Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Flecker, Herman James Elroy
FLECKER, HERMAN JAMES ELROY (1884-1915), poet and dramatist, was born at Lewisham 5 November 1884, the elder son of the Rev. William Herman Flecker, D.D., sometime head master of Dean Close School, Cheltenham, by his wife, Sarah Ducat. He was educated first at Dean Close School; in January 1901 he went to Uppingham School, and in October of the next year, with a classical scholarship, to Trinity College, Oxford. Here he wrote great quantities of verse, most of it of no particular merit, talked much and well, and made some lasting friendships. He took his B.A. degree in 1906. In 1907 he went to London and spent a short time teaching in Hampstead. His first book of verse, The Bridge of Fire, appeared in that year. In 1908 he resolved to enter the consular service. After passing the examination he went, as was customary in the service, to Cambridge for two years’ special training. Here he became a member of Caius College, and studied Oriental languages. In June 1910 he was sent to Constantinople, and almost at once his health broke down and he returned to England to recruit. In March 1911 he had apparently completely recovered and went back to Constantinople, to be transferred in April to Syria. Here, at Beirut, he remained, with two short intervals of leave, until 1913. He was not a very efficient vice-consul, and was never altogether happy in the East, being increasingly anxious to obtain employment in England where he would not be cut off from the literary world. In May 1913 the state of his health, which had been failing for some time, made necessary his immediate removal to Switzerland, and in Switzerland he died, of consumption, at Davos on 8 January 1915. During his two years at Beirut he had felt deeply the influence of the life, and of the literature, of the East, an influence obvious in a number of his best, and best-known, poems, and above all in his play Hassan. When on leave in Athens in May 1911 he had married a Greek lady, Mile Helle Skiadaressi, whose influence upon his literary judgements, as well as upon his life, was very considerable. He was buried at Cheltenham.
Mr. J. C. Squire’s edition of Flecker’s Collected Poems (1916) contains all his published verse, save ‘seven lyrics which there is reason to believe he did not desire to perpetuate’, as well as a few poems hitherto unpublished or uncollected. Flecker’s published collections of poetry were: The Bridge of Fire (1907), Thirty-six Poems (1910), reissued with additional matter as Forty-two Poems (1911), The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913), and The Old Ships (1915).
Flecker’s fullest achievement was reached in The Golden Journey to Samarkand, and this volume contained, besides the beautiful title-poem, enough to ensure its author’s lasting fame. Flecker had deliberately turned his back upon the tendencies fashionable with his contemporaries, which were towards the formless, the intimate, the psychological, or the self-consciously ‘shocking’. His one object was ‘to create beauty’. The preface to The Golden Journey to Samarkand attempts to explain his own theory of his art. He believed that a poet needed a definite theory to guide him in self-criticism, and he claimed to be a disciple of the French Parnassian school, which was, he wrote, ‘a classical reaction against … sentimentality and extravagance’. The characteristics of the Parnassians he seems to have understood to be a determination first and foremost ‘to create beauty, a beauty somewhat statuesque, dramatic, and objective, rather than intimate’. It was sheer beauty and not ‘the message’ of poetry which mattered. Flecker certainly wrote up to this theory, and though he left no ‘message’, and though his work contains few intimate revelations of his own personality, it enshrines much beauty, glowing and sensuous rather than statuesque, yet certainly objective and sometimes dramatic. He is much less representative of his age than Rupert Brooke [q.v.], with whom, as an untimely loss to literature, he is inevitably associated; but his achievement was already great and his promise, for his work still bore the stamp of youth, was incalculable.
Flecker’s Collected Prose (1920) contains, except The King of Alsander, a novel (1914), all the prose that he published in book form during his lifetime as well as a number of pieces reprinted from periodicals. Of the longer prose works here reprinted, The Last Generation, an entertaining but somewhat precious fantasy upon the end of mankind, is perhaps the most typical; but Flecker’s prose was of comparatively little importance. A great number of his private letters, which are of much interest, will be found in The Life of James Elroy Flecker (1925) by Geraldine Hodgson.
His two plays, of which he hoped much, were both published posthumously, Hassan in 1922 and Don Juan in 1925. Of these Hassan has already attained a celebrity, which is partly due to most effective staging. It is the work of a student of The Arabian Nights and Sir Richard Burton’s Kasîdah, but it is even more obviously the work of a poet of vivid originality, who is experimenting with dramatic forms, sometimes unsuccessfully, here and there with a startling sureness of touch. Flecker’s drama stands almost as far aloof as his verse from the stream of contemporary tendency. Had he lived he would have done much to revive the poetic and imaginative drama in England.
[Introduction to the Collected Poems; Geraldine Hodgson, The Life of James Elroy Flecker; Douglas Goldring, James Elroy Flecker, 1922; private information. See also Letters of J. E. Flecker to Frank Savery, 1926.]