The Debt to Pleasure E-Book

John Wilmott (Earl of Rochester)

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Rochester, incontestably the greatest of the Restoration poets and reprobates, is presented in The Debt to Pleasure both in his own words and the words of those who loved or loathed him. The book is a mosaic in which the poet's voice and the voice of his age sound with a startling, ribald and riotous clarity. As John Evelyn recalls: 'Mr Andrew Marvell (who was a good Judge of Witt) was wont to say that [Rochester] was the best English Satyrist and had the right veine. Twas pitty Death tooke him off so soon.'

Leseprobe

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Roamon!Thelightwesoughtisshiningstill

Dostthouaskproof?Ourtreeyetcrownsthehill,

OurScholartravelsyetthelovedhill-side

from ‘Thyrsis’

JOHN WILMOT

In the eyes of his contemporaries and in his own poetry and prose

EARL OF ROCHESTER

The Debt to Pleasure

Edited with an introduction by JOHN ADLARD

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

A Note On The Text

1‘Those Shining Parts … Began to Show Themselves’

2 ‘Many Wild and Unaccountable Things’

3 ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’

4 ‘The Right Vein’

5 ‘A Man Half in the Grave’

6 Epilogue (1685)

Notes

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

THE credulous Dr Plot, author of TheNaturalHistoryof Oxford-shire, once stood by some hayricks on the outskirts of Woodstock, testing an echo from ‘the brow of the hill on which my Lord Rochester’s Lodge stands’. Having read that Bacon had tried in vain to make an echo repeat the word ‘Satan’, he was delighted to find this echo ‘neither so modest or frighted’ of the Devil’s name.1 Many of his readers must have thought it only too natural that Echo should lose her inhibitions near that lodge where the diabolical Earl, with his diabolical friends from the court of Charles II, ‘used the body’ of more than one Woodstock girl, had ‘lascivious pictures’ drawn and ran out naked into the Park.

This diabolical, romantic Rochester has always been with us, together with the noble penitent of the other school of biographers, the merely wicked man converted on his death-bed, an example to us all. Probably nobody needs to be told that both versions are false. Yet little has been written on Rochester’s character and poetry that brings out their true distinction. According to Dr Leavis, he ‘had uncommon natural endowments which, it is reasonable to suggest, he might have done much more with had he been born thirty years earlier’.2 There is little one can say with any certainty about what a man might have done had he been born into another age, but thirty years earlier the intellectual milieu would of course have been different, and it is Rochester’s response to the intellectual milieu of the Restoration that brings him into harmonywith certain thinkers who are changing our lives, or at least provoking us, today.

Wilhelm Reich has described ‘what is called the cultured human’ as ‘a living structure composedofthreelayers’:

On the surface he carries the artificial mask of self-control, of compulsive, insincere politeness and of artificial sociality. With this layer, he covers up the second one, the Freudian ‘unconscious’, in which sadism, greediness, lasciviousness, envy, perversions of all kinds, etc., are kept in check, without however, having in the least lost any of their power. This second layer is the artifact of a sex-negating culture; consciously, it is mostly experienced only as a gaping inner emptiness. Behind it, in the depths, live and work natural sociality and sexuality, spontaneous enjoyment of work, capacityforlove.3

To reach that ‘third layer’ one has not only to blast a way through the first; the terrors of the second have also to be encountered. Such was Rochester’s Divine Comedy, with a coda including his dialogues with Burnet, preparatory to his conversion, and Robert Parsons’ reading of the Suffering Servant, by which that conversion was effected. Anne Righter has described the conversion as the total collapse of a personality: his last letters and his recantation ‘could have been written by anyone’; Rochester ‘had effectively ceased to be Rochester’.4 To Burnet he said, in those preparatory conversations,

the two maxims of his morality then were, that he should do nothing to the hurt of any other, or that might prejudice his own health: And he thought that all pleasure, when it did not interfere with these, was to be indulged as the gratification of our own natural appetites. It seemed unreasonable to imagine that these were put in a man only to be restrained, or curbed to such a narrowness. This he applied to the free use of wine and women.5

Burnet replied that ‘if appetites being natural was an argument for the indulging them, then the revengeful might as well allege it for murder, and the covetous for stealing; whose appetites are no less keen on the objects; and yet it is acknowledged that these appetites ought to be curbed’. This can only be called a foolish answer, Rochester having defended pleasure provided it did ‘nothing to the hurt of any other’. However, Burnet went on: ‘If the difference is urged from the injury that another person receives, the injury is as great, if a man’s wife is defiled, or his daughter corrupted …’ and he makes it clear, later in his book, that these ideas of ‘defilement’ and ‘corruption’ were based not on love but on laws of property. ‘Men’, he says, ‘have a property in their wives and daughters, so that to defile the one, or corrupt the other, is an unjust and injurious thing….’6 He proceeds from this to a negative view of the passions:

Why should we not as well think that God intended our brutish and sensual appetites should be governed by our reason, as that the fierceness of beasts should be managed and tamed by the wisdom, and for the use of Man? So that it is no real absurdity to grant that appetites were put into men, on purpose to exercise their reason in the restraint and government of them….7

Burnet, then, sees as divinely ordained that Reichian ‘artificial mask of self-control, of compulsive, insincere politeness and of artificial sociality’, and the energies beneath wholly contemptible, mere sparring partners of Reason, to exercise and strengthen the ‘first layer’.

Rochester, it seems, did not protest. ‘All this he freely confessed was true….’8 But he was then a very sick man and we must compare these last conversations with his poetry and some part of its intellectual background. ‘Sometimes’, writes Burnet, ‘other men’s thoughts mixed with his composures, but that flowed rather from the impressions they made on him when he read them, by which they came to return upon him as his own thoughts, than that he servilely copied from any.’9 Even so, Rochester read in Hobbes’ Leviathan: ‘There be also other names, called negative, which are ‘notes to signify that a word is not the name of the thing in question; as these words, nothing …,’10 and wrote in his ‘Upon Nothing’:

Great Negative, how vainly would the wise

Inquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise

Didst thou not stand to point their blind philosophies!

Here, though he told Parsons that Hobbes’ philosophy ‘had undone him, and many more,’11 words rather than ideas are carried over,12 naturally enough since Rochester was not a philosopher but a poet. The same is not true of another sentence in Leviathan: ‘The present only has a being in Nature; things past have a being in the memory only, but things tocome have no being at all….’13 This became:

All my past life is mine no more;

The flying hours are gone,

Like transitory dreams given o’er

Whose images are kept in store

By memory alone.

Whatever is to come is not:

How can it then be mine?

The present moment’s all my lot, …

Time involves change. ‘And because‚’ writes Hobbes in his sixth chapter, ‘the constitution of a man’s body is in continual mutation, it is impossible that all the same things should always cause in him the same appetites and aversions….’ Here is the background of the rest of Rochester’s lyric:

The present moment’s all my lot,

And that, as fast as it is got,

Phyllis, is wholly thine.

Then talk not of inconstancy,

False hearts and broken vows;

If I, by miracle, can be

This livelong minute14 true to thee,

’Tis all that heaven allows.

Strephon, in an early dialogue-poem, had justified his jilting of Daphne by explaining that ‘’tis nature’s law to change’. The task is to preserve humane behaviour in the face of this. Love is presented as a recurring death-wish, every orgasm being, in a stock seventeenth-century witticism, a death:

When, wearied with a world of woe,

To thy safe bosom I retire,

Where love and peace and truth does flow,

May I contented there expire,

Lest, once more wandering from that heaven,

I fall on some base heart unblest,

Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven,

And lose my everlasting rest.

If ‘expiring’ in one’s mistress’s arms was to Restoration readers a traditional joke (indeed, Dryden never tired of it), to Rochester it was also a very tender joke. ‘Contented’ on that ‘safe bosom’ he attains not only death but also ‘everlasting rest’ comparable to that, after death, for which the Christian hopes. The background seems to be in Leviathan, Chapter 2:

For men measure, not only other men, but all other things by themselves: and because they find themselves subject after motion to pain and lassitude, think every thing else grows weary of motion and seeks repose of its own accord; little considering whether it be not some other motion wherein that desire of rest they find in themselves consisteth.

In the continual ‘motion’, as Hobbes calls it in Chapter 1, ‘of external things upon our eyes, ears and other organs thereunto ordained’, the sensual women who move through men’s lives play no small part. Hence Rochester’s determinedly realistic view of love in a society where sex-negation and pornographic exploitation necessarily exist side by side. All that we can be sure of is the ‘happy minute’, the death which is both extinction and salvation, peace after orgasm, rest.

Ronald Berman sees Rochester’s ‘vision’ only as ‘a kind of ordering (no matter how absurd or obscene) of the existential in terms which life seems unlikely to provide’.15 This seems to miss all that divine gusto. And Berman goes on: ‘It deals with pleasure, but only as it is flawed and ambiguous. The profound sexuality with which it is expressed is loveless and rarely erotic.’

‘Loveless’ is no word to apply to ‘Absent from thee, I languish still …’, to the lines apparently addressed to the young actress Elizabeth Barry (‘Leave this gaudy gilded stage’), to ‘A Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover’, and to several more. Berman puts the Young Lady’s lover in the same category as the hostess in ‘Timon’. ‘All,’ he says, ‘are images of the dead ideal.’16 But the Young Lady, surely, is in love and happy. He forgets too – at least, he does not mention – that love between different generations is a standard Metaphysical theme.17 In these poems Rochester has reached what Reich called the third layer: ‘natural sociality and sexuality, spontaneous enjoyment of work, capacityforlove’:

Love, the most generous passion of the mind,

The softest refuge innocence can find,

The safe director of unguided youth, …

Love as a ‘safe director’ suggests that youth in love can do without moral guides. These are lines from a poem of Rochester’s mature period, ‘A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country’, in which Artemisia complains that ‘this only joy’ has become ‘an arrant trade’, and lays the blame on her own sex:

To an exact perfection they have wrought

The action, love; the passion is forgot.

The result is a desperate battle for survival between the sexes, whether as wife or whore, husband or rake, demonstrated in the story of Corinna, later in the same poem. The victims of that battle are a deserted wife, a bankrupt husband, and another girl under the lash in Bridewell.

The ‘natural sociality and sexuality’ of Reich’s ‘third layer’ undoubtedly endowed Rochester with both a ‘spontaneous enjoyment of work’ and a ‘capacity for love’. His spontaneous enjoyment of the duties of a country landowner sets him apart from the other court wits, for whom, writes J. H. Wilson, ‘the countryside was no more than a place of hideous banishment’.18

Even in those discussions with Burnet ‘he slurred the gravest things with a slight dash of his fancy’. Like many another realist he chose to face the horrors of Reich’s ‘second layer’ with brilliant clowning, defying without hesitation all taboos on subject or language. Exploding taboos he blasted his way through that cold crust, Reich’s ‘first layer’. ‘Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay, …’ begins a pastoral song; he complains that he has become ‘a common fucking post’19 and his mistress ‘a passive pot for fools to spend in’20 among people dedicated not to ‘mere lust’ (‘there’s something generous’ in that, he remarks) but to the ‘action’ of love brought to ‘an exact perfection’, the passion forgot. Nowhere are taboos on word or subject rejected more emphatically than in the play Sodom. ‘Sodom, I assume, is spurious,’ writes David Vieth,21 and most people make the same assumption. But that assumption seems to be based on an article by Rodney M. Baine published as long ago as 1946.22 Baine seems over-anxious that Rochester should be ‘exculpated’, should not be ‘damned with Sodom’, and his anxiety seems utterly out of place when we consider that other works confidently attributed to Rochester contain ideas and words quite as likely to be offensive. And some of Baine’s ideas are plainly silly. He tells us that Sodom ‘contains a good deal of military characters and atmosphere’, and that this makes one Fishbourne a more likely author, since he had been in the army, whereas Rochester had served his king only at sea. In fact there are no more military characters, no more military atmosphere, than in most heroic tragedies or heroic farces. It will probably never be known whether Rochester or Fishbourne or someone else wrote Sodom, but we may say at least there is no reason why Rochester should not have written it. There are some very spirited and funny passages. In the last years of his life Rochester set about ‘altering’ for the Restoration stage the old play Valentinian by Fletcher. Valentinian is a lecherous Roman emperor with a lecherous court; the name rhymes with Bolloximian (Bolloxinion in some manuscripts), who, in Sodom, is a lecherous king with a lecherous court. It seems just possible that Rochester diverted himself while at work on Fletcher’s play by writing a quite uninhibited farce.

Rochester’s interest in Valentinian is not hard to understand. In the tragedy of this late Roman emperor he could safely express his feelings on the reign of Charles II. From his boyhood there was a unique emotional link between him and the king; his father had saved Charles after the disaster at Worcester and died in exile in his service. Rochester had grown up without a father, and as he reached maturity Charles had not been slow to perform some at least of a father’s offices, in financial help and the choice of a wife. Thus it is not surprising to find the well-known love-hate relationship between father and son. Generally Rochester treats the easy-going king with good-humoured banter, but at times he is contemptuous of a monarch who, as he puts it, may be controlled by anyone who knows how to play with his penis, and this contempt broadens into a hatred of all kings, ‘from the hector of France to the cully of Britain’. This is the last line of the ‘Satire on Charles II’, in which he had seemed to approve the gentleness which dissociated Charles from the ruinous military adventures of Louis XIV. There is a similar judgement in a passage inserted in Valentinian:

Yet even his errors have their good effects,

For the same gentle temper which inclines

His mind to softness does his heart defend

From savage thoughts of cruelty and blood.

There may be a connection with Rochester’s drunken folly in the Privy Garden at dawn, when he smashed a set of dials after crying ‘Dost thou stand here to fuck Time?’ It has been said that the dials had a phallic appearance, but this is far from obvious in the drawing we have of them. Possibly Rochester was addressing not the mechanism but the painting of ‘chaste, pious, prudent’ Charles II adorning it. ‘In His Majesty’s picture,’ we are told, ‘the house is shown by the shade of the hour-lines passing over the top of the sceptre …’,23 and in the drawing we see Charles’ rather phallic sceptre continually passing through Time. The king in Sodom declares that his penis shall be his sceptre. In the ‘Satire’ just quoted Charles’ ‘sceptre and his prick are of a length’. Samuel Pepys once made a similar observation. In short, to use our energies creatively and exultantly is the only effective response to the threat of Time, and there is more in life than copulation, especially for a king. According to another account of the smashing of the dials, Rochester quoted a well-known song by Shirley, a favourite of Charles, that tells us sceptre and crown must tumble down.

Rochester’s critics still write gloomily of ‘obscenity’, but such laughter releases the dangerously repressed, and he knew that our passions are rivers refreshing or perilous depending on how we approach them:

If any force

Stop or molest them in their amorous course,

They swell with rage, break down, and ravage o’er

The banks they kissed, the flowers they fed before.24

Burnet writes of his ‘strange vivacity’25 and the ‘two principles in his natural temper, … a violent love of pleasure and a disposition to extravagant mirth’.26 This mirth seems to be missed by certain of his critics. ‘Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay’ is a gloriously funny poem, yet Anne Righter finds it ‘horrifying’ and the account of Chloris’ rape (in her dream only) ‘deprecating, brutal, matter of fact’. She devotes almost a page of heavy-handed analysis to what is simply a very good joke.27 David Vieth on the same poem is even clumsier: it ‘not only incorporates two planes of experience by being mock-pastoral as well as pastoral, but adds a third through its Freudian elements of wish-fulfillment in a dream and the symbolic cave with a gate at its mouth.’28

This ‘extravagant mirth’ sometimes moved him to ‘go about in odd shapes, in which he acted his part so naturally that even those who were on the secret and saw him in these shapes could perceive nothing by which he might be discovered’.29 The most famous of these ‘shapes’ was his disguise as Dr Bendo, the Famous Pathologist, under which name and title he practised Rabelaisian medicine and won great acclaim in the environs of Tower Hill. We are reminded of the conclusion to his ‘Tunbridge Wells’:

Bless me! thought I, what thing is man, that thus

In all his shapes, he is ridiculous?

Ourselves with noise of reason we do please

In vain: humanity’s our worst disease.

Thrice happy beasts are, who, because they be

Of reason void, are so of foppery.

The same theme is pursued in ‘A Satire against Reason and Mankind’:

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.

The poem is based on the eighth satire of Boileau:

Voit-on les loups brigands, comme nous inhumains,

Pour détrousser les loups courir les grands chemins?

Jamais, pour s’agrandir, vit-on dans sa manie

Un tigre en factions partager l’Hyrcanie?

L’ours a-t-il dans les bois la guerre avec les ours?

But the debt is wider – to the whole tradition of libertinism. ‘Quant à la guerre …’, wrote Montaigne in the ApologiedeRaimondSebond, ‘il semble qu’elle n’a pas beaucoup dequoy se faire désirer aux bestes qui ne l’ont pas’. Montaigne frequently quotes Lucretius, and so do the libertines (in both the philosophical and merely sexual sense of the word) of Rochester’s day. ‘Besides,’ declares the preface to the Lucretius translation published in 1682 by Thomas Creech of Rochester’s college, Wadham, ‘the admirers of Mr Hobbes may easily discern that his Politics are but Lucretius enlarged; his state of Nature is sung by our poet, the rise of laws, the beginning of societies, the criterions of just and unjust exactly the same, and natural consequents of the Epicurean origin of Man.’ Several of Rochester’s acquaintances – from Dryden, in a letter of 1673, to the author of a ‘Prologue intended for Valentinian’ – stress his love for Lucretius, which was evidently worth notice although shared at the time by a good number of educated, Epicurean people. Like Dryden, Evelyn and other contemporaries, he tried his hand at translating DeRerumNatura. Two fragments have come down to us, one of them the great invocation to Venus that opens Book One:

Great mother of Aeneas and of Love,

Delight of mankind and the powers above,

Who all beneath those sprinkled drops of light

Which slide upon the face of gloomy night,

Whither vast regions of that liquid world

Where groves of ships on watery hills are hurled

Or fruitful earth, dost bless, since ’tis by thee

That all things live which the bright sun does see.

Though Creech’s translation appeared after Rochester’s death, John Evelyn’s was available to him:

Rome’s parent Venus, joy of Gods above

And men, who under those bright signs that move

In heaven, dost all comfort bring and mirth

To the ship-bearing seas, corn-bearing earth,

By thee conceived since all things living be

Beholding the sun’s light….