SOURCE: Paulson, Ronald. “Rochester: The Body Politic and the Body Private.” In The Author in His Work: Essays on a Problem in Criticism, edited by Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Williams, pp. 103-21. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1972, Paulson claims that obscenity, which is at the center of Rochester's best poems, is used as a analogy for private life.]

A man could not write with life, unless he were heated by Revenge; for to make a Satyre without Resentments, upon the cold Notions of Phylosophy, was as if a man would in cold blood, cut men's throats who had never offended him.¹

In these words spoken by the Earl of Rochester to Gilbert Burnet during their conversion dialogues it is not difficult to detect the stereotype that underlies the satirist's apologia: it may take an evil man to detect evil in others, though only out of a desire to revenge himself for their greater success. “Heated by Revenge,” however, seem to be Rochester's operative words. There is another interesting remark he dropped to Mr. Giffard, his tutor:

My Ld. had a natural Distemper upon him which was extraordinary, … which was that sometimes he could not have a stool for 3 Weeks or a Month together. Which Distemper his Lordship told him [Giffard] was a very great occasion of that warmth and heat he always expressed, his Brain being heated by the Fumes and Humours that ascended and evacuated themselves that way.²

The problem of evacuation carries over into Rochester's poems. In the persona of M.G. (Mulgrave) he writes to O.B. (“Old Bays” or Dryden) that “Perhaps ill verses ought to be confined / In mere good breeding, like unsavory wind,” and concludes:

What though the excrement of my dull brain
Runs in a costive and insipid strain,
Whilst your rich head eases itself of wit:
Must none but civit cats have leave to shit?

And this is very close to the sense of his own argument (in the persona of Horace) with Dryden in “An Allusion to Horace,” where, for example: “Yet having this allowed, the heavy mass / That stuffs up his loose volumes must not pass. …” He is criticizing Dryden's “looseness” against the norm of his own costiveness, as Horace did with Lucilius. The “warmth and heat he always expressed,” however, refer to both sexual and literary activity, emphasizing the naturalness of both but also the particular situation of a body for whom catharsis has a special meaning.

Horace writes satiric verses to ward off insomnia (“verum nequeo dormire”) and Pope responds to a fool or a knave as “Bulls aim their horns, and Asses lift their heels.” Rochester tells us he “never rhymed but for [his] pintle's sake.” Unlike Pope, who was “dipp'd in ink” as his baptism into literature, Rochester says he “dip[s his] pen in flowers” (semen or menstrual discharge). The symptoms he describes are, needless to say, those of melancholy, for which the natural outlet is ordinarily sexual fulfilment. He might have served as a case history for Robert Burton.

Rochester is the difficult transitional figure, in some ways the father of the Augustan mode of satire, in others still an Elizabethan in the tradition of the melancholy satyr-satirist of Jonson and Marston. Some poems—the satires on Sir Carr Scroope come to mind—exist simply as the vivid expression of an individual's disgust, in the ancient tradition of Archilochus's iambics, rather than as the exposure of some general truth about man. It may, of course, take an excitation of the subject to elicit a truth otherwise not noticed in the object—something like the heightened awareness arrived at by a conscious disarranging of the senses. And we have here the alternative possibilities that he associates himself so thoroughly with a particular type, a melancholiac or a Mulgrave or a “hater of Scroope,” that via impersonation a transference takes place; or that Rochester's hatred is a kind of attraction leading into the projection of an aspect of himself that he must exorcise or explore. Indeed, the relationship between his poems and his own actions (as distinct from the experience from which they may have emerged) involves the question: do the poems act as a self-criticism, a confession, and a penance for the actions; or are the actions meant to extend the disruptive effect of the satires? Rochester's involvement in the murder of Captain Downs argues for the former; his confrontation with the glass chronometers in the garden of Whitehall Palace, with his obscene but pertinent question followed by his shattering of the mechanism, argues for the latter.

Acknowledging that in his case there often seems to be a physical action in his life that corresponds in some way to a literary expression, we may start by enumerating the conventional aspects of his satires to see if anything remains that is not convention. The obscenity, for a start, was a facet of the low burlesque or travesty mode; the shock has the satiric function of awakening the reader and, by laying bare in the most vivid way his animal origins, making him reassess customary humanist values. Reacting politically and emotionally against the repressive years of the Commonwealth, many Englishmen—but most of all the Cavaliers—encouraged an attitude that was bent on exposing old pious frauds and treating grave subjects like love or life with disrespect. Long before Charles II's return from his travels, the discrediting of something so ostensibly upright as the Puritan led naturally to travesty as a satiric form. The Puritans presented and regarded themselves as paragons, and so allying them with greed for money or power and secret sexual proclivities was intended to expose the real man under the false appearance of saintliness. Begun by Rump Songs, the tradition was carried on by Samuel Butler's attacks on the Puritans in Hudibras, Cotton's irreverence for heroic attitudes in his Scarronides, and Rochester's attacks on the court and the morals of his age in both word and deed.

Elsewhere I have argued that travesty as a satiric device was as necessary for the anti-court forces as the mock-heroic was for the procourt forces.³ The latter began with an assumption of the high position of king and court and showed the upstart's presumption in aspiring toward that unassailable position. The aim of the anti-court satire was to show the real hollowness, human weakness, and corruption beneath the rich and respectable, supposedly divine, facade of the court. The obvious corruption of Charles II's court and his personal predilections, like the worldliness of many of the most pious Puritans, made such an approach almost irresistible.

It is a revealing fact that the best of the anti-court satirists were also “court wits” who, though having gone over to the Opposition, shared Charles's libertine skepticism and had helped to give his court the bad name at which they leveled their diatribes. The belief in the efficacy of release and reliance on instinct that contributes to the libertine complex led to the cynical dictum that reality can be found only in the crudest sensuality; the close scrutiny of kings and their mistresses offered another way to this insight. Travesty then ends as a double revelation, of a gross reality masquerading under a glittering appearance, and of the only true reality. Love becomes obscene and life scatological in order to expose certain simpleminded illusions (or hypocrisies), but also because experience proves that love and life are no more than obscene and scatological, that perhaps this is all there is.

Obscenity, though at the center of Rochester's best poems, almost never appears alone; it is the private half of a basic analogy between public and private life.⁴ Sexuality offered the most impressive symbol available for the private world, drawing upon an impressive tradition of satirists who wished to remind man of his unheroic, animal self. Even the “gentle” Horace had used sexual lust as a metaphor for a general lack of control in man (satire 1.2). The Puritan emphasis on sexual violation as the darkest of sins, and the court's opposite view, served as further authorities for the intensity of the symbol at this moment of history. There have been few occasions when sex as a vehicle has been closer to the tenor of the satire.

“The Scepter Lampoon” begins with a negative simile relating two kings—Charles II of England is not like the foolish Louis XIV of France—and then proceeds to prove that they are precisely alike. The first couplet gives us the generalization that England is famous “For breeding the best cunts in Christendom,” as the second couplet parallels this fact about England with the wonderful appropriateness of its king, Charles, the “easiest King and best-bred man alive.” The third couplet then contrasts the peaceful Charles with the war-loving Louis, who is characterized by his frantic, meaningless soldiering: he “wanders up and down / Starving his souldiers hazarding his Crown.” Opposed to him is Charles: “Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such, / And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.” The equation becomes explicit when we are told of Charles that (like Louis who “wanders up and down” fighting wars) “Restless he rolls about from whore to whore, / A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.”⁵ Kingship is the subject of the poem: Louis's kind of kingship is compared with Charles's, the one a game of war, the other a game of love, and the conclusion is, “All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on, / From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.” They share a common lack of serious purpose, abdication of the duties of kingship, and a frenzied, compulsive, and altogether pointless activity.

The initial analogy between war and lust remains implicit, but our attention is focused in the larger part of the poem on Charles and the second half of the comparison, which becomes an equation of Charles's scepter with his sexual organ (and, by implication, Louis's scepter with his sword). Since the king is in an important sense the state, public and private life are one, and the king's body is the body politic; and so quite appropriately for Charles, “His scepter and his prick are of a length.” The vehicle of the metaphor—as befits an effective lampoon—is taken from the material of the tenor or subject: Louis did wage wars and Charles did have numerous whores. The metaphor is based on a physical resemblance and on a causality between private and public actions. The whore “may sway the one who plays with th' other,” and, in effect, Charles's lust determines policy; conversely, his policy is characterized by the changeableness of his passion. And so when Rochester says that Charles's lust is now so jaded that Nell Gwynn can barely arouse it to action, he is saying the same for Charles's rule of the country.

Rochester begins the “Scepter Lampoon” with a contrast of war and lust, which could appear to be public as opposed to private activities (war is traditionally a public duty of kings). By equating them he not only exposes the frantic meaninglessness of Charles's lust (this is the part that adheres to Charles from the “war” half of the equation), but also reduces the idea of war to a level with whoring. The official view was that war was public and whoring private, that a king's public acts were separate from his private. Charles replied to Rochester's lines “He never said a foolish thing, / Nor ever did a wise one” that he was responsible for his words, his ministers for his actions. Rochester demonstrates that they are a unity.⁶

Rochester follows the same procedure in a nonpolitical poem, one of those that used to be taken as autobiographical, “The Disabled [or Maimed] Debauchee.” Again he begins with the false praise of his subject, in this case debauchery:

As some brave admiral, in former war
          Deprived of force, but pressed with courage still,
.....So, when my days of impotence approach,
          And I'm by pox and wine's unlucky chance. …

It takes six stanzas, however, to connect the retired admiral and the old poxed rake—six stanzas which elevate debauchery to the level of a heroic duty, war. The continuum is somewhat ambiguous to be sure: debauchery and war share such noble attributes as “courage,” “daring,” “boldness,” “glory,” and ideas of excitement and vigor, as opposed to “the dull shore of lazy temperance.” And yet both are clearly dangerous, causing disabling wounds, and with the “honorable” scars of the syphilitic that are paid for by “past joys” a mock-heroic effect emerges.

Then in stanzas 9 to 11 the speaker presents a close-up of love-war, only indicated before through the admiral's rose-tinted telescope, and a different kind of soldiering emerges. It is no longer the beautiful abstraction of war but the physical reality of pillaging, reminiscent of Callot's Misères de la guerre: “whores attacked, … Bawds' quarters beaten up, and fortress won; / Windows demolished, watches overcome; … some ancient church [put] to fire. …” As these images suggest, the references are to lovemaking as a frenzied, destructive, pointless activity, which reaches its nadir in the link-boy episode, with the matter of whether the rake or his mistress will enjoy the link-boy's favors, a matter to be decided by whose kiss is the better (37-40).⁷

The debauchery and the love-war parallel are the same as Charles's rolling about “from whore to whore” and Louis's warring. The metaphor begins again with a clearly separated tenor and vehicle, but the two parts merge into a single image of debauching soldiers; what starts as a comparison or a contrast becomes a unity, or a mutual travesty. If the reality beneath the rake's glamor is squabbling with whores, it is much the same with the soldier. In both the public and the private parts of the comparison, a public aspect—a glamorous appearance—is reduced to a private, which is a squalid reality. The assumed but invisible term that joins the rake and the admiral is gallantry or some such attractive abstraction. The poem is composed in the stanzaic form of Gondibert, Davenant's heroic poem which contains all the “gallantry” of the sort Rochester is referring to, but treated grandiosely. Davenant portrays the kind of battle “Where even the vanquish'd so themselves behave, / The victors mourn for all they could notsave.”⁸ Rochester begins by setting up a high ideal against which to measure debauchery; but very soon both soldiering and debauchery are exposed as the ugly reality underlying the gallant Gondibert stanzas and the heroic talk of old poxed rakes. The whoremonger talks like an admiral; but, as the mock-heroic effect changes to travesty, the admiral behaves like a whoremonger.⁹

The metaphor of love-war is, of course, an ancient Petrarchan cliché. Rochester's use of it is still close to conventional love parlance in “Second Prologue to the ‘Empress of Morocco’”: when he addresses the king with “your prosperous arms” he refers both to Charles's war with the Dutch and his amorous powers. The “Millions of cupids, hovering in the rear” are “like eagles following fatal troops,” both awaiting “the slaughter” of the warriors in the play and the lovers of the outside world, including the audience in the theater and the king. Rochester's translation of Ovid's Amores 2.9 demonstrates his appropriation of the metaphor. Ovid's lines (in Humphries's translation),

Old soldiers, their long term of service over,
Retire to acres given by the state,
And an old race horse kicks his heels in clover
When he is done with breaking from the gate,

which refer to the peace an old lover desires, become in Rochester's translation:

But the old soldier has his resting place,
And the good battered horse is turned to grass.
The harassed whore, who lived a wretch to please,
Has leave to be a bawd and take her ease.
For me, then, who have freely spent my blood,
Love, in thy service, and so boldly stood. … [etc.]

The last four lines, Rochester's addition of his own metaphor, carry the matter into “Celia's trenches” and toward another “Disabled Debauchee.” In his rendering of Ovid, the love-war relationship is causally linked: “With doubtful steps the god of war does move / By thy example led, ambiguous Love.” Cupid is directing Mars as Charles's sexual organ does him.

Rochester's poetry projects a situation in which the two areas of experience, public and (illustrated by sexuality) private, are for all practical purposes one. In “Timon” a bore's attempt to lure a gentleman to his dinner party is compared to a whore's soliciting; the meat and carrots served are arses and dildoes; the lady's question to Huff (“if love's flame he never felt”) is answered, “Do you think I'm gelt”; the diners go into heroic verses about war from plays, which lead into talk about actual war (Huff and Dingboy at dinner are the equivalent of kings and generals and admirals running the war), and a squabble among the diners ends with a “peace” treaty. The correspondence appears in the most incidental imagery. In “The Imperfect Enjoyment” the speaker's organ would “invade, / Woman or Boy”;¹⁰ it “Breaks ev'ry stew, does each small whore invade.” In Satyr against Reason and Mankind the distrust accorded wits is like that accorded whores by the clients who fear the consequences of their pleasure;¹¹ and in Artemisia to Chloe “whore is scarce a more reproachful name / Than poetess.” In all of these “whore” is connected with a perversion of natural feeling that reflects on a similar perversion in the tenor of the comparison. By inference, friendship and not social climbing should be the occasion for dinners, as true love and not prostitution should be for sexual satisfaction.

The distinction between nature and its perversion points to the meaning of Rochester's sexual metaphor. In the example of Charles and Louis the terms would be freedom (nature) and license (perversion). Charles's behavior is to the ideal (or in his terms, the romantic illusion) of kingship as uncontrolled lust is to love. The relationship between the terms becomes somewhat more complex in “The Disabled Debauchee.” The squabbling, the destruction, and the treatment of the link-boy might easily have been presented as praiseworthy freedom, opposed to the chains of custom; even the burning of “some Ancient Church” might have been shown to be a laudable gesture. But the poem presents such actions as mechanical parts of a rigid pattern of behavior passed down from debauched rakes (or retired admirals); their libertine function of freeing the human spirit is not operative.

Rochester makes his point by the comparison in the last stanza of the impotent debauchee to a statesman who sends out youths to battle. Both stand back and watch others killed for an abstraction that was once perhaps real to them: “And being good for nothing else, be wise.” It is wise to stay out of these actions but wisdom is actually mere impotence, since as long as one is able he does the unwise thing. Implicit is a contrast between two kinds of wisdom, natural (the instinct that drove the old debauchee to “Love and Wine” in his youth); and the so-called wisdom of counsellors and statesmen who curb the instinctive actions of others.

However meaningless the rake's actions in the past, Rochester implies a moral distinction between them and his present generalizations. The fact that the admiral is so feeble that he “crawls” up the hill is contrasted with his eyes that cannonlike emit “flashes of rage”; and, to the accompaniment of the rhymes “courage still” and “adjacent hill,” he shows his courage by climbing a safe hill and watching the combat through a telescope. There was something good in the vice at the time—it was at least a self-fulfillment of some kind—which has been completely expunged now in the old impotent rake's proselytizing. He has himself become a symbol of the custom he flouted. (Even the stanza form underlines the formalized quality of the vice now that it is promulgated as a doctrine by the impotent debauchee.) To generalize from one's own experience is probably the greatest sin represented in the poem, coming close to Rochester's definition of custom (and also underlying his lines on Charles II, who never said a foolish thing, nor ever did a wise one).¹²

If to generalize from one's own experience is the greatest sin, what then is the “Rochester” in his works? His own ambivalence about the difference between saying and doing, or between public and private parameters, is expressed in the following lines:

Should hopeful youths(13) (worth being drunk) prove nice,
          And from his fair inviter meanly shrink,
'Twill please the ghost of my departed vice
          If, at my counsel, he repent and drink.

Here “hopeful,” “worth,” “fair,” “meanly,” and “repent” are so ambiguous as to be pivotal words between the two parts of the poem. In terms of Rochester's own experience there was the heroic sea battle in which he had fought bravely but also witnessed the bloody death of Montagu; there were the later shadowy acts which were called (at least by some) cowardice and the fact that he was ill and prematurely aged.¹⁴

In “The Imperfect Enjoyment” the “brave Youth” who may “meanly shrink” has become the speaker's own sexual organ which “shrinks, and hides his head.” He addresses it to curse it:

When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way,
With what officious haste dost thou obey!
Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets
Who scuffles, cuffs, and justles all he meets,
But if his King or country claim his aid,
The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head.

Here is the resumé of all we have seen associated with evil in Rochester's satires. The activity of the “roaring hector” is exactly that of the debauching soldiers in “The Disabled Debauchee”; and any old whore versus the woman he loves is the private part of a comparison with king or country, street fights, and civil chaos. But the poem is not about whores and street fights but the poet's unruly organ, which can succeed with whores but not with his true love (and, by the terms of the comparison, cannot serve his king and country as it ought). We might say that when he talks about a personal problem like his impotence he is really talking about a much larger issue, which he can feel so strongly because of the analogy to his own plight. The king's body (body politic) is also manifest in the microcosm of the body-Rochester.

In “The Imperfect Enjoyment” and “A Ramble in St. James's Park” the public half of the analogy can only be inferred; or, rather, the sexual experience has become a synecdoche for more general considerations of life. The “Ramble” begins with a short history of St. James's Park and a situation parallel to that of the speaker. The origin of the park, according to legend, was “an antient pict” lover who was jilted by his love. His natural object being thwarted, he resorted to masturbation, fertilizing the ground and giving birth to the sinister foliage which now conceals such lewd, unnatural behavior as the pict was forced into: “And nightly now beneath their shade / Are buggeries, rapes, and incests made.” These—like the link-boy episode in “The Disabled Debauchee”—are the unnatural outlets for man's normal and natural passion for women. The speaker himself has been jilted by Corinna for a pair of fops, and while he admits “There's something generous in mere lust,” he rails at this “abandoned jade” who mechanically copulates with any male who happens along, engaging in a meaningless activity divorced from affection or love, and his railing points ultimately toward the leather phallus of “Signior Dildo” which replaces the human agent entirely. The speaker's romantic love is an ideal behind the indictment of the restless woman, but his own reaction is as sterile and aimless as the ancient pict's: he merely loads curses on Corinna's head, and the outlet of outraged and pointless ejaculation is paralleled by this outpouring of invective.

Rochester's explanation for the perversion of love—and so of all other human relationships—develops in two divergent lines. One in purely satiric terms, as in the poems we have mentioned so far, places the blame on the opposite extremes of license and custom. The Restoration gentleman presumably follows the middle road of libertine love, hindered by neither marriage, indiscriminate lust, nor ideal love. This is part of the pose that connects Rochester's satires with the great comedies being written by Etherege and Wycherley.

The other explanation is hinted at in the implication that the speaker of the “Ramble” could not get together with Corinna because of a similar but unfortunately definitive trouble between Adam and Eve. Rochester's fable, turning St. James's Park into a version of Eden, suggests a certain hopelessness in the situation of present-day man, a hopelessness which surfaces in his letters when he remarks that there is “soe greate a disproportion 'twixt our desires and what is ordained to content them” that love is impossible.¹⁵ The various unnatural channels chronicled are all that is left: masturbation, invective or satire, and whores.

“The Imperfect Enjoyment,” a pessimistic resolution to the problem of the “Ramble,” is an adaptation of Ovid's Amores 3.7. The latter celebrates the impossibility of controlling the flesh, but though it recalls the speaker's past successes with other women, it makes no distinction between them and the present one; this one is a whore, and so presumably were all the others. In Rochester's poem the whores are contrasted with the true love in whose arms he now lies, as lust with romantic love. In effect, Rochester says that even if the girl of the “Ramble” came to him he would be unable to achieve a consummation because he loves her, because he has an ideal image of her; not only do we have no control over our bodies, but they can satisfy only the pattern of lust, not the patternless complexity of love. This is an extreme statement, which even Swift does not approach, of a Strephon who doesn't need to get into Chloe's dressing room; under the most felicitous circumstances he simply could not bridge the gap between ideal and real.

Something is to be said about the relationship between the impotence in these poems (sexual, royal, moral) and the profligacy or license of the mistress who is merely a “passive pot to spend in” or “The joy at least of a whole Nation”: “On her no Showers unwelcome fall, / Her willing womb retains 'em all.” The receptivity of the woman is matched by the “looseness” of Rochester with any passing whore, of other “lovers” like Charles II, and, to extend the metaphor, of writers like Dryden (in the “Allusion to Horace”). For impotence / constipation is a general malady of Rochester / Charles, who say wisely but act foolishly, while the world around is full of mere “looseness.” The custom of respect or “love” is the trap in which such as Rochester and the king, and many of his subjects, find themselves when confronted by “king” or “loved one” or any hallowed ideal. The organ will not respond. The only alternative to the costive, in love or art or politics, is the loose.

“Kings and Princes,” Rochester wrote to Henry Savile, “are only as Incomprehensible as what they pretend to represent; but apparently as Frail as Those they Govern.”¹⁶ It is certainly noticeable that Rochester attacks in others (like Charles) what he comes around to attacking in himself. Their mutual impotence and inability to relate public and private life become the insight that one must be satisfied with whores and link-boys; Rochester turns this knowledge into a private version of the body politic metaphor, an image of the whole world's decline that looks forward to Swift's use of his own body in his Irish poems. We might, in fact, say that Rochester projects his plight into poems about the monarchy in the same way that Swift projects his into poems extending from political lampoons to “A Beautiful Young Nymph going to Bed.” Rochester must have seen himself as a representative man (certainly so by 1676, when Dorimant appeared), fully as representative as the king: and it is at this point that he begins to project his alternative selves—versions of damnation, pride, and conversion. When he enquires of the postboy the way to hell, he is told: “The readiest way, my Lord, 's by Rochester.” That is, by way of the city of Rochester, toward the sea and France; but also by playing the Earl of Rochester, or by his example, or by being himself.

Rochester's career comes to a climax, or a watershed, in 1675-76: his greatest poems are written around this time and he begins seriously to extend his poetry into life in various forms, looking toward his conversion and death. It is also the time when the two great comedies of the Restoration, The Country Wife and The Man of Mode, are first performed, reflecting Rochester mimetically and metaphorically. We know from contemporary evidence that he was seen as the model for Dorimant,¹⁷ but Horner is equally Rochester, because Wycherley makes him a symbol in precisely the way that Rochester was making himself one. The most immediate analogue (whether source or allusion is not certain) is Harcourt's remark that Horner, like “an old married general, when unfit for action, is fittest for counsel” (3.2). Horner is a symbol that combines the repletion or retention with the covert release by both sexual and satiric catharsis that we have seen in Rochester's satire. The pose of impotence is a device for exposing the lust of the hypocritical women and the complaisance of their husbands, an outlet equally for his sexual and for his satiric satisfaction. The satire depends on the private-public analogy of Horner and the world, as of sex and china, which is painted, decorated, and collected to conceal its earthy origins.

But this is a masquerade which also educes a reality, an otherwise invisible aspect of the man. Horner's pose of impotence is a symbol of his own real moral impotence, and with him the moral (and social and political) impotence of English society as a whole. The sense in which Horner is really impotent is like that in which Volpone is really sick. Moreover, Rochester's masquerade as Alexander Bendo is very reminiscent of Horner, who derives in more ways than one from Volpone, another actor whose repertory included the role of mountebank, a self-disguise to expose politicians and clergymen and other more respectable mountebanks. In Rochester's (Bendo's) words, “the Politician is, & must be a Mountebank in State Affairs, and the Mountebank no doubt … is an errant Politician in Physick.”¹⁸ Bendo begins by distinguishing true physician and quack but then blurs them into one, together with politicians and clergymen. Rochester's impersonations transform the private man momentarily into the public; they extend from mountebank and city merchant to naval hero, peer sitting in the House of Lords, rake “some years always drunk, and … ever doing some mischief,”¹⁹ coward refusing to duel with Mulgrave, and atheist turned convert.²⁰ Etherege and Wycherley recorded some aspects of the impersonation, as later Gilbert Burnet and Robert Parsons recorded the drama of conversion and a “good death,” mixing life and art in a way that is central to Rochester.

Parsons, Rochester's mother's chaplain, stresses Rochester's “commands to me, to preach abroad, and to let all men know (if they knew it not already,) how severely God had disciplined him for his sins by his afflicting hand.”²¹ I have no doubt that Rochester's urge for publication was conscious: both Burnet and Parsons were his amanuenses, the first of the conversations leading up to conversion, the second of the funeral sermon describing the conversion, with the appropriate text from the parable of the prodigal son. The passage from Isaiah 53 which converted Rochester did so, I rather suspect, because of its transference of his own situation to the “Suffering Servant” of Jahveh who is a prophecy of the suffering Christ:

He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief … he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.²²

Rochester must, at some level of consciousness, have remembered Lady Fidget's words to Horner:

But, poor gentleman, could you be so generous, so truly a man of honour, as for the sakes of us women of honour, to cause yourself to be reported no man? No man! And to suffer yourself the greatest shame that could fall upon a man, that none might fall upon us women by your conversation?

[2.1]

The portrait Rochester commissioned of Huysmann (c. 1675) shows the poet with an ape. In a reciprocal action he offers the ape his bays, and the ape (emblematic of imitation) offers the poet a page he has torn out of a book; he is aping the poet, sitting on a pile of books with another in his hand, a finger marking the place where he has stopped reading or has torn out pages. Rochester himself, however, is holding in his other hand a number of manuscript pages, aping the ape. Sir John Vanbrugh was later to put an ape holding a mirror atop his monument to Congreve at Stowe, but that ape could be Congreve's subject (“Vitae imitatio, / Consuetudinis Comoedia”). Rochester juxtaposes himself with the ape in a gesture of mutual give-and-take: the ape is his double.²³ Rochester has chosen not a satyr, in either of its aspects, but an emblem of the satirist's imitative faculty and his own apish aspect, which reaches into his poems (“like an ape's mock face, / By near resembling man do man disgrace”) and into his life (he owned an ape and remarked to Savile that it is “a Fault to laugh at the Monkey we have here, when I compare his Condition with Mankind”).²⁴

Barely glimpsed in the upper right corner, beyond the pillar before which Rochester stands, are an arch and trees and sky—hints of another life. The reference is to Rochester in the country, his wife, and his recoveries from life in the court and city. The country, he writes to Savile, becomes the place “where, only, one can think; for, you at Court think not at all; or, at least, as if you were shut up in a drum; you can think of nothing, but the noise that is made about you.”²⁵ Country seems to be almost outside the public-private division; or at least it serves Rochester, as it later did Pope, as a place to stand from which to look back at the riot of the city. He told Burnet that “when he was well furnished with materials [from the city], he used to retire into the country for a month or two to write libels.”²⁶

But in the country there was also the distinction between Adderbury, the retreat with his wife and children, and Woodstock, where with his wilder companions he revived the city in the country—or, perhaps, with friends like Buckingham plotted Country Party strategy against the court. Woodstock was near Ditchley, the house in which he spent his childhood and in which his mother lived, separated (as the name implies) from Woodstock by a ditch—with beyond the ditch the pious dowager Lady Rochester; and then at some distance further north, almost to Banbury, the wife and family waiting at Adderbury.²⁷

We have strayed from the poetry into the conversations and letters and beyond. Since we will never know what Rochester really was, any more than what Charles II or the times were, we ought to prefer the fictions that derive from Rochester himself. His two earliest surviving poems, of 1660, associate him and Charles II as son and father. He was born into a relationship with the great world of the court, and specifically with Charles II: his father, Lord Wilmot, had saved Charles at Worcester. In that scene Wilmot was to Charles as father to son, and Rochester becomes, in his own terms at least, both son and brother (or alter ego) to Charles. Whether Rochester wrote these verses of 1660 (he would have been only thirteen), or whether they were revised or even dictated by his mentor Robert Whitehall, nonetheless the two poems express the essential relationship that emerged. The king took over the dead father's role, supervised Rochester's education at Oxford, his grand tour, his life at court thereafter (navy and pension), and chose a wife for him. But this father/brother was also a slave to his lusts, and his energies were scattered when they should have been focused on his duty/queen/kingdom/son/subjects—and so it is no surprise that Rochester wrote attacks on the king that could have been directed at himself and eventually, in his last year, went over to the Opposition—which was, of course, centered on the crisis of the Succession, the replacement of the brother York with the bastard son Monmouth.²⁸ The protagonist of “A Ramble through St. James's Park” and “The Imperfect Enjoyment” could have been either Rochester himself or Charles II: as the kind of projection of omnipotence in Bajazet could have been of the illusory power and real impotence of either.

The poems show Charles II, the father surrogate, transformed from a threatening figure to the other side of the poet, the harmless, impotent, castrated, uxorious man—the costive man of wise words and bungled deeds, safer in the country but always yearning for the city.²⁹ What we do know is that Rochester's mother's ancestral sympathies were Puritan, while his father (whom he can have met no more than once, when he was eight) was the staunchest of cavaliers, who saved and served Charles until his death, separated from his wife and son (when he returned that once he was travelling in disguise on a secret mission directing Royalist conspiracies to undermine the Puritan Commonwealth). Perhaps the father, in that one return, seemed a threat to the son's own monopoly of his mother, or a threat to his own identity. Presumably something of Rochester's association with his father and his glamor persisted in the life at court in London and at sea, but Rochester always followed it with a return to the country to be near his mother, to meditate and write (although keeping Woodstock at hand in which to live like a cavalier).

He disguised himself as the low to expose the low in everyone, even the highest; but also to destroy—or replace or atone for—his own identity as John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, or as Dorimant or Bendo, moving toward what the Puritans would have considered a conversion and rebirth. But only the final conversion of many, if we look back at the poems and masquerades. The satirist perhaps requires (as Evelyn Waugh's diaries of the 1920s show) the pleasure of debauchery followed by deep Puritan hangovers. Certainly from his mother's letters we see that his “conversion” (which remains as ambiguous as Dorimant's retreat to the country with Harriet), the final immolation of the father, brought him home to her. There remained a ditch between Woodstock, where he died, and Ditchley and his pious childhood; but he broke, with his final gesture, the Puritan aim of private but exemplary salvation away from the cavalier's public duty to crown.

Notes

1. Gilbert Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of Rochester (1680), in Rochester: The Critical Heritage, ed. David Farley-Hills (London, 1972), p. 54.

2. The Remains of Thomas Hearne, ed. John Bliss, rev. John Buchanan-Brown (Carbondale, 1966), p. 122. One thinks at once of Swift's “Digression on Madness” but also of Freud's Wolf-Man. The latter suggests that, like the Wolf-Man, Rochester was unable to have a bowel movement for long periods without the assistance of an enema: “… spontaneous evacuations did not occur for months at a time,” writes Freud, “unless a sudden excitement from some particular direction intervened, as a result of which normal activity of the bowels might set in for a few days. His principal subject of complaint was that for him the world was hidden in a veil, or that he was cut off from the world by a veil. This veil was torn only at one moment—when, after an enema, the contents of the bowel left the intestinal canal; and then he felt well and normal again” (Freud, Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey, vol. 17 [1955], pp. 74-75). In other details as well the two cases may be similar; but the conventionality of the metaphor, as it extends from medical treatises to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy to Swift's Tale of a Tub, needs little documentation.

3. See my Fictions of Satire (Baltimore, 1967), pp. 106-07, from which the present essay takes off.

4. David Vieth has done more than anyone else to make Rochester available to us in his Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester's Poems of 1680 (New Haven, 1963) and his edition, The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (New Haven, 1968). One full-length study, Dustin H. Griffin's Satires against Man: The Poems of Rochester (Berkeley, 1973), has appeared, as have a number of enlightening essays. Some of these will be mentioned in the notes that follow; here I shall mention only Vieth's “Toward an Anti-Aristotelian Poetic: Rochester's Satyr against Mankind and Artemisia to Chloe, with Notes on Swift's Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels,” Language and Style 5 (1972): 123-45, because Vieth has gradually changed his view from that of Rochester as proto-Augustan to something much closer to the view expressed in this essay. For two essays that are close to my own view of Rochester, see Carole Fabricant, “Rochester's World of Imperfect Enjoyment,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 73 (1974): 338-50, and “Rochester's Valentinian and the Subversion of the Augustan Hierarchy,” MLR, forthcoming, on the demythologizing mode in Rochester.

5. My text is Vieth's Complete Poems, where he calls the poem “A Satyr on Charles II.” For the problem of the arrangement of the lines, see p. 193 and Vieth, “Rochester's ‘Scepter’ Lampoon on Charles II,” Philological Quarterly 37 (1958): 424-32.

6. Swift may have had the “Scepter Lampoon” in mind when he wrote: “The very same Principle that influences a Bully to break the Windows of a Whore, who has jilted him, naturally stirs up a Great Prince to raise mighty Armies, and dream nothing but Sieges, Battles, and Victories” (Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith [2d ed., 1958], p. 165).

7. The link-boy may be a Rochester confessional purging or merely another way to outrage. It was not part of the rake's image, except perhaps for some innuendos in The Country Wife, where Marjorie dresses as a boy and is attacked by Horner, and in the character of Fidelio in The Plain Dealer. In general we must regard the link-boy in Rochester as we would in a satire of Juvenal, as a perversion of normal human activities.

8. Argument to Canto 5. The possibility must not be overlooked, however, that Dryden's Annus Mirabilis, with the same stanzaic form, intervened; and the reference could as well be to that glorification of specifically British arms. Rymer noticed the allusion to Gondibert in his preface to Rochester's Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1691), p. A4, as did Pope in his copy of Rochester's Poems (1696, p. 97); noted by Griffin, Satires against Man, p. 48.

9. This sort of metaphor may have been a reflection of the virtual consonance felt by Dryden and many of his contemporaries among the worlds of politics, religion, art, and literature. Rochester participates in this tradition but with a conclusion far less sanguine than Dryden's—perhaps because he chooses the two parts of a travesty contrast, public and private, whereas Dryden relates science/politics or literature/politics in a concordia discors, or a way of showing the unity within apparently disparate areas of experience.

10. I prefer the 1680 edition's “boy” to Vieth's “Man.”

11. This, the most anthologized of Rochester's poems, first attacks man's feigned and boasted reason and then exposes the personal fear which is the reality under this pose (as under the masks of knavery and all others that separate man from the beasts), and then it extends this personal, private situation to the public one of the court, statesmen, and clergymen.

12. One other sense of “private/public” for the king should be mentioned. Christopher Goodman, the Puritan apologist, wrote long before the Civil War that if rulers failed in their duty they would “be accounted no more for kings or lawful magistrates, but as private men: and to be examined, accused, condemned and punished by the law of God” (How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed [1558, reproduced Facsimile Society, New York, 1931], p. 139). With the trial and condemnation of Charles I this doctrine became real: he was judged not by his own but by a different law; and for this to happen, he had to become a private citizen, just as the private men who judged him became public.

13. “Hopeful” is my emendation, from the 1680 edition, for Vieth's “any.”

14. Of the naval heroics, he told Gilbert Burnet that “He thought it necessary to begin his life with those Demonstrations of his courage in an Element and way of fighting, which is acknowledged to be the greatest trial of clear and undoubted Valour” (Some Passages, in Critical Heritage, p. 50); of his health, he wrote to Savile: “I am almost Blind, utterly Lame, and scarce within the reasonable hopes of ever seeing London again” (Oct. 1677, in John Hayward, ed., Collected Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester [London, 1926], p. 252).

15. To his wife, in Hayward, Collected Works, p. 288. Cf. Fredelle Bruser, “Disproportion: A Study in the Work of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,” University of Toronto Quarterly 15 (1945-46): 384-96.

16. Hayward, Collected Works, p. 252.

17. John Dennis, “Defence of Sir Fopling Flutter” (1722), in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E. N. Hooker (Baltimore, 1943), 2:248.

18. The Famous Pathologist, or the Noble Mountebank, ed. V. de Sola Pinto (Nottingham University Miscellany, no. 1 [Nottingham, 1961]), p. 34.

19. Burnet, History of his own Time (1753), 1: 370-72.

20. The subject of Rochester's masquerades and their meaning has been well treated by Anne Righter, “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,” Proceedings of the British Academy 53 (1967): 47-69; Griffin, Satires against Man; and Carole Fabricant, “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: A Study of the Artist as Role-Player” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1972), especially chap. 3, pp. 153-225.

21. Robert Parsons, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Rt. Honorable John Earl of Rochester … (1680), p. 30.

22. Parsons, A Sermon, p. 24. Rochester stressed the passage to Burnet, “He hath no form nor comeliness and when we see him there is no beauty that we should desire him,” glossing it: “The meanness of his Appearance and Person has made vain and foolish people disparage him, because he came not in such a Fool's-Coat as they delight in” (Some Passages, in Critical Heritage, p. 142).

23. Sir Thomas Killigrew, the last royal jester, with whom Rochester once exchanged identities to deceive two maids of honor, appears in his engraved portrait with a monkey sitting on the table imitating his pose, both heads supported by hands in the iconography of melancholy. See British Museum Catalogue of Satiric Prints, no. 1681; reproduced, Graham Greene, Lord Rochester's Monkey (London, 1974), p. 68.

24. “Epilogue to ‘Love in the Dark,’” Vieth, Complete Poems, p. 92; to Savile, June 1678, in Hayward, Collected Works, p. 256.

25. Hayward, Collected Works, pp. 252, 258.

26. History of his own Time, in Critical Heritage, p. 93; see also Some Passages, in Critical Heritage, p. 54.

27. An old ditch ran directly by the house, which so fascinated Thomas Hearne when he visited the house in 1718 that he looked into its history. Ditchley got its name, he learned, from this ancient boundary-line ditch or dike, and he examined one “great Ditch, or Trench, of a vast Extent,” a mile from Ditchley House, which “parts the two Manors of Ditchley and Woodstock” (The Remains of Thomas Hearne, p. 206).

28. But in a letter to Savile he relates Oates's trial for buggery to his accusations at King's Bench two days later “for the Honour of the Protestant Cause.” The “Lowsiness of Affairs,” he tells Savile, is such as “'tis not fit to entertain a private Gentleman, much less one of a publick Character, with the Retaile of them” (Hayward, Collected Works, p. 263).

29. For a much more elaborate attempt to place Rochester in a Freudian context, see Griffin, Satires against Man, pp. 120-29.