring influence, We take a flight beyond material sense. Dive into Mysteries, then soaring pierce, The flaming limits of the Universe. Search Heav'n and Hell, find out what's acted there-, And give the World true grounds of hope and fear.

This passage has the curious virtue of expressing one of the most extravagant and at the same time convin­ cing encomiums of reason and mankind written during the

Restoration at the same time that its context makes it ridiculous. The redundancy In the line "Whom his great

Maker took such care to make," is the only apparent satire, and yet we have been given enough of Rochester's thought in the beginning of the poem to realize that at least for -79- him the argument defeats itself. We have already seen the MImage”of God, the ’’fair frame, in shining Reason drest” huddled in the dust of his collapsed vanity. The idea that reason dignifies man’s nature would be absurd to Rochester, who would ask what dignity nature needs when nature itself is our highest aim. And it is such flights

"beyond material sense” which perplex and drown us in

"doubts boundless sea.” Finally, he might ask of what possible use to man are hope and fear? In a song called

The Fall, he applauds the time when "natural” man, in . the Garden, was free from hope and fear:

How blest was the Created State, Of Man, and Woman, e ’re they fell, Compar'd to our unhappy Fate; We need not fear another Hell.

Waked beneath cool Shades they lay, Enjoyment waited on desire. Each Member did their wills obey, Wor cou'd a wish, set pleasure higher.

But we poor Slaves, to hope and fear, Are never of our joys secure. They lessen still as they draw near. And none but dull delights endure.

Then Cjoris, while I duty pay, T h e WobTer Tribute of my Heart. Be not you so severe to say, You love me for a frailer part.

At the risk of diverting attention from Satyr

Against Mankind I would like to examine The Fall more closely for clarification of Rochester's conception of the instinctual life of "nature." In the first place, the poem probably means that not only mankind but the

"frailer part" has fallen, which adds up symbolically to -80- the same thing. Impotence is a recurring theme in the

Restoration, but particularly in Rochester's poetry. One of the most notorious of his poems is the powerful

Imperfect Enjoyment (discussed in Chapter V), in which his hysterical rage on the occasion of a premature or­ gasm amounts to a furious rejection of the whole life of the senses. In The Fall the tone is gentler; but it is significant that one of the characteristics of man in

Paradise is better coordination of desire and potency.

The key to the fall in this view is the interference of the mind. The sin of Eden was knowledge; and Hell con­ sists of our present experience withering under conscious­ ness. Hope and fear, the curses of intellect, curtail our ecstasy, making sense experience, or, again, "nature,” insecure and unsatisfactory. Like Dover Beach this poem ends with a plea for personal fidelity as a bulwark against unsatisfying experience in a fallen world. Some­ what humorously he says, "I'm not Adam, honey; but love me anyway. For after all, you're not Eve and this isn't

Paradise. Since we ard damned to do without our natural powers and pleasures, let us erect love to fill the gap in nature." In Satyr Against.Mankind Rochester is ap­ plauding this same nature, in which the mind helps rather than hinders animal bliss, in which one wants no more than he can have and can have all that he wants.

At any rate, Rochester can tolerate no more of the clergyman's enthusiasm; -81-

Hold mighty Man, I cry, all this we know, Prom the Pathetique Pen of Ihgello; Prom Patrick's/ Pilgrim, S/ibbs'/ soliloquies And ' tis this very reason I despise. This supernatural gift, that makes a Myte, Think he is the Image of the Infinite: Comparing his short life, void of all rest To the Eternal, and the ever blest. This busie, puzling, stirrer up of doubt, That frames deep Mysteries, then finds 'em out; Pilling with Prantick Crowds of thinking Pools, Those Reverend Bedlams, Colledges, and Schools Borne on whose Wings, each heavy Sot can pierce, The limits of the boundless Universe. So charming Oynments, make an Old Witch flie, And bear a Crippled Carcass through the Skie.

All the dull, monotonous, pious, sentimental writers

perpetrate the same nonsense in praise of reason. It is

this very reason which leads men away from nature, which

gives them an exaggerated sense of their own importance, which creates uncertainty, mystery, all the mental traps with which men amuse and torment themselves. Thinking drives men to Bedlam, whether they choose to call it such

or dress it up with the-more "Reverend” label of college or school. Thought is responsible for the delusion of the understanding, the delusion of dignity, the delusion of the supernatural, the delusion of escape fromnan's sot­ tish blundering reality— and such delusions are the stuff of Insanity. This wholesale denunciation as we are to find out, does not include all thinking processes, but is aimed at those which man had particularly celebrated un­ der the name of a certain kind of reason: speculation about ultimate truth. Scholastic reasoning, the logical structures of an Aquinas or the cerebral juggling of the metaphysical poets, had long since been discredited. -82-

Rochester probably would include in his attack such modern manifestations of reason as deism, or the

’’reasonable" Anglicanism of men like Gilbert Burnet, or the empirical quest for truth engaging some members of the Royal Society. Such words as "busie" and "Fran- tick Crowds" associate with reason the unpleasant ideas of trade and religious enthusiasm which for Rochester would characterize the bourgeoisie, the prosaic-minded dissenting tradesmen of the City. The reference to witch’s ointments has the effect of equating specu­ lative philosophy and religion with popular superstition.

But perhaps the cleverest turn in these lines is the inversion of the striking image which the "Band, and

Beard" appropriated from Lucretius. Lucretius said that when man overcame superstition and sought truth he went "Beyond the flaming ramparts of the world." It is somewhat ironic that in his flight of rhetoric, the clergyman should turn to the materialist for inspiration to deny materialism:

We take a flight beyond material sense Dive into Mysteries, then soaring pierce The flaming limits of the Universe.

Rochester, then, in his own voice, returns these lines in mockery: each heavy Sot can pierce The limits of the boundless Universe.

I am not sure how much significance can be attached to the paradox (almost oxymoron) of a universe which has -83- limits but no bounds. Pinto reports that in one manu­ script version the word boundless is corrected in the margins to utmost— which is more logical, though per­ haps less effective satire. If, however, boundless was intended, it suggests the whole vision of contemporary astronomy that the world, far from the center of a singing set of spheres, was a speck flying lost in endless wastes of space, a world in a universe of worlds. In other words,

Rochester might be answering religion with science, giving one of the most powerful arguments the age provided against the dignity and special status of man.

The attitude which lies behind all these arguments is that reason is a corruption of a natural function.

The created world is good. Things were made to work.

But reason corrupts nature, making man either absurd or evil.

'Tis this exalted Pow’r, whose bus'ness lies, In Nonsense, and impossibilities. This made a Whimsical Philosopher Before the spacious World, his Tub prefer, And we have modern Cloysterd Coxcombs, who Retire to think, cause they have naught to do. But thoughts, are giv'n for Actions government, Where Action ceases, thoughts impertinent: Our Sphere of Action, is lifes happiness, And he who thinks Beyond, thinks like an Ass.

One might answer that Rochester is asking man to think like an ass rather than a man, and he might smilingly agree.

The mind in a successfully functioning beast is a kind of extension of the limbs. It enables the body to do more, never impedes its activity. It controls and governs -en­ action; but the emphasis is upon the action, not the

control. In other words, thought cannot be an end in

itself, parasitically sapping energy which could better

be spent in enjoyment. Rochester calls this use of the

mind to extend the use of the body "right reason," quite

a different thing from the "reason" of the Band and Beard:

Thus, whilst 'gainst false reas'ning I inveigh, X own right Reason, which I wou’d obey: That Reason that distinguishes by sense, And gives us Rules, of good, and ill from thence: That bounds desires, with a reforming Will, To keep 'em more in vigour, not to kill.

The parallels of this poem with the philosophy of

Thomas Hobbes have been noticed by several writers, but

never explored in detail. One is tempted by such passages

as the following, In Chapter III of Leviathan, to

attribute much of Rochester's disillusion to Hobbes:

. . . there is no idea or conception of any­ thing we call infinite...... When we say anything is infinite, we signify only that we are not able to conceive the ends, the bounds of the things named; having no conception of the thing, but of our own Inability.

in particular, the passage of Rochester just quoted con­ denses a good deal of Hobbesian psychology Into a few

lines.. Good is the object of appetite; ill the object of aversion. Appetite and aversion are the motions of the

imagination toward or away from objects, and imagination, in turn, is continuation of the motion of sense experience.

That Is, our senses are put into operation by impulses from the outside world. And after the immediate object of sense experience has'left us, the motion it causes within us continues in the imagination, as waves continue to roll after the wind has died. The imagination thus presents objects to our mind which are not present. If we desire these objects, we internally begin to move toward them,

calling them good; if we dislike them, we move away,

calling them bad. Will chooses among them, calculating the greater good, restraining the impulse which would lead to unpleasant consequences. The will, thus, has no more freedom than a set of scales;

And therefore if a man should talk to me of a round quadrangle, or, accidents of bread in cheese, or immaterial substances, or of a free subject, a free will, or any free, but free from being hindered by opposition; -*■ should not say he were in an error, but that his words were without meaning, that is to say, absurd.

The difference between Hobbes and Rochester is, it seems to me, primarily one of tone. Hobbes demolishes the past with a cocky certainty; Rochester rages bitter­ ly coarsening and pushing to extremes what Hobbes has to say, bathing hysterically in mud. I doubt that the sim­ ilarity arises so much from his reading of Hobbes as from his general awareness of the ideas in the air at the time. The individual stamp he puts upon these ideas is his tortured sense of the ambiguity of truth as he saw it. What was true.was squalid; what was false was inspir­ ing. Yet it was truth he saw he had to live with.

The affirmation is blustering but sharply to the point -86-

Your Reason hinders, mine helps t*enjoy, Renewing Appetites, yours wou'd destroy. My Reason is my Friend, yours is a Cheat, Hunger call's out, my Reason bids me eat; Perversely yours, your Appetite does mock, This asks for Food, that answers what's a Clock? This plain distinction Sir your doubt secures, rTis not true Reason I despise but yours.

When I am hungry my intelligence tells me to eat, perhaps helps me to find food, perhaps warns me when I have had enough. False reason, circumscribed by the formal world of categories and rules and traditions, asks what time it is. Is it mealtime? The clock and not the stomach governs eating in this world; an artificial rational structure--preordained mealtime--interferes in the natural process of appetite and fulfillment, stimulus and immediate, uninhibited response. The'bind-forged manacles" limit and agonize men who might be free.

But "right reason" is the reason of the beasts, and man's addiction to false reason is inexorable. Therefore man Is damned without equivocation:

Thus I think Reason righted, but for Man, I'le nere recant defend him if you can. For all his Pride, and his Philosophy, 'Tis evident, Beasts are in their degree, As wise at least, and better far than he. Those Creatures, are the wisest who attain, By surest means, the ends at which they aim. If therefore Jowler, finds, and Kills his Hares, Better than M ^ r e ^ , supplyes Committee Chairs; Though one's a States-man, thTother but a Hound, Jowler, in Justice, wou'd be wiser found.

The argument is divided into a consideration of man's wis­ dom and of his goodness; the example of Jowler pertains only to wisdom, and is perhaps the most superficial piece -87- of logic in the poem. The instinctual behavior of the

dog is sure and unfaltering; we may imagine the politician

muddled and stammering by comparison. But even if we

accept Rochester’s anti-intellectual definition of wisdom,

we cannot be sure that poor Meres is not attaining f,By

surest means11 the end at which he aims. If, for instance, he finds that properly conducted parliamentary government

rewards him with the greatest happiness, if he has as

his aim the solution to a problem of great complexity,

he may very well be going about it In the surest way,

regardless of his stammering and muddling. It might

not be expedient at all to lope through the council

room with the hanging jaw and twitching nose of a dog on

the hunt. I think Rochester does not quite say what he means: that hunting hares is a more satisfactory aim

than filling a committee chair; that Jowler is wiser not only because his instincts are surer but because he

limits his range of activity to simple sense experience.

The second half of the argument pertains to man's goodness:

You see how far Mans wisedom here extends, Look next, if humane Nature makes amends; Whose Principles, most gen'rous are, and just, And to whose Moralls, you wou'd sooner trust. Be judge your self, I ’le bring it to the test, Which is the basest Creature Man, or Beast? Birds, feed on Birds, Beasts, on each other prey, But Savage Man alone, does~Man, betray: Prest by necessity, they Kill for Pood, Man, undoes Man, to do himself no good. With Teeth, & Claws, by Nature arm'd they hunt, Natures allowance, to supply their want. -88-

But Man, with smiles, embraces, Friendships, praise, Unhumanely his Fellows life betrays; With voluntary pains, works his distress, Nor through necessity, but wantonness. For hunger, or for Love, they fight, or tear, Whilst wretched Man, is still in Arms for fear;

The inhumanity of man to ittan was not a new subject, but

Rochester's version is helpful in clarifying the extent to which he idealized nature. As I have been pointing out, he continually contrasts to the depravity and weakness of man some vision of a paradise of instinctual and primitive blessedness. If this vision involved an idealization of the noble savage or the idyllic life of beasts gently grazing in a world of abundant green, Rochester would have wandered far from the tutorship of Hobbes, who imagined primitive existence to have been a-perpetual state of war and "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." However Rochester's agony Is un­ relieved by any Ideal of pastoral bliss. The beasts are better than men, but even the beasts are doomed to a life grim as the cave man's. Nature is inadequate! its winters and droughts blast the meadow, and to com­ pensate for destitution it provides its creatures with claw and fang. The best hope we have in this world Is for honest warfare. Man, the accent scathingly falls, betrays. With deliberate effort he works his fellow's distress, not because he must but because he wantonly chooses to. Beasts "fight, or tear," because of appetite, desire, while the sole motivation for man's viciousness is fear. -89- Hobbes was not so single-minded in his analysis

of human motivation, but Rochester might very well

have been reinforced in his conviction by the example

of Hobbes. The philosopher continually points to fear

as at least one explanation of man’s noblest pursuits,

and fear had a peculiarly important function in Hobbes’

own life. In his old age he wrote an autobiographical

poem which included the couplet:

The year of the Armada, doubtful year, My mother brought forth twins, myself and fear.

And the pattern of his life is in a way symbolic of the

fear man felt looking forward from the crest of the

Renaissance. While Hobbes’ writing exhibits often a

startling, swaggering audacity, it offers an interesting

contrast to the picture given us by his friend John

Aubrey of the white-haired, red-moustached giant of an

old man, afraid of ghosts, sitting alone in his locked room at night playing prick-songs on his lute and sing­

ing in a voice cracked with ninety years--,,for health.”

He had dispelled ghosts with the light of reason: the ghosts of tradition, of mystery, of myth. But at night

they slipped by even the magnificent and evil bulk of

the Leviathan andwmld not down.

Rochester, at the climax of his satire, reduces all man’s pretensions to fear:

For fear he armes, and is of Armes afraid, By fear, to fear, successively betray'd Base fear, the source whence his best passion came, His boasted Honor, and his dear bought Fame. -90-

That lust of Pow'r, to which he's such a Slave, And for the which alone he dares be brave: To which his various Projects are design'd, Which makes him gen'rous, affable, and kind. For which he takes such pains to be thought wise, And screws his actions, in a forc'd disguise: Leading a tedious life in Misery, Under laborious, mean Hypocrisie. Look to the bottom, of his vast design, Wherein Mans Wisdom, Pow'r, and Glory joyn; The good he'acts, the ill he does endure, 'Tis all for fear, to make himself secure. Meerly for safety, after Fame we thirst, For all Men, wou'd be Cowards if' they durst.

Fear is the spring of love, honor, fame; it motivates the search for power, which, in turn, enslaves man, teaches him policy which has the appearance of human warmth. The lust for power inspires intellectual achievement. It forces him to worry about the appearance of his behavior, hence to misrepresent his Intentions, to labor to please others, to submit himself to the most wretched of ser­ vitudes, hypocrisy. All of his achievements and virtues thus stem from the same source. In our century we would say "inferiority complex" or "insecurity" leads men to be bold or shy or to boast or condemn themselves, to write, paint, lead armies or make love. But for us the explanation serves as an apology; for Rochester it did not excuse man but damn him.

The final paradox of this passage leaves no alter­ native: we achieve because we are afraid to follow our first miserable impulse to fear achievement itself.

And honesty's against all common sense, Men must be Knaves. 'tis in their own defence. Mankind's dishonest, if your think it fair, Amongst known Cheats, to play upon the square, You'le be undone------Nor can weak truth, your reputation save, The Knaves, will all agree to call you Knave* Wrong’d shall he live, insulted o're, opprest, Who dares be less a Villain, than the rest. Thus Sir you see what humane Nature craves, Most Men are £owards, all Men shou'd be Knaves The diff'rence lyes (asifer as I can see) Not in the thing it self, but the degree; And all the subject matter of debate, Is only who's a Knave, of the first Rate?

Thus ends the poem as it probaHy was first published.

These last lines show the ethical consequence of fear.

Honesty would mean exposure, and so does not seem sensi­ ble to fear-ridden man. Since one may assume, then,

that other men are knaves, he is forced to be a knave himself--or suffer the defeat of the naively honest in a card sharks' game. And it will do no good after you are beaten to protest that you alone were playing fair.

The sharks will all agree that you were cheating. Man not only is not virtuous, but he makes virtue silly and impossible.

Some fifty lines seem to have been added later to the poem which mitigate somewhat the breathless fury of what we have seen. He says:

All this with indignation have I hurl'd At the pretending part of the proud World, Who swolne with selfish vanity, devise, False freedomes, holy Cheats, and formal Lyes Over their fellow Slaves to tyrannize.

It is obvious that he is not going to retract much. All men, we gather, are slaves, presumably of their fears.

Rochester's indignation is directed only at that "pre­ tending part" who do not confess their weakness. -92- But, he says In the lines which follow, if there

is such a thing as a politician who Is honest, or a

clergyman who exemplifies real piety, he will "recant

“7 Po-P&dox to them." For the most part he describes

the pattern of virtue he hopes to see by negatives: a courtier who directs his "needful flattery" to the good rather than the ruin of the country, whose passions are

controlled by an unbiased intelligence, who devotes his

skills "To raise his Country, not his Family," who does not condemn avarice only to receive "Aureal Bribes" in secret; a clergyman who is not vain, who does not "deride" man for his sins, (a surprising concern for the author cf this Satyr), who doesn't use his eloquence to chide kings

"and raile at Men of sense," who doesn't lie, abuse and gossip from his pulpit, who is not avaricious, proud, slothful and gluttonous, who does not "hunt good Livings, but abhor good Lives," and who is not so lustful that he fills his parish with his own progeny. The last lines of the poem, however, turn from negation to affirmation, and we have a portrait of a clergyman who, like Pope's

Man of Ross, stands at the end of the satire as an example that worthwhile human character is possible:

But a meek humble Man, of modest sense, Who Preaching peace, does practice continence; Whose pious life's a proof he does believe, Misterious truths, which no Man can conceive. If upon Barth there dwell such God-like Men, I'le here recant my Paradox to them. Adore those Shrines of Virtue, Homage pay And with the Rabble World, their Laws obey. If such there are, yet grant me this at least, Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast. -93- Underlying this affirmation is a threat that he will not

adore anything less than the ideal, or obey the laws pro­

duced by men who are not his moral superiors. Despairing

of the ideal, it is likely that he will continue to

find the actual contemptible.

It is not surprising that nowhere else in his poetry

does Rochester sustain for any length of time the earnest­

ness and depth of the Satyr Against Mankind. If he means

what he says— and there is no reason to believe he does

not— man is simply not worth the effort. We may assume

that Rochester would have the same underlying contempt

for poetic achievement as he has for any other product

of man's cowardice and knavery. It is, indeed, surprising

- that we have as great a body of poetry as carefully

wrought as it is from Rochester's hand.

But if Satyr Against Mankind represents the furthest

reach of his earnestness and profundity, it does not ex­

press the depths of his negativism. In a powerful

adaptation of a chorus from the second act of Seneca's

Troadea he turns a denial of the afterlife into a ter­

rifying contemplation of pure nothing:

After Death, nothing is, and Nothing, Death, The utmost Limits of a Gasp of Breath: Let the ambitious Zealot, lay aside, His hopes of Heav'n (where Faith is but his Pride) Let Slavish Souls. lay by their Fear, Nor be concern'd, which way, nor where. After this life they shall be hurl'd, Dead, we become the Lumber of the World; And to that Mass of Matter shall be swept, Where things Destroy'd, with things Unborn, are kept. -914-- Devouring time swallows us whole, Impartial Death confounds Body and Soul. For Hell, and the foul Fiend, that rules, Gods everlasting fiery Goales, Bevis'd by Rogues, dreaded by Fools; (With his grim griezly Dog, that keeps the Door) Are sensless Stories, idle Tales, Dreams, Whimseys, and no more.

To savour fully the temperament of Rochester working upon

this material, it is perhaps useful to compare his version

with the prose translation of the same passage from

Seneca in the Loeb Classical Library:

There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing, the final goal of a course full swiftly run. Let the eager give up their hopes; their fears, the anxious; greedy time and chaos engulf us altogether. Death is a something that admits no cleavage, destructive to the body and unsparing of the soul. Taenarus and the cruel tyrant’s kingdom and Cerberus, guarding the portal of no easy passage— all are but idle rumours, empty words, a tale light as a troubled dream. Dost ask where thou shalt lie when death has claimed thee? Where they lie who were never born.

A "course full swiftly run" becomes a "(rasp of Breath";

"the eager" becomes "ambitious Zealot," stirring associa­

tions with the contemporary scene of religious fanatics

claiming mystic relations with divinity; "the anxious"

become "Slavish Souls," repeating the idea expressed in

the Satyr Against Mankind that freedom is sacrificed to

fear; a death which is "destructive to the body and un­

sparing of the soul" becomes one which "confounds Body

and Soul." The most startling images are Rochester's.

He has succeeded remarkably in objectifying complete

nullification in lines which are wholly his own: -95- Dead, we become the Lumber of the World; And to that Mass of Matter shall be swept, Where things Destroy'd, with things Unborn, are kept.

While this poem has a literal statement of comfort, the

emotional effect is quite the opposite. The horrible tales

of hell are whimsey--but instead of a "grim griezly Dog" we may expect nothing. Dreams good and bad fall palely

silent before the void. The truncated rhythm of the

final line, "Dreams5 Whimseys, and no more," falls to

silence. The murmuring line leaves us silent and round

mouthed with the ambiguity of "no more."

The tone is too serious for real and paralyzing

hopelessness. We might expect Rochester to face the

void with rattling laughter, and in the poem which most

completely wallows in negation, that is approximately

what he does. Upon Wothing is a hearty address to what

Rochester regards as the beginning, end and purpose of

life:

Nothing thou Elder Brother ev*n to shade, Thou hadst a Being, e're the World was made, And (well fixt) art alone of ending not afraid.

Here is Donne-like wit at last applied literally to

"Natures nothing," Donne was able to distill a lover

from "A quintessence even from nothingnesse" and Roches­

ter is able to imagine a nothingness antedating darkness.

The "well fixt" sets up a Donne-like counterpoint con­

trasting and harmonizing with the main line of statement:

if nothing is "well fixt" (we might say "well hung") it

need not fear extinction, since it has the potency to -96-

reproduce itself. This Idea of potent sterility dropped

sotto voce gives the poem an unexpected metaphysical turn.

As the Satyr Against Mankind was reasonable mockery

of reason, Upon Nothing is metaphysical mockery of meta­

physics. Nothing, he tells us, united with itself and

begot "Something, the gen'ral Attribute of all"--which

as the product of Nothing must back to Nothing "undis-

tinguish'd fall." The created world is thus a temporary

illusion of "Men, Beasts, Birds, Fire, Aire and Land"

which Something snatched from "fruitful emptinesses hand."

Matter is a wicked offspring. Light is a rebellious dar­

kening of Nothing's "reverend dusky Face," just as we have

seen the light of reason blinding overenlightened man.

Time, however, which seems to be in the enemy's camp, is

really in the pay of Nothing and in the process of driving

all the evil manifestations of Something back into Nothing's

"hungry Womb." Really divines are the only one with

warrant to pry into the mysteries of Nothing, but a layman may at least be certain that Nothing takes nothing from

the virtuous--that heaven is a piece of nonsense which

Nothing dispells--and that the wicked wisely pray to be a

part of Nothing. Nothing provides neither reward nor punishment. Nothing is the end product of the elaborate philosophies by which the wise "Enquire, define, dis­

tinguish, teach, divide" in their attempts to discern

"Is, or is not" and "true, or false." With one blow fall both the pretensions of man to discover reality and reality itself. -97- From this point the applications become more specifi­ cally satirical. Sacred monarchs, representatives of Some­ thing, incongruously sit at council with statesmen "high­ ly thought, at best, for Nothing fit.”

Whil'st weighty Something, modestly abstains, From Princes Coffers, and from States-Mens Brains And Nothing there, like stately Nothing reigns.

Fools decorate their Nothing in the "Lawn-sleeves, & Furrs,

& Gowns“ of clergymen, merchants and lawyers. To the vapidities of the professions are added those of the nations:

French Truth, Dutch Prowess, British Policy, Hybernian Learning, Scotch Civility, Spaniards dispatch, Danes Wit, are mainly seen in thee.

And finally all mankind, high and low, is stirred into the whirlpool:

The great Mans gratitude, to his best Friend, Kings promises, Whores Vows, towards thee they bend, Flow swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end.

The last line lifts the poem again from local satire to the total vision with which it began.

What Donne feared, Rochester sees happening. Donne's fear in the Anatomy of the World is still somewhat tenta­ tive:

Wee seeme ambitious, Gods whole worke t*undoe; Of nothing hee made us, and we strive too, To bring ourselves to nothing back;

Thus was ushered in the light of reason and the evapora­ tion of mystery. The mists rose from the crumbling bastions, leaving stone for a salvage crew of scientists. Nature's something— the antique reality of human dignity— was -98- exorcised along with witches and ghosts by nature’s

nothing. It remained for Pope, in the Dunelad, to

sound the requiems

Art after Art goes out, and all Is night. See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, Mountains of casuistry heap'd o'er her headl Philosophy, that lean'd on Heaven before, Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense! See Mystery to Mathematics fly! In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and. die. Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires. Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine; Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine! Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restor’d; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And universal Darkness buries all.

Man lost not merely God. Rochester bids Him joyful fare­

well. But the new orthodoxy of truth replaced Christ with

a spinning-jenny as Yeats says in this brief meditation

upon the Enlightenment:

Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.

And however beneficial to mankind is that mechanical

cornucopia, It represents after wit the triumph of dull­ ness, after art the triumph of artifice, after vision

the triumph of sight. I V . T H E MIND r S RIGHT OBJECT

Then what Donne had feared had come to pass. The nihilism of Upon Nothing seems a literal embodiment of

"dwelling lazily/ On Natures nothing," except that laziness does not describe the frenzy of Rochester's rejection of the something his world had given him. In fact it would be a distortion to see Rochester's despair as a perverse choice of weeds in a garden of blossoms. A good deal of the best thought of his day pushed him to the premises of his negativistic poems. Rochester is unique not for what he thought but for shamelessly pursuing to extremes the implications of much believed generally In the In­ tellectual world around him.

For example, two overlapping traditions of thought flourished In Restoration England which together tended to lead the mind to "Natures nothing." Empiricism and libertinism had in common the effe

-99- attack or ignore, first, scholasticism and, second, any

rational speculation or any preconception, ethical or

otherwise, inherited from the past. As we see empiricism

and libertinism reflected in the literature of the time we can understand more fully the tawdriness of Rochester’s view of life. At least in the more or less popular forms

in which these ideas filter through such writers as

Cowley, Sprat and Shadwell, they undercut a great deal which had sustained men in the past and provide little to replace what they destroy.

The empirical bias derives, of course, from Bacon, who was regarded (whether or not with justice ) as a kind of David who had slain the Goliath of scholasticism:

Autority, which did a Body boast, Though 'twas but Air condens’d, and stalk'd about, Like some old Giants more Gigantic Ghost, To terrifie the Learned Rout With the plain Magick of true Reasons Light, He /akcon/ chac'd out of our sight, Nor suffer'd Living Men to be misled By the vain shadows of the Dead:

Since the discussion by Alfred North Whitehead in Science and the Modern World (New York: New American Library 1949)* several criticisms of Bacon as the vessel of the mo­ dern empirical viewpoint have been repeated frequently. In undervaluing mathematics, Whitehead charges, Bacon missed the whole temper of modern science, which is organized pri­ marily in terms of measurement. Also he suffers from tb® contradiction which plagues even modern empiricismJ he draws conclusions without providing for a generalizing principle which can account for the coherence of a series of physical observations. Whitehead claims, and I am not learned enough to disagree, that the empiricist has to assume a continuity in physical extension which sensory perception, by defini­ tion, cannot bring knowledge of. Thirdly, Bacon imperfectly understood the role of hypothesis, of conscious or uncon­ scious selection, In organizing perception and experiment. -101-

This Is Cowley, addressing the Royal Society, and it is to be noticed that freedom from scholasticism is general­ ized into freedom from the past. Significantly, Bacon's magic is "plain,” his reason is "true,” as distinguished, we may assume, from the more artificial or ornate magic of mystical religion or the false reason of speculation— deduction. The anti-inteliectuallsm is clearer when, in the same Ode, Cowley defines the process of the "new” philosophy which the Royal Society incorporates:

Prom Words, which are but Pictures of the Thought, Though we our Thoughts from them perversly drew) To things, the Minds right Object, he it brought.

The freedom is now from language— from abstractions which

according to Hobbes have no objective reality. The mind is to be occupied not with words but with things— an attitude which amounted, in its worst phases, to standing agog at the clutter of the universe, unvaluing and un­ reasoning. Probably Cowley's "things" are equivalent to

Donnas "natures nothing." The respectability of the world of things has gone full circle. Now, for Cowley, know­ ledge is a knowledge of things, to the exclusion of any generalization about them by wit, poetry or discourse (or rational elaboration):

That his philosophy's/ own business he might quite forget, They /past ages/ amus'd him with the sports of wanton wit, With the Desserts of Poetry they fed him, In stead of solid meats t'encrease his force; in stead of vigorous exercise they led him Into the pleasant Labyrinths of ever-fresh Discourse: -102-

The "philosophy” which resulted was explicitly anti­ learning, anti-thought, "a sensory primitivism which resembles . . . the concrete vision of a child, • . . not so much the idea of mental operations as it does their absolute contrary--the operation of the five senses un- p der material stimulus at their simplest level."

The self-righteousness and high moral tone with which some moderns defend "the scientific method” also characterizes the defenses of the very early champions of the new philosophy. In view of the close kinship between the "natural" observation celebrated in the

Bacon-Royal Society tradition and the "natural" conduct of the libertines (which I will discuss in a moment), this strong moral impetus is somewhat ironic. One might regard, for instance, the search for knowledge of things by means of the senses, in defiance of "Autority," as

2 H. W« Smith, "'Reason* and the Restoration Ethos," Scrutiny XVIII (195*1)* 118. Bacon and those who followed . him explicitly denied that simple wonder, or admiration, was the end of knowledge, but the men in the ranks more often than not pursued science with an open-mouthedg ape (as, I daresay, do most men in the ranks today.) A splendid exposition of the history and psychology of the amateur scientists in this period, among whom we might count Cowley, Sprat, Dryden, and, notably, Evelyn, is given by Walter E. Houghton, Jr., "The English Virtuoso in the Seventeenth Century," JHI, III (19^2), 51-73? 190-219. Shadwell's famous play, The Virtuoso, one of many satires upon these gentlemen, appeared In 167&, after the premises of natural philosophy had had general acceptance; it is interesting that Gimcrack, the virtuoso of that play, Is not attacked for materialism, a dead issue, but fdr uselessness and impracticality--from a more narrowly utilitarian, anti-intellectual position than that of Gimcrack himself. -103- dangerously like the crime of Eve; but, for Cowley,

quite the contrary. The s enses seem to be a check upon

man's pridd. In the opening lines of the Ode to the

Royal Society. Cowley says:

Philosophy the great and only Heir Of all that Human Knowledge which has bin Unforfeited by Mans rebellious Sin, . . .

a curious turn upon the Eden legend. Man forfeited

knowledge in the garden. Apparently for Cowly Adam and

Eve were in harmony with the divine (hence had instinctive

knowledge of God) as long as theyd&d not question and re­ mained satisfied with sensory knowledge of things. The

"rebellious Sin" seems to have entailed the curse of

limitation to an inferior way of knowing— thought. This

is an inversion of scholastic rationalism. For the

school men sense perception is either verification of

truth which the reason grasps or, at best, the gross material of truth which reason shapes into meaning. Such reliance upon the speculative power of the mind is for

Cowley tantamount to disobedience, to blasphemous imita­ tion of God:

Yet still, methinks, we fain would be Catching at the Forbidden Tree, We would be like the Deitie, When Truth and Falshood, Good and Evil, we Without the Sences aid within our selves would see; For *tis God only who can find All Nature in his Mind.

Of course these lines attacking Deism attempt to pre­ serve the eternal mysteries in the safety zone of faith, but the interesting thing to me is that reaching too far -10L}.- is reaching "Without the Sences aid." The search for knowledge is ethical as long as it is sensory. We can­ not know such things as "Truth and Falshood, Good and

Evil" except by faith.

This same concept of original sin is found in Dry- den's epistle To My Honor’d Friend, Dr. Charleton:

The longest tyranny that ever sway'd Was that wherein our ancestors betray'd Their free-born reason to the Stagirite,

Betrayal to Aristotle is of course sinful, but does not yet sound like the Fall. However, the savages which

Columbus discovers are free from Aristotle and are con­ sequently still in the state of innocence, "guiltless men, . . . happy as their clime." Scholasticism is idolatry and earthly pride, it is "homage to a name,/

Which only God and nature justly claim." And truth has been "Redeem'd from error, or from ignorance" by such men as Bacon, Boyle, Harvey, Dr. Ent and Dr. Charleton, a clinical absolution which seems to be as efficacious as if it were ecclesiastical.

The mitre of Bishop Sprat nodded its approval of

"natural" philosophy (in effect, scientific research) as a moral cause. He found that it enlightened and adorned the country, that it kept gentlemen out of trouble in their leisure hours. He recommended it to gentlemen of wealth and breeding, saying it was pleasanter and easier than academic learning as a means to prestige. -105- Their Minds should be charm'd by the allurements of sweeter and mord plausible Studies; and for this purpose Experiments are the fittest: Their Ob.jects they may feel and behold, . . . their Method is intelligible, and equal to their capacities.3

The moral value of simplicity and absence of duplicity,

which was recognized by both religionists and scientists

in the development of a plain style in prose, was also

felt to reside in the direct methods of natural philosophy.^-

The kinship of empiricism and libertinism may be

seen in the Ode to the Royal Society also. Cowley says

that the medieval guardians of philosophy:

Would ne're consent to set him Free, Or let his own Natural Powers to let him see, Lest that should put an end to their Autoritie.

And there are frequent references throughout the poem to

nature, in the sense of the original state, uncorrupted

by speculation and artificial restraint, and to liberty,

in the sense of recapture of that untrammeled happiness,

just as Dryden's reference to a Mfree-born reason"

3 Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society of London, London, 1667.

^For fuller discussion of the relation of scientific and ethical values in the development of prose, see Richard F. Jones, "Science and English Prose Style, 1650-73," PMLA, XLV (1930), 977-1009; George Williamson, The Senecan-Amble and Harold Fisch, "Puritans and the Reform of Prose ktyle," ELH, XIX (1952), 229-^8.

Many qualifications of the account I have given here of empiricism need to be made for a full understanding of the interaction of such different kinds of empiricism as that of Bacon or Hobbes or the Royal Society. The tremendously penetrating study of seventeenth century epistemology, Basil Willey's, The Seventeenth Century Background (London: Chatto & Windus, I934-) elaborately demonstrates the prevalence of the habit of mind I am referring to. Some useful distinctions are made by L. I. Bredvold in "Dryden, Hobbes and the Royal Society, " MP, XXV (1928), ij.17-38. implies a preference for an unreasoning reason, the libertine right reason of the Satyr Against Mankind.

Libertines give themselves away by their jargon.

Thomas Shadwell had an unusual propensity for ab­ sorbing and reflecting in his plays the intellectual preoccupations of his day. The Libertine, a version of the Don Juan story, was no doubt intended as a satirical attack upon the extravagant behavior of court wits such as Rochester. The play is a useful document of at least the popular conception of libertinism, and in it we may see that for the libertine, as for the empiricist, the mind's right object was things; the mind's right activity was escape from speculation..

For example, Don John's friends praise him for having freed them from education "And the dull slavery of Pupilage.

They refer to the "liberty of Nature" and "Natural Appetites jargon similar to that we have seen the empiricists use.

Don John expounds the doctrine:

Nature gave us our Senses, which we please: Nor does our Reason war against our Sense. By Natures order, Sense should guide our Reason, Since to the mind all objects Sense conveys.

They will "never think ought can be ill that's pleasant."

One libertine says, "We live in the life of Sense, which no fantastick thing, cal'd Reason shal controul." And another, "My reason tels me, I must please my Sense." An alliance with Hobbistic determinism is explicit: "All our actions are necessitated, none command their own wills."

In a long discussion with a hermit, the libertines argue -107- that the will depends upon judgment— the last opinion

one has of what good is is what sways his will, "What-

soe'r men do,/ Their present opinions lead 'em to."

The hermit insists that the "understanding" is free

"and might perswade 'em better." Don John rejoins that we do what we understand: the senses convey objects

to the mind which then sways the will, a brief exposition

of Hobbesian psychology. Finally the hermit pleads for

them to "Lay by your devillish Philosophy," and one of

the libertines answers, "Change our natures; Go bid a

Blackamore be white, we follow our Constitutions, which we did not give ourselves." Don John adds, "If we be bad, *tis Natures fault that made us so." It was a world

they never made.

I would say that the difference between empiricism as it was understood by the lay scientists of the seven­ teenth century and libertinism as it is represented by

Shadwell is the difference between the amoral and the im­ moral. Where Cowley seems innocent, Don John seems motivated by a malevolent urge to show up the evil he finds in the world. Of the two views, only libertinism seems to incorporate real ethical vision; the ethics are negative, they compose a creed of the ugly and the evil, but the fury of libertine conviction suggests again and again disillusionment, painful recognition of the disparity between the real and the ideal. In Rochester the pain frequently produces mockery. Love Is that hell In which . we are strapped irrevocably to our pleasures, the tarnished

Petrachan Slave of Love having become, in the new scientific age, the Slave of Glands:

A Gainst the Charmes our Ballocks have, How weak all humane skill is? Since they can make a Man a Slave, To such a Bitch as Phillis.

The only ideals which can sustain and inspire love are those produced by the delusion of drink:

Upraide mee not that I designs Tricks to delude yr charmes When running after mirth & wine I leave yr Longing Armes

For wine (whose power alone can raise Our thoughts soe farr above) Affords Idea's fitt to praise What wee think fitt to love.-’

One of the grossest of Rochester's onslaughts against the ideal with the weapon of his century's new view of the actual is his mock pastoral, “Fair Clorls in a Pig-

Stye, lay." The delicacy and refinement of the pastoral tradition contribute to the irony here, where the Ideal shepherdess is reduced to a slumbering swineherdess. The poem follows her dream, in which one of her"Love-convicted

Swaynes" runs to her to tell her that a "BosomePig" is trapped under a gate which leads to a cave. When she flies to the cave, the swain rapes her. The dream is so realistic it awakens the swineherdess who finds herself sexually aroused:

Stanzas found by Vivian de Sola Pinto in Roches­ ter's autograph. The poem is "How perfect Cloris, & how free," as it appears in the Portland MS (f.i^.). . Frighted she wakes, and waking Friggs, Nature thus kindly eas’d, In dreams rais'd by her murmr’ing Piggs And her own Thumb between her Legs, She innocent and pleased.

In a way, the reader's experience is something like that

of the swineherdess. After the dream--suggested to.us

by the pastoral form of the poem--of love and beauty and

excitment, we awake to a reality which is uglier, more

shocking, more familiar, than reality itself. The word

innocent summons up the staggering irony that after visions of sun-bathed love on the cushiony greensward, which the pastoral inevitably reminds us of, innocence—

real innocence in this world--is masturbation in the mud

of a pig stye.

Such poems are deliberately destructive. After a period of comparable disillusionment, Hemingway wrote a novel, The Sun Also Rises t which also rollicks in life’s

seamy aspects. But the difference is definitive. Hem­

ingway is concerned with destroying the illusion which sus­ tained a naively idealistic world; but, in addition, he says the real values are here; food, drink, sex, sport.

The second half of this statanient would be impossible for

Rochester. The solid values of sense are no less dis­ gusting to him than the phony values of tradition. He dwells upon them— he has his heroine masturbate--because they are the only reality we have. But the pleasures he is obliged to pursue are even more tormenting than the ideals he cannot respect. -110-

It is surprising that Shadwell catches something of

this torment— and presents it somewhat sympathetically—

in The Libertine. Shadwell's focus is not clear--and it

is difficult to know to what extent and for what reasons

he intends to secure the sympathy of the audience for the

libertine point-of-view. for example, much of the liber­

tine ethic is like Hobbism; but it is not merely either

diluted Hobbism or empiricism. It has a tradition of its

own. The contrary of Hobbeds view of a brutish state of

nature is the libertine vision of happiness in complete

freedom, a religious and moral position not unlike that

of several antinomian, "primitive Christianity" sects

of the seventeenth century which regarded defiance of

custom and law as a moral duty aimed at destruction of 6 the barriers to primitive purity. In two places In

Shadwell's play there are statements that uncorrupted nature was idyllic, but in both cases the statements come from people who suffer at the hands of the libertines.

6 Notably the Ranters, an anarchic movement appear­ ing about l6[}ij., the "left wing" of the seventeenth century search for apostolic Christianity, who were actually ac­ cused of libertinism by many of their enemies. The Ran­ ters were above right and wrong: the outward man didn't matter, and, to the pure, all things were pure. They were extreme pantheists and mystics. They earned their bad reputation among the quieter dissenting sects by exorbitant defiance of authority, nude demonstrations and complete indifference to criticism. Quakers and Baptists had rea­ son to deplore th© extravagance of Ranters, since magis­ trates were inclined to class dissenters indiscriminately as belonging to one of the larger sects. -111-

Perhaps Shadwell has in mind a distinction between

true libertinism, which is gentle (for him), and false

libertinism— the libertinism of the rakehell circle of

court wits— represented by Don John. The latter strain

might be considered by the ’’true" libertines as nothing

more than another example of the corruption of society

by civilization. Maria, whose brother and lover have

been killed by Don John and his crew, says:

More savage cruelty reigns in Cities, Than ever yet in Desarts among the Most venemous Serpents, and remorsless Ravenous Beasts, could once be found. So much has barbarous Art debauch'd Mans innocent Nature.

Rochester would agree, as would Th.eoph.ile de Viau, 7 the most notable of the French school of libertins, as

would, I daresay, so respectable a libertine as Evelyn or

as Almanzor in The Conquest of Granada who says:

The libertin school in France in the early seven­ teenth century was a more or less formal group which existed in reaction to the Pr^cieux. Their thought derives immedi­ ately from Montaigne, but anti-Stoical (and anti-Platonic) principles had, of course, been voiced since classical times. I have been able to find no discussion of English libertinism in the Restoration. For the earlier years of the seventeenth century, see Fletcher Opin Henderson, ’’Traditions of Pr^oieux and Libertin in Suckling's Poetry,” ELH, IV (1937) > 274"300, and articles on Donne: George Williamson, "The Libertine Donne,11 Pg^ XIII (1934)* 276-291; L. I. Bredvold, "The Naturalism-of Donne," JEGP XXII (1923)* 471-502; and.Bredvold, "Religious Thought of Donne," of Michigan Publications in Language and Literature, Vol. I. For France one might assemble a long bibliography, but the most eomprehensive works.are F. T. Perr ens, Les Libertins en France au XVIIe Siecle •( Par is: L. Chailley, 1896) and Reng Pintard, he L'lbertinage ^rudit... (Paris: Boivin, 1943). -112-

I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When in wild woods the noble savage ran.

Later in the play, after a scene of particular

villainy, we are suddenly presented with a pastoral scene

"in a delightful Grove" in which two shepherds and two

nymphs come in and extol "uncorrupted Nature . . . not

yet debauch'd by Art." They claim to copulate endlessly

without ever becoming tired or vicious. Then the liber­

tines rush in and rape the nymphs while the shepherds

run for the magistrates. This little scene encompasses

much that I have been talking about: the idyllic pas­

toral ideal viewed now as sensual indulgence rather than

poetry; and even that ideal corrupted by a grosser sen­

suality, the violent and depraved lust of the libertines;

the country carnalists set upon by the city slickers; and

it is interesting that the "pure" libertines, the shep­

herds and nymphs, call upon the law— the very antithesis

of libertinism— to save them.

In spite of the fact that Don Juan is consumed by

Hell fire, unrepentant because he cannot have any other heart than that given him by nature, The Libertine might

easily be regarded as a libertine play. The strong argu­ ments are all on the libertine side; the libertines fair­

ly successfully relieve themselves of responsibility for

the horrors they commit; and the source of evil, as it is presented here, might be conceived as the libertines -113- conceive it--artificial restrictions and limitations upon conduct.®

Lucretius was the Bible to many of the material­ istic and naturalistic thinkers of the period and was very popular with the poets, but although the Epicurean and libertine traditions overlap to a large extent, the libertine substituted excess for moderation. (For in­ stance, see Etherege's poem, The Libertine, which in­ sists upon excess, dwells upon forcing the body to pleasure right in the teeth of the age and death. Artificial stimulants, masochism, dildoes, cantharides, etc., are referred to frequently in the literature of the period.)

Glorification of excess requires some distortion of the libertine belief in releasing natural capacities; it points no longer toward recovery of primitive bliss but toward a Dionysian ecstacy, an exploration of the outer limits of pleasure. Whether or not libertinism ever meant this in practice, the libertine villain-heroes--Shad-

' f t Thomas B. Stroup, "Shadwell*s Use of Hobbes," SF, XXXV (1938), l|05-32, points to some ambiguity in the dramatist*s use of the philosopher. Shadwell*s chief interest in Hobbes seems to have been in his determinism, which is itself but a step beyond the humor theory of comedy which Shadwell developed from Jonson. The em­ phasis upon determinism in The Libertine is much heavier than I have found it elsewhere in connection with liber­ tinism. The major ethical problem raised by the play— whether we can judge transgressors who are not re­ sponsible for their actions--is really irrelevant to the main line of libertine thought in which ethics is meaningful only in terms of pleasure. -Ho­ well's Don John, Lee's Nero, Otway's Alclbiades and Don

Carlos, Rochester’s Valentinian— are pictured not as quietly Indulging themselves but as laying the country­ side waste in psychopathic preoccupations with activ- 9 ities which exceed pleasure and leave it far behind.

Jacomo lists Don John's pleasures: ”Some thirty Mur­ ders, Rapes innumerable, frequent Sacrilege, Parricide,” and on and on. I doubt that Don John could have done all this in his own interest; he must have performed with the selfless devotion of a mystic or a scientist. His guilt, perhaps, lies not in his pleasure-seeking, but in his enthusiasm.

Before leaving The Libertine I would like to point out that it brings us up sharp against Rochesterian wit.

At one point Don John is shaming Jacomo for being faint of heart:

Away! thou formal phlegmatiek Coxcomb, thou Hast neither courage, nor yet wit enough To sin thus. Thou art my dull conscientious Pimp. And when I am wanton with my Whore within, Thou, with thy beads and Pray’r-Book keep’st the door.

It requires wit to sin as outrageously as Don John because wit is the house-cleaner, the David slaying

Goliath, the Samson, more aptly, bringing the temple down

^The string of absolute monarchs in this list of libertines brings to mind Albert Camus's Caligula. The relationship of Restoration libertinism to modern existentialism needs to be explored. Also, of course, de Sade is another logical culmination of the attitude. -115- about his ears. Notice that wit is combined with courage

and opposed to formality, which we may take as unthinking

acceptance of forms, of tradition; to phlegm and dullness,

the atrophy which Pope was in time to feel coming up out

of nighty depths and overcoming the universe; to religion

and conscience, the specific kind of formality which did

most to bind man's mind and capacity. And the good, for

Don John, is courage and wantonness and sin, all of

which represent above all liberation from the bondage of

formality, dullness and conscience. Bishop Sprat would

not have put his sermon in the same terms, but his in­

tent, and Cowley's and Dryden's, has the same Promethean

spirit. They would steal wit from the gods and give it

to men; they would light the world against dullness.

In this context it might be well to examine The

Maim'd Debauchee, a poem of Rochester's which is often

regarded as a satire, but which might be read almost with­

out irony. Just as an old, disabled admiral might stand

on a hill and observe with relish a naval engagement he

cannot participate in, the poet hopes that in his own

impotent days he will be able to observe and encourage

the drinking, whoring and civil violence of younger men.

We are apt to be thrown off by Rochester's insis­

tence upon words with strong negative connotations. The admiral "crawles” to the top of the hill, where he "en­

joys the Bloody Day.tf The title itself selects a par­ ticularly unpleasant way of referring to a retired wit,, -116-

and the debauchee describes himself in unflinching

terms:

So when my Days of impotence approach, And I'm by Pox, and Wines unlucky chance, Drov'n from the pleasing Billows of debauch, On the dull Shore of lazy temperance.

or what is apparently self-condemnation emerges more

strongly in the last stanza:

Thus States-man-like, I'll sawcily impose, And safe from danger Valiantly advise, Shelter'd in impotence, urge you to blows, And being good for nothing else, be wise.

Such strong language used by the speaker about him­

self might lead us to regard the poem as a blast at just

such aged lechers as the poem represents: the poem, in

that case, would be a dramatic monologue spoken by a person Rochester means to expose as reprehensible.

However Rochester, like many hard-bitten twentieth

century poets, shows a willingness to call a spade by name, to use the harshest language to express the values he cares most for. I am reminded of a line from Yeats' poem After Long Silence, "Bodily decrepitude is wisdom.”

The attitude is hardened in the fire of irony, but never­ theless means what it says.

If we may read the poem this way we find that evil was deliberate and highly valued. Vice is called vice in

the following stanza, and, at the same time, seen as a good thing:

Shou'd hopeful Youths (worth being drunk)prove nice, And from their fair Inviters meanly shrink, 'Twou'd please the Ghost, of my departed Vice, If at my Couneel, they repent and drink. -117-

Wa have to remember that nice in this context has.par­

ticularly unpleasant connotations, meaning stupidly

scrupulous, formal, Frenchly fastidious. The last line,

suggesting the ritual of communion, lays out the terms

of the religion of vice. It is not surprising, then,

that he persuades "some cold complexion'd Sot" whose

"dull Morals" oppose him to "long some Antlent Church

to fire." The ancient churches must go, as the new one

of the libertines is fervently theocratic and will brook

no co-existence.

What are the compensations of that new religion?

Its ceremonies are described in hearty rapture:

When Fleets of Glasses, Sail about the Board, Prom whose Broad-sides Volleys of Wit shall rain.

But these are relatively innocent sensual pleasures; the more strenuous crusade requires real devotion to appreciate:

I'll tell of Whores Attacqu'd, their Lords at home, Bawds Quarters beaten up, and Portress won, Windows demollsht, Watches overcome, And handsome ills, by ray contrivance done.

The aesthetics of the ugly, of the outrageous, of

the shocking, Is the weapon of revolution. Fittingly,

the most revolutionary play of the time, the Rehearsal,

announces in Its prologue that it is"a posy made of weeds

Instead of flowers," aiming to substitute "wit" for "dull

sense" and for "rules" by which men are writing "in spite of reason, nature, art, and wit." Ostensibly that play is an elaborate parody of the fashionable heroic drama of -118-

the period; but in many ways— in values, characters, lan-

guage--it represents a more generalized outburst of wit--

Rochesterian wit--against all that had gone before. The

group of men who wrote it (the Duke of Buckingham, Bishop

Sprat, Samuel Butler, Martin Clifford and others) were

reacting against Western Civilization, as it was rarified,

systematized and set out in balanced couplets. Because

it objectifies many of the empirical and libertine

attitudes shared by Rochester, the Rehearsal deserves

to be considered here. But perhaps it should be approached

by means of the heroic drama which it satirizes.

A principal play in that genre is Dryden’s Conquest

of Granada--really two plays--a magnificent ten acts of

the gaudy wealth of the heroic tradition. Almanzor,

the hero, switches allegiance often and each time carries victory with him. This causes some doubt to be thrown upon his trustworthiness. Almanzor pulls up his chin:

Were I, like thee, in cheats of state grown old (Those public markets, where for foreign gold, The poorer prince is to the richer sold), Then Thou mightst think me fit for that low part; But I am yet to learn the statesman's art. My kindness and my hate unmasked I wear; For friends to trust, and enemies to fear. My heart's so plain, That men on every passing thought may look, Like fishes gliding in a crystal brook; When troubled most, it does the bottom show, 'Tis weedless all above, and rockless all below.

The numerous antitheses in the individual lines (in one couplet, kindness-hate, friends-enemies, trust-fear) are contained by larger antithesis in the whole speech, setting off what isn't against what is. The figures of speech -119- are so carefully chained to the argument that their decorative value would scarcely be noticed if attention were not directed to them by the rhetorical devices of the parentheses, the truncated line and the final alexandrine. Notice that Almanzor first examines the premise of his accuser, then carefully states his own and, as carefully, decorates it. The effect is to make com­ munication exclusively that of explicit statment— he tells them his heart is plain, not so much through vanity

(of which Almanzor has his share) as through a necessity for logical completeness, a necessity for expressing the premises which are supressed in ordinary human inter­ course. The judgment exhibited here represents con­ formity to the ideals of a world man has never seen.

But it was a world all men recognized: an embodi­ ment of the ideals, not the actualities, of their civil­ ization— the ethics, the language, the very plumes and gestures, the outsize passions of outsize men. Perhaps this is a prosaic, matter-of-fact age, but one would never know from the heroic drama, the high style of poetry to which the aesthetics of neoclassicism were geared.

Quite the contrary, poetry and imagaination had been re- 10 leased entirely from observable reality. Both Hobbes

10 The rationalistic separation of truth and art is studied in detail by D. C. Allen, The Legend of Noah (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1914-97* and. more directly literary discussion of the development of symbol as a rational replacement of literal belief is given by Ruth Wallerstein in Seventeenth Century Poetic (Madison: and. Davenant— the critics who had most to do with defining

the new way of heroic wit in the 165©'s— were anxious

to enlist poetry in the cause of judgment, to make it

serve the ideals which they considered desirable, and the central ideal for both of them was order: order in

society, in the mind, in the universe, yea in the very

couplet. This had nothing to do with life as they found it: that life had no order; the chaos of revolution in church and state and mind was precisely the reason that order was necessary. Observation was an unpleasant waste of time. Hobbes throughout his lifetime had no use for experimental, science, and in this respect stood in snarling opposition to the Baconian-Royal Society movement which was surging past him. The poetry which was developed to the dry taste of Hobbes and Davenant is not to be confused with the poetry of common sense.

University of Wisconsin Press, 195=0). The dualism which in the late seventeenth century so largely freed art from not only truth but seriousness and so damagingly undercut it as an effective cultural force at the same time that it permitted unprecedented technical development is one of several splits and dissociations which have their summation in the Cartesian separation of mind and mat­ ter. L. C. Knights' essay on "Bacon and the 'Dissocia­ tion of Sensibility'” in Explorations (Hew York: G. W. Stewart, 19)4-7) and three articles by Harold Wendell Smith in Scrutiny "'Reason* and the Restoration Ethos," XVIII (1951),' 118-36, "The Dissociation of Sensibil­ ity," 3n/TII (1952), 175-88, and "Nature, Correct­ ness .and Decorum," XVIII (1952),-287-3l4* are illuminating studies of the logic-tight compartments which developed in leading minds of the seventeenth century. -121-

The Rehearsal was the prose of common sense, leveled

vengefully against such uncommon sense, such idealism and

other nonsense, as The Conquest of Granada. Not 1$

Granada but in London, not in battle but in a playhouse,

not Almanzor but Johnson and Smith appear on stage.

Johnson announces that he is opposed to the dull and

fantastical:

I love to please myself as much and to trouble others as little as I can, and there­ fore do naturally avoid the company of those solemn fops who, being incapable of reason, and insensible of wit and pleasure, are al­ ways looking grave and troubling one another, in hopes to be thought men of business.

"Business'* is the dull, the selfish and narrow and gloomy

pragmatism of the true, blue protestants, the citizens,

the swarming, buzzing capitalistic middle class. But

the alternative is worse: the plays are:

such hideous, monstrous things, that it has almost made me forswear the stage and resolve to apply myself to the solid nonsense of your men of business as the more ingenious pastime.

The word solid had then surprisingly near the range of

•connotations it has now: businesslike, efficient,

financially and morally sound, dr it might be used

satirically to conjure up the milk-horse of business

wearing his blinders of conventionality and unimaginative

avarice. This sounds like a seventeenth century English

Babbitt:

. . . though, perhaps, they send their Youth into other parts, to learn Fashion, and Breeding: yet their Men come hither for nobler ends; to be instructed, in the masculine and the solid Arts of Life; 11 but it is Bishop Sprat. Such men as Sprat, Glanvil,

Dryden, Wilkins and Boyle, the empiricists, by their un­

ashamed use of solid in this sense, may be distinguished

from the wits, for whom the word was as damning as dull

or formal. In a Mter to Henry Savile, Rochester refers

to the ,rflashy Pry (of which I own myself the most un- 12 solid)11 Sprat separates himself cleanly from the wits,

insisting

that a plain, industrious Man, . . . is more likely to make a good Philosopher, then all the high, earnest, insulting Wits, who can neither bear partnership, nor opposition. ^

But Sprat could "bear partnership" even with the Wits, as

is evidenced by the fact that he was one of Buckingham's

collaborators in writing the Rehearsal, and so, I suppose,

shares the responsibility for this denunciation of

business. Dryden, too, the chief target of the Rehearsal, wrote comedies enlightened by the bias of the Wits. And

Rochester wrote a scene for a heroic play as well as a

somewhat heroic tragedy of his o w n . ^ However, no matter how often the boundaries were crossed, the major antagonisms

“^ History of the Royal Society, p. 6£. 12 J. H. Wilson, ed., The Roohester-Savile Letters, 1671-1680, Letter XIV.

^ H i s t o r y of the Royal Society, p. 3k •

1^His adaptation of Fletcher's Valentinian was largely an original work. For a discussion of the rela­ tionship of the wits to heroic and other drama, see the chapter, "Patterns for the Stage" in Wilson's Court Wits of the Restoration. -123- between wit and business, wit and religion, wit and con­ vention, even wit and the scientists of the Royal

Society, were deeply ingrained and were to become more violent at the end of the century, as the next chapter will show.

I think that I should qualify that the denunciation of business and the solid virtues by the Wits was more nearly an intellectual or even ethical position than a mark of their behavior. When it came right down to living the Wits, as a group, must have realized the value of financial and political seriousness. Some were actively engaged in industry; some were politically left- wing, although, of course, such a classification is meaningless except in the specific historical context.

Rochester's remarks to Savile are helpful in de­ fining what we may take to be the attitude of the Wits toward the practical affairs of the world. It is assumed that one will avoid the "Peril of Sobriety" (Letter II) for "that second bottle . . . Sets us above the mean

Policy of Court prudence," (Letter III), an attitude by which, while they recognize that the joke is ultimately on themselves, they also recognize that the serious world of business and politics is grubbing and dishonest, that deceit and avarice are at least as immoral as drunkenness.

£> 1 References to Letter numbers are those given in Wilson, Rochester-Savile Correspondence. -12k- However, with, ironic apology, one must face that world in which the real work is done: "Livy and Sickness has a little inclin'd me to Policy,” he says in Letter IX, and”I have a great Goggle-Eye to Business,” he admits in

Letter XXX. In both (jases he does attend to business, discussing political affairs with some perspicuity.

This combination of ironic self-parody and serious intent reminds me of Shaw (although Shaw is always more ten­ der of his own person than Rochester); in fact Letter IV, in which he Justifies wealth as an essential to good character, sounds remarkably like the Introduction to

Major Barbara. Rochester says, "few men uneasy in their fortunes have proved firme & cleare in their friendships," and "not one of a thousand can bee good natur'd to another, who is not pleas'd within himself." It was an attitude at least more complicated than a siraple.playboy disregard of and contempt for trade as uninteresting and beneath a gentleman's dignity.

With this set of values established, Smith and

Johnson, in the Rehearsal, bring them to bear upon the new sort of play in London— the heroic drama. Smith has heard of such plays, and he has heard "our country wits commend 'em."

JOHNSON: Aye, so do some of our city wits, too, but they are of the new kind of wits.

SMITH: New kind! What kind is that?

JOHNSON: Why, your virtuosi, your civil per­ sons, your drolls--fellows that scorn to imitate nature, but are given al­ together to elevate and surprise. SMITH: Elevate and surprise? Prithee, make me understand the meaning of that. T JOHNSON: Nay, by my troth, that's a hard matter . . . I ' l l tell you, as near as I can what it is. Let me see; 'tis fighting, loving, sleeping, rhyming, dying, danc­ ing, singing, crying; and everything but thinking and sense.

The "new kind of wits" was no longer new when the Re­ hearsal was produced in the early seventies; it may be recognized that Johnson is grouping together a number of types I have mentioned: the neoclassicist, the re­ spectable, Royal Societian empiricist, the businessman.

In saying that these people refuse to "imitate nature"

Johnson is playing with the very words of the neoclassicist he means not Aristotelian imitation, for which the neo- classicist uses the terra, but observation of the actual.

Johnson Is objecting that the plays don't look like life to him, and he is disregarding the question of whether they "imitate" the essential or ideal "nature" of man.

He wants "thinking and sense," by which he means commentary upon the whores and rascals who, he knows, populate his w o r l d .

The play which follows is exactly that. It is satire, and consequently it involves exaggeration. But the exaggeration points down rather than up, a kind of super-realism which enlarges out of proportion those aspects of its material which the audience will recognize.

As Basil Willey might point out, the choice Is simply be­ tween two kinds of truth. The essential quality of man -126- for the neoclassieist was his nobility; the essential quality for the satirist was his absurdity. Which ac­ tually is truer is relative to the assumptions of one’s culture. The truth the satirist dealt with was distinct from the other truth principally in that it was ob­ servable by the senses. Suddenly the stage is inhabited by men who are no longer inflated like the balloons which stagger down the street in a circus parade. They are men more like the little brown monkeys in the circus tent.

The intent is no longer to convey what man might be but what he observably is.

Is he? Or was he in the 1670’s as minimal as the

Restoration writers of comedy portrayed him? Perhaps so, if one looks only at the ,lfact,, of man, the Mthing" which brawls in the city streets and stinks and cheats and lusts, the upright animal perceptible to our grosser means of observation. The point is, for Rochester, to view man any other way was a lie, and it was a lie because the most persuasive intellectual currents of the time forced his attention to the thing. The palpable phoni­ ness of the ideals passed on to him in his childhood, the hypocrisy and venality of those he saw who gave greatest reverence to abstractions and speculations, had burned him young. All that was left was the thing— and disillusion and despair. V . CORRUPTION OP REASON

Between Donne and Rochester wit has wound out an increasingly mocking, increasingly frightful song. The speculative and introspective quality of metaphysical wit seems on the whole to be a result of a fervent search for absolutes by means of personal reasoning and faith.

Speculation, associated with scholasticism, and intro­ spection, associated with the enthusiasm and anarchy of private religious sects and private views of truth, were both somewhat discredited in the impulse after the rev­ olution to establish some kind of objectively determined order: either the ideal order achieved by conformity to law (neoclassicism in poetry, totalitarianism in govern­ ment and religion) or the solidity of concrete observation, of the actual, divorced from rational elaboration (satire,

"scientific” prose, poetic essays, comedies in literature, and empiricism or materialism in philosophy, libertinism

-127- -128- in ethics). Wit was always the faculty of mind which produced these varying and conflicting efforts to dis­ cover and express truth.

As the century wore to a close wit became more and more specialized through associations with a social group which self-consciously applied itself to intel­ lectual concerns. (Although an intellectual group, it was anti-intellectual insofar as it was hasbile toward speculation, introspection and tradition.) Wit thus came to describe the minds and manners of the Wits, the band of bohemian aristocrats of which Rochester was the high priest. It was this group which inspired Shadwell to write the Libertine and Etherege to write the Man of

Mode— radically different plays, but with a fascinating and easily seen kinship.

We may see that kinship first of all in regard to tone. Although Shadwell calls his play a Mtragedy," it is consciously comic even in the final scenes. Here is a speech in which Don John answers a lady's charge of infidelity. He speaks In the language, the spirit, the very cadence of Dorimant:

Your dissembling Arts and jilting tricks, taught you by your Mothers, and the phleg­ matic coldness of your constitutions, make you so long in yielding; that we love out almost all our love before you begin, and yet you would have our love last as long as yours. I got the start of you a long way, and have reason to reach the Goal before you. -129- An epithalamium which Don John has sung for six women whom he has married states in the baldest possible terms the assumptions of the Wits about sex, marriage and civ­ ilization:

Since Liberty, Nature for all has design'd A pox on the Pool who to one is confin'd. All Creatures besides, When they please change their Brides. All Females they get when they can, ■ Whilst they nothing but Nature obey, How happy, how happy are they? But the silly fond Animal, Man,- Makes Laws 'gainst himself, which his Appetites sway; Poor Pools, how unhappy are they?

This very explicit suggestion that man take his ethics from the animals rather than the angels resembles in sentiment

Dryden's well-known song, "Why should a foolish marriage vow," from Marriage a la Mode.

But the attitude is more complex than libertinism alone. It pervaded a cult— much like the cult which Van

Wyck Brooks decries in 1953i

. . . let us put an end to the Mcult of callous­ ness," as Lewis Mumford calls it, --the insen­ sitive, the brutal, — that cult of immaturity, good for blustering boys alone, which is really— — based on nothing but the fear of life. We have heard too much of Nietzsche's injunction, "Be hard!", and there is nothing less unmanly than the injunction, "Be gentle I

Brooks might have been writing at the end of the seven­ teenth century, when sentiment reacted with much the same shudder to the wit which went before. There is much in common between the social set of The Sun Also Rises and

^The Writer in America, p. 190. -130-

that of The Man of Mode (except that the people in

EtheregeVs play are on the whole more polite, less

violent). We might imagine Dorimant (or his prototype,

Rochester) exclaiming with Hemingway that talk about

courage, love, tenderness, happiness, hope and trust is

a lot of rot.

Well manner'd, honest, generous, and stout, Names by dull Fools, to plague Mankind found out,

is the way Rochester puts it in A very Heroical Epistle

in Answer to Ephelia. In both cases a generation found much pretense in church and state; traditional values

rang hollow, and ’'lost" intellectuals in search of a

firmer ethic began with values they were sure of: sex,

food, drink, sport. They were suspicious of refinements

upon these elementals.

The term Wit was applied to those who, in one way

or another, embraced this attitude:

The name was as loose as the morals of the assemblage. A Wit was anyone from wild, malicious Harry Killigrew or George Bridges ("created a Wit for hard drinking ) to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the.last splen­ did playboy of the fading Renaissance, or William Wycherley, the finest dramatic genius of the Restoration Court. A Wit was not necessarily one skilled at jest and repartee, nor need he be a poet, playwright, or maker of libels and lampoons. In the Restoration meaning of the term a Wit was simply anyone who pretended to intellectuality, and (es­ pecially if he were a lord) he was often taken at his own valuation.

2 J. H. Wilson, The Court Wits of the Restoration, p. j?. This book underlies whatever I say here. -131- l't is the pretense to (or achievement of) intellectuality which unifies them, a nd the very special turn which in-

tellectuality--wit--took in this century. Callousness may, perhaps, be singled out as the central characteris­

tic of this intellectuality; and I am sure that in both

the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the motivation for the respective cults of callousness is a good deal more complicated than adolescent "fear of life," to which Brooks attributes it. This "hard-hearted wit" or

"Wit stiff as any you have e'er a d m i r e d , was a fiercely positive reaction to experience, the response pf intelli­ gence to an extremely complex intellectual climate. Wit comes to imply unfaithfulness, deceit, brutality, moral

indifference— but these reversals of usual ethical values are themselves sharp ethical weapons against the phoney in the fight for the true and the good.

The witty circle can, perhaps, best be surveyed in the comedies, which, though probably exaggerated for comic and dramatic effect, nevertheless represent ten­ dencies . Like the heroes and heroines of Noel Coward, the witty men and women of Restoration comedy shock and amuse us; but at the same time it is intended that we ad­ mire their sophistication and emulate their values. Dryden, particularly, observing the Wits from the outside, shows

-^Dryden, Prologue to The Rival Ladies. -132- a keen awareness of exactly what wit implied in social behavior.^*

We find, for example, in Dryden's Maiden Q,ueen that to be witty may be to be facile at telling lies, when Celadon says, "... thanks be to my wit. . . I never pumped for a lie in all my life yet.11 Lies, one might say, are a kind of good: they have functions— in scheming to save one's neck or to procure money or a sexual partner. But they may not be used indiscrimin­ ately. Isabelle, in A Wild Gallant, has promised two would-be lovers that she will sleep with them after her marriage to a third man. They doubt her. "What!" she exclaims, "do you think I would tell a lie to save such a paltry thing as a night's lodging?" An order of values is suggested here: veracity isn't worth much, but worth more at that than fidelity.

Marriage in general gets hard treatment by the wits.

That same Isabelle, one of the emancipated women frequent

In the comedies, attacks the double standard of marital fidelity not by supposing that her husband should be true, but by defending her own right to play the field:

. . . if he fought with the sword, he should give me leave to fight with the scabbard . . . . You'll grant there's a necessity I should cuckold him, if it were not to prove myself a wit.

^■Rochester, in An Illusion to Horace, made fun of Dryden's preoccupation with wit and his attempts to crash the aristocratic circle. See pp. 32-3 above. -133- Loveby, in the same play, shows his wittiness by in­ sulting Bibber, whom he has cuckolded:

BIBBER: There was a wit now: he call'd me cuckold to my face, and yet for my heart I cannot be angry with him.

And Bibber, a man with a slobbering admiration for the wits, takes infidelity lightly: he happily acknowledges

Loveby's affair with his wife, and, in fact, compares notes with him. Wit requires a refusal to take affront-- an interesting contradiction of the eighteenth century opinion that wit is always bad-tempered— but it is not simply weak-kneed good nature. The wit would ask what is to be gained by being a martyr or a hero. When one of Don John's bevy of wives threatens to kill herself in shame and indignation, the wit knows better: "I'll trust ♦ you for that, there's ne'r a Lucrece now a-days, the Sex

* has learnt Wit since." But she does stab herself, which astonishes one of the libertines and brings forth a touching recognition of virtue: "S'death, she's as good as her word. The first time I e're knew a Woman so."

Transferring this attitude out of the theater one can imagine a range of feelings for outmoded forms from the affectionate Indulgence one has for a child who hangs up his Christmas stocking to a painful wish to believe in the nobility of man which observation will not justify.

The wit, we find in Dryden's Sir Martin Mar-All, is the fashionable man of taste: -13k- MILLISENT: I will have certain proof of his wit, before I marry him.

WARNER: Madam, I'll give you one; he wears his clothes like a great sloven, and that’s a sure sign of wit; he neglects his outward parts; besides, he speaks French, sings, dances, and plays upon the lute. or, in The Wild Gallant:

. . . he's a wit; he understands eating and drinking-well: Foeta coquus, the heathen philosopher.

Since wits are always indigent, wittiness can be unscru­ pulous cleverness at scheming, particularly for money, but also for sex.

. . . he's rich and thou want'st a fortune; achieve him if thou eanst; 'tis but trying, and thou hast as much wit as any wench in England. and later:

. . . Dost thou think he'll ever admit thee to govern him? /financially/ No, he fears thy wit too much.

Here the term means something like the tight fist and lifted eyebrow of shrewishness.

The witty speeches are frequently characterized less by verbal cleverness than simple bluntness, even coarse­ ness:

ISABELLE: But as for your great belly, nuncle, I know no way to rid you on't, but by taking out your guts.

Loveby, the hero of The Wild Gallant, admires this state­ ment greatly and regrets he will not be able to marry

Isabelle. -135- LQVEBY: ’Tis such a pretty smart rascal, . . . but I could have got such Hectors, and poets, and gamesters out of thee.

Constance, however, protests, reminding Loveby of the

close association of wit and poverty:

CONSTANCE: No, no: two wits could never have lived well together; want would have so sharpened you upon one another.

ISABELLE: A wit should naturally be joined to a fortune. Earlier, Constance, another Wit, has shown that she pre­ fers not to marry poverty. In a husband she wants no

"flash of wit" or "gay outside," but that solid virtue of the soul, an estate. In An EveningTs Love Jacintha thinks "the rattling of a coach and six sounds more elo­ quently than the best harangue a wit could make me."

While the Wits were quite aware that they couldn’t live on love alone, they also knew that sex, at any rate, was the point of living. A Wit must be lascivious, and yet not drool openly. Spanish women in An Evening’s Love are mocked for not being witty enough to keep their chins dry:

As for their wit, you may judge it by their breeding, which is commonly in a nunnery; where the want of mankind, while they are there, makes them value the blessing ever after.

Jacintha, a Spanish woman who nevertheless qualifies as a Wit, indicates clearly, however, that outward briskness and reserve constitute no restraint upon indulgence:

BEATRICE: Do you love him, then?

JACINTHA: Yes, most vehemently I -136-

BEATRICE: But set some bounds to your affection.

JACINTHA: None but fools confine their pleasure: What usurer ever thought his coffers held too much? No, I ’ll give myself the swing, and love without reserve. If I keep a passion, I ’ll never starve it in my service.

An Evening1s hove, of which Jacintha is the heroine,

is in fact a rather definitive example of witty grace

and bawdry. Like most of the comedies it brings together

a witty couple who fear and detest constancy and marriage.

They reach for one another while they fend one another

off in witty duels, all of which come to a draw. Finally

they shrug shoulders and accept marriage with as good £ grace as possible, muttering milder protests. In the process they have uttered an elaborate critique of sex

and marriage, and the resolution may imply that the

characters and the audience feel that marriage is toler­

able, even desirable, provided both parties fully under­

stand It and are safe from the error of sentimentality.

Early In the play we are assured that Wildblood, the hero, is a healthy-minded (I. e. witty) young man by this expression of horror:

Marriage, quotha! what, dost thou think I have been bred in the deserts of Africa, or among the savages of America? Nay, if I had, I must needs have known better things than so; the light of nature would not have let me go so far astray.

5 For a study of this pattern see John Harrington Smith’s, The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy. -137- Wit, as the civilized counterpart of the light of nature which would protect the savages, is exactly libertinism resisting an unnatural contrivance of law-bound man.

Jacintha also shows us her credentials when she says of the marriage bed:

I am sorry to hear 'tis so cold a place: But •tis all one to us, who do not mean to trouble it.

Even after the couple is resolved to marry, Jacintha keeps the idea at arms length:

If I stay till after Lent, it shall be to marry when I have no love left: I’ll not bate you an ace of tonight, father; I mean to bury this man ere Lent be done, and get me another before Easter.

And the resignation of the pair after nuptials is splendid with wit's delicate shading of the coarsest of attitudes:

WILDBLOOD: Jacintha Wildbbod, welcome to me: Since our stars have doomed it so, we cannot help it; but 1twas a mere trick of fate, to catch us thus at unawares; to draw us in, with a what-do-you-lack, as we passed by; Had we once separated to-night, we should have had more wit, than ever to have met again to-morrow.

JACINTHA: 'Tis true, we shot each other fly­ ing: We were both upon the wing, I find; and, had we passed this critical minute, I should have gone for the Indies, and you for Green­ land, ere we had met in a bed, upon consideration.

T. S. Eliot, speaking of Marvell's wit, called it "a tough reasonableness beneath a slight lyric grace”, and praised him for never being too serious for the matter at hand. The effect, in Marvell and, here, in Dryden, -138- is shocking to minds sopped in the liquid sentimentality of traditional and uncritical responses. All one need do to feel the full sting of such lines as these is to imagine the same people saying, "Well, it looks like we were made for each other after all," or "Jacintha Wild- blood. How does that sound? How you gonna like being called Mrs. Wildblood, honey?" The passage draws attention, too, to its "slight lyric grace": the perfect distribu­ tion of accents, spaced among the tumbling of supressed syllables. The "what-do-you-lack" and the "gone for the

Indies" pull each speech up to meet the actor's gesture, furnishing a simultaneous climax of sound and sense. The

"similitudes," developed but not insisted upon, hurry and expand the statements of plain sense without ob­ scuring them.

This passage summarizes the best of wit as a social force, reminding us of the man of wit insofar as he was the model and the critic of his glittering world. It has clarity and beauty and is oriented by sound and necessary values. The same play provides many instances in which beauty is rubbed off and the values merge the anti-senti­ mental with the anti-humane. For instance, when Jacintha's father, Alonzo, is prohibiting her alliance with Wild­ blood— a rascal by any standards— two men and a girl bring muscle to the aid of wit.

ALONZO: You do not mean to murder mel BELLAMY: You murder yourself, if you force us to it. -139- WILDBLOOD: Give me a razor there, that I may scrape his weesand, that the bris­ tles may not hinder me when I come to cut it.

BELLAMY: What need you bring matters to that extremity? You have your ransom in your handr Here are three men, and there are three women; you under­ stand me.

(Bellamy isn't really as witty as Wildblood, you see; but Jacintha is, who says to her father:)

JACINTHA: If not, here's a sword, and there's a throat; you understand me.

(Alonzo, at this point, is not witty at all.)

ALONZO: This is very hard!

The society felt that wit went too far. There are always

enough Alonzos in the world to bring the Wildbloods to heel when they are no longer amused, and so they did.

But even the wits were sick of themselves. They had ripped the clean, white, orderly bandages from society to let in air; but the sore they found was running and unheal­ ing and too disgusting for even their steady eyes.

It is this final stage of wit, this last phosphorescence of decay, which illuminates some of Rochester's most power­ ful poetry. The grinning Weltschmerz of these lines, fcr example, Is perhaps the end product of Wildblood's cruelty:

I Rise at Eleven, I Dine about Two, I get drunk before Seven, and the next thing I do; I send for my Whore, when for fear of a Clap, I Spend in her hand, and I Spew In her Lap: There we quarrel, and scold, till I fall asleep, When the Bitch, growing bold, to my Pocket does creep; -llj.0-

Then shyly she leaves me, and to revenge th' affront, At once she bereaves me of Money, and Cunt. If by chance then I wake, hot-headed, and drunk, What a coyle do Iitake for the loss of my Punck? I storm, and I roar, and I fall in a rage, And missing my Whore, I bugger my Page: Then crop-sick, all Morning, I rail at my Men, And in bed I lye Yawning, till Eleven again.

Of all the roles Rochester has played--the young aris­

tocrat aping the best poetry of his day to gain favor of

the king, the gentle Strephon of lewd but lovely pastorals,

the cocky, clever seducer of crisp court ladies, the sar­

donic, objective satirist of the foibles and affectations

of his age, the serious, sensitive young man rocked by a

little "philosophy” into total disillusion about his

species,' the sophisticated cynic surveying with cocked

eyebrow the pomp and corruption of politics, war and

intrigue, the enfant terrible pushing over privies in

the night— of all these it is this final sodden, bestial

Rochester who seems to me to have most to say to his world. The very bestia]jty repels us, I think, because it

is altogether too clear a recognition of the state of

Enlightened man. His world denies him any other ful- i fillment than physical indulgence— and the enjoyment of that is "imperfect"--ridden by fear, disease, pain, de­ ceit, the meaningless, endless tortures of one damned to the limits of his body.

It is The Imperfect Enjoyment which, for me, summarizes

Rochester's vision of reality. While the subject of the poem is specifically a sexual experience, it is of a piece -114-1 - with all experience and demonstrates in little the way ideals invest actuality with purpose, with the promise of heaven, but how actuality collapses short of the ideal. The bed may seem an unworthy testing ground for such ideas; but it is, in a way, definitive. The ideas work here or they work nowhere: here truth is basic, bare of hypocrisy, as it were, supine.

Naked she lay, claspt in my longing Arms, I fill'd with Love, and she all over charms, Both equally inspir'd with eager fire, Melting through kindness, flaming in desire; With Arms, Legs, Lips, close clinging to embrace, She clips me to her Breast, and sucks me to her Face.

Juxtaposed in the second and third couplets are the cliches of idealized love and the fresh, hot details of real love. It is a metaphysical blending of the two which is sought— a fusion of desire and experience. This process of juxtaposition is continued as physical facts are rendered by the metaphor of lightning:

The nimble Tongue (Love's lesser Lightning) plaid Within my Mouth, and to my thoughts convey d. Swift Orders, that I shou'd prepare to throw, The All-disolving Thunderbolt below.

Here, as in other poems, humor, a sneaking cynicism, slyly lets the air out of any suggestion of pomp or hypocrisy.

As we move to close the cirele of mouths and genitalia, we have more shifting from actuality to metaphor, ideali­ zation:

My flutt'ring Soul, sprung with the pointed kiss, Hangs hov'ring o're her Balmy Lips of Bliss. But whilst her busie hand, wou'd guide that part, Which shou'd convey my Soul up to her Heart, - 142-

Ih liquid Raptures, I dissolve all o're, Melt into Sperme, and spend at ev'ry Pore: A touch from any part of her had don't, Her Hand, her Foot, her very look's a Cunt.

The disengaged soul, "flutt'ring,” "hov'ring," antici­ pates a complete, full, meaningful experience--the poet will deliver his soul to her "Heart.11 These are still

the terms of idealization: a spiritual union will be

achieved through physical union.

The word "busie" in these lines interestingly fore­ shadows the rest of the poem. It is the business of this world, the necessary, gross and practical applicati on of means to ends, which destroys the ideal. In this case, the "busie hand" spills the offering intended for the altar of love. From this word on the poem is increasing­ ly corrupted by the gross, obscene considerations of practicality. The word "Cunt" at the end of the quoted passage announces blatantly that the circumlocutions of idealizations are finished. From now on a spade is a god-damned spade.

The lurid subject matter is apt to distract a reader from the poetry. I would therefore like to draw particu­ lar attention to the care with which Rochester has wrought this description of an orgasm. Earlier we were intro­ duced to the powerful (if somewhat humorous) concept of an .'Sa.l-disolving Thunderbolt below." Now, suddenly, we have dissolution— not with the smashing, explosive crack of a bolt from the heavens but with the sickening, exhaust­ ing, frustrating waste of inner dissolution, of crumbling -343- away into formless sand and water. "Raptures11 is, of

course, a trite word in erotic poetry, but this context,

I think, forces a memory of the word's etymological

relationship with rape; ecstasy and forceful depriva­

tion are yoked together in the experience. As for the

sound and meter, listen to the lines cascade down from

the height of "Heart,11 the liquid sounds reinforcing

the liquid sense while the spitting and, it seems to me,

contemptuous, £ sound in "Raptures" asserts itself in

the next line: "Sperme," "spend," "Pore."

The poignancy of the similarity of this tragedy of premature orgasm and the larger tragedy of Rochester’s futile and disintegrating life emerges with more and more clarity as the poem progresses. I will quote only a few lines:

But I the most forlorn, lost Man alive, To shew my wisht Obedience vainly strive, I sigh alas I and Kiss, but cannot Swive. Eager desires, confound my first intent, Succeeding shame, does more success prevent, And Rage, at last, confirms me impotent. • • • • Trembling, confus’d, despairing, limber, dry, A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I ly.

Half the poem is consumed in impotent rage at his unco­ operative member--which might be thought of as what? his physical self? his poetry? his restless, sputtering, brief life as a man? Or he perhaps was thinking of all poetry, all men, in these sweating sun-drenched days as

"Shrunk up, and Sapless, like a wither’d Flow’r." The point is, he is equipped and adequate for any of the -lllll.-

vicious, painful, shameful employments of man, ""When

Vice, Disease and Scandal lead the way,11 hut joyful

transcendence, Love— which would give dignity, meaning,

real pleasure, to his life— he cannot manage.

Rochester did "dissolve all o*re" in his thirty-

third year. His conversion under the logical ministra- 6 tions of Gilbert Burnet was, however sincere, an im­

potent withering away of the questions his life raised—

rather than a solution of them. But the contribution of

wit— the pathetically laughing clear-sighted and dis­

illusioned view of life which Rochester epitomized--had

been made in 1680, and all that remains now is to de­

scribe the last flickering of wit in the closing years

of the century.

The central fact about wit today is that it is not

taken seriously, not regarded as a serious a ttempt of

the creative imagination to perceive or express truth.

Wits still say very true things, just as drunkards say

truer things than they or anyone else wants to admit, but respectable society has joined hands in a tacit under­

standing that the drunken or witty Red Rover will not be let through.

Since the eighteenth century wit has largely been regarded, in the first place, as jest and, in the second

^Described by Burnet in Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester, 1680. -345- place, as slightly naughty, unwholesome decadence. As

early as Donne wit was, at least part of the time, play­

ful and clever. Wordplay, epigram, startling reversal

or analogy, insulting repartee--always recognized as in­

gredients of true or false wit— are, of course, products

of a quick rather than a necessarily profound intelli­

gence; but good wit has profundity, too, producing

cerebral titillation rather than laughter. Sona

Raizlss calls it "a smile of the mind, a criticism of

life conveyed in corrective irony,"

The pun, denounced steadily since the metaphysicals, has itself in little the history of this attitude toward

wit. One supposes that Donne's audience must have thrilled

at a pun with the sense of simultaneous communication on more than one level, but, then, there were bad puns which depended more on sound than sense for their effect,

and people began to groan. Still today a groan is the

expected appreciation of a pun; and the groan, usually, is a kind of pun in itself, implying simultaneous ac­

ceptance and rejection, pleasure and pain. Satire of any

sort usually has something of the same reception. Usually one does not laugh at satire; in fact he may very nearly cry. Nevertheless satire as a genre is ordinarily classed with the amusing rather than the moving; socjteby for some reason assumes that the satirist isn't playing for keeps

7 The Metaphysical Passion, p. 35. -llj.6-

in the same way that the scientist, politician, or

tragedian is. The joke in our society is a degraded

form of communication; and while, for example, William

Empson, in a chapter on "Wit in the Essay on Criticism"

in The Structure of Complex Words, arrives at a richer

understanding of Pope's poem by remembering that when­

ever Pope uses the word wit the sense of joke is some­

where in the background, perhaps the important duty in

our time is to point out that almost always wit has

something about it which is not joke.

Luckily the process of denunciation of wit as im­

moral and the discrediting of it as a serious pursuit

of truth may be documented as historical fact. That

process involved a sharpening of the differences between wit and sense on the one hand and wit and humor on the

other. I would like to dwell upon sense and humor for

a moment as a means of making this late seventeenth cen­

tury reaction to wit clearer.

Sense cuts deeply into seventeenth century thought.

The senses, of course, were dignified and glorified by

empiricism, materialism and libertinism as the source of

knowledge and/or happiness. At the same time, by exten­

sion, sense referred to judgments made on the basis of

sense--or' concrete, "real" experience— an intellectual

quality something like wit itself, only without connota­

tions of quickness, cleverness or malice. The libertine heroes of the comedies are referred to indifferently as -147- "men of wit'1 and "men of sense," or, often, "men of wit and sense," a coupling in some ways akin to that of fancy and judgment or wit and wisdom. For Rochester sense was the "light of Nature"— a fusion of feeling and understand­ ing. Since the word, unlike wit, was free from the sug­ gestion of levity or superficiality, it was able to move closer and closer to sentiment and sententiousness. In

Sheridan, a hundred years later, sense has come to mean fatuous piety.

In the 1690*s the words wit and sense became defin­ itively associated with class. The wits were the aris­ tocrats, the Town, and sense became the special virtue of the sober middle class, the City. The principal documents reflecting this split are Blackmore’s Satyr against Wit and the Commendatory Verses and Discommenda- 8 tory Verses which followed it. I will return to Black- more shortly, but I would like to describe first a similar controversy between advocates of wit and of humor.

This dispute grows out of,: but is certainly not limited to, the conflict in dramatic theory between the 9 tribe of Ben and the authors of the comedy of wit. In

8 The social issues are discussed in Robert M. Krapp's "Class Analysis of a Literary Controversy; Wit and Sense in. Seventeenth Century English Literature," Science and Society, X (I9I4.6 ), 80-92. A fuller study is Richard C. Boys’ Sir Richard Blackmore and the Wits (University of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology, No. 13, 1949). 9 Almost any commentary on Restoration drama gives an account of the controversy as it affected the stage, but a full-length study of the reaction is given by -111.8-

general the politically conservative writers believed that

a healthy condition of the social body could best be pre­

served by molting "characters”--the odd, perverse and un­

balanced members who did not measure up to a reasonable

standard. The "comedy of wit" which these writers de­

veloped concerned itself to some degree with illustrating

the reasonable standard and ridiculing "false wits" whose

deviation from the norm was regarded as imperfection.*^

The humorists, on the other hand, tending to liberal

politics, strong protestant sympathies and identification

with the relatively unpolished middle-class, translated

into comedies their general belief in the wholesomeness

of diversity and individuality. Their comedies were

structured on the circumstantial inter-relationships of

J. W. Krutch in Comedy and Conscience After the Restoration (New Yorks Columb ia Univ. tress, 192!}.}. The" account given in Shipley's Dictionary of World Literature, E. N. Hooker's "Humor in the Age of Pope,lf HLQ., XI C i9 l4 .fiK 361-85* and Stuart M. Tave's "Corbyn Morris: Falstaff, Humor and Comic Theory in the 18th Century," MP, L (1952), 102-115* are extremely valuable for an understanding of the later ramifications of the consequent shift in comic theory.

^The term "comedy of manners" too often used to describe the work of such writers as Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve is misleading. See T. H. Fujimura* The Restoration Comedy of Wit (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952). I think I should emphasize that I am over­ simplifying. The wits had no political or philosophical position which neatly submits itself to this kind of generalization. I use the term "conservative" not to mean Tory but a more general and vaguer attitude that better­ ment lies in conservation of the good and correction of the bad. The attack of wit upon abnormality produces an interesting gallery of would-be wits which, as Professor Edwin Robbins has suggested, would make an interesting study in themselves. -1149- characters who behaved deterministically according to

their prevailing ’’humor" or mental bias. Since erery man

was in his humor in this world, peculiarity of tempera­

ment was treated with more tolerance than it was in the

comedy of wit; the opinion therefore grew that humor was

gentler, pleasanter, kinder, than sharp-tongued and bad-

tempered wit (although the dark Calvinistic-Hobbistic

determinism which underlay the philosophy of humor might

be regarded as the most dismal of comforts.)

Sense and humor, accordingly, found themselves in

arms against a common enemy, wit, in every area of opinion—

economic, philosophic, political, religious. Whether

class produced the s truggle or the struggle the class

£ will not attempt to pronounce, but by 1700 the issue

was clearly between people not words. As it happens,

the drama provides the clearest crystalization of the

changing ideas, and it is interesting that whatever good

this reaction may have accomplished, it by the by effective­

ly drained the sap out of the English stage. What the

eighteenth century substituted may very well have pro­ vided a broader and sounder critical basis for comedy than

the limited and somewhat sour Restoration wit; but it is

interesting that it didn't, for a long time, provide

any plays that were a credit to the theory. A modern humors play, like Harvey, however it may warm the cocia.es of our hearts, has still the grim undertone that deviation

is fate's provision of at best a harmless way out of a pretty hopeless world. -i 5o-

Meanwhile wit itself was undergoing a metamorphosis.

A curious play by Nathaniel Lee, The Princess of Cleve, provides a concrete example of witrs late and poisonous flowering. The hysteria of this play helps one under­ stand the hysteria of Blackmore. Moreover I think the play provides a more fitting finish to the career of

Rochester--whom it intimately concerns--than the crude fact of his submission to the church. It carries the tenor of Rochester's life to its logical extreme and properly respects and properly damns him. Here is a release of energy defying control. At the same time it is a death-seeking energy, and to feel It searing through

The Princess of Cleve Is to understand why the wits, under attack by Blackmore and Collier, so half-heartedly resisted extermination.

The central figure of Lee's play is "a Ruffian reeking from Whetstone's Park,"^ one Count Nemours

11 Epistle Dedicatory, quarto, 1689- This was the first printing in English (see R. G. Ham, Otway and Lee (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1931)» P* 236, n. 6.J— eight years after the play was produced, during which time Lee had spent four years in Bedlam. It is not known to what extent the play was rewritten before publication. Nemours, I, ii, claims to quote Ronsard but actually gives an imperfect quotation of the lines from Valentinian, I, I, beginning, "Call all your Wives to Council . I T" The first quarto of Valentinian appeared in the year usually given for its first presentation, 1685, five years after Rochester's death, which might indicate that Lee added these lines upon reviving the play in 1689. (See W. J. Lawrence, TLS, Nov. 9, 1935, p. 722.) However, the ver­ sion of Valentinian, titled Lucina's Rape, may indicate that Rochester's play was produced as early as 1677-8, making it possible for Lee to pick up the lines before the first production of She Princess of Cleve (Graham -151- who attempts to seduce the Princess, wife of his friend

the Prince, and provides along the way an exposition and

rationale of the state of wit in the year after Roches­

ter's death. He refers to Rochester, under the name of

Rosidore, and pays this tribute to him when told that

Rosidore is dead:

Then we may say Wit was and Satyr is a Carcass now.

• • • Hay, then let's Rave and Elegize together, Where Rosidore Is now but common clay, Whom every wiser Emmet bears away, And lays him up against a Winters day.

He was the spirit of Wit--and had such an art in guilding his Failures, that it was hard not to love his Faults: he never spoke a Witty thing twice, tho to different Persons; his Imperfections were catching, and his Genius so luxuriant, that he was forced to tame it with a Hesitation in his Speech to keep it in view— But oh how awkward, how insipid, how poor and wretchedly dull is the imitation of those that have all the affectation of his Verse and none of his Wit.

Later Nemours remembers Rosidore again and makes more

explicit what his wit consisted of:

Thus wou'd I have Time rowl still in all these lovely Extreams, and the Corruption of Reason being the Generation of Wit; and the Spirit of Wit lying in the Extravagance of Pleasure: Nay, the two nearest ways to enter the Closet of the

Greene, TLS. Nov. 2, 1935* P» 697.) Genest, I, l|-09* says the play "was not published until 1685— but was probably acted sooner, as the first Prologue contains an allusion to Blanket Fair, which was holden on the Thames in the great frost, that lasted from the beginning of December to the l5th of February 1683." Of course conjecture here is bound to be poorly founded. Nothing prohibits Lee's having had access to the play before it was JSroducedv - -152- Gods, and lye even with, the Fates themselves, are Fury and Sleep--therefore the Fury -of Wine and Fury of Women possess me waking and sleep­ ing; let me dream of nothing but dimpl'd Cheeks, and laughing lips, and flowing Bowls, Venus be my Star, and Whoring my House, and Death I defie thee. Thus sung Rosidore in the Urn--

I think we must designate this the mysticism of wit, the cult of Dionysius, the ecstasy of the religion of unreligion.

Wit is generated by decaying Reason; it seeks the absolutes in the extremes of sensual experience, which is wit’s understanding of the Fury, the divine madness of the poet, and in sleep, the release of the unconscious, the pre­ civilized soul. Although the concept is voluptuous, wit doesn't seem to be aimed at pleasure as the end of life, but at 11 the Extravagance of Pleasure" as a means to con- sumate knowledge. Dike the mystic marriage with Christ, the vision here is of sexual unioh with the divine, of falling panting into the very arms of truth, "to enter the Closet of the Gods, and lye even with the Fates them­ selves." The fury of the devout is two-fold, sex and drunkenness, integrated in the pun, "flowing Bowls." To transcend the human condition one must escape it, and the escape is through it, and through violation of it.

It is difficult to know with how much sympathy Lee felt that he was representing the credo of the Wits. Mon­ tague' Summers feels that the play contains a double repre­ sentation of Rochester, in Rosidore, who does not appear in the play but is described, and in Nemours himself, whom Summers regards as a viciously satirical portrait of -l 53- the Earl,"^ But as in Shadwell's Libertine, the "Ruffian"

1 2 T, Playhouse of Pepys, p. 301. Summers, of course, does not think of his identification.as open to question;

Curiously enough, however, it seems to have eluded observation that Lee with a certain literary duplicity, very Machiavelian but very under­ standable in the circuiustances, having paid his obvious compliment to the late Lord Rochester as Rosidore— of whom nevertheless it is said "I thought his last Debauch wou'd be his Death"— proceeded to draw him full length as Duke /jiicJ Nemours, and when the Town "expected the most polish'd Hero ip. Nemours" the poet "gave 'em a Ruffian reeking from Whetstones's -Park. The Fourth and Fifth Acts of the Chances, where Don John is pulling down; Marriage Alamode, where they are bare to the Waste; the Libertine , and Epsom-Wells, are but Copies of his Villany. He lays about him like the Gladiator in the Park." In Nemours character, talk, morals, and actions Rochester is reflected not once or twice but seen steadily and as a whole. Moreover, the tragedy has a scorpion sting in its tail, since the couplet (spoken by Nemours) which concludes the last act runs: —

He wd.1 repents that will not sin, yet can; But Death-bed Sorrows rarely shew the Man.

Judging, however, by the references he gives, Lee, by villainy seems to mean merely bawdry. A brief, vague physical description of Neriiours given in the body of the play seems to imply that the character may have been in­ tended as personal satire, but not of Rochester, if "Brawny" has any significance;

No man so built for whoring as his Grace, black sanguine Brawny— a Roman Nose-long Foot and a stiff— calf of a leg.

Professor J. H. Wilson points out that "sanguine" (which could hardly apply to Rochester) might well have been applied to Buckingham, who was bigger and of ruddier com­ plexion, but that the allusion is too vague to make much of.

The final "scorpion sting" certainly looks like an allusion to Rochester. The Count, in the last breathless lines, has just re.covehad himself to virtue in reaction to gets the good lines. For example he defends the "Obscen­ ity" from the censures of the "well bred Fops" with remarkable effectiveness. "Why ' tis the way of ye all," he says, "only you sneak with it under your Cloaks like

Taylors and Barbers; and I, as a Gentleman shou'd do, walk with it in my hand." He points out that the Priest inveighs against the flesh, a nd yet brags to the ladies that his arm, "a chopping one," is the "least Member about him." And "Does not your Politician, your little great Man cf bus’ness, that sets the World together by the Ears, after all his Plotting, Drudging and sweating at lying, retire to some little Punk and untap at Night?" the spectacle of the Princess’s refusal of him, a twist which causes Thomas B. Stroup, "The Princess of Cleve and Sentimental Comedy," RES, XI (193£)» 200-3, to consider the play as transitional, illustrating the breakdown of heroic drama into the eighteenth century comic mode. Re­ gardless of what Lee's intention may have been, the re­ pentance of Nemours is less convincing than the "Death­ bed Sorrows" of Rochester or anyone else. I would like to suppose that Lee had as much common sense and sophis­ tication as Rev. Summers and I have, that he knew very well that his audience would smile at Nemours for fling­ ing himself to virtue and then promptly showing the quickest and most superficial of virtue's symptoms: a sanctimonious superiority to his erstwhile god, Rosidore— or Rochester.

The point is that if Lee is sympathetic with his "Ruffian" he is admittedly on the side of vice. He praises Rochester not for his startling repentance, but for wit; he may have felt that Rochester's "Death-bed Sorrows" were either insincere, superficial.or entirely the con­ trivance of that old liar Burnet. There is no reason to suppose that Lee was so shallow as to have preferred either Nemours or Rochester with a thin veneer of moralism to the same men in their rough aid unreforraed integrity. -155- (The reference is to Shaftesbury, who was accused of lechery and who suffered continuous draining of an abscess kept open by a silver pipe in his side.) This stand against hypocrisy was central to the best elements of the witty reaction against ’’formal'1 nonsense. Listen to Bruce, an enlightened wit, stating the case to Snarl in ShadwellTs Virtuoso:

SNARL: The last Age was the Age of Modesty—

BRUCE: I believe there was the same Wenching then: only they dissembled it. They added Hypocrasie to Fornication, and so made two sins of what we make but one.

And one of Rochester's wryest comments on the state of the world:

. . . Hypocrisie being the only Vice in decay amongst us, few Men here dissemble their being Rascals; and no Woman disowns being a Whore.-**3

There is no doubt that at least part of the time Nemours is fighting the good fight.

Several things about the play indicate that it may have been intended as a survey of wit in its last ecstatic stages. Perhaps Lee felt that, with Rochester, wit really was dead or dying. Perhaps the sardonic, piercing, but on the whole respectful comments he makes through the play are a kind of witty elegy for a quality of mind which killed itself in extravagance. I would like to gather here a collection of quotations from a number of characters which

^Rochester-Savile Letters, Letter XXXII. seem to be explicit definitions of wit and of the values

which it comprises:

Stick to clean Pleasures, deep Sleep, moderate Wine, sincere Whores, and thou art Happy.

/he/ has the knack of telling a story malicious­ ly, and is a great pretender to Nature.

No cunning, Touron, my was is downright, leav­ ing Body, State and Spirit, all for a pretty Woman, and when grey Hairs, Gout and Impotence come, no more but this, drink away pain, and be gathered to my Fathers.

/Jl expect to be/ drawn by the Poets for a Man of Wit and Sense . . . For I know how to Re­ partee with the best, to Rally my Wife, to kick her too if I please Sir, to make Similes as fast as Hops Sir, tho I lay a dying slap dash Sir, quickly off and quickly on sir, and as round as a Hoop Sir.

. . . bear ourselves like Men of Wit and Sense, Snub our Wives, Rally *em, and be as Witty as 1fche Devil.

Prithee Spouse— do not provoke me, for I'm in the Witty Vein, and shall Repartee thee to the Devil.

. . . never let business Flatter thee Frank into Nonsense: Women are the sole Pleasure of the World; nay, I had rather part with my whole Estate, Health and Sense, than lose an Inch of ray Love—

Why the freedom Wit and Roguery, and all sort of acting, as well as Conversation. In a Domestick she, there's no Gaity, no Chat, no Discourse, but the Cares of this World and its Inconvenienciss . . .

The strongest, most reasonable statements of witfcy values come from Nemours. In contrast, the Prince is a slave of love who can say to the Princess:

I am thy Creature . . . Thy cringing crawling Slave, and will adore The hand that kills me. -157-

Perhaps with some irony, the Princess replies, "You are too goodl" The way Nemours behaves toward this

Prince is perhaps an index of the strength and weak­ nesses of wit. When the Prince charges Nemours with loving his wife, Nemours answers honestly that he loves he can't say whom, and[that he hasn't cuckolded the

Prince yet. The Princ^— up to now a good friend of the Count— insists upon fighting. Nemours disarms him and then returns his sword. They part as good friends,

Nemours weeping.

. He is not exactly a hypocrite here. I think one can believe in his friendship, in his desire not to hurt

Cleve, and his apology delivered to the audience refers as usual to what he regards as the inevitable springs of human action. The "Precise," he says, will condemn him for wronging such a sw.eet friend as the Prince, but they lie in their th .ad they the chance and the desire, "they would Spirit, cast the dapper cloak, leave off their humming and hoing, and fall to like a Man of Honor." Meanwhile the Prince, despairing of securing the devotion of his wife, kills himself.

The escape of the horse, so to speak, inspires his wife to shut the barn door, and her vows of fidelity to his memory, in turn, inspire the reformation of Nemours which ends the play.

If the witty behavior of Nemours is in some ways a moral reaction to the sterile, formal, dull and commercial -158- values of the citizenry, it is easy to understand how the citizenry might well have experienced a moral re­ action to the heartlessness, indecency, profligacy and anarchy of Nemours. As early as 1668, in the Preface to The Sullen Lovers, Shadwell was firing at the Wits from the solid center of public morality. He sadly finds most modern playwrites

. . . imagining that all the Wit in Plays consisted in bringing two persons upon the Stage to break Jests, and to bob one another, which they call Repartee, not considering that there is more wit and invention raquir’d in the finding out good Humor, and Matter proper for it, then all their smart reparties .... in the plays which have been wrote of late, there is no such thing as perfect Character, but the two chief persons are most commonly a Swearing, Drinking, Whoring Ruffian for a Lover, and an impudent, ill-brdd tomrig for a Mistress .... almost anything Ts proper for them to say, but their chief Sub­ ject is bawdy and profaness, which they call brisk writing . . . me thinks . . . the ill Manners of it . . . should make Poets avoid that Indecent way of Writing.

Thirty years later when Jeremy Collier was laying about

*}■ him like the gladiator in the park he spoke in much the same terms;

To sum up the evidence, a fine Gentleman is a fine Whoring, Swearing, Atheistical Man. These ^ qualifications, it seems, complete the idea of Honour.^4-

Even the wits seem to have tired in time of sounding the depths of vice. When an emancipated woman in Rochester’s

Valentinian gives the libertine arguments for sexual freedom

~^A Short View . . . , 1698, p. II4J4. -159- and claims that honor's a cheat, she is given a re­ markably serious rebuttal by Claudia, who may not

speak the sympathies of Rochester, but who nevertheless

gives, from Rochester's mind, a careful analysis of the

limitations of that point of view:

Concluded like thyself, for sure thou art The most corrupt corrupting thing alive, Yet glory not too much in cheating Wit: •Tisbut false Wisdom; and its Property Has ever been to take the part of Vice, Which tho’ the Fancy with vain shows it please, Yet wants a power to satisfie the Mind.

If there were an alternative to wit which would ”satis­ fie the Mind/1 I am sure Rochester would have been the most anxious to discover it-~and it may be that in the feverish days of his last illness he mistook Burnet's rhetoric, persistence and neat logic for such an alter­ native.

The lines of battle, then, between wit, associated with atheism, immorality, Indecency and sloth, and sense, associated with middle-class stolidity, dissent, concern with business, and hypocrisy, were drawn sharply by

Blackmore's Satyr against Wit at a time when the Wits were already somewhat weary of the flesh. Blackmore's poem may be cited as a summary statement, by the opposition, of what wit had come to.

He complains that the native land is being "undone by wit," that "Insect-WIts" are swarming like locusts, cropping each "budding Virtue." The Jester in ancient times was justly called both wit and fool, but on the -160-

whole our•ancestors were free from wit and "other modern

crimes." They were "For Businss born, and bred to Mar­

tial toil." Mow the pestilence has blanketed England. ,

It takes Men in the Head, and in the Fit They lose their Senses and are gone in Wit. By various ways their Frenzy they express: Some with loose Lines run tearing to the Press, In Lewdness some are Wits, some only Wits in Dress. • • • Who can produce a Wit and not a Rake? • • • The Mob of Wits is up to storm the Town, To pull all Virtue and right Reason down; Quite to subvert Religion’s sacred Fence, To set up Wit, and pull down common sense; • • • . So do but Lock/e7 or Books or Bentley name, The Wit's in clammy Sweats or in a Flame. • t • For next to Virtue, Learning they abhor, Laugh at Discretion, but at Business more. A Wit's an idle wretched Fool of Parts, That hates all Liberal and Mechanick Arts.

• • • Wit does enfeeble and debauch the Mind, Before to Business or to Arts inclin'd. • • • Those who by Satyr would reform the Town Should have some little Merit of their own, And not be Rakes themselves below Lampoon. For all their Libels Panegyricks are, They're still read backward like a Witch's Pray'r.

As Blackmore*s own clumsy couplets (I have quoted some

of the best) make evident, "Wit was and Satyr is a Car­

cass now." The fight took another form, another furious

spurt, in the work of Swift and Pope. Blackmore's hysteria, in fact, sounds in places something like Pope's

king of the dunces cringing in horror of "wit's wild

dancing light." But on the whole the settling of the

cloud of dullness was as complete in years to come as

Pope described it. Besides, the alliance with vice which -161-

characterizes the wit Blackmore is opposing had by Pope’s

time been quite forsworn.

Interestingly, Blackmore regards wit as a kind of

enthusiasm, an irrational veering from the orderly path

of the body politic. The charge is similar to that

made of metaphysical wit, and is an Ironic ending for

the new wit, bred on judgment by disgust with extrava­

gance. Wit had turned full circle. Prom the safe drawing

room of the norm it had cleverly carped at the enthusiasm

of the dissenters; now it had swung to furious dancing

In the streets while the sharp-nosed Puritans had stolen

by means of the counting-house into the drawing room

itself. History forced the Wits into the left wing, the

lunatic fringe; it had declassed them and passed ordin­

ances against their raving. The cause of wit was lost,

the cause of vice and fury and honesty and imagination.

Respectability, the dapper dress of the wit which succeeded

the seventeenth century, is the death of liberty.

Wit, Nemours tells us, is born of the corruption of

reason; it is the phosphorescent glow of decay. Roches­

ter is no more than that--a surface phenomenon, a strange

light generated by the decomposition of Ideas— and he

disappears in the dawn without sputter or smoke. The

sunny years which followed were able to put out of mind

completely the weird and disgusting vision which had troubled

the night before. But his meaning is none the less for all that. The glow of decay announces its unpleasant -162-

truth in cold, unflickering presence, squat on the rot which produces it. And over the years of solid oblivion

it continues to cast a haunting enchantment. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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I, Judson Blair Jerome, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma,

February 8, 1927* I went to high school in Houston,

Texas, and entered the University of Oklahoma in September,

194-3 > which I attended until drafted in 194-5. After

separation from the army I entered the University of

Chicago in March, 194-7 > where I received my Master of

Arts degree in March, 1950. I taught, as Assistant

Professor of English, at Trinity University, San Antonio,

Texas, in the summer of 1950 and entered Ohio State

University that fall as Assistant in the Department of

English and candidate for a doctoral degree. I left that position in order to become Assistant Professor of English at Antioch College in August, 1953- I held that position during the school year 1953-4- anc* the position of Assistant to the President and Assistant

Professor of English during the school year 1954--5* while completing the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy.