Claude Rawson Satire and Sentiment, 1660–1830.
Cambridge University Press, 309 pages, $64.95
Distinguished scholar Claude Rawson’s Satire and Sentiment, 1660–1830, amounts to a survey of what might be called social and socially-placing tones of voice in comic English literature of its period. The book, about half of which started life as discrete reviews, aims to hit “stress points, rather than to provide a progressive narrative.” First, Rawson finds in the Restoration grandee Rochester a lordly ease in obscenity lacking in the socially insecure Oldham; he notes, too, that “Rochester, Laforgue, and Eliot, all wrote, while still in their twenties, portraits of men suffering or affecting an elderly sexual debility, though the refined timidities and wilting sadness of Prufrock differ greatly from the thrusting ostentation of [Rochester’s] Disabled Debauchee.”
The central essay deals with the relation of mock-heroic (Augustan and Romantic) to the heroic epic’s central concern, war. Dryden and Pope, in their mocks of and in their translations from ancient epic, shy away from war, in conformity with the pacifist sentiments of the age; the Dunciad, he notes, “uses every rhetorical routine associated with classical or Miltonic epics, including an Odyssean or Aenean journey from East to West, a visit to the underworld, and a parody of heroic sports. But there is no fighting.” Swift, who does excoriate the gruesomeness of war, eschews the mock-heroic. There was an Augustan embarrassment, an aporia, an “inverse anxiety of influence” here: Homer and Virgil were untouchable