Page:Works of Sir John Suckling.djvu/19

 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