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The Originality of Rochester's Satyr Against Mankind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John F. Moore
John F. Moore*
Affiliation:
Connecticut College
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Extract

Two recent studies, which ascribe to Rochester's Satyr against Mankind an originality which has long been in dispute, differ as to the nature and degree of that originality. V. de Sola Pinto is convinced that the Satyr “is a thoroughly original poem,” but he supports his opinion only with the observation that Rochester's poem has “a passionate vehemence which makes the carefully meditated art of Boileau's satire seem frigid.” Kenneth Murdock, in his recent biographical study of Rochester, treats the ideas of the poem as clues to Rochester's mind and thought, but he nevertheless refers to the Satyr as a “skilful adaptation of Boileau's verses.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , June 1943 , pp. 393 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1943

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References

1 Representative critical opinions on the question:

“The Satyr upon Man is commonly taken to be a translation from Boileau … but My Lord Rochester gives us another Cast of Thought, another Turn of Expression….. Wheresoever he Imitated or Translated, was loss to him …” Thomas Rymer, in the Preface to Rochester's Poems & c On several Occasions (London, 1691).

“Of the Satire Against Man, Rochester can claim only what remains when all Boileau's part is taken away.” (Samuel Johnson, Lives, Hill ed., 1905, i, 226).

“Rochester improves on Boileau by his English version.” (Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading [New Haven, 1934], p. 146.) It is ironical that Pound, after citing Rymer's Preface “to show that intelligent criticism is not my personal invention,” should repeat the error which Rymer was trying to correct—that the Satyr was a version, improved or otherwise, of Boileau's poem.

2 Rochester, Portrait of a Restoration Poet (London, 1935), p. 174.

3 In The Sun at Noon (New York, 1939), p. 284.

4 “Rochester's Satire Against Mankind,” W. Va. Univ. Studies: III. Philological Papers, ii (May, 1937), 73.

5 One instance of the danger of citing Montaigne as a source of parallels: Crocker offers as an “unmistakable parallel” Montaigne's “plus de différence de tel homme à tel homme que de tel animal à tel homme,” and Rochester's “Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast.” (p. 71) But Montaigne was repeating Plutarch's Gryllus: “For I do not believe that there is such difference between man and beast in reason and understanding and memory, as between man and man.” The possibility that Rochester knew the Gryllus either in the original or in translation cannot be ignored, particularly since, as Lovejoy and Boas have pointed out, the Gryllus “had the greatest influence in later times, for it was imitated in the sixteenth century by G.-B. Gelli, who was read by Montaigne and imitated by a host of lesser writers.” (Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, p. 411). The first English translation of Gelli's Circe, by Henry Iden, appeared in 1557.

6 Boileau's thought is almost entirely derivative. The Latin satirists furnish him with epigrammatic comments on the weaknesses and vices of Roman society, which he deftly translates and applies to Paris. It would indeed be difficult to find in the poem a single idea which does not have its roots in the works of classical writers. If other grounds were lacking, Boileau's thorough-going eclecticism would make him almost as questionable a source for Rochester's ideas as is Montaigne. Cf. George Boas, The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, 1933), p. 147; and, for a detailed study of Boileau's sources, the Société des Textes Modernes edition of the satires, Albert Cahen, ed. (Paris, 1932). My citations are from this edition.

7 Op. cit. Cf. animalitarianism, the term used by Lovejoy and Boas, op. cit. Of the two terms, theriophily seems preferable as less ambiguous. Animalitarianism, as a partial analogue of humanitarianism, might be erroneously taken to refer to activity on behalf of animals—to the program and philosophy of the SPCA.

8 Collected Works, John Hayward, ed. (London, 1926). All of my citations from Rochester are from this edition. Cf. Plutarch's Gryllus: “… observe the combats of beasts, both one against another as well as against yourselves, how straightforward and artless they are….” Rochester's thought is clearly closer to Plutarch's than to Boileau's.

9 Professor Ronald Crane suggests a more likely source: Thomas Stanley's History of Philosophy (1655–62). See A Collection of English Poems, 1660–1800 (New York, 1937), p. 1198.

10 Preface to Valentinian (London, 1685). Elsewhere in this Preface Wolseley is somewhat less flattering and probably more realistic when he says that Rochester “had a Wit that could make even his Spleen and ill-humour pleasant to his friends …”

11 Cf. the Gryllus: “Thus your fortitude appears to be prudent fear: and your courage a knowing timidity ….”

12 Loc. cit.

13 Cf. Ezra Pound's comment on “A Letter from Artemisa in the Town to Chloe in the Country”: “… Rochester is free of specific social urge, and his eye lights on the eternal silliness …” (op. cit., p. 161)

14 Fragm. 23 (cited by Lovejoy and Boas, op. cit., p. 396).

15 Op. cit., p. 356.

16 See Oldham's “Bion, A Pastoral … bewailing the Death of the Earl of Rochester.”

17 The Works of Mr. John Oldham …, 7th ed., (London, 1710), p. 200. That Rochester was Oldham's source for the Lucretian phrase seems clear from his adoption also of the immediately preceding Rochesterian image of flight, and specifically, of the word “soaring.”

18 Op. cit. Presumably Rymer had the benefit of any evidence which may have been generally available to Rochester's contemporaries.