SOURCE: Knight, Charles A. “The Paradox of Reason: Argument in Rochester's ‘Satyr Against Mankind.’” Modern Language Review 65, no.2 (April, 1970): 254–60.

[In the essay below, Knight argues against previous critics' contentions that A Satire Against Mankind should be seen in terms of Rochester's interest in seventeenth-century materialism and his eventual conversion, and maintains that the poem is more complex and playful than previously supposed, which is evident from Rochester's handling of his argumentative method and his paradoxical treatment of reason.]

One of the most apparently pessimistic elements of Rochester's Satyr against Mankind is not his attack on speculative reason but his attack on human nature itself. The forceful lines that open the poem are balanced by Rochester's later distinction between deductive, scholastic reason and ‘that reason which distinguishes by sense / And gives us rules of good and ill from thence’ (l. 100). Thus the opening picture of man's delusive intellectual journey and of his terrible self-knowledge in death is not a picture of the inevitable human condition. It is a view of man who has strayed, rather than a picture of the road itself. But Rochester's assertion that fear and knavery are at the heart of human nature and human society is left without a redeeming distinction in the original poem. Even in the added ‘Epilogue,’ Rochester, though dissipating the force of his earlier indictment and speaking in a different tone of voice and from more ostensibly conventional values, does not retract his earlier statements about human nature.¹

C. F. Main comments (p. 101) that Rochester's initial attack on man's pride in reason is a reflection of the doctrine of original sin. It does seem to share the notion of man's loss of preternatural wisdom and man's disposition to pride. But even more central to the doctrine of original sin is the Augustinian view that man's very nature is deformed and bent towards sinfulness (more than towards illusion and error). In this respect Rochester's attack on human nature seems almost conventionally religious in specifying the workings of original sin in human society. But the context makes it all the more pessimistic, for Rochester, in replying to the theological arguments of the ‘formal band and beard’, attacks rationalistic theology, especially the tenet that reason distinguishes man from beast and makes man the image of God. Thus man is still the weak victim of original sin without the redeeming likeness to divinity. The story of man's Fall is left without the story of creation. The Pascalian Tension of man with and without grace is removed, for man is seen without grace only.²

This dark view of human nature has generally been accepted as Rochester's own, or at least as the view implicit in the poem. Most biographers of the poet see the poem in terms of Rochester's interest in seventeenth-century materialistic philosophy and as an anticipation of his later religious conversion. Thus Vivian de Sola Pinto writes that in the poem ‘Rochester had reached the end of the cul-de-sac into which he had been led by materialism. In the epilogue we see the truth beginning to dawn upon him that he must retreat from it’. Later, Pinto, commenting on Rochester's path to religion, claims that ‘Hobbes's materialism had appealed to him at first because of its boldness and the justification it offered for the life of pleasure. But the Satyr against Mankind shows that by the spring of 1675-6 he was outgrowing that “seducing system”, and it was natural that he should turn to the other unorthodox creeds which were current at the time in Western Europe’.³ Others, like Thomas H. Fujimura, are more cautious about drawing biographical inferences but nonetheless assume that the last lines of the original poem represent a philosophical statement to be taken only at full face value.⁴ C. F. Main is careful to couch his reading of the poem in the language of formal verse satire. But though he speaks of ‘the satirist’ rather than of Rochester, he does not take up the question of tone or see the last half of the poem as anything but a relatively straightforward philosophical statement. He calls the last section of the poem almost Hobbesian in its treatment of human fear (p. 107).

Hobbesian the poem may be, but thus far attempts to consider the poem have done so apart from its tone and the rhetorical structure of its arguments. My purpose here is to suggest that in some respects the poem is more playful and more complex than has been previously supposed and that these qualities derive from Rochester's handling of his argumentative method and from his paradoxical treatment of reason in the structure of the poem. Irrelevant as biography may be to such consideration of the poem, there is at least some biographical evidence that suggests suspicion about the poem's straightforwardness, for every reader of Rochester's antics, even his genuine ones, and every viewer of Huysmans's famous portrait of him crowning a monkey with bays, can recognize his basic interest not merely in disguise, but in the put-on, in a deception that derives from a basic awareness of society and of motive, and in a posing that embodies that awareness in wit. It is not my purpose here to suggest how deep this tendency may be in Rochester's basic attitudes or to speculate on its influence in Rochester's own personal life, but this public trait in Rochester does suggest that we ought not to accept too automatically the surface meaning of the poem without regard for its tone or its wit.

The poem begins by enunciating its primary satiric device, the preference of beasts to men and the mocking distress of the speaker that he cannot choose to be other than he is. This preference dominates most of the poem and is its formal organizing device. In addition to introducing the play of stock attitudes concerning the role of reason in identifying man's position in the cosmic hierarchy, it presents important aspects of the speaker's cast of thought, for he sees himself as inextricably caught by his view of the human situation. But unlike his later adversary, who indulges in flights of reason to escape human limitations, the speaker presents alternative choices that he knows are impossible. Thus he is comically aware that he is trapped by his situation, and the rest of the poem develops that awareness.

The speaker quickly focuses on the problem of man's rationality, and this remains the poem's major concern up to line 111. The attack on reason is appropriately unreasonable. The speaker makes unargued assertions of his position (‘The senses are too gross, and he'll contrive / A sixth, to contradict the other five’, l.8⁵), and on the basis of these assertions he constructs an elaborate metaphor in which the reasoner is seen following a will-o'-the-wisp through various misadventures until ‘old age and experience, hand in hand, / Lead him to death, and make him understand …’ The force of this passage (ll. 12-30) lies in the speaker's ability to keep extending his comic metaphor of the folly of reason until it culminates in a crashing triplet:

In hopes still to o'ertake th' escaping light,
The vapor dances in his dazzling sight
Till, spent, it leaves him in eternal night.

(l. 22)

The metaphor is serious in its content but it has as well a playfulness which derives both from its extension and from the confusion it presupposes between objective and subjective reality. The searcher's fate, which he has brought on himself by supposing that the products of his fancy were objectively real, is dramatized by his final and absolute realization that ‘all his life he has been in the wrong’.

The poem's initial attack comes, then, not through the logical argument of an intellectual position but from its embodiment in metaphor. As the attack is expanded, the speaker uses analogues from human society to explain his distinctions: pride is like a gamester, wit like a whore; pride is directed at dupes and ‘bubbles’, wit at fops and fools. Thus the speaker begins to direct his attack, as he will more fully in the poem's conclusion, towards human society itself, rather than towards the specific individual deluded by reason. But this process is interrupted by the introduction of the adversary.

Rochester's transition to the speech of the adversary seems at first to be arbitrary, for the adversary does not appear with surprising and obtrusive anger, nor has his appearance been prepared from the beginning. But his relevance becomes apparent when he starts his speech itself. The adversary has a false notion of the speaker's treatment of wit. Indeed, the speaker's attack was not directed at wit itself but at its consequences in society. But the adversary is so defensive in the face of the speaker's attack that he is glad to glean from his hostile remarks whatever he can agree with. Howard Erskine-Hill ably corrects Pinto's suggestion tht the adversary represents an argument in which Rochester wished he could believe, for the lines themselves, as he notes in detail, are weak and unconvincing.⁶

The adversary's remarks represent a break in both the content and structure of the poem. They give the speaker a specific position against which to argue and a specific audience against which to direct his arguments. They also signal a change in technique. The first forty-five lines of the poem are organized around rather large, extended, rich comparisons. In the middle section of the poem the comparisons are short, more verbal, more immediately heightened by the structure of the couplets, and more frequent. The middle section, then, gains force through the variety and proliferation of its devices.

The speaker's characteristic method of attack in the middle section is to couple language used by the adversary with stronger, antithetical terms, making the position of the adversary seem paradoxical and absurd. Many of these antitheses are heightened by rhyme: ‘mite’, with ‘infinite’, ‘void of all rest’ with ‘ever-blest’, or in a couplet like the following:

Borne on whose wings, each heavy sot can pierce,
The limits of the boundless universe.

(l. 84)

The essential conflict embodied in this method and expressed by it is that the adversary sees reason as a means by which man can achieve the transcendent; but in fact, the speaker implies, such reason is fallacious in the first place and, in the second, more binding on human nature than that which it wishes to transcend:

This made a whimsical philosopher
Before the spacious world, his tub prefer.

(l. 90)

The embodiment of this contradiction in specific antitheses leads, then, to the distinction between proper reason, which begins with the senses and governs rather than restricts them, and reason that is limited by the abstract presuppositions with which it begins. Having undermined the position of his adversary, the speaker now develops his own view contrasting the utility of his reason to the rigidity expressed by his adversary:

My reason is my friend, yours is a cheat;
Hunger calls out, my reason bids me eat;
Perversely, yours your appetite does mock:
This asks for food, that answers, “What's o'clock?”

(l. 106)

The effect of these lines is not to convince us that the speaker's position is philosophically more sound, but primarily to emphasize that his position is more directly conducive to pleasure. Thus here, as earlier in the poem, the speaker carefully avoids a genuinely rationalistic basis for his argument.⁷ Rather, he develops contrasts and paradoxes which exemplify his position, making it concrete and convincing.

The final section of the poem, excluding the Epilogue, depends upon the speaker's initial comparison between man and beast. Having discussed the arguments of the adversary, the speaker drops that particular rhetorical stance (though we remain conscious of the adversary as part of the audience of the remaining lines). But when he no longer confronts the adversary directly, the speaker loses the immediate context against which he could develop his own specific arguments in a concrete manner, and thus it is necessary for him to resume his earlier and more extensive animal contrast. Consequently, he argues more absolutely, claiming a kind of truth for his position rather than asserting merely that his views are more satisfactory than those of the adversary. In doing so, as we shall see, the speaker takes a step that is fraught with satiric danger.

In the first stage of his final argument, the speaker proposes wisdom as the intellectual criterion by which the merit of man and beast is to be weighed. He postulates that

Those creatures are the wisest who attain,
By surest means, the ends at which they aim.

(l. 117)

But it becomes clear by example that beasts more surely attain their ends than man and therefore must be wiser. Similarly, human nature itself is less trustworthy than animal, for men lack that natural loyalty to their species found in beasts, nor does man's cruelty even satisfy the basic natural wants and self-interest of beasts. Instead, the speaker continues, dropping his specific comparison with beasts to develop his major characterization of human nature, the primary motive of human society is fear:

Look to the bottom of his vast design,
Wherein man's wisdom, power, and glory join:
The good he acts, the ill he does endure,
'Tis all from fear, to make himself secure.
Merely for safety, after fame we thirst,
For all men would be cowards if they durst.

(l. 153)

Indeed, so ubiquitous is the propensity to fear that honesty is virtually impossible: if one is honest, one will suffer in a society that has no place for honesty, and, therefore, fear leads to dishonesty (even to the dishonest pretension to bravery). Thus the only difference between knavery and cowardice lies ‘not in the thing itself, but the degree’ (l. 171).

It is clear that this final section of the poem is dominated not so much by the rhetorical devices of contrast used in much of the earlier part of the poem as by syllogistic reasoning and the use of logical fallacies. From the premises that wisdom equals economy of means and that man's means are less direct than beasts', the speaker concludes that beasts are wiser than men are. But the first premise begs the question of whether the ends are valuable or even comparable. Moreover, the speaker jumps from his one representative example to assuming the truth of his second premise. (Thus Jowler the hound can be wiser than Aristotle as well as than Meres. But, on the other hand, the rapacity of hounds and politicians—the real ground for their comparison—does not play a formal role in the satiric argument.)

The same satiric use of reason sustains much of the speaker's attack on human nature, where he comes much closer to dealing with the question of ends. Ironically, man's ‘principles’ and ‘morals’ are inferior to beasts'. In this instance the speaker, who was perfectly able to distinguish varieties of reason, does not distinguish between principles and nature. The argument of orthodox morality is that man's principles restrain the excesses of his fallen nature. But in the Satyr those elements that would be identified as excesses of nature (treachery, self-interest, and ‘wantonness’) are treated as principles.

Thus the speaker proceeds by chop logic, by syllogistic reasoning, by shifting the terms of his premises, by arguing on unexamined assumptions, and by using language that departs from accepted senses (as in his use of ‘wisdom’). This logical manipulation provides much of the sharpness of language in this section. The major logical fallacy is the speaker's failure to make any essential distinction between man and beast and his placing of them in classes which defy that distinction. But he also uses that satiric overlapping of distinguishable levels as the source of verbal play, as in such adjectives as ‘savage’ in the following couplet:

Birds feed on birds, beasts on each other prey,
But savage man alone does man betray.

(l. 129)

or in his similar contrast between what is natural and what is human:

With teeth and claws by nature armed, they hunt
Nature's allowance, to supply their want.
But man, with smiles, embraces, friendships, praise,
Inhumanly his fellow's life betrays.

(l. 133)

As the speaker's discussion of human nature develops, he moves from his contrast of man with animals, and his concomitant logical play, to emphasizing man's ‘forced disguise’—the contrast between the virtues to which he claims to aspire (honour, fame, generosity, affability, kindness, wisdom, power, and glory) and his real motive of fear. At the very end of the poem he reintroduces the clergyman as his addressee and, having moved in his attack from cowardice to knavery, proceeds to negate any essential difference between them. Yet Rochester is careful to indicate that all of this follows from the particular position assumed by the speaker which, once adopted, closes any further speculation concerning human nature:

Thus, sir, you see what human nature craves:
Most men are cowards, all men should be knaves.
The difference lies, as far as I can see,
Not in the thing itself, but the degree,
And all the subject matter of debate
Is only: Who's a knave of the first rate?

(l. 168)

There are several conclusions that can be drawn from such an analysis of the argument of the last section of the poem. In the first place, despite the speaker's serious allegations about man, the tone is in part playful. At least the poem depends in part on adroit juggling of words and logical categories (e.g. ‘For all men would be cowards if they durst’), and this implies more emotional distance between the speaker and the object satirized than does a straightforward diatribe. Moreover, in its intellectual play, the last section of the poem employs much the same kind of reasonable, deductive argument that the speaker had attacked in the adversary. Its major intellectual movement is syllogistic, and, like the adversary, the speaker becomes victimized by the limitations of his own premises: having postulated that men and beasts can be compared on moral grounds, his vision is limited by the terms of that comparison. Such limitation does not mean the speaker is merely wrong, for at the other end of the satiric process his remarks gain whatever truth they possess when the implied reader (whose sympathies in the argument ought, after all, to lie with the speaker rather than the adversary) senses their approximate truth in terms of his own experience. But the speaker's use of reason implies that it is impossible for him to escape reason and its limitations, just as he cannot escape from dishonesty or from his human nature.

The last section of the poem and, indeed, the poem itself, provide an argument not merely for a hedonistic intellectual stance but for a hedonistic life. Man's goal is human happiness, which is derived from the senses; and since fear and knavery are the bases of human society, the honest and virtuous life is both unlikely and impractical—certainly not conducive to happiness. In providing this argument, the poem seems to follow the pattern more largely writ in Rochester's ‘Love and Life’ (‘All my past life is mine no more’), which Vieth places in the same period as the Satyr.⁸ There the poet's rather lyric meditations on time and memory become the excuse for infidelity. Here the dishonesty of life and the hypocrisy of virtue justify hedonism and, indeed, conventional immorality. Thus the speaker, like the adversary, is not merely defending an abstract position but justifying himself. In so doing he is motivated by self-interest, but from his own point of view such motivation is possible and consistent. His use of reason in making his argument, however, is not.

The speaker becomes, then, a complex vehicle for satire. While on one hand his assertions about human nature have conviction, on the other, the way in which he makes them is an exemplification of the very limits of human nature and human reason he has spoken of. Pinto, in describing the ‘passionate vehemence’ of the last passage, compares it to Gulliver's Travels. ‘Its place is … beside the great things in Swift, and it recalls the King of Brobdingnag's denunciation of the human race.’⁹ Swiftian the passage may be, but to my mind it seems closer to the angry remarks of Gulliver at the end of ‘A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms’. Like Gulliver, the speaker of the Satyr is himself included in his denunciation of man, and his denunciation itself exemplifies that which he denounces. But in this case there is perhaps more humility than pride in the speaker's position. He does not attack, as Gulliver does, unmindful of his own involvement in the fear and knavery he attacks. Indeed, the element of personal defence in his attack requires such awareness.

Rochester's Satyr against Mankind is not, then, merely a reflection of seventeenth-century materialism in an early formal verse satire. It is a rich and complex work because Rochester uses a variety of argumentative stances to present his material, indeed to embody it in his work. It is this cohesion of satiric form and content and this appropriate shifting of satiric perspective that unify the work and give it depth and brilliance.

Notes

1. Vivian de Sola Pinto, in Enthusiast in Wit (1962), pp. 157-8 claims that the Epilogue, certainly by Rochester, is ‘a sort of conditional recantation’, which is ‘of great biographical significance’. Pinto considers it, then, a later addition. David M. Vieth does not take up the question of dating the Epilogue in his Attribution in Restoration Poetry (New Haven, 1963), but his list of the Satyr's early manuscripts and texts (pp. 370-75) includes some with the Epilogue, some without it, some which call it an ‘Addition’, and some which present the Epilogue alone. C. F. Main (‘The Right Vein of Rochester's “Satyr”’, in Essays in Literary History Presented to J. Milton French, edited by Rudolf Kirk and C. F. Main (New Brunswick, 1960), p. 97) argues that the Epilogue is an important part of the poem, within the ‘retraction’ tradition of satire. I find the Epilogue less interesting in style and less forceful in subject than the main part of the poem, and, since there is reasonable bibliographical evidence for considering it an addition, I prefer to do so. I am not conscious, however, that inclusion of the Epilogue would contradict any of the points that I make without it.

2. ‘Par où il paraît clairement que l'homme par la grâce est rendu comme semblable à Dieu et participant de sa divinité, et que, sans la grâce, it est comme semblable aux bêtes brutes’ (Pensées, 434, renumbered 438, in OEuvres Completes, edited by Jacques Chevalier (1954), p. 1208).

3. Enthusiast in Wit, pp. 158, 186.

4. Thomas H. Fujimura, ‘Rochester's “Satyr against Mankind”: An Analysis', S.P., 55 (1958), 576-90.

5. References are to The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, edited by David M. Vieth (New Haven, 1968).

6. Enthusiast in Wit, p. 154; Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Rochester: Augustan or Explorer’, in Renaissance and Modern Essays Presented to Vivian de Sola Pinto in Celebration of his Seventieth Birthday, edited by G. R. Hibbard (1966), pp. 53-4.

7. The speaker does argue syllogistically in claiming that man's goal is human happiness and that reason is subordinate to it. But his argument is little more than a general statement of his more concrete material. Certainly it is distinguishable from the more satiric use of syllogistic argument found later.

8. Complete Poems of John Wilmot, p. 200.

9. Enthusiast in Wit, p. 157.