JAMES ELROY FLECKER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19298, 10 April 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

JAMES ELROY FLECKER.

CHILD, MAN AND POET.

BY MON.Y GORDON

The recently-published "Life of James Elroy Flecker," in tracing the development of a genius unique among modern poets, has ably filled a blank long felt in the right understanding of his work. To those —and there arc many—who know Flecker only as tho author of "Hassan," it will reveal much; but to those who find purer spirit, higher art, lovelier image among his lyrics, it will reveal a great deal more. On a "gloomy, foggy" Guy Fawke's day of 1884, James Elroy Flecker was born at Lewisham. Eighteen months afterwards, his father having been appointed headmaster of Dean Close School, Cheltenham, the family moved thither. The home of tho Fleckers was set amid lovely country bounded to the south by tho Cotswolds, and with its many trees (among which were the elms immortalised in "November Eves"), its rambling rose garden and its wide views over undulating plain and hill it formed an ideal setting for a poet's home. Very early in life young Flecker showed his love of light and colour. He would sometimes be taken by his father to watch tho changing signal lights on the Great Western Railway; and, as they flashed forth their messages in shifting colours, Roy, as he was always called, saw opened before him a wonderful world of fairy enchantment of which ho never tired. "There was also one evening train he particularly liked and usually sonio of the Dean Close boys went with him to watch for it. When it came, he shouted a greeting, watched it rattle away under the bridge, and then ... he would turn quite unbidden, and walk, a quiet, unforgettable little figure, across the field toward home and bed." Boyhood to Manhood. So on through the years this fascinating book leads us with glimpses here and there of the child Flecker; at the age of eight—beginning his Greek; at twelve — writing verses on notepaper and making them "into tiny books;" his long walks and talks with his father; his early decision to be an engine-driver and later a missionary; his school days, his holidays —these stood for a great deal in the early life of the beauty loving boy. He spent them by tho seaside, wandering among cliffs, fields and sand-dunes, or chipping strange fossils from the limestone of the Cotswold Hills. Then, too, he felt tho lure of pines, and the memory of their music stayed with him through many years of after life when the sheen of eastern cities by the sparkling Mediterranean dazzled his westyearning eyes. Writing from a pinewood of Brumana, in the Lebanon, he calls them "sister pines"— For pines aro gossip pines the wide world through And full of runic tales to sigh or sing. Tis ever sweet to lie On tho dry carpet of the needles brown. And though the fanciful green lizard ttir And windy odours light as thistledown Breathe from the lavdanon and lavender, Half to forget tho wandering and pain, And dream and dream that I am homo again This poem of his mature art was written, of course, in after years, but the love of pines was formed long ago in childhood days. At the ago of sixteen Flecker went to Uppingham. Perhaps the most striking thing about this chapter of his life was his amazing capacity for knowledge, amounting to a literal thirst. A list of some of the classics he was reading at this time will suffice to show his development of mind : —Thucydides, Virgil (/Eneid), Greek Testament, Homer, Pindar's Odes, Greek Anthology, Cicero, Demosthenes, and among English authors, More. Carlvle, Ruskin, de Quincev, Clough. Besides these he was jilso engaged in rendering several translations of Catullus. You may blush or you may sigh, dear seventeen-year-old New Zealander, not born for Jetters but for life. Those eager hours you spend on football field or cricket pitch are those in which Flecker, at the divine springs of classicism, filled deep the secret caverns of his soul. /

The long chapter devoted to the poet's life at Oxford may be summed up in the short fwntenco: " Flecker's many-sided and impulsive self was thrown into a turmoil of new ideas, impressions, suggestions." It was resultant chiefly in the formation of friendships and of a critical attitude toward religion. He was chiefly concerned at this time with tho passing of examinations. The latter he only managed to scrape through, not without bitter disappointment, for thero was little of the academic scholar about Flecker. He was not among " the heavy cavalry of learning"—he so aptly described as " a skirmisher of the infinite." In the Consular Service. After an unsettled period of two years, Flecker went to Cambridge to study languages for the Foreign Consular Service. Cambridge ho found dull, and tho Fen country uninteresting; but ho succeeded in passing the necessary examinations, and was appointed to tho Consular Service at Constantinople. He never loved the East—" I loat.ho the. East and the Easterns," ho wrote, yet, somehow, it drew from him some of his loveliest lines, his most perfect imagery— Down tho Horn Constantinople fades and flashes in the blue. Rose o' cities dropping with the heavy summer's burning dew. And tho Orient was to be his doom, not her heat, but the chill waves of the Black Sea—the Friendless Sea according to tho Greeks. Into it he plunged straight from a swift and heated rido: three days later the doctor discovered tho germs of consumption in him. It was tho beginning of the end ; but many things were crowded into tho few remaining years —his marriage in Athens, his official appointment to Beirut, his increasing illness, and removal to the higher country of Brumana, and finally to Switzerland. Hero ho wrote tho greater part of " Hassan," while struggling against ever-in-creasing ill-health; bore ho suffered the bitterness of financial dependency on his father, and here, from his eagle's nest among the mountains, ho watched the opening stages of the cataclysm that shook Europe to her foundations —the Great War. The War and the End. The Great War—and he a prisoner of fate, outside it nil—young, activo, ardent —but cut off. . No one can perhaps imagine Flecker's feelings. 110 had been writing busily during all theso painful months, and escaping thereby from himself, but there could be no ultimate release but death, and on January 3, 1915, it came. And wards—the crossing of tho Channel a nil a tho roar of guns, to England in a British destroyer," and burial beneath the brooding Cotswolds"' in tho land of his homo and of his lovo. Flecker, like so many others, did not livo to see his proper Yneasure of recognition. He never saw " Hassan" staged; ho was in lifo unrecognised as a rare and enchanting spirit among contemporary poets; ho had a hard fight not only for fame but for life itself. I I know the countries -wher« tho white moons burn, And star on star Dips on the pale and crystal hills, I know tho river of the sun that fills With founts of gold the lakes o£ Orient skyAnd because he knew and loved them, he is with tho immortal makers of English poetry —those who among dark and mundane things of earth have seen also heaven " strewn with the glistening salt of innoroerablo stars.**