Note 9 — POEMS

Hayls may not have been a great painter; but he certainly seems to have had the knack of putting character in his portraits. Neither that of Pepys nor that of his wife is without it: and that of Flatman has a great deal.9 It is what would be called, I suppose, by most superficial judges an 'ugly' face—with a broad retroussé nose, lips of the kind sometimes called 'sensual', and a heavy (something of a double) chin. But the forehead is high, the mouth smallish, and above all there are a pair of somewhat melancholy eyes which entirely rescue it from any charge of vulgarity, though it is not exactly refined. It certainly suggests what is called in stock phrase an 'artistic temperament': and it may not be too fanciful to see in it the kind of artistic temperament which aims higher than it can hit, begins what it is unable to finish, and never forgets the yew even among the roses. This complexion is, of course, in a way reflected in the very titles of the few things of Flatman known10 to the few people who do know him—'Death', 'A Thought of Death', 'A Dooms-day Thought', 'Nudus Redibo', &c. But it is almost everywhere; and there is no affectation or sensiblerie about it. Flatman is not, as Longfellow, picturesquely and perhaps Carlylesquely, remarked of Matthiessen and Salis, 'a gentleman who walks through life with a fine white cambric handkerchief pressed to his eyes'. He can write battle-songs and love-songs and festive gaillardises naturally enough. But the other vein is also natural, and perhaps more so. The funeral panegyric Odes which make a considerable feature of his works were, of course, almost part of the routine business of a professional poet in those times of patronage: one of his regular sources of revenue, in fives or tens or hundreds of guineas, according to his rank on Parnassus and the rank and liberality of his subject in Church or State or City. But Flatman at his best suffuses them with a grave interest in Death itself—a touch now of Lucretius (who seems to have been a favourite of his), now of the Preacher—which is not in the least conventional. In this curious Second Caroline period of faint survivals of the Renaissance and complete abandonment of its traditions, Flatman's heritage appears to have been this sense of Death. A poet might have a worse portion.