SOURCE: Weinbrot, Howard D. “The Swelling of the Volume: The Apocalyptic Satire of Rochester's Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 5, no. 2 (October, 1972): 19-37.

[In this essay, Weinbrot claims that Artemisia to Chloe demonstrates Rochester's breadth of satiric talent, especially his adept use of the most pessimistic or “apocalyptic” form of contemporary satire, as the work presents the degeneration of the chief character Artemisia from a worthy voice to an agent for the propagation of infamy.]

Modern revaluation of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature has helped Rochester's reputation as both man and poet: many of the nastier myths of his life have been exploded, his poetry has been reliably edited, and critical and scholarly studies have illuminated aspects of his intellectual context and poetic achievement. The Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country (1679), however, has received sparse critical comment and is excluded from the latest, weighty, anthology of contemporary literature.¹ This is unfortunate, not only because of our ignorance of the poem that is probably Rochester's masterpiece, but also because the Letter helps to show Rochester's broad exercise of satiric talent and, especially, his mastery of the most pessimistic form of serious contemporary satire.

Of course it is difficult to label and classify the varieties of so-called “Augustan” satires, but three broad and, sometimes, overlapping classes may be found. I call these punitive satire, formal verse satire, and apocalyptic or revelatory satire.² In the first the poet hopes to punish an adversary rather than correct him, as in Rochester's “On Poet Ninny” (1680), a lampoon upon Sir Carr Scroope. Though there are certain implicit and explicit norms—beauty is preferable to ugliness, pride is bad—the main thrust of the satire is towards abuse rather than instruction:

Thou art a thing so wretched and so base
Thou canst not ev'n offend, but with thy face.

(ll. 6-7)³

In formal verse satire, normally in heroic couplets and based in part upon the examples of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, the poet attacks one central vice and praises its opposite virtue. Such a form requires the presence, however faint, of a workable and working norm for this world. Two of Rochester's major poems fall roughly at opposite ends of a spectrum of formal verse satires. The “Allusion to Horace” (1680) affirms related norms—the critical perception of the sheltered aristocratic poet, and poetry which eschews mere popular acclaim. Both the speaker and the friends he mentions fulfill these positive values:

I loathe the rabble; ‘tis enough for me
If Sedley, Shadwell, Shepherd, Wycherley,
Godolphin, Butler, Buckhurst, Buckingham,
And some few more, whom I omit to name,
Approve my sense: I count their censure fame.

(ll. 120-24)

But the “Allusion” is also punitive in its attack upon Dryden, who is the central target of Rochester's anger, and whose rhymes are “stol'n, unequal, nay dull many times” (l. 2). He wonders whether

          those gross faults his choice pen does commit
Proceed from want of judgment, or of wit;
Or if his lumpish fancy does refuse
Spirit and grace to his loose, slattern muse?

(ll. 89-92)⁴

Though Rochester is anchored in Horace's relatively mild Satires, I, 10, his poem hovers near the borders of punitive satire, just as the Satyr against Mankind hovers near those of revelatory satire.

That poem is often regarded as the embodiment of Rochester's “furious contempt for mankind” and his gloomy view that man is a beast.⁵ The fury of Rochester's satire cannot be denied; but the force of his argument suggests that he still cares enough to want us to reform, and has hope enough to offer a clear alternative through which correction is possible. Speculative reason is “an ignis fatuus in the mind” (l. 12) and is the false reasoning he attacks. On the other hand,

I own right reason, which I would obey:
That reason which distinguished by sense
And gives us rules of good and ill from thence,
That bounds desires with a reforming will
To keep 'em more in vigor, not to kill.
.....My reason is my friend, yours is a cheat.

(ll. 99-103, 106)

The final paragraph of the poem's “epilogue” describes “a meek, humble man, of honest sense” (l. 212), an ideal clergyman who at least may exist.

If upon earth there dwell such God-like men,
I'll here recant my paradox to them.

(ll.216-17)

Even at the end of this harsh formal verse satire the speaker is willing to keep the corrective norm alive. Rochester's slight expectation of change—rather than a demonstrated probability—is surely more extreme in this work than in more moderate satires like Pope's epistles to Arbuthnot or Bathurst, in which the adversarius finally embraces Pope's own values. The Satyr thus moves towards the revelatory or apocalyptic mode, which primarily intends to depict the terrible situation within or without us and, often, to suggest massively destructive results. This sort of satire is partially at work in A Tale of a Tub (1704), sometimes bursts from the genteel surface of Edward Young's Love of Fame (1725-28), and is particularly clear in The Dunciad in Four Books (1743). I believe that this is also the most illuminating way to view the Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country. It has been discussed in terms of the conventions of the novel and of Restoration comedy,⁶ but, as I hope to show, in ways the poem is grimmer than Swift's Tale and perhaps even the final Dunciad. In the Letter Rochester presents us with a world of interlocking sins and sinners with a collective ability to seduce the weak and reach out beyond the confines of the poem's 264 lines. Artemisia's words frame the poem and indicate its direction; as her reluctant beginning evolves into the eager promise of a volume to come, her better values collapse and a whore's triumph. Instead of the country going to the city to seek news of debauchery, the city actively communicates debauchery; Artemisia sows infamous tales which Chloe will reap; the town and the country begin to blend; and the poem takes on a quality of rapidly spreading evil. In the process the poem pictures venal and murderous women, stupid or foolishly clever men, the mere memory of what heavenly love could be, and the hellish actuality earthly love has become.

I. THE RELUCTANT CORRESPONDANT

The poem begins with the first part of Artemisia's frame, her protest against the essentially unfeminine act of writing poetry, something she does only, “Chloe, … by your command” (l.1). She supports her reluctance to engage in “lofty flights of dangerous poetry” (l.4) with the perils to both wit and woman in so writing. If “the men of wit” (l. 13), she argues, are so often “dashed back, and wrecked on the dull shore, / Broke of that little stock they had before!” how would a less talented woman's “tottering bark be tossed” (ll. 10-12)? Hence she “gravely” advises herself that “poetry's a snare” (ll. 15-16), that the poet will sadden the reader and be thought mad, and that as a jester or tool of pleasure for the town one is “Cursed if you fail, and scorned though you succeed!” (l. 23). Although Artemisia had responded only to a command, and had concluded “That whore is scarce a more reproachful name / Than poetess” (ll. 26-27), she quickly becomes “Pleased with the contradiction and the sin,” and stands “on thorns till I begin” (ll. 30-31). She is “well convinced writing's a shame” (l. 25), but abandons her conviction in the face of her urge to do “the very worst thing” (l. 29) she can.

Such a movement is a microcosm of what happens to Artemisia and her world in the Letter, and is consistent with the important similarities between wit and woman. Like the putative wit, Artemisia will explore a “stormy, pathless world” (l. 9), and will be dashed back upon the shore. He reveals his creative deficiencies; she reveals her moral deficiencies and is broke of the little stock of virtue with which she starts the poem. He becomes the fiddle of the town—the jester, as Professor Vieth glosses it; she is also potentially a fiddle—an instrument to amuse and please whoever chooses to pick her up. The wit, we will see upon the Fine Lady's appearance, must know the truth about woman at his own cost; Artemisia also pursues the truth about woman and the world she inhabits at her own, but somewhat different, cost, as she already is pleased with sin and becomes worse than a whore in being a poetess. The two opening paragraphs, then, establish the contradictory nature of woman, the tentative virtue of Artemisia herself, and the similarities between wit and woman.

But Artemisia can not be condemned from the start. For all her obvious blemishes, hers is still the voice that presents the best values of the poem, values which, if preserved, could have preserved her society as well. We know little about Chloe, except that she orders her friend to write in unfeminine rhyme and expects “at least to hear what loves have passed / In this lewd town” (ll. 32-33) and who is currently sleeping with whom. Such matters, Artemisia tells Chloe, are “what I would fain forget” (l. 37). Poor Artemisia cannot “name that lost thing, love, without a tear, / Since so debauched by ill-bred customs here” (ll. 38-39). She is not so misguided that she cannot see the right path, and though apparently incapable of achieving love herself, she can describe its source, what it was and should be. The following affirmation serves as an ideal against which the current status of love is measured, and from which Artemisia—the only character with even a hope for change—so badly strays. Love, she says, is “This only joy for which poor we were made” (l. 50):

Love, the most generous passion of the mind,
The softest refuge innocence can find,
The safe director of unguided youth,
Fraught with kind wishes, and secured by truth;
That cordial drop heaven in our cup has thrown
To make the nauseous draught of life go down;
On which one only blessing, God might raise
In lands of atheists, subsidies of praise,
For none did e'er so dull and stupid prove
But felt a god, and blessed his power in love.

(ll. 40-49)⁷

The piling on of positive words for the portrait of blessed, innocent, heavenly love is as clear as the pejoratives in the portrait of contemporary, earthly love that follows. What should be a joy, is “an arrant trade” (l. 51); a refuge for innocence and a director of youth becomes a refuge for rooks, cheats, and tricks (ll. 52-53); direction by Heaven is taken over by fallen women (ll. 54-58); those same women, created free by God, “Turn gypsies for a meaner liberty” (l. 57) and become slaves to distorted senses and fashion. The perfection of God's blessing and His generous passion of the mind is twisted:

To an exact perfection they have wrought
The action, love; the passion is forgot.

(ll. 62-63)

Spiritual love surrenders to secular love, God's design to woman's. As a result of this collapse of values the senses are also out of order. Such women are “deaf to nature's rule, or love's advice” (l. 60), and so desire undesirable men, covet merely fashionable lovers, and do not even enjoy the amiably gross weaknesses of the flesh, since they “Forsake the pleasure to pursue the vice” (l. 61):

'Tis below wit, they tell you, to admire,
And ev'n without approving, they desire.
Their private wish obeys the public voice;
‘Twixt good and bad, whimsey decides, not choice.
Fashions grow up for taste; at forms they strike;
They know what they would have, not what they like.
Bovey's a beauty, if some few agree
To call him so; the rest to that degree
Affected are, that with their ears they see.

(ll. 64-72)

Artemisia wins our approval as she is offended by these betrayals of Heaven's wishes, love's aims and end, nature's carnal desires and the senses. Indeed, she has been fulfilling one part of the similarity between wit and versifying woman—that of self-revelation. Having shown her own weakness, she re-engages at least some of our sympathy through her awareness of what love should be, and her disapproval of what it is. Hence, though she is a willing participant at the Fine Lady's place of assignation, she nevertheless disappears and allows the Lady her own words and actions.

This change of voice allows Rochester to enlarge the poem's point of view and to lend “objective” support for a scene intended to illustrate several of Artemisia's remarks regarding the action love. We had seen Artemisia's equation of herself with the exploited woman (and wit), the fiddle of the town; she is abused and hardened but nevertheless capable of preserving a vision of redeeming love. If there is any hope for the Restoration world, the opening part of her frame suggests, it is in that lingering memory. Artemisia is thus an improper vehicle for the ensuing section, in which a town-woman recently arrived from the country depicts, defends, and unconsciously debases the destructive battle of the sexes that Artemisia temporarily deplores. Like Artemisia, the Fine Lady also reveals herself, but what she reveals is so ugly that for the time being, at least, Artemisia is preserved as a tainted norm who disapproves of what she sees, whereas the Lady is an active participant and, as we will find, the “creator” of an even uglier character.

II. THE FINE LADY

The Fine Lady presents three categories of the action love: wife and husband, wife and gallant, wife and beast. The first demonstrates the sharp contrast between heavenly love's generous passion of the mind and earthly love's debasement of mind. The Lady's linguistic pyrotechnics, for example, are made clear at once. The husband had prevailed with his wife “through her own skill, / At his request, though much against his will / To come to London” (ll. 75-77). The earlier image of love as a “cordial drop” that Heaven has put in “the nauseous draught of life” (ll. 44, 45), contrasts with the Fine Lady's wish that her husband drink a brew that offers ill effects for him and ill opportunities for her.

“Dispatch,” says she, “that business you pretend,
Your beastly visit to your drunken friend!
A bottle ever makes you look so fine;
Methinks I long to smell you stink of wine!
Your country drinking breath's enough to kill:
Sour ale corrected with a lemon peel.
Prithee, farewell! We'll meet again anon.”
The necessary thing bows, and is gone.

(ll. 85-92)

The process of dehumanizing and bestializing will become even more overt, though it is obvious enough in this passage. The relationship between husband and wife is a matter of social and economic necessity, devoid of any human emotion but disdain and, perhaps, shame on her part for needing such a booby (l. 82).

Nor is the relationship with the gallant any better. His presence may force the husband to leave, but it is without clear benefit to himself: “The gallant had been, / Though a diseased, ill-favored fool, brought in” (ll. 83-84). And that is all. Once the husband is gone she does not run into the arms of a lusty paramour, but flies upstairs to gossip with the mistress of the house and to insist upon the wisdom of having only a fool as husband or lover. The Fine Lady, then, has her country-fool husband and town-fool gallant, one a necessary the other a fashionable thing.

The only physical or quasi-sexual contact we see (the later episode between Corinna and the fool is narrated) occurs with the Lady and a pet monkey. She courts him, smiles at him, is generally seductive, and provides an obscene parody of love:

She to the window runs, where she had spied
Her much esteemed dear friend, the monkey, tied.
With forty smiles, as many antic bows,
As if 't had been the lady of the house,
The dirty, chattering monster she embraced,
And made it this fine, tender speech at last:
“Kiss me, thou curious miniature of man!
How odd thou art! how pretty! how japan!
Oh, I could live and die with thee!” Then on
For half an hour in compliment she run.

(ll. 137-46)

Throughout much of the Letter both man and woman are reduced to subhuman levels; she is “an arrant bird of night” (l. 121) or “a fly, / In some dark hole” (ll. 205-06). The fool is “Ever most joyful when most made an ass” (l. 130), or is an “unbred puppy” (l. 240), or “an owl” (l. 250). But this unpleasant scene—and its probable pun on die—carries the poem's dehumanization of love to its fullest degree, especially since the monkey in its own right and as a near relation to the ape was commonly regarded as the embodiment of base sexuality and man's and woman's lowest drives.⁸

Rochester, I suggest, is using the embrace of the Fine Lady and the monkey as an emblem of what human sexuality and love have become—lust channelled into fashionable bestiality. All other liaisons in the poem are based upon passionless modes, misplaced revenge, a self-destructive desire for forbidden knowledge, or prostitution. Rochester is not attacking mere lust, since such a desire would almost be healthy—nature's voice—in comparison with the unfeeling world we actually see. He is attacking the absolute withdrawal of positive human emotion from human sexual embraces, so that the woman can be warm, friendly, and sexual only with the fashionable pet, a creature close to man—indecently so, Edward Topsell says (p. 4)—yet infinitely below him. In so doing she becomes more bestial than the beast she courts, both because normally the ape or monkey “courted” the lady, and because the monkey is merely acting its prescribed role, whereas she is a product of willingly demeaned reason. The fool, the Fine Lady says, is “Ever most joyful when most made an ass” (l. 130), and the Lady, Artemisia insists, becomes “an ass through choice, not want of wit” (l. 151). The woman who reduces man to an ass becomes one in the process, and she makes herself a fit mate for a monkey (transformed from miniature of the mistress to miniature of man) when she embraces one and becomes a “dirty, chattering monster” (l. 141) as well.

In short, the scene with the monkey is a logical extension of three themes in the poem. First, we recall that “Fashions grow up for taste; at forms they strike; / They know what they would have, not what they like” (ll. 68-69). Under such circumstances even the ugly Sir Ralph Bovey may be judged more than handsome and other women will agree. The Fine Lady's gallant is “a diseased, ill-favored fool” (l. 84), and must owe his fortunate position to just such sense-defying fashion as also leads her to court the monkey.

The Lady and her values, moreover, continue the substitution of the secular for the spiritually ordered world. She knows “everything,” apparently with God's blessing, yet chooses to be an ass (ll. 150-51). This is fitting, since God's vision is clearly different from woman's as here portrayed. Nature is inadequate “in making a true fop” (l. 154), and God Himself “never made a coxcomb worth a groat. / We owe that name to industry and arts” (ll. 159-60). This product of civilization who insists upon her wisdom in marrying a fool has also made herself “An eminent fool” (l. 161). Along the way she alters God's design for her, and is ignorant of her true character:

                    she … had turned o'er
As many books as men; loved much, read more;
Had a discerning wit; to her was known
Everyone's fault and merit, but her own.
All the good qualities that ever blessed
A woman so distinguished from the rest,
Except discretion only, she possessed.

(ll. 162-68)

The play upon turning over “as many books as men” suggests the loss of love as a generous passion of the mind, and the blindness that comes when one rejects the truth and kind wishes of God and seeks faults with the aid of human wisdom. The final step in the replacement of God's design by woman's emerges at the end of the Lady's tale, in which the whore Corinna seduces and financially rapes a country fool after she herself had been abandoned by a wit. In this parody of divine purpose God, who ordains all things including the cordial drop of love, is replaced by “Nature,” who provides vengeance, victims, and continued vice for whores.

          “Nature, who never made a thing in vain,
But does each insect to some end ordain,
Wisely contrived kind keeping fools, no doubt,
To patch up vices men of wit wear out.”

(ll. 252-55)

In spite of this inversion of order, however, the reader is carried along by the remnant of moral sanity in Artemisia. From the moment of the Fine Lady's introduction she voices her partial disapproval of this gross-voiced creature (ll. 78-79) with malfunctioning taste in her husband, lovers, animals, language, manners, books, and personal perception. But Rochester does not leave us secure—as he might have in a formal verse satire—with the knowledge that as long as there is one good person who preserves the ideal of love there is yet hope. No more, indeed, than he lets us wholly disapprove of the Fine Lady or approve of the poor victimized man. Though Artemisia sees much to deplore in her, she also sees that she is a “mixed thing … / So very wise, yet so impertinent” (ll. 148-49), and that she has “All the good qualities that ever blessed / A woman” (ll. 166-67). Indeed it is attraction to the Fine Lady's world that ultimately breaks Artemisia's little store of virtue; and it is also Rochester's ability to communicate the “mixed thing” that prevents this poem from being merely another anti-feminist tract or a black-and-white moral allegory.⁹ Specifically, let us examine the role of the man in creating the debauched world that also debauches him.

III. THE LADY AND CORINNA; THE WIT AND FOOL

Like Artemisia, the Fine Lady sees that there is a dangerous relationship between wit and woman. The wit is a threat to the Lady because he knows or seeks to know woman's true nature, and in the process of knowing may destroy his comfort and her worldly success. The Fine Lady, for instance, relates that when she was married “men of wit were then held incommode” (l. 104), primarily because they insisted upon clearly perceiving the difference between appearance and reality. Wits are:

Slow of belief, and fickle in desire,
… ere they'll be persuaded, must inquire
As if they came to spy, not to admire.
With searching wisdom, fatal to their ease,
They still find out why what may, should not please;
Nay, take themselves for injured when we dare
Make 'em think better of us than we are,
And if we hide our frailties from their sights,
Call us deceitful jilts, and hypocrites.
They little guess, who at our arts are grieved.
The perfect joy of being well deceived;
Inquisitive as jealous cuckolds grow:
Rather than not be knowing, they will know
What, being known, creates their certain woe.
Women should these, of all mankind, avoid,
For wonder by clear knowledge is destroyed.
Woman, who is an arrant bird of night,
Bold in the dusk before a fool's dull sight,
Should fly when reason brings the glaring light.

(ll. 105-23)

The portrait here is hardly flattering to women, and again illustrates the difference between the truth of Heaven's love—“This only joy for which poor we were made” (l. 50)—and “The perfect joy of being well deceived” (l. 115) which has replaced it. Woman represents deception of husband, lover, and reason itself where possible. But the wit is not much better (nor is the urban or rural fool): his knowledge does not bring him pleasure, destroys the illusions he might otherwise live by, and serves no broadly effective purpose of exposure, since even “though all mankind / Perceive us false, the fop concerned is blind” (ll. 131-32), and thus courts the woman nonetheless.

A brief contrast with Section IX of Swift's A Tale of a Tub will make clear the wit's complicity in the unhappy world of the Letter. In the Tale happiness as “a perpetual possession of being well-deceived” is pronounced by a modern madman. Yet behind him, indeed through him, we are aware of Swift's own insistence that knowledge of man's ugliness is necessary before we can move towards his potential beauty, that self-deception is bad because it inhibits self-improvement, that you shall know the truth, however unpleasant, because it shall make you free to seek something better, the ultimate truth in God. The savage satire of that work would not be possible if Swift did not strongly feel and need to communicate the dangers to a Church, state, and culture worth saving. The anger of the “real” speaker in the Tale grows with the aberration his persona communicates.

In the Letter, however, the wit is divorced from any theological or moral basis for his action. He does not urge us to see the earthly truth in order to correct it and work towards a corollary higher truth. He sees only the deception, depravity, and despair at the heart of life, and actually contributes to others' and his own unhappiness by offering an inadequate cerebral counter-vision, inadequate moral life (he debauches whomever he pleases and whoever pleases him), and inadequate emotional response. He is neither angry, nor spiritual, nor an effective source or model for change. He is merely destructive of his own and others' ease and offers a barren secular vision that is not even a distant shadow of the sort of divine love and truth Artemisia describes early in the poem. Under such circumstances the wit—unlike Swift in the Tale—helps to make the world he deplores. He already shares many of its values, offers no viable alternative, and worsens the situation by causing those he has jilted to seek revenge upon fools who, though sublimely subhuman and delighted when made asses, surely are punished out of proportion to their crime.

This disproportion is made clear in the Fine Lady's own story of Corinna—a tale within a tale that exemplifies the Lady's point regarding fools and wits just as the Lady herself exemplifies Artemisia's regarding the action love. Moreover, Corinna's story not only continues to show ruptured human relationships and the perversion of God's plan for His love on earth; it also moves the poem from black comedy to overt tragedy, from figurative to literal destruction of the family, and provides the final impetus to draw the tottering Artemisia into the Lady's world.

At first Corinna's adventure is sad, and well illustrates one consequence of the unstable wit's social life. She was a prosperous young whore—“Youth in her looks, and pleasure in her bed” (l. 196)—until she doted upon a man of wit,

Who found 'twas dull to love above a day;
Made his ill-natured jest, and went away.
Now scorned by all, forsaken, and oppressed,
She's a memento mori to the rest;
Diseased, decayed, to take up half a crown
Must mortgage her long scarf and manteau gown.
Poor creature! who, unheard of as a fly,
In some dark hole must all the winter lie,
And want and dirt endure a whole half year
That for one month she tawdry may appear.

(ll. 199-208)

The wit has rendered Corinna outcast and sub-human, probably because he has exposed her, forced her to run from his searching reason that seeks to satisfy his own need to know, and then move on. However, her state is not irreparable, since “A woman's ne'er so ruined but she can / Be still revenged on her undoer, man” (ll. 185-86). Yet in this case the poor fool and his family must pay for the wit's crime. The newly arrived country-fool “Turns spark, learns to be lewd, and is undone” (l. 223) as he courts Corinna. The wits have “searching wisdom, fatal to their ease” (l. 108), and “Fools are still wicked at their own expense” (l. 225). Both are self-destructive, but the fool is more victimized—in part because he is paying the wit's penalty, but largely because his entire family is destroyed in the process. The wit makes Corinna a memento mori; Corinna makes the fool die. He

          falls in love, and then in debt;
Mortgages all, ev'n to the ancient seat,
To buy this mistress a new house for life;
To give her plate and jewels, robs his wife.
And when t' th' height of fondness he is grown,
'Tis time to poison him, and all's her own.
Thus meeting in her common arms his fate,
He leaves her bastard heir to his estate,
And, as the race of such an owl deserves,
His own dull lawful progeny he starves.

(ll. 242-51)

The poem adopts the abandonment of conventional cause and effect that characterizes tragedy; that is, ordinary events have results vastly out of proportion to their usual expectations. A wit “seduces” and abandons a whore; several months later she revenges herself upon the wit by seducing a young country-fool, bankrupts his family, kills him, acquires his estate, neglects his children, and, in the process, becomes a paradigm of the good life of those women who deal with fools. It is now that the parodic perversion of divine order emerges (ll. 252-55), as all things do seem to be connected—each part has its reason for being, “Nature” ordains that “kind keeping fools” be provided “To patch up vices men of wit wear out.” By synecdoche, woman is vice and man her tailor.

Let us sum up the world of this letter: with the exception of Artemisia early in the poem, women reveal themselves as destitute of divinely inspired love; they are contradictory, enjoyers of sin, foulers of their own nest, tasteless, passionless creatures motivated by fashion and desire for revenge, and reduce others and themselves to the sub-human. Man is either a blind, easily duped fool or a restless wit disturbed by the vision of harsh female reality he seeks, yet incapable of correcting it; he is also a prime cause of the revenge by women upon fools and their families. The poem portrays pleasureless adultery, a diseased and unattractive gallant, a murderous town wench, a murdered lover, a bastard child, and distortion of divine love and order. The true emblem of this world of bestial humans with a passion for the mode is the embrace of the Fine Lady and the monkey.

But this vision is not dark enough for Rochester. I suggested earlier that Artemisia's disapproval of the society she portrays is mixed and that the progress of her first two paragraphs—from reluctance to desire to write in verse—embodies her change in the poem at large. I do not wish to overstate the “dialectical” qualities of the poem since, after all, Artemisia's initial coyness may merely be a gossip's conventional desire to excuse her urge to chatter. Nevertheless, the view of Artemisia's decline is supported through her muted reaction to the tale of Corinna. After that tale Artemisia has a splendid opportunity to reject the world the Fine Lady has been describing. She might, for example, elaborate upon the dangers of the morality portrayed, as Rochester does in the Satyr against Mankind. Or she might briefly condemn it and dissociate herself from it, as Pope was to do at the end of his first Dialogue of the Epilogue to the Satires (1738): “Yet may this Verse (if such a Verse remain) / Show there was one who held it in disdain” (ll. 171-72). Artemisia's latent attraction to the Lady was implicit in her earlier dissection of this “distinguished” woman and her “good qualities” (ll. 167, 166); but now the several lines of reservation—her foppery, sexual license, folly, blindness, lack of discretion—are condensed into one tepid remark that comments on the Lady's rambling discourse—her inability to be pertinent—at least as much as on her wisdom: during the Lady's long talk there were “some grains of sense / Still mixed with volleys of impertinence” (ll. 256-57). Perhaps Artemisia has been worn down by and drawn into the vigorous world she describes, as so many ordinary writers are in The Dunciad. Perhaps the Fine Lady's judgments concerning the need to avoid wits and cultivate fools have convinced her that as long as love inspired by Heaven is forgotten, she had better make her own market, forget the background of chastity and female heroism and fidelity associated with her name, and live as best she can.¹⁰ In any case, unlike the formal verse satirist, at a strategic point in the poem Rochester has her ignore an opportunity to reject the Lady's values and, instead, diminishes her earlier criticisms. We are more impressed with what Miss Righter calls Artemisia's amusement, delight, and exasperation than with any desire to expose or punish. And we are, I think, equally impressed with how much that world should be punished.

The final paragraph is even more important in characterizing Artemisia's inverted growth, as she concludes with a promise of awful tales swelling to a volume. Hitherto the letter's partially decent voice, she now becomes an agent for the propagation of infamy. Like the wits who reveal their meager talents for writing, she reveals her meager moral fiber and perseverance. She is “dashed back, and wrecked on the dull shore, / Broke of that little stock [she] had before” (ll. 10-11). She does not merely abdicate her own judgments; she accepts the Lady's. Instead of attempting to substitute the ideal of spiritual love, she warms to a new task of spreading—indeed planting—infamy:

          But now 'tis time I should some pity show
To Chloe, since I cannot choose but know
Readers must reap the dullness writers sow.
By the next post such stories I will tell
As, joined with these, shall to a volume swell,
As true as heaven, more infamous than hell.
But you are tired, and so am I.
                                                                      Farewell.

(ll. 258-64)

Rochester is probably alluding to the biblical warning that as one sows so shall he reap. Here, however, the sowing comes from Artemisia in the city, the reaping will be from Chloe in the country—the locations are connected in a widening web of depravity (witness the Fine Lady's arrival from the country, and Corinna in town ruining the fool's family in the country). Chloe's request initially induces a reluctant reply that comes to 264 lines; Artemisia's promised letter is offered without invitation, and includes an ominous biblical allusion that denotes planting, growth, and harvest of a volume. Heaven, which had been a touchstone for divine love, becomes a touchstone for the truth of diabolical victory. Artemisia, to repeat, is neither exposing nor condemning when she claims that the tales will be “more infamous than hell” (l. 263). By refusing to do so, or by doing so in mild terms in the ambiguous “volleys of impertinence” (l. 257), she is encouraging such hellish values to take root. Rochester as satirist is severely critical; Artemisia no longer is. He may be motivated by the Juvenalian need to satirize vice triumphant; she is merely exhilarated, and by tolerating the morally intolerable fosters the decline of God's “one only blessing” (l. 46).

The structure of the poem not only shows Artemisia's increasing acceptance of the world she describes. Perhaps even more significantly it also shows a series of characters, one virtually “creating” the other, who fall more deeply into a self-regarding world. At the start Rochester offers us Artemisia, who responds to Chloe's command that she write, but laments the contents of her letter—“what I would fain forget” (l. 37)—and still remembers the proper sort of love. Artemisia then turns the poem over to the Fine Lady, who enjoys the contents of her tale and recalls Chloe's role for Artemisia. Just up from the country, she seeks news of how love is governed and “who are the men most worn of late” (ll. 101-02)—exactly the sort of question that Artemisia assumed rural Chloe would want answered. But where Artemisia also offers a picture of “that lost thing, love” (l. 38), the communicative Lady offers her own picture of a flourishing love that is mere modish and unsatisfying lust. As Artemisia created the Lady, a “mixed thing” (l. 148), so the Lady creates the abandoned Corinna; the lost, selfless love of Artemisia is turned on its end and becomes the propagated, selfish love of Corinna. Innocence surrenders to criminality, and the safe director of unguided youth becomes the wicked director of a prostitute who ruins the country-boy. The cordial drop is discarded from our cup, and life will no longer go down. What is thrown up quickens in the land of atheists, there is no praise of God's power in love, and woman helps her true joy to disappear in the face of plate, jewels, and land purchased by revenge, prostitution, and murder. The movement from the modest involvement of Artemisia, who knows and gives us the Lady, to the deeper involvement of the Lady, who knows and gives us Corinna, heightens the apocalyptic quality of the satire and mirrors the movement from dead spiritual to living diabolical love. At the start of the poem Artemisia at least has values she can set against the Lady's; in the middle the clever Lady has misguided values; at the end Corinna has no values at all—or only self-serving ones. Artemisia sees that such a society's works are “more infamous than hell” (l. 263), but instead of purging them she spreads them. One must at least suspect that Chloe will end like the Fine Lady—or worse—if she is to reap similar food. Artemisia's norm of defeated love is a mere ten lines; the Lady's norm of prostituted, triumphant love is sixty-six lines.

Moreover, the rhyme scheme of the final two couplets is different from the rest of the poem's and thus catches our attention. Rochester has used end-stopped couplets, run-on couplets, half-lines, half rhymes, masculine and feminine rhymes, and several triplets in a virtuoso display of poetic technique and colloquial dialogue. Now, however, he invites us to focus on the conclusion, as he presents the poem's only rhymed quatrain and supplies an important relation of rhyme and reason. The rhyme words are tell, swell, hell, and farewell, and offer one related comment: the poem will swell to tell of hellish stories which signify a farewell of any hope for the cordial drop of Heaven's love. City and country, man and woman, wit and fool, narrator and character are part of a world gathering momentum as it parodies and replaces “This only joy for which poor we were made” (l. 50). The beautiful twelve-line passage describing “Love, the most generous passion of the mind” (l. 40) will be obscured even more than it now is in the true stories willingly sent and received.

IV. CONCLUSION: A NOTE ON SATIRIC MODE

Next to such perceptions the so-called pessimism of the Satyr against Mankind is not very frightening, especially since the speaker of that poem preserves his anger against the vices he exposes. To polarize, in the Satyr the interlocutor succumbs to his opponent, the normative speaker in the poem; in the Letter the opponent (Artemisia) succumbs to the values of the interlocutor (the Fine Lady). In the Satyr the main voice is triumphant in affirming its values; in the Letter it is defeated, there is no working norm, the ideal of love is proclaimed lost even before we hear it, and the narrator is too flimsy an anchor to hold on to the remnants of virtue. Her loss of control of that virtue is implied in her loss of control of the other characters in the poem. Samuel Johnson's formal verse satire The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) works toward a climax that affirms the existence and acquisition of religious, spiritual wishes that are neither vain nor human. Rochester's Letter reverses that process; it quickly announces the death of the spiritual ideal and works towards a climax that affirms the existence and acquisition of devilish, selfish, and earthly love.

That is why the apocalyptic or revelatory satire of, say, Swift's Tale and the final version of The Dunciad are proper analogues for Rochester's poem, though they are obviously not congruent in many ways. The speaker in The Dunciad must finally beg the goddess Dullness for a few moments more to finish his poem before he, his civilization, and its values are put to sleep. Yet he will not capitulate, he must be conquered. Swift's narrator, on the side of dullness as soon as the Tale begins, and confident of writing more by its end, is sometimes undercut by a recognized sane person behind him. But Rochester's poem takes the path between dead hero and partially triumphant madman, and shows us, instead, the morally downward movement of a once decent woman and a once decent world. The Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country is an apocalyptic satire that proclaims the triumph of Hell.¹¹ It is one of the best of its kind and, as Artemisia predicted, one of the saddest.

Notes

1. Eighteenth-Century English Literature, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell, Jr., and Marshall Waingrow (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969).

2. I have dealt at greater length with these distinctions in The Formal Strain: Studies in Augustan Imitation and Satire (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 86-94. I use the term apocalyptic not in the biblical sense of destruction of the evil old world and the beginning of the purged new but as prophetic revelation of darkness. Of course each mode of satire might appear in verse, prose, or the mingled Menippean kind. Since poetry is generally the medium of the best eighteenth-century satires which show a functioning norm, I have chosen to deal only with formal verse satire at this time. I should also reiterate that some of the conventions of the three satiric kinds discussed here may be shared with one another. Apocalyptic satire, for instance, is often punitive, but it punishes an age (or a culture, or a nation) rather than an individual.

3. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), p. 141. Subsequent quotations are from this edition.

4. For a fuller analysis of this poem, see my forthcoming essay in Studies in Philology, “The ‘Allusion to Horace’: Rochester's Imitative Mode.”

5. Thomas H. Fujimura, “Rochester's ‘Satyr against Mankind’: An Analysis,” Studies in Philology, 55 (1958), 590.

6. For the former see Anne Righter, “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,” in Proceedings of the British Academy, 53 (1967), 55: “Artemesia [as in Pinto's spelling] herself, the woman composing the Letter, is a kind of seventeenth-century Elizabeth Bennett. Witty and self-aware, both amused and exasperated, delighted and saddened by the follies she describes, she is the sister of Jane Austen's heroines.” For the latter see Vivian de Sola Pinto, Enthusiast in Wit: A Portrait of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester 1647-1680 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 121, 124; Vieth, Complete Poems, pp. xl-xli; and James Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 171-72. Some aspects of the dialogue, devices, and characters do have analogues in Restoration comedy, but these seem to me subsumed under the larger satiric, revelatory, intention.

7. George Williamson shrewdly observed that “For all his agnostic wit, Rochester's best love poems are haunted by ideas of religion”: The Proper Wit of Poetry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 126. The same can be said about his two major satires as well, even though such a reading does not conform to the conventional view of pre-Burnet Rochester as atheist-libertine. Rochester, we know, sought out Burnet, not Burnet Rochester.

   While discussing the dialectical cast of Rochester's mind, V. de Sola Pinto quotes this tale Rochester told Robert Parsons:

   ‘One day at an Atheistical Meeting, at a person of Qualities', I undertook to manage the Cause, and was the principal Disputant against God and Piety, and for my performances received the applause of the whole company; upon which my mind was terribly struck, and I immediately reply'd thus to myself. Good God! that a Man, that walks upright, that sees the wonderful works of God, and has the use of his senses and reason, should use them to the defying of his Creator!’

   The rest of Rochester's discussion of his reaction to the “Atheistical Meeting” is also instructive:

   But tho' this was a good beginning towards my conversion, to find my conscience touched for my sins, yet it went off again. Nay, all my life long, I had a secret value and reverence for an honest man, and loved morality in others. But I had formed an odd scheme of religion to myself, which would solve all that God and conscience might force upon me; yet I was not ever well reconciled to the business of Christianity, nor had that reverence for the Gospel of Christ as I ought to.

   (A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester … August 9 [1680] [London, 1772], p. 26)

   Pinto observes that “Rochester was always ‘replying to himself’. His celebrated conversion to religion was no sudden volte-face; it was the culminating point of a dialectical process which had been going on in his mind for years”: Enthusiast in Wit, pp. 185-86.

8. See Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes. Describing the true and lively figure of every Beast, with a Discourse of their several Names, Conditions, Vertues … (London, 1607), pp. 3, 10-13. Topsell translates much of Konrad Gesner's Historia animalium (1551). The 1658 edition—eleven years after Rochester's birth—was “Revised, Corrected, and Inlarged” by John Rowland, and includes the same information and illustrations. Topsell, other contemporary and later naturalists, and lexicographers use the term ape to include a variety of monkeys as well. See, for example, the definitions in Johnson's Dictionary (1755) and the varied translations of “una ximia de bronze” in Part II, Book 4, ch. 39 of Don Quixote (Madrid, 1615), p. 149. Philips, Motteaux, Ozell, Smollett, and Jarvis translate ximia as “monkey,” Shelton and Stevens as “ape.”

   For other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century references or discussions, see II Henry IV (1600; III.2.338-39); Othello (1622; III.3.402-03); Donne's Progresse of the Soule (1601; stanzas 46-49); Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690; III, 6, 23); and Edward Tyson's “A Philological Essay concerning the Satyrs of the Ancients,” in Ourang-Outang, Sive Homo Sylvestris (1699), Eric Rothstein, Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 71. H.W. Janson's Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: The Warburg Institute and the University of London, 1952), supplies an abundance of relevant information.

9. John Harold Wilson, however, regards the poem as “the longest and mildest of Rochester's satires against women,” and observes that “The moral is clear; poor, weak, silly woman is capable of incredible monstrosities. Only the man of wit can escape her ravenings”: The Court Wits of the Restoration: An Introduction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), p. 131.

10. Artemis is the Greek name of Diana, the perpetually celibate goddess of the chase who presided over child-birth, was identified with the moon, and in a many-breasted statue at Ephesus, symbolized the productive forces of nature. Artemisia, the Queen of Caria and daughter of Lygdamis, had masculine courage, performed heroically for Xerxes at Salamis, and later was so in love with Dardanus that, when he slighted her, she put out his eyes while he slept. Artemisia Queen of Caria, daughter of Hecatomnes and wife of Mausolus, immortalized herself by preserving her husband's memory in the magnificent mausoleum at Halicarnassus, lived two years after her husband's death, and was reported to have died of grief and melancholy. These tales of Artemisia were recorded in Moréri's and Bayle's encyclopedic dictionaries, first published, respectively, in 1674 and 1697. In Moréri, Artemisia the wife of Mausolus received the most attention, and it is possible that if Rochester has either model in mind as a norm, it is that of tender rather than brutal love. The masculine achievements of the Queen of Caria, however, may have inspired Rochester to have his Artemisia succeed in masculine poetry. Since the two earthly Artemisias were often mingled, both could easily supply background for Rochester. Bayle reports that “It would be too tedious to point out all those, who have confounded the two Artemisia's. Ravisius Textor … and the Authors of the Thesaurus Fabri are of this number. Olivier, who wrote a Commentary on Valerius Maximus, is also one of them.” For fuller discussion of the classical and Renaissance and later seventeenth-century contexts of these names, see Des Maizeaux's edition of The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, 2nd ed. (London, 1734), I, 522-25.

11. The apocalyptic quality does not deny the comic aspects of Artemisia, any more than it does that of A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, and The Dunciad. Indeed, one might argue that their ultimate effect is enhanced by the comedy, which serves as a comfortable entryway to terror. The Fine Lady's “conversation” with the monkey, for example, is amusing until one realizes that it becomes an emblem of upper-class depravity, just as the childish urinating contest in The Dunciad is raucous until one sees that the contestants include a gonorrheal publisher who is polluting his London audience. An intensive study of the intermingling of comic, tragic, and satiric modes and conventions would be of great value.