The battle between the puritans and the sophisticates is never ending.
At certain stages of cultural development the worldly wise are in the
ascendent in the literary world, as they were in the Restoration and
after the first World War. Yet those with a more sober view of life
are never submerged, even when they are overshadowed. The court of
the restored Charles gave full play to the indelicacy of Rochester,
Dryden, and their circles, but most of their contemporaries were
probably more content to read George Herbert, Queries, Baxter, and
Bunyan. Though the fashionable and urbane remained dominant in letters
through the age of Dryden, the forces of morality were rallying, and
after 1688 the court (with which Blackmore was connected) threw
its weight on the side of virtue. Jeremy Collier was but the most
important voice of a great movement, destined to have its effect on
literature.
Sir Richard Blackmore contributed his share to the growing wave of
bourgeois morality, which in the 18th century was reflected in the
middle-class appeal of Addison and Steel, Lillo's _London Merchant_,
and Richardson's almost feminine plea for virtue rewarded. A
physician, Blackmore had turned to poetry for relaxation and composed
his soporific epics, by his own admission, in the coffee-houses and in
his coach while visiting patients. In the preface, to _Prince Arthur_
(1695) the City Bard took occasion to flay the Wits of the day for
their immorality, an attack which he followed up in 1697 with the
Preface to _King Arthur_, whose thinly disguised political allegory
won him a knighthood. Up to this point the Wits had treated him with
amused scorn, but when he called his big guns into action in the
_Satyr against Wit_ (dated 1700 but issued late in 1699) the Wits set
out to crush him for once and all. _Commendatory Verses on the Author
of the Two Arthurs and the Satyr against Wit_ (1700), the reply,
was far from commendatory. Edited by Tom Brown and sponsored by
Christopher Codrington, this miscellany attempted in scurrilous and
often bad verse to laugh the Knight out of literary existence. Its
main distinction lies in the list of contributors, among whom were Sir
Charles Sedley, Richard Steele, Tom Brown, and probably John
Dennis. Blackmore's supporters answered _Commendatory Verses_ with
_Discommendatory_ _Verses on Those Which are Truly Commendatory, on
the Author of the Two Arthurs, and the Satyr against Wit_. (1700).
It is not at all certain that Blackmore emerged second best in this
exchange of blows in the miscellanies. At any rate, unabashed he went
on to write more epics on Elizabeth, Alfred, Job, and to win himself a
doubtful immortality by being pilloried in Pope's _Dunciad_.
Throughout his writings Blackmore has a good deal to say about Wit,
and much about the abuse of it. While Swift in the _Tale of a Tub_
scolds the Wits for their addiction to nonsense and irreligion,
Blackmore goes still further in the _Satyr_, seeing Wit as something
which, in common practice, is evil and vicious, to be eradicated as
quickly as possible. It is the enemy of virtue and religion (in the
Preface to _Creation_, 1712, he links it with atheism), a form of
insanity, in opposition to 'Right Reason', and the seducer of young
men. Combatting its iniquities, Blackmore proposes to set up a Bank
and Mint of Wit to assure that it will be refined and purified. By
this process, the works of Dryden, Congreve, Southerne, Wycherley,
Garth, and Vanbrugh will be melted down to separate the sludge from
the pure metal. In the _Nature of Man_ (1711) he takes a more kindly
attitude towards Wit and pairs it with Sense, Reason, Genius, and even
Piety. While he is moderate in his denunciation of Wit in the _Essay
upon Wit_, he does insist that even at its best it can never be noble.
Wit is harmful, he states, because it is often employed in immoral
subjects, raillery, ridicule, and satire. It is chiefly useful as
ornamentation: "The Addition of Wit to Proper Subjects, is like the
artful Improvement of the Cook, who by his exquisite Sauce gives to a
plain Dish, a pleasant and unusual Relish".
Addison's _Freeholder_ essay (No. 45) was inspired by Blackmore's
_Essay upon Wit_, to which he paid a compliment in his opening remarks
(much to the disgust of Swift, who accused him of double-dealing).
Although Addison had praised Blackmore's _Creation_ warmly in the
_Spectator_ No. 339, he had not always been friendly, for earlier
Blackmore had sneered at Addison in the _Satyr against Wit_, a jibe
that drew Steele's reply in _Commendatory Verses_.
Blackmore's _Essay upon Wit_ appeared in his _Essays upon Several
Subjects_; the one-volume first edition of this work was published
in 1716 and was followed by the second edition, in two volumes, the
following year. The present reprint is from the first edition. The
1716 _Freeholder_ No. 45 here reproduced is from the edition of 1758.
Both copies are owned by the University of Michigan.