# The Works of Sir John Suckling in prose and verse/Introduction

INTRODUCTION
The Fragmenta Aurea of Sir John Suckling were published in 1646, four years after their author's death, 'by a friend to perpetuate his memory.' A second edition followed in 1648, and in 1658 a third edition contained an additional collection of poems and letters and the unfinished tragedy of The Sad One. The success of these volumes was aided doubtless by the reputation for high accomplishment and ready wit which Suckling had enjoyed, by the part which he had taken in the public affairs of a critical epoch, by his sudden disappearance, and the mystery which attended his death. He belonged to a family whose chief estates lay at Woodton, in Norfolk, and Barsham, in Suffolk, in the neighbourhood of Bungay and Beccles. His father. Sir John Suckling, became Secretary of State in 1632; his mother was a sister of Lionel Cranfield, who in 1622 was created Baron Cranfield of Cranfield and Earl of Middlesex; and he himself was born in February, 1608-09, at Cranfield's house at Whitton, between Twickenham and Hounslow. He was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1623, and in 1627, the year of his father's death, was admitted to Gray's Inn. He succeeded to his father's estates, and appears to have spent the time between 1627 and 1630, when he received knighthood, in travelling abroad. His letters bear evident testimony to the fact that he joined the contingent of English soldiers who served in the army of Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years' War; he was certainly with them during the winter of 1631-32, and, although his indications of his movements are very slight, they seem to point to his presence at the battle of Breitenfeld. He certainly returned to London in May, 1632, and seems to have spent the greater part of his time there for the ​next seven or eight years, a prominent figure among men of fashion at Court and a distinguished amateur of letters. His poems throw a considerable amount of light upon his occupations and friendships during this period, while his letters give us a somewhat closer insight into his personal character. The anecdotes given by Aubrey are founded, like many of Aubrey's statements, on a not necessarily accurate reminiscence of casual gossip; they testify, however, to certain qualities which may be gathered from the internal evidence of his writings—his versatile and mercurial temperament, and his tendency to ostentation. His expensive production of Aglaura, probably at the end of 1637, excited some comment, and the folio edition of the play, with its wide margins and slender channel of type, was referred to with satire in some lines by Richard Brome. When in 1639 he raised a troop for the first Scottish war of Charles I., their extravagant accoutrements were much ridiculed. Aubrey quotes a lampoon by Sir John Mennes, which reflected on Suckling's courage during the campaign. However, if the surface of Suckling's life at this time was unpromising, there can be little doubt that he read widely and wisely, and that his expressed cynicism was often contradicted by a prudent kindliness of heart and a thoughtfulness which was not a leading characteristic of the society in which he moved. His letter of advice to a foolish and selfish cousin, though written in the tone of a man of the world, does not conceal a genuine anxiety for his correspondent. His friendship with men like John Hales, and the fact that he could spare time from his amusements to write his Account of Religion, are evidence of qualities far removed from the conventional libertinage of many of his lyrics and some of his letters; while if, as is possible, the Account of Religion was thrown off merely in order to astonish his friends with his versatility, at any rate his letter to Henry Jermyn shows that the expedition to Scotland had awakened in him a serious interest in public affairs and a far-seeing concern for the King's safety. He fell a victim to his politics. In May, 1641, he took an active part in the plot for rescuing Strafford from the Tower. He escaped to France, and died at Paris in 1642, either by taking poison, or, according to another tradition, by the ​malice of a manservant, who placed an open razor in his boot.
In the various branches of literature in which Suckling worked he was professedly an amateur, cultivating literary society, bestowing upon it the casual inspiration of his wit, but abstaining from any regular apprenticeship to literature. As a natural result, his poetry suffers from a striking irregularity of execution. Many of the verses printed in the present volume are little better than doggerel, and if the doggerel is sometimes clever, it is often very much the reverse. The Sessions of the Poets (to give it its earliest title), which won for its author considerable fame as a wit, and produced a crop of imitations, has much of Suckling's casual happiness of phrase, and hits off with terse criticism the more conspicuous attributes of the persons who take part in the contest described. But, beyond the amusement aroused by it at the time, and its historical interest for us to-day, it is of no intrinsic poetical value. Suckling approached verse in a condescending spirit, treating it as a pastime, or as an accomplishment within reach of a gentleman, but unsuited to absorb too much of his time and power. He attached himself to no school of poetry in particular. Some of his friends, Carew, for instance, were nominal disciples of Jonson. Suckling's poetry, save for a few epigrammatic pieces and an imitation, written half in burlesque, of a famous song by Jonson, retains little trace of Jonson's influence. He spoke rather scornfully of the poet's notorious boastfulness in the Sessions of the Poets, and caricatured him with a light touch in The Sad One. His inclinations led him rather in the direction which had been pointed so forcibly by Donne. The strong, if artificial, style of Donne, with its elaborately pursued metaphors, and its explosive violence of statement, had leavened most of the non-dramatic poetry of Suckling's age. Such poems as Love's World, a collection of similes by which the lover proves that he and his passion reflect the universe and its elements in detail, or the Farewell to Love, with its gruesome imagery of death's-heads and worms, and the lover's declaration—
'A quick corse, methinks, I spy
In every woman,'
'I long to talk with some old lover's ghost, Who died before the god of love was born.'
Less directly imitated, but still an immediate effect of the type of simile for which Donne was responsible in English poetry—the simile worked up with care from the physical and mechanical science of the day—is the description of the clock in lover's hearts, to which are devoted the lines beginning, 'That none beguiled be by Time's quick flowing.' In the spirit of Donne, but with a more graceful command of phrase, are the lines,
''Tis now, since I sat down before
That foolish fort, a heart,'
with their close description of the siege and its abandonment.
However, if Suckling made his most ambitious attempts in this fashionable style, he did not achieve his greatest successes in it. It is the chief characteristic of the poets of the school of Donne that their artificiality, if the paradox is admissible, is a spontaneous part of their nature. They are naturally involved in expression, and diffuse in thought; their style seems to be naturally hard and monotonous. Few of them possessed that force of imagination which, in Donne's case, survived, if it did not always conquer, the tortures to which it was submitted by its owner. The fervent piety of George Herbert redeems much of the triviality which marks its outpourings; but, beyond question, his frame of mind, in which the highest aspirations translated themselves into quaint plays on words and out-of-the-way analogies from Nature, was no artistic pose, but a natural mood. Suckling, in his 'metaphysical' excursions, stands outside the group which indulged in poetical distortions of wit, pious or profane. He may be dull, he is frequently barren, but he is never involved. His idea is clear to himself, and if he elaborates it, he does so without raising a cloud of words and confused images ​round it for his readers. ''Tis now since I sat down' may recall Donne's favourite figures of thought; but its ready ease and smoothness, its conciseness of phrase, are very different from Donne's ponderousness and jerkiness, amid which effects are achieved, either by a sudden and apparently accidental digression into short-lived melody, or by a piece of forcible abruptness that arrests the attention and remains fast in the memory. Suckling is clear and easy with no apparent effort. There is no depth of feeling in his poetry; he evidently prided himself on its absence. The deep emotions of the poet were no part of the equipment of a gentleman. In depth of abstract thought, too, he is deficient. Donne's least graceful verses usually have the merit that their thought, while not always profound, is at least novel. Suckling's thought was commonplace, and had little fertility. Again and again, in his plays and letters, we find old ideas re-used from his poems without more alteration than a careless memory admits. His Account of Religion by Reason, a prose pamphlet written during a holiday at Bath, or West Kington, is a clever performance, with a comparative grace and clearness of style that, from the point of view of purely literary merit, place it somewhat in advance of most of the prose of Suckling's age. But its treatment of its subject—a man of the world's apology for Christianity—is merely a light resume of arguments commonly advanced by other writers; and little original thought has come into being from the perusal of the 'cart-load of books' which, as Aubrey tells us, Suckling brought down to Bath with him. His ready and superficial intelligence of abstract subjects was consistent with real earnestness and foresight where practical issues were at stake. The letter already alluded to, addressed to Henry Jermyn, and evidently intended for the eye of Charles I., discusses with great clearness and wisdom the proper attitude of the King to Parliament, and the advisability of the surrender of Strafford. Suckling eventually clave whole-heartedly to the royal cause, and Strafford's liberty was the rock on which he made shipwreck; but it seems clear that his subsequent actions must have been in defiance of his better judgment, and that his end, whatever its manner, was probably hastened by the ​hopelessness of the cause which he longed to serve. At any rate, the type of intellect which the letter shows was not a type which would be freely employed on the minute intricacies of fancy so dear to Donne and his followers.
It follows that, where Suckling excels as a poet, we find him dealing with concrete subjects, or using imagery with which he is practically familiar. This is the merit of a lyric like ''Tis now since I sat down,' in which the details of the simile are so perfectly adjusted to the subject of the poem. Suckling's obvious cynicism where affairs of the heart were concerned expresses itself at once in verse. 'Why so pale and wan, fond lover?' is a happy impromptu in which the natural Suckling declares himself without reserve. When he turns to hymn constant love in 'O! for some honest lover's ghost,' he is writing conventionally and uneasily, and the conclusion of the poem, with its airy disclaimer of the possible rewards of earthly fidelity, is arrived at with evident relief. Similarly, beside the Ballad upon a Wedding, the dialogue on the same subject between Suckling and his friend Bond is awkward and uninteresting. The ballad itself finds Suckling in a thoroughly congenial mood. He has no longer to forage for similes 'far-fetched and dear-bought,' but speaks as a plain person dealing directly with facts. Putting himself in the position of a countryman come up to town, free to adopt the simple imagery of a country life which he evidently loved, his imagination comes into play unforced, and his task of simple description is at once enlivened by the exquisite pictures which imagination in these happy circumstances suggests. It is not that these pictures are peculiarly Suckling's own: the Easter sunshine had already been the chief motive of George Herbert's loveliest and most natural lyric, and other writers had found analogies between fresh beauty and the Catherine pear, but no one had made these allusions with so little elaboration or with so thoroughly pictorial an effect. Here, at his best, Suckling is akin to Herrick, equalling him in the delicacy of line with which his pictures are drawn, but giving no hint of that gentle philosophy, so susceptible to the beauty and pleasure of the moment, while so apprehensive of its fleeting rapture, which gives Herrick's verse its never-failing charm. ​In the pretty lyric, 'Love, Reason, Hate,' Suckling again approaches Herrick. He is thoroughly at home in the rustic game which his abstract qualities play, and here, just as in ''Tis now since I sat down,' the real subject of the poem is exactly suited by the image employed.
In the adoption of natural and concrete imagery, then, unhampered by the demands of artifice and ingenuity. Suckling's inborn directness of intellect finds its way to expression most readily, and the chief characteristic of that expression is its happy simplicity of phrase. It was, however, the great drawback to his poetic gift that he felt himself bound, as a fashionable amateur, to follow the latest fashion. We could exchange many of his 'metaphysical' ventures for more lyrics like 'Love, Reason, Hate,' or the Ballad upon a Wedding, with their 'music made of morning's merriest heart.' But if in lyric poetry he hastened to be in the mode without much serious thought, it is evident that as a dramatist he took himself more seriously, and had a real desire to excel. Contemporary traditions record the trouble which he took to bring Aglaura before the public notice; the play was acted with the unusual addition of scenery, and the cost of the dresses was borne by the author. The plays, one and all, display Suckling's debt to Shakespeare, and the lighter passages are marked by free satirical allusions to the affectations and politics of the day, which give these dramas a definite historical interest. The comedy of The Goblins, too, has a very effective centre in the company of outlaws, in whose disguise the secret of the plot is contained. No individual character, however, can lay any real claim to life. The verse-scenes are written in the loosest of that loose blank verse in which the Stewart dramatists abused the free licence of their predecessors, and, in spite of occasional passages of eloquence, are seldom free from tediousness. Excessive complication of plot, as in Aglaura, is further obscured by Suckling's inability to keep distinctly before us the motives which animate his characters, and the characters suffer further from that apparent instability of purpose and liability to sudden change of conviction which mark the epoch of Fletcher's and Massinger's influence, and lessen the psychological value of drama, even where plot and character are handled with ​some individuality. Suckling's failures are more conspicuous, in that he is always pointing us to his models. The influence of the character of Hamlet is perceptible in the discontent of Brennoralt. Hamlet, probably seen through the medium of Vendice in Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy, is again responsible for the hero of The Sad One. Aglaura, the most ambitious and complicated of the tragedies, is reminiscent of Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy, not merely in the hero's reverence for royalty, but in the position of the heroine with regard to her lover and the King. The dramatic strength of the Maid's Tragedy resides in the guilt of Evadne, and her vengeance on the seducer who has ruined her life. Aglaura, on the contrary, is innocent; her would-be seducer is murdered by others, while she murders her lover by mistake—a confusion in slaughter by which the tragic horror of Beaumont and Fletcher's play is totally missed. When, after the Restoration, the last act of the Maid's Tragedy was altered to avoid the reflections raised by the murder of the guilty King, the effect of the play was spoiled. In Suckling's alternative last act of Aglaura, written at an earlier date, with a similar purpose, the change leaves every reader tranquil, unless here and there one may be found who delights in mechanical carnage on the stage. It is impossible to feel much lively interest in the conduct of a plot whose characters go through their evolutions so tamely.
In the present edition the text of the early editions of the Fragmenta Aurea has been carefully collated. Its contents, with one or two additions, such as that of the Cantilena Politica-Jocunda, are those of the 1646 edition with the additions introduced in 1658. These have been reprinted in as close accordance with the original editions as is permitted by the use of modern spelling. In the plays, the prose-scenes, printed in the early and modern editions alike as though written in blank verse, have been arranged as prose for the first time. The verse-scenes in the early editions are printed very irregularly, and in modern editions have been subjected to much alteration, in which it is often difficult to recognize the likeness to blank verse that presumably dictated such radical departures from the text. The present editor has ​endeavored to reproduce where possible the suggestions of the early texts as to the scansion of these scenes, but where, as is often the case, those suggestions are wanting, and the printing of the lines is merely arbitrary, he has arranged the lines in the closest likeness to blank verse that their hasty construction, confused by the constant elision of final vowels and the smaller and more usual monosyllables, and by the frequent use of half-lines in exclamatory passages, may be allowed to bear. In the notes an endeavour has been made to connect the poems and letters as far as possible with Suckling's life and the history of his day, and to trace his allusions to contemporary, and, where necessary, to earlier literature. Here and there allusion has been made to some of the more valuable comments signed 'W. W.,' which are written in a copy of the 1658 edition of the poems, and have been assigned to Wordsworth. These comments, from internal evidence alone, cannot be the work of Wordsworth, although the volume in which they occur seems to have belonged to him, and to contain notes which are his.
Mr. Carew Hazlitt, in his edition of Suckling's works for the Library of Old Authors, included a certain amount of new matter, notably two letters, one of which, addressed to Davenant, was printed from MS. Ashmole 826, f. 101, and the other to Sir Henry Vane, from S. P. Dom. Chas. I., vol. ccxvi., p. 6. The second of these is printed as an Appendix to the present volume, from a copy of the original made by the editor. In addition to these, an Appendix to Mr. Hazlitt's edition contains four satires on Suckling, three of which deal with his flight to France, and an anonymous elegy on his death. It is apparent that, while Suckling's somewhat riotous life and conversation excited the enmity of Puritans, his ostentation, of which examples already have been given, made him ridiculous in the eyes of less bigoted contemporaries. At the same time it is impossible to doubt that beneath a gay and careless exterior he possessed sound practical sense, and that his ambition to excel as an amateur wit only too often concealed a high, if somewhat fragile, poetic gift, which on happy occasions rose superior to an atmosphere not a little hostile to its full development.