THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
STREETS : A BOOK OF LONDON VERSES
THE FORTUNE
REPUTATIONS
THE BLACK CURTAIN
MARGOT'S PROGRESS
Etc. Etc.
Flecker, in his Rooms at Cambridge.
Frontispiece.
JAMES ELROY
FLECKER
AN APPRECIATION
WITH SOME BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
BY
DOUGLAS GOLDRING
LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
11, HENRIETTA STREET, W.C. 2
1922
Printed in Great Britain at
The May/lower Press, Plymouth
William Brendon & Son, Ltd.
PREFACE
THE chapters which follow have been
written in the confident belief that
the subject of them has secured a
permanent position in English literary
history, that his poetry will be read and
admired centuries after those who were his
contemporaries have passed away, and that
in the years to come generations of poetry-
lovers will be eager to know what kind of
man he was, what he looked like, what his
circle thought of him. It has seemed worth
while, therefore, to jot down the impressions
and reminiscences of a few of his friends
who have been kind enough to search their
memories at my request, and to add to this
material my own. My excuse for under-
v
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
taking the work is the fact that — first as
editor and contributor and then as pub-
lisher and author — Flecker and myself were
closely associated during the greater part of
his literary life, and I was thus fortunate
in hearing more of his literary plans and
of his ideas about his own poems than most
of his other friends, including many who
knew him far more intimately than I
did.
This small volume certainly makes no
pretensions to be described as a " Life " of
Flecker ; but it will, I trust, be found to
contain a certain amount of information
which lovers of his poetry will find of in-
terest.
As a complete biography of the poet will
doubtless be issued in due course, I have
refrained deliberately from tapping many
important sources of information. I have,
however, gratefully to acknowledge the help
which I have received from (among others)
vi
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Mr. Henry Danielson, Mr. Frank Savery,
Mr. Roger Ingpen, Mr. Trelawney Dayrell-
Reed, and Mr. John Mavrogordato. To
Mr. Danielson I am expressly indebted for
the bibliographical information given at the
end of the book.
DOUGLAS GOLDRING.
May 22nd, 1922.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Flecker, in his Rooms at Cambridge . . FrontiepUce
Foxing page
"Two Englishmen (Flecker and J. D. Beazley)
ENJOYING THEMSELVES IN GERMANY " FROM A DRAW-
ING by J. D. Beazley ...... 36
James Elroy Flecker (1909) ..... 66
Corrections to "Oak and Olive/' in Flecker's
Handwriting ........ 138
A PECULIAR glamour surrounds, in
retrospect, the fourteen and a half
years which separated the end of
the 'nineties from the outbreak of the Great
War. Looking back, in 1922, those of us
who are now in the middle 'thirties can see
ourselves playing, all unmindful of our
doom, in a world that then seemed almost
shadowless. School days, undergraduate
days, early manhood — life seemed to grow
better and better as the years slipped away
which divided us from the great catastrophe.
1913 and the summer of 1914 must always
have that historic interest which the human
imagination attaches to " last moments."
But if we like to dwell on this queer " pre-
war " period, to think about it, to try to get
3
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
it in perspective and disentangle some of
the main threads from its jumble of ten-
dencies and ideas, and to keep green the
memory of friends who died before the Great
Adventure had been revealed to stricken
humanity as the Great Illusion, it is not
because we wish it back again or are mere
praisers of time past. Let us admit that
if the present is a period of short commons,
bewilderment, and suffering, there is no
time like it — except the future. We have
struggled through our disasters to man's
estate ; we are — compared with those of
our contemporaries whose lives ended before
the war — grown-up. We have gained much
in the process, changed our sense of values,
become politically " responsible," realised,
however dimly and imperfectly, the human
bonds which unite us with our fellow-men
and women the world over.
In these circumstances it is only natural
that our ideas of Beauty should have
4
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
changed also. The artist of to-day— poet,
painter, novelist, sculptor, musician — is dis-
satisfied with much that might have given
him pleasure a decade ago. He seeks more
than what is at times contemptuously
termed " Beautiful Beauty " ; and if he
is taunted with accepting ugliness in its
place, he can reply that what he seeks is
significance — not the pretty Chinese lantern,
but the naked light within. So it is that
much of the art produced between 1900-14
has become almost unbearable with the
passage of years. Reputations have
flourished and withered, fashionable figures
have had their day and night has covered
them : even the war-poets have wilted. If
the casualties in regard to reputation are un-
expected, the survivors are equally so. Very
few can claim to have foretold on the
publication of " The Golden Journey to
Samarkand " that the status of James Elroy
Flecker would be as high as it is to-day.
5
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
If it was the visible world which enthralled
Flecker, and if the beauty that he sought
to create was an obvious, almost a tangible
beauty, he had at least the advantage of never
being fashionable, and he had that quality of
queerly detached effort which differentiates
the " pains " taken by genius from those
which are taken by talent. He worked at
his poems for his poems' sake ; was de-
liberately ascetic and austere in regard to
his art ; deliberately objective. He sup-
pressed ephemeral emotion, just as he
suppressed the ephemeral " message,"
fashionable philosophy, or what-not. And
so, with everything of a merely momentary
significance expunged, the precious metal
of his verse has survived, has held its own
and will continue to be treasured perhaps
as long as our language lasts.
Having said this much, it must be added
that James Elroy Flecker was at the same
time peculiarly the product of his age. He
6
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
was definitely, entirely " pre-war." He
died with the pre-war public schoolboy's
idea of war undamaged, intact, and the
dying embers of his life were waked into
their final flame by its fierce breath. But
if his work is (as I believe) of a lasting
worth, then like some masterpiece of Greek
sculpture, it will be found to epitomise its
period and will give the historian of the
future some valuable clues as to the nature
and character of the age in which he lived.
At present we are very much too near
the decade in which Flecker grew to man-
hood, wrote and died, to be able to do
more than speculate, very tentatively, as
to what may subsequently appear to
have been its salient features. It was
a strange period. It saw the birth of
the English Review, the rise to fame of
John Masefield and Walter de la Mare, of
Mr. Granville Barker and Joseph Conrad.
George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells
7
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
produced in it a good deal of their finest
work ; it witnessed a cult of the open air
and the open road ; of nut cutlets and no
hats, and — at all events, at Oxford — a tre-
mendous cult of the eighteen-'nineties, of
Wilde, of Beardsley, of Verlaine, Baudelaire,
and Ernest Dowson. Another dominating
influence on English poetry during the period
was A. E. Housman. Theatrical interest was
divided between the imported musical
comedies staged so superbly by the late
Mr. George Edwardes (who that saw it will
forget his production of Les Merveilleuses,
at Daly's ?) ; and the activities on a dif-
ferent plane of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Granville
Barker, the Stage Society, etc. Of the
social gaieties of the period, culminating
in the Bacchanalian crescendo which ended
in July, 1914, it is scarcely necessary to
speak. A generation hence, volumes of
memoirs will pour from the press making
a vain attempt to describe what those who
8
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
never witnessed it will never be able to
believe. Those radiant nights of dancing
in travesti, those unceasing libations of
dry monopole, that frenzied pursuit of plea-
sure careless of the morrow, have passed
away as even the most brilliant night
must yield before the grey and menacing
dawn.
For the leisured classes, for people, that
is to say, with incomes of about £800 a year
and over, we can see now that the period
was one of peculiar ease and comfort,
eminently conducive to the pursuit of the
most diverse, delightful, and completely
useless branches of scholarship. Such hoary
institutions as the public school, Oxford
and Cambridge, the " English gentleman,"
and so forth, if they bore in them the seeds
of decay or the indications of change, had
not yet either decayed visibly, or changed
in any manner that attracted notice. For
public schoolboys and for undergraduates —
b 9
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
and James Elroy Flecker was essentially of
the fine fleur of our public school and Uni-
versity system — it was a time of unusual
opportunity for intellectual flower-gathering.
It provided a little of everything and
nothing long. Perhaps, by giving adoles-
cent boys and girls so many lovely things
to think about, it helped to deprive them —
in matters of which, after crossing an ocean
of blood and tears, we can to-day so depres-
singly see the importance — of all capacity
for thought. The world was so full of a num-
ber of things — who can blame them if they
were happy ?
And, indeed, for the young things of the
privileged classes, it was a happy time.
In the world of art and letters the absinthe-
sodden gloom of the 'nineties had dis-
appeared, with much of the Victorian
puritanism which had provoked it. The
sun was shining again, the lark, etc., were
functioning to perfection. Who can blame
10
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
those young men and women for not troubling
to investigate problems so banausic as those
of foreign politics ? They had the world
full of toys to play with, and for to
admire they had " the flowers and
men and mountains that decorate it so
superbly."
Looking back, it is delightful to remem-
ber that stern moralists of the Kipling type
found much to distress them in the pre-war
public school. Bullying had to a large
extent disappeared from the unofficial cur-
riculum. The " treat-'em-rough " prefect,
who was almost a subaltern and had almost
a moustache, was beginning to make way
for sixth-form boys with a real interest in
the classics and some feeling for literature,
who were almost undergraduates. It ceased
to be altogether shameful to read the
English poets in the school library on a
Sunday afternoon. A wave of what our
reactionaries would call " softness " and
11
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
outside observers might have described as
" civilisation " broke over our crusted insti-
tutions— those institutions in which normal
intelligence has still to make such a desperate
struggle for existence. The change in the
public schools was reflected at Oxford.
Instead of the fierce and violent reactions
of the 'nineties, when those who could not
bear the public school atmosphere signalised
their escape from the prison-house by rush-
ing to extremes of morbid decadence, there
was a more widely diffused cultivation of
the arts and less persecution of the poseur,
with the result that young men became
on the whole less closely wedded to their
poses. To be a " decadong " was really
more of a rag than anything else, and I
don't suppose that any of the youths who
in slightly intoxicated moments recited the
" credo of a despairing decadent " would
have gone to the stake for it, though one
or two were induced (to their disgust), by
12
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
a gloomy ass who controlled one of the
smaller colleges, to take the train to Cam-
bridge.
The 'nineties were cultivated with rapture
in the nineteen-hundreds, and the extrava-
gances and eccentricities of the earlier period
were reproduced with painstaking zeal ;
but, as I have suggested, the point of view
was changed, the " ennui " was factitious.
Of plutocratic Oxford in the pre-war period
Mr. Compton Mackenzie, in the second
volume of " Sinister Street " has proved a
faithful recorder, endowed with a prodigious
memory. Of conventional Oxford — which
then as now, comprised such a large propor-
tion of the undergraduates — no recorder is
or ever will be necessary. " The system "
took their money and at the end of three
or four years produced them like rabbits
from a conjuror's hat and distributed them
among curacies and assistant-masterships
and lawyers' offices, to continue the work
13
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
of perpetuating " the system." The pro-
portion of undergraduates, however, whose
main interest was in literature, art, and
scholarship — the aesthetes, in short — deserve
some reminiscent pages. Poetry or, to be
exact, shockingly bad verse, was written
by the ream, and the fashionable thing was
to be " wondrous," more wondrous than
anyone had ever been before. One had
also to be sensitive and rather frail, to culti-
vate " ennui," to be gnawed by secret
despairs. How much of a camouflage was
this frail and lily-like attitude was once
agreeably displayed by a friend of Flecker's
and of my own who, on being debagged at
Merton, horrified the aghast rowing men
by a boxing display which left quite a
number of them prostrate. The outraged
poet then resumed his trousers with a dignity
which struck awe into all beholders. The
despairs were the greatest possible fun.
Don't imagine from the following lines that
14
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
the author of them was not enjoying himself
hugely.
There is no new hope to be hoped for,
There is no new word to be said ;
All ends are as shadows of shadows,
Pale ghosts of things dead.
The good and the evil, what are they ?
I am weary of ease as of strife :
The days as they drag are made heavy
With loathing of life.
Before composing this work he had, I
believe, lunched unwisely. After luncheon,
in a mauve silk shirt, he had punted on the
Cherwell and sadly and regretfully he had
been seasick into it. The tragedies of
youth !
Other lines, I think they must be from the
same delightful source, have lingered in my
memory. I hope their author (if he sees
this book) will forgive me for quoting
them. After all, the prompting motive is
as much sentiment as a sense of humour I
15
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Here, then, are the opening stanzas of " My
Lilies " : I
In my soul's garden, 'mid a tangled bed,
A few poor lilies grew.
But now, alas ! is their pale glory shed.
They were but few.
Sadly the white leaves severed one by one
And fell upon the bed :
The flowers I had are faded, there are none
That are not dead.
My poor flowers ! the garden of my soul
Is empty now and bare ;
I have no lilies left, I gave them all :
All that there were.
Besides lilies, we were nearly all of us
greatly addicted to " lassitude " ; none
more so than the friend from whose works
I cull these gems. Here is one example
of it :
Tired September : and the rain is falling, falling,
With a sound of utter lassitude, outside :
Up the garden I can see the gray mists crawling
Over rose-beds where, alas, the flowers have died.
16
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
And here another :
Despair is on us in these autumn days :
The year is tired of flowers ; the year is cold —
I am tired, too, of all these weary ways,
For the soul in me is very, very old.
I am tired, so tired, of all that I remember,
So tired of everything that I forget.
With me, as with the year, it is November —
0 this lassitude, this mist of vague regret !
Oh, this lassitude ! I remember how a
genuine relic of the 'nineties (grown in the
course of years into a very sensible parish
priest) once parodied our silliness, in a
happy after-dinner moment. Unfortunately
the first verse is the only one which I can
recall. It went thus :
From the garden of sorrow
Wan blossoms I pick.
My mistresses bore me,
My meals make me sick !
What Flecker's bad verses were like I do
not know, as I did not make his acquaintance
until his Oxford days were over. But Mr.
17
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Frank Savery has recorded that even as a
schoolboy he already wrote verses " with
appalling facility." " He imitated with
enthusiasm and without discrimination, and,
the taste in those long-gone days being for
Oscar Wilde's early verse and Swinburne's
complacent swing, he turned out a good
deal of decadent stuff, that was, I am con-
vinced, not much better than the rubbish
written by the rest of his generation at
Oxford. What interested me in Flecker in
those days," Mr. Savery continues, " was
the strange contrast between the man — or
rather, the boy — and his work. Cultured
Oxford in general, I should add, was not
very productive at that time : a sonnet a
month was about the maximum output of
the lights of Balliol. The general style of
literature in favour at the time did not lend
itself to a generous outpouring. Hence
there was a certain piquancy in the ex-
uberant flow of passionate verse which
18
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
issued from Flicker's ever-ready pen, in
spite of his entire innocence of any experi-
ence whatever.
" Furthermore, he was a wit — a great wit
I used to think, but no humorist — and, like
most wits, he was combative. He talked
best when someone baited him. At last
it got to be quite the fashion in Oxford to
ask Flecker to luncheon- and dinner-parties
— simply in order to talk. The sport he
afforded was usually excellent. . . . Look-
ing back on it now, I believe I was right in
thinking that in those days he had no
humour (there is very little humour in
Oxford) ; nor am I so entirely sure that
his wit was bad. I had, at any rate, a
growing feeling that, in spite of his im-
maturity and occasional bad taste, he was
the most important of any of us : his
immense productiveness was, I vaguely but
rightly felt, better and more valuable than
our finicky and sterile good taste.
19
tl
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
By 1906 he had developed greatly —
largely thanks to the companionship of an
Oxford friend whom, in spite of long absence
and occasional estrangements, he loved
deeply till the end of his life. Even his
decadent poems had improved : poor as are
most of the poems in 4 The Bridge of Fire,'
they are almost all above the level of
Oxford poetry, and there are occasional
verses which forecast some of his mature
work."
If, as Mr. Savery tells us, Flecker during
his Oxford life poured out an almost cease-
less stream of bad and imitative verse, we
can, I think, regard this chiefly as the
emotional overflow from his intellectual
development. I have dwelt at some length
on the sillier aspects of pre-war Oxford, but
it would be giving a hopelessly wrong im-
pression to represent such asininities as being
all that Oxford meant, to those who indulged
in them. All Universities are, I suppose,
20
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
divided into two camps, the first consisting
of those who acquire learning for a definite
ulterior motive —money, position, and so
forth ; the second, those who read for their
own delight and intellectual enrichment,
those who have the true scholar's instinct,
who would not insult any branch of study
by taking thought as to its utility or profit.
Now, in the pre-war period it was the spirit
of this second camp which was in the ascen-
dant at Oxford and was to a most notable
degree embodied in James Flecker. It was
a time when men read the literature of
Greece and Rome, of France and of England,
much in the spirit in which Keats read
Chapman's Odyssey. And they are scarcely
to be blamed if they combined with some
of the aesthetic ardour of the Renaissance
not a little of its joyous obscenity and
hearty appetite for life.
Flecker's obscenity amounted to a gift,
and many of his most famous witticisms and
21
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
jeux d? esprit (written down and illustrated
in a MS. volume bound in " art linen,"
called the " Yellow Book of Japes," the
joint production of Flecker and of his
greatest Oxford friend) are scarcely likely
to find their way into print. One may be
forgiven, perhaps, for regretting this, for
they were the outcome of enormous high
spirits and of a wholly charming gusto for
life — a rapturous enjoyment which so many
of us can experience in retrospect, so few,
like Flecker, at the moment. " Ever is
Now," says the philosopher. But only
those whom the gods love know his meaning
by instinct and without being taught.
22
II
II
FLECKER was a tall, dark man, with
a swarthy complexion, blue eyes,
thick black eyebrows, full lips. The
most noticeable things about him to anyone
who met him for the first time were his
gentle, rather high-pitched voice, his en-
thusiasm, and the curious mixture of ironic
humour and sadness of which his habitual
expression was compounded. In general
appearance he was decidedly " foreign-look-
ing," and a strain of Jewish blood was
apparent. He himself was always aware
that he did not look entirely English, and
as he had a passionate love for the country
of his birth, nothing annoyed him more
than to be mistaken for anything but an
Englishman. On one occasion, inquiring of
c 25
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
a fellow-passenger whether a 'bus went in
a certain direction, the individual whom
he addressed, mistaking him for a foreigner,
insisted on pointing out several landmarks,
such as the Law Courts, St. Paul's Cathe-
dral, and so on. Flecker's disgust can be
imagined. When the vehicle arrived at the
Bank, and he prepared to descend, he
growled at his informant, who was obvi-
ously about to show him the Royal Ex-
change, " Damn it all, I may have seen it
before ! "
He had several moustaches during his
early manhood, and shaved them off ; but
he stuck to a moustache in the end, and it
certainly suited him. " You can hear it
whistle as it grows," he once pathetically
remarked about his beard, while he was
shaving.
Flecker was born in Lewisham, on Novem-
ber 5th, 1884. He was christened Herman
Elroy — James was a name which he adopted
26
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
at Oxford — and was the eldest of the four
children of the Rev. William Herman
Flecker, d.d., now the headmaster of Dean
Close School, Cheltenham. He was edu-
cated at his father's school at Uppingham,
and at Trinity College, Oxford. He was
at Oxford from 1902 to 1907. During his
last year at the University (or just after
he went down) he paid his first visit to
Italy with the friend to whose influence
and inspiration he owed so much. This
first Italian visit was a turning-point in
his career, and had a marked reaction upon
his poetry. Soon after he left Oxford (in
1907) he became for a time a master at
the preparatory branch of University College
School at Holly Hill, Hampstead, of which
the late Mr. Charles Simmons was then
principal. Flecker had rooms at the top
of Holly Hill, opposite the Mount Vernon
Hospital.
He was certainly an original and probably
27
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
an extremely able teacher. The whole
subject of education was one of his deepest
intellectual interests until the end of his life,
and he was an ardent educational reformer,
as his dialogue " The Grecians " indicates
clearly enough. What his general attitude
was towards learning and towards the con-
ventional education of his time may be
guessed in part from the following sentences,
taken from the preface to his " Scholar's
Italian Book " :
" Finally, I express the hope that some
headmasters may find in this book a useful
recreation for a sixth form exhausted by
successful labours in scholarship-hunting ;
and that many scholars may be induced by
me to spend a holiday fortnight studying a
language which all those who know love. . . .
No attempt has been made in the ensuing
pages to produce a work of commercial or
military value. . . . My sole object has
been to enable any intelligent student who
28
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
knows some Latin and French to learn with
the minimum of labour to read a great
literature."
Although Flecker was only at Holly Hill
for one term, he made a great and lasting
impression on some of his pupils. Many
of his translations from the French, which
were subsequently printed, after revision,
were first drafted in the schoolroom, and
written in chalk on the blackboard after the
boys had produced their own attempts, as
an illustration of how it could be done.
Leconte de Lisle's " Hjalmar speaks to the
Raven " was translated in this way. Flecker
threw himself with characteristic gusto into
the school-life, and took an active part in
the school games, which he played with
immense enthusiasm and no skill. He was
popular, but he must have startled everyone
in the school, from the boys upwards. He
certainly once shocked one of the school-
mistresses by informing her at luncheon
29
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
that he had been to the Oxford Music Hall
the night before !
When he left Hampstead he went for a
a few months to Mill Hill, but he found
its Nonconformist atmosphere antipathetic.
After leaving Mill Hill he gave up teaching
altogether, and decided to go in for the
Consular service, the training for which
would enable him to spend two years at
Cambridge in the study of Oriental lan-
guages.
I think the first set of verses which
Flecker ever got into print in a London
paper was the poem called " Desire," which
appeared in the Idler in January, 1907. It
is signed " H. E. Flecker," and is worth
quoting, because, though immature and,
indeed, of no great value, it is nevertheless
characteristic and bears the impress of
the writer's personality.
Launch the galley, sailors bold !
Pro wed with silver, sharp and cold,
Winged with silk, and oared with gold.
30
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Silver stream in violet night ;
Silken clouds in soft moonlight ;
Golden stars in shadowy height.
Stars and stream are under cloud ;
Sinks the galley, silver-prowed,
Silken sails are like a shroud.
Flecker's fondness for the precious metals
is traceable through all his work. In this
short poem it will be noticed that " silver "
appears three times and " golden " once.
He probably had several little poems in
the Idler, and other early work was printed
in a motor journal of which a friend of his
was editor. But he was a sufficiently good
self-critic, even at this period, not to re-
print all these ephemeral pieces in " The
Bridge of Fire," which Mr. Elkin Mathews
published for him in the Vigo Cabinet Series
in 1907. " The Bridge of Fire " was origin-
ally to have been illustrated, by Mr. Tre-
lawney Dayrell-Reed, who made a set of
Beardsleyesque drawings, in one of which
31
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
the poet was caricatured, in much the
same way that Beardsley caricatured Wilde
in one of the " Salome " illustrations. I
do not know why the project was abandoned.
Expense, most likely.
The friend to whom I am indebted for
information about Flecker's schoolmastering
experiences at Holly Hill has given me the
following notes about Flecker's London life
at this period.
" He had a great liking for Hampton
Court, and was never weary of wandering
through the picture gallery or around the
beautiful gardens. He was one of the very
few Englishmen I have ever met who went
often to the British Museum, Tate and
National Galleries. When he was in London
he would frequently arrange to meet people
opposite such-and-such a picture in the
National Gallery, regardless of the fact that
it generally took his friend ten minutes to
find out where it was situated. He was fond
32
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
of going to the Cafe Royal — he called it the
only really Parisian cafe in London — and
when there he used to draw (very badly)
monkeys on the table. He was fond also
of the Vienna Cafe in Holborn, where he
liked studying the types. . . . Flecker pos-
sessed a cynical sort of wit, and was occa-
sionally a practical joker."
In October, 1908, Flecker went to Cam-
bridge, and entered at Caius College — not
altogether a happy choice. His rooms were
in Jesus Lane, near the Sidney Street end.
One of his intimate friends at this period
has sent me the following account of
Flecker's life at Cambridge :
' My most vivid recollections are largely
jokes, limericks, rhymes, and fantastic social
schemes which were never meant to pass
beyond word of mouth, and which I have
no intention of helping into print, delightful
as they were : he had a genius for such
things. There are a few I might mention.
33
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Government under an obligation (the revolt
was then already near collapse). His com-
panion was J. J. Knox, who afterwards
went (I think) to Teheran. But very likely
you have had this story already from some-
one else.
"Flecker told it very vividly — they were
sitting in a cafe when a mob rushed up,
crying, c A la lanterne ! ' No one could
believe they were both English, because of
the excellence of Knox's accent. ' On
peut passer vingt ans a Paris — on ne perd
jamais l'accent anglais.'
" Flecker was much amused at what he
regarded as a certain childishness and
affected naivete in Cambridge men, particu-
larly King's men. He typified this by an
imaginary King's man's dream : 4 Do you
know I had such a wonderful dream last
night. I dreamt that I was walking in a
beautiful garden, all by myself ! '
" He always had a great desire to herd
36
Two Englishmen (Fleckeb and J. D. Beazley) enjoying
THEMSELVES IN GERMANY."
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
his friends round him, to establish a sort
of society of them — calling them all c Brother
,' and so on. I think the people who
impressed him most at Cambridge were
A. W. Verrall and Prof. E. G. Browne : none
of his contemporaries at Cambridge had an
influence on him in any way comparable
to that of J. D. Beazley at Oxford.
" He was very enthusiastic about
Apuleius, and once started an admirable
translation of the Golden Ass. He read me
part of the Xlth Book, but he never finished
it : I'm afraid my criticism of detailed
points discouraged him, which was the last
thing I meant.
1 Of particular visual recollections of him,
one of the vividest is on a river picnic above
Byron's Pool, when we all bathed, and
Flecker marched about up to his waist in
the river, holding a canoe upside down over
his head, entirely hiding it. He was an
expert both at punting and canoeing, and
37
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
had a justifiable contempt for Cambridge
standards in these arts.
" He translated Arabic stories delight-
fully : I recollect very clearly hearing him
read the story on which he based the Ballad
of Iskander. His version was entrancing,
and I thought he spoiled it in the poem by
the metaphysical colouring he there gave it.
" I remember how furious he was at
being called, in some review of c The Last
Generation,' a grim disciple of H. G. Wells
at his grimmest. . . . He was at Caius,
but I don't think he had many friends there
or took much part in the life of the College.
His friends were chiefly, I think, King's
and Trinity men. ..."
That Caius was not altogether a happy
choice for a man of Flecker's temperament
is confirmed by another Cambridge con-
temporary, from whose letter (to a third
party) I am permitted to quote some pass-
ages : "I remember, of course, that lunch
38
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
in Rupert's (Rupert Brooke's) rooms in
May, 1908, when you and Flecker also were
there. . . . Flecker, I remember, was not
very happy here. The men of Caius were
not sympathetic to him. Almost any other
college would have been more congenial,
and either King's or Trinity obviously the
best. The Caius people tried to be kind to
him, but I don't think he found much
enjoyment in breakfast at 8 a.m. with
Rugby blues and students of law and medi-
cine. He saw a good deal of Rupert and
of other members of the Carbonari circle in
King's. Arthur Schloss, now Waley, was,
I think, his greatest friend in King's. They
were both lovers of the East. I think he
joined the Fabian Society of those days, as
nearly everyone did who was in or on the
fringes of these King's circles. But he
wasn't much interested in politics. He
was inclined to dislike the poor and to be
bored with them and to regard the large
39
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
projects of our young hopes as waste of
time."
At Oxford Flecker had been the (then)
conventional high Tory in politics. He liked
the idea of Emperors and Kings, and of
magnificent courts, because he associated
them with a lavish patronage of the arts.
His view was that the best art was produced
under an autocracy, e.g. Velasquez and the
Russian Ballet under the late Czar — and
that nothing else much mattered. The
plebs, he felt, in their own best interests,
should be governed firmly, from above. By
the time he reached Cambridge, however,
his ideas on political matters were rather
more " serious." Cambridge made him a
Liberal, even an enthusiastic Liberal. At one
time he seems to have played with the
project of throwing up his career in the
Consular service and standing for Parlia-
ment. For several reasons, I venture to
disagree with the statement of the Cam-
40
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
bridge contemporary whose letter I have
just quoted, that Flecker wasn't much
interested in politics. No doubt the minutiae
of party politics bored him, and the arid
intellectual wrangles of the Fabians. But
he was certainly interested in the general
progress of political thought, in revolutions,
in the politics of the human race. He had
an ardent sympathy with the political ideal-
ism of Shelley and of Keats, and deplored —
from his standpoint as poet— the apparent
absence of any movement capable at once
of absorbing and inspiring him. In a review
of the sixth volume of Professor W. J.
Courthope's " History of English Poetry "
he writes : " Yet we often agree with Mr.
Courthope when he is not employed in
criticism, and especially when he deplores
the absence of political interest in modern
poetry. He is rather apt to blame the
poets : he should blame history. The dearth
of proud and eagle-winged forces in this
d 41
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
modern age is a calamity for art. Whether
these century-old poets preached an idea
as Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth, ran
counter to it, as Crabbe, or neglected it, as
Keats, they had the inestimable advantage
of living in a society rent by the enthusiasm
and hatreds of the French Revolution. In
those good days Shelley was not an in-
effectual angel whose pretty lyrics might
be read by simpering girls, but a most
effectual Devil, like a socialist of to-day,
attacking the very foundations of society.
Only during the last year has there arisen
in England a political crisis worthy of the
pen, and in this revived bitterness of strife
lies at least some hope for the future of
English Poetry."
In regard to his life at Cambridge, although
his attempt to recover the old rapture of
University life may not have been entirely
successful (any more than an amorous
rechauffage can be entirely successful), he
42
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
certainly did not regret the years he spent
there. He played strenuous tennis ; punted
a good deal ; wore his beloved blazers when-
ever he got a chance ; at times sported a
corduroy coat ; talked ; made many friends ;
contributed to various Cambridge papers
such as The Cambridge Review and The
Gownsman, and — more important to him
than anything else — made progress in the
art to which his life was devoted. To me he
often referred with great satisfaction to the
fact that he had had " the peculiarly delight-
ful experience " of life at both Universities.
After leaving Cambridge, Flecker was
sent to Constantinople in June, 1910 ; was
taken ill there in August of the same year,
returned to England in September and
went to a sanatorium in the Cots wolds. In
March, 1911, he returned to his post, ap-
parently quite recovered, and was trans-
ferred to Smyrna in April. In May, 1911,
he went on leave to Athens, where he
43
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
married a Greek lady, Miss Helle Skiadaressi,
whom he had met the year before. He spent
three months' holiday mostly in Corfu (where
the poem called "Phseacia" was written),
and was sent to Beirut, Syria, in Septem-
ber, 1911. Flecker did not really like the
East, or the Easterns, when he got to know
them well, although he had an instinctive
understanding of them. His first impres-
sions of Constantinople were, however, happy
enough. Writing to a friend about it, he
says : " It is very beautiful, and, as I tell
everybody, not a bit like our Earl's Court
Exhibition, as I feared it might be. I am
going to stay here for two months more, at
least, so I hope I shall enjoy myself : indeed,
I do. I ride a horse and take photographs
and swim in the Bosphorus and play tennis
and talk to Turks in the loveliest country in
the world. But I am lonely at times. ..."
He undoubtedly missed his wide circle of
friends in London and at the Universities.
44
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
At Beirut he seems to have been particularly
homesick, and he admitted afterwards that
he spent most of his time there dreaming of
Oxford. But it was not so bad to start
with. " Not a bad life here," he says in
one of his letters, " riding, bathing (bathed
Nov. 22, sea quite warm), decent rooms,
piano . . . people mostly fools."
In December, 1912, he came back on leave
for a few weeks to England, and visited
Paris, returning to Beirut in January, 1913.
In March, 1913, he was again taken ill, and
after a few weeks on the Lebanon (Brumana)
he went to Switzerland, where he remained
for the last eighteen months of his life. He
went first to Leysin, but moved on to
Montreux, then to Montana, to Locarno,
and finally, in May, 1914, to Davos. He
died at Davos on January 3rd, 1915, and
was buried at Cheltenham at the foot of
the Cots wold Hills.
45
Ill
Ill
MY personal memories of James
Flecker start from an evening in
the summer of 1907, when, in
response to an invitation, I called upon him
after dinner at his lodgings in a Bloomsbury
Square. The details of that evening call
remain clear and vivid in my mind, but
where we first encountered one another and
how many times we had previously met I
cannot remember. It was, no doubt, Tre-
lawney Dayrell-Reed, a friend whom we
had in common, who introduced us ; and
I have a vague recollection of a crowded
tea-party in a flat in Chelsea (given by the
mother of the lady who later on was so
often to be our hostess) at which Flecker
must have been present. But, in any case,
49
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
we could only have known one another very
slightly on the evening when I walked over
from my Bloomsbury lodgings to his. I
remember very well telling myself, as I
crossed Russell Square, not to be impressed
by the Flecker " legend." Already, after
a few months of journalism in London, I had
begun to be rather contemptuous both of
Oxford wit and Oxford reputations.
Flecker was the great man among my
circle of friends in those days, and his name
—and jokes— were upon everybody's lips.
I had got rather sick of hearing it.
The house in which he was staying was
the usual slightly dingy Bloomsbury board-
ing-house, differing hardly at all from the
one which I was temporarily inhabiting
myself. I well remember its gloomy hall,
lit by a meagre speck of gas, the landlady's
folded arms and suspicious eye, the dark
stairs leading up to the " second-floor back,"
and the bright line of light gleaming under
50
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Flecker's door. When I opened the door, I
found the poet striding about under the
baleful glare of unshaded incandescent gas,
amid an indescribable confusion of books
and pictures and belongings. He was " pack-
ing up," he said, in preparation for a journey-
to France with a friend of his called Knox.
They were going to investigate the rising
among the vignerons of the Bordeaux dis-
trict, where Catholicism was in conflict with
the Republic — a romantic adventure, with
revolvers in it ! Flecker had bought his,
and its barrel glittered in the gaslight as he
showed it to me.
If he really was " packing up," there was
certainly nothing to indicate that the enter-
prise had got very far. The tables and all
the chairs were piled with books — beauti-
fully bound classical texts, French and
Italian novels in paper covers, copies of
" L'Assiette au Beurre " and of " Jugend,"
dictionaries, volumes of the poets — and,
51
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
half-buried among the piles, were such things
as a typewriter, a bottle of Maraschino and
another of Chianti, tumblers, pictures, manu-
scripts. Pictures were piled up against the
skirting-boards, or lay on their faces on the
floor in imminent danger of being crushed
under their owner's feet as he paced up and
down the room.
My disinclination to be impressed vanished
in a very few minutes. I was immensely
impressed. Flecker was precisely what I
thought a poet ought to be. We were most
of us sentimental francophiles in those far-off
days, and I was full of yearnings and illu-
sions about the Latin Quarter and Mont-
martre and the Moulin de la Galette and the
Bal Bullier and the Bal des Quatz' Arts, and
so on— knowing nothing at all about them
at first-hand. But Flecker had already
tasted and explored these long-dreamed-of
delights, and his accounts of his visits to
Paris thrilled me with excitement. He
52
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
talked of Paul Marinier and Lucien Boyer,
of Steinlen and Aristide Bruant, of the
" Chat Noir " (ye gods !) and of the Noctam-
bules, of the Cafe d'Harcourt and the
BouT Mich', of poets and painters and their
mistresses. He was an admirable talker,
even before an audience of one speechless
and ecstatic acquaintance, and he had a
pleasant knack of giving a vivid and amusing
description of incidents and events in which
he had played a part. He had a gentle,
high-pitched, enthusiastic voice, singularly
attractive to listen to. He turned life
always and all the time into a tremendous
adventure. Like most creative artists, he
was egoistic, and used to talk in a strain
which would have seemed like megalomania
if it had not been lightened by wit. On this
occasion he read me two " magnificent '
poems which he had recently finished —
"Ideal" and "The Town without a
Market." I shall never forget the gusto
53
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
with which he read the line (from " Ideal "),
" Friend, we will go to hell with thee."
" Hell," I remember thinking slyly, was
just the sort of big, vague, decisive spot to
which anyone of Flecker's enthusiastic
nature would think of accompanying a
friend. But his enthusiasm, if it carried
him at times off his feet, carried him also —
throughout his life and throughout his work
— away from all meanness.
Said I : " The world was made for kings :
To him who works and working sings
Come joy and majesty and power
And steadfast love with royal wings."
The poet and the painter were to him the
real "kings" of this world — this world
given them to enjoy to the utmost as a
reward for their work.
The first two chapters of one of the many
versions of Flecker's novel, " The King of
Alsander," fell off the table during the
evening, and at my request he read them to
me. I was sufficiently under the spell of his
54
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
personality to think them marvellous. (Alas,
when nearly seven years later the completed
manuscript came to me in my capacity as
adviser to Flecker's publishers, it was a
bitter disappointment to find how time had
robbed the poor old " King " of nearly all
his glamour !)
When the chapters of the " King of Al-
sander ' had been read and discussed, our
talk reverted to poetry and to Flecker's
own poems. His arrangements regarding
" The Bridge of Fire " had just been con-
cluded with Mr. Elkin Mathews, and he
was looking forward with tremendous ex-
citement to its appearance. He read me
a few more of the poems which the book
was to contain, including " Riouperoux " —
a poem for which I have retained a particular
affection ever since.
As I walked home that night, filled with
excitement and warmed, no doubt, with
Chianti and Maraschino, I felt that to be
55
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
a poet was the most wonderful, the most
romantic adventure in a world full of the
maddest and most delicious possibilities.
I had never before encountered anybody
with anything like Flecker's rapturous joy
of living. Most of us, at that time, cul-
tivated a mask of artificial gloom (" There
is no new hope to be hoped for, there is no
new word to be said ! ") which ineffectively
concealed our high spirits. Flecker, I think,
to some extent reversed this process. His
eyes were always sad eyes, and there was
a certain sadness latent in his smile which
added much to its charm. It has been
asserted, particularly by critics who never
knew him, that the occasional undernote
of melancholy in some of his poems was
purely factitious. This, to my mind, is a
very superficial view, based not only on
ignorance of Flecker but on ignorance of
the human heart as well. To me it seems
impossible not to connect Flecker's extra-
56
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
ordinary joie de vivre, his capacity for
living each moment to the full and the rap-
ture with which he looked upon the visible
world, with a belief that he had an early
premonition that his allotted span was too
short to allow him a moment to waste.
When he described himself as " the lean
and swarthy poet of despair," it was prob-
ably a joke, but like all jokes worth making
there was a substratum of truth in it.
Throughout his work is to be traced that
natural horror at the idea of death which
a man of his temperament may well be
excused for admitting. It would be absurd
to dismiss such a poem as " No Coward's
Song," or the poem called " Prayer " (which
was written, I believe, as early as 1907),
as being insincere or artificial. Indeed, the
opposite is probably the truth — that they
come straight from the poet's heart and are
among the most intimate and subjective
utterances which he ever entrusted to print.
e 57
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
After the evening I have described, Flecker
and I met very frequently in a queer flat in
Brixton, the home of a lady of many accom-
plishments, not the least of which was a
capacity for appreciating young poets and
their verses. The atmosphere of the flat
was ultra-Parisian. French novels (not al-
ways of a very prudish kind) and volumes
of French verse lay about everywhere, and
the walls of the sitting-room were decorated
with Steinlens, principally Steinlen cats.
Here we used to gather and read one an-
other's verses and sing the songs from Paris
cabarets of which Flecker and our hostess
between them seemed to have an almost
inexhaustible repertoire. Paul Marinier's
long-forgotten " Ninon " was a great
favourite. I fancy the chorus went like
this :
Allons, Ninon ! Ninon, ne dis pas non !
L'Amour est bon, c'est un peche mignon.
Pour y goutter descends vite en cachette,
Ninon, Ninette !
58
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Flecker was very fond of " Navaho " and
" La Branche de Lilas," and I can see
him now, sitting at the piano, dressed in
a scanty Japanese kimono, smiling his
pleasant, sardonic smile, and picking out
the tunes, while the rest of us shouted the
choruses.
Both Flecker and his friend, J. D. Beazley,
had a habit of writing out their poems very
neatly in tiny little manuscript books and
presenting them to the lady of the flat.
Several such volumes were in circulation
among our group and are still, I hope, in
existence, though it is hardly likely that in
Flecker's case there is much unpublished
work of any real value which has yet to find
its way into print.
At these far-off parties, " literary " as,
indeed, they were, I do not remember that
there was much flow of conversation as (for
example) the Dublin intellectuals under-
stand the word, or as the modern under-
59
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
graduate understands it. The hours were
devoted to singing and to laughter ; the
problems of the world were let go hang ;
taste, Shakespeare and the musical glasses
were neglected utterly. Flecker nearly al-
ways kept the room in a roar when he was
present, by his constant flow of wit and his
almost unvarying high spirits. I remember,
however, one amusing occasion on which
the tables were turned against him and his
repartee extinguished. I had taken to
dinner at the Brixton flat a friend of mine
who was anxious to meet Flecker, but who
had a rooted objection to " Bohemia."
Our hostess — it was in the days when
Society was beginning to be badly bitten
with stage-mania — had recently been tour-
ing the suburban music-halls in a sketch
written by one of her friends, and in the
course of her wanderings had made the
acquaintance of a little Cockney dancer
named Gertie. It was Gertie whom, out of
60
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
sheer naughtiness, she invited to make the
fourth at this particular dinner. From the
beginning nothing went well for Flecker.
Whenever he caught the ball of conversation
Gertie snatched it ruthlessly. She was
exceedingly plain, the blameless wife of a
Brixton dentist, and by no means in her
first youth. But in her own strange world —
that of the smaller music-halls —Gertie was
as outstanding a character as Flecker was
in his. Her humour was the humour of
the New Cut, her back-chat surpassed a
South London 'bus conductor at his best.
Never before have I listened to such a
torrent of " lip " as this true descendant
of Mrs. Peachum and of Diana Trapes
poured out on the poet's (for once) defence-
less head. Whenever poor Flecker got in
a rapier-thrust, he was promptly bludgeoned
by devastating references to " Jerusalem '
and wholly libellous innuendoes connecting
his swarthincss with a neglect of baths !
61
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
I think this was the only occasion on which
I ever knew him to be verbally at a dis-
advantage.
The incident which really formed the
beginning of my more intimate acquaintance
with Flecker was connected with his first
volume of poems, " The Bridge of Fire."
We were all of us in a great state of excite-
ment about the book before its appearance,
and I had arranged with the editor to review
it in The Academy. When I received my
copy I found that, alas ! it did not come
up to my exaggerated expectations, and in
my disappointment I proceeded to adminis-
ter a perfectly sincere if rather jejune
" slating." My notice, when it came out,
caused surprise and wrath among our little
circle. All my friends were, indeed, ex-
tremely angry with me — except Flecker.
I think Flecker must have been amused and
interested to hear one note of honest criti-
cism, however amateurish, amid a chorus of
62
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
rather fatuous praise. In any case he con-
tented himself with sending a rejoinder to
The Academy, which was published the
week after my notice — a rejoinder which
showed great skill and the most exemplary
good manners. And when, a year or two
later, I gathered up my own stray verses
from the periodicals which had printed
them and issued my first book, he took the
trouble to review it in a Cambridge paper
in characteristically generous terms.
Our connection of author and publisher,
which was to last until his death, began
when, in 1910, I started a monthly magazine
of earnest literary aspirations. In the first
number of this periodical, J. D. Beazley, of
Christchurch, Flecker 's most intimate Ox-
ford friend, had let me print a poem of his
called " The Visit," which Trelawney Dayrell-
Reed illustrated. And Flecker himself became
a fairly frequent contributor. The poems
called " In Memoriam," " Pillage," and
63
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
" The War Song of the Saracens," first
appeared in its pages.
It was some time in 1910 that I got the
firm which owned the magazine to issue a
new volume of Flecker's verses, to which he
gave the title " Thirty-Six Poems." But
the concern having, unfortunately, more
good intent than capital or business manage-
ment, the volume did not prosper, and on the
death of my magazine after a year's struggle
for existence, the sheets of the book were
transferred to Messrs. J. M. Dent and
Sons, Ltd. Messrs. Dent reissued the
book in 1911, with six additional pieces,
under the more familiar title, " Forty-Two
Poems."
During Flecker's Cambridge years I only
met him occasionally during vacation, and
my memory in regard to details is less
trustworthy than for the earlier period.
But I recall an extraordinary luncheon at
the Petit Riche restaurant, just after his
64
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
return from a summer holiday, I think in
Wales. (I have a vague notion that he had
been staying at a " Fabian Summer School.")
I had been invited to meet a friend of his,
a friend who " lived in South Kensington."
Awe-inspiring details were whispered to me
regarding the friend's home, and Flecker
had clothed himself in perilous splendour
for the call which he proposed to make
there during the afternoon. I tell myself
my memory must be playing me tricks
when I think of his get-up ! It could not
have been a bowler hat, a dark grey frock-
coat with watered silk facings, trousers to
match, a skimpy green-knitted tie, and
yellow boots ! But if it wasn't just that,
it was a mixture of garments which gave
the same impression. I don't think he found
the South Kensington atmosphere very con-
genial ; and I never saw him arrayed so
wonderfully again. Very shortly after this
he left England for the East. I fancy that
65
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
the last time I saw him in the flesh was at
a luncheon at Beguinot's in Old Compton
Street, when J. J. Knox was present. On
that occasion I heard once again the story
of their adventures during the Wine riots,
a story which has been retold in an earlier
chapter.
When I look back on James Flecker and
remember what he meant to his wide circle
of friends, it is to feel much more than a
sense of personal loss. It is to feel that
something has gone out of life which the
new generation does not know, perhaps can-
not be expected to know, in view of the
grisly shadow under which it has grown up :
something rare and irrecoverable — a radi-
ance, a generosity of heart and mind, a
natural (not stimulated) ecstasy which the
robust commercialism of the present day
neither produces nor encourages. Flecker's
attitude towards life was what that of the
aristocrat is supposed to be, but usually is
66
James Elroy Flecked 1909).
Facing pa i '
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
not. He had caught some of the spirit
of the Italian renaissance ; and, in com-
pensation for the shortness of his days, he
was given the capacity to live them with
+he intensity of one of those figures whom
Cellini has described for us, and to appre-
ciate the earth's loveliness in a way which
has been given to few men since that fierce
sweet renewal of springtime in the Western
world. He was, as far as I know, completely
without ulterior motive or base ambitions.
He never could have played the now too
familiar game of literary and social intrigue
by which verse-writers of only moderate
talent inflate themselves into great figures.
His conception of what is required of those
who practise the art of poetry would have
made any such proceeding simply unthink-
able—a game for bagmen, not for kings.
Even in his critical appreciations and denun-
ciations, which I think often erred on the
side of over-enthusiasm and were occa-
67
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
sionally at fault, he was at all events never
cheap. Nothing, in this connection, showed
him in a more favourable light than his
rage when some of the English vers librists
and their associates were leading a hue-and-
cry against the Victorians, damning Tenny-
son and Browning right and left in a noisy
effort to call attention to their own not
very successful experiments. Flecker 's
sense of the continuity of the English poetic
tradition made this kind of vulgarity un-
bearable ; a wanton breaking of the fourth
commandment !
I have put down these odds and ends of
recollections for whatever they may be
worth, in the hope that by so doing I may
encourage others who knew him better to
search their memories before it is too late.
For, if Flecker was not a " great genius,"
he was a man of great intellectual integrity
and courage, a superb craftsman with a real
devotion to his art. His work has certainly
68
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
the qualities of permanence, and the interest
which future generations are likely to take
in his personality and in the details of his
short life is very likely unrealised at present
by many who were his contemporaries.
69
IV
IV
A FTER Flecker's departure for the
/ % East I heard very little news of
him until the beginning of 1913,
when I became associated with the new
publishing firm of Max Goschen. (Owing to
the regretted death of its proprietor, who
was killed in the early days of the war, this
firm no longer exists and its copyrights have
been distributed among other publishers.)
Whether we corresponded at all during the
interval, I cannot remember. I suppose we
must have done, since I knew his address.
But, unfortunately, I have not kept any of
the early letters. The first letter from
Flecker on which I have been able to
lay my hands is dated January 22 [1913].
F 73
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
It is addressed from the British Consulate-
General, Beyrouth, Syria, and was written,
apparently, in answer to my request to be
allowed to use some of his work in an
anthology of modern verse which I was
intending, at that time, to compile. The
letter runs as follows :
" My dear Goldring,
I was in London a few days in Decem-
ber— and asked after you — but no one
seemed to know where you were. I tried
hard to get a job in town but couldn't. I
never get paid a penny for anything and
my book has not yet sold 200 copies. I am
trying to place a play. I am in utter despair
and suppose I shall have to live in this
bloody country all my life.
Of course take anything you like. I hate
all modern poetry and think it perfect . . .
— except Yeats and Kipling : these Mase-
fields — though he was a great man once —
74
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Gibsons, Pounds, Abercrombies, and people
make me fume with rage.
Q.'s Victorian Verse has got my
Saracens,
Riouperoux,
and my friend Marsh has got
The Queen's Song,
Joseph and Mary.
Don't take any of the above but any-
thing else you like.
I have much to thank you for, my dear
Goldring. I am fairly well known now —
that is to say, about as known as Ezra
Pound or T. Sturge Moore— but for £500
a year and a berth in England I'd turn
Wesleyan.
Yours bitterly,
James Elroy Flecker."
I dropped the idea of making an an-
thology as soon as I discovered what a job
75
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
of work it was going to be, and, instead,
determined to try to get for my firm a
volume of Flecker's poetry. By this time
my belief in him was unshakable and I
knew that sooner or later he was bound to
come into his own. I wrote offering to
take the financial risk of a new book by
him (he had previously been forced to pub-
lish on commission, except in the case of
" Thirty-Six Poems "), and to pay a small
advance, £10, on account of royalties.
Flecker's reply was dated March 6th and
runs as follows :
" Just a line on some filthy imported
notepaper to thank you very much indeed
for your kindness in getting me the offer
of £10.
I think there is enough for a volume — but
I had some idea of adding a preface — would,
in fact, if needed.
I don't want the issue of my poems to
76
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
clash with the publication of my novel —
there ought to be a month's interval. I
suggest that you get Messrs. Goschen to ask
when he is going to publish the novel,
and act according. I have only just sent the
MS. I have no proofs and shan't get 'em for
some time.
All my press notices should be either with
you or with Dent. There have been some
good ones (Daily News, Athenaeum) of the
42. . . .
Could you tell me the name of a press
agent less indecently slipshod than Messrs.
•
The press notices on the cap of the 42
were rottenly chosen. I bar the idea, how-
ever, of printing them inside the book unless
it's done in very small print and on different
paper. Even then it's pretty horrid. The
most eulogistic of the dogs write such terrible
, aias.
I read through your poems. Honestly, I
77
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
like them extremely. I confess they seem to
me to have a charming atmosphere of taking
seriously a fashion of thought that is just out
of date — but that is a very great charm —
and I think of Pater's essay on Lamb. It
seems to me you aim at something simple
and graceful and attain it, while other rotters
with their Exultations and Sicilian Idylls
aim very high and write God-forsaken
formless muck.
With many thanks for getting me a good
offer and for sending me your volume,
Ever yours,
J. E. Flecker.
Your little poems of London streets make
me feel rottenly sentimental, imprisoned
perhaps for life in this godless sunshiny
palm-tree hole without an intelligent soul to
speak to."
I was delighted when Flecker fell in with
our suggestion : still more so when the MS.
78
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
of " The Golden Journey to Samarkand '
eventually reached the office. I wrote to
promise that I would do anything I possibly
could to get the book adequately noticed
and to push the sales. And at the same
time I urged him to write the now famous
Preface, and if possible to make it con-
troversial, in order to stir the reviewers into
animation. The task of writing the Preface
and of correcting the proofs — he almost re-
wrote the book in proof, and substituted
several new poems for those which he thought
not up to the standard of the rest of the
volume — must have exhausted him, for he
was already seriously ill. The following
letter, written in pencil on May 10th, 1913,
reveals his nervous and overwrought con-
dition :
it
Really, your people ought to take the
trouble to understand how long it takes a
letter to get to Syria. I wrote that dam
79
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Preface and sent it within about a week of
getting the letter. / am now waiting for
proofs of the Preface and the extra poems,
which must be published at all costs, and
I must see the proofs because they're most
terribly hashed. The other proofs are cor-
rected. I have sent off everything.
I am very ill again and probably shall
come to England. Can't work at much and
hardly at this letter. The Preface was an
awful strain. If the printers make a fuss
I will pay for the rather heavy alterations.
I must have the book just as good as it can
be. I am anxiously awaiting proofs of the
preface and remaining poems.'
55
Flecker did not, of course, return to
England (which he was never to see again) ;
but on his doctor's advice went instead to
Switzerland. His next letter, dated June 5th,
came from Leysin-sur-Aigle :
80
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
" Thank the Lord this place is curing me.
The journey nearly killed me. There is
nothing terribly wrong — but I shall take
a month or two to recover, and always
have to live with precaution. Meantime
many thanks for your kind letter. Here-
with I have sent the proofs complete.
Please look over the revise — or ' Taoping,'
in its new version, will come out in a
hash.
Left out first page of Preface as being
rather babyish. You might let me know
what you think of the book — and especially
of my alterations to ' Gates of Damascus '
and ' Taoping.' I am immensely proud of
it. I've turfed out all the rot. It seems
to me — and to the few critics who have seen
it— to be miles ahead of the 'Forty-two.'
If the publisher wants to puff me he can
safely say that the Oriental Poems are
unique in English.
I do wish one could have a few de luxe
81
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
copies (as they do in France), on fine paper
with fine binding.
I have, alas ! lost a good deal more than
£10 in not having time to get all the poems
into mags. In particular ' Oak and Olive '
was being kept by the Fortnightly, and they
sent it back because they had no time to
publish it by June. But never mind, let's
out with the book at once !
I have some glorious translations from
Paul Fort and other modern Frenchmen,
but I preferred to keep ' The Golden
Journey ' original from beginning to
end. . . ."
I heard from him again a week later, still
from Leysin— a long and very lucid business
letter, chiefly about "The King of Alsander,"
and the behaviour of another publisher
who, after accepting the book and getting
Flecker to alter it two or three times,
eventually declined to bring it out, on the
82
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
ground that he had " lost interest." (It
is only fair to the publisher in question to
assume that there were two sides to the
dispute.)
" Hotel Belvedere,
Leysin, Switzerland.
June llth [1913].
My dear Goldring,
(1) Many thanks for your letter. I am
most frightfully glad about the Edition de
luxe : I suppose I shall be allowed one or
two copies for myself. But what about
sending round notices of it ?
As for the Printer's note, I'll pay any-
thing in reason — but I don't consider myself
liable for additions or omissions of complete
poems. Against the omissions can be put
my writing the Preface specially to please
the publishers. 1 am liable to pay for
Alteration to ' Gates of Damascus,'
One verse altered in ' Hyali,'
J do. do. ' Oak and Olive,'
83
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
About six lines altered at beginning of
Preface,
Alteration of Taoping,
as far as they are above 10 per cent, etc.,
as per contract. The apparently extensive
minor alterations in the first few pages of the
proofs are due to the gross carelessness of the
printers. The last few pages were 20 times
better done— except that the fellow, appar-
ently by way of a dirty joke, put tips
instead of lips in no less than four separate
places —obviously on purpose. I don't think
the joke was very funny.
The advertisement is excellent.
(2) I have long had a scheme for bringing
out an anthology of French verse. Poets of
To-day and Yesterday —from after Hugo
and Musset and not including them, to the
present day. Each poet would be preceded
by a short notice.
In the idea of the short notice and in the
period traversed the book would thus re-
84
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
semble Walch's great three-volume work —
but in no other way.
(1) There would be a large and very
different choice of the more important people
and none of the pages of dreary rot by the
great unknown.
(2) The criticism at the beginning would
be original and not borrowed.
(3) The whole book would not be more
than one volume.
It would mean a lot of toil, but very
pleasant toil, doing this book — but what I
want to know is —would it pay ? I think
if a sale in France could be arranged for it
might. But the sale in France would have
to be arranged through the Mercure de
France, so as to facilitate matters of copy-
right for the more modern fellows. I should
want three or four pounds for buying books
to cut up, typing, copying, and other exes.
(3) I told you was going to publish
a novel. He made me revise it twice, the
85
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
last time in December. I half-killed myself
getting it finished this January — and sent it
off. No answer for three months, and then
the inconceivable person returns the novel
and says he doesn't feel like publishing it
after all this time, as he has lost interest in
it. And he is under contract to publish it.
He now will not answer my letter. Give
me some advice. I've got my contract
somewhere— at Cheltenham I think, but my
papers are disturbed. I must obviously
take legal action and claim about £200
damages. I had put in altogether 4 mortal
months' work on the novel. . . .
The novel, originally a very poor pro-
duction, is now a very jolly and fantastic
work. Whether it will sell or not I don't
believe a publisher in the world could say.
It may take or it mayn't. I'll send it you
if you like. But —
(a) Messrs. Goschen may well fight shy of
a book which another publisher has
86
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
broken his contract to evade pub-
lishing,
(b) It might be better to get compensation
before I get another publisher. Yet it
might again be better the other way.
If you care to go round to and see
what he means and tell him I'm going to
claim a round £200 from him at once, I
should be only too glad, but I really, I con-
fess, see not the slightest reason why I
should presume even to ask you to do any-
thing so boring. But I think with your
literary experience you might be kind
enough to give me some advice and perhaps
to give me the address of a solicitor who is
a friend of literary men.
Ever yours,
James Elroy Flecker.
You will have the revise back by return
when it comes."
Since Flecker directly asked my advice I
had to tell him, out of a wealth of unenviable
87
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
experience, that he did not stand very much
chance of receiving any damages, whether
by legal or any other kind of action.
Eventually he sent the book to Messrs.
Goschen.
When the MS. of " The King of Alsander "
reached me I must confess that my heart
sank a little, in spite of all the pleasant
memories which the opening chapters re-
vived. I did not think the book had much
chance of selling, or, indeed, that it particu-
larly deserved to sell, and I wrote to Flecker
explaining my reasons for this opinion.
His reply is dated June 21st (1913) :
" Thanks so much for writing promptly
and at such length. The novel is a most
patchy affair — I quite agree with you. I
am not a novelist because I don't really
think novels worth writing — at the bottom
of my heart. Yet I did not burn the old
4 King of Alsander ' —it is, by God, seven
88
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
years since I lost the first three chapters of
it on the way to Paris with . . . and . . .
of your acquaintance — because it has, with
all its faults, some passages which I think
rather jolly, and because even if a bit
laboured in parts, it is such a joyously silly
performance.
I have written to Goschens accepting their
offer.
A drama is a thing, now, that is worth
writing. I have had most encouraging
letters about my work in that direction from
Drinkwater, of the Birmingham Repertory
Theatre ; but I hope that Granville Barker
and no other will take up ' Hassan,' my
Oriental play. It may interest you to know
that Yasmin is out of my play — was written
for it— and also 'The Golden Journey to
Samarkand ' is nothing but the final scene.
I admit a little verse into my play here and
there.
Read the poem called ' The Golden
g 89
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Journey,' and consider the ' pilgrim with
the beautiful voice ' to be Hassan, the
hero of a whole drama, and think what it
would sound like actually on the stage,
with Granville Barker scenery — moonlight.
More alive to-day. I hope the novel may
succeed after all. It is pleasant of you to
be so prompt. The misery of literary
people ! The Spectator and The Nation
will return or accept pretty quick. The
' ' is hopeless, utterly. ' ' are, I
think, mad. Good God, if one ran the
rottenest of little Vice-Consulates in the
way the ' ' is run, there'd be a row in
a month !
Ever yours thankfully,
J. E. Flecker.
P.S. — (1) Should much like to read your
novel ; didn't know you'd written one.
(2) What do you think— if by chance
' The Golden Journey ' gets known —of
90
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
having the Oriental poems (plus ' Saracens '
and ' Ballad of Iskander ' from 42) illus-
trated by Syme for a Xmas volume ?
(3) Shan't anthologise after what you
told me. Thanks."
I had one more letter from him from
Leysin (dated June 30, 1913), in which the
following interesting passage occurs :
' In Phaeacia ' (the rottenest poem in the
book) should appear in Everyman and ' Taop-
ing ' in The Spectator (eh, what ? the citadel
of respectability stormed !) this week. Did
you see Solomon Eagle's extremely amusing
jibe at me in The New Statesman ? Who is
he ? Am getting fatter and stronger. I
hope to be in England producing my play
this autumn. Why does no one translate
great French books like Jules Renard's
' Lanterne Sourde ' or Claude Farrere's mar-
vellous ' Battaille ' ? "
91
It
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
The Golden Journey to Samarkand '
was issued in the early part of July, and was
a success almost from the first. Mr. Frank
Savery has kindly given me permission to
print the following letter analysing the con-
tents of the book, which Flecker addressed
to him from Leysin at the time of its appear-
ance :
tt
Hotel Belvedere,
Leysin.
(July, 1913.) Saturday.
My dearest Franko,
Ever so many thanks for your letter
of criticism. Helle told me particularly to
tell you that she agreed with you practically
in everything. So do I. I think you under-
rate c Santorin ' — much admired by Dun-
sany, by the way. J Lord Arnaldos ' was
after all a translation. Otherwise I agree
with you, particularly in your damnations.
I might explain that the Publishers wrote
92
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
asking if I had anything for them at once
and I very hurriedly replied —nothing but
a new volume of poetry. I packed off a
weird collection of stuff to make up a volume
— including a revision of the ' Bridge of
Fire.' I then sat down to write the book —
and it was after I got the proofs I managed to
hoof out all sorts of godless rot, and replace
them by 4 In Hospital,' ' Brumana,' ' Taop-
ing ' ; and also just at the last minute I
suddenly rewrote ' The Gates of Damascus '
and enlarged it. There are I reckon still
two rotten poems in the book — ' Phaeacia '
(an unconscious imitation of Yeats and
Jack Beazley) and the ' Sacred Incident ' —
both of which I should, however, describe
as harmless rather than offensive.
It may amuse you to know a little of the
history of these things : you certainly de-
serve to be told if it amuses you.
The Preface. Written when I was pretty
ill— like all the later poems— is not quite
93
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
sincere. My chief desire was to say what I
thought was wanted to shake up the critics :
not to expound the essence of poetry, which
would take 500 pages. The beginning is
ugly enough with ' theory ' repeated so
often — but I reread the end with pleasure
and thank you for the word ' manly.'
2. The Epilogue is the last scene of
1 Hassan ' — or rather I wrote ' Hassan ' to
lead up to the Epilogue. A moonlight scene,
a sudden burst into poetry (you know my
trick from ' Don Juan '), and the singer
with the beautiful voice is the chief character
of the play — the famous singer Ishak —
anima naturaliter Christiana. If it doesn't
give the public shivers down the back when
it is acted in its place, I'll never write again.
3. ' The Gates of Damascus.' I consider
this to be my greatest poem — and I am
glad you seem to agree. It was inspired by
Damascus itself by the way. I loathe the
East and the Easterns and spent all my
94
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
time there dreaming of Oxford. Yet it
seems — even to hardened Orientalists — that
I understand.
4. ' Yasmin ' is an anthology piece. It
is part of ' Hassan ' — written for it and
should sound well in its place.
5. ' Saadabad ' is, with ' Areiya,' perhaps
the only poem with individual passion I have
written. Though verses 1, 3, and 4 of
Pt. I are translations from the Turkish, the
poem is the most passionately sincere I have
ever written. It was written straight out
and not a line revised.
6. Of course the ' Turkish Lady ' won't
wash. The poem is a pretty close translation
in the book.
7. 'Doris,' dear Frank— it's very short
and I don't think it's easy to say how sin-
cere. Mightn't it come out of the Greek
Anthology ? I mean by the ship the Ship
of Dreams.
8. Glad you like 4 Hyali,' I never saw
95
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
the island (which exists), but I passed it in
the night — and I have seen many isles of
the JEgean.
9. Don't you think the legend at least of
' Santorin ' one of the loveliest in the world ?
I wonder if you weird Catholics realise that
the Middle Age is still in flower in the
iEgean. ' That man married a Syren,' said
a peasant once to my wife — and showed the
man !
10. A ship an isle you don't mention. A
very subtile poem, Frank, and when you read
Henri de Regnier you will find some more.
11. ' Oak and Olive.' A jest after all in
the good old manner. No, I wouldn't have
it out of the volume, though, of course, it's
very slight.
12. ' Brumana.' Horrible misprint — in
lines you quoted —mountain should be moun-
tains.
Poem sincere enough, good God, was
thinking of the Bournemouth pines.
96
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Lavdanon is the Greek name of the
Cytisus, a rock rose which makes the woods
lovely in Syria. It has a queer little scent.
13. ' Areiya ' was, as it says, written in
just three minutes and never altered.
14. My wife likes 'Bryan' : I hate it —
or rather find it cold. But the story (a
Greek story again) is jolly enough.
15. Damned clever of me to write a poem
as far out of myself as the 4 Painter's Mis-
tress.' My wife has not ceased wondering.
Suggested by a play of Battaille's and
written on the Lebanon.
16. Oh, I did sweat when very ill over
1 Taoping,' and turned it from rot into a
good poem of workmanship. Suggested by
a strange amazing book of one Daguerches
called ' Consolata fille du Soleil. . . .'
Concerning the Chinese. Frank, I almost
accuse you of insincerity. Do you really
shudder at a Japanese print ? Do you
really believe in the ' inhuman Oriental '
97
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
myth ? Or do you think you ought to believe
in the myth ?
Don't you think that the healthy honest
way for a European to look at a Chinaman
or a nigger is to laugh at him ? Don't you
think they are there for the joy of the
picturesque — as I portray them in ' Taop-
ing' ?
The Turks too. I hate them because I
am a modern civilised man. Catholics
should and do love them. Why is Turkey
rotten ? Why is the Turk an inefficient
gentleman ? Islam ? Nonsense : not en-
tirely. Simply because he thinks middle
age and is middle age. Saladin and Richard
were both very near each other. They
talked the same language. They both be-
lieved in Aristotle. But Saladin is still
Saladin — arguing with a twist — because his
' Aristotle ' was translated for him and he
never learnt Latin at the Renaissance.
Richard is now King George V, , , ,
98
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Do read Paul Fort. Perhaps the
greatest of all French poets. The humour
is wonderful. Have just read ' Mortcerf '
and an introduction which quotes the most
amazingly jolly things.
i Du temps qu'on allait encore aux
baleines, si loin que 9a faisait, mat'lot,
pleurer nos belles, y avait sur chaque
route un Jesus en croix, y avait des marquis
couverts de dentelles, y avait la Sainte
Vierge et y avait le Roi.'
2. ' Du temps qu'on allait encore aux
baleines, si loin que 5a faisait, mat'lot,
pleurer les belles, y avait des marins qui
avaient la foi, et des grands seigneurs qui
crachaient sur elle, et y avait la Sainte
Vierge, et y avait le Roi.'
3. ' Eh bien, a present tout le monde est
content, c'est pas pour dire, mat'lot, mais
on est content ! Y a plus de grands seig-
neurs ni Jesus qui tiennent, y a la Re-
99
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
publique et y a l'President, et y a plus de
baleinesS
That should send you round to the
Bookshop.
So sorry you have neuralgia : hope you
are better.
4 Hassan ' nearly ended. You shall see it
when complete.
Write again soon as your letters are a
great joy.
I don't believe in Barbey's Catholicism a
bit. See Jules Lemaitre on him.
Thine,
James."
Flecker at about this time moved from
Leysin to Montana, and the next letter from
him which I preserved came from the latter
place and is dated August 31st.
" I have been a most shameful time
answering your delightful and enthusiastic
100
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
letter of congratulation, for which I thank
you most heartily. The reviews — especially
The Times and the Morning Post — have been
good enough for Shakespeare : I do hope
they will even be enough to sell a few copies
of the book ; I should hate Goschens to be
badly had by the transaction.
I have been bothered lately trying to
find a new place to live in, and only got here
after a frightful lot of bother. I am pretty
sick of life. I've finished my play, but I
don't suppose it will ever be played.
Would you be so awfully good as to tell me
what a poor ought to do if he wants to
make a little gold by writing (and drawing
— my wife can draw) advertisements ? I
mean, is it any good just inventing adver-
tisements for Pears' soap and sending it
straight to Manager, Pears' Soap, or ought
one to work through an advertising agency
and, if so, do you know one ? Your experi-
ence of these things is so vast. It seems to
101
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
me one might do something paying in that
line.
I don't think you answered me about my
idea of making a Xmas illustrated book
out of my Eastern poems. Trelawney could
do it very well.
I shall write a book one day on how
to spend money in a jolly way, for men
of moderate income (£500-£l500 a year).
Tell the they ought to travel. The
book will sell by the hundred thousand
million on the railways' bookstalls.
Do tell me about advertisements.
Ever yours,
James Elroy Flecker.
Hope you had or are having a sumptuous
holiday."
From this time onwards, inspired perhaps
by the splendid reception which nearly all
the critics accorded to " The Golden Journey
to Samarkand," he sent me a stream of pro-
102
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
jects for books, none of which he was ever
destined to carry out. The only one which
he seems seriously to have begun is a trans-
lation of " Virgil, iEneid VI," of which in a
letter dated " Sunday," he writes as follows :
' I have to thank you sincerely for the
raising of my royalty. Would you let me
know about when you expect to publish
' The King of Alsander ' ?
My next book is half written. It is, I'm
afraid, rather horrifying. This is the title —
6 An interpretation
in Blank verse
of
Virgil, ,Eneid VI,
based on the poetic value of the Sounds,
together with the Latin text
and ten prefaces,
by
James Elroy Flecker,
120 pp. Wide margins. Paper, 3/6 (?)
Ready in February.'
103
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Seriously, this is exactly the title I intend
to give the book, with which I am well
advanced already. The book is simply an
attempt to do a translation of ' Virgil ' as
satisfactory as Fitzgerald's ' Omar ' —a
translation which will utterly eclipse the
very numerous and very feeble attempts
hitherto existing.
The ten prefaces will be as combative as
Bernard Shaw's, and occupy some forty
pages. They will be on the translation of
sounds, on blank verse, on Hell literature,
on preceding translations of ' Virgil,' on
' Modern Scholarship,' on the ' Modern
Spirit,' etc., and should irritate everyone as
effectually as my preface to ' Samarkand.5
5 55
The letter quoted above was sent to the
firm, but the envelope contained also a
letter addressed to myself, giving more
details about his project of translating the
6th iEneid.
104
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
" Confidential.
Hotel Stephani,
MoNTANA-SUR-SlERRE,
Switzerland.
Sunday.
MY DEAR GOLDRING,
This accompanies a somewhat start-
ling announcement to Messrs. Max G. that I
want them to publish the 6th iEneid of
Virgil translated by me into blank verse.
Seriously the translation, of which 200 lines
out of 900 are ready, will be so striking and
the prefaces so combative that I think
produced in the way I suggest it may bring
in quite good money. Other books of the
iEneid may follow— but I can't pledge
myself.
Suppose 500 arc sold at 7/6. Take 75 off
for review. Call it £200 for the firm after
the Bookseller's profits. Production even
in fine style, with advertisements, £60 at
H 105
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
most. A tenner for the author and £130
for the publisher and there you are.
Many thanks for your letter. I'm glad
you like the corrections to the novel. It
was very fair-minded of Goschens to give me
the increased royalty.
Would you tell me what you think of this :
A publisher — friend of mine— writes me (as
I told Goschen) will I write a book ' The
Future of Poetry ' (2/6 book). Offers me £25
down in advance of 10% royalty.
Do people ever accept contracts like these,
my dear Goldring, unless they're starving ?
I would rather like to do the book and I
might get chapters of it into Reviews. But
3 months' work for £25 ? To a dramatic
author whose work Tree is considering with
enthusiasm —but there's many a slip, etc.—
it don't seem brilliant and I haven't yet
closed. Of course its damned unlikely such
a book would sell more than 2000 and that
I should ever get more royalty. And if it
106
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
sold ten thousand I should net the not
enormous sum of £100.
Please keep the above confidential. As I
have to rely upon my pen now I shall have
to be a bit snarky about contracts. I must
have at least the chance of making good
money. I think I have enough followers
to be able to sell the Virgil at a stiff price
and with a stiff profit, but I shall want a
good fat share in the latter.
If Goschens don't want it I shall try the
Riccardi Press and issue it at about eleven
guineas !
There is perpetual sunshine here and
perpetual leisure. Otherwise there's no par-
ticular reason for my continued existence.
I get neither better nor worse and wait all
day for news of ' Hassan.'
Ever yours — with many thanks for many
troubles undertaken on my behalf.
James Elroy Flecker."
107
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
As the discerning reader will easily gather
from this letter, Flecker really had no com-
mercial or money-grubbing instinct what-
ever. His attempts to be businesslike and
" snarky " were a delightful tour de force,
and they probably did not deceive himself.
As everyone who knows anything about
the hard facts of book production will be
aware, the offer of an advance of £25 for a
half-crown volume on a theme unlikely to
attract a big public, was far from being
ungenerous ; while the poet's estimate of
the publisher's probable profit from the sale
of 425 copies of his translation of the
Vlth JEneid at 7/6 can only be described
as a " rich bit of fun."
In another undated letter, written about
this period, from Montana, Flecker describes
one more projected book, some notes for
which may have been found among his
papers.
108
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
" My dear Goldring,
1. Messrs. have sent me
the enclosed. Will you tell me what to
reply ? As far as I read my contract the
Foreign rights are not available. What do
they mean though translation, America,
or Tauchnitz ? Are they any damned use,
anyhow. If the ' K. of A.' begins to move, I'd
like to get it hitched on to Tauchnitz.
Please return the letter and answer if
possible by return.
2. I have, it is true, a vague scheme
for a book. I have quaint ideas on
most things — literature, of course, but also
current politics — and a million other things.
I find that exile makes it useless trying to
work these ideas up into articles, and also
that if I do turn them into articles all my
dear ideas become heavy and dull. I don't,
for instance, a bit want to write a long
review on II. G. Wells. But I do want to
109
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
say and state my opinion for posterity that
his latest work is pompous drivel, and that
Mr. Polly is one of the best things ever
written in any language.
I might call the book i Poet's Porridge,'
and should write it very quickly. Under
headings : Literature, Politics, etc., it would
consist of little brief paragraphs of rather
pithy comment. You may not know that
I am a violent phil-Hellene : that will come
in also. (I am writing a magnificent corona-
tion ode for King Constantine.)
Just mention the idea to Goschens, will
you ? Then if they'd like to see a bit, I'll
scrape together a few pages and send them
as a specimen. There is something novel
about a poet damning round on current
events : only, of course, I ought to be better
known than I am to get a hearing."
Flecker, despite much illness, seems to
have been fairly active during his stay in
110
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Montana. I had another very long and
complicated business letter from him, sent
from the Hotel Stephani, chiefly about the
cost of the corrections to " The King of
Alsander." I am very glad to gather from
it that the firm let him off lightly and raised
his royalties. At the end of this letter he
refers to an " excellent and sensible article,
by a lady called Hodgson, on ' Samarkand '
in December Gentlewoman with which I was
very pleased."
What I take to be the last communication
which I had from Flecker from Montana is
undated like the others, but was evidently
sent soon after the publication of " The King
of Alsander."
" My dear Goldring,
The advertisements are excellent. I
hope the book will ' move ' : there is time
yet.
I suggest (tho' no one ever yet took
111
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
note of my advertising suggestions) that The
Times' review, which wasn't a review but
a remarkably clever synopsis, should be
printed in full on the front page of the cap,
if it can be done inexpensively.
You know my play ' Hassan ' is going
to be played in London this autumn if all
goes well : I've got an excellent collabor-
ator. Goschens shall print it — but only after
it's played and that's a long way off yet.
Otherwise I try to revise another older
play of mine and when not sufficiently
inspired for that I do the Virgil, which
Gilbert Murray has pronounced to be the
best translation of him in English.
I can't work much, and haven't at present
any original ideas in my head. I'm only
just now managing to get up to lunch after
3 months' illness. Hope to go to Locarno
soon — will send you address if I move. As
for poems I've only written 4 since ' Samar-
kand ' and they be small ones. Clement
112
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Shorter offered me three guineas, and I've
only been able to send one, whereas he asked
for two.
Re 'King of Alsander' Dramatic Rights.
I know that signature of J. N. Raphael
under many an inadequate verse translation
from the French and some fairly adequate
Paris gossip. Of course make a bargain for
the stage rights. ... I will write formally
on this subject if you like. But I would like
to work the play in collaboration with J. N. R.
if possible —a collaboration in which I should
take the minor part.
I owe you many thanks for having intro-
duced me to Goschens. They are certainly
advertising excellently. I shall be not only
disappointed but astonished if the ' K. of
A.' don't move. The Evening Standard
review and Globe are better quoting than
The Times. The Westminster review is a
mad muddle— it seems to think I'm a plot.
How reviewers love prefaces —it's astonishing.
113
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
If the Virgil can't be published by Oxford
Press or Riccardi, I may get Goschens to
print a few copies, partly at my expense,
paper bound and no advertising. Perhaps
if I got G. Murray to write a preface they
would even be pleased to do it. But I prefer
to publish it in the august quietude of
Oxford if possible.
That Poetry and Drama do irritate me
(I don't refer to your excellent review) with
its childish anti-God rubbish (we're about
200 years ahead of these asses, on the
Continent, in the middle of a Catholic
reaction, and we leave that sort of vulgarity
to the plebs) and its ridiculous abuse of
Tennyson and other Victorians. Do they
really imagine writes as well as Tenny-
son or Kipling ? It's astonishing. Do write
again. Do you ever see D ? If so
remember me to her fondly.
Yours,
James Elroy Flecker."
114
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Flecker went on to Locarno in the spring
of 1914, and I have only been able to dis-
cover one postcard sent from there though
he must have written several times. The
address on the card is " Pension Rhcin-
gold, 8 via dei Fiori, Locarno " and the
date on the postmark is 18th April,
1914.
" I am asked tentatively what I'll take
for the rights of having ' Alsander ' trans-
lated into German. £15 or £20 suggested, of
which I suppose Messrs. Goschen take half.
Shall I close if offered £15 ? Don't think I'll
get more (Langen's, Munich). Can't it get
on to Tauchnitz ?
Please send copy of ' Alsander ' to
for review, also copies of ' Alsander '
and ' Samarkand ' to . He is a worthy
fellow who offers to puff me inimitably in
America : he offers to pay for the books —
but I hope you can send him a free copy
as he is full of youthful enthusiasms and
115
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
promises to review the book in some rag or
other."
To judge from the following extract from a
letter to Mr. Donald Robertson, the change
to Locarno made the poet more cheerful
even if it did him no good.
"8. IV. 14.
My dear Donald,
What a pest ! Are you going to make
me regret having quitted the fir trees, snows,
and thaws of that infernal Montana ?
And exactly 2 days ago, having procured
from Gomrae an address of yours in S.
Remo, I wrote to you there begging you
to try and return by the Gothard and
see me.
But look here. Make a sporting effort.
Come and see me all the same ! It's a long
journey because the steamer from Stresa
here (you ought to go to Stresa to see the
Borromean islands unless you know them :
116
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
otherwise Baveno is a few minutes nearer)
is slow (4 hours), but the trip is a very jolly
one. . . ."
In May he moved to Davos Platz — for
Flecker, as for so many other invalids, the
final resting-place before the end. The last
three of the letters or postcards which I
was able to retrieve from my files were sent
from Davos. The first of these, a card, is
dated June 1.
" My dear Goldring,
1. Please send a copy of 'The Golden
Journey ' to at my expense.
2. Do send me any news there is going.
3. No, my dear fellow, don't ask me if I
can write a book about Greece — descriptive
tour. I can only preserve the rotten rem-
nants of my life by lying in bed here for
years— in the ugliest hole God ever created.
4. But I do intend to publish my great
117
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
ode to Greece separately with a forty-page
preface of a most violent kind, full of abuse
and invective of pro-Turks, pro-Bulgars, the
Liberal Press, with history of the Eastern
question. I should much value an assurance
that Goschens would take this ; it might
create a bit of a stir.
5. I'm still waiting to hear from Oxford
about my ' Virgil,' and haven't done a
line more to it, or, indeed, to anything
for months. I need encouragement. Tell
Goschens I want to write a play on Judith,
and I ought to revise my ' Don Juan,' and
I've got to work ' Hassan ' with my collabo-
rator. And day after day I do nothing. I
must try for that photo : The Sphere wants
one too, and a poem !
Ever yours,
James Elroy Flecker.
I'd give all my poems to be a healthy
navvy.
118
?5
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
The next one probably arrived about a
fortnight later.
" Hotel Buol : Davos Platz,
Switz.
Dear Goldring,
1. I enclose photo. Will send 12
more as soon as ready. Please dispose to
most important customers.
2. I enclose biographical details. As I
have no notion how these should be got up,
will you please be so kind as to work 'em
up for me and have a few copies typed to
send to enquirers. One can't do these
things oneself : it's so grotesque.
3. Would you let me know if the offer
of Goschens' of £10 in advance for the
' Virgil ' is definite : as I want to know.
The Oxford Press would take it.
4. Please send me any money you can.
5. Please see about an American press
agency for me.
119
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
I'm so damned ill I'm almost in despair.
Sorry I wrote a crusty letter last time.
Seems I've lost the Polignac prize, damn it.
Murray & Yeats voted for me. Damn
everything."
As far as I can recall, all Flecker's pro-
jects for books were welcomed by me on
behalf of my firm, though not a page of
MS. ever reached us of any of them. In
regard to the translation of ' Virgil ' I felt
bound to urge him, in his own interests,
to let the Oxford Press issue it, if they
would. At this period, although it was
within a few months of his death, I had
no idea that he was in any imminent
danger or that a complete recovery was
impossible.
The last letter I can find from him is
dated October 12th, 1914.
120
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
"Maison Baratelli,
Davos Platz.
My dear Goldring,
I should much like to hear from you —
but perhaps you're at the war. Wish I
were ! We've got a flat and I amuse myself
by lying in bed all day. I can write only
a very little in the morning. Have pupped
a war poem and some prose. Could we send
a dozen of our novels to the Navy : the
officers, it seems, have only too much time
for reading ! And they must weary of the
Strands and illustrateds people send them.
If my War poem gets published by The
Times (80 lines blank verse) we might make
a Broadsheet of it. Unlikely, however,
that Times will be up to scratch. Do give
me news : post is quite safe : about 7 days.
Let's have news of you. Why don't you
send me your novel ?
55
He died on January 3rd, 1915.
I 121
B
V
Y the way, who is Flecker ? Is he
any good ? "
It was Ezra Pound, I remember,
who asked me this question, in all good
faith, some time after the publication of
" The Golden Journey to Samarkand." The
question impressed me because it seemed to
emphasise one of Flecker's most valuable
qualities : he was never fashionable, never
joined any mutual admiration society, and
never depended, for inspiration, upon the
reactions of any gang or clique. He met
very few of his brother-poets. After his
Oxford days he could never be said to have
belonged to any particular set ; and though
he was, with some notable exceptions, gener-
ously treated by reviewers (despite his stric-
125
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
tures upon them), he was never boomed by
any one circle of critics. I don't suppose
that he even knew the names of any of the
critics who noticed his books in the principal
London papers. The literary people who
admired him were scattered, widely diver-
gent types, mostly unknown to one another.
As a poet he stood upon his own feet. He
followed his own path, looking neither to
the right nor to the left, and as soon as he
had "found himself" he was apparently
but little influenced by any of his contem-
poraries. Flecker, at a very early age, must
have been perfectly conscious that he was
a poet ; and, having a passion for the
art of poetry for its own sake, he set to
work to make himself as fine a poet as it
was within his nature and capacity to
become. Allied with his extraordinary
facility went an equally extraordinary power
of restraint and of self-criticism ; and he
knew all about the value of taking pains.
126
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
In his school days and at Oxford, his out-
put of verse was enormous. He imitated
all his favourite poets fluently and easily,
and probably with a fairly clear notion in
his head that these outpourings were metri-
cal exercises and nothing more. As a
corrective to his gush of experiment — the
first delighted leaps from the earth of one
who 4s determined at last to fly— he early
acquired the habit of making translations,
and there is no doubt that the labour and
concentration involved in them were of
immense help to him throughout his life,
while the translations themselves, at their
best, now form by no means the most
negligible part of his " Collected Poems."
Flecker' s career as a poet is one of un-
broken progress up to and including " The
Golden Journey to Samarkand." And if
some of the work which followed the publica-
tion of this volume seems to show a falling
off, it must be ascribed less to any diminu-
127
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
tion of his capacities or inspiration than to
the ravages of the disease from which he
died. Even so, four poems at least, written
after the publication of the " Golden
Journey " — " Stillness," " The Pensive
Prisoner," "The Old War-ship Ablaze,"
and "The Old Ships" — are equal to any-
thing he ever did. If the " Collected
Poems " has its dull pages, it must always
be borne in mind that it contains much the
publication or re-publication of which the
poet himself never authorised. The " Juven-
ilia " are, on the whole, of little interest
except for the second Glion poem, " Glion-
Evening," — where we have an early indica-
tion of his love of precision, of the clear image
and the vivid picture as opposed to a lazy,
emotional vagueness.
From Glion when the sun declines
The world below is clear to see :
I count the escalading pines
Upon the rocks of Meillerie.
128
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Like a dull bee the steamer plies
And settles on the jutting pier :
The barques, strange sailing butterflies,
Round idle headlands idly veer.
These two stanzas achieve with success
the effect aimed at, and the more closely
they are examined the better the workman-
ship appears. The two remaining stanzas
of the poem are not quite up to the same
level. " Glion-Evening " is dated July,
1904, and was thus written before the poet
was twenty.
It was towards the end of his time at
Oxford that Flecker's real personality first
began to show itself in his work. In the
first stanza of " A New Year's Carol,"
Flecker sings unmistakably with his own
voice :
Awake, awake ! The world is young
For all its weary years of thought :
The starkest fights must still be fought,
The most surprising songs be sung.
And to get any real insight into the poet's
129
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
nature it must also be realised that the
poem " Envoy " is equally authentic, equally
revealing :
The young men leap, and toss their golden hair,
Run round the land, or sail across the seas :
But one was stricken with a sore disease, —
The lean and swarthy poet of despair.
Know me, the slave of fear and death and shame,
A sad Comedian, a most tragic Fool,
Shallow, imperfect, fashioned without rule,
The doubtful shadow of a demon flame.
His dejections were inevitably the counter-
part of his enthusiasms, and could safely
be deduced from them, even if he had never
given them poetic expression.
Flecker's first volume of verse, " The
Bridge of Fire," issued by Mr. Elkin Mathews
in his " Vigo Cabinet Series " in 1907, though
it contains a good many pieces that the
poet himself afterwards suppressed or re-
wrote, bears at the same time very vividly
the impress of his personality and has in it
the promise, at least, of what he was to
130
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
become. We can see, as in " From Gren-
oble " and " Riouperoux," his love for
places and for place-names already inspiring
him ; and he is high-spirited even when he
is being " decadent," and serving us " Kubla
Khan " with a dash of absinthe — as in the
two sonnets of Bathrolaire. These two
sonnets must have given him enormous
pleasure to write, and his voice, for those
who remember it, is audible in every line.
They are humorous, imaginative, and ex-
tremely adroit, and it seems to me (biassed
as I may be by a certain sentimentality)
that the years have treated them more
kindly than some of the other poems of
this period. " The Ballad of Hampstead
Heath ' is an example of undergraduate
humour —brilliant overnight, but rather flat
the next morning — and only useful in its
place in the " Collected Poems " as a con-
trast to the careful workmanship surround-
ing it.
131
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
The faults of taste, occasional cheapness,
and mere " cleverness," which can be found
in " The Bridge of Fire " (mingled though
they are with a youthful freshness and elan),
have also their interest, in that they show
us, by contrast, how steadily Flecker's work
improved as he grew older. In " The Golden
Journey to Samarkand " period he would
not have been capable of such a poem as
" Mary Magdalen." And his later version
of " Tenebris interlucentem " is an enormous
improvement on the one contained in his
first printed volume. Not all his alterations
and revisions were as successful as this. In
the little poem called " We that were
Friends " he made a change in the first
verse without improving it, while leaving
in the second the unfortunate line " whom
dreams delight and passions please" (What-
ever passions may do, it is difficult to think
of them as "pleasing" anybody — except
perhaps a fish, to whom a passion might be
132
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
a " pleasing " surprise.) And his blue pencil
has failed to delete the epithet " great " in
the penultimate line, an epithet which is,
to say the least, unhappy. Another altera-
tion which some of those who possess " The
Bridge of Fire " will regret occurs in the
last verse of " The Ballad of the Student in
the South." The first line of this verse
originally ran : " We're of the people, you
and I." In the version contained in the
" Collected Poems " this has been changed
to "For we are simple, you and I" — a
much weaker, because more ' literary,"
way of saying the same thing.
In neither " The Bridge of Fire " nor in the
much more mature " Forty-Two Poems '
can Flecker be said quite to have found him-
self. Up to 1910 he still wanted, for some
unknown reason, to write poems about
London, and he retained enough affection
for his failures in this direction to print two
of the worst. " The Ballad of the Londoner '
133
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
does not come off, while " The Ballad of
Camden Town " is perhaps the only one
of Flecker's pieces in which, by wallowing
solemnly in false sentiment, he becomes
unconsciously funny. In the poems of
this first period— with the splendid excep-
tions of the "Ballad of Iskander," of
" Pillage " and of " The War Song of the
Saracens"— it is when he is most subjec-
tive, when his poems are most intimate
and deeply felt, that he is most successful.
As examples, one may quote " The Senti-
mentalist," "No Coward's Song," "To a
Poet a Thousand Years Hence," and the
beautiful " Dulce Lumen, Triste Numen,
Suave Lumen Luminum." The first-men-
tioned of these poems shows— what is also
apparent elsewhere in his work — that
Flecker understood the romantic side of
friendship as only very few English poets
have understood it.
It was not until Flecker went to the
134
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
East, and found in travel in Turkey, Asia
Minor, Greece, and among the islands of
the iEgean the greatest inspiration of his
life, that he really came into his own. " The
Golden Journey to Samarkand " is the book
of his maturity in which all his finest poetic
qualities are displayed. In technique it
marks a notable advance. By this time
he had formed, or rather adopted, a definite
theory of poetry, and it was a theory from
the application of which, at that stage of
his development, he gained a great deal.
That, had he lived through the war, the
theory would have been cast aside, there
are, at least, indications. But speculations
of this sort are fruitless, and it is the work
which he actually accomplished which alone
concerns us. Not only is Flecker's own
assertion, made in a letter which I have
quoted, that the Oriental poems in " The
Golden Journey to Samarkand " are
"unique in English," fully justified, but it
135
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
can, I think, be stated that few poems in
our literature show a more passionate love
of England than " Brumana," a poem, if
ever there was one, wrung from the heart by
the agony of exile. I quote the opening
verse :
Oh shall I never never be home again ?
Meadows of England shining in the rain
Spread wide your daisied lawns : your ramparts
green
With briar fortify, with blossom screen
Till my far morning — and O streams that slow
And pure and deep through plains and playlands go,
For me your love and all your kingcups store,
And — dark militia of the southern shore,
Old fragrant friends — preserve me the last lines
Of that long saga which you sung me, pines,
When, lonely boy, beneath the chosen tree
I listened, with my eyes upon the sea.
By nature, I do not think that Flecker
ever had any tendency to be didactic ; but
he very likely had a strong inclination to be
sentimental and subjective, an inclination
which he deliberately restrained and of
which he was himself rather afraid. The
136
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
repression which he exercised in this respect
has earned for his poetry a reputation for
frigidity which is, on the whole, undeserved.
He probably adopted his Parnassian theory,
in the first instance, as a discipline and a
corrective. He knew that both his ' feel-
ings " and his verbal exuberance needed
pruning and canalising : and the Par-
nassians offered him precisely what he
required.
" A careful study of this theory " (the
Parnassian theory), he says, in his preface
to " The Golden Journey to Samarkand,"
" however old-fashioned it may by now
have become in France, would, I am con-
vinced, benefit English critics and poets,
for both our poetic criticism and our poetry
are in chaos. It is a Latin theory, and
therefore the more likely to supply the
defects of the Saxon genius. . . . The Par-
nassian school," he continues, " was a
classical reaction against the perfervid
k 137
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
sentimentality and extravagance of some
French romantics. The Romantics in France,
as in England, had done their powerful
work, and infinitely widened the scope and
enriched the language of poetry. It re-
mained for the Parnassians to raise the
technique of their art to a height which
should enable them to express the subtlest
ideas in powerful and simple verse. . . .
The French Parnassian has a tendency to
use traditional forms, and even to employ
classical subjects. His desire in writing
poetry is to create beauty : his inclination
is toward a beauty somewhat statuesque.
He is apt to be dramatic and objective
rather than intimate. The enemies of the
Parnassians have accused them of cultivating
unemotional frigidity and upholding an aus-
tere view of perfection. The unanswerable
answers to all criticism are the works of
Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Samain, Henri
de Regnier, and Jean Moreas. .
138
55
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Corrections to "Oak and Olive," in Flecker's Handwriting.
Fucin
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
These passages are not only interesting
in themselves, but they illuminate the poet's
attitude towards his own work, and enable
us to guess that he had as shrewd a notion
as anyone could have of his own gifts and
weaknesses. Indeed, it may be said that
part of Flecker's genius lay in his realisation
of his capacities. He knew what he could
do, and we rarely find him groping after
things which are too high for him. I think
it can nowhere be said of him that he
" wrought better than he knew " ; and to
judge from his love of revision and of
emendation he seems to have had an
almost exaggerated distrust of what Mr.
Arthur Symons has somewhere called
' the plenary inspiration of first thoughts."
His hatred of sloppy writing, " native wood
notes," and temperamental gush had its
counterpart in his devotion to the Classics,
and his resulting desire to create, in his
poetry, a ' beauty somewhat statuesque,"
139
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
marmoreal, indestructible. Greek names
thrilled him all his life, and one can imagine
that nothing gave him greater delight than
to fit such names as Hylas, Aeolus, Orei-
thyia, into a setting of verse. But easily
traceable as is his love of Greek and Roman
poetry throughout all his work, it is possible,
nevertheless, that the most fruitful literary
influence which inspired him was that of
Sir Richard Burton, the whole of whose
" Kasidah " he had, as a boy, taken the
trouble to transcribe. Perhaps one should
qualify this by saying that it was not so
much Burton as the flavour of Persian and
Arabic poetry conveyed to him through
Burton, which so fertilised his mind as to
make it possible for him, in the fulness of
time, to give us " Gates of Damascus,"
the Prologue and Epilogue of " The
Golden Journey to Samarkand " and his
play, " Hassan." There is a rare and
magical beauty in such lines as these
140
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
which it requires no trained ear to dis-
cover :
I am the gate that fears no fall : the Mihrab of
Damascus wall,
The bridge of booming Sinai : the Arch of Allah all
in all.
O spiritual pilgrim, rise : the night has grown her
single horn :
The voices of the souls unborn are half adream with
Paradise.
To Meccah thou hast turned in prayer with aching
heart and eyes that burn :
Ah, Hajji, whither wilt thou turn when thou art there,
when thou art there ?
All through " Gates of Damascus," and
in such poems as " Saadabad," "Tasmin,"
and the " Hammam Name," we have the
East, the real East, as it is given us nowhere
else in English poetry.
At the time of the publication of " The
Golden Journey to Samarkand," as has
been seen, Flecker was already seriously
ill. Whenever he had any strength to do
141
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
so, he wrote, and when he could not write
he lay in bed, dreaming of the great poem
which he would accomplish before his eyes
closed for ever. The War came to him as
the great occasion for which all his life he
had been looking, the occasion to which
the poet must at all costs rise greatly.
" The Burial in England " was his last
tremendous effort. He fought for life while
he was writing it, fought for strength to
finish it. It is an heroic attempt, and thus
to his friends there is something sacred
about these lines wrung from the poet's
brain by so gigantic an effort of will. Criti-
cism, however, must care nothing for senti-
ment, and if one can put aside the
circumstances in which it was written, one
has to admit that the poem is a failure.
It strains all through at the big thing, the
big effect, and never reaches it. It is
voulu, laboured : it does not ring true.
Its thought has the ephemeral qualities of
142
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
the newspaper leading article at the end
of 1914— when leading articles were scarcely
endowed with prophetic insight. Peace,
" angry and in arms " is represented, we
find, by :
The same laughing, invincible, tough men
Who gave Napoleon Europe like a loaf,
For slice and portion, — not so long ago !
In cold blood, their change of heart seems
unduly rapid. . . . But no : of all poems, this
one ought not to be examined in cold blood.
It is the last noble gesture of a dying artist,
and we can leave it at that.
If Flecker did not succeed in his effort to
write a war-poem on the grand scale, at
least in two or three of the shorter pieces
which he wrote towards the end of his life,
he reaches his highest level. The two poems,
" Stillness " and " The Pensive Prisoner,"
both of them intimate and personal, are
among the most beautiful things that he
ever produced. And they indicate, also, a
143
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
tendency to free himself from the Parnassian
shackles. Here is the last stanza of " Still-
ness " :
Then twittering out in the night my thought-birds flee,
I am emptied of all my dreams :
I only hear Earth turning, only see
Ether's long bankless streams,
And only know I should drown if you laid not your
hand on me.
And here the first verse of " The Pensive
Prisoner " :
My thoughts came drifting down the Prison where I
lay-
Through the Windows of their Wings the stars were
shining —
The wings bore me away — the russet Wings and grey
With feathers like the moon-bleached Flowers — I was
a God reclining :
Beneath me lay my Body's Chain and all the Dragons
born of pain
As I burned through the Prison Roof to walk on Pave-
ment shining.
This is not the occasion to attempt to
" place " Flecker as a poet. Anything in
the nature of a final judgment upon his
144
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
poetry must be left to some professional
critic, unmoved by personal memories and
aided in his task by that master-critic,
Time. My own ideas about Flecker's work
have modified in several respects during
the seven years which have elapsed since
the articles on which this book is based were
printed in the now defunct " Academy."
What I first regarded as coldness now seems
to me to be better described as restraint, a
restraint which the poet consciously imposed
upon himself. And his apparent materialism,
which seemed to me at one time to limit
his range, I have come to believe was no
more than superficial. Flecker for many
years used to be fond of saying that he was
an agnostic, and perhaps he thought it was
true. But in the last period of his life he
definitely returned to Christianity. It is
significant that his last present to his mother
— sent shortly before his death — was a copy
of the New Testament in the Tauclmitz
145
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
edition, which he had specially bound for
her, so that it resembled, exactly, his own
copy. He was evidently influenced by the
" Catholic Reaction " on the Continent (see
his letter on page 114), and had come to
regard what he calls " childish anti-God
rubbish " with impatience, as a kind of
vulgarity liable to attack the half-fledged.
This point may appear to have but little
direct bearing on Flecker's poetry, but it
seems to me essential to an understanding
of the man who wrote it.
As a poet, it will be allowed that Flecker's
description of the Parnassians in the Preface
to " The Golden Journey to Samarkand '
applied also, in the main, to himself. Like
the Parnassians he loathed romantic egoism ;
like them he had a fine sense of language,
using words and epithets with the nicest
scholarship and taste ; and again, like them,
he preferred as a rule to derive his inspira-
tion from the classics, from history, from
146
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
mythology, from places and from beautiful
names, rather than from the details of daily
life and personal emotions. As a poet of
" actualites " he was rarely a success ; and
though his mind was often filled with ideas
of writing "magnificent odes" — in honour
of King Constantine's Coronation, or on
some similar theme — he was never able
successfully to accomplish anything of the
sort. His revised version of " God Save
the King" is merely funny, with its exotic
literary airs and graces —
Till Erin's Island lawn
Echoes the dulcet-drawn
Song with a cry of Dawn —
God Save the King !
—and "The Burial in England" was labour
spent in vain. We need not regret these
failures, for the inception of such poems —
and they only form a small proportion of his
work — came evidently from the head rather
than from the heart. Perhaps the poems
147
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
were due (despite his Parnassian theory) to
a wrong idea of what constitutes a " great "
poet— the "great poet" which he was
always determined to become.
It was hardly ever " life " —either in its
ordinariness or in its strangeness — which
Flecker succeeded in transmuting into
poetry. His work is an escape from life, and
only incidentally an interpretation of it.
His emotional range is limited, perhaps de-
liberately. His greatest strength lies in his
power to create pictures compact, clear in
outline and rich in colour ; and in the
haunting music of which he had the secret.
" Emaux et C amies " would not have made
a bad alternative title for his collected
poems. There are times when his art seems
to resemble that of the jeweller and of the
worker in precious metals. His poems, if
they rise but rarely to the highest imagina-
tive level, are yet hammered and worked
till they attain a hard, indestructible per-
148
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
fection. They have an impressive solidity,
and it is difficult to believe that verse of
such a character will be quickly forgotten.
It depends on nothing transitory for its
interest ; and it contains no message to
grow stale.
In the generations to come we can imagine
that students of Literature will remember
of Flecker that in an age of anarchy in verse
he took the trouble to become a master of
technique : in an age of formlessness he
upheld the finest traditions of form. What
was beautiful twenty centuries ago is beauti-
ful still ; and, as Flecker has told us himself,
it was with the single object of creating
beauty that his poems were written. Who
can read them and imagine for a moment
that he failed in his object ? He only failed,
as I have suggested, on the rare occasions
when he wrote with other aims than this.
It is hard to believe that the glowing
visions which Flecker's poems bring before
149
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
the mind will prove any less enchanting to
readers in the centuries to come than they
are to-day, or that his lines, "To a Poet a
Thousand Years Hence," will fail to carry
their message through the ages to some
craftsman as conscientious as himself :
0 friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone :
I was a poet, I was young.
Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
1 send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.
150
VI
VI
FLECKER' S published prose works
consist of an early fantasy called
" The Last Generation," printed by
the New Age Press in 1908 ; " The
Grecians : a Dialogue on Education," issued
by J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd. in 1910 ; his soli-
tary novel, " The King of Alsander " (Max
Goschen, 1914) ; a certain number of stray
papers, essays and reviews contributed to
periodicals, a selection from which was issued
by G. Bell and Sons in 1920, under the title
" Collected Prose"; and "The Scholar's
Italian Book," an introduction to the study
of the Latin origins of Italian, published in
1911 by Mr. David Nutt. Probably, before
these lines are in print, " Hassan," his great
Oriental play, will have appeared through
l 153
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Messrs. Heinemann. There exist also, so
I have heard, one or two other plays,
possibly unfinished : and, when anyone
succeeds in collecting them, there is a
further delightful prose volume waiting to
be made out of Flecker's letters. As even
the few rather business-like specimens which
I have been able to give show clearly enough,
Flecker was an easy and engaging corre-
spondent, writing frankly from the heart
without literary airs and graces, writing,
indeed, precisely as he talked. His total
output of prose, intended for publication,
was in proportion as restricted as his output
of verse which he considered worthy of
print. With the exception of " Hassan,"
which is in a class by itself, the prose is
primarily interesting as shedding a light on
the mental make-up, character and per-
sonality of the poet. He is at his best when
(as in his dialogue, " The Grecians ") his
occasional artificiality of style and excess
154
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
of polish fit in with the general conception
and serve to enhance his effects. " The
Grecians," which for some reason has suf-
fered almost complete neglect, is one of his
most successful prose efforts. And to read
it will assist more towards an understanding
of the man and of his poetry than any
critical commentary or appreciation could
hope to do. In it, with complete sincerity,
with no poses, he shows us the holy places
of his own mind and describes in detail the
things which have enriched it. The con-
versation is staged now at Bologna, now
Pistoia, now Florence. The debate is be-
tween two schoolmasters, Edwinson the
Classic and Hofman the Scientist, and a
' beautiful youth,' called by the un-
romantic name of Harold Smith, who en-
counters them at Bologna. The youth
listens attentively and sympathetically to
what the schoolmasters have to say : and
then, with much eloquence, expounds to
155
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
them his ideas on the subject of education.
Finally, at their request, he reads them a
paper, on " true education," in which he
traces out in detail, for Edwinson's and
Hofman's benefit, a course of education
which he hopes " will appeal to the thought-
ful as possible, desirable and sufficient."
There is much sound and practical wisdom
in this discourse. Flecker was, as we have
seen, not only the son of the headmaster
of an English public school, but on several
occasions himself a schoolmaster. The
whole subject of education was one of his
deepest and most permanent intellectual
interests, and what he has to say in " The
Grecians " is the fruit of long thought and
considerable experience and inspired by an
enthusiastic idealism. There are many pass-
ages, particularly those on school discipline,
punishment and the treatment of sexual
questions which it would be interesting to
quote. But Flecker is perhaps most self-
156
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
revealing when he is treating of the literary
training which " Harold Smith " proposes
to give in his ideal school, to the selected
few who shall be judged worthy of it.
" The three great arts," says the ' beauti-
ful youth,' " I would place in this order of
educational importance — literature, repre-
sentation, music. . . . But it is literature
which appeals especially to educators as
being always a criticism of life, however
incomplete we may feel that definition to
be : through reading literature we enhance
our delight in life. . . . We must, therefore,
give our boys the most complete literary
training possible, not often worrying them
by examinations and commentaries, nor
ever dreaming to make them acquainted
with all the great books of the world before
the age of twenty-one." Of adventure-
stories they should be given the best —
Stevenson, Kipling, and Conrad, or among
the minor writers of romance, Anthony
157
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Hope, Maurice Hewlett, Gilbert Chesterton.
In regard to poetry, " we will not give even
our youngest boys inferior so-called patriotic
poetry to read, out of the false conception
that such despicable stuff is specially suit-
able to a childish understanding." On the
other hand, " we will certainly enliven the
interest of the young in verse by giving
them to read such good stories as ' Sohrab
and Rustum,' ' Enid and Geraint,' or the
' White Ship.' " He has a good deal to say
upon how poetry should be read aloud.
"... They shall read with dignity, slowly,
with realisation of the beauty of each word,
and of how in verse each word has its value,
not only of sense, but of sound and associa-
tion : they shall pause at the end of the
lines and mark the metre subtly and not
grossly : and all this may be taught to the
wise." He advocates the teaching of English
verse, as opposed to the conventional elegiacs
and iambics, and, says he, " we expect our
158
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
boys to write mock Cicero and Tacitus :
why, in the name of common sense, can
they not write mock Gibbon or Carlyle ?
Nor do I think for a minute that these
exercises will hinder any from forming in
later years an original style, but rather the
reverse should happen, for boys so instructed
will very clearly understand before they
leave us that style is attained by scrupulous
care and individuality of expression." The
art of verse is to be very diligently taught
and the boys are to be initiated " by setting
them to write verse translations from poems
in other tongues. Our criticism will be
ruthless : we shall point out vulgarity of
idea, insufficiency of thought, staleness of
metaphor, harshness of sound. We shall
not necessarily produce great poets by this
training, but we shall certainly produce
young men who love poetry and (what is
rarer still) who understand it. The artist
may have an incomplete understanding of
159
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
poetry ; but only the artist can have a
complete understanding of it."
The changes which he advocates in the
teaching of Latin and Greek will be heartily
endorsed by most English public-schoolboys
who have not forgotten hours of unprofit-
able boredom. " We shall read very quickly
in class, and confine ourselves to works
which are either good in themselves, histori-
cally interesting, or influential on subsequent
thought. We shall divert the young with
Homer, easiest of great poets, with Lucian's
' Vera Historia,' with a few legends of old
Rome from Livy, and with fairy-tales from
Apuleius. We will not weary even Grecians
with Thucydides when he talks about dreary
expeditions into jEtolia ; but all Grecians
shall read the fate of the Sicilian expedition,
and learn by heart the speech of Pericles.
Into Demosthenes we will only dip ; of
Sophocles and Euripides we will select the
finest plays and read them, as well as the
160
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
iEschylean trilogy, more than once. Hero-
dotus we shall read through lightly, as is
fitting, and we shall take parts in the plays
of Aristophanes in merry congress ; of
Plato we shall never weary, for he is good
for the soul. Nor shall we presume to forget
Theocritus and the lyric fragments, or those
unfading roses of the Anthology, which
tell how roses fade. And only for the very
young shall we Bowdlerise anything, since
we are dealing, not with urchins, but with
the select and chosen few.
"In Latin we will trouble no reasonable
soul with Plautus or Terence, or with more
of Cicero than is needed to grasp the excellent
style of that second-rate intellect. Of Ovid,
too, who is only interesting when immoral,
we shall read, for the style's sake, some
of the duller portions. To the claims of
those deathless school-books, the ^Eneid
of Virgil, the Odes of Horace, and the
Satires of Juvenal, we shall submit, for
161
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
their fame is deserved ; Lucretius and Catul-
lus are too obvious to mention ; Tibullus
is a sleepy fellow ; and from Propertius we
shall select. Tacitus tells us much history,
and is pleasant to read, nor are the letters
of Pliny the Younger disagreeable ; but
Caesar I would abandon to the historical
specialist, and Livy I would read in haste.
Of Apuleius only one book is essentially dis-
agreeable ; the rest is charming, and too
long neglected."
By reading on these lines, the youth
maintains that the boys will love the classics
more and obtain " a fuller understanding
of the classical spirit than those to whom
Latin and Greek are a ceaseless drudgery
and evil. I believe," he says, " that they
will learn no less than others have learnt,
from these time-honoured studies, that calm
and even fervour of mind, that sane and
serene love of beautiful things, that freedom
from religious bigotry and extravagance
162
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
which marks the writings of the Greeks,
and that sense of arrangement and justice
which marks the writings and still more the
history of the Romans."
Harold Smith is equally explicit and
interesting in his remarks upon what books
should be read and what classical works
avoided, in the study by his Grecians of
French, German, and Italian. His observa-
tions upon the Italian language and upon
Italy may be taken as expressing one of the
strongest of Flecker's enthusiasms. I quote
the passage in full, because of the clear light
it casts upon Flecker's personality.
" Italian we shall reinvest with the honour
and importance which it has so unjustly lost
since the first half of the nineteenth century.
In the days of Peacock no gentleman with
any pretension of culture could afford to
dispense with a smattering of this delightful
tongue, whose literature we now imagine
163
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
to be represented by Dante, Petrarch, and
the 4 Promessi Sposi ' of Manzoni. It is sad
to think that there are now not a hundred
living Englishmen who know and enjoy the
calm and classic humour of Ariosto, or who
care anything for the countless masters of
early Italian lyrical verse, which Eugenia Levi
has collected in her two fascinating volumes.
Yet no classical scholar can be excused for
not taking the trouble to learn to read this
easiest of languages, when a fortnight's
work will enable him to read any average
Italian prose with fluency and enjoyment.
"Our boys shall know a great deal of Dante,
a little of Petrarch, the two great collections
of Italian verse to which we have referred,
besides a little anthology of Carducci, which
extends to the nineteenth century ; nor
shall they neglect to read the splendid
c Barbarous Odes ' of Carducci himself,
which, based on the Horatian metres, form
so brave a protest against the natural
164
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
deficiency of a tongue wherein rhymes are
too easy and compression too hard. Several
of the tales of Boccaccio, even some of
Bandello and Masuccio, claim consideration,
for they do not all consist, as some imagine,
of indecent ribaldry, but are full of pathos,
humour, and most cunning psychological
observation ; and why neglect the ' Corti-
giano ' ? Our playwrights shall be Goldoni
and D'Annunzio : perhaps not the D'An-
nunzio of the terrible ' Citta Morta,' but
certainly the D'Annunzio of ' Francesca da
Rimini.' For are we not the heirs of the
Italian Renaissance, and shall we continue
to neglect a literature not inferior to the
French and far greater than the German,
a literature which in the present age has
produced at least two immortal names ?
Least of all can we dream of so doing, after
gazing at the masterpieces of Italian paint-
ing. Would it not be well to know what
these great men read, thought, and wrote ?
165
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Have we forgotten that Italy is also the
first, and will perhaps be the last, home of
the purest and most noble music ? To
understand the spirit of the greatest artistic
country the world has ever known, greater,
in my opinion, than Greece herself, by
virtue of Leonardo and Michelangelo, not
to mention Scarlatti and Pergolesi, is surely
the direct duty of anyone who desires to
enjoy all that life can offer, and to assist
others to share his delight."
These long extracts have been given
primarily for the purpose of showing the
importance of " The Grecians " to anyone
who wishes to appreciate fully the quality
and nature of the poet's mind. I hope,
however, that they may have the effect of
sending readers to the book itself. The
point of view is, perhaps, likely to become
old-fashioned, and the literary judgments
expressed in it, in the main so just and
166
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
sound, may run counter to the taste or
preferences of the future, for taste is always
changing. But the quality of sincerity the
dialogue will always have, and it is nowhere
seen to better advantage than in the con-
cluding sentences of the discourse :
" But we will re-found La Giocosa, and
build it anew in England beside the sea
that typifies our race. And if I have made
no single direct reference to patriotism, let
me say this now. Patriotism is not taught
by bad poetry and bad literature, by rifle-
clubs, or Union Jacks, or essays on Tariff
Reform. La Giocosa will give England
men of intelligence, fit to govern her, and
not private soldiers fit to be shot down for
her in some financial war. And in training
Grecians La Giocosa has fulfilled her duty
to England. Ours shall be no ideal school
for the ideal youth, but a place where hard
work is done, and where boys are toilfully
167
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
prepared for the difficulties of a modern
world; yet where, too, we shall train many
to understand and love the sweet pleasures
of the senses. We even hope that a few of
our scholars will be among the great. Now,
my friends, our long and toilsome journey is
over : and it is evening."
" The King of Alsander," Flecker's soli-
tary novel, has always seemed to me, since
I first read it in its entirety, an unsatisfactory
and unequal performance. It has some
beautiful passages and many amusing ones,
but it never quite " comes off." The high
spirits are only intermittent, and there are
some dismal slabs of " fine writing " which
destroy all effect of spontaneity. Flecker,
like most poets, had a tendency to adorn
his prose too richly. It is just as difficult
for English prose to wear jewels with success,
as it is for an Englishman to wear diamond
studs in his shirt front ; and Flecker did not
168
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
always restrain his liking for the purple
patch. He is, perhaps, at his best as a prose
stylist in some of his critical studies, in
those two charming papers "Mansur" and
" Pentelicus," and in such vigorous out-
pourings as Philanthropists. Both "The
Last Generation" — a story issued as a
pamphlet by the New Age Press in 1908, and
begun while the author was at Oxford — and
the brief sketch called "N'Jawk," illustrate
very happily Flecker's love of the fantastic
and the grotesque. " N'Jawk " is a delicious
trifle, as amusing to-day as when I first
read it in typescript fifteen years ago. It
makes one wish that instead of spending
months and years of toil over " The King
of Alsander," Flecker had devoted the same
amount of energy to writing a series of
these fantastic sketches, which would have
made a volume not unworthy of the poet,
and interesting as illustrating his irony
and wit.
m 169
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
In his critical studies, Flecker gives voice
to his literary preferences and opinions with
characteristic impetuousness and vigour, and
these pages in his " Collected Prose " are
extremely readable and illuminating. Some
of his enthusiasms it is not easy to share,
and occasionally his abuse and denuncia-
tions seem excessive. One gets the impres-
sion that he divided authors into those who
were " magnificent " and those who wrote
" God-forsaken formless muck." Writing,
for example, of William Watson, he says :
" The temporary reputation acquired by
Mr. Watson is particularly pernicious to
the well-being of Poetry ; and it is ridiculous
as well as aggravating that any notice should
be taken of his pompous outcries." But in
the same essay from which this is taken
he shows, in observation after observation,
that there is technical knowledge and sound
sense behind his damning and his praising.
Of Mr. Housman, the author of the " Shrop-
170
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
shire Lad " (a volume by which he was con-
siderably influenced and from which he
learnt much), he writes : " Within metres
almost as limited and simple as those
employed with ascetic choice by the author
of ' Emaux et Camees,' Mr. Housman ex-
hibits a great subtlety of workmanship. It
would not only be dreadfully prosaic, but
also rather unfair to expose at any length
his wizard tricks. The infinite joys that
all true lovers of poetry find in the deft
manipulation of verbal sounds are almost
too sacred for explanation. Let a short
poem be quoted, almost at random :
Now hollow fires burn out to black
And lights are gathering low.
Square your shoulders, lift your pack,
And leave your friends and go.
O never fear, man : naught's to dread,
Look not left nor right.
In all the endless roads you tread
There's nothing but the night.
The quiet and forcible alliterations of the
171
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
first and last lines, the surprising vigour of
the third, the impressive slowness of the
fifth line is remarkable. There is, more-
over, an art in the juxtaposition of sounds
about which it is rather sacrilegious to talk,
not because of any superhuman merit in
this particular poem, but because the art
of melody is one of suggestion, and not of
code." Here is one poet writing about
another with the accent of authority. He
can say with impunity much that the lay-
man would scarcely dare to say even if he
thought it. Flecker may not always be
right, but his opinions have at least an
intrinsic and lasting interest.
Of the art of criticism in general Flecker
took a very high view. In his essay on
" The Public as Art Critic," he gives a
brief but illuminating sketch of the ideal
critic of poetry. " The critic of poetry
must know all the minutiae of the technique,
not so much that he may be able to carp at
172
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
faults as that he may realise perfection.
He must know his art so well that he feels at
once and instinctively, not after reflection
merely, whether the lines he is reading ring
true. Yet he must not be a pedant : he
must have deep experience of life, he must
be a man of character. In the true sense
of the word he must be moral. He must
prepare for his task austerely : it is a high
one. He must cast aside for an hour his own
puritanism and prejudice, his petty, even
his noble beliefs about the world, and
become receptive of the impressions of
others to the extreme limit of human
nature. . . . The critic must be of purer
mould than the poet himself. He must
have a profound love for man, not the
vague enthusiasm of the humanitarian but
a vivid delight in all the men in the world,
men sinful, men splendid, men coarse, or
cowardly, or pathetic. And in all the
phenomena of nature, sordid or shining,
173
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
the background to our tragedy, he must
admire, if not the beauty, then the force,
the law, the cruelty, and the power. And
with this enthusiasm in his soul he will
bitterly condemn dullness, weakness, bad
workmanship, vulgar thought, shoddy senti-
ment as being slanders on mankind ; and
in this sense and this sense only — that it is
the glory of man — great art is moral."
This passage is an additional illustration
of the fact that there must always be a
strain, at least, of true " nobility " in
every fine artist, and that Flecker had very
much more than a strain of it in him.
Of Flecker's play, " Hassan," which in
years to come may be considered his master-
piece—so wonderfully is it compounded of
poetry and farce, of the fantastic and the
beautiful— it is too early yet to speak in
detail. I read the MS. of the play in bed —
in the hotel in Paris in which Oscar Wilde
died — on a rainy January morning. I had
174
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
to read it hastily, because the MS. was
required of me and I was unable to prolong
my stay in France. Before one will have
a chance of judging it adequately it must
be seen in its printed form, and it must be
seen upon the stage, produced, as near as
may be, in accordance with Flecker's ideas.
It is to be hoped that, at no very distant
date, it may be possible to do both these
things. Then, unless the impressions which
I gained from the MS. were utterly mistaken,
the wider public to whom Flecker is still
all but unknown will begin to realise what
manner of man it is whose work they have
been content for so long to neglect.
Flecker is a poet who has had to wait a
long time for that recognition and accept-
ance which is his due. But when at last he
receives it one may be forgiven for believing
that the recognition will be general among
educated people : and the acceptance
permanent.
175
VII
VII
[The following appreciation of James Elroy
Flecker was written by Mr. John Mavro-
gordato at Florence, on January 14, 1915,
less than a fortnight after the poet's death.
He has kindly given me permission to
print it here. — D.G.]
THERE was something so essentially
youthful about the enthusiasm of
J. E. Flecker's poetry that some
critics may say that his early death was not
unexpected. Poetry for him, as for Keats,
meant always a passionate love of beauty,
a passionate and impatient love. He was
more fortunate than Keats in that his con-
sular appointments took him to many of
the actual places of his coloured dreams ;
but his body was being slowly consumed by
179
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
the tainted flames of the same disease. His
last years were spent between his work in
Turkey and periods of partial recovery in
England ; until the last attack sent him
last summer to Davos, where he died.
The work of a vice-consul in the British
Levant Consular service is underpaid, of
course, and not as exciting as it sounds.
He often longed for English talk and English
books and the low-toned English country ;
and one of his poems, written in the Lebanon,
tells how he used to dream of England in his
Turkish exile, just as he had dreamed in
England of the East. Some of the few
exciting incidents of his official career he
described in an article, as far as I know his
last published work, which appeared in
The New Statesman a few weeks ago.
But if his early death was only shocking
as the inevitable end must always be, it
was, indeed, a bitter surprise to find it
announced in six inches of The Times as a
180
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
" Loss to English Poetry." I don't mean to
say that the papers were quite unapprecia-
tive during his lifetime. They were, on the
whole, as kind as the press of any nation,
with the possible exception of France, is
expected to be to any young poet. The
average reviewer is not a detector of genius,
but only the shop-walker of journalism, the
usher of the so-called " reading public " :
and the public's attitude to poetry is that
of the Italian housekeeper who lately re-
proached one who went to market and came
home with an armful of flowers — " Molto
hello, but why spend money to get a head-
ache ? ' Flecker's books were well, if
sparsely, noticed, and his poems were occa-
sionally published in the best reviews. But
few will believe, especially when they read
the columns of praise that will presently
appear, the insults and delays he was com-
pelled to suffer, submitting his works, as
he was nearly always bound to, from a
181
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
distance, and depending for the most part
on flights of letters and postcards to remind
editors of his existence. Only at the end
of July [1914] he wrote to me characteristi-
cally on a postcard :
"Damn Austria. Also damn .*
Could you please be so monstrous kind
as to rescue my ' Paul Fort ' MS. I can't
get a word out of him. I am horribly ill
and can hardly write. Hope some day
to finish ' Ode on Greece.' The savage
bitterness of its preface would relieve
me. . . . Why don't the Hellenic League
protest against 's pompous inepti-
tudes ? . . . All I can do is a few lines
of translation of ' Virgil.' ..."
I don't know whether the article on
" Paul Fort " was ever published, by that
or by some other editor ; it would cer-
tainly be interesting to read a criticism of
* An editor,
182
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
France's prince des poetes, written by the
most individual among England's younger
poets, differing as they do in style and tem-
perament. Paul Fort's every thought seems
to run naturally into a rhythmic exuberance,
while Flecker's had to be strained by a fine
sense of language and refined till it could
shine with beauty's clearest ray.
He was a scholar and always a student
of languages. " What can they know of
English who only English know ? " being for
him the best misquotation of that much-
abused aphorism. So he was a great reader
of the modern as well as of the Oriental and
classical tongues. Only for him a knowledge
of French must include the power to appre-
ciate the experiments of Moreas and the
squibs of Georges Courtcline, just as any
valuable reading of Latin was bound to
extend to Petronius and Apuleius.
This view of Greek and Latin studies,
shared, indeed, by some Oxford and Cam-
183
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
bridge scholars, but not generally by school-
masters, he put forward in a charming
dialogue on the ideal public-school education,
called " The Grecians " : it was published
by Dent about five years ago, and immedi-
ately forgotten. Towards the better study
of modern languages he wrote, besides a
number of translations, an Italian grammar
" for scholars," in which an outline of the
grammar, explained where possible by refer-
ence to the corresponding Latin forms, was
supplemented by a short anthology of Italian
literature, from Dante and Boccaccio to
d'Annunzio and Carducci. (He sold the
copyright for a few pounds, and had the
annoyance not only of not being allowed
to see proofs, but also of having his work
revised by another hand before it was
published under his name.)
His only other prose work* was the
* Not to mention a few scattered articles and reviews, one,
for instance, on the early work of Mr. J. C. Siiaith, and an
early pamphlet called, I think, "The Last Generation."
184
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
picaresque, or, as some would prefer to call
it, Ruritanian novel, " The King of Al-
sander," a work of very personal charm,
although the clear vision of romance that
makes the opening chapter so uncommonly
alluring is confused by some dusty and
gruesome incidents, as, for that matter, is
the masterpiece of Apuleius to whom the
author here confessed his devotion.
There used to be among his manuscripts
a couple of plays, of course unproduced ;
one a fantastic tragedy on a " Don Juan "
theme, the other an heroic farce in an atmo-
sphere of the " Arabian Nights."
There remain the poems, four thin
volumes, of which the second and third
contain almost the same pieces, and the
last two practically all the best of his
poetical work. Among these forty or fifty
poems it is hard to indicate the best to
those who do not already know them. But
one remembers specially his reproductions of
N 185
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Oriental metrical forms : there is, for instance,
a gh'azel (if that is the way to transliterate
it) to " Yasmin " which contains all the
fainting loveliness of the East without fall-
ing into the sickly convention of the bulbul
and the rose. Flecker's diction was never
extravagant. He understood the rule that
any inversion is sudden death to a modern
lyric. Similarly, his imagery, however ex-
quisitely conceived or expressed, was always
based on the simplicity of ordinary percep-
tions : the common life and business of the
East, the ordinary but magic love of a young
man, the forms and colours and emanating
emotions of trees and hills and sea —
" the dragon-green, the luminous, the dark,
the serpent-haunted sea."
All his poems are the work of a scholar.
Not because they make any show of pe-
dantry or erudition, but because they seem
to have been conceived in a mind accus-
186
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
tomed to classic shapes : each poem, that
is, seems to have a form of its own, pre-
existent in the mind, after a melodic pattern
laid up in heaven, like the form of a Greek
statue pre-existent in the tranquillity of
Pentelicus. Scholarship, too, has chosen
the diction. The history and associations
of every word, as well as the absolute sound,
seem to contribute to the effect, as, of
course, they should. Words in poetry should
be hard, with a clear-cut, gem-like outline ;
but in some of these poems, without ever
becoming soft like the vague predications
of some of our modern mystics, the language
combines this classical purity and definite-
ncss of shape with a lustre like that of a
pearl.
It is to be hoped that some attempt will
be made to collect Flecker's scattered pieces ;
even the plays might be published, as they
would give some idea of the robust humour
that was part of his character.
187
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
His life was not easy, but he found, as
poets do, an intenser enjoyment of it than
ordinary men ; and he was happy in the
power to put the essence of this into his
writing. So his work is the proper memorial
of the tall and foreign-looking figure, dark-
eyed, and shyly excitable, that passed in a
few years from Oxford and Cambridge to
Smyrna, from the Cots wold Sanatorium
again to Beyrout, and then tragically to
Switzerland.
He was a clear soul burning with many
flames, loving physical beauty in many
forms, and longing always to immortalise
it in words. He will not be forgotten.
188
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
OF JAMES ELROY FLECKER
The Best Man. Eights' Week, 1906. Holywell
Press, Oxford.
[Issued at 6d., in scarlet paper wrappers, for
sale during Eights' Week. The letterpress is
almost entirely by Flecker, the drawings are
by Mr. J. D. Beazley, of Christchurch, Oxford.
There is no copy in the British Museum.]
The Bridge of Fire, poems by James Flecker.
London. Elkin Mathews, Vigo Street.
1907.
[No. 45 in "The Vigo Cabinet Series." It
contains 64 pages and is bound in red printed
paper wrappers.]
The Last Generation ; a Story of the Future, by
James Elroy Flecker. The New Age Press,
140 Fleet Street, London. 1908.
[This is a volume of 64 pages, issued in light
fawn printed paper wrappers, the front cover
bearing an illustration of a scene in the story.
It is now extremely scarce. There is no copy
in the British Museum.]
191
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Thirty-Six Poems, by James Elroy Flecker. Lon-
don, The Adelphi Press Ltd. 1910.
[Issued in red cloth, lettered across the back
and on the front, in gilt. Unopened edges. The
unbound sheets of this book were later trans-
ferred to Messrs. J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd.
There are probably not more than 200 bound
copies in existence.]
The Grecians, a dialogue on Education, by James
Elroy Flecker, sometime scholar of Trinity
College, Oxford, and Student-interpreter
at Caius College, Cambridge. London,
J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd. New York,
E. P. Dutton and Co. 1910.
[Issued in green cloth, lettered on back in
gilt.]
The Scholar's Italian Book, an introduction to
the study of the Latin Origins of Italian,
by J. E. Flecker. London, David Nutt,
57-9 Long Acre. 1911.
[Issued in black cloth lettered in gilt on back.]
Forty-Two Poems, by James Elroy Flecker.
London, J. M. Dent and Sons, Limited.
1911.
[Issued in dark red cloth, lettered on back
and front in gilt. This volume is a reissue of
Thirty-Six Poems, with six new poems added.]
192
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
The Golden Journey to Samarkand, by James
Elroy Flecker. London, Max Goschen,
Ltd., 20 Great Russell Street, W.C. 1913.
[Issued in dark blue cloth, lettered on back
and front in gilt.
There was also an edition de luxe limited to
50 copies, printed on fine paper, issued in drab
boards, with vellum back, lettered across the
back in gilt and on front in gilt. Top edges
gilt and fore edges unopened. A certificate of
issue, which is numbered and signed by the
author, is pasted in the upper left-hand corner
of the inside front cover of each copy. When
the book was transferred to Mr. Martin Seeker
the remaining copies of this edition de luxe were
reissued with a cancel title, bearing Mr. Seeker's
imprint. Considerably less than fifty copies of
the original issue are now in existence. The
average price at which they change hands when
they come into the market is (May, 1922) £5 5s.]
The King of Alsander, by James Elroy Flecker.
London, Max Goschen, Ltd., 20 Great
Russell Street, W.C. 1914.
[Issued in scarlet buckram, lettered on back
in gilt and on front in white foil with gilt
crown. Afterwards transferred to Messrs. G.
Allen and Unwin. Ltd., and reissued by them
with cancel title.]
193
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
The Old Ships, by James Elroy Flecker. London,
The Poetry Bookshop, 35 Devonshire Street,
Theobald's Road, W.C. 1916.
[Foolscap 4to. Issued in greyish blue printed
paper wrappers, with a large illustration of a
ship with mermaid on front cover. The mer-
maid was eliminated in later issues.]
God Save the King, by James Elroy Flecker.
[Issued in green paper wrappers, by Mr.
Clement Shorter. The following bibliographical
note appears on p. 12 : " This poem and the
accompanying Foreword appeared in The Sphere
for January 16th, 1915. Twenty copies have
been printed by Clement Shorter for distribution
among his friends."]
The Burial in England, by James Elroy Flecker.
Born 1884. Died 1915.
[Issued in dark blue paper wrappers. The
following bibliographical note appears on p. 2 :
" Of this poem, first published in The Sphere
newspaper of February 27th, 1915, twenty
copies have been printed by Clement Shorter
for distribution among his friends."]
The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker,
edited with an introduction, by J. C.
Squire. London, Martin Secker? Number
194
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Five John Street, Adelphi. (On verso of
title-page : 1916.)
[Issued in blue cloth with paper name and
title-label on back.]
Selected Poems, by James Elroy Flecker. London
Martin Seeker, Number Five John Street,
Adelphi. (On verso of title-page : 1918.)
[Issued in blue cloth with paper name and
title-label on back.]
Collected Prose, by James Elroy Flecker. G. Bell
and Sons. MCMXX.
[Issued in brownish red cloth, with paper
name and title-label in red on back.]
Fourteen Poems, by James Elroy Flecker, with
lithographs by Charles Freegrove Winzer.
Dijon : printed by Maurice Darantiere.
MCMXXI.
[This volume was issued by Mrs. Helle Flecker,
the poet's widow, in an edition limited to 500
copies. It bears no publisher's imprint, but is
(1922) obtainable in London at The Poetry Book
Shop, 35 Devonshire St., W.C., and in Paris at
Shakspeare and Co., 12 rue de l'Odeon.]
The Story of Hassan of Bagdad and how he came
to make the Golden Journey to Samarkand,
by James Elroy Flecker.
| Awaiting publication.]
L95
INDEX
Abercrombie, Lascelles, 75
Academy, The, 62, 63
Apuleius, 160, 162
Arabian Nights, The, 185
Areiya, 95, 97
Ariosto, Ludovico, 164
Aristophanes, 161
Aristotle, 98
Athenceum, The, 77
Ballad of Camden Town, The,
134
Ballad of Hampstead Heath,
The, 131
Ballad of Iskander, The, 91,
134
Ballad of London, The, 133
Ballad of the Student in the
South, The, 133
Bandello, 165
Barker, Granville, 7, 8, 89, 90
Bar bey, d'Aurevilly, 100
Battaille, Henri, 97
Baudelaire, Charles, 8
Beardsley, Aubrey, 8, 32
Beazley, J. D., 37, 59, 63, 93
Bell & Sons, Messrs. George,
153
196
Birmingham Repertory
Theatre, The, 89
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 165,
184
Boyer, Lucien, 53
Branche de Lilas, La, 59
Bridge of Fire, The, 20, 31,
55, 62, 93, 130-3
Brooke, Rupert, 39
Browne, Professor, E. G.,
37
Browning, Robert, 68
Bruant, Aristide, 53
Brumana, 93, 136
Bryan, 97
Burial in England, The, 142,
147
Burton, Sir Richard, 140
Byron, Lord, 42
Caesar, Julius, 162
Caius College, Cambridge, 33
Cambridge Review, The, 43
Carducci, 165, 184
Carlyle, Thomas, 159
Catullus, Caius Valerius, 162
Cellini, Benvenuto, 67
Chapman, George, 21
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Chesterton, G. K., 158
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 159,
1G1
Clemenceau, Georges, 35
Collected Poems, 127, 128,
131, 133
Collected Prose, 153, 170
Conrad, Joseph, 7, 157
Constantine, King, 147
Courteline, Georges, 183
Courthorpe, Professor W. J.,
41
Crabbe, George, 42
Daguerches, 97
Daily News, The, 11
Danielson, Henry, vii.
D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 165,
184
Dante Alighieri, 164, 165, 184
Dayrell-Reed, Trelawney,
vii, 31, 49, 63
De la Mare, Walter, 7
De Lisle, Leconte, 29, 138
Demosthenes, 165, 184
Dent & Sons, Ltd., Messrs.
J. M., 64, 77, 153, 184
De Regnier, Henri, 96, 138
Desire, 30
Don Juan, 94, 118, 185
Doris, 95
Dowson, Ernest, 8
Drinkwater, John, 89
Dulce Lumen, Triste Numen,
Suave Lumen Luminum,
134
Dunsany, Lord, 92
Eagle, Solomon, 91
Edwardes, George, 8
English Review, The, 1
Enid and Geraint, 158
Envoy, 130
Euripides, 160
Evening Standard, The, 113
Everyman, 91
Fabian Society, The, 39
Farrere, Claude, 91
Fitzgerald, Edward, 104
Flecker, James Elroy, the
product of his age, 6-13 ;
life at Oxford, 13-22 ; as
a schoolmaster, 27-30 ;
life at Cambridge, 33-43 ;
life in the East, 43-5 ; life
in London, 49-69 ; his
poetry, 73-150 ; life in
Switzerland, 80-121 ; his
prose, 153-75
Flecker, D.D., The Rev.
William Herman, 27
Fort, Paul, 82, 99, 182, 183
Fortnightly Review, The, 82
Forty-Two Poems, 64, 81, 133
From Grenoble, 131
Future of Poetry, The, 106
Gates of Damascus, The, 81,
83, 93, 94, 140, 141
Gentlewoman, The, 111
George V, His Majesty, 98
" Gertie," 60, 61
Gibbon, Edward, 159
Gibson, John, 75
197
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Glion-Evening, 128, 129
Globe, The, 113
Golden Journey to Samark-
and, The, 5, 79, 82, 89, 90,
92,102,104,111,112,115,
125, 127, 128, 132, 135,
137, 140, 141, 146
Goschen, Max, 73, 77, 86, 88,
89, 101, 105-107, 110,
112-15, 118, 153
Gownsman, The, 43
Grecians, The, 28, 153-68,
184
Hammam Name, 141
Hassan, 89, 90, 94, 95, 100,
107,112,140,153,154,174
Heinemann, Messrs.William,
154
Heredia, Jose Maria de, 138
Herodotus, 161
Hewlett, Maurice, 158
Homer, 160
Hope, Sir Anthony, 158
Housman, A. E., 8, 170, 171
Hugo, Victor, 84
Hyali, 83, 95
Ideal, The, 53, 54
Idler, The, 30, 31
Ingpen, Roger, vii
In Hospital, 93
In Memoriam, 63
Jugend, 51
Juvenilia, 128
Keats, John, 21, 41, 42, 179
King of Alsander, The, 54,
55, 82, 88, 103, 111, 113,
115, 153, 168, 169, 185
Kipling, Rudyard, 11, 74,
114, 157
Knox, J. J., 36, 51, 66
Kubla Khan, 131
L'Assiette an Beurre, 51
Last Generation, The, 38,
153, 169, 184
Lemaitre, Jules, 100
Leonardo da Vinci, 166
Les Merveilleuses, 8
Levi, Eugenia, 164
Livy, 160
Lord Arnaldos, 92
Lucian, 160
Lucretius, Titus Carius, 162
Mackenzie, Compton, 13
Manzoni, 164
Marinier, Paul, 53, 58
Marsh, Edward, 75
Mary Magdalen, 132
Masefield, John, 7, 74
Masuccio, 165
Mathews, Elkin, 31, 55, 130
Mavrogordato, John, vii, 179
Michaelangelo Buonarroti,
166
Mill Hill, 30
Moore, T. Sturge, 75
Moreas, 183
Morning Post, The, 101
198
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Murray, Professor Gilbert,
112, 114, 120
Musset, Louis Alfred de, 84
My Lilies, 16
Nation, The, 90
Navaho, 59
New Age Press, The, 153,169
New Statesman, The, 91, 180
New Year's Carol, A, 129
N'Jawk, 169
No Coward's Song, 57, 134
Xutt, David, 153
Oak and Olive, 82, 83, 96
Ode on Greece, 182
Odes of Horace, 161, 164
Old Ships, The, 128
Old War-ship Ablaze, The,
128
Ovid, 161
Oxford University Press,
The, 119, 120
Parnassian Theory, The,
137, 144, 146, 148
Pater, Walter, 78
Peachum, Mrs., 61
Peacock, Thomas Love, 163
Pensive Prisoner, The, 128,
143
Pergolesi, 166
Pericles, 160
Petrarch, Francesco, 164
Phwacia, 44, 91, 93
Philanthropists, The, 169
Pillage, 63, J 34
Plato, 161
Plautus, Titus M., 161
Pliny the Younger, 162
Pound, Ezra, 75, 125
Prayer, 57
Public as Art Critic, The, 172
Raphael, J. N., 113
Renard, Jules, 91
Richard I, King, 98
Riouperoux, 55, 131
Russian Ballet, The, 40
Saadabad, 95, 141
Sacred Incident, 93
Saladin, 98
Saniain, 138
Santorin, 92, 96
Savery, Frank, vii, 18, 20, 92
Scarlatti, Alessandro, 166
Schloss, Arthur, 39
Scholar's Italian Book, 28,
153
Sentimentalist, The, 134
Shakespeare, William, 60,
101
Shaw, George Bernard, 7, 8,
104
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 41,
42 *
Shorter, Clement K., 113
Simmons, Charles, 27
Sinister Street, 13
Snaith, J. C, 184
Sohrab and Rustum, 158
Sophocles, 160
Spectator, The, 90, 91
199
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
Stage Society, The, 8
Steinlen, 53, 58
Stevenson, Robert Louis,
157
Stillness, 128, 143
Strand Magazine, The, 121
Swinburne, Algernon Charles,
18
Symons, Arthur, 139
Tacitus, Marcus Claudius,
159, 162
Taoping, 81, 84, 91, 93, 98
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 68,
114
Terence, 161
Theocritus, 161
Thirty-six Poems, 64, 76
Thucydides, 160
Tibullus, 162
Times, The, 101, 112, 113,
121, 180
To a Poet a Thousand Years
Hence, 134, 150
Town Without a Market, The,
53
Trapes, Diana, 61
Tree, Sir Herbert Beer-
bohin, 106
Trinity College, Oxford, 27
Turkish Lady, The, 95
University College School,
27
Uppingham, 27
Velasquez, Diego, 40
Verlaine, Paul, 8
Verrall, A. W., 37
Virgil, ^neid VI, 103-105,
107,108,112,114,118-20,
161, 183
Visit, The, 63 ■
Walch, 85
Waley, Arthur, 39
War Song of the Saracens,
The, 64, 91, 134
Watson, Sir William, 170
Wells, H. G., 7, 38, 109
Westminster, The, 113
White Ship, The, 158
Wilde, Oscar, 8, 18, 32, 174
Wordsworth, William, 42
Yasmin, 95, 141, 186
Yeats, W. B., 74, 93, 120
Yellow Book of Japes, 22
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