No more!—Alas! that bitter word, No more!
and how many have put it more simply and passionately? The 'Morning Hymn' and 'Evening Anthem' have rather strangely missed (owing no doubt to that superficial connexion with Bishop Ken's which is noticed below) association with hundreds and thousands of very often inferior divine poems that have found home in collections. 'The Resolve' begins quite admirably, and only wanted a little more pains on the poet's part to go on as well. 'Love's Bravo' and 'The Expectation' and 'Fading Beauty' and 'The Slight' are very far indeed from being contemptible. The two gaillardises, the 'Bachelor' and the 'Cats', want very little to make them quite capital; and 'The Whim' is in the same case. 'The Advice' actually deserves that adjective, and not a few others will be found pointed out in the notes; while even his Pindarics (at least the earlier ones, for those written after Rochester's death more fully justify his censure than those he can have read) have fine lines and even fine passages.
It is no doubt rather unfortunate that Flatman should have left us so many Horatian translations. For the one thing needful—except in a very few pieces where Horace outgoes himself in massive splendour, and so can be outgone further by more of this, as in Dryden's magnificent version of Tyrrhena regum—the one thing needful in translating Horace is something of his well-known and 'curious' urbane elegance. And this was the very quality which perhaps no Restoration poet—certainly not Flatman—could give. The 'dash of vulgarity'[11] which Mr. Bullen has too truly stigmatized affects nearly all of them except when transported by passion (which is nowhere in Horace); or fighting hard in a mood of satiric controversy which is quite different from his pococurantism; or using a massive rhetoric which is equally absent from him. The consequence is that what Flatman gives us is not Horace at all; and is not good Flatman. The 'Canidia' pieces, as one would expect, are about the best, and they are not very good.
I own, however, and I am duly prepared to take the consequences of the confession, that Flatman appeals to me, though in a different way, almost as much as any other of the constituents of this volume, though certainly not so much as some of those of the other two. He had the pure misfortune—as the sternest critic must acknowledge it to have been—of being born too late for one period and too early for another. He could not give to his most serious things the 'brave translunary' exaltations and excursions which came naturally to the men of a time just before his, and he could not correct this want by the order and the sense, the neatness and the finish, which were born with the next generation. 'Death' and 'A Thought of Death' and the other things mentioned unfairly but inevitably remind us that we have left Donne and Crashaw, Vaughan, and even Herbert, behind us. 'The Mistake' and 'The Whim' and many others remind us that we have not come to Prior. Yet others—which it were cruel to particularize and which he that reads will easily find for himself—display a lack of the purely lyrical power which, among his own contemporaries, Rochester and Sedley and Aphra Behn, not to mention others, possessed. Nor had he that gift of recognizing the eclipse of the Moon and utilizing the opportunities of the Earth, which has made Dryden, to competent and catholic tastes, all but one of the greatest of English poets. But still he was a 'child of the Moon' herself; and he has the benefits which she never withholds from her children, though they may be accompanied by a disastrous influence. He was no doubt a minor poet in a time when minor poetry was exposed to special disadvantages. But with far less wit he was more of a poet than Cleveland; with far less art he was perhaps as much of a poet as Stanley; and I am not even sure that, with 'weight for age' in the due sense, he was so very much less of a poet than King. And if those who think but little of these others as poets deem this scanty praise let us go further and say that he is a poet—imperfect, disappointing as well as disappointed, only half aneled with the sacred unction and houselled with the divine food—but a poet. Which if any denies he may be 'an excellent person'—as Praed or Praed's Medora so finally puts it—but he does not know much, if indeed he knows anything, about poetry.[12]
[1] By judicious remarks in the preface to his Musa Proterva (London, 1889, p. viii), and by specimens both in that and in its companion, Speculum Amantis.
[2] In Ashmole MS. 436, at folio 50. Mr. J. K. Fotheringham, who has kindly deciphered the horoscope, points out that there are some inaccuracies in the astrologer's computation, which 'leave a doubt of a few minutes'.
[3] Mr. Ernest Barker, Librarian of New College, kindly gave Mr. Simpson access to the College records to test the above dates and facts.
Should Flatman for his Client strain the laws
The Painter gives some colour to the cause: