The work of James Elroy Flecker, who died in 1915 at the age of thirty-one, represents a remarkable fusion of the British culture in the early years of this century with Orientalism, which in turn was stimulated and influenced subtly by the poet’s Jewish strain. Herbert Howarth, who here analyzes the poetry of this British writer too little known in this country, is a young English poet who served with the British administration in Palestine from 1943 to 1945, when he resigned in protest against his government’s policy.
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Probably, as the phase of revaluation of the work of the first decade of this century comes round, James Elroy Flecker’s rating will rise and he will be seen more clearly along with contemporaries of his like Rupert Brooke. Whatever the final estimate of his poetry may be, it has its own compelling idiom: it has always had its devotees, and one or or two of his poems have steadily held their places in the popular anthologies throughout the more than thirty-five years since his death. As a figure he has special interest for those who would gain insight into the inner problems of a man born of a mixed marriage, in whom two strains meet and seek for a common purpose.
Flecker was born in London in 1884, the son of an English Christian clergyman and a Jewish mother. He grew up in Gloucestershire on the Cotswold Hills, had the routine English upper-class schooling at Uppingham, followed by Oxford. His university career was not academically distinguished, but he made a mark as a poet, a dandy with a genius for the higher kind of bawdy, and a person of independent ideas. For a time he felt he would like to know the working people—it was the era of the Fabians, and Rupert Brooke at Cambridge was thinking along similar lines—and he would nostalgically haunt the drabber parts of London, and he devoted one long vacation to tramping the Bordeaux district of France, drawn there by a rising of the vineyard workers. In his first play, Don Juan, which earned praise from Bernard Shaw, he oddly mixed a craving for the betterment of the industrial poor, an ardor for Britain and the Empire, and a passion for romantic love and magic. “The worst scene,” Shaw wrote to him about it, “is the argument of Don Juan with the labor leader, which is not knowledgeable.” And then—“You had better go on making a fool of yourself for ten years or so and see what will come of it.”
Actually Flecker had less than four years of life left. In these he found, as his travels had taught him, that his best creative source was the eastern Mediterranean. He had spent two years at Cambridge preparing himself for the Levant consular service; and so out to Turkey and Syria. The writing of poetry had always been easy to him, but too easy. During his spell in Syria he sometimes succeeded in breaking free of glibness and finding new heights and depths. He produced there a number of lyrics, and one superbly wrought play, Hassan, based on a story from the Arabian Nights. Then he began to succumb to a chronic tuberculosis. Early in 1915 he died in a sanatorium in Switzerland. So much for the external facts of his life.
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Flecker and his generation grew up in the shadow of the work of the great archetype of Victorian romanticism, Sir Richard Burton, today best remembered for the most full-blooded translation of the Arabian Nights, but in his own time renowned for his spectacular journeys in the Orient and Africa, for his prolific writing about them, and in particular for his Kasidah, a poem of Arab life. At the beginning of the 19th century English poets had to go no further than the Mediterranean where it touched France, Corsica, and Italy, to find color and nationalism and primitive vigor sufficient to activate their powers. Fifty or sixty years later the world was smaller, and Europe more homogeneous, or at any rate more familiar; the imagination had to range further to make contact with the exotic. Laurence Oliphant wandered the world and spent the close of his life largely in the Near East; Fitzgerald hammered out, almost without knowing what he did, his quatrains paraphrasing the Persian Omar Khayyam; Doughty was trekking the desert, and he completed Arabia Deserta in the year of Flecker’s birth; Wilfred Blunt, growing interested in the people of Egypt, had begun his heroic single-handed contest against Lord Cromer, the British Resident in Cairo. The 20th-century names are as well known: those who found their arena in the Near East, like T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell and Flecker, and those who had to go further, to India and China, like E. M. Forster and Arthur Waley.
What turned them all East? T. E. Lawrence claimed that in boyhood he read By the Waters of Babylon, and that made him dream of restoring to life a great dead empire of the Near East. Hecker while still a boy came across Burton’s Kasidah and transcribed it whole. One is tempted to say that in neither of these cases could the reading have planted the ideas that grew from them, but that rather it awakened deep congenital impulses. For certainly, what happened to the Englishmen who went out to the Orient was that they made their chosen regions a focal point for solving their deepest and most personal problems.
Lawrence projected on to Arabia all the opposing Napoleonism and nihilism, the ambition and the despair, of his being. Hecker brought to Syria a no less disruptive complex of dualities. Like Burton, he was peculiarly responsive to the Orient and its fascination, and peculiarly and painfully aware of its evils. T. E. Lawrence, having made himself master of the contours of the desert and the structure of Syrian castles and the nomad Arab mind, could brood most profoundly on the gardens and moat of an old English cathedral town, and for his favorite music choose the “ghost-harmonies” of the essentially English Elgar. A similar tug between place of birth and place of choice characterizes Hecker. In his poem “Oak and Olive,” beginning “I was born a Londoner and bred in Gloucestershire,” he goes on to tell how the scenes of London and the Cotswolds all were transformed by the mind’s eye, as he walked among them, to scenes of the longed-for Aegean:
Have I not chased the fluting Pan
Through Cranham’s sober trees?
Have I not sat on Painswick Hill
With a nymph upon my knees,
And she as rosy as the dawn,
And naked as the breeze?
But then, he tells, as soon as he is actually in Greece, his thoughts alter every scene to the shape of the England he has left:
But when I walk in Athens town
That swims in dust and sun
Perverse, I think of London then
Where massive work is done,
And with what sweep at Westminster
The rayless waters run.
With such a sentiment uppermost in his feeling, Hecker seems to be saying that no place possesses the quality of “here,” but everywhere tends to become “elsewhere.” T. E. Lawrence was in such a plight, too, but he had several loopholes into reality, made available by his pleasure in practical problems, by his interest in machinery, and so forth. Flecker had few such loopholes, and thus was more at the mercy of the opposing pulls. Just as he oscillated between England and the Orient, unfree to be happy in either because the other always preoccupied him, so he was torn between reality and dream: and between a concern, dictated by conscience, with the poor and the drab, and an appetite for the exotic and rich.
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Flecker’s interest in the East may have been parallel with that of other Englishmen of his generation, but there were also some sharp differences. Most Englishmen who practiced the romantic cult of the Orient asked: “Where can I find vitality? Where will my energies be spurred and my dreams find scope to be lived? Flecker at least once claimed that this was the shape of bis question too: in the first section of his poem “Ideal,” there’s a dialogue between the poet and an old man who, though only half-drawn, is a queer and disturbing image of skepticism. The poet sings of the nobility of life. The old man mocks him and points to the degeneracy of the city people moving around them. The poet answers that whatever is wrong with London, where folk have “hearts of stone,” there are other climates where greatness may yet flourish:
Said I: “In London fades the flower
But far away the bright blue skies
Shall watch my solemn walls arise,
And all the glory, all the grace
Of earth shall gather there, and eyes
Shall shine like stars in that new place. . . .”
But the old man, answering him again, and with an ambivalent comment, puts a different light on the matter, and marks Flecker off from other Orientalizing Englishmen:
Said he: “Indeed of ancient race
Thou comest, with thy hollow scheme.”
In a way typical of the working of poetry and of the honesty it forces on the poet even when he seems bent on striking a pose, this turn aptly shows the special difficulties facing Flecker. In his case, we see that this young poet’s search for a new animating realm involves quite separate personal issues. The translation of his question is no longer merely “Where vitality?” but also, and first of all, “Who am I? Where do I truly belong?”
Before a man can escape he must at least first know where he is trying to escape from. (The man who is torn between two worlds is often trying to escape from both of them, yet all his contortions only carry him backwards and forwards along the groove between.)
Soon after his arrival at Oxford, the poet had taken a step the very triviality of which indicates how much the matter of self-identification was worrying him. Herman Elroy Flecker was his registered name. To be more English he decided to drop Herman and become James. He retained Elroy. Why? There are three possible reasons. He was called “Roy” at home, and could not abandon it. He knew that his mother had wished him to have a Hebrew name (El roï: “a God of seeing”), and he would not forsake the one she had chosen. By false etymology he associated it with kingliness. Any or all these thoughts may have decided him. In any case he felt, in a rather primitive way, that his name was important, and must be an expression of himself. By pairing James and Elroy he declared himself simultaneously a modern Westerner and a personality linked with the East and the past.
When he looked into the history of his father’s family he found a link with the East even there. The Reverend Flecker’s father had been a schoolmaster for a time in Constantinople. A part of the past was sympathetic to the enlightening mission of the teacher; and significantly enough, when he himself reached Constantinople he published The Grecians, a study of the principles of education in the form of a modern Platonic dialogue. But in his university period, when he was so nervously and urgently trying to discover himself, he wanted to find somewhere in his family history a more direct contact with a much deeper past, and if possible a contact that would justify his conviction that he was “an aristocrat by nature.” Inevitably he now looked to his mother’s side of the family. I once asked Arthur Waley, who had been a friend of his, whether he thought Flecker had been influenced by Jewish memories reaching him through his mother. Mr. Waley replied, “A good deal more than that. After all, he himself looked strikingly Oriental and I think this, as much as anything, made him feel he did not belong here. He had a short phase of interest in his mother’s ancestors and made up his mind that she was descended from some kind of Maccabean chief or irredentist. . . .”
It is strikingly appropriate to the English poetic tradition that when Flecker at last locates his kingly origins, he places them in a context that is also revolutionary. Associating himself with militant leaders of the past, the English writer often thus lays bare his secret hope that destiny intends him for militant leadership in the future. “I was the true, the grand idealist,” Flecker cried in the person of Don Juan:
Noble on earth, all hut a King in Hell,
I am Don Juan with a tale to tell.
Don Juan is, in some of its unequal parts, a study in his own identity. It has one luminous and crucial scene pivoting on the idea that a man must be interpreted through his maternal ancestors. The Leporello of the play is a South Welshman, Owen Jones, and at the psychological climax he changes from a cringing valet to an agent of magical compulsion, dominating his master and enforcing on him the memory of the procession of the ages: “Who was your mother, O my master? She was some mighty Jewess, I dare say, robed in a leopard’s skin, who knew the deep secrets of Persia and wrote them in a book.” Again the paradox operates that, by facing inwards on himself and groping about his memories for all that is most alien in him, he becomes powerfully associated with a major English tradition—the tradition of faery, in which the primitive and the magical are apprehended in terms that movingly mix good and evil. So with Melville’s Captain Ahab; so with Mr. Kurtz in Conrad; so in Malory’s chapter—a chapter that often recurred to the imagination of T. E. Lawrence—when Lancelot begat the world’s purest knight on a woman who came secretly to his bed. To know himself Flecker had to dare to peer into clefts of the past and see there the ancient ambiguous symbols; and he had to go to the East in order to be confronted by the landscape of old past-haunted caves and clefts, like the Dravidian cave in Forster’s Passage to India.
In an essay on pleasures denied to the complacent, Flecker tells how the imagination can be activated by the scenery of Asia, when the past—formidable, dark, pregnant—is glimpsed suddenly there: “He might have walked beneath heavy Indian skies and understood in a flash, standing in the monstrous shadow of an ancient god, the secret of all Empires.” T. E. Lawrence knew these apocalyptic moments; they came to him in childhood at Oxford, and when his expeditions to the desert began they came, as one night among the diggings at Carchemish when a storm lit up the figure of a colossal god. To Lawrence they came as a spur to action, and at the same time as the eternal criticism of all action. To Flecker they were rather his marrow, his innards, his dreams, his kingdom, awakening all he had forgotten in himself. The power that Walter Pater found in Mona Lisa, and that D. H. Lawrence wanted to see in the Etruscans and Aztecs, the power that it is sometimes supposed might be available in a primitive integration of good and evil, this Flecker was at moments on the point of seizing from the memory of his mother’s ancestors.
“What if the Jews are an older race than we and know old forgotten secrets?” he makes Hassan meditate. The momentary flashes of intuition answered his question “Who am I?” by lighting up the Asiatic side of himself; by accepting that answer he was to write his best poetry; yet he could never accept it permanently and wholeheartedly, and the more he learned of either side of himself, the more passionately he was inclined to cling to the other.
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Writers whose intuitive life is lived in one tradition but who are also molded in another tradition by the language they use are not infrequent. Considerable contributions to English literature have been made by them: by such Irishmen as Yeats, or by a Pole like Conrad. Sometimes great sticklers for the “correct” and the formal, yet they impose their difference on the old forms or on the fashions in vogue among their contemporaries, and bring a special originality into their work. Flecker can be counted with these. He gave a new flavor to English. Some readers find it over-sweet; all admit it to be singular. He made a unique literary success out of the current vogue of traveling East to escape the pressure of personal problems. But in his case this escape to the Orient had a special exquisite value: it provided the cleverest of all evasions, the surest of all escapes from oneself. Flecker took a leap right into the area of his ancestral origins, the last place any man would be expected to use as a hide-out from his ancestry.
It must have been clear to the critic in him—he was a good critic of poetry, and his early critical essays still make tolerable reading—that such verse as he had written in a professedly British and patriotic vein showed his differences from England rather than his likenesses. They were over-British. They had, for instance, none of the odd ironies of Kipling, with whom he would have liked to compare himself. T. E. Lawrence describes him as “furiously British: a patriotic ‘God Save the King’ exile, nostalgic, and knowing himself landless, clinging desperately to fiction,” and tells how he tried to transcribe this into life by knocking a German down in the Deutscherhof Pension in Beyrouth. These pugnacious exertions might succeed in life, but not in poetry, and it is not surprising that when Flecker realized this he turned to the diametrically opposite maneuver of overtly exploiting his Oriental side in order to dissimulate it. To a man in love with his own gifts and his own dexterity, as he frankly was, this must have been highly gratifying: to adopt a fashion; to use it as an escape from himself through himself; to be the excelling master of it; and so, secretly, to find himself even while he escaped.
Flecker’s writing did in fact become masculine, rounded, truly original only when he reached the Orient and started to exploit the local forms, scenery, traditions. After two or three years he was able to say that he had created the best Oriental poems in the English language, and that he could, at call, improve on Fitzgerald’s “Omar Khayyam.” He really understood the Aegean and the Fertile Crescent, he claimed, and the best judges admitted his claim. Natural linguist he was (T. E. Lawrence stated that he knew all the great Old World cultures except Russian, and actually he had some interest in Russian too), but his understanding of the Arabs went further than their language. The secrets of Turkish and Arabic poetry were in his grasp. He found the right, provoking English names for the sensuous data of his region:
Take to Aleppo filigrane,
and take them paste of apricots,
And coffee tables botched with pearl,
and little beaten brassware pots:
And thou shalt sell thy wares for thrice
The Damascene retailers’ price,
And buy a fat Armenian slave
Who smelleth odorous and nice. . . .
To these sensuous catalogues he added the strange moral echoes, legacies of the problems of the deserts and the desert religions, which give depth to Arabic poetry. And to this in turn he added a living critique of the eulogistic tradition of the Arabs, showing how when a great poet worked in it he had no option but to accept its distasteful duties, yet continued, watching for the moments when he could suddenly insert truth in it. The output in which Flecker actually does all this is not voluminous, but it is sufficient to show that the “bright blue skies” to which he had come from gray England were as vital as he had hoped.
What was this “flair” that delivered the Orient into his grasp? Was it not the act of recognition of his own identity, made possible, as he had foreseen, by contact with an ancestral landscape? From the moment when this contact was made in 1910 he burned feverishly through a series of conflicting reactions. His tuberculosis was re-awakened, and he had to go home for a spell of treatment, but he came back again, and again the tuberculosis and the poetry advanced rapidly abreast of each other.
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Love of the Orient; hatred of the Orient; poetry of the Orient; illness demanding a withdrawal from the Orient: these four factors collide, struggle, obtain momentary fusion in Flecker in the short period between 1910 and his retirement to a Swiss sanatorium in 1914. His writing often failed even amid this internal excitement; and it was of the sort that when it was not good was atrocious. But in a few things, notably in the play Hassan, he worked at a level of perfection. In doing so he also came close to resolving his disparate trends, the split between his feelings for the poor and his love of richness, between a weakness for dreams and a largely compulsive acknowledgment of the claims of reality.
There are two themes in Hassan: the story of a humble and profoundly humane confectioner who wins the Caliph’s favor by accident and loses it within a day by criticizing tyranny; and the story of the mistake of Pervaneh, when she induces her lover, Rafi, to elect for a joint death with her instead of life apart. Into this second theme, the debate between love and life, Flecker projects something of his lifelong fluctuation between dream and reality.
He had in several earlier poems displayed his conscious fear of death:
O, I’d rather be
A living mouse than dead as a man dies.
By this criterion all real life is worth living; it does not have to approximate impossible dreams to be good. But some of his poems do try to turn life into impossible dreams. One of his own favorites, a paraphrase from the Turkish Saadabad, thus pictures the poet enjoying love as the greatest glory in the world.
In the choice confronting Pervaneh and Rafi, Flecker passes judgment on the dream of Saadabad, and makes dreams the synonym of death. “I die for love of you,” says the ecstatic Pervaneh, but Rafi cries “Comfort me, comfort me! I do not understand thy dreams.” This harrowing prison scene rings the death knell of 19th-century romanticism. In choosing love deified and distorted by poetry, the two choose wrong. They should have chosen life with its incomparable realities.
With no less dramatic conviction, in the person of Hassan the poet solved the problem of presenting poor people in poetry for the first and only time. All the efforts to make “songs of the people” in proletarian London or peasant France had failed. Even though he had tried to write ballads claiming “We’re of the people, you and I,” as long as he was in the West Flecker seemed unable to bear the common people except at a distance. (His friend Douglas Goldring has recorded that when he actually came close to them it was disastrous, as he found one night when, by a chance of Bohemian life, he was at supper with a little Cockney girl called Gertie. He loved to hear himself make dinner conversation, but she repeatedly bludgeoned him into silence with innuendos connecting his swarthiness with neglect of bathing.) Always retaining an affection for his London working-class poems, he republished one or two later on, yet he probably knew they were misfires. The poetry of the industrial tenements could not be written till Eliot came with a new technique, a sense of the appropriate elusive new forms, whereas Flecker’s skill lay in the flexible and surprising use of old chant forms.
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Now in the Near East Flecker found that these difficulties of making touch with the people vanished. He could go and meet them and listen to them. That was what he had hoped for from the Orient. One of the poems specially scored in his copy of Thalasso’s Anthologie de l’Amour Asiatique was a Baluchistan “Song of the People.” When he toured the Aegean islands with his Athenian wife he heard a peasant tell her, That man married a siren,” pointing out the man. Here were the peasants speaking, and what they said was what he had been long telling himself he wanted to hear. He heard from them “the songs of the people, which are better than mine.”
His use of what he heard, then, reaches its best point in Hassan. Hassan, the comfectioner, and Ishaq, the Caliph’s poet, both spring from the people. When the Caliph admires the beauty of Hassan’s common speech, he asks Where did you learn poetry, Hassan of my heart? and the answer comes
Hassan: In that great school, the Market of Bagdad. . . . All the town of Bagdad is passionate for poetry, O Master. Dost thou not know what great crowds gather to hear the epic of Antari sung in the streets at evening. I have seen cobblers weep and butchers bury their great faces in their hands!
The Caliph: By Eblis and the powers of Hell, should I not know this, and know that therein lies the secret of the strength of Islam. . . .
Hassan, like Ishaq, is lifted into the Caliph’s favor, and the brief splendor teaches him that a king is rich because a people is poor, that in an empire even culture is only a function of general misery.
Elroy Flecker had long cherished an image of himself as a king-to-be. When he moved from Athens on the last step of his entry into the Levant he had said, “I do a Waring,” thinking of Browning’s Londoner who left the West and its drabness to rule among waiting primitive peoples:
‘so I saw the last
Of Waring? You! O, never star
Was lost here but shone out afar.
In Vishnu-land what avatar!
But actual experience of the East extinguished his Waring image. To be a king in a society based on the servitude and ignorance of millions, that might be tolerable either to a Waring or a Kurtz, but not to a living Flecker. The king becomes the tyrannical Caliph of Bagdad. Because of the Caliph’s ways Ishaq says, “I have broken my lute and will write no more qasidahs in praise of the generosity of kings. I will try the barren road, and listen for the voice of the emptiness of the earth.”
This is a splendid program that Ishaq announces, but not one easy to carry out. The play ends with the Golden Journey to Samarkand, along a road traveled not by the poor of the earth, but sensuous people who handle sensuous goods:
The Chief Draper
Have we not Indian carpets dark as wine,
Turbans and sashes, gowns and bowls and
veils,
And broideries of intricate design
And printed hangings in enormous bales?The Chief Grocer
We have rose-candy, we have spikenard,
Mastic and terebinth and oil and spice,
And such sweet jams meticulously jarred
As God’s Own Prophet eats in Paradise.
In fact there is no successful sequel to Ishaq’s decision. The character Hassan is the achievement most nearly related to it. Flecker had planned to make Ishaq—a poet and so a projection of himself—the center of his play. When imagination had done its work, Ishaq, for all his admirable qualities, fell into second place, and in the center revolved the fat, poor, middle-aged, humane confectioner. He is no mere piece of autobiography. He is an invention, full and rounded, with a soul where taste and humanity merge, where what Fletcher loved and what he felt he ought to love are reconciled. Ishaq, like Flecker, makes poems. Hassan, like the ideal common man, is a poem.
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After this play, finished in the summer of 1913, a rapid physical disintegration set in and Flecker found he could no further perform Ishaq’s promise to try the barren road. It was as though in life he had already made a different, a wrong choice with Pervaneh and Rafi, and had seen his mistake only when he was a ghost blowing on the wind. The pang of doubt in all his exuberance, injected by the difficulties of the question Where do I belong? had long made him interested in the “Parnasse” school of French poetry and its wormwood tinctures, so unlike the profuse Arabic literary colors. In picturing the lovers ghosts bleakly evaporating after the execution, Flecker used the palette of the Parnasse with great effectiveness, and was rightly pleased with himself for it. But as he succumbed to illness in his last year, he tended to a wholesale adoption of the Parnassian doctrine, which then began to enfeeble his work.
Once more he turned to dreaming and away from reality. One of his last pieces of writing, a review of Paul Fort’s Vivre en Dieu, says “The divine function is to dream. . . . All lives dream each other into existence.” Against the anemia of some of these last thoughts only two positive indications can be set, a note on Milton as a masculine figure in English poetry, and the idea of a play on Judith; also, just before his thirtieth birthday his fever subsided for a moment and he had his “only mystic vision,” an imaginary poem about Jerusalem new and old.
Looking again at the course of his creative life, one feels that there is a sudden sharp rise in it, followed by an equally sudden fall. The rise begins when he goes to live in the Orient. It reaches its upper limit with Hassan, and at this point all the problems of his life come together and, interacting dynamically and productively, are within an ace of being resolved and leading to a new phase of work. But that lies just beyond his power. Then the tensions which have been beneficial for an inspired moment become utterly destructive. He sinks and dies. He is never able to follow the kindly, cynical, worldly wisdom of Bernard Shaw, put to him in the letter about Don Juan: “Do, for Heaven’s sake, remember that there are plenty of geniuses about, and that the real difficulty is to find writers who are sober, honest, and industrious and have been for many years in their last situation.”
Like Burton as revealed in the famous Kasidah, Flecker found himself, by the test of experience, both lover and hater of the Orient. And unlike Burton and the other Englishmen who made this discovery about themselves, Flecker felt bound to accept a measure of responsibility for what he met in the Orient, since to a part of him these lands were home. Out of this intimate connection with two geographical and cultural extremes came both his creative and physical fevers. Pardy he belonged to the East, yet it was hard to agree to belong to a region which was “malignant” in that it weakened the will. The will to what? To live history and accomplish change.
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At Candilli on the Bosphorus he watched the ships dim away eastwards down the Black Sea in the evening and retrospected on the armies that had used the junction of the two continents, and wrote how from all this “a light fever distracts the dreamer’s body, and his mind longs for some coercive chain, and he begins to understand why men in the East will sit by a fountain from noon to night and let the world roll onward.”
He perceived a relationship between the politics and the geography of Asia, and traced to it the prolonged submission during the last centuries to squalor and corruption. And perceiving it he recoiled. “I am a modern civilized man,” he cried out. To Catholic friends Flecker wrote that if they were attracted by medievalism they should investigate it in the sordid present of the Near East.
So while his faculties flowered in the Levant, he resented and criticized the stagnant beauties that fertilized him. This man whose stage properties were ornate lattices and friezes—
We shall watch the Sultan’s fountains
ripple, rumble, splash and rise
Over terraces of marble,
under the blue balconies,
Leafing through the plaster dragon’s
hollow mouth and empty eyes.
—this man was off the stage an apostle of the sanitation and functional architecture of the new West. The places he praised were, for instance, the Berlin of 1905, “where there is, indeed, no taste for art, but, better still, there are no slums.” His criterion was the newest of America. “We shall build,” he wrote in The Grecians—“for comfort and utility, and obtain our beauty not from the added ornamentation of an antique style, but from the principles of symmetry and design. Indeed, I imagine we shall build our school after the American manner with iron and reinforced concrete. Of all methods of construction this is the strongest, for the San Francisco earthquake itself could not shake down the slimmest buildings wrought of this material. Therefore we shall build our school with straight and simple harmonious lines; and in doing so we may, perhaps, be advancing into a new architectural style, some day to be reckoned great. . . .”
For the first years of the century this is a live manifesto, indicating Western values of a conspicuously progressive nature. When he yearned from Brumana for England—
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
—his characteristic decision to give the title “home” to the place where he is not living at that moment was probably influenced by a concurrent judgment on the quality of housing and living and leisure standards in the West as compared with the East. His images do somewhat suggest the fronts of smug villas, but included in this vision of the English downs is possibly also le Corbusier’s vision, a healthy knitting of nature and town.
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Thus at the date when his genius still supported his inner tensions and made literature out of their opposing pulls, there was a constant critical descant, sustained by one song. By a paradox it added the richness of an astringent doubt to his sensuousness, doubled his emotions by coupling each with its obverse, brought form with it. This is true of Hassan above all. Describing the play in a letter, Flecker himself adumbrates the point: “It’s utterly Oriental externally, but I hope the flash of the little European blood I possess gleams through its seraglio atmosphere from time to time.”
The European conscience, which had worried him and sent him wandering round working-class London and peering through windowpanes there, had never been able alone to guarantee him poetry; it had even misled him many times; yet his best work was done when he let it penetrate his elected Eastern material as a corrective antidote.
T. E. Lawrence wrote that with Flecker passed “the sweetest singer” of the pre-war world. That is true, but that is not his significance, for even in his own day sweetness of song was becoming a less prized achievement, and Hardy was showing that infelicity might be an asset to those who had a contemporary message. His significance lay in his treatment of his problems. Lawrence, devoted to the Semitic mind, also said of him: “It is restless, is life, for the man whose blood mates North and South (NW and SE).”
Flecker was restless and he used his restlessness. Repose was not possible to him because illusion was not possible. The other Englishmen who went abroad went to something that was truly different and strange to them, but he went to something that he knew in his blood; and thus he found, more quickly than they did, the things that were wrong, and that urgently needed the attentions of both king and schoolmaster, the poet and the rebel, the Oriental and the Westerner. All these personalities were inherent in him, and had found shadowy, tentative expression in his early writing. To develop them, keep them balanced, integrate their work—that was the aim imposed on him by his crucial contacts with the East. It was perhaps outside any man’s strength, but in making the effort, he won his triumph as well as slew himself, and earned the right, which he once claimed in a lyric, to be read by poets a thousand years hence:
Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.
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