SOURCE: Rogers, Pat. “‘An Allusion to Horace.’” In Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester, edited by Jeremy Treglown, pp. 166-76. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982.

[In this essay, Rogers provides a detailed analysis of “An Allusion to Horace” to show that Rochester's poem is written in a different cultural, linguistic, and critical context than the Horatian satire on which is depends, and argues that the work should be assessed as a seventeenth-century English poem and not compared too strictly with its first-century Latin inspiration.]

The poem based on Horace's satire I. 10 has had its share of attention in recent years. It slithers in and out of the Critical Heritage volume, and it has been more extensively discussed in the past decade by Dustin H. Griffin, David Farley-Hills and others. There is also an important article by Howard Weinbrot.¹ I am in substantial agreement with the three critics named, for though they differ in some aspects of their reading they accord the poem roughly the same standing, and they have more shared assumptions than perhaps they acknowledge. All of them pay some attention to the link with the Horatian original, even if they describe this connection differently. For example, Farley-Hills argues that Rochester picks up the Dryden/Shadwell dispute ‘by using Horace's poem to Dryden's disadvantage’. He goes on to suggest that the poem finally lacks conviction because the pose on Rochester's part is itself unconvincing—that is, the adoption of a ‘role of Horatian arbiter of taste’. Weinbrot, like Griffin, notes some of the significant departures made in the later poem, and offers this statement of the general divergence: ‘Horace gains our sympathy through association with a good man of letters; Rochester through disassociation from a bad man of letters.’ He contends that there is, directly, ‘little thematic interplay between the two poems’, and speaks of Rochester's ‘refusal to be substantially in debt’. The attitude towards Horace is finally neutral: the English satirist uses the Latin as a stalking-horse or point of departure, not (as with Pope) as a constant reference and moral gauge.

Much of this recent discussion seems to me to stand up well, and I do not wish to pick quarrels here. Nor shall I attempt anything comparable to Weinbrot's valuable consideration of the meaning of an ‘imitation’ in the Restoration context. These large-scale aerial views have their place in criticism, but it may now be time to proceed to the immediate features of the landscape.

The poem's very first phrase, for instance, points up an important divergence from the model. Horace has ‘Nempe incomposito dixi pede currere versus / Lucili’ (‘To be sure, I said that the verses of Lucilius run with a halting foot’); Rochester, ‘Well Sir, 'tis granted, I said Dryden's Rhimes, / Were stoln, unequal, nay, dull many times’.² Of course, Horace is referring to a producible text and a particular occasion (the fourth satire in this first book). Rochester, on the other hand, hadn't to my knowledge said anything to the purpose in any place, and certainly not in a parallel literary undertaking. So the Latin word ‘nempe’ is supported by an authentic history of previous discourse: the implied listener really would be able to turn up the minutes to find the reference. Rochester has to mount a greater feat of rhetoric, because there has been no real situation to which the verbal gesture corresponds. The ‘ongoing dialogue’ is a fabrication, and I think this shows: it sounds more like the opening of a Donne satire than one of Horace's. From the start, then, there is something contrived or factitious about Rochester's strategy; but he doesn't care about that, as the Augustans might.

There is an interesting linguistic point at line 3. Rochester has ‘What foolish Patron … so blindly partial.’ This goes back to ‘Lucili fautor inepte’ in the original. (I think it is possible to speak of an original in this sort of case, where the earlier work is not so much paraphrased or developed as worked on, bounced off, so that it is, as it were, left intact by the imitation.) Now without the adverb ‘inepte’, the term ‘fautor’ in classical Latin merely meant a promoter or patron; the construction here suggests ‘favens’, meaning one applauding or protecting in a mindless sort of way. Translators usually import a bad sense by using an English word such as ‘partisan’. But on the surface the expression is pretty neutral, and Rochester's ‘Patron’ is apt because that term itself had not slid very far into outright opprobrium, which it sometimes later was to indicate. It's worth recalling the first sentence of Johnson's Dictionary definition, as well as the follow-up, which is all we usually remember:

Patron. One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.

What ‘commonly’ asserts is that you could support without insolence. In the present context it is certain that Rochester does wish us to have hostile feelings towards Mulgrave. But after all the drift is that Dryden gets the patron he deserves: and it's right that ‘patron’ shouldn't be an unremittingly hostile expression—that might deflect too much of the criticism away from the main object, Dryden.

In the following lines, there is something perhaps a shade awkward in the management of tenses. Rochester speaks of Dryden's plays, ‘embroider'd up and down’ with wit, as having ‘justly pleas'd the Town’. He then goes on to mention the ‘heavy Mass, / That Stuffs up his loose Volumes’. Now plays are interesting because, even if they stay in the current repertoire, they tend to be identified with their first presentation on stage. As against Lucilius, available to Horace chiefly in terms of written works—texts, with their continuous present—Dryden is here first located by reference to dramas put on in the recent past. This is important, because it helps to elide one of the great differences in the subject-matter of the two poems. Lucilius is safely dead, a couple of generations back. Dryden is not merely alive, but, as we can now confirm with hindsight, not yet at his literary peak; he is still there in the argument. Horace has to face only the Lucilius party among contemporary critics; but at any moment Dryden may rise up and make his own contribution to the debate. This sense of a live opponent lends a certain menace to the ‘Allusion’ which is highly characteristic of Rochester, and the sort of thing he turns to good poetic effect. One might point up the difference by saying that Horace is using a literary controversy with personal overtones, whilst Rochester is using a personal controversy with literary implications. But this would be going a little too far. The main issue is that past and present have different relations, and Rochester's sequence of tenses is coping with that fact.

I am aware that this is to simplify the cultural situation on both sides of the comparison. For example, in the case of Horace, Fraenkel makes it clear that the poet is taking sides ‘in a struggle between rival literary parties … His place is on the side of Virgil, Varius, Asinius Pollio … and of all those associated with them. Horace is proud to belong to this circle; without overreaching himself (haec ego ludo) he knows that he has contributed and is contributing his proper share to the common effort.’³ Fraenkel even speaks of the poem as ‘the manifesto of an advancing force’. Similarly, in respect of Dryden, we must obviously read between the lines a subtext of implication which derives from Dryden's critical pronouncements. As Vieth points out, there is extensive reference, beginning at line 81, to the essay ‘On the Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age’, the more pointed because that essay makes significant use of this very satire by Horace.⁴ Less directly, when words such as ‘wit’, ‘fancy’, ‘spirit’ and ‘grace’ crop up we may be invited to hear echoes of Dryden's own discussions of imaginative qualities, for example in his preface to Annus Mirabilis, with its touchstone of ‘apt, significant, and sounding words’.⁵ But the simplification is not very damaging if we hold on to the central distinction, which is that Rochester has the beast in view in a very real sense.

One surprising degree of literalism occurs at line 25, when Rochester advises the poet ‘Your Rethorick with your Poetry unite’. The phrasing is obviously infected by the terms used by Horace: ‘… modo rhetoris atque poetae’. Are we meant to think primarily of oratory, as the Latin noun would direct us? Eighty years later, Johnson would define Rhetorick primarily as ‘the act of speaking not merely with propriety, but with art and elegance’ (the instances he uses being all taken from the post-Rochester period: Dryden, Locke and Thomas Baker). Only as a secondary sense do we get ‘the power of persuasion, oratory’, with examples from Shakespeare, Milton and Fairfax. Up to the middle of the seventeenth century, one would expect the latter sense to be the dominant one. Is Rochester importing some of the newer overtones, by a sort of pun on Horace's terminology? The Oxford English Dictionary's sense 3: ‘skill in of faculty of using eloquent or persuasive language’ might be the nearest, but I leave this question to better scholars of the period.

Moving on to line 32, we encounter an interesting epithet, ‘refined’ Etherege. Of course, ‘gentle George’ was a friend and ally of Rochester. But if you stick closely to the order and logic of Horace's original, you could just place Etherege after the equivalents to the writers of old comedy (here, Shakespeare and Jonson) and before the aping and tedious Flatman. That would mean that Etherege corresponds to ‘pulcher Hermogenes’. The Loeb translation⁶ here has ‘the fop Hermogenes’; it is true that ‘pulcher’ could mean excellent or noble, but the overtones of the translation seem right. Could there be any kind of covert allusion to Sir Fopling Flutter, who first appeared on the stage at the very juncture when (according to Vieth) the satire was written? Could there, that is, be a suggestion, however affectionate and oblique, of ‘over-refined’, ‘too fastidiously elegant’? There is certainly some such element in Swift's use of ‘refine’, ‘refined’, ‘refinement’ a generation later.

Next, we come to a bit of evidence on the ‘dog that did not bark’ pattern. Rochester's decision not to supply a parallel to Horace's short autobiographical excursus can be explained by the different course his argument is taking around line 40 and following. He does not seem to have tried very hard to find an equivalent to Horace's reference to the mixture of Latin and Greek in Lucilius. Pope had no trouble in using French as an updated version of Greek in the Epistle to Augustus (line 263 and following). It is true that Dryden had not obliged by producing macaronic verse, but Rochester could have got round this. He evidently did not want to introduce too much by way of autobiography: it might reinforce the sense of a merely personal attack. As it is, Horace's charming conceit, lines 31-5 of the original, is simply lost.

The case for Rochester's ‘un-Augustan’ phrasing and outlook is supported in lines 69-70:

Till the poor vanquish't Maid dissolves away,
In Dreams all Night, in Sighs, and Tears all day.

A hard-line Augustan could scarcely have resisted the yawning opportunity for a chiasmus in the second line, either by recasting the line as ‘All Night in Dreams, in Sighs and Tears all Day’, or by revamping the couplet altogether:

The melting Maid is vanquisht quite,
By day in Sighs and Tears, in Dreams by night.

Not as good as Rochester, but it does show how easy it is to make the Augustan architecture spring up at command, and to get the emphases more pronounced.

I pass on to the culminating passage, that directly implicating Dryden. At line 75, Vieth simply notes: ‘A “dry-bob” is coition without emission.’ Certainly; but we are now so used to the obscene that we may not always realize when strong poetry takes the form of turning to obscene ends an innocent phrase. The point underlying Rohester's expression ‘a dry bawdy bob’ is that a familiar phrase is being travestied. A ‘dry bob’ had a more ordinary or at least more respectable meaning in the sense of ‘a taunt, bitter jest, or jibe’ (OED)—very common right through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But OED also gives a more literal meaning, ‘A blow that does not break the skin’. This is surely much to the point. Dryden, though full of lubricity, is impotent, not just sexually but as a would-be damaging wit. To pursue the indelicate side of the phrase to the exclusion of all else is to miss an important part of the critique.

What then of the famous phrase ‘Poet Squab’? I had always assumed this was a vague mode of abuse, based on the common sense of squab as ‘short and plump’. But there seems to be more contemporary relevance in an alternative meaning, ‘unfledged, raw, inexperienced’. That is how OED glosses the use by Shadwell in The Medal of John Bayes, and I think it must be applicable here too. The notion of Dryden in the middle 1670s as a callow youth may strike us as inapt, but the logic of lines 71-6 seems to rely on this idea of a green aspirant to the honours of Venus. Indeed, are not these lines very close in spirit to the famous story which Colley Cibber told of Pope—when the young man was ‘slily seduced … to a certain House of Carnal Recreation, near the Hay-Market … [to] see what sort of Figure a Man of his Size, Sobriety, and Vigour (in Verse) would make, when the frail Fit of Love had got into him’? The ‘little-tiny Manhood’ of the poet is duly aroused, and Cibber righteously comes to the rescue of ‘this little hasty Hero, like a terrible Tom Tit’, when he is in danger of doing himself an irreparable injury.⁷ One can surely detect in the passage by Rochester the scorn of a practised libertine for the bungling ineptitude of a piffling author attempting to turn urbane lover.

Lines 79-80 again have a lower autobiographical quotient. Rochester uses the image of a laurel distantly, dispassionately almost. Horace had said exactly the same thing in lines 48-9 of his satire, but in his case the remark follows on a small personal claim. What is in the English poet a mere gesture, a recognized figure of speech, has a real element of competitiveness in the Latin. Rochester will not wrest the laurel, as a post facto claim; Horace will not seek to wrest the laurel by his very practice, by writing a poem in the precise vein pioneered by Lucilius.

At line 93 Rochester loses particularity and point, in limiting himself to ‘five hundred verses every morning writ’: Horace is not only more elegant but more comic in dividing the work into sessions before and after dinner. The ending of this verse paragraph is noteworthy because it endorses a mode of composition which, we may think, conflicted with Rochester's own practice, as compared with the ultra-correct Waller school:

To write what may securely pass the Test,
Of being well read over Thrice at least;
Compare each Phrase, examine ev'ry Line,
Weigh ev'ry Word and ev'ry Thought refine;
Scorn all applause the vile Rout can bestow,
And be content to please the few who know.

Farley-Hills might say this is unconvincing because it rests on an urbanity Rochester seldom commands for long at a stretch. Or, put slightly differently, that the message requires a poise and certainty of tone which the medium resists. I am not sure about this. One could surely argue that the absence of high Augustan gloss gives the passage a sort of immediacy, of catching the poet with the rubber end of his pencil at the ready. There is occasionally something of a feeling of de trop when poets like Horace and Pope call on us to blot our lines more assiduously, because we know that some of their least-blotted lines were already better than anything we shall ever achieve. Rochester has a comforting degree not exactly of incompetence, but of baldness: his technique only frays at the very edges, but fray it does on occasion. His advice seems more earned, consequently. One is always more inclined to take advice from people who find it hard to obey their own injunctions, because they can have no vanity in promoting good practices to which they do not keep.

At line 111, Rochester introduces the figure of the courtesan Betty Morice. This enables him to get in a good Restoration riposte and convey something of the flavour of court life—a gain for his poem at this juncture. It is assuredly nowhere near as polished or deft as Horace's line and a half, where the resources of an inflectional language allow him to pack so much into the participle ‘explosa’:

                                                                                          ut audax,
contemptis aliis, explosa Arbuscula dixit.

(‘As the bold Arbuscula said, scornful of the rest [of the house], as they hissed her off.’) ‘Explodo’ (‘hoot off’) was I suppose a good word in Latin, but it has become a better one in view of what has happened to the root in English. This is a supreme moment in the original satire, and whilst Rochester cannot match it he at least avoids disaster by the vivid anecdote.

One final difference, of course, is that Rochester omits the concluding farewell, and Horace's instructions to his boy to carry off his verses to add to his ‘libellus’. A great deal is lost, for Horace does not merely round off his volume (something Rochester obviously couldn't do), but gets in a typical self-deprecating, yet purposeful remark. As we saw at the start, Horace is able to suggest that the present poem is a contribution to a larger whole—less, that is, of an off-the-cuff pronouncement. With Rochester, the finality has to be achieved internally, as it were, rather than externally. This is done through the powerful and resonant lines 120-4. He borrows ‘I loathe the rabble’ from another Horatian context in the Odes and makes a fine list of friends and admirers, all of whom seem to have good mouth-filling names. The concluding line lacks the brittle symmetry which an Augustan would have devised for it, but the point is made.

Now such hedge-hopping trips as this have their limitations. Yet within the existing accounts of the poem, it seems to me, there is a lot of detail to be filled in; and to study Rochester at close range is to come away with a realization that there is a great deal going on which has been overlooked in the broader controversies over his intellectual bearings and artistic identity.

In his fine book on Horace's satires, Niall Rudd observes that ‘even if Lucilius and Horace had shared the same theories their temperaments would have led to different results’.⁸ Yes: and their techniques, as well as their temperaments. Rochester is not merely writing in a different age from Horace, about a different target. He is writing in a different linguistic and critical context, for the triumph of the new ‘Augustan’ poetics was not in 1675 yet assured. One of the great merits of ‘Allusion to Horace’ is that it lives within seventeenth-century English as the original lived in the first-century Latin. What I have tried to do is show a few of the ways in which idiom bends in response to the needs of contemporary thought and feeling.

Notes

1. Howard Weinbrot, ‘The Allusion to Horace: Rochester's Imitative Mode’, Studies in Philology, 69 (1972), 348-68.

2. Quotations from Rochester's poetry are taken from the edition by V. de Sola Pinto, Poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (2nd edn revised, 1964).

3. E. Fraenkel, Horace (1957), pp. 132-3.

4. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (1968), p. 124n.

5. Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. G. Watson (1962), I, 98.

6. Horace: Satires, Epistles and ‘Ars Poetica’, trans. H. R. Fairclough (1926, revised edn 1929), p. 117.

7. Pope: The Critical Heritage, ed. John Barnard (1973), p. 337.

8. N. Rudd, The Satires of Horace (1966), p. 117.