Blazing Star

by Larman, Alexander;

  As he wrote it, England was in a state of flux. With the country all but bankrupted by the failures of the Anglo-Dutch wars, there were many politically unaffiliated men and women who quietly regretted that the stringent morality of the Commonwealth had been replaced by such profligacy. The joy and optimism of the Restoration had given way to a growing sense that Charles II had no clear idea how he wanted to govern the country. As he and his familiars devoted themselves to a life of sexual and sybaritic abandon, their existence might as well have happened on the moon for all the good that it did for an increasingly weary, impoverished and put-upon populace. The government—​the so-called Cabal Ministry of Buckingham and the king’s other high councillors—​grew increasingly unstable and fell in September 1674, with the result that Buckingham and Charles’s old tutor Hobbes’s earlier fears that life would become ‘solitary, poor, brutish, nasty and short’ without the strong presence of a committed sovereign seemed to be on the verge of realization.

  The influence of Hobbes on at least the first half of ‘A Satire’ is impossible to overstate. Pilloried for perceived blasphemy after a 1666 bill that outlawed atheism and profaneness, Hobbes in 1674 was a diminished figure, much revered by continental philosophers but unable to publish anything on human conduct or reason in England. The term ‘Hobbist’ became less a mark of intellectual respect than a sneering denigration of renegade, atheistic spirits; ironic, perhaps, given that it referred to one who believed in the absolutist rule of a monarch. Anthony à Wood refers to Rochester having become ‘a perfect Hobbist’ under the influence of the court. Meant as an insult, this comment unintentionally gives an accurate summary of Rochester’s philosophical and social views.

  Rochester had already written one poem, ‘Love and Life’, which owed a significant debt to Hobbes. As with all of Hobbes’s philosophy, the blend of pragmatic common sense and implied carpe diem sensibility—​if it is only the present that has any point, take full advantage of it—​proved a strong influence on Rochester, whose desire to write a satire on reason as well as mankind stemmed from another passage in Leviathan in which Hobbes attempts to explain the curiously sinuous definition of what ‘right reason’ and ‘false reason’ are. He claims that:

  reason itself is always right reason, as well as arithmetic is a certain and infallible art; but no one man’s reason, nor the reason of any one number of men, makes the certainty; no more than an account is therefore well cast up, because a great many men have unanimously approved it.

  In other words, mass consensus cannot be taken seriously as a means of decision-making. Hobbes makes the subsequent point that what he terms ‘natural wit’ is found principally in two things: ‘celerity of imagining’, or speed of passing from one thought to another, and ‘steady direction to some approved end’.

  However, Rochester’s aim in writing ‘A Satire’ was not so much to produce a philosophical treatise as to offer an entertainingly biting commentary on the mores of his time. The loose, conversational tone of the opening sets the scene for Rochester’s attack on humanity:

  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.

  In these seven lines, Rochester offers a treasure trove of motifs and themes that recur throughout his work. The metaphysical poetry of Donne and Marvell hangs over the image of the ‘case of flesh and blood’, with Rochester’s own spirit encased in his all too corporeal and weak form. The choice of animals is far from coincidental: the dog was associated with Charles and the court; the monkey was a sly allusion to Rochester’s own pet, shown with him in his most famous portrait; and the bear is a likely reference to the tavern of that name, as referenced at the beginning of ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’. All this is counterpointed by man, ‘that vain animal’, and his pride in being ‘rational’. The irony practically drips from the page.

  The next section of the poem offers a concerted attack on the Hobbesian definition of false reason and the willingness of the weak-willed to be beguiled by what he terms ‘pathless and dangerous wandering ways’. Rochester’s satiric evocation of reason as a sixth season that will ‘contradict the other five’ is soon undercut by his sardonic dismissal of it as ‘an ignis fatuus of the mind’ and one that will leave both ‘light of nature’ and ‘sense’ behind. His sights are initially set on the philosophical compass of ‘error’s fenny bogs and thorny breaks’, but it is quite clear that all the seeker of reason will find himself in is ‘doubt’s boundless sea’. Rochester offers a wry comment that books will ‘bear him up awhile’, while ‘bladders of philosophy’ offer a life raft of sorts, but eventually all will fail. The will-o’-the-wisp offers some fleeting distractions, but eventually and inevitably ‘eternal night’ beckons. The final part of this section offers Rochester at his most nihilistic:

  Then old age and experience, hand in hand,

  Lead him to death, and make him understand,

  After a search so painful, and so long

  That all his life he has been in the wrong.

  Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies,

  Who was so proud, so witty and so wise.

  Two centuries later, Tennyson would recite the couple of dozen lines of this part of the poem by heart, rising to rhythmic exaltation on the final ironic stresses. Its theatrical quality comes from the pessimistic worldview expressed by the poet-speaker, here building to the height of his own rhetoric. Rochester’s often overlooked gift for metaphor and imagery is here shown in full flower, with man, the ‘reasoning engine’, merely ‘huddled in dirt’ after the long and painful search. There are possible echoes of Milton’s ‘two-handed engine’ from Lycidas, just as the use of the word ‘engine’ brings Robert Boyle’s writing on chemistry to mind. Of course Milton and Boyle, brilliant and dangerous though they had been, would themselves end up huddled in dirt in good time, just like every other thinker and writer of the age.

  If Rochester was anything as a writer, he was self-aware, and the next part of ‘A Satire’ finds him taking aim at those who lived by their charm and intelligence. It is virtually inconceivable that the fifteen lines that follow were not written about himself and his friends, as a kind of living epitaph:

  Pride drew him in, as cheats their bubbles catch,

  And made him venture to be made a wretch.

  His wisdom did his happiness destroy,

  Aiming to know that world he should enjoy.

  And wit was his vain, frivolous pretence

  Of pleasing others at his own expense,

  For wits are treated just like common whores:

  First they’re enjoyed, and then kicked out of doors.

  The pleasure past, a threatening doubt remains

  That frights th’enjoyer with succeeding pains.

  Women and men of wit are dangerous tools,

  And ever fatal to admiring fools:

  Pleasure allures, and when the fops escape,

  ’Tis not that they’re belov’d, but fortunate,

  And therefore what they fear at heart, they hate.

  The tone here has altered from the jauntily conversational first-person voice of the opening into something sterner and more didactic. Rochester might almost be preaching a mountebank sermon, with the quasi-biblical incantations of the lines only undercut by the wit and sharp self-awareness imbued within them. It is certainly the case that Rochester’s career at court owed much to his ‘pride’, but the barely submerged anger in his dismissal of wit as a ‘vain, frivolous pretence’ shows his disillusion with the way in which he had become as much the king’s lapdog or pet monkey as the actual animals, an amusing distraction from the weightier affairs of state. ‘Dangerous tools’, such as Rochester, were banished from court and on
ly allowed to return when it was felt that sufficient reparation had been made, or when the king needed their presence once more (this looks back to ‘Timon’, too, with its focus on men of wit being taken up by ‘admiring fools’). Some might label this simple cynicism, but for Rochester by this point royal favour had become insufficient reward for having given his life and his health to the service of debauchery. This is alluded to here, first in the reference to ‘common whores’, and then in the ‘succeeding pains’, where Rochester’s ever-present syphilitic agonies persisted.

  A recurring theme throughout Rochester’s writing is a hatred of cant and bigotry. This is seen first in the dismissal of the fops as a breed of whom he says ‘what they fear at heart, they hate’, but then more explicitly in the appearance of ‘some formal band and beard’, the depiction an allusion to a Restoration Anglican clergyman, who has come to take Rochester to task for what he perceives as his ‘degenerate mind’. As the poem briefly turns into a dialogue, Rochester effortlessly slips inside the skin of a pedantic, querulous figure, adding another persona to the many others that he had adopted, both in poetry and in life. The ‘band and beard’ could have been based on Gilbert Burnet, who had arrived at court in 1674 and had received some preferment from Charles, becoming a royal chaplain. However, Rochester’s generally amicable relationship with Burnet, who would become an important figure later in his life, suggests that he had no especial grievance towards him, and it is more likely that Rochester based the character on his old theological sparring partner Isaac Barrow.

  Then, by your favour, anything that’s writ

  Against this gibing, jingling knack called wit

  Likes me abundantly; but you take care

  Upon this point, not to be too severe.

  Perhaps my muse were fitter for this part,

  For I profess I can be very smart

  On wit, which I abhor with all my heart.

  I long to lash it in some sharp essay,

  But your grand indiscretion bids me stay,

  And turns my tide of ink another way.

  The self-appointed essayists and moralists who criticized the wits of court (as Burnet subsequently did) were seldom blessed with the literary talent of Rochester and his circle, and so the band and beard’s impotent growling of his wish that ‘my muse were fitter for this part’ and his unconscious proclamation that ‘I can be very smart / On wit’ are clearly added for comic effect. All the same, this moral man has set his sights on Rochester’s ‘grand indiscretion’, and once again Rochester adopts a persona to criticize himself, to dizzyingly kaleidoscopic effect:

  What rage ferments in your degenerate mind,

  To make you rail at reason and mankind?

  Blest, glorious man! To whom alone kind heaven

  An everlasting soul has freely given,

  Whom his great Maker took such care to make

  That from himself he did the image take

  And this fair frame in shining reason dressed

  To dignify his nature above beast;

  Reason, by whose aspiring influence

  We take a flight beyond material sense,

  Dive into mysteries, then soaring pierce

  The flaming limits of the universe,

  Search heaven and hell, find out what’s acted there,

  And give the world true grounds of hope and fear.

  Rochester here once again returns to his old tutor Francis Giffard’s biblical edicts to mock the clichéd religious terminology that this section of the poem is littered with. ‘Kind heaven’, ‘everlasting soul’ and ‘great Maker’ are all the stuff of leaden scriptural language, used here purely in an attempt to mock the clergyman using them by showing his lack of imagination as he eulogizes ‘Blest, glorious man’. By this point in the poem, it is quite clear that man, whether Rochester or his fellows, is anything but.

  As the band and beard finishes, Rochester, returning to his own first-person avatar, takes up his statements as a means of ridiculing him explicitly, rather than implicitly. Describing him belittlingly as ‘mighty man’, Rochester first mocks the clergyman’s derivative arguments, even listing the obscure sources that his clichéd views are taken from. He then goes on to say that it is this ‘reason’ he has the greatest cause to despise, ‘that makes a mite/ Think he’s the image of the infinite’. Rochester wore his contempt for organized religion proudly, at least at this point in his life, and similar ridicule is extended both to the ‘short life, void of all rest’ that all endure—​again, the echo of Hobbesian language—​and to the organized representative of God, or, as he puts it, ‘this busy, puzzling stirrer-up of doubt / That frames deep mysteries, then finds ’em out’. The implicit reference is to God moving in mysterious ways: if the ways are so lacking in mystery that they can be found out, then the ‘infinite’ is all too unimpressive.

  Further satire follows of the ‘frantic crowds of thinking fools’ who populate ‘reverend bedlams, colleges and schools’. If Rochester is to be believed, then the philosophical and intellectual thought of the age was essentially ‘nonsense and impossibilities’, ministered to by ‘modern cloistered coxcombs’. However, to say that contemporary intellectual life in England was as poor as Rochester makes out was disingenuous. In 1674 figures of the magnitude of Milton (who died in November that year), Robert Boyle and Thomas Browne were all renowned for their work in a variety of fields, much of which was groundbreaking in its intellectual breadth. Hobbes, although a prophet without honour in England, was still alive and highly regarded by many. The likes of Isaac Newton and John Locke were quietly establishing their own reputations, and the greatest architect of the day, Christopher Wren, had been knighted the previous year in recognition of his rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Likewise, looking beyond England, Rochester is likely to have encountered the philosophy of Descartes and the astronomy of Galileo while on his grand tour the previous decade, all of which represented rather more than the ‘nonsense and impossibilities’ he mocks. The key philosophical argument of the day, which he refers to twice in the poem, was whether the universe was really infinite or bounded by its own ‘flaming limits’; to have proved the former trod perilously close to disputing the existence of heaven and hell. It was not a time of wilful ignorance.

  Nevertheless, it remained a time of superstition and doubt. Boyle’s enormous success within the field of natural philosophy was balanced by his unwavering belief in alchemy, as well as other eccentric views such as his claim that all humanity was inevitably descended from Adam and Eve (in his will, he left instructions that a series of lectures be funded in his name promoting Christianity and attacking ‘notorious infidels’, ranging from Muslims and Jews to atheists and deists; no mention of inter-Christian disagreement was to be allowed). The famous ceremony of ‘touching the king’s evil’ was one widely adhered to by many—​including Rochester a couple of years previously—​despite little visible sign of success. Witchcraft was still believed to be prevalent. Catholics were rumoured to be in thrall to diabolical practices. The less said about medical care in many cases, the better.

  With such uncertainties thus in place, the carpe diem spirit displayed by many seemed the best way of dealing with a mercurial and ever-shifting world. Rochester acknowledges this in ‘A Satire’ when he echoes Hobbes’s own distinctions between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ reason:

  Our sphere of action is life’s happiness,

  And he who thinks beyond, thinks like an ass.

  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 vigour, not to kill.

  Again, this references Leviathan, specifically the statement:

  whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it, which for his part he calleth good:
and the object of his hate and aversion, evil… for these words of good, evil and contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so.

  The remarkable shifts in tone and voice across the first half of the poem show Rochester at his most technically accomplished, retaining the substance of the argument that he wishes to make and keeping his attack on hypocrisy and ‘false reasoning’ current. As a topical satire, it could hardly be improved upon. Rochester, once again adopting his poetic libertine persona, makes a further argument to show why ‘his’ reason is a better one than that of his interrogator:

  Your reason hinders, mine helps to enjoy,

  Renewing appetites yours would destroy.

  My reason is my friend, yours is a cheat;

  Hunger calls out, my reason bids me eat;

  Perversely, yours your appetite does mock:

  This asks for food, that answers ‘What’s o’clock?’

  This plain distinction, sir, your doubt secures:

  ’Tis not right reason I despise, but yours.

  There is little about Rochester’s poetic persona here that is penitent or humble—​instead, he boasts about ‘renewing appetites yours would destroy’—​but the devil-may-care spirit conveyed is nonetheless a more likeable and sympathetic one that that of the ‘formal band and beard’. When the poem first appeared at court, and possibly beyond, in late 1674, its readers might not have ended the first section of ‘A Satire’ wholly convinced that Rochester had managed to offer the definitive refutation of ‘wrong reason’ and a pure explanation of ‘right reason’, but his argument is conveyed with such attractive verve that most would have been carried along with his wit and energy. The poetry, once again, reflects the man.

  With a shift in emphasis from philosophical musing to social criticism comes the second part of the satire, ‘Of Mankind’. It is heralded by Rochester, announcing:

  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,