SOURCE: Everett, Barbara. “The Sense of Nothing.” In Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester, edited by Jeremy Treglown, pp. 1-41. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982.

[In the following essay, Everett examines Rochester's work in the context of Restoration England and the Court of King Charles II, discussing the poet's need to follow fashion and the way his poems point to a void beneath a smooth social surface.]

Rochester's general character as a poet is evident to any reader. He is a realist, his world bounded by the limits of King Charles II's court and the London that lay immediately beyond. If this makes his field seem narrow, then so it is—compared at any rate with the greater of his contemporaries: Milton, Dryden, even Bunyan, all live and write in a wider, larger world. But if, in turn, the relative thinness of Rochester's work is noticed as little as it is by any enjoying reader, this is because of the poet's compensating skills: the casual certainty that makes the elegance of his style, the extremity with which he goes to the limits of his vision.

It is from the balance of these opposing elements that Rochester's work gets its peculiar character. On the one hand there is the accepted commonplaceness of its content and milieu, the lack of preliminary with which the poet takes his place (‘Well, sir, 'tis granted I said’—this or that) among the ‘merry gang’ as Marvell called them, Dryden's ‘men of pleasant conversation … ambitious to distinguish themselves from the herd of gentlemen’, or Pope's more lethal ‘mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease’. Precisely because he so takes his place, there remains a border area of his work where editors still argue about who wrote what; and about how much, precisely, can be thought to function ironically—irony in itself being an index of that social commitment. But, on the other hand, the best of Rochester's poems could have been written by no one else; just as it is a fact that he was clearly not just one of the ‘mob of gentlemen’ but himself a social legend in his own time and for at least a century after. The particular nature of Rochester's involvement in the social life of his time is perhaps a matter on which biography has never placed the right kind of stress, or from which it has never drawn conclusions useful enough for the poetry. Those of the events in his life which we know something about suggest how necessary it was to Rochester not merely to be in the fashion but to excel in it, to transcend it almost—to do a thing so well that the mode itself broke under him, unrepeatable. It is impossible to draw any other conclusion from the Alexander Bendo incident, in which the poet impersonated a quack with high success. The affair is usually treated as evidence of his obsessive acting talents. What is not mentioned is that the trick had been played at least twice before: once by Buckingham, then more recently by Rochester's own friend Sedley. Acting a quack was in fact a fashion among the Wits.¹

What distinguished Rochester was the strange intensity of his need not only to follow the fashion but to follow it to breaking point—the extremity, one might say, of his worldliness. That he had been (in youth) drunk for five years on end is something he was eager to tell Burnet on his repentant death-bed; and it is a fact that his final collapse followed on a sick man's ride back home to Somerset from London where he had returned with the King after insisting on attending the races at Newmarket. It is this quality of extremity that distinguishes Rochester's poems, balancing their realism and elegance. Or perhaps, in the end, bringing about the imbalance that an original genius must consist in. For a work of art is recognized by its incapacity to be absorbed wholly by the society which produces it, and which it represents so admirably. Rochester's most social poems are very odd products indeed, but with an oddity that has nothing to do with eccentricity. This oddity—the oddity of art, not of social or psychological idiosyncrasy—is less easy to define than it is to illustrate, and I should like to illustrate it, as it were, from the life, taking an incident and using it as a kind of metaphor for Rochester's poetry; but the life I want to use is not, as it happens, Rochester's own, but his father's.

The elder Lord Wilmot, a general in Charles I's army and an adviser of the young King Charles II, is said to have been a brave man and a wit—as a companion of the King probably needed to be. He was made Earl of Rochester, the title his son inherited when he was only ten, for helping the King escape after the defeat at Worcester in 1651. At least, ‘helping’ is (again) what the history books say he did. Clearly the award of an earldom suggests that he did something for it: but the King himself almost implies, in the account of the flight which he dictated to Pepys thirty years later, in 1680, that it was he who helped Wilmot to escape after the battle, and this is a view not unsupported by contemporary witnesses. For it is clear that Wilmot complicated the flight in one particular way. Charles says: ‘I could never get my Lord Wilmot to put on any disguise, he saying that he should look frightfully in it, and therefore did never put on any’.² This is one of the King's own footnotes to his account, as though he found it an importantly lingering memory, even if he could not entirely fathom it. And the refusal of disguise certainly did affect the flight, enforcing Wilmot's travelling separately, either in front or well behind, keeping his court silks and laces well away from the strenuously walnut-stained and ostler-coated King, whose menial state of dress the recording Pepys—describing it in immense and awed detail—nearly faints to think about. Wilmot, on the other hand, condescended to one compromise only: he carried a hawk on his fist. He must have been, one cannot help reflecting, glad to see the back of it, when after six long weeks they reached the coast and embarked for the continent: where Wilmot was to die in exile seven years later, during the Interregnum, leaving his title to his ten year old son. But Rochester may have inherited from that necessarily little-known father more than the title and the estate, quite as much as he had from his mother, a powerfully dominating and able Puritan lady: and what precisely he inherited is reflected somewhere, perhaps, in that curious event which the King recorded.

Probably Wilmot was being funny—certainly his remark is funny, when one considers that to look ‘frightfully’, or at least to look unlike one's normal courtly self, is the whole purpose of disguise, especially when one is running for one's life pursued by troopers across the boggy English woodlands. And Charles's evident happiness in all the play-acting of this marvellous adventure—which he harked back to, wistfully, for over thirty years afterwards—might well have aroused an acerbic wit in a more battle-scarred companion. But the humour remains conjectural. What shines principally in Wilmot's remark is its quality of sheer ‘face’, its highly independent disobliging panache that yet operates within a narrow social context that gives that mocking word ‘frightfully’ its peculiar character. (‘One would not, sure, be frightful when one's dead.’) It is the very impassivity of the general's remark, our difficulty in knowing what precisely Wilmot was at (though there is no difficulty in seeing that he did what he wanted, in his easy way) that suggests its special social function. This is an occurrence of that highly English social phenomenon, the use of manners to get away with almost anything: for heroism, folly, intelligence, guile, whimsy or sheer blankness of mind may lurk beneath that recorded turn of phrase.

A sense, perhaps unconscious, of what social tone may serve for must have come quite naturally to the Cavalier courtier. But when the same sense occurs in the far more conscious Restoration wit of the son, it forms the great originality of his verse. For it is Rochester, perhaps, who invents vers de société in English. The act of translation places a radically new stress, it might be said, on the mere proposition, so that the poem is now written ‘about’ rather than ‘from’ society, with a new kind of inside-outness that helps to explain why Rochester should be also perhaps the first user of pure irony in English after Chaucer. The complexities latent in writing English vers de société are nicely suggested in a recent poem by Philip Larkin which takes the actual phrase for its title; one of his most undermining poems, what is undermined in it is basically the ‘société’, and yet it is, for all that, a brilliantly ‘social’ piece of verse.

Another and more explicit case of this highly ambiguous social fidelity can be observed through the letters of Henry James, from the moment at which the young American writer sends back home, in the late 1870s, his impressions of the English social scene—

The people of this world seem to me for the most part nothing but surface, and sometimes—oh ye gods!—such desperately poor surface!

—to that, some twenty years later, at which James struggles patiently to explain to a correspondent less sympathetic than his family just what he had meant by the extraordinary art with which he had recently (in The Awkward Age) dealt in that world of ‘surface’:

I had in view a certain special social (highly ‘modern’ and actual) London group and type and tone, which seemed to me to se prêter à merveille to an ironic—lightly and simply ironic!—treatment … with no going behind, no telling about the figures save by their own appearance and action and with explanations reduced to the explanation of everything by all the other things in the picture …³

Rochester himself would not have been caught making such ‘explanations’ at all: he was even further ensconced behind that social ‘surface’, that world of appearance and action which there was ‘no telling about’. He inhabited, he half invented, that English social world where James was never much more than a wonderful lifelong tourist; which is why, perhaps, Rochester needed those compensating retreats to his country estates which were his equivalents to James's American nationality, his family background and his Puritan inheritance.

It is because of this very immersion and silence on Rochester's part that, despite all the differences of temperament and period and nationality, James's more self-conscious and detached reflections can be useful in suggesting some of the peculiarly ambiguous, confining conditions of a social art like Rochester's. There is an odd parallel, perhaps, between that famous Max Beerbohm cartoon which makes some sort of cool comment on the way in which the James of the Sacred Fount period did and did not ‘belong’, representing him as stooping to examine with horrified concern the mixed sexes of the pairs of shoes left to be cleaned overnight outside the bedroom doors of some hotel or house party—and a hostile aside on Rochester by a Victorian critic. Alluding to the anecdote of Rochester's having posted a footman in a sentinel's red coat and with a musket outside the doors of court ladies to watch the goings-on, the critic glosses it by saying that the poet ‘for no earthly reason you can think of, set detectives to note him the indiscretions of the Court’.⁴ Criticism ought perhaps to be better than this at thinking of earthly reasons.

For, if Rochester's verse transcends its own representativeness, this is by virtue of the way in which it goes, one might say, to the end of the road; the way in which his commitment to social forms was a manner of breaking those social forms. The story of his drunken destruction of the King's upward-pointing chronometer, and the apparent prudery of his for centuries unprintable reason for breaking it, is one of the best-known anecdotes that have survived him—and in the same way, even his most elegant verse often resounds with the crash of breaking glass; or where there is no crash, a startled reader will find himself glimpsing a void beneath the bright surface, a vacancy beneath the brilliant style.

As an example of this method of transcending the temporal mode, it is worth considering what happens to a Hobbesian idea of time in one of Rochester's best-known poems. In another of these often-repeated jottings that compose the legend of Rochester's life, Anthony à Wood remarks—thinking, perhaps, of the sensitive and well-read seventeen-year-old who first arrived at court with a tendency not only to blush but to stammer—that ‘the Court … not only debauched him but made him a perfect Hobbist’.⁵ Hobbes, whose Elements of Law include the laws that

Continually to be outgone is misery.
Continually to outgo the next before is felicity.
And to forsake the course is to die …

was certainly the philosopher of Charles's court, as he had himself been the tutor of the King—as he was, in fact, the most popular philosopher of the age in some cultural sense: we are told that in the year after Rochester died ‘the folly and nonsense of meer mechanism’ had passed to the very craftsmen, even the labourers of the time, who were ‘able to demonstrate out of Leviathan … that all things come to pass by an eternal Chain of natural Causes’, and that human nature was a mere machine.⁶

It is hardly surprising that Rochester committed himself to this most fashionable system, which was also the most imaginatively challenging of his time, having a hard self-consistency not easy to refute. All the more striking is the transmutation of these ideas within the medium of Rochester's verse: within, for instance, his ‘Love and Life’. This incorporates the materialist and mechanistic doctrine of Hobbes that the only real time is time present: ‘The present only has a being in Nature; things past have a being in the memory only, but things to come have no being at all …’⁷ But in Rochester's lyric these ideas are not incorporated, but rather disembodied, attenuated, made to float lightly in the emptiness of the ‘flying hours’:

All my past Life is mine no more,
          The flying hours are gone
.....The Time that is to come is not,
          How can it then be mine?

If everything in Hobbes is material and mechanical, then everything in the poem is immaterial and organic.

In part this is a simple question of what happens to all statements within the quasi-musical discipline of poetry, which part liberates ideas and part destroys them. ‘When a thing is too stupid to be said, we sing it’; and conversely to sing a thing may be to make it sound stupid—or if not stupid, then released into a kind of radiant folly. It may be relevant that elsewhere Hobbes admits that he cannot explain music—‘I confess that I know not for what reason one succession in tone and measure is more pleasant than another’—and this issue seems to be supported by Dryden's comment that the philosopher ‘studied poetry as he did mathematics, when it was too late’. There appear to be conditions separating philosophy in modern periods from music and poetry, so that if they come together, in—say—the Metaphysicals, the result does not resemble Lucretius or Dante, but has a startled paradoxical self-undermining wit, as of a man who now knows that he is doing the impossible. In such verse, ideas get airborne, or at least stand on their heads. And Rochester's ‘Love and Life’ does have this Metaphysical wit; its title is borrowed from Cowley, and the whole poem's movement has a quality of strong fantasy, an extravagance in self-commital to paradox, perhaps learned from Donne, whom Rochester sometimes seems to know by heart.

But the change in Hobbesian doctrine in ‘Love and Life’ goes beyond the effect of what we may call either a ‘musical’ or a ‘metaphysical’ discipline. Nominally it is spoken by a libertine, a rake on principle, a man whose wholly selfish moral presuppositions followed hard upon Hobbesian cosmology and accepted the practical consequences of disbelief in past and future. But Rochester's libertine first translates philosophical maxims, words used as counters to win intellectual assent, into factors of human consciousness; and then, with a kind of sublime or idiot logic, extends that consciousness into a radical self-undercutting, an intelligence almost self-destructive. The conclusions of that intelligence might have surprised even Hobbes. For Rochester's libertine, having no past or future, has, in all honest logic, no present either: unless we give the name of a ‘present’ to the poem itself, which the poet, however ‘courtly’ or ‘gentlemanly’, speaks as out of an essential solitariness, in a surprise of realization rendered by the abrupt, lucid monosyllables, that seem to resonate in a void. ‘All my past life is mine no more … How can it then be mine?’

One of the ‘mob of gentlemen’ here speaks with that peculiar lucidity which is the speech of the inward self, alone; and it is with a curiously chaste impersonality that the libertine watches the ‘flying hours’ carry his life away into a driftage as of dead leaves, of ‘Dreams’, ‘Images’, memory. When this same rakish lover turns at the end of the second stanza, in a beautifully located surprise, to hand over the poem to its audience and reader, the suddenly-invoked Phillis, his courtesy and gravity are hardly at all ironic; his ‘Miracle’, in fact, is one of those most undermining of word-plays, where a quiet literalism forestalls metaphor, irony grows serious and pretence turns real:

If I, by Miracle, can be
This live-long Minute true to thee
          'Tis all that Heav'n allows.

The brilliance of this small poem, and what surely explains its great popularity and its anthology status both in the poet's time and in our own, is the way it converts a relatively sterile proposition from Hobbes into a potent human moment. The poem is a ‘saying’ that moves itself into action, becoming the fulfilment of the promise it half makes; its conclusion thus ‘seals’ the poem like a personal crest on a document now long crumbled away. Given that this hypothetical and contingent ‘Phillis’ is partly a mocking relic of past tradition, and partly some future dream, this ending makes of the lines a decisive handing over of the self to some unknown quantity, the ‘present’ being only a knowledge of what is unknown. And this sudden, ironic and yet generous self-offering is so circumspectly dealt with as to be able to suggest the perpetual existence of the self as in a void, created from moment to moment as a poem is from line to line. For the poet of ‘Love and Life’ has, by definition, nothing at all to call his own—neither past nor future, nor any present that he knows, beyond that ‘Miracle’ of the poem's live-long Minute. Neither a philosopher nor a libertine but something more like an equilibrist, the poet balances in the void, sustaining himself on nothing whatever.

I have been hoping to suggest that Rochester's poems may only safely be said to be representative of the Restoration period if that period is defined very cautiously. The 1660s and 1670s through which Rochester lived and which, in literary terms at least, he helped to create, were something of a cultural no man's land, a pause in time equally out of touch with the past and future, the medieval and the modern. It was an age in which writers began to inch themselves along again, with what Emily Dickinson would describe as ‘that precarious gait / Men call Experience’. Rochester's best poems, in short, were probably all written in that decade after the Plague had seemed to empty London, and the Fire to level it. They were written, moreover, for a court presided over by a penniless king back home from banishment and living carefully hand to mouth. The period which we name after its political Restoration has a reality not confined to its King and his court; but it is that court sphere which colours with an intensity beyond its apparent importance some of the best literature of the time. Similarly, though there were a number of different aspects of the world of that court, the one which features most vividly in writers of the period was that which the Marquis of Halifax (elder brother of Rochester's closest friend, and an even cleverer man, perhaps, than Rochester himself) was to call, in his well-known essay on the King, ‘His Dissimulation’. In the drafts for his History Burnet had given this ‘art of concealing’ in the Restoration court a historical basis, deriving it from Charles's education at the hands of a Queen Mother determined that her sons should not display the (in the event) fatal unworldliness of their father. Whatever its source, this court dissimulation, evoked in Halifax's brilliant scattered phrases, suggests a kind of evasive darkness that we should perhaps see behind the sparkle of Rochester's court verse:

Men compared Notes, and got Evidence … His Face … would sometimes tell Tales to a good Observer … At last it cometh to Smile for Smile, meaning nothing of either Side; without any kind of Effect; mere Drawing-room Compliments … there was less Signification in those Things than at first was thought … He would slide from an asking Face, and could guess very well … It was a kind of implied bargain.⁸

It was for this world of ‘Smile for Smile, meaning nothing of either Side’, that Rochester's love poems were written; his Satires are ‘Notes’, ‘Evidences’, telling ‘Tales to a good Observer’. To describe his verse as a construct from a world of surfaces implies that it is always close to irony; but the concept of irony can only be used cautiously of Rochester. For since its Socratic origins true irony has always served some polemic purpose—its ‘lies’ have always functioned to make clearer some truth. Rochester's poems often have a highly ironic sound, but something like a total lack of any provable intention (or even tone), except possibly the intention of hollowing out the surface they so finely construct. Apart from this latent sense of void, there is no form of what James called ‘telling about’, ‘going behind’: only the ‘explanation’ by ‘all the other things in the picture’. Rather than by a smoothness so excessive as to make us defensive (as in Swiftian irony), Rochester's poems show intent by minute flaws in that smooth surface, by local shocks and coruscations of wit. Even where Rochester's tone seems cool, sweet and safe, his wit leaps to the surface in striking, even dangerous, disjunctions of language which locally fracture the style, like the minute cracks that beautify crackleware ceramics. An apparently ‘polite’ poem that addresses its subject as a ‘Fair nasty nymph’ (as does ‘By all love's soft, yet mighty powers’) is not going to leave quite where it was a socially-orientated ‘fair’ sex that relies on its unfair fairness of face to get away with murder; nor does a poem that goes on to advise in the name of hygiene a more ‘cleanly sinning’ leave either hygiene, or sinning, quite where it was before. Swift's famous letter to a young woman approaching matrimony which primarily advises her to wash often and thoroughly is possibly sensible but not funny in any human way, because some degree of animus towards the female makes itself plain in the intemperate style of a man who is for good or bad never a pure ironist; similarly all the smoothness of even the Modest Proposer only enforces what any reader instinctively knows, that eating people is wrong. Rochester's equally profane and good-taste-violating poem on the ‘Fair nasty nymph’ is more purely ironic than Swift's letter because it voices no animus at all against women (I think it highly unlikely that the poet had any)—it voices nothing: it merely sets out the flaw in the china in the cool crack about the ‘Fair nasty nymph’. Bodies being as they are, it is the social insistence on ‘fairness’ that is the thoroughly ‘nasty’ thing.

In very much the same way, but with a more expansively indecorous decorum, the better-known outrageously-ending lines that tell us how ‘Fair Cloris in a Pig-style lay’ make it their business to flesh out the discrepancies between that ‘Fair’ and that ‘Pig-stye’. But they do no more—they do not satirize; they leave both reader and Chloris ‘Innocent and pleased’, with their illusions in place even if not quite intact. Chloris ends happy with her fantasy of lust and her virginity both unviolated; the reader ends happy in the belief that pastoral tells him something true about life or love; everything in the pig-sty is lovely. The power of this poem, compared with that about the ‘Fair nasty nymph’, is the greater degree of poetic acceptance of the mode proposed, the triumphant, non-committal accomplishment of this vacuous, self-deceiving, dishonestly erotic pastoral. How good an actor Rochester really was is unclear—certainly he sometimes loathed whatever he meant by the image of ‘this gawdy guilded Stage’; but he was perfect at assuming the pose of a certain verbal style. Thus the charm of the very popular ‘Ancient Person of my Heart’ is its embodiment of the innocence of tone and terrible social polish that make the deb an evidently unchanging type over several centuries of English social life. The pronunciation of the time brings together in an assonance words as discrepant as the frigidly social ‘Ancient Person’ (‘Parson’) and the boldly intimate ‘Heart’: the comical insistence of this paradoxical refrain—‘Ancient Person of my Heart’—embodies a social type on the page, as elegant and peremptory as a pedigree cat.

That refrain from the ‘Song of a Young Lady’ makes relevant here an even more minute detail. In citing ‘Ancient Person of my Heart’ (with its capital P, capital H), as in most other quotations from Rochester's poems up to this point, I have deliberately used Vivian de Sola Pinto's Muses' Library text (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952, second edition 1964), which is now to some degree superseded by David M. Vieth's scholarly modernized edition (Yale University Press, 1968). Vieth modernizes because, as he rightly argues, there is no bibliographical authority for any of the Restoration editions of the poet. But this is helpful proof of the simple fact that, where literature is concerned, bibliography is frequently (like patriotism) not enough. The primary need in presenting a poet is not to obscure his tone; and certain of Rochester's poems are so social in tone as to profit from the retention of that Restoration and Augustan habit of visual literacy, the capitalization of important nouns. Thus, Vieth's able but toneless text renders meditative and inward a poem like ‘Upon his Leaving his Mistress’, a part of whose flagrant virtue it is to give the whole of social life the look of an open secret, a network of called passwords in a war, a surface of nods and becks which there is no ‘going behind, no telling about’:

'Tis not that I'm weary grown
Of being yours, and yours alone:
But with what Face can I incline,
To damn you to be only mine?
You, who some kinder Pow'r did fashion,
By merit, and by inclination,
The Joy at least of a whole Nation.

The first word the Muses' Library edition follows its 1680 text in capitalizing is the third-line ‘Face’; the next in this stanza is ‘Pow'r’. All the delicate contradictions of a lover's psychology, which the poem also manages to hint at, the ironies of a Petrarchan self-abasement in the sensitive lover's soul, are shouldered back behind and yet somehow expressed by the heightened capitalized forms of social observances, the agreement that socially it is ‘Face’ not feeling that matters, it is ‘Pow'r’ not love that governs (‘continually to outgo the next before is felicity’); and in such a context to give or take fidelity is hardly a saving grace—it is to ‘damn you to be only mine’.

Rochester can write tenderer, more inward poems than this, such as justify Vieth's modernized reading of the poet. One of these more tender poems offers a stylistic detail as interesting as Rochester's use of capital letters: a rhythmic effect that speaks to the ear, as the capitals speak first or primarily to the eye. In each of the two, apparently highly conventional, stanzas of ‘My dear Mistress has a Heart’, the last foot of each of its four-footed lines is, in lines 2, 4, 6 and 8, a trochee (‘gave me … enslave me … wander … asunder’); but lines 1, 3, 5 and 7 truncate their last foot by a syllable, so that ‘My dear Mistress has a Heart’ (not an ankle or an elbow). The result of this delicately asymmetrical scansion is that every line ends with what sounds like an unexplained falter, the odd lines because they have one syllable too few, the even because they have one too many. With a striking technical mastery, this effect of varying but inevitable falter, like a flaw in nature or an irony in the mind or what medicine calls a shadow behind the heart, is repeated conclusively in the structure of the whole; for the sense of the poem's first eight-lined stanza and then its succeeding six lines swells to a climax of feeling, of certainty, that is suddenly undercut by a kind of ‘rhyme’ the reader had not expected, the repetition at the end of the second verse of the last two lines of the first, a reprise like a stammer that turns the whole poem into an echo of its sustaining and yet faltering pairs of lines. And yet again, that falter finally does not seem to matter, because where the first time its rhyme-word ‘asunder’ occurred, it only half-rhymed with ‘wander’, here in the repetition it comes to rhyme with ‘wonder’, so the poem is after all strangely complete.

If ‘My dear Mistress has a Heart’ is touching and troubling in a way we do not necessarily expect a conventional Restoration lyric to be (so that Victorian critics used to compare it with Burns), the cause is a quality not often found in Restoration poems: its power of latency, its character of reserve. The blank general words with their capitals—‘Heart’, ‘Constancy’, ‘Joys’, ‘Mankind’—are a fine hard surface under which (we delusively feel) the real life of the poem goes on; but we feel that real life at the point of breakage, where the poem falters for an instant and then carries on—where we see the surface as only surface, with perhaps vacancy beneath. But for this there are no ‘explanations’, there is ‘no going behind’.

In all these poems, minute technical details—what one might call flaws of the surface—speak of conditions that one cannot consider in a merely ‘technical’ way. All Rochester's most potent and idiosyncratic lyrics develop this sense of ‘flaw’ into a condition of discrepancy that almost breaks apart the convention he appears to be working within—almost, but not quite: the result is never true burlesque, only a kind of agitation below the social surface. That agitation, or submerged quality of personal apprehension, can render the actual treatment of a conventional subject quite unlike what a reader might expect it to be. It might be said, for instance, that Rochester approaches the question of the physical in love as a libertine, with a frank and cynical ‘realism’. That he has realism is true, but to say so may imply a quality of apprehension quite different from what we actually find. To say that in ‘The Fall’ Rochester portrays Adam and Eve as a pair of cool libertines caught between the acts is to predicate a poem that has little in common with what he actually wrote:

Naked, beneath cool Shades, they lay,
          Enjoyment waited on Desire:
Each Member did their Wills obey,
          Nor could a Wish set Pleasure higher.

The plangency of this comes partly from that negative, ‘Nor could’, a little like Milton's ‘Not that fair field of Enna’. But what is even more striking is the absence of the sensuous, of which the ‘puritan’ Milton's Adam and Eve in Paradise have far more. When Poussin paints Adam and Eve in Paradise he gives them, over their naked bodies, a hair-style comically close to the great wigs of Louis's court, as though to his mind certain aspects of dress can't be taken off even in Paradise, but are generic to the human estate. Rochester, another court artist, seems to be driven by a comparable yet reversed impulse. It is as if, in order to undress his fallen couple, to get them back towards whatever innocence once meant, he has to take off their very bodies, which in this poem are dissolving towards the Platonic condition of shadowy Idea, under trees so abstract as to have grown mere generic ‘Shades’, dark reflections of themselves, in an experience so reversed as to be only the negative opposite of that dulled satiety which is the one happiness we know. In Rochester's Paradise, ‘Enjoyment waited’, in a past and future defended from the satisfactions of the horrible present.

If this seems a strained reading of that strange abstract stanza, it should be said that it is only consonant with the poet's representation of physical existence throughout his work: all Rochester's lovers are portrayed, at their most intense, like his Adam and Eve. If these first parents are abstracts, then the poet's typical lovers are simply ghosts, haunting a period of time never ‘Now’ but only a reflex of past and future. The manner of these poems will make a reader expect an art as of an expert social photographer catching smiling and solid persons in the bright light of the moment: but when looked at hard, these results are all negative. The speaker of ‘Absent from thee’, whose ‘Fantastic Mind’ desires only not to be a ‘straying Fool’, makes it his hope, not that he will be true, but that he will betray love enough—that he will tie a tight enough knot of punished infidelity to hold himself steady in: as steady as the poem is held by the syntactic knot of the line which sums up the only available alternative of fidelity—

To wish all Day, all Night to Mourn.

‘An Age, in her Embraces past’ starts its vagrancies by letting the reader down from the expected summer's night which its erotic context suggests, into its actual ‘Winter's Day’ of love: a chilly actuality as mistily indecorous to our conventions of love as are the divergencies of the poem's chief character, a Shade of Soul that wanders ghostily through the poem. Its path is indicated by a ramifying grammar—

          When absent from her Eyes;
That feed my Love, which is my Soul,
          It languishes and dyes …

—that becomes a fragmented style from which even the poet dissociates himself contemptuously (‘Love-sick Fancy’), thus disintegrating the medium still further. The poem at last rests for its stability on one conclusion only, that ‘expiring’ truth attained in ‘Absent from thee’; here it takes the form of the stoical ‘Pain can ne'er deceive’, the belief that jealousy at least provides

                    Proof 'twixt her and me,
We love, and do not dream.

The time scheme proposed in this poem comes to rest, not on present moment, but on that shadowy past and future evoked in its last stanza's re-echoing rhymes, ‘when past’ and ‘at last’. It would seem a mistake to write down this lack of the libertine art of present enjoyment to a mere bad mood of love, a passing depression. For this same insubstantial medium may be found in poems that cannot be written off as court lyrics of love. One of Rochester's strongest short poems, ‘The Maim'd Debauchee’, takes as surface (without quite burlesquing it) the graver heroic style of the period, and its vision extends as wide as state affairs: but it is a fact that its perspective on war and politics is identical with that of the lyrics on love. Immediately beneath the grave, powerful surface, all is a resonant dissolution:

Shou'd some brave Youth (worth being drunk) prove nice,
          And from his fair inviter meanly shrink,
Twould please the Ghost of my departed Vice,
          If, at my Counsel, He repent and drink.

That the warrior of love here becomes a Ghost of Vice fits the peculiar decorum of the poem, for its situation offers the temporal vertigo of a man who lightens the miseries of present love by toughening himself with the reminder of the prospects of future impotency—the future pleasure, that is, of remembering a then past potency. The fragile, hardly Socratic, self-knowing wisdom which its last two syllables tender (‘be wise’) is something like the knowledge that human beings love, or lust for power, in order to enjoy looking forward to the pleasure of looking back at the pain of having suffered. It moves in fact from

My Pains at last some respite shall afford …

to:

Past Joys have more than paid what I endure.

The brute strength of these factual-sounding lines has to be balanced against the shadowy non-existence they record. The poem celebrates fulfilments never more than ostensible. And its title, ‘The Maim'd’—or, as Vieth reads, ‘Disabled’—‘Debauchee’, compacts into a phrase the theme of impotency or emptiness below the surface of an extreme worldly experience.

This theme, brilliantly embodied in the matter of the poem, is oddly reflected too in one specific detail. I am still quoting here from the Muses' Library text of the poems; but in that edition, this poem's climactic stanza will not be found in the text, only doubtfully added to the notes at the back of the book. And even there, it is to be read only in the more decent version which the 1680 text printed, and which Vieth rejects for one hardly printable until a decade or so ago. Thus, earlier versions, extending over nearly three centuries, all give the poem as it were a hole in the page, a void between the lines. The editorial problem, in fact, which begins with a matter as simple as Rochester's use of the notorious four-letter word, properly considered takes us right to the centre of the whole question of his aesthetic purpose, as expressed in the characteristic abstract violence of his style. For an art that so brilliantly and customarily brings together fact and fantasy, the surface and the void, also brings together with particular point the elegant and the obscene. For in obscenity, in the words unprintable—except in pirated editions—even in Rochester's time, the extreme of verbal and emotional nothingness is reached. Whatever the changing proprieties in an age, an obscenity is a non-word, a hole in the page—a betrayal of human sense and meaning to mere grunting phatic gesture.

It is clear, I think, that Rochester, who is sometimes misnamed a pornographic poet, wrote as a man capable of thinking of his obscenities in precisely this way—with the eye and ear of the sensitive man who once came to court not merely blushing but stammering, finding certain things unsayable. Consider the missing stanza from ‘The Maim'd Debauchee’:

Nor shall our Love-fits Cloris be forgot,
          When each the well-look'd Link-Boy strove t'enjoy
And the best Kiss, was the deciding Lot,
          Whether the Boy us'd you, or I the Boy.

It could hardly be said that this gets worse when Vieth reads,

Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy …

In fact a strong case could be made for feeling that the verse undoubtedly gets better in the more brutal transposition. For that specific, end of the road, last-ditch verbal shock both embodies and in some curious way resolves the other much larger shock which the poem is about: which it is both about, and bespeaks in everything we mean when we gesture vaguely towards its ‘mock heroic’ or burlesque manner.

A more recent poem, one of Philip Larkin's, mentions the ‘long perspectives / Open at each instant of our lives’, meaning the deracinating shocks time brings to those whose element is said to be the temporal; and Rochester's ‘obscene’ stanza provides this among other shocks. It brings to a culmination, just before the end of the poem, everything pastiche in it up to that point: in an imitation of ‘antiquity’ whose soft delicate indelicate procedure has hardly been improved on in three hundred years of translation, imitation, pastiche and burlesque, up to and even including Pound's reversals and repetitions of a whole century of phoney classicism. Rochester's stanza aches with an almost Virgilian sense of distance, the yearning both of and for the classical, since all epic from Homer on looks back to an earlier innocence only surviving in an epic lumber of weapons, feasts, ships, the nicknames of gods and the code of poets. That loaded long-perspectived classic sense of life in time Rochester reaches back for and wraps around, not a battle or great feast but a memory of private pleasure; and that memory and that pleasure capsize the great mood, bring it down to a ground-bass of simple wordless obscenity. This last line is, in its way, perhaps tender, perhaps funny; it also shows reality dissolving, chaos and promiscuity taking over, and sheer nothingness opening all around.

The self-defeating lordly art of that ‘unprintable’ final line is generic to Rochester's work, which offers many parallels—though not, of course, in such older texts as the Muses' Library, in which a couplet or a whole poem will become that ‘hole in the page’: as where the poet, skating on the thin ice of obscenity, has fallen in. In all of them Rochester devotes his elaborate talent to capturing both phonetic and semantic nullity: as when he settles the scope of his monarch's affections with a noise as of a mud bath, in ‘Love he loves, for he loves fucking much’; or, leaving his club or coffee house one evening, looks back, as it might be down to the bottom of a well, to see and hear the Symposium reduced to the sound of frogs—

Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who and who does worse …

This reductiveness and this nullity are in fact the heart of the matter, for Rochester can when decorum demands maintain the same brutal art of monosyllables without the aid of obscenity, as when Artemisia gives us the whole Art of Love in wondering whether

The old ones last, and who and who's together.

Similarly, the Satire against Mankind says the last word when it paraphrases the whole Hobbesian dance of human society as

Man undoes Man, to do himself no good

—an extraordinary complexity of sonic monotony, a concrete music of fallen nature.

To observe the peculiar artistry of Rochester's single-lined brutalities is to understand more clearly what he is doing in whole poems like the extraordinary complex of finesse and unrepeatability, A Ramble in St James's Park, whose Symposium-like opening pair of lines I have just quoted (from Vieth's edition). The poem is a vision of the social scene as a violent phantasm, with the darkness of night-time London showing through it. Its poised yet perhaps three-quarters-mad speaker has been betrayed by the ‘infinitely vile, when fair’ Corinna, taking turns with three young blades (a Whitehall gadabout, a Gray's Inn wit, and a Lady's Eldest Son) who may well embody the world, the flesh, and the devil in person; and what maddens the poet to near screaming-point is that this semi-goddess has sold him for nothing, as exercise of mere preference of change for change's sake, fashion in love; a preference which therefore brings the speaker in all logic to recognize his equal guilt in similarly loving a mere nothing, a mere love object, a figment of imagination. In self-punishment as much as revenge he curses her with the fate logic demands: she shall ‘go mad for the north wind … and perish in a wild despair’.

The Ramble's savage, dangerous, yet obscurely innocent fantasy—innocent from the sensed rectitude which its upside-down fury violates, the contained and quashed romantic idealism without which we could not (I think) laugh at that wilfully frightful ending—epitomizes much of what Rochester does in his elegant and obscene writings. If one says ‘much’ rather than ‘all’, this is because the violently sustained grossness of the Ramble, its comic extravagance or fantasy of wildly pained love, unbalances that poise which the poet more usually maintains. A more representative art may be found in a slighter poem, in the delicate brilliance of the translated ‘Upon Drinking in a Bowl’. This poem is from Ronsard's version of the Anacreontic ‘Cup’ lines. But Rochester's final effect is radically unlike the almost Jonsonian directness Ronsard keeps to here. Its difference will illustrate well enough—better in fact, than the Ramble—that art by which Rochester will place obscenity up against a brilliant social surface.

For the poet makes two mutually opposed departures from Ronsard. Taking a hint from Cowley's version of this much translated poem, Rochester gives it a vein of controlled fantasy that Ronsard knows nothing of: he replaces the French poet's sober directions by allowing the poem to mime before us the shaping of the cup, to call forth to the imagination the ‘contrivance’ and ‘Skill’ of its ‘trimming’, the chaste feel of it to the mind as it is ‘Damasked … round with gold’. Fantasy begins to build on the simpler sensuousness of ‘Damask’: the ‘swelling Brim’ holds an almost Mallarméan vision of imagined toasts swimming on the ‘delicious Lake, / Like Ships at Sea’; and on this image, the poem flashes through each stanza scenes of War, of the Planets, of a Vine, each perceived only to be rejected. The poem grows and solidifies as the imagined cup, an exquisitely ‘holding’ structure, is turned before us in an imagined hand. With the sixth stanza, quietly, this whole beautiful structure is tossed away, like a wineglass thrown over the shoulder. Building on a mere hint offered by Ronsard, who introduces a vulgarism (‘Trogne’, ‘mug’ or ‘phiz’, for Bacchus's face), Rochester closes:

Cupid and Bacchus my Saints are;
          May Drink and Love still reign:
With Wine I wash away my Cares,
          And then to Love again.

In this last line, where the more seemly Muses' Library text reads ‘Love’, Vieth follows the 1680 text and prints a cruder monosyllable, mockingly alliterating with ‘Cares’. This obscenity must be, I think, what Rochester wrote. He has given this exquisite but shocking small poem a wholly original structure, necessitating two opposed poles: the one creating in fantasy an extremity of imagining; the other with one casually dropped word shattering everything that has gone before. The final dynamic effect of the poem is not unlike the extraordinary structure which Milton's bad angels erect in hell: a brilliant energy of human creation, teetering over a void.

Rochester's biographers have noted that in his last years—his early thirties—his reading turned to history, philosophy and politics; and they have surmised on that basis that had he lived he might have given more time to the public affairs he had profoundly despised earlier. In something of the same spirit Robert Parsons implies that on his death-bed Rochester looked forward to the writing of sacred poetry. Both prospects seem unlikely. Both seem, moreover, to be associated with the kind of anxiety that impels even his best critics (like, for instance, David Farley-Hills in his admirable study) to overstress the ‘positive’ aspects of his work, either in the direction of making much of the philosophical importance of his ideas, or of underlining the exciting fictiveness of the more substantial poems—of finding in them even the three-dimensionality of the novelist. Both ventures risk distorting the real aesthetic quality of Rochester's poetry. A moment's consideration of some of the couplet poems will show how little truly ‘fictive’ they are, how little they rest within the play of psychological and social relationships.

Rochester's more overtly satirical writing makes it seem odd that there is still any question as to why he chose Timon as a persona. Shakespeare's character took the covers off the dishes at his banquet to show, beneath, nothing but spangles and warm water; and he looked forward to his removal from the great social scene with the words

                                                            My long sickness
Of health and living now begins to mend
And nothing brings me all things.

Of A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Cloe in the Country one might say that all things bring us nothing.⁹ Some recent critics regard this as Rochester's best poem, and the quality most admired is its fictive density of substance, its moral relativism. This admiration is responding to something true in the poem which explains its sheer entertainingness; but it is a dangerous admiration that overlooks an essential element of structure. ‘Dear Artemisia! Poetry's a Snare’: and this poem is as reductive, as self-underminingly self-consuming as anything Rochester ever wrote, the seductive promise of whole Decamerons of future stories with which it ends as unaccomplished and unaccomplishable as those ‘Promises’ and ‘Vows’ which end Upon Nothing: for Rochester was not a man who wrote the same poem twice. And it is an unalterable condition of the poetic form that, unlike drama or the novel, poetry has no free-standing voice, each persona must be taken responsibility for by the poet—who was, in this case, as peculiarly well known to the audience for whom he wrote for his masculine gender as for his aristocratic standing. Rochester never, that is to say, writes like a woman, only like a man writing like a woman, and carefully selecting only such female attributes as may solidify the equation latent in the opening that women are to men as the individual man of wit is to the rest of society. For, as Rochester says elsewhere,

Witts are treated just like common Whores,
First they're enjoy'd, and then kickt out of Doores …
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 last they hate.(10)

From the beginning we hear Artemisia, for all the brilliance of the impersonation, as Rochester's voice at one remove, and gain perpetual pleasure at the paradoxical comparisons that continually arise from his two-faced mask of man of wit and woman; indeed the pleasure derives from the exact measuring of the distance of that remove—‘Thus, like an arrant Woman, as I am’. This is a game that grows more difficult, but all the more worth playing, as the resemblances stretch and grow thin but still sustain through the inset personae of fine lady and true whore. The poem is composed of women betraying each other—and the other sex, too, insofar as it comes in their way—and is thus made up of a descending series of self-scrutinies, of measurements of the treachery that detachment from the human self entails, when a writer (for instance) stops living in order to sigh, in an impossible self-denying act of self-scrutiny, a remark like

Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man.)
A Spirit free, to choose …

This construct made out of creative treacheries, this descending spiral of darker and darker illusion analysed, may explain Rochester's choice of a name for his heroine. The word ‘Artemisia’ means the species of bitter herb that contains the plant wormwood, and the poet may have thought this ‘flower of Artemis’ a good name for his sharp-tongued virginal heroine; but Rochester's impersonation of a female speaker suggests that he remembered the punchline of a story from Herodotus's account of the Persian Wars.¹¹ Artemisia, Queen of Halicarnassus, saved herself at the battle of Salamis by a brilliant act of treachery: hotly pursued by a Greek vessel and finding her way barred by one of her own allies, she promptly rammed and sank the allied ship. The Greek pursuer assumed that she must therefore after all be Athenian, and turned away; the observers of her own party assumed that the rammed vessel must after all be Athenian, and sang her praises. Xerxes said afterwards: ‘My men have behaved like women, my women like men!’

In the circumstances this remark has complexities that resonate in the memory (though Herodotus did not think it his business to notice them); the likelihood is that they lingered in Rochester's, given the subtle and paradoxical games based on wars of the sexes that he goes in for in Artemisia, from the point of view of the unsexed, unsocial writer—

Like Men that marry, or like Maids that woo,
Because 'tis the very worst thing they can do.

For the poem traces a charming, casual course downwards from disloyalty to criminal treachery. The substance is so delightfully ‘sociable’, so randomly entertainingly gossipy, so thick with amusing observations of the known, that we barely notice its structure, which is hardly in fact extrusive: it may even be slightly flawed. But it has without doubt three descending stages. We open with the innocent but wilfully sentimental Artemisia's discovery of solaces for herself—from a social world that both governs and disgusts her—in the conscious follies and illusions of art, turning from a hated passionless love to a loved loneliness of letter writing. From there the poem moves by a refined malice on Artemisia's part to the inset treacheries of the ‘fine lady’, who is false not only to the other sex—her poor fool of a husband—but even to her own species, preferring the ‘dirty, chatt'ring … Minature of Man’, a monkey to be fondled instead of a human creature to be loved. And she herself glances down with a considering pity to the voiceless, unindividuated, merely type-treachery of Corinna, who—a kind of dark shadow behind the delicate Artemisia—also knows how to use her experience and others' for her own purposes, but who rests, ‘diseas'd, decay'd’, at the mortgaged bottom of society, ‘looking gay’, ‘talking fine’, her every feeling a lie and her whole life an illusion—her child a ‘Bastard Heir’ to existence itself, the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. The poem climbs down through one level of fashion and fantasy to another, and then another as through a ‘snare’—

(Bedlam has many Mansions; have a care)

—which catches us and lands us on the brilliant last line:

But you are tir'd, and so am I.
                                                                                                              Farewel.

In a letter to his friend Savile, Rochester wrote: ‘The World, ever since I can remember, has been still so unsupportably the same’. It is on that ‘tired’ insight into some pure banality in social existence that the poem rests, as on a rock. And later he wrote to the same correspondent, casually: ‘few Men here dissemble their being Rascals; and no Woman disowns being a Whore’.¹²Artemisia is a kind of undissembled dissembling, an owned disowning, because it is a social construct itself, and gives genuine pleasure thereby: it is a letter to a friend just like these often delightfully witty friendly letters Rochester wrote to Savile, or the usually charmingly kind and nonsensical notes he sent home to his wife. But at the same time it expresses the weary lucidity of Rochester's insight into the social self: it is a progressively more ruthless, more searching light turned towards the darkness that cannot be either ‘dissembled’ or ‘disowned’. And it is on that darkness, the lack of anything beyond the self-cancelling illusions of the poem, that it rests: there is nothing else, and nothing is what it is. At the centre of Artemisia is the fine lady who defines the aesthetic which both poem and social world are content to share, with a line that clearly haunted Swift's imagination: ‘The perfect joy of being well deceiv'd’. So long as the poem lasts the poet is content to stay within that ‘perfect joy’, to follow out to the end his own curiously elegant, undoubtedly entertaining construct of lies and illusions: one that is successful enough to make many of its readers ask (as does Rochester's best editor), ‘Which of the poem's many characters represents the truth?’—when the only answer is, ‘Fewer and fewer and less and less’.

This is something like the answer, at any rate, which Rochester gives in his most powerful poem, the Satire against Mankind, whose finality is its essential character, at whatever stage of the poet's career it happened to be written. It is here that a reader may see most clearly the achievement and the cost of Rochester's peculiar art of extremity, the intensity he gained by arriving at the point where something comes to an end:

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.

I mentioned earlier Rochester's use of capitals, and the faltering rhythm that breaks his strongest lines. The peculiar character and memorability of this climactic fourth line is the way that capital L ‘Life’ quietly dissolves into wavering distractedly weak negatives—Man is not, but ‘has been’, he is nowhere but ‘in the wrong’. This ‘satire’ is no satire, but simply a poem, which we cannot understand unless we believe its medium, its verbal surface; and this poem, which seems to have so much public clarity, in fact works through a style like a misty secret labyrinth in which the person who reads well gets lost,

                                                  climbs with pain,
Mountains of Whimseys, heap'd in his own Brain:
Stumbling from thought to thought, falls head-long down.
Into doubts boundless Sea, where like to drown,
Books bear him up awhile …

It is, again, unsurprising that the best part of the poem, its harsh, undeniably conclusive opening prelude, moves from paradox (‘who to my cost already am’) to net us throughout in a rhetoric whose most memorable effects are all explicit intricacies of verbal surface, like that later famous obsessive passage in which the poet winds his subject, Man, in a knot of monosyllables:

                    wretched Man, is still in Arms for fear;
For fear he armes, and is of Armes afraid,
By fear, to fear, successively betray'd
Base fear …

Perhaps only Rochester among English poets could have got such power from the exploration of that purely negative form of imagination, fear.

It may be asked how a writer whom I have presented as so concerned with ‘Nothing’ could have made of his work a ‘something’ still appreciated after three hundred years—indeed, enjoyed and admired now as at no other time since that period of intense success during which the poet himself wrote. I want to finish by suggesting an answer to this question: and it will be one other than the supposal that nihilism as such is peculiarly the concern of the present. Rochester was not a philosophical nihilist, and there is no reason to suppose that, if he were, the modern reader would admire him for it. But the reasons are, I think, in some sense philosophical, so long as we are content to allow that the philosophical can include the highly paradoxical. For Rochester can, like any other poet, be more relevantly ‘philosophical’ when he is writing entirely playfully, with an appearance of casual randomness, than when he ‘thinks’ in prose. Rochester's arguments with Burnet, for instance, are well worth looking at: but at their most interesting they only include points that will be put far more forcibly and personally in the verse, even where we might least look for it.

Thus, a reader interested in Rochester's philosophical position could do worse than read the Epilogue he wrote for a friend's comedy, Love in the Dark (even the title is Rochesterian, suggestive of that ‘mistaken magic’ he calls love in ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’), where he mocks the success of a rival company given to effects of flying spectacle:

Players turn Puppets now at your Desire,
In their Mouth's Nonsence, in their Tails a Wire,
They fly through Clouds of Clouts, and show'rs of Fire.
A kind of losing Loadum is their Game,
Where the worst Writer has the greatest Fame.

These two brilliant images are better than they ought to be—than any casual satire can be expected to be. This is surely because Rochester was himself a kind of equilibrist, an expert in moving high over that vacuity he defines in ‘Love and Life’: no past, no future, no present to call his own, beyond a ‘miraculous’ minute high over the crowd. All his verse is, similarly, a ‘losing Loadum’, a card-game like a slow bicycle race where the loser wins, because he does the difficult thing. The French Symbolist dramatist Jarry wrote a blasphemous essay, which is genuinely funny and innocent, called ‘The Crucifixion considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race’, which gets us within the area where Rochester needs to be considered; remembering Eliot's remarks on the relative spirituality of certain kinds of blasphemy.

Rochester's angry antipathy to the worldly world of success, that world in which for long he was so anxious to succeed and in which he so long succeeded in succeeding, even to the point at which the perhaps comparably worldly Bishop Burnet remarked with some satisfaction after the poet's death, ‘All the town is full of his great penitence’—this world-opposing side of his character was clearly far more evident to the other and probably more intelligent attendant on his death-bed, Robert Parsons, his Puritan mother's private chaplain. It was Parsons who brought to Rochester perhaps his only moment of true spiritual vision, by reading to him Isaiah's prophecy of the Suffering Servant, the Messiah who is a man of no importance at all; and it is Parsons, similarly, who in the sermon he preached at Rochester's funeral at once grasped the game of ‘losing Loadum’ the poet had played morally all his life:

He seem'd to affect something Singular and paradoxical in his Impieties, as well as in his Writings, above the reach and thought of other men. … Nay so confirm'd was he in Sin, that he liv'd, and oftentimes almost died, a Martyr for it.¹³

It was surely this upside-down spirituality, or reversed idealism, that made Johnson among other eighteenth-century writers think that Upon Nothing was Rochester's best poem, for it is the single one of all his works which in its startling depth and largeness comes close to that classic standard, even to that image of Nature which Johnson demanded of his poets; for Upon Nothing is of course both cosmology and history, a mischievous rendering down of all those Renaissance histories that start with the Creation and end with the present day. Johnson, who had remarked casually to Boswell that ‘Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world’, would have appreciated Rochester's demonstration that sub specie aeternitatis they are also a means of falling in it:

The great Man's Gratitude to his best Friend,
Kings Promises, Whores Vows, tow'rds thee they bend,
Flow swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end.

The liturgical cadence here, as in the music of an ancient Latin hymn gone slightly wrong in the translation, gives Upon Nothing something of that real largeness often lacking in Rochester's insubstantial verse—a verse that finally seems to hate substance—and makes of this poem an object with the extension of a Rubens ceiling reversed, or a Purcell chorale reset for solo flute. Or, to make comparisons within the poet's own work, Upon Nothing is empowered, by its source in the paradoxical encomium, to bring into the forefront those elsewhere entirely latent Metaphysical elements in Rochester's imagination, such as he himself tended to dismiss with irritation as the ‘extravagances’ of ‘my fantastic mind’; elements which make, for instance, A Ramble in St James's Park, when it is compared with the reductive and mean-minded work of Butler which it so admiringly seems to copy, an actual if finalizing perpetuation (for all its grossness) of earlier Renaissance modes of idealism, rather than a Butlerian destruction of them.

It is in this high and spacious abstraction that Upon Nothing contrasts so interestingly with another ‘nothing’ poem, the very late translation from Seneca's Troades. The best lines of this translation are those in which the poet picks up and adds to the essential materialism of his source:

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 …

Bodies here become disturbingly indestructible, like old dressmakers' dummies stacked among the dusty attics of Chaos: the Lumber image has a humorous irritated homeliness in considering physical existence that is the other side of the coin to Rochester's idealism. Clearly, it was the very closeness and actuality of the Restoration poet's sense of the physical and material world—the inevitabilities of his ‘realism’, the close limits of the only vision he knew, like the small confines of the court he was ironically drawn to—that threw him back on an idealism markedly negative, abstract: such as Rochester himself found in another Roman poet, Lucretius, after whom he splendidly invoked gods who needed nothing, asked nothing, were angered by nothing. And similarly he maintained against Burnet's Christian God—a god deeply marked by that recurring pragmatism that can make English theology, as Coleridge once remarked, as insistently vulgar as it is realistic—that

God had none of those Affections of Love or Hatred, which breed perturbation in us, and by consequence he could not see that there was to be either reward or punishment. He thought our Conceptions of God were so low, that we had better not think much of him: And to love God seemed to him a presumptuous thing, and the heat of fanciful men.¹⁴

It is easier to see, or rather to feel, the flaws in the theology of the time if we turn the kind of over-pragmatism that the romanticism in Rochester was struggling with into its more secular philosophical form: the Hobbesian philosophy that entered deeply into the imagination of the age, even into areas where nothing was consciously felt but angry hostility to Hobbes's premises. Hobbes's philosophy has more power than Burnet's theology simply because it relies more deeply on and speaks more frankly from its age's historical presuppositions than any true theology can honestly do. It is possibly easier to write a Leviathan out of mid-seventeenth-century history—out of the disillusioned consciousness of the age—than to create a work of dogmatic theology out of it. Hence the potency of a passage that says:

The whole mass of all things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body … also every part of body, is likewise body, and hath the like dimensions; and consequently every part of the universe, is body, and that which is not body, is no part of the universe: and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it, is nothing; and consequently nowhere …¹⁵

Where the religious imagination of a period becomes hopelessly comfortable, a conformist cul-de-sac, more life may be found latent in the world of blasphemy or heresy. Thus, even the intensely ‘social’ Henry James—whom I cite, as having used him elsewhere in this essay—at the end of the nineteenth century turned, like many good writers after him, to the murky world of the ghost story, to express moral and spiritual facts not easy to keep hold of otherwise within the philistine insensibility of contemporary middle-class England. The real subject of The Turn of the Screw, as he made clear in a letter, was the appalling exposure of children to lethal adult affections; it was to help him out in saying this, to a society of hard sentimentalists, that he called up the pot-boiling spooks, for whom he apologizes to his correspondent, jokily: ‘I evoked the worst I could … “Excusez du peu!”’¹⁶ Rochester, two centuries earlier, had ‘evoked the worst he could’: he evoked half-lovingly that ‘Nothing’ which Hobbes laid down like a Green Belt at the edge of his unimaginably material universe, whose ‘body’, in the light of what Rochester does with his ‘Nothing’, takes on something of that ghostly immateriality which the poet gave mockingly to his ‘bodies’—the lovers who haunt his poems.

Such negativism deserves, I think, the highest respect: it should not be brushed aside, in anxious search for more substantial virtues—more positive philosophical values. Rochester's Nothing deserves, what is more, even more respect in that it entails for the poet something of a losing game, a ‘losing Loadum’. To refuse, in all honesty, to trust the only world one has; to find oneself incapable, on the other hand, of any other music in one's poetry beyond the crash of breaking glass—this is a fate as grim as that appalling epitaph with which Johnson sums up the fate of Harley: ‘Not knowing what to do, he did nothing; and, with the fate of a double dealer, at last he lost his power, but kept his enemies’. Rochester clearly possessed that extreme moral courage that is willing to leave behind a body of work fundamentally ‘unlikeable’—that presents the self in it as unlikeable, for the work's sake: a moral courage which is the prime virtue, one would have thought, of all true artists. For, from inside Rochester's work, which is likely to have come from a personality both sensitive and generous as well as honest, no ‘nice man’ emerges. There is only an image strikingly like that image, now in the National Portrait Gallery, which we mainly know Rochester by: a portrait surely planned and dictated to the painter by the poet himself, and so an actual picture to match those several verse ‘Instructions to a Painter’ which were a favourite literary exercise in this period. Half turned away from his audience, whom he regards with a sideways and wary inward amusement, the Earl of Rochester welcomes us with an open gesture of his shining silk left arm, which gesture at the same time directs our eyes to his raised right hand holding a laurel wreath high over the head of a pet monkey; a monkey who, like an image in a mirror, gives to the poet with his left hand a torn fragment from the book he grips open with his right. In aesthetic terms, the animal is the focus of the human being, while reversing his every gesture: its little black mask is raised devoutly towards the white unforthcoming stare that the tall young aristocrat directs down on us; the monkey's small chest slightly unnerving in its nakedness against the costly concealing taffetas that fall from a lace collar over the man's torso. Like his own ‘fine lady’, the poet is playing with a ‘Minature of Man’.

In itself the portrait is a design of pure rebuttal, all dead ends and barriers. It is an impassive self-concealing refusal of disguise, a courtier's serious joke about looking ‘frightfully’: it takes us back, that is to say, to the elder Wilmot's remark, and summarizes what I have tried to say about an art of social surface. For all such charm as the Rochester portrait has is not a charm of ‘personality’, but is a matter of the subtle shadowings of the taffeta cascading down below the intelligent but rebuffing eyes of the poet, the silk's beauty sharpened by contrast with the disturbing nakedness of the small ape's chest beneath its blank dark averted mug. Underneath the taffeta there is to all intents and purposes nothing whatever: but the picture is not, for all that, empty—it is full of something, even if that something is couched in mockeries and denials.

Notes

1. See V. de Sola Pinto, Sir Charles Sedley 1639-1701 (1927), pp. 62-3; also p. 62, note 5: ‘The idea of masquerading as an itinerant quack always had a fascination for the Restoration gallants.’ Dr Anne Barton suggests to me that Ben Jonson's story of his own disguise forms a possible precedent: ‘he with ye consent of a friend Cousened a lady, with whom he had made ane apointment to meet ane old Astrologer jn the suburbs, which she Keeped & it was himself disguysed jn a Longe Gowne & a whyte beard at the light of < a > Dimm burning Candle up jn a litle Cabjnet reached unto by a Ledder.’ (Conversations with Drummond, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson (1925-52), I, 141.)

2. The Boscobel Tracts, ed. J. Hughes (1830), p. 151. See also Richard Ollard, The Escape of Charles II (1966).

3. The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (1920), I, 67, 341.

4. G.S. Street, Miniatures and Moods (1893), p. 27; quoted in Rochester: The Critical Heritage, ed. David Farley-Hills (1972), p. 254.

5. Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (1691), II, 489.

6. Edward N. Hooker, ‘Dryden and the Atoms of Epicurus’, in Essential Articles for the study of John Dryden, ed. H.T. Swedenberg Jr. (1966), p. 241.

7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (1946), p. 16.

8. Gilbert Burnet, MS draft of The History of His own Time, printed as an Appendix to Ranke's History of England principally in the Seventeenth Century (1875), VI, 78; and Halifax, A Character of King Charles the Second (1750), pp. 15-46.

9. I quote the Muses' Library title and text for this poem, while changing the spelling of the name to Vieth's Artemisia, for reasons suggested in my discussion of the name's possible source.

10. In the last line of this passage from the Satire against Mankind, Pinto follows the 1680 text in reading ‘And therefore what they fear, at least they hate’. John Hayward, in his Nonesuch Press edition (1926), reads ‘And therefore what they fear, at heart they hate’. I have silently altered the Muses' Library text here to ‘last’, a reading which I propose as possibly underlying the erroneous least; in literary terms, the conclusive ring of ‘at last they hate’ is both more Rochesterian and more generally Augustan.

11. The relevant parts of Herodotus's History, Book VIII, chapters 87-8, here quoted in George Rawlinson's translation of 1858, had not been translated into English before Rochester's death, though there were both Latin and French versions. The story may have reached Rochester indirectly, but it is worth noting that most contemporary accounts support Parsons's description of the poet as ‘thoroughly acquainted with all Classick authors, both Greek and Latin’, and that Rochester seems to have had no less a taste for reading history than Lucius Cary, who a generation earlier was reading the Greek historians.

12. The Rochester-Savile Letters, ed. J. H. Wilson (1941), pp. 40, 73.

13. Robert Parsons, A Sermon Preached at the Earl of Rochester's Funeral (1680), p. 9.

14. Gilbert Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester (1680), pp. 52-3, quoted in Farley-Hills, Critical Heritage, p. 60.

15. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. cit., p. 440.

16. Lubbock, Letters of Henry James, I, 308.