Blazing Star

by Larman, Alexander;

  ’Tis evident beasts are, in their degree,

  As wise at least, and better far than he.

  Rochester here returns to the paradox that he, or whoever was responsible for the satire ‘Tunbridge Wells’, stated at its end:

  Thrice happy beasts are, who, because they be

  Of reason void, are so of foppery.

  Faith, I was so ashamed that with remorse,

  I used the insolence to mount my horse;

  For he, doing only things fit for his nature,

  Did seem to be by much the wiser creature.

  While John Stuart Mill would famously state nearly two centuries later that ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied... if the pig [is] of a different opinion, it is because [it] only knows [its] side of the question’, Rochester, himself no stranger to swinish pleasures, took the argument that man’s ‘pride and his philosophy’ failed to conceal his innately beast-like nature. Thus, he provides a mocking comparison between an idealized hunting hound, Jowler, and a prominent Whig of the time, Sir Thomas Meres, claiming that Jowler’s ability to find and kill hares was a more useful one than Meres’s ability to act as a chairman on committees. As with Milton, Rochester looks back to a prelapsarian world, although his poetry is less concerned with the absence of original sin than it is with the surfeit of tiresome meetings.

  The jokes conceal a more serious point. With coruscating irony, Rochester asks whether human or animal principles are ‘most generous’ and ‘just’, finally rising to rhetorical splendour by inviting his reader to make his own judgement:

  Be judge yourself, I’ll bring it to the test:

  Which is the basest creature, man or beast?

  Birds feed on birds, beasts on each other prey,

  But savage man alone does man betray.

  Pressed by necessity, they kill for food;

  Man undoes man to do himself no good.

  Betrayal was something much on Rochester’s mind at this time. He considered himself, and the country, betrayed by Charles’s unwillingness to adopt the high moral standard of kingship, just as he felt snared by the foolishness and foppery of the court. He had been betrayed by everyone from the low tarts who had given him syphilis to the great men of Whitehall such as Mulgrave, who blackened his name at the slightest provocation, all the while feigning amity and fellowship. No wonder that he wrote ‘But man, with smiles, embraces, friendship, praise / Inhumanly his fellow’s life betrays’, thinking of the double-dealing that he was privy to. Yet he was far from perfect himself, a man who had deceived his wife and children both in his love affairs and in his extended absences from home in the flesh-pots and taverns of London. Money and the desire for recognition led him to return to the deafening clamour of the world of court, as well as royal command on occasion, and if the devil did indeed enter him at Brentford, then it was the price he paid for supping with him so regularly.

  Perhaps the best way to look at ‘A Satire’ is as a symphonic poem. The humour and mild self-deprecation of the first movement has now given way to a far angrier and more tumultuous sense of half-controlled fury, where Rochester lashes out at everyone he can think of, the cruelty of their actions devastatingly taking place ‘not through necessity, but wantonness’. It is possible that he sat down to write the poem with this escalating sense of misanthropic discontent as part of his literary scheme, but it is as likely that he became seduced by his own argument, rising to yet grander heights of disdain as he progressed. The crowning irony is that he wrote the poem while he was relatively happy; had he written it when he was in a worse state, it might have been an unreadable screed of bitterness and pain.

  Rochester was in roughly equal parts bold, reckless and pragmatic. Even if there was some justification in his being pilloried as a coward by Mulgrave for exercising a rare sense of self-preservation in refusing to duel with him, his actions throughout his life—​whether his abduction of Elizabeth, his military service against the Dutch, or the boldness of his libels against Charles and the rest of the court—​all smacked of either courage or rashness, depending on your perception. However, if his writing in the next part of the satire is an accurate reflection of his feelings at the time, then Rochester was starting to weary of a life lived without restraint or checks. The tone, by turns angry, scornful and resigned, is the perfect counterpoint to the devil-may-care exuberance of many of the earlier poems.

  Rochester begins with the memory of the failed Anglo-Dutch war—​which was still fresh—​offering implicit criticism of Charles and his generals, as well as men in the wider world and, as ever, himself:

  For hunger or love they fight and tear,

  Whilst wretched man is still in arms for fear.

  For fear he arms, and is of arms afraid,

  By fear to fear successively betrayed;

  Base fear, the source whence his best passions came:

  His boasted honour, and his dear-bought fame;

  That lust of power, to which he’s such a slave,

  And for the which alone he dares be brave.

  At first glance, this appears to be a simple criticism of man’s bestial nature, where his only impulses are driven by hunger or ‘love’, here a euphemism for sex. Yet the repeated references to ‘arms’, closely juxtaposed with ‘fear’, indicate that it is the military world that Rochester is satirizing, with the betrayal he refers to both by and of the ordinary man. Those fighting in the Anglo-Dutch wars were, for him, less lions led by lambs and more hapless sheep being led to the slaughter by their similarly ovine masters. This is made explicit by his sardonic dismissal of ‘boasted honour’ and ‘dear-bought fame’, before he takes a wider aim at ‘that lust of power’. Rochester was mindful of the fact that his own ‘honour and fame’ owed no small part to his successful military service, and this rejection of his prizes and accolades as nothing more than baubles shows his disillusionment with the world of dulce et decorum est.

  Of course, it was not just war that showed man at his most ineffectual. Rochester, apparently satisfied with his denunciation of patriotism as a hollow sham, proceeds to look at the venal, self-satisfied nature of what mankind represents on the wider scale. It is an impressively clear-sighted cry of anger, albeit one lacking in the wit of earlier:

  For which he takes such pains to be thought wise,

  And screws his actions in a forced disguise,

  Leading a tedious life in misery

  Under laborious, mean hypocrisy.

  Look to the bottom of his vast design,

  Wherein man’s wisdom, power and glory join:

  The good he acts, the ill he does endure,

  ’Tis all from fear, to make himself secure.

  Merely for safety, after fame we thirst,

  For all men would be cowards if they durst.

  It is hard to think of any of his court contemporaries producing such a simultaneously nihilistic and intellectually sophisticated attack on their world. Although he had often before been caustic and dismissive in his poetry, nothing comes close to the way in which, in this poem, he gazes on the entire Whitehall society that he is part of and finds nothing to praise or extol, seeing merely a gaggle of frightened hypocrites acting roles that they are ill-equipped to fill in their ‘forced disguise’. Perhaps his banishment from court and subsequent recall had made him bolder, but it had also made him contemptuous of the world he had returned to. Rochester, himself less a phoney actor than a chameleonic performer, could tell an unconvincing line reading or intonation when he heard one.

  He ends the main body of the poem by comparing the cowardice that permeates mankind with the essential dishonesty that goes hand in hand with it, describing all men as knaves and using a cynical examination of human nature to justify the comparison: ‘if you think it fair / Amongst known cheats to play upon the square / You’ll be undone.’ As ever, Rochester writes with an eye on the fluidity of truth and integrity. As he says:

  Nor can weak truth your reputation save:<
br />
  The knaves will all agree to call you knave.

  Wronged shall he live, insulted o’er, oppressed,

  Who dares be less a villain than the rest.

  By this stage, Rochester has written nearly 170 lines of closely argued, occasionally self-contradictory, but brilliant and witty satire on the intellectual and social life of the world he inhabited. As an act of revenge on those he detested, it could scarcely be more devastating, provided of course that the targets of his criticism were not too stupid to miss the point. Apparently hurrying to end the poem, for the first time a note of impatience enters into the satire, as he resumes the dialogue with the clergyman and offers a summary of his arguments:

  Thus, sir, you see what human nature craves:

  Most men are cowards, all men should be knaves.

  The difference lies, as far as I can see,

  Not in the thing itself, but the degree,

  And all the subject matter of debate

  Is only: Who’s a knave of the first rate?

  The reason why the initial ending feels cheap and rushed is because the language itself lacks the serpentine elegance and rhetorical grandeur that Rochester has revelled in up to this point; it is as if the poet has chosen to reiterate the point made at the beginning that, however seductive his rejection of reason and mankind, he is still one of ‘those strange, prodigious creatures, man’ and liable to write below par. Nonetheless, even if its tidy encapsulation of Rochester’s sprawling and fascinating satire verges on the glib, the final question it asks offers an amusingly double-edged proposition; the reader’s only answer, surely, can be to see none other than Rochester himself as the first-rate knave.

  Between summer and autumn 1674 the poem was written, widely copied and distributed around court as it stood. Despite its length, it was much read and was of particular interest to the clergy, given the satiric depiction of the ‘band and beard’. It was famous enough to be referred to by the clergyman Edward Stillingfleet, in a court sermon preached before Charles on 24 February 1675. Stillingfleet, a quick-witted and intelligent man who would eventually become Dean of St Paul’s in 1678, rejected Rochester’s arguments and said: ‘it is a pity [Rochester and others] had not their wish, to have been beasts rather than men... that they might have been less capable of doing mischief among mankind.’ Possibly as a result, Rochester felt it necessary to respond, and so added a coda or ‘Addition’ of about fifty lines, probably between 1675 and 1676, in which he attempts to redress the balance with continued satiric barbs and scorn. He also altered line 74, changing ‘Sibbs’ soliloquies’ to ‘Stillingfleet’s replies’ and so allowing him specifically to attack his antagonist.

  Continuing to criticize ‘the pretending part of the proud world’, Rochester mocks society for being ‘swollen with selfish vanity’ and reliant on ‘fellow slaves’ who try and lord it over one another with ‘false freedoms, holy cheats and formal lies’. However, he now concedes the possibility that there might be someone at court who is upstanding and uncorrupted:

  But if in Court so just a man there be

  (In Court a just man, yet unknown to me)

  Who does his needful flattery direct,

  Not to oppress and ruin, but protect

  (Since flattery, which way so ever laid,

  Is still a tax on that unhappy trade);

  If so upright a statesman you can find,

  Whose passions bend to his unbiased mind,

  Who does his arts and policies apply

  To raise his country, not his family,

  Nor, whilst his pride owned avarice withstands,

  Receives close bribes through friends’ corrupted hands.

  Looking at Rochester’s circle of intimates, there is nobody who fits this description. The likes of Buckingham, Savile and Rochester himself were all far from being ‘upright’ and ‘unbiased’, after all, and none of them were ‘just men’. This is itself a further allusion to Hobbes, who wrote that ‘a just man... taketh all the care that he can, that his actions may be all just’. However, it is telling that here, for the first time, Rochester explicitly sets the action at Whitehall, concentrating on a milieu that he knew and understood intimately. It is here that it is accepted that flattery must always be ‘needful’, rather than offered indiscriminately, and that his ‘unbiased mind’ will use this flattery for national, rather than personal, gain. The last ‘decent’ man at court, Clarendon, was not immune to feathering his own nest, thereby attracting a degree of opprobrium on which his enemies thrived.

  This fantastical figure, then, seems slightly less likely to have existed in court than an eighteen-year-old virgin. Rochester then turns his attention to the clergy. Mindful of the criticism that the poem received from Stillingfleet, and perhaps stung, he launches a bravura sally of abuse at the corrupted men of God in general, and Stillingfleet in particular:

  Is there a churchman who on God relies;

  Whose life, his faith and doctrine justifies?

  Not one blown up with vain prelatic pride,

  Who, for reproof of sins, does man deride;

  Whose envious heart makes preaching a pretence,

  With his obstreperous, saucy eloquence,

  To chide at kings, and rail at men of sense;

  None of that sensual tribe whose talents lie

  In avarice, pride, sloth and gluttony

  Who hunt good livings, but abhor good lives.

  The criticism continues as Rochester castigates the imagined clergyman for adultery, dominating council business, inefficiency and affectation. However, the point has already been made about the ‘sensual tribe’ whose fleshly wants dominate their spiritual inclinations. The references to Stillingfleet are most explicit when he refers to his ‘vain prelatic pride’. His apparent derision of Rochester is ascribed, typically, to a mixture of envy and a desire to show off his oratorical skills, thereby making preaching nothing more than a ‘pretence’, with the primary aim that of point-scoring. Hence Rochester’s allusion to a sermon preached in front of the king being nothing more than ‘chiding’, and his knowing self-description as a man of sense.

  The poem concludes with a final description of the fantastical figure that Rochester imagines being a sincere man of God rather than merely worldly. The ‘meek, humble man of honest sense’ that Rochester praises is one who ‘preaching peace, does practice continence’, leads a ‘pious life’, and believes the ‘mysterious truths, which no man can conceive’. If there is a barely concealed scepticism about this figure, it is thrown open by Rochester’s typically dramatic and ironic statement:

  If upon earth there dwell such God-like men,

  I’ll here recant my paradox to them,

  Adore those shrines of virtue, homage pay,

  And, with the rabble world, their laws obey.

  Rochester’s view of ‘God-like men’ is, necessarily, an insincere one, strengthened by his mocking description of them as ‘shrines of virtue’. For him, the world in which he lived was essentially rotten, with even the best of men compromised and dedicated to little more than self-interest. His fantastical creations of a good statesman and a faithful clergyman remain safely fictional. ‘A Satire’, in its extended form, remains a coruscating attack on Rochester’s world, but also on the nature of intellectual and social achievement, reducing it to nothing more than puffed-up vanity and grubby cheating. The final couplet accepts all this, wearily, leaving the reader with a devastating belittlement of what ‘reason’ and ‘mankind’ can ever aspire to:

  If such there be, yet grant me this at least:

  Man differs more from man, than man from beast.

  For a year that would prove catastrophic for Rochester, 1675 began well enough. On 4 January Charles approved a request to erect a home for him, paid for out of royal funds, in the shape of ‘a small building in his Majesty’s privy garden at Whitehall between the Lord Keeper’s Lodgings and the Lodgings his Lordship now possesses’. This was a clear sign of favour, as the cost of suc
h an erection was far from cheap at around £200, indicating Rochester’s continued place at the heart of the court that he claimed to despise so openly. This paradox—​the more he cavilled against the court, the greater his standing became—​amused him. In a letter, he claimed that ‘they are at present pulling down some part of my lodging’, indicating that his gratitude, such as it was, was limited.

  The following week, on 12 January, Rochester attended the first performance of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife at Drury Lane. The play was outrageous, even by the standards of the day, revolving around a committed rake, Horner, who feigns impotence in order to facilitate access to the ladies of ‘quality’ and innocent, untutored girls from the country, including the titular wife, Margery. Examples of its unfettered smut include a lengthy scene where ‘china’ becomes a sexual innuendo, and the immortal line ‘Wife! He is coming into you the back way!’ Even the title contains an obvious pun.

  Despite his involvement with the theatre, whether as a spectator, an occasional collaborator or mentor of Elizabeth Barry, there were few contemporary writers who Rochester considered particularly talented, other than Etherege and Wycherley, both of whom were his friends. Although later in 1675 he paid lip service to Thomas Shadwell’s abilities in ‘An Allusion to Horace’, claiming that his ‘unfinished works do yet impart / Great proofs of force of nature’, he also made a further dig at the writer, claiming that they had ‘none of art’. The insult stung, and Shadwell began work on a play based on the Don Juan legend, The Libertine, which had a central character, Don John, who exhibited a familiar joie de vivre and unrestrained Bacchanalian impulse.

  Rochester’s own impulses in early 1675 were mainly being channelled into his love affair with Elizabeth Barry, which engaged him in a way that none of his more casual dalliances had ever managed. He wrote her numerous letters that strike a balance between the ardently passionate and the knowingly arch. (One even ends in medias res, as Rochester is distracted by a Porlockian type: ‘a damned impertinent fool bolted in that hinders me from ending my letter.’) He might say ‘you are stark mad, and therefore the fitter for me to love’ and declare ‘so much wit and beauty as you have should think of nothing less than doing miracles’, but this is immediately put into context by the statement that ‘there cannot be a greater [miracle] than to continue to love me’.