[In the essay below, Robinson discusses the oppositions in Rochester's poetry, noting, for example, that A Satire Against Mankind starts out advocating appetitive values and ends by espousing more traditional ideas, and that Upon Nothing can be seen as a struggle between reason and intuition.]

Dr. Johnson once remarked to Topham Beauclerk (great-grandson of Charles II and Nell Gwynne): ‘Thy body is all vice, and thy mind all virtue’.¹ He might equally well have been talking of that well-known associate of Beauclerk's great-grandfather, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, companion, yet sternly moral critic of Charles II. There is in Rochester an extraordinary opposition of venal life-style and moral capacity. The opposition is more than merely historically or psychologically compelling: if we dig down to its intellectual foundations we shall reveal an ambivalence of pressing modernity. For Rochester's mature life constitutes an attempt to cope with the metaphysical ‘weightlessness’ which is so much a part of the consciousness of post-Nietzschean man. It is the intention of this paper to explore something of this attempt.

It is not surprising that William Empson should have been drawn to Rochester:² the ambivalence we are to explore manifests itself in the sort of polar oppositions so dear to Empson's heart. We may begin with a question of values. In the Satyr against Mankind Rochester is concerned with two quite different ways of valuing. On the one hand he theorizes upon nominalistic and appetitive values derived from sense (values clearly inspired by Hobbes):³ on the other he practises more traditional and universal values in the second, pragmatic part of the poem (from line 112 onwards).⁴ These traditional values, which are implicit in such terms as ‘basest’, ‘inhumanly’ and ‘wantoness’, are more closely related to the values of the ‘formal band and beard’ than to those of Hobbes or the Hobbists. We can see this antithetical juxtaposition at work when Rochester defines a framework relative to which he can judge man (a framework consonant with appetitive values),

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

(l.117)

only to leave it behind to judge the ends in absolute terms. Hobbes had ruled that in a commonwealth man's private appetite ought to be subserved to the interests of the state and that his actions could be judged good or bad in so far as he observed, or failed to observe, this social obligation.⁵ For Hobbes, ‘moral rules were rules found out by reason for avoiding social calamity’.⁶ Conversely, Rochester's judgments go beyond the social to strike deep at man's ethical capacity. When Rochester condemns the man who ‘Inhumanly his fellow's life betrays’, it is the fact of betrayal itself, not the social significance of the betrayal, that irks him. This clash between the nominalistic and appetitive and the universal is summed up in a line from the fragment ‘What vain, unnecessary things are men!’: ‘Things must go on in their lewd natural way’ (l. 32), here taken slightly out of context but not so as to distort it in any essentials. It appears that Rochester accepted the materialist account of man's reaction to his world, with all its implications of appetitive action, as rationally just and therefore natural yet found that reaction reprehensible, lewd. He was heartily opposed to the a priori and the artificial,⁷ the ‘Affected rules of honor’ (‘What cruel pains Corinna takes’, l.12), and, in the absence of a motivating telos, he found it difficult to transmute his intuitive allegiance to traditional values into action which seemed natural, uncertain whether those intuitions pointed to indoctrination or truth. The ‘Satyr’ dramatizes a profound epistemological and ethical dilemma which underlies the whole of Rochester's life and thought, a dilemma resolved only on his deathbed. He was in the paradoxical position of judging actions committed with rational integrity to be immoral, unable (except at the last) to wrench his support away from the abortive Hobbism which seems to have been close to the root of his perplexity.

Writing against the background of renewed interest in the famous Hobbes/Bramhall debate,⁸ Rochester was acutely aware of the concomitant polarity of free-will and determinism. Briefly, Bramhall had objected that Hobbes's notion that ‘such a liberty as is free from necessity, is not to be found in the will either of men or beasts’⁹ robbed man of his birthright of free-will because it rendered all his actions extrinsically caused. Bramhall, in line with traditional thought, believed that in order to be free a man's actions should be intrinsically caused. This distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic causation is analogous to that between universal and nominalistic values: both spring out of a difference between the received and the new sense of right reason, as defined within the ‘Satyr’. Just as Rochester was split between ad hoc and absolute values, he was possessed by anxieties about his freedom. Cudworth held that praising or blaming a man presupposed his freedom,¹⁰ but, as we have seen, Rochester's assault on the baseness of his world is juxtaposed with a theoretic justification of a hard determinist view of experience. Hobbes had discounted the possibility of a separate faculty called the will (demoting the will to the last stage in the process of deliberation which precedes an action), just as he had dismissed the notion that man possessed a soul or spirit—the spirit was for him none other than the vital motion.¹¹ At the beginning of the ‘Satyr’ Rochester, too, appears to expropriate intrinsic volition, but his conception of the ‘strange prodigious creature, man’ entails a more complex view:

          Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose, for my own share,
What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal
Who is so proud of being rational.

These lines lament man's estate, in large part because of his lack of freedom. Traditionally his freedom had to do with his possession of a spirit, but here that notion of spirit is circumscribed with difficulties. Even if this spirit were free to choose, it ironically would not be free to remain a spirit: it would have to choose a host and that host could not be a beast, for to become a beast would involve self-destruction by and of an entity which is by its very nature indestructible. The optation is shot through with hopelessness: it must choose man. At the back of Rochester's worries about the freedom which this hypothetical spirit might be said to have lies the materialist conviction that ‘nothing can change itself, or act upon itself, or determine its own action. Since the same thing cannot be both agent and patient at once’.¹² He would prefer to be a beast because the beast is at least experientially free. Relative to man the beast was traditionally conceived of as being unfree—a slave to the senses—but the force of the elevation of beasts above men here is to stress that man is not only subject to the same extrinsic causation but, unlike the beast, must live with a consciousness of his position. In other words, Rochester subverts man's vain pretensions to superiority, whether they be on the basis of spirituality, rationality, or both. Reason for Rochester, the reason of the new philosophy as much as the scholastic—he is careful not to qualify it in his opening lines—is an ignis fatuus: it removes man from the simple amorality and irrational felicity of animal existence into areas of metaphysical angst which it can do little to resolve.¹³ The quest for meaning which it initiates in man seems to him to be in vain. Yet despite the materialist basis of Rochester's dismay, he is careful not to deny the existence of the spirit within man: nor does he assert it. The ambiguous syntax of the opening lines preserves the possibility on man's possessing a spirit, a possibility which derives from those intuitions of freedom and absolute value which run counter to his reasoning. His angst is not simply nihilistic: alongside his consciousness of extrinsic causation works an ambition to be free. Later in the ‘Satyr’ the same polarity exerts itself when Rochester dashes all man's virtues with the charge that they are extrinsically caused by ‘fear, to make himself secure’ (l. 156) only to posit an optimum man who is implicitly an embodiment of intrinsic volition, by reference to whom he makes his judgments.

It may seem that a solution for this dilemma is implied in the apparent marriage of the concept of will to appetitive action, but the solution is merely propositional. The “Satyr” itself records its irrelevance in practice:

Thus, whilst against false reasoning I inveigh,
I own right reason, which I would obey:
That reason which distinguishes by sense
And gives us rules of good and ill from thence,
That bounds desires with a reforming will
To keep 'em more in vigor, not to kill.
.....          Thus I think reason righted, but for man,
I'll ne'er recant; defend him if you can.
For all his pride and his philosophy,
'Tis evident beasts are, in their degree,
As wise at least, and better far than he.

(l. 98)

The gap between the propositional ideal and the actual is focused in the phrase ‘reforming will’.¹⁴ It seems to suggest that man can so govern his appetites with a conscious will that he will never suffer satiety, but, both traditionally and according to the Hobbesian scheme, man committed to appetitive values is in a state of subjection. The normal ethical sense of the phrase represents, in context, an impossible ideal whilst the technical reference to the forming and reforming process of deliberation (which Hobbes had substituted for the conscious will)¹⁵ represents the actual. The disparity is one between being free to pursue a chosen course and not being thus free. Underlying the contrast between open and restrictive reactions to the appetites, designed to recommend the newly defined ‘right reason’ at the expense of the old, there is a recognition that on the materialist account it is only by chance that the appetites are not satiated. The mechanistic conception of man allows him no conscious part in governing, or attempting to govern, the outcome, or the last stage, of deliberation. Ironically, the man who ‘kills’ his appetite seems to be more free.

It is significant that both the adversary and the paradigm of virtue in the ‘Satyr’ represent a belief in transcendental truth. Rochester's theoretic rejection of universal values and intrinsic choice is inseparable from a thoroughgoing doubt about the existence of any such truth. Yet it is only a doubt. Like Koestler's Rubashov he cannot prevent the ‘grammatical fiction’, the internal voice, from breaking through the facade of contingent logic.¹⁶ His quite unmaterialistic judgments of himself and his fellow man lead inevitably to worries about judgment in the hereafter. His need for, and perhaps vestigially intuitive sense of, a telos is best seen in ‘After death nothing is’. At first glance Rochester's version of Seneca might appear to be a straightforward statement of unbelief, but its tone suggests that it is the utterance of a man deeply anxious about the nature of finite existence. The concluding lines have the ring of someone trying to convince himself as much as his addressee: they protest too much:

For Hell and the foul fiend that rules
God's everlasting fiery jails
(Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),
With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,
          Are senseless stories, idle tales,
                    Dreams, whimseys, and no more.

(l. 13)

The passion of Rochester's outburst points to uncertainty about the rational, nihilistic tenets of the poem. The closeness of the language of dismissal to Hobbes's irritable exposé of false reasonings serves to underline the failure of the materialist philosophy to meet Rochester's intuitive needs. The uncertainty leads to an inconsistency. Rochester both heaps scorn on ‘slavish souls’ who by subscribing to the concept of the soul—and to the conception of man as quintessentially soul—subjugate themselves to a worrying eschatology and appears to allow the idea of the soul some meaning, although he claims it to be confounded at death. The inconsistency is closely related to the ambivalent attitude towards the spirit at the opening of the ‘Satyr.’ A soul by its very nature would not be so confounded, nor could a mechanistic conception of man strictly speaking accommodate the soul. The illogicality (which Rochester leaves unresolved) is symptomatic of his profound incertitude.

There is a hint of the same puzzlement in the single word ‘kept’ in

Dead, we become the lumber of the world,
And to that mass of matter shall be swept
Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.

It cannot contain the simple neutrality which Rochester the materialist wishes to impose upon it; instead it looks beyond the bounds of the mechanical laws governing finite existence towards a purposive, directing force. We meet this same force in Upon Nothing. Beneath the passing ridicule of scholasts, statesmen and monarchs lies a more profound concern with the nature of things. Committed to the idea that life is nothing and leads to nothing after death, Rochester attempts to describe the genesis of human life only to find that his cause and effect thinking requires a first cause. ‘Nothing’ is personified, made an active force which begets ‘something’, a term which loosely describes a positive, purposive energy. The genealogy is an inversion of the received idea of creation in which God, the positive, creates, amongst other things, the negative, nihilistic force of evil imaged in Satan. In the traditional account man battles against the negative so as to be reunited with his creator; in Rochester's version meaningful life (or intimation of it) is the rebellious force which must be suffered before reimmersion in nothingness. But it is in the nature of this sense of meaning to call into question the nihilistic conception of death. It is this ‘something,’ the need for a teleology, with which Rochester, a committed materialist, finds it difficult to cope. The notion that ‘something’ is begotten places Rochester's difficulties within the context of the Christian account of the incomprehensible Trinity. Whereas the Christian can make a virtue out of incomprehensibility (in much the same way that Wittgenstein can make a virtue out of nonsensicality in his Lecture on Ethics),¹⁷ Rochester can only find it intensely disorienting. He tries to explain the world beyond experience in terms of the physical world so that the worryingly unknown and formally unknowable is described as some thing, but neither it nor its attendant values are so easily dismissed. Unlike material things ‘something’ does not return to nothingness: it is as everlasting as the ‘Great Negative’ itself. Moreover, Rochester seems to expect ‘something’ (at least he doesn't discount the possibility) to affect human life positively:

But Nothing, why does Something still permit
That sacred monarchs should in council sit
With persons highly thought at best for nothing fit … ?

(l. 37)

Unable to synthesize logic and intuition, Rochester can trust neither at the expense of the other.

Faced with this dichotomy Rochester cast around for a philosophy which might resolve it. It is easy to see why he should have become interested in Lucretius who held it as a fundamental principle that ‘Nothing can ever be created by divine power out of nothing’.¹⁸ He looked carefully at the Lucretian gods whom he interpreted as being uninterested in, and beyond, human affairs:

The gods, by right of reason must possess
An everlasting age of perfect peace;
Far off removed from us and our affairs;
Neither approached by dangers, or by cares;
Rich in themselves, to whom we cannot add;
Not pleased by good deeds, nor provoked by bad.

(l. 1)

but his translation, alongside these lines, of the invocation to Venus at the opening of De Rerum Natura presents an ambiguity essential to his interpretation. The invocation presupposes at least some hope for success. The ambiguity is similar to that generated by the clash of materialist reason and intuitive conviction in Upon Nothing. The Lucretian via media of gods whose existence did not help one iota to explain the genesis of the universe and who remained unconcerned in, or for, human life, was no solution for his metaphysical difficulties. Lucretius's uncomplicated materialism permitted him to deal easily with nothingness: ‘Nature resolves everything into its component atoms and never reduces anything to nothing’.¹⁹ He is unperturbed by his apparent inability to explain creation. It is an index of Rochester's divergence from the Lucretian and materialist that, whilst endorsing the notion that matter is neither created nor destroyed, he should remain anxious about metaphysical nothingness and contingent problems of creation. Yet Rochester's interest in Lucretius is further testimony of the seriousness of his quest for the truth.

This nonplus, of a man cruelly split between two apparently irreconcilable ways of regarding human experience, is embodied in the less obviously philosophical poetry both directly in purposeful inconsistencies and indirectly in Rochester's doing the beau monde in different voices. The poems using personae do not merely employ the persona as a convenient polemic device. Certainly, they are keenly reductive, but the strategy of disguise renders them heuristic, too, not least because Rochester was aware that he was susceptible to many of the things that he attacks. Dr. Johnson ran division on a line from Pope to describe Beauclerk: ‘Thy love of folly, and thy scorn of fools’; his alteration applies poignantly to Rochester. Everything he did showed the one, everything he said the other.²⁰ This is true even of the lampoons on Sheffield. Rochester did not, to be sure, share Sheffield's unintelligent conceit, but he was troubled by an inconstancy and self-interest (both corollaries of his materialism) which are related to the ideas of inconstancy and self-interest which Mulgrave is represented as pressing into his service. But these poems require a separate paper: for the remainder of the present essay I shall examine several poems concerned with love and/or sexual relations in the light of Rochester's general predicament.

Artemisia writes of love as ‘That cordial drop heaven in our cup has thrown / To make the nauseous draught of life go down’ (l. 44). Rochester longed for a stability based on human relationships, and the experience of love appears to have offered a glimpse of such stability. In ‘Absent from thee I languish still’ the lady is represented as Rochester's secular heaven, and like heaven she offers the fixed and everlasting, the constant in contrast to the mutability of mortal life in general and the inconstancy which was so much a modus vivendi of courtly society, in particular. No matter how emotionally vibrant the stability caught sight of, it is, however, only glimpsed. Rochester is torn from it by his nominalistic commitment, by that rational integrity which seemed to him simultaneously necessary and fantastic, reasonable yet wrong, and, most ironically, in some way in contravention of the realities before him. The language of contemporary complaisance is here fired with fresh significance. It was customary in contemporary painting to embellish the portrait of the most licentious beauty with iconographic virtue,²¹ but when Rochester writes of a ‘safe bosom … Where love and peace and truth does flow’ (l. 11) he is describing, within the context of the poem, a sincere, if fleeting, experience of permanence. Equally, the torments and languishings are far from that mixture of appeasement and courtesy with which it was customary to invest in the carnal services of a lady of whom one had for the moment tired. Rochester is the ‘straying fool’ (l. 3): cast adrift from the traditional teleology and the stable human relationships supposed to be based upon it, yet painfully in concert with it in certain important respects and without a substitute belief, his lot was to wander in ways which simultaneously removed him further from, yet strengthened his need for, traditional values. He came to fear that ‘the readiest way to Hell’ might be by Rochester.

It is in the nature of Rochester's thought that he should be committed to action according to immediate sensory impulse. The idea of inconstancy ought not, strictly speaking, to have carried any weight with him; as Strephon puts it:

Since 'tis nature's law to change,
Constancy alone is strange.

(‘A Dialogue between Strephon and Daphne’, l. 31)

yet in ‘Absent from thee’ he is much exercised by the fear and charge of inconstancy. In ‘Love and Life’ where the materialist rejection of constancy is most explicitly stated, there is no celebration of a sensualist present but an elegiac resignation to mutability:

Then talk not of inconstancy,
          False hearts, and broken vows:
If I, by miracle, can be
This livelong minute true to thee,
          'Tis all that heaven allows.

(l. 11)

The desire for stability here (as in ‘The Mistress’) is balanced by Rochester's suggestion that all the forms of stability to which the lines reach out are either delusive, or offer no consolation. He exploits the inherent contradiction in the idea of being true for a minute; and the perfect heaven, almost smuggled into the argument as a transcendental point of stability, is shown (or at least implied) to be derived by a shaky logic from the imperfect world. Nor does he allow it to be a solution to conceive of heaven as synonymous with the Lucretian gods or as the province of a god who set the world ticking and left it to function according to its immutable mechanical laws; for such a conception only engenders resentment that the Lucretian gods are inactive or that the laws are limiting, that, in short, inconstancy is ‘all that heaven allows’.

Despite his obedience to the present appetite, Rochester could enjoy little sensual consolation for his reduced moral stature. He had to live with the pressing awareness that even in the most rudimentary aspects of physical life man could lay little claim to autonomy. It was not simply that his moral self-repulsion led him to view himself as passion's slave; he was more fundamentally anxious about man's capacity for free action. Pleasure became a debt. In ‘The Fall’ he focuses his worries upon sexual relations. He posits an ideal against which he can contrast the actual so as to stress the hard determinism which governs men's actions:

Naked beneath cool shades they lay;
          Enjoyment waited on desire;
Each member did their wills obey,
          Nor could a wish set pleasure higher.
But we, poor slaves to hope and fear,
          Are never of our joys secure;
They lessen still as they draw near,
          And none but dull delights endure.

(l. 5)

The very fact that Rochester regards life as in some way unideal points to aspirations to something beyond his experience, an unwillingness simply to accept life as determined by mechanical laws. It is clear that he would have liked to free pleasure as Lucretius had sought to do. As Lucretius puts it, ‘nature is clamouring for two things only, a body free from pain, a mind released from worry and fear for the enjoyment of pleasurable sensations’.²² But here again Lucretius's example provided no solace. The release was impossible for Rochester because he could neither give a mechanistic theory of behaviour unequivocal support nor dismiss his awareness of absolute values as superstitious. As much as he wished to free the passions from the unnatural restrictions and superstitions of old-fashioned rationalism, he had first to deal with his anxieties about the freedom with which man might be said to engage in pleasure. His substitution of the Hobbesian deliberation, or alternate succession of appetite and fear, for the conscious will made man seem a ‘poor slave to hope and fear’; and his distress at the substitution both prejudiced his chances of simple hedonistic enjoyment and denied him the Lucretian ataraxia. He liberates the ‘pleasures’ from superstition only to find them unfree, and his yearning for their freedom inseparable from a yearning for some of the things he had regarded as superstitious. All Rochester has is the unstable, externally determined present in which the frailer part remains frail in spite of its revaluation in the sensualist outlook. The traditional view of the mind as dominant over the body offers no escape: it is, he suggests, a convenient rationalization of man's infirmities, simply dependent upon the lovers' willingness to collude:

Then, Chloris, while I duly pay
          The nobler tribute of my heart.
Be not you so severe to say
          You love me for the frailer part.

(l. 13)

Rochester's adherence to a hard determinism could not, then, pressure his intimations of freedom out of existence any more than Rubashov could rid himself of ‘illogical morality’.²³ The contradictory mixture of hope that he might achieve his desires and a conviction that such achievement could only be coincidental created a burden which further exacerbated his difficulties. This compound of anxiety and self-consciousness is a major part of the subject of ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ in which it leads to premature emission, represented by Rochester as symptomatic of a more general volitional impotence:

          But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive,
To show my wished obedience vainly strive:
I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.
Eager desires confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame does more success prevent,
And rage at last confirms me impotent.
.....Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry,
A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.

(l. 25)

The force of ‘vainly’, ‘shame’ and ‘confirms’ is to stress that in the very act of desiring the anxiety is felt as obstructive. The desirer believes that his desiring is probably in vain, becomes ashamed of his apparent inability to succeed and the result is a failure which seems to confirm both his fears of determinism and the illusion of those intuitions of freedom which led to the attempt to effect his will. Rochester has a keen eye for what is quintessentially disturbing in the mechanistic philosophy. Hobbes had argued that there could be no cause of motion except in a body contiguous and moved; transferred to the human context this meant for Rochester that no amount of desiring could initiate action (or movement) ‘for the cause of his will, is not the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing’.²⁴ And yet he could neither help wishing nor finding himself weak in the face of inevitable failure.

In ‘A Ramble in St. James's Park’ Rochester describes a release from this nagging self-consciousness, but he represents it as an escape into an irrational state, hedged round with a complex of limitations:

When, leaning on your faithless breast,
Wrapped in security and rest,
Soft kindness all my powers did move,
And reason lay dissolved in love!

(l. 129)

The single word ‘faithless’ explodes the celebratory tone and language of the whole passage: the security and rest are deceptive, the lady's ‘soft kindness’ meretricious—‘kind’ and cognate terms always demand caution in Rochester. The ‘love’, in short, is merely physical. The false security belongs to the momentary demise of reason at the climax of coition when ‘In liquid raptures [the lover] dissoves all o'er’ (‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, l. 13). It is no use leaning on Corinna in the hope of stability for she is as unable to be constant, as unable to act freely. She is ‘a passive pot for fools to spend in’ (l. 102) and Rochester is one of the fools.

It is important to remember that what Rochester wants is not simply sensual gratification: the opposite of the insignificance suffered in ‘A Ramble’ would entail the freedom and stability which he so desired (and glimpsed in ‘Absent from thee I languish still’). Such ambition can only have deepened his unhappiness with his apparent lot, hence the physical loathing (direct and indirect) of both ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ and ‘A Ramble’. Yet it is significant of his dubiety that the reader is left unsure about the nature of his feelings towards Corinna, despite the loathing. The materialist assumptions involve the reduction of traditional values to physical terms (as they do in Marvell's ‘To his Coy Mistress’), but there remains a hankering after those values. It is in the nature of Rochester's dilemma that the something beyond the materialist should be felt rather than definable, like the something of Upon Nothing. Just as the ignis fatuus reason removes him from simple animal happiness into ‘doubt's boundless sea’ (‘Satyr’, l. 19), so it denies him the natural sexual responsiveness of animals in which there seems to be ‘something generous’ and replaces it with both the awareness that the drives are extrinsically caused and the fear that they are lustful:

Such natural freedoms are but just:
There's something generous in mere lust.

(‘A Ramble’, l. 97)

This attempt to give some value to the sexual drives is ironically doomed to failure. The ‘freedoms’ of ‘mere lust’ are not consistent with freedom; nor is lust consistent with benevolence. Yet the conventional framework of judgement implies reponsibility in man. We must not expect to resolve the inconsistencies here (as elsewhere in Rochester's work): they are Rochester's puzzlement. To his cost he was rational.

This account of Rochester derives considerable support from Burnet's Life.²⁵ According to Burnet, Rochester was morally alert even in the midst of his infamous life: ‘These Exercises in the course of his life were not always equally pleasant to him; he had often sad Intervals and severe Reflections on them’ (pp. 14-15). Although he ‘came to bend his Wit, and direct his Studies and Endeavours to support and strengthen these ill Principles both in himself and others’ (pp. 15-16), he did not cease to detest his immoral behaviour. ‘He would often break forth into such hard Expressions concerning himself as would be indecent for another to repeat’ (p. 24). It is clear from Burnet that Rochester felt himself to be torn between antithetical modes of behaviour. Yet, although he could understand the necessity of morality ‘both for the Government of the World, and for the preservation of Health, Life and Friendship: … he was very much ashamed of his former Practises, rather because he has made himself a Beast, and had brought pain and sickness on his Body, and had suffered such in his Reputation, than from any deep sense of a Supream being, or another State’ (p. 35). It was not that he was merely an atheist: he confessed to Burnet ‘That he had never known an entire Atheist, who fully believed there was no God’ (p. 22). Further, he ‘could not think the World was made by chance, and the regular Course of Nature seemed to demonstrate the Eternal Power of its Author’. According to Burnet, his conception of the ‘supream Being’ was Lucretian: ‘He looked on it as a vast Power that Wrought every thing by the necessity of its Nature: and thought that God had none of those Affections of Love or Hatred, which breed perturbation in us, and by consequence he could not see there was to be either reward or punishment’ (p. 52). It is only here that the reading offered in this paper differs from Burnet. We have seen that Rochester certainly explored Lucretius, but the poetry seems to strike deeper into his puzzlement than Burnet's account.

This paper began with an assertion of Rochester's modernity: I should like to give a little solidity to that assertion by placing Rochester briefly against the following lines from Arbuthnot's ‘Know Yourself’:

By adverse gusts of jarring instincts tossed,
I rove to one, now to the other coast:
To bliss unknown my lofty soul aspires,
My lot unequal to my vast desires.
As 'mongst the hinds a child of royal birth
Finds his high pedigree by conscious worth,
So man, amongst his fellow brutes exposed,
Sees he's a king, but 'tis a king deposed.
Pity him, beasts! you by no law confined,
Are barred from devious paths by being blind;
Whilst man, through opening views of various ways,
Confounded, by the aid of knowledge strays;
Too weak to choose, yet choosing still in haste,
One moment gives the pleasure and distaste;
Bilked by past minutes, while the present cloy,
The flattering future still must give the joy.
Not happy, but amused upon the road,
And like you thoughtless of his last abode.
Whether next sun his being shall restrain
To endless nothing, happiness, or pain.(26)

This might seem to be remarkably close to Rochester, but it is far removed from him in at least one important respect. Arbuthnot shares the Augustan commitment to commonsensical reason as a tool with which to understand an objective truth. Vice, whether it be a surrender to the passions or an overweening trust in ‘the wings of vain philosophy’²⁷ is a deviation from the reasonable norm. Mathematics provides the paradigm of certainty: ‘the mathematics … charm the passions, restrain the impetuousity of the imagination, and purge the mind from error and prejudice. Vice is error, confusion and false reasoning; and all truth is more or less opposite to it’.²⁸ Arbuthnot's account of man's restlessness is, that is, limited by its peculiarly Augustan context of certainty: aberrations are institutionalized just as they are in Pope's Essay on Man. But for the Rochester we have been examining there was no certainty,²⁹ though there was a strong desire for it. He is cast back upon that puzzling about essential contradictions so much a characteristic of metaphysics,³⁰ and in so puzzling his work achieves a perennial modernity. Arbuthnot, by contrast, is at most historically interesting. This is one aspect of his modernity: the other has to do with a more particular resonance with important thinking closer to our own time, most notably with the Existentialists. Arbuthnot is, in Sartre's terms, in bad faith, like any man who ‘unthinkingly accepts his condition, including the moral code which he lives by, as if it were inevitable’.³¹ Although Rochester could not disengage himself from the joint pressures of the absolute and contingent logic sufficiently to see the world as an existentialist might, as ‘a place in which each by himself has the power to choose his own life from the foundations, to choose what he is to be, because he can choose what to value’,³² he did not hide behind, or use, bad faith to protect himself from the recognition of his responsibility.

Notes

1. Boswell's Life of Johnson. ed. George Birkbeck Hill. rev. and enlarged by L.F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934-50), I, 250.

2. See New Statesman, 28 November, 1953, pp. 691-2, Collected Poems (London, 1955), pp. 54-5, The Structure of Complex Words (London, 1951), pp. 163 and 194, and William Empson: The Man and His Work, ed. Roma Gill (London, 1974), p. 156.

3. On the relationship between Hobbes and Rochester, see K.E. Robinson, ‘Rochester and Hobbes and the Irony of A Satyr against Reason and Mankind’, Yearbook of English Studies, III (1973), 108-19.

4. All subsequent line references and quotations from Rochester's poetry are from The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David Vieth (New Haven, 1968).

5. Leviathan, intro. by A. D. Lindsay (London, 1965), p. 372.

6. P. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (Harmondsworth, 1954), p. 17.

7. Cf. Reba Wilcoxon, ‘Rochester's Philosophical Premises: A Case for Consistency’, ECS, VIII (1974/75), 183-201.

8. For a bibliography of the debate, see Hugh Macdonald and Mary Hargreaves, Thomas Hobbes: A Bibliography (London, 1952), passim; and for an account see Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 110-33.

9. Body, Man, and Citizen, ed. Richard S. Peters (New York, 1962), p. 161.

10. A Treatise of Freewill, printed in British Moralists 1650-1800, ed. D. D. Raphael, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1969), I, 120 (#136).

11. Leviathan, p. 211.

12. This is Cudworth representing his adversary's case: op. cit. I, 122 (#129).

13. For Rochester's radical difference from Hobbes here, see Body, Man, and Citizen, p. 106.

14. See Robinson, op. cit. p. 113.

15. Leviathan, pp. 28-9 and Body, Man and Citizen, pp. 269-71.

16. See Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (Harmondsworth, 1964), p. 92.

17. Philosophical Review, LXXIV (1965), 3-16.

18. On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth, 1951), p. 31.

19. Ibid, p. 33.

20. Boswell's Life of Johnson, I, 249-50.

21. See J. Douglas Stewart and Herman W. Liebert, English Portraits of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Los Angeles, 1974), pp. 3-43.

22. On the Nature of the Universe, p. 60.

23. Darkness at Noon, p. 205.

24. Body, Man, and Citizen. pp. 131 and 271.

25. Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester (London, 1680), All subsequent references are by page within the text.

26. The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot, ed. George A. Aitken (Oxford, 1892), pp. 437-38.

27. Ibid, p. 439.

28. Ibid, p. 412. On the dangers surrounding the mathematical paradigm in the later seventeenth century, see A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Fontana edition (London, 1975), p. 73.

29. Cf. Howard Erskine-Hill. ‘Rochester: Augustan or Explorer?’ in Renaissance and Modern Studies Presented to Vivian de Sola Pinto in Celebration of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. G. R. Hibbard (London, 1966), pp. 51-64, and P. C. Davies, ‘Rochester: Augustan or Explorer’ Durham University Journal. LXI (1969), 59-64.

30. See James Smith. ‘On Metaphysical Poetry’, Scrutiny, II (1933), 222-39.

31. Mary Warnock, Existentialism (London, 1970), p. 21.

32. Ibid, p. 22.