SOURCE: Manning, Gillian. “Artemiza to Chloe: Rochester's ‘Female’ Epistle.” In That Second Bottle: Essays on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, edited by Nicholas Fisher, pp. 101-18. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.

[In the essay below, Manning points out that in Artemisia and Chloe Rochester presents a favorable picture of the female condition largely because of the subtly argued point of view presented by Artemisa, which is especially effective because to the powerful use of intertextual reference.]

In a virulent, anti-feminist satire of 1691, Robert Gould invokes Rochester, and appropriates lines 26-7 from A Letter from Artemiza in the Towne to Chloe in the Countrey:

Hast thou not heard what Rochester declares?
That Man of Men …
He tells thee, Whore's the like reproachful Name,
As Poetress—the luckless Twins of Shame.(1)

Pace Gould, I should like to consider some of what (on balance) I take to be the predominantly female-friendly perspectives of Rochester's Artemiza to Chloe. These I suggest result largely from the controlling viewpoint of Artemiza, the poem's chief speaker and fictive composer, and the techniques and strategies employed to construct and define this view point: in particular a complex intertextual web of significance. Before discussing this, however, a few contextual details may be noted relating, firstly, to Rochester himself, and, secondly, to the poem's reception.

Despite Rochester's reputation among both contemporary and later readers as a misogynistic rake, and the perpetrator of some obscene, anti-female verse, there is evidence that he was regarded with affectionate respect, both as friend and literary mentor, by at least two women writers: his niece, Anne Wharton, and Aphra Behn. Wharton's elegy on her uncle describes generally how

He civiliz'd the rude and taught the young,
Made Fools grow wise; such artful magick hung
Upon his useful kind instructing Tongue,

(lines 20-2)

and more personally recalls her assisted gradus ad Parnassum:

He led thee up the steep and high Ascent
To Poetry, the Sacred Way he went.
He taught thy Infant Muse the Art betime
Tho' then the way was difficult to climb.(2)

Behn's own elegy for Rochester caused Wharton to reply in complimentary vein with To Mrs. A. Behn, On what she writ of the Earl of Rochester, a poem which in turn elicited a politely supportive response from the established writer: To Mrs. W. On her Excellent Verses (Writ in Praise of some I had made on the Earl of Rochester) Written in a Fit of Sickness. Here Behn describes an inspiring vision: a visitation by the ‘Lovely Phantom’ of her late fellow-poet, ‘the Great, the God-like Rochester’, whom she depicts as continuing to offer her the same gracious, if characteristically stringent, artistic advice as he had in his lifetime:

It did advance, and with a Generous Look,
To me Addrest, to worthless me it spoke:
With the same wonted Grace my Muse it prais'd,
With the same Goodness did my Faults Correct:
And Careful of the Fame himself first rais'd
Obligingly it School'd my loose Neglect.(3)

Interestingly, the penultimate line suggests also that Rochester had been in some way instrumental in helping to establish Behn's literary reputation.

If Rochester himself encouraged both Behn and Wharton in their writing, so Artemiza to Chloe may have prompted several other women writers to engage with some of its materials and techniques. I am discounting here the many eighteenth-century writers, male and female, who merely cite the poem, or who, like Gould, appropriate the occasional line or phrase for their own ends, and note only those who appear effectively to enter into creative dialogue with Rochester's poem: taking up and developing issues central to the latter work, especially women's views on love, attitudes to men and the predicament of the woman poet in a predominantly hostile or dismissive society. Given such titles as Chloe to Sabina, An Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame, and perhaps also Cloe to Artimesa, it seems arguable that these works are deliberately flagged as bearing some relation to Rochester's tour de force of ventriloquism, Artemiza to Chloe.⁴ If so, then it might suggest that several Restoration and eighteenth-century women poets read Artemiza to Chloe not as a satire relating primarily to the misogynistic tradition which includes Juvenal's sixth satire, Boileau's tenth satire and Pope's Epistle to a Lady, but as a less biased, though still complex and rigorous, assessment of the contemporary female condition. Endorsing such an approach, I shall first canvass some possible implications of Artemiza's name, and then discuss two key related, though neglected, aspects of the poem: its allusions to specific texts, and the significance of its epistolary nature.

Artemiza hardly seems to have been a popular name, and it is unlikely that Rochester's decision to bestow it on his protagonist was simply casual, especially since he gives proper names only to Artemiza and Timon, of the main speakers in his major satires.⁵ The possible implications of Artemiza's name proposed by recent readers have been diverse and numerous. As in Timon's case, however, all seem broadly compatible and relevant to Rochester's portrayal of his speaker, and some would also seem to offer significant hints as to the precise nature of Artemiza's role, character and situation.

Weinbrot is the first critic to consider the matter of Artemiza's name in any detail, though, in consequence of his somewhat sensational reading of the poem, he is moved to fancy that, as part of the process of her gradual corruption, Artemiza may have been persuaded to ‘forget the background of chastity and female heroism and fidelity associated with her name’. However, he usefully outlines the stories concerning the two most famous bearers of the name, the classical queens and heroines Artemisia of Caria, and Artemisia of Halicarnassus, and he also implies a possible additional link between Rochester's Artemiza and Artemis, the ‘perpetually celibate goddess of the chase’. Of the two celebrated queens, Artemisia of Caria was perhaps the better known in the seventeenth century, but writers often confounded the two figures. Jonson, for instance, in his Masque of Queens, rightly describes Artemisia of Caria as ‘renowm'd for her chastety and love to her Husband, Mausolus, whose bones, (after he was dead) she preseru'd in ashes, and drunke in wine, making her selfe his tombe’, but mistakenly attributes to the same lady the ‘excellence of spirit’ and more than manly prowess displayed by her namesake, Artemisia of Halicarnassus, who fought to such effect with Xerxes against the Greeks at Salamis. Since Rochester could hardly have been unaware, either of the famous stories concerning the two queens or of the commonly accepted derivation of the name Artemisia from that of the goddess Artemis (whose festivals were, in addition, called Artemisia), it seems probable that his intention in using the name was to suggest a range of possible implications and associations to enhance the subtlety and significance of his protagonist's persona. There may also be a slighter, more playful and contemporary reference to the high-minded Princess Artemise of La Calprenède's popular romance La Cléopâtre.⁶

Clearly, a good many of the characteristics noted above appear applicable in varying degrees to Rochester's Artemiza, if rather more ironically, or obliquely, than some readers have suggested. For instance, it seems inappropriate in view of the poem's elusive nature, and the lack of positive evidence, that Artemiza should be seen as ‘virginal’, or at least that her ‘apparent non-engagement in sexual relationships [should attributed to] the affinity with her namesake, Artemis’.⁷ Equally unsubstantiated is Weinbrot's theory that Artemiza may have been led, in the course of the poem, to reject such an affinity. If, as seems probable, Rochester is alluding more lightly, tenuously and creatively to Artemiza's possible affinities both with Artemis and with the two heroic, classical queens, there is no more reason necessarily to suppose Artemiza herself a virgin, like Artemis, or (after Weinbrot) a hitherto principled lady who has had a recent change of lifestyle, than to suppose her, for example, a faithful and devoted widow, like Artemisia of Caria. Since Artemiza's letter appears designed to offer (albeit indirectly) both information and advice (to stimulate, not merely interest in, but thoughtful assessment of, various attitudes and patterns of conduct open to women, especially in the sphere of love and sexual relationships), it seems reasonable to hold that her name carries associations variously suggestive of Artemis's role as the patron of young girls and approver of chastity, as well, perhaps, as of her liking for a simple life in rural surroundings (Chloe's name, incidentally, bears the literal meaning, ‘young plant’ or ‘green shoot’).⁸ Clearly, such allusions, like those relating to the two queens, relate only in subtle or ironic ways to Artemiza's own views, situation, and activities; Chloe may be in the country, but Artemiza herself is writing from ‘this Lewd Towne’ (line 33). Also, Chloe may be young and innocent, but while she is not, perhaps, ‘lust[ing] for the game of gossip’ in quite the manner that one critic suggests,⁹ it is evident that, in Artemiza's view, Chloe is at least looking to be brought up to date with the latest gossip and news of love affairs about town, and in fact Artemiza makes this the pretext for diverting the course of her letter into rather more demanding channels. Moreover, though obviously disapproving of the ‘fine Lady’ (line 74) and her libertine notions, Artemiza makes no explicit attempt to define the kind of views and practice that she herself might endorse with regard to love. Even her lament for ‘that lost thing (Love)’ (lines 36-53) can hardly be taken as a direct, unequivocal encouragement to the practice either of a species of idealised, sublimated passion that might be acceptable to an Artemis, or of the kind of chaste, devoted love exemplified by Artemisia of Caria.¹⁰

In contrast to the two latter figures, Artemisia of Halicarnassus would seem to constitute a more ambiguous exemplar. Though indisputably courageous and great-hearted, according to Herodotus she escaped personal disaster at Salamis only by an action as ruthless and cunning as it was resourceful and daring.¹¹ In Rochester's poem, Artemiza's wary, self-mocking, but determined venture ‘for the Bayes’ (line 7) might seem to carry a witty allusion to her heroic namesake's exploits in the famous sea-battle; even the imagery used in these lines (7-13) is appropriately, if fortuitously, naval. Nor is the implied parallel quite of the sort to be found in ‘Timon’, where, by comparison with a classical heroic figure, a modern counterpart is diminished. Though Artemiza's poem is intimate and conversational, rather than heroic in kind, this seems appropriate, in view both of the debased and unheroic nature of the age she depicts, and of the disasters already encountered by more impetuous and hubristic male writers. Moreover, her preoccupations and, finally, her achievement are not trivial, while it is arguable that her courage and craft serve worthier ends than did those of Artemisia of Halicarnassus.

Perhaps the most important of the possible implications brought together by Rochester in naming his speaker ‘Artemiza’ was first touched on by Rothstein, who notes succinctly (though inaccurately) that ‘“Artemisia”, in Latin, is wormwood’, and suggests that ‘the letter showers the bitter medicine of urban vice on sheltered innocence’, the latter being, as we have seen, in his view somewhat less innocent than may at first sight appear. Everett makes much the same point, remarking that the ‘word “Artemisia” means the species of bitter herb that contains the plant wormwood, and the poet may have though this “flower of Artemis” a good name for his sharp-tongued virginal heroine’.¹²

In fact, the nature and significance of Rochester's herbal allusion seem likely to be more extensive and complex than either of these readers suggests. Artemisia is the Latin name not for wormwood (the Latin for which is absinthium) but for mugwort, a plant which, according to Pliny, resembles wormwood in appearance, but which, up to the eighteenth century at least, does not appear to have been considered of the same species. Thus the properties which a seventeenth-century reader would have associated with Artemisia are those connected with the mugwort, rather than with the wormwood, plant. English herbalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries leaned heavily upon Pliny, and their esteem for the many useful properties of mugwort would have rendered it a familiar plant to both professional and amateur physicians. It seems to have been quite well known, too, by its Latin name; Elisha Coles, for instance, in his popular English Dictionary (1676) has as his (somewhat selective) entry for ‘Artemisia’: ‘Queen of Halicarnassus, also Mug-wort’. The general character of the species is described by Gerard as ‘hot, and dry in the second degree, and somewhat astringent’, and the little group of plants then considered to belong to the species is credited with diverse properties, often either of a protective or a bracing nature. Gerard notes, for example, that mugwort prevents weariness, and serves as a protection against ‘poysonsome medicines’, and the effects of the sun and ‘wilde beast[s]’, besides being ‘drunke against Opium’. It was best known, however, for its supposed efficacy in treating women's diseases, and Pliny suggests that it may derive its Latin name from ‘Artemis Ilithyia, because the plant is specific for the troubles of women’, though he also notes that it may have been named after ‘Artemisia, the wife of Mausolus’.¹³

In view of Rochester's well-attested interest both in ‘Books of Physick’ and in the more practical aspects of the subject, it seems likely that he would have been familiar with the works of such standard herbalists as John Gerard and John Parkinson, and perhaps, too, with the relevant portions of Pliny's Natural History.¹⁴ Moreover, his decision to call his main speaker Artemiza, perhaps with allusion to the herb of the same name, may have been partly influenced by the example of his favourite English poet, Cowley. Cowley not only shared Rochester's interest in physick, but had also studied medicine professionally, and his friend Sprat records how, in the course of these studies, Cowley ‘proceeded to the Consideration of Simples; and having furnish'd himself with Books of that Nature, he retir'd into a fruitful part of Kent, where every Field and Wood might show him the real Figures of those Plants of which he read’. As a result of this sojourn, he composed a Latin poem concerning plants, which was published in six books in 1668, though Books I and II had appeared already in 1662.¹⁵ Both these books may well have engaged Rochester's interest, and the second may have given him a hint for Artemiza to Chloe, since it concerns only those herbs which are used specifically in the treatment of women's conditions, and which Cowley characterises as female themselves, giving a prominent role to Artemisia. Nahum Tate, in his introduction to the complete English translation of the Six Books of Plants, gives the scene of the second book as ‘the Physick-Garden at Oxford’, and the occasion, a council of those herbs which ‘come under the Female Province, and are serviceable in Generation or Birth’.¹⁶ The assembly of plants begins at twelve on an April night, and is finally abruptly adjourned by its president, Artemisia, when just before dawn, the gardener is seen approaching in urgent search of herbs to ease his wife's labour pains, whereupon the plants hastily retreat to their beds. Throughout the poem, Artemisia plays a dominant and controlling role: as president of the council, her title is ‘Mat[er] herbarum’, she delivers the opening speech of the meeting, prescribes the topic for discussion and bids each herb speak in turn and given an account of its properties and duties in combating female disease.¹⁷ Later, when the discussion has turned into impassioned altercation, she contributes an important speech in a successful move to conciliate a number of herbs who react furiously to being attacked as abortifacients by their fellows. Before steering the debate into other channels, Artemisia admits that she herself shares the maligned properties of the former group, and points out judiciously their usefulness in times of disease, remarking that herbs intended to prove helpful remedies can hardly be blamed if they are misused.

It seems probable that Rochester knew Cowley's Sex Libri Plantarum, especially since his father, Henry Wilmot, receives a respectful mention in Book VI, which, though ostensibly devoted to trees, is largely concerned with relating ‘the History of the late Rebellion, the King's Affliction and Return, and the beginning of the Dutch Wars’. It seems equally likely that Cowley's characterisation of Artemisia in Book II, and his general handling there of the herbs ‘under the Female Province’, may have proved a contributory factor in Rochester's naming his main speaker Artemiza.¹⁸ The implications of a possible herbal allusion in Rochester's choice of name for his female protagonist are not far to seek, and are compatible with the range of other such allusions already mooted. Several of Artemisia's more diverse medicinal properties, as an astringent, as an antidote to opium and as a protection against poisons and weariness, seem metaphorically applicable to the character and function of Rochester's Artemiza. Her sharp wit and perceptive insights regarding herself and others often appear astringent, and her narrative is far from anodyne. In view of the herb's reputed capacity to prevent weariness, her final reference to her own and Chloe's tiredness may be something of a joke on Rochester's part, as well as a conventionally witty way to conclude a letter.¹⁹ More seriously, Artemiza's obliquely presented, but powerfully pejorative, disclosures concerning the corrupt state of love in ‘this lewd Towne’ (line 33), may parallel mugwort's discutient properties, and its supposed efficacy against poisons. There may also be a more general allusion, of a kind similar to that in Tunbridge Wells, to the traditional concept of satire as a form of physick.

Mugwort's specific reputation for being helpful in the treatment of women's diseases, relates self-evidently to Rochester's Artemiza, in that she endorses at least a positive moral stance regarding the corrupt views and practices her letter describes, if not a prescriptive code of wholesome ethics by which they should be countered. Moreover, Rochester, like Cowley, gives his speaker, Artemiza, the leading, authoritative role, in a poem where the characters, view points and preoccupations are almost exclusively female. Again, while Cowley's Artemisia sees her true function as cleansing and health-bringing, she laments that, as one of the ‘Ecbolicks’,²⁰ she may be wickedly misapplied to produce abortions. Equally, Artemiza fears that her poem, whatever its intrinsic merits, may be maliciously received and abused by ‘th'ill-humour'd’ (line 22).

In all, then, Rochester brings together a range of possible allusions—medical, literary, historical and mythological—most of them familiar, and some already often interlinked, or even confounded. All combine to enrich the poem's significance and to add depth and definition to Artemiza's complex role and character. Of the various possible allusions suggested by Artemiza's name, however, it is those relating to her herbal namesake which are central to the poem's themes and subject. Such allusions supply a unifying metaphor to the whole poem. This links together a chain of associations which extends throughout the work, and adds resonance to such details as the ‘Diseas'd’ state of Corinna at her nadir (line 203), her final poisoning of her duped protector and, by contrast, ‘That Cordiall dropp’ (line 44) which Artemiza, at the outset, suggests might once have more truly figured the nature and function of love.

Artemiza's ‘Cordiall dropp’ not only contributes to the medicinal and disease-linked imagery and detail which inform the poem as a whole, but is also one of many intertextual allusions to be found throughout the work. The significance of these allusions, however, and in some cases even their presence, has been largely overlooked; in consequence, some important hints as to the poem's general tone and character have been missed, and its degree of literariness underestimated. Readers have in the main been content to note the undoubted general similarities which exist between Artemiza to Chloe and some of the stage comedies of the period, though Vieth has pointed out more specifically that the poem shares a group of related ideas with Etherege's The Man of Mode.²¹ In addition, however, Artemiza to Chloe contains a range of precise and often pointed allusions to poetic and philosophical works. While some of these references are of limited and local significance, others plays a major role in focusing the prime concerns of the poem. All combine to provide a context which is not only appropriate to the refined character and literary sensibility of the writer and true-wit, Artemiza, but which also define the pretensions of her counter-type, the ‘fine Lady’.

The allusions of relatively local significance include the lines in which Artemiza describes love as ‘That Cordiall dropp Heav'n in our Cup has throwne, / To make the nauseous draught of Life goe downe’ (lines 44-5). This well-known couplet seems to refer to a famous passage in De Rerum Natura, which first appears in Book I, lines 936-47, and is later repeated verbatim in Book IV, lines 11-22.²² Here Lucretius likens his practice of conveying in pleasing poetic form a doctrine which in itself may appear as rather harsh or unacceptable to that of physicians who persuade children to drink bitter medicines by coating the rim of their patients' cups with honey. Rochester appropriates Lucretius's thought and expression in a characteristically inventive manner. As suggested above, Lucretius's medical simile (similar in concept to Cowley's reference to his books of herbs as ‘small Pills … gilt with a certain brightness of Style’), is neatly absorbed into the medicinal metaphor associated with Artemiza's name, and may even touch on her epistolary strategy of promising Chloe gossip, and in fact presenting her with entertaining, but morally (if obliquely) pointed, portraits.²³ As regards its specific context, moreover, it underlines the ironic ambivalence of Artemiza's lament for ‘that lost thing (Love)’ (line 38). In Lucretius, the patients are described as deceived but not betrayed by the doctors' ruse, since by this means they are restored to health, and the writer expresses similar confidence in the efficacy of his bitter but intrinsically wholesome philosophic ‘draught’. Artemiza, however, presents both the gift of love and heaven's action in bestowing it on humanity, in a rather more dubious light. Unlike the careful pagan physicians in Lucretius, who coat the rims of sick children's cups with honey, an ostensibly Christian ‘Heav'n’ is described by Artemiza as having ‘throwne’ a mere ‘dropp’ of sweetened and heartening (or perhaps only heart-affecting) liquid into ‘our Cup’,²⁴ in an effort to bribe hapless humanity into swallowing the ‘draught of Life’ which is not merely bitter but ‘nauseous’, and for which no compensatory properties are claimed.

Elsewhere in Rochester's poem, apparent allusions to works by Boileau, Sidney and Hobbes are put to similarly ironic purposes. These appropriations may be grouped together, since they all serve primarily to define various aspects of the pretensions of the ‘fine Lady’ (line 74). The Boileau reference occurs in this character's first speech to the assembled company when, preparatory to holding forth on why women should prefer fools as lovers, she remarks: ‘When I was marry'd, Fooles were a la mode, / The Men of Witt were then held incommode’ (lines 103-4). The lines to which Rochester alludes here occur in Boileau's first satire (itself loosely based on Juvenal's third satire). The speaker, a penurious poet, about to leave Paris where his talents have been despised and neglected, comments bitterly that: ‘Un Poëte à la Cour fut jadis à la mode: / Mais des Fous aujourd'hui c'est le plus incommode’ (lines 109-10).²⁵ In adapting these lines for use by his affected francophile, Rochester has followed Boileau's rhyme, but wittily varied the sense. In Boileau's satire, the honest speaker laments the time, now long since past, when true poets, rather than fools, were favoured at Court. By contrast, in Rochester's poem, the overbearing female fop recalls the time of her youth when fashionable women favoured fools as lovers above ‘Men of Witt’, and makes it plain that she, at least, has not changed her tastes in this respect. Having pronounced this opinion, she then proceeds to give her reasons for holding it, and her following speech contains several allusions which either ironically conflict with her viewpoint, or confirm that lack of ‘discretion’ later remarked on by Artemiza (lines 166-8); in the course of the strictures of the ‘fine Lady’ upon ‘Men of Witt’, she argues that such men should be avoided as less easy to deceive than fools, and advises that:

Woman, who is an Arrant Bird of night,
Bold in the Duske, before a Fooles dull sight,
Should flye, when Reason brings the glaring light.

(lines 121-3)

These last lines may owe something to Sidney's seventy-first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella, which describes:

                                                  all vices' overthrow,
Not by rude force, but sweetest soveraigntie
Of reason, from whose light those night-birds flie.

(lines 5-7)²⁶

Rochester adjusts this sentiment to accord with the views of a speaker who fails to share even the qualified idealism regarding love expressed by Sidney's Astrophil, let alone the Platonism of the famous Petrarchan original (Rime, 248) to which Sidney alludes. Where, in Sidney's lines, the ‘night-birds’ represent man's vices, gently but inexorably put to flight by the light of Stella's virtuous reason, in the Rochester passage, by contrast, it is ‘Woman’ who is labelled ‘an Arrant Bird of night’, and advised to fly from the harsh and oppressive glare of man's excoriating reason. By inverting the terms of Sidney's sonnet, Rochester stresses the degree to which the ‘fine Lady’, in cheerfully degrading the status accorded woman (and reason) in an earlier less ‘ill-bred’ age, conforms to the lamentable pattern of behaviour previously decried by Artemiza (lines 54-8).

The coolly rationalistic and amoral argument of the ‘fine Lady’ is grounded on self-interest and a desire to maintain at least a limited form of dominance over men. As such, it might appear to owe something directly to Hobbes, but any reference here to Leviathan, however, serves merely to pinpoint the ‘fine Lady’'s deficiencies. The libertine lady may have fashionable Hobbist pretensions, and she is certainly not without intelligence, but she lacks judgment, the one attribute essential not merely to a philosopher but to any person of good sense:

All the good qualityes, that ever blest
A Woman, soe distinguisht from the rest,
Except discretion onely; she posset.

(lines 166-8)

The term ‘discretion’, that is, judgment, may relate to a chapter in Leviathan, where Hobbes praises the importance of the ‘Vertue … called DISCRETION’, arguing that without it, even people of intelligence and imagination may run to folly:

And in any Discourse whatsoever, if the defect of Discretion be apparent, how extravagant soever the Fancy be, the whole discourse will be taken for a signe of want of wit; and so will it never when the Discretion is manifest, though the Fancy be never so ordinary.²⁷

In Hobbes's view, want of ‘discretion’ signifies ‘want of wit’ (and vice versa), wit being the very faculty upon which the ‘fine Lady’ prides herself, as her mock-modest disclaimer plainly reveals (lines 171-2). The lack of self-knowledge which she displays in this respect, and which Artemiza shrewdly points out (lines 164-5), merely confirms the former's essential lack of ‘discretion’. Moreover, in general terms, the ‘fine Lady’ may be seen as exemplifying in her speech and behaviour what Hobbes in the same chapter calls ‘GIDDINESSE, and Distraction’, and which he claims results from ‘hav[ing] Passions indifferently for everything’.²⁸ The ‘fine Lady’ feels no strong desire for anything, or anyone, in particular—being akin in this regard to those female libertines of whom Artemiza earlier remarks: ‘To an exact perfection they have wrought / The Action Love, the Passion is forgott’ (lines 63-6). The prime concern of the ‘fine Lady’ is not with her own desires, but with conforming to fashionable tastes; hence her behaviour towards her hostess's pet monkey, behaviour which, far from being ‘warm, friendly, and sexual’, therefore rendering her ‘more bestial than the beast she courts’, is essentially affected and dispassionate.²⁹ To the ‘fine Lady’, the animal (like a lover) is merely a fashionable property, to be picked up and dropped at will. Such ‘indifference’ convicts her, again, of lack of judgment, since, according to Hobbes, a person who is ‘indifferent … cannot possibly have either a great Fancy, or much Judgement. For the Thoughts, are to the Desires, as Scouts, and Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired: All Stedinesse of the minds motion, and all quicknesse of the same, proceeding from thence.’³⁰ The terms used by the lady in condemning the ‘Men of Witt’ for their wary and critical approach to women recall those employed by Hobbes in defining why ‘indifferent’ people (of whom she herself is one) lack judgment.

These local allusions to the works of such diverse writers as Hobbes, Sidney and Boileau indirectly confirm and substantiate Artemiza's assessment of the ‘fine Lady’ as ‘a Foole of Parts’ (line 161), one whose lack of the fundamental qualities of judgment and good sense perverts her undoubted gifts of intelligence and percipience. Thus, in a sense, the ‘fine Lady’ represents a more dangerous and disturbing exemplum than Corinna, whose tale she relates with a patronising scorn, and complacently insistent wit. Weinbrot complains that at the close of this narrative, ‘Rochester has [Artemiza] ignore an opportunity to reject the lady's values and, instead, diminishes her earlier criticisms’, adding that ‘we are more impressed with … Artemisia's amusement, delight, and exasperation than with any desire to expose or punish’.³¹ In the face of such a tale and such a teller, however, there seems little that even the most rabid moralist might add by way of further exposure. In fact, it is hard to know which is the more disturbing: the inexorable process of corruption which leads Corinna from her state of heedless and deceived innocence, to eventual triumph as cheat, whore and murderess; or the distorted lens which the loquacious narrator brings to bear upon this history. Moral condemnation features here only as a passing reference to Corinna's ‘Man of Witt’ (line 198), and serves merely to bear out the narrator's defined ‘Rule’ (line 177). In essence, the ‘fine Lady’ invites her audience to ignore all the obvious moral enormities exemplified in her tale, and to deprecate instead the meanness and folly of its chief characters. Thus Corinna's dupe and his family are viewed as receiving their just deserts as fools, while Corinna herself is regarded as a whore of attainments too mediocre, and too painfully acquired, to occasion any great wonder or admiration. In her own eyes, the teller is relating a common story of common and foolish people, the main purpose of which is to illustrate and confirm her own previously proclaimed views, and to enable her to display what she takes to be her own vastly superior wit, judgment and accomplishments. Lengthy or more strident criticism from Artemiza at this stage of her letter would be superfluous: she has already plainly indicated her disapproval of the ‘fine Lady’, comprehensively indicting, by a variety of means, the latter's character, manners and opinions. The story of Corinna, and the figure cut by its narrator are left to speak for themselves, and Artemiza pauses only to add a tersely dismissive comment, and to promise Chloe accounts of more such ‘infamous’ characters and events, before briskly concluding her letter.

While it is clear that Artemiza unreservedly condemns the ‘fine Lady’, Corinna and all their works, it is less immediately obvious what kind of positive attitudes (if any) she may endorse regarding the areas of concern uppermost in her letter. At no point does she presume to offer Chloe direct advice, let alone to dogmatise in the opinionated manner favoured by the ‘fine Lady’, nor does she make any explicit attempt to define the kind of views or practice she herself might approve or seek to promote with regard to love, life or literature. None the less, her letter, though often brilliantly entertaining, treats serious issues in a complex and thoughtful way that clearly distinguishes it from the familiar verse epistle that is merely trying to be witty, and is concerned with presenting gossip or trivia. As noted earlier, Artemiza (albeit with characteristic tact) fails to comply with what she assumes is Chloe's desire to hear the latest details of the love affairs about town, and, though some of her letter's basic materials are sufficiently scandalous to satisfy the most avid gossip, their handling and careful positioning within the letter's sophisticated structure ensure their subjection to oblique but powerful condemnation. The reader is left in no doubt that they are present on the grounds not of sheer sensationalism but of their relevance to the letter's essentially moral themes and focus. Though Artemiza seems wary of offering anything very direct or explicit by way of positive advice or definition, her whole approach being characterised by an ironic, tentative, oblique and even somewhat devious quality, this seems appropriate given the nature of her enterprise. Not only is it fitting to the refined and complex character of her moral and literary preoccupations, which are themselves subtly intertwined with her roles as woman, friend, correspondent and poet, but it suits also with the decorum of the literary mode which is used to encompass all these: the familiar moral epistle. It seems likely, moreover, that in Artemiza to Chloe, Rochester is both alluding to and seeking to emulate the practice of the greatest master of this kind, Horace.

Reference in Artemiza to Chloe to the famous first line of Horace's Epistles, I.vi, seems to be of a different kind from some of the literary allusions discussed above. Firstly, it could hardly be missed, and seems intended to be recognised, in contrast to some of the other allusions, such as that to the Sidney sonnet, or to Boileau's first satire, where recognition of the source may constitute more in the way of an additional bonus than an absolute requirement for readers.³² Secondly, it seems to serve more than a purely local function—in fact one might argue that to an extent it informs the whole poem. Thirdly, it occurs not on one occasion but on several, each time in a slightly varied form, echoing through the poem like a musical motif. The allusion first occurs quite early in the poem, in the course of Artemiza's deprecating account of the injurious views and practices of fashionable women, who, not content with debasing both their own status, and that of love, by their libertinism, do not even take account of their personal preferences in choosing lovers but seek instead to conform to whatever is the current taste in men among their modish acquaintance. Artemiza records with some astonishment their attempts to justify this practice: ‘'Tis below Witt, they tell you, to admire, / And e'ne without approving they desire’ (lines 64-5). Rochester is referring here to ‘nil admirari’, the opening words of Epistles, I.vi, in which Horace advises his friend Numicius that the only sure way of leading a happy and virtuous life is to cultivate a philosophic attitude of calm, moderation and independent rational judgment: to avoid violent extremes of emotion, whether of fear or desire, and to crave nothing in excess. The misuse of this axiom by the fashionable female libertines whom Artemiza decries is only one of several instances in the poem of the misapplication of this or other aphorisms. In the case related by Artemiza, the irony is clear: that the advice ‘nil admirari’ should be used to justify the kind of fashionable and pointless libertinism of the women in question could hardly be further removed from its intended moral and philosophic purpose. The failure of understanding revealed by this misapplication only underlines the women's grievous lack of the ‘witt’ to which they lay such claim.

A further allusion to ‘nil admirari’ occurs in the first address of the ‘fine Lady’ to the company (line 107), and is apparently conflated both with the glance at Leviathan noted above and perhaps more importantly with a reference to the second of Seneca's Epistulae Morales. Rochester would seem to make several references to the Seneca epistle, and the first of these occurs at the beginning of the poem, where Artemiza is warily reflecting on the risks involved in writing poetry. Hammond notes in lines 7-10 of Rochester's poem ‘a variant of the traditional image of the poet as explorer’, and he implies a possible connection with a phrase from Seneca, Epistles, II.5-6: ‘non tamquam transfuga, sed tamquam explorator’.³³ In this epistle, Seneca offers his friend, Lucilius, advice on reading habits, and recommends using his own custom of selecting each day from an approved author a single thought or saying for careful consideration. He then remarks that he took his thought for today from Epicurus, adding that he is accustomed to make such forays into the rival philosophic camp, ‘non tamquam transfuga, sed tamquam explorator’—not as a deserter, but as a scout or spy. Both the epistle and the cited phrase were well known in the seventeenth century, and the latter was often alluded to in connection with literary endeavour, at times apparently feeding into the more general notion of the writer as explorer.³⁴ Rochester's reference to Seneca's phrase is rather more oblique. Seneca's image of exploring, or scouting through, enemy territory to see what he can abstract for his own advantage is wittily martial and mercenary; in Rochester's lines, it becomes assimilated into a more inclusive and damning image of ambitious poets as explorers and exploitative merchant adventurers. The latter image may even subsume a reference to Milton's Satan.³⁵ Such implications lend weight to the pejorative tone of Artemiza's shrewd assessment of the failed poetic fortunes of some of her male counterparts. These so-called ‘Men of Witt’ evince greed, hubris and reckless daring, rather than the alert, self-critical and humorous attitude evidenced by Seneca's epistle, and exemplified by Artemiza herself.

Rochester makes what may be a further allusion to the same epistle later in the poem, where Artemiza offers a penetrating analysis of her own anti-type, that sententious would-be wit, the ‘fine Lady’. In noting the latter's not inconsiderable ‘Parts’, Artemiza remarks sharply that ‘such a One was shee, who had turn'd o're / As many Bookes, as Men, lov'd much, reade more’ (lines 161-3). Seneca's epistle is largely concerned with warning Lucilius against reading too many books of different kinds, and advises him to concentrate instead on acquiring a thorough knowledge of a few select masterpieces. Moreover, Seneca anticipates that his friend might, by way of objection to this advice, indicate a preference for turning over first one book and then another, and comments that it is the sign of an over-nice appetite to pick at too many dishes. Rochester's lines may imply a parallel between the reading habits of the libertine lady and those condemned by the Stoic philosopher: Artemiza's witty linking of the lady's way with books and her way with men stresses again the latter's characteristic quality of ‘GIDDINESSE and Distraction’, as well as hinting at her incapacity to distinguish adequately between people and objects.

The most complex of Rochester's allusions to Seneca's epistle, however, occurs in line 107, and, as already mentioned, appears to be conflated with a second allusion to ‘nil admirari’, and with the Leviathan reference noted earlier. The fact that this line contains a further allusion to the Horace epistle seems to be signalled and emphasised by the triple rhyme ‘desire/inquire/admire’ of lines 105-7, which repeats the rhyme ‘admire/desire’ in lines 64-5, where the first allusion to ‘nil admirari’ occurs. Finally, the triple rhyme appears again with the rhyme words slightly varied in lines 124-6, where a last echo of the allusion may be caught. Such repetition is unlikely to be merely casual (despite Pope's censure of Rochester as having ‘very bad versification, sometimes’³⁶), and it would seem that rochester is not only stressing the ‘nil admirari’ allusion, but is also encouraging the reader to compare and contrast its uses in these passages.

On its first appearance the allusion is employed to endorse Artemiza's strictures on the general lack of wit and moral judgment of fashionable female libertines, since it indicates how the latter, through ignorance or perversity, misapply a famous Horatian aphorism. On its second appearance, its significance is more complex, as one might expect from the manner in which it is conflated with the allusions to Seneca and to Hobbes, and from its presence in a speech delivered by a perfect exemplar of the female type it has earlier been used to condemn. In fact, the ‘fine Lady’ compounds the errors of her sisters' misapplication of ‘nil admirari’, by using it herself, not as they did, to justify their own perverse practice by asserting their claim to wit, but as the basis for lambasting the ‘Men of Witt’. Evidently her ‘rules’ are not only morally and intellectually dubious but are intended for selective and arbitrary application to accord with her own self-interested designs. Thus while she and women of her type pride themselves on having too much wit to ‘admire’ men, they are illogically outraged at those men who have the temerity to do likewise (mutatis mutandis) and who wilfully refuse to settle for ‘The perfect Joy of being well deceaved’ (line 115). As we have seen, the ironic allusion to Hobbes in lines 105-7 convicts the speaker herself of a basic lack of judgment; Rochester's central conflation in line 107 of the allusion to ‘nil admirari’ with that to Seneca's ‘tamquam explorator’ further defines and emphasises this failing. Nevertheless, the attitude of the ‘Men of Witt’ to women is not thereby condoned. They share the selfish and dispassionate approach to love of the ‘fine Lady’, though they do not (apparently) seek to justify it by misapplying moral aphorisms, and there is no evidence that they also share that quality of ineffable blindness to their own faults which so distinguishes their female counterpart. The allusions to the moral epistles of Horace and Seneca, however, testify to the fine, but clear, line to be drawn between the alert, ironic, moral-awareness which informs Artemiza's attitude, and the kind of dispassionate, self-interested prudence variously exemplified by the ‘fine Lady’ and her crew, by the ‘Men of Witt’, and belatedly, but to chilling effect, by Corinna. Throughout, then, Artemiza to Chloe expresses a subtly argued critique of the female condition, which draws much of its efficacy from Rochester's powerfully resonant use of intertextual reference.

CHLOE TO SABINA

My Deare Sabina why should you & I
Inn these soft times be foes to Poetry?
We cannot sure suspect yt ye chast Nine
Should prove as bauds to lead us into sin
Nor need we much those blasts of censure feare
With which ye men of wit so shaken are;
Wee are secure, ye low shrubs of ye plain,
Whilst they, ye tall Oakes, by the Stormes are slain.
Where can a Muse more soft retirement find
Then in a fair white womans gentle mind?
Where ye young son of Venus may indite,
And make ye dire Poetick virgin write
As her own forehead smooth, whilst her bright eye
Sends fire & flashes to her poetry.
But I too far am wander'd from the Theme
At which I chiefly in my letter aime;
My Dear Sabina since you left ye town
There is among us a strang faction grown,
A new discover'd crew call'd men of wit,
The silliest rogues yt ever aim'd at it:
So vain, so loud, so ungentily ill—
Their wit is froth, whose floods w(h)ere they swell
Fall like ye headlong cataracts of Nile.
Which neither cherish nor refresh the ground
But make much noise & deafen all around;
Their wickednesse appears more dull to me
Then aged country Parson's Poetry.
Some of this new society are from
That Mistresse of all follies London come
To people here like collonies from Rome.
Some from ye Scools & colledges appeare
Where natures unshapt whelps by art & care
Were lickt & form'd each into perfect Beare.
And some are country Squires new come to town
Being happily arriv'd at twenty one
These no acquir'd follies seem to adorne
But are the same rude lumps yt they were born.
Amidst ye many yt infest this place
Up started one extraordinary Asse
Who like ye rest not satisfied yt bare
Mien & behaviour should a Fop declare
Gave in a scurrilous & sencelesse Scrole
Under his own hand yt he was a fool.
Twas a lampoon & by Lord Blany writ
An Engine by which fooles sometimes do hit
Because at flocks they allways levell it.
The Oph I hear to forreigne lands is gon
To End ye fool which nature has begun:
So wild geese with ye Season disappeare
To hatch new goslings for ye Ensueing yeare.
Let him go on ye Oph to natures Schoole
But sure no care ere can redeem yt soul
Whom God predestinated to be fool.
But Dear Sabina we alas! have found
That bluntest weapons give a cruell wound
Would it not vex a saint thus damn'd to bee
And nere to tast of ye forbidden tree?
The Devil himself shew'd us less cruelty.
We should not much of our hard fate complaine
Had we been nobly in the battle slain
Or by ye hand of some fam'd warrior ta'ne
Who like true Venus son had bore his sire
And household gods safe from amidst ye fire:
But to be thus by beardlesse foes undone
Raw puny cocks whose spurs are not yet grown
Sabina for my part for ever more
I am resolv'd to shut up Eden door
Where a strict guard still flameing in their eyes
Shall stop mens passage to yt Paradise.
Mrs Jean Fox.

Copy text: Dublin MS 2093, pp. 112-16

Notes

1. A Satyrical Epistle to the Female Author of a Poem called Sylvia's Revenge Etc. (London, 1691), p. 19. For details of Gould's attack on the ‘Female Author’, see F. Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women 1660-1750 (Lexington, 1984), pp. 34-7.

2. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-century Women's Verse, edited by G. Greer et al. (London, 1988), pp. 287-8. The second extract was omitted from the first published version of the elegy in 1685.

3. Kissing the Rod, pp. 249-50.

4. There is a copy of Chloe to Sabina (reproduced at the end of this paper in an appendix) in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin MS 2093, pp. 112-16, where it is attributed to Mrs Jean Fox (as yet unidentified, though perhaps the Fox attacked as an ‘Irish whore’ in Rochester's lampoon, ‘To longe the Wise Commons have been in debate’, lines 6-7). For details of Dublin MS 2093, see Peter Beal, Index of Literary Manuscripts, 2, pt 2 (London, 1993), p. 232. Chloe to Sabina follows closely after Artemiza to Chloe in the Dublin MS, there being only one intervening poem, also attributed to Rochester (‘This Bee alone of all his race’: see Rochester 1999, pp. 282-4), which may indicate that the scribe recognised a link between the two verse epistles. However, while I have suggested that Fox's poem responds to Artemiza to Chloe, the reverse cannot be ruled out, given the uncertain date of Chloe to Sabina. An Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame is printed in Mary Leapor, Poems Upon Several Occasions, vol. 2 (London, 1751), pp. 43-54; Cloe to Artimesa is unascribed in A New Miscellany of Original Poems Translations and Imitations By the Most Eminent Hands (London, 1720), p. 123, though the compiler, A[nthony] H[ammond], lays claim to ‘the pieces which appear without any name’ (‘Preface’, sigs Ar-Av).

5. Other contemporary spellings of Artemiza are: Artemisia, Artemisa, Artimesa, Artemise.

6. H. D. Weinbrot, ‘“The Swelling Volume”: the Apocalyptic Satire of Rochester's Letter from Artemisia In the Town To Chloe In The Country’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 5 (1972), 19-37 (p. 33 and n. 10); Ben Jonson, The Works, edited by C. H. Herford, and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1941), 7, 308. Jonson also quotes what (according to Herodotus) was Xerxes' comment on Artemisia's courage at Salamis: ‘“Viri quidem extiterunt mihi feminae, feminae autem viri”’. La Cléopâtre, first published 1646-8, was translated by Robert Loveday as Hymen's Praeludia, Or Loves Master-Piece Being That so much admired Romance entituled Cleopatra, twelve parts (London, 1665).

7. B. Everett, ‘The Sense of Nothing’ in Spirit of Wit, p. 29; C. Fabricant, ‘The Writer as Hero and Whore: Rochester's Letter From Artemisia To Chloe’, Essays in Literature, West Illinois University 3 (1976), 158.

8. E. Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660-1780 (London, 1981), p. 33.

9. Ibid.

10. See Fabricant, ‘The Writer as Hero and Whore’, 157.

11. Noted by Everett in Spirit of Wit, pp. 29-30.

12. Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-century Poetry, p. 33; Everett, Spirit of Wit, p. 29.

13. Pliny, Natural History, with an English translation in ten volumes by W. H. S. Jones, Loeb Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), VII, Book 25, XXXVI, 73, p. 189; John Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes. Very Much enlarged and Amended by Thomas Johnson (London, 1636), p. 1104.

14. See Critical Heritage, p. 54; Letters, p. 142.

15. ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr Abraham Cowley’ in The Works of Abraham Cowley, 3 vols (London, 1707), 1, xxvii-xxviii; Plantarum Libri duo (1662); Poemata Latina. In quibus Continentur, Sex Libri Plantarum (London, 1668).

16. Cowley, Poemata Latina, p. 60, n. 1 and The Works, 3, sig. P7r.

17. ‘Non immerito in hoc conventu praesidet Artemisia (quam honoris puto, causa quidam matrem herbarum appellant)’, Cowley, Poemata Latina, p. 67, note to line 5.

18. Cowley, The Works, 3, sigs P4v-P5r, P7r.

19. Cf. Wycherley to Shadwell: ‘I wou'd turn o're the Leafe, but know / My Muse has tyr'd her self and you / And so Adieu’, The Works of Thomas Shadwell, edited by Montague Summers, 5 vols (London, 1927), 5, 232. Noted also Thormählen, p. 137, n. 63.

20. ‘I.e. such Medicines as bring away dead Children, or cause Abortion’, Cowley, The Works, 3, p. 323, note*.

21. ‘Etherege's Man of Mode and Rochester's Artemisia to Chloe’, Notes and Queries, New Series, 5 (1958), 473-4.

22. Griffin, p. 139.

23. Cowley, The Works, 3, sig. Qv. Artemisia was often administered in sweet wine (see Pliny, Natural History, vol. 7, Book 25 LXXXI, 130, p. 229; and vol. 7, Book 26 XLIX, 81, p. 325).

24. Perhaps, also, a biblical allusion. Cf. that in line 17, noted by Walker in Rochester 1984, p. 278; and that in line 260, noted by Fabricant, ‘The Writer as Hero and Whore’, 162, and by Weinbrot, ‘The Swelling Volume’, 34.

25. First noted by P. C. Davies, ‘Rochester and Boileau: a Reconsideration’, Comparative Literature, 21 (1969), 354.

26. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by William A. Ringler, Jr (Oxford, 1962), p. 201. We have no other evidence to suggest Rochester knew Sidney's works. There were twelve editions of Astrophil and Stella between 1599 and 1739.

27. T. Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 135 and 137. Cited by Walker in Rochester 1984, p. 280, note to line 168.

28. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 139.

29. Weinbrot, ‘The Swelling Volume’, 27.

30. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 139.

31. Weinbrot, ‘The Swelling Volume’, 33.

32. Only two modern scholars have noted its presence: C. Rawson, ‘Rochester's Systems of Excess’, The Times Literary Supplement (29 March 1985), 336; and Frank H. Ellis (Rochester 1994), p. 347, note to line 64. Pope's reference in his Imitation of Horace Epistles, I.vi to ‘Wilmot’ and the ‘“cordial drop”’ (lines 126-7), suggests that he recognised Rochester's appropriation of ‘nil admirari’.

33. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: Selected Poems, edited by Paul Hammond (Bristol, 1982), p. 102, note to lines 7-10.

34. The epistles were also included in summarised form in Sir Roger L'Estrange's Seneca's Morals By Way of abstract … (London, 1678), which ran to many editions, and see, for instance, the prologue to Behn's first play, The Forc'd Marriage, or the Jealous Bridegroom (London, 1671), where the speaker remarks of the new female playwright:

    Today one of their party ventures out,
    Not with design to conquer, but to Scout:
    Discourage but this first attempt, and then,
    They'le hardly dare to sally out again.

    (lines 23-6)

35. For Satan as a merchant adventurer, see Paradise Lost, 2, 629-43 (The Poems of John Milton, edited by John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London, 1968)). See, too, Book 10, where the fallen angels await the return of ‘their great adventurer from the search / Of foreign worlds’ (lines 440-1). Rochester evidently knew Paradise Lost (see Letters, p. 202, n.).

36. Recorded by Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, edited by James M. Osborn, 2 vols (Oxford, 1966), I, 202, para. 471.