Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/637
Beneath the green electric glare
I saw men pass with hearts of stone.
Yet still I heard them everywhere,
Those golden voices of the air:
Friend, we will go to hell with thee. . . ."
—in his gentle, rather high-pitched, enthusiastic voice, with its latent suggestion of melancholy. And after this he read me the first two chapters of The King of Alsander, and never before, I thought, had work of such epoch-making brilliance been written! (Alas, when I read the poor old King in his entirety, seven years later, it was a blow to find how Time had robbed him of his glamour.) Then he talked of his approaching visit to France, with a friend in the Foreign Office. They were off to plunge into some kind of rising among the vignerons of the Bordeaux district, where at that time Catholicism was in conflict with the Republic. Flecker produced the rigolo which he was taking with him; its barrel glinted in the gaslight. Somehow he made the adventure of being young almost unimaginably thrilling. At that time I was an ardent Francophile, and Flecker seemed to have done all the things which I (at twenty) was pining to do myself. It appeared that he knew Paris almost as well as London; had been to all the cabarets of Montmartre and the Latin Quarter; was familiar with Steinlen's work (not so hackneyed in those far-off days) of which he had many reproductions; and could hum all the songs of Bruant, Lucien Boyer, or Marinier.
Flecker was essentially of the fine flower of the English public-school and university system.
He was entirely absorbed in his art and in the loveliness of a world seen through the eyes of a scholar and a poet. Never before or since have I encountered any one with such a rapturous, with such an intoxicating joy of living. Our talk soon came back to poetry, to his own poems; and as I listened, to be a poet seemed the most wonderful thing in a world full of the maddest, most delicious possibilities. . . .
That was one aspect of Flecker; there was another. Behind his delight in life could be detected, even then, an under-note of sadness. When he wrote of himself as "the lean and swarthy poet of despair" it was probably a joke—it was still the fashion to be despairing, in those days—but like all jokes worth making, there