INTRODUCTION TO HENRY KING.
Among the numerous possible extensions of that practice of writing Dialogues of the Dead which has been, at various times, rather unusually justified of its practitioners, not the least tempting would be one which should embody the expectations and the disappointment of the pious Bishop who held the see of Chichester in Fuller's Bad and Better Times—long afterwards, between 1843 and 1888. In the former year, as most students of English poetry know, the late Archdeacon Hannah, then a young Fellow of Lincoln College, published a most admirable edition of part of King's Poems; and announced that the rest must be left for a separate volume 'which will be published without delay'. He lived forty-five years longer, and 'the rest' was by no means an extensive one; but, whatever may have been the reason,[1] the second volume never appeared, while, to complete the misfortune, King's one famous thing, the beautiful
Tell me no more how fair she is—
is not in the first. Nor has any one since attempted to supply the deficiency,[2] though that benefactor of the lovers of Caroline poetry, Mr. J. R. Tutin, included a fifteen-page selection of King's poems, with Donne and Walton, in one of his 'Orinda Booklets' (Hull, 1904) some little time after the plan of this collection was announced, and when its first volume was passing through the press.
There must have been many readers who, like the present writer long enough ago, have felt a sensation of mingled amazement and chagrin on buying Dr. Hannah's book and not finding 'Tell me no more' in it. For that poem, though in certain 'strange and high' qualities it is the inferior of the best jets of the Caroline genius, is one of the most faultless and perfect things in this or indeed in any period of English poetry, and may be said to impart the Caroline essence in a form that can be (in the medical sense) 'borne' by all who have any feeling for poetry at all, as hardly anything else does. It enlists, with unerring art, the peculiar virtue of the metre—that of expressing settled but not violent hopelessness—which Cowper afterwards utilized, more terribly but hardly more skilfully, in 'The Castaway'. It has the 'metaphysical' fancifulness of thought and diction, tempered to a reasonable but not an excessive degree 'below proof' and so fit for general consumption. No one who possesses literary 'curiosity'—in the good old sense, not the degenerate modern one—can be indifferent to seeing what else the author of this could do.
It may be frankly and at once admitted that he has nothing exactly to match it. The once even more famous—and still perhaps not much less famous—Sic Vita, is not certainly his; and, though a fine thing, is very distinctly open to the metaphysical reproach of playing with its subject too much—of that almost wilfully mechanical and factory-like conceit-mongering which reaches its extreme in Cleveland. If it is King's, 'The Dirge' is a sort of extended handling of it—less epigrammatic but more poetical, and brought down again to that via media of metaphysicality which is King's special path. He is, in fact, a sort of Longfellow of this particular style and school of poetry—from the other side; a sort of Donne in usum vulgi. 'The Exequy' and 'The Elegy', 'Silence' and 'Brave Flowers', are all in this middle way; and perhaps his treading of it may be a reason why he has been comparatively neglected—the great vulgar not being grateful for poetry which never can fully please it, and the small wanting something more concentrated and 'above proof'. But even if he had not lacked complete presentment so long, such a collection as this would be manifestly incomplete without him. It has not, however, been thought necessary to include his verse translations of the Psalms, which form a separate volume, not much more successful than most of the attempts at that impossible task. With the admirable English of the Authorized or the Prayer-Book Versions at choice, and the admirable Latin of the Vulgate to fall back upon, nobody can want stuff like
Earth is the Lord's with her increase,
And all that there have place:
He founded it upon the Seas,
And made the floods her base.[3]
Henry King's private and public history (for he had more to do with public affairs than can have been at all comfortable to himself) had no very obvious connexion with poetry, except in so far as circumstances fed what was clearly a special taste of his for elegiac writing. He was born in 1592 at Worminghall in Bucks., for some time the abode of a family which, whether its tracing to 'the ancient Kings [by function, not name merely] of Devonshire' was fiction or fact, was, and had been for generations, highly respectable. The Kings had recently addicted themselves very specially to education at Westminster and Christ Church (there are said to have been five of the same family on the books of the House at one time) and to the clerical profession. The poet-bishop was the eldest son of John King, Prebendary of St. Paul's and Chaplain to the Queen, himself a verse-writer, and after having been Dean of Christ Church, Bishop of London from 1611 to 1621. The son—if not without some nepotism yet with results which fully justified it—became himself Prebendary of St. Paul's (as did a brother, who was still younger, in the same year) when he was only four-and-twenty; and successively received the archdeaconry of Colchester (1617); a canonry at Christ Church (1624); and the deanery of Rochester (1639). He had then the good and evil luck to be one of the large batch of Bishops made or translated by Charles on the very eve of the Rebellion. He never sat in the House of Lords before its suppression; and he had taken possession of his see but a short time when he was rabbled out of his palace at Chichester and plundered of his property, contrary to the terms of surrender of the City, by Waller's soldiers. He was also ousted from the rich living of Petworth, usually held in commendam with the (poor) bishopric of Chichester, by that particularly pestilent Puritan, Francis Cheynell. He seems to have passed great part of the Interregnum with the Salters of Richkings, near Langley in Bucks. (a house well famed for hospitality at different times and under different owners and names[4]), and at the Restoration he recovered his preferments, Edmund Calamy tertius having the extraordinary impudence to state that Cheynell was 'put out to make room for King'. And he held them for nearly a decade longer, dying in 1669. He left children and also grandchildren, one of whom, Elizabeth, seems to have married Isaac Houblon, Pepys's 'handsome man'.
Despite King's persecutions by the Puritans he was accused of a leaning to Puritanism, as his father had been before him,[5] but seemingly without much foundation. He appears to have been a sound Churchman, and a very good man in every way, though with a slight tendency (not to be too harshly judged by those who have lived in quieter times) to 'grizzle', as it is familiarly called, over his tribulations. He was also what was termed at the time 'a painful preacher' and a popular one. Pepys, it is true, did not like him when he first heard him, and afterwards thought a sermon of his 'mean'. But between these two he describes a third as 'good and eloquent'; and Samuel's judgements on such matters, always unliterary, were also much conditioned by circumstances, and by the curious remnant of Puritan leaven which always remained in that very far from pure lump.
King's poems must, from various signs, have been much handed about in manuscript; but how they came to be collected and published in 1657 is quite unknown. They were at first attributed by some to his brother Philip; and a reprint, or perhaps merely the remainder with a fresh title-page, in 1700 actually attributed them to Ben Jonson, which was going far even in a period which had seen Kirkman and was to see Curll.[6] One or two pieces besides Sic Vita are doubtful, and one or two more certainly not his; but on the whole the collection seems to be fairly trustworthy, from Dr. Hannah's comparison of it with MS. copies. And it rarely offers cruces of interpretation.
As to the origin and general character of the pieces there is nothing surprising about it either. King belonged to a time when, fortunately, churchmanship, scholarship, and literature were almost inseparably connected; and by accident or preference he seems, all his life, to have been thrown or drawn into the society of men of letters. He was a friend if not a 'son' of Ben Jonson; he was an intimate of Donne's, and one of the recipients of the famous blood-stone seals; he was for more than forty years (as he has himself recorded in a letter to Walton) a friend of 'honest Isaac' [sic]. And if his middle days were politically unhappy, they, and still more his earlier, were poetically fortunate. How, and in what degree, he caught the wind as it blew has been partly indicated above: the text should show the rest.[7]
[1] I have suggested below that some slight scruples of pudibundity may have had their influence; but if they had been serious the Archdeacon would hardly have promised this rest.
[2] Until quite recently, and after this present edition had been long printed, one appeared in America (Yale University Press, 1914) by Lawrence Mason, Ph.D.
[3] I think this will justify the critic (whoever he was) whose sentence—'quaint mediocrity and inappropriate metre'—offended Hannah's editorial chivalry as 'very unjust'. Indeed, I should make it stronger and say 'irritating inadequacy alike in metre and phrase'.
[4] Especially that of Percy Lodge in the eighteenth century, when it was the Dowager Duchess of Somerset's: see Shenstone, Lady Luxborough, and Southey's Doctor, chaps. 107 and 108. Between the times it had belonged to Bathurst, and was then also a home of men of letters.
[5] With the complementary and not unusual libel that he died a Romanist.
[6] Between the two dates there had been a fresh issue in 1664, with four new elegies. But it has been doubted whether even this was a new edition.
[7] The text of the following poems will be found, as far as Hannah's edition goes, to differ not greatly from his; but it has been collated with the originals in print and MS. by myself and, more carefully still, by Mr. Percy Simpson. The remaining poems (including the fourth or 'King Charles' Elegy added in 1664, which Hannah did not give) are adapted in the same way from direct photographic copies of the originals—collated where necessary. The variants of Sic Vita which the Archdeacon collected are of such interest and so characteristic of seventeenth-century poetry that it seemed desirable to reproduce them.
It may perhaps be added that the 1657 text is very carefully and well printed, requiring so little modernization as practically to justify the standard adopted in this collection. To modernize Chaucer or Chatterton has always seemed to me, though from slightly different points of view, a grievous error or worse. But to show how close, when scholarly writing met careful printing, the result even before the Restoration was to what it would have been to-day, I have printed the opening poem exactly as it originally stood, and have drawn attention in a note to the fewness of the differences. Because other typographers, not deacons in their craft, and confronted perhaps with copy as bad as, say, mine, plus the eccentric ethelorthography of the period, lavished italics and capitals and superfluous e's, and strappadoed the spelling, I cannot see why the eyes of a present-day reader should be unnecessarily vexed.—Hannah's edition, as far as it goes, can hardly be too well spoken of by any one who does not think that, in order to magnify himself, it is necessary to belittle his predecessors. One cannot but regret that he did not (as he might most easily have done, even in the single volume) complete his work. As it is, I am deeply indebted to him. I have, however, restored the order of the original, which he altered partly to get chronological sequence in the Elegies, &c., and partly to make subject-heads for his groups—a proceeding which to me is rarely satisfactory. But I have borrowed his useful datings of the individual pieces under their titles.