Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/647

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
DOUGLAS GOLDRING
559

rately with a 40 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 sheuld much value an assurance that Goschens would take this; it might create a bit of a stir.

(4) 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 want to write a play on Judith and I ought to revise my Don Juan, and I've got to work Hassan with my Collaborator. And day after day I do nothing. . . .

Ever yours,
James Elroy Flecker.

I'd give all my poems to be a healthy navvy."


The last letter is dated October 12th, 1914.


"My dear Goldring,

I should much like to hear from you. . . . 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. Do give me news of you. Why don't you send me your novel."


He died on January 3rd, 1915.

········

It was fortunate for Flecker that the kind of poetry which by temperament, by intellectual equipment, and by the circumstances of his birth and upbringing he was most capable of writing seems to have been just the kind which he most wanted to write. In this respect his career, short as it was, was singularly happy. He followed no literary wild-goose chase. He was not, apparently, dissatisfied with his manner, only with his workmanship—which never satisfied him. At least a part of his genius seems to have lain in a realization of his exact capacities. He seldom gropes 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 constant emendations, he seems to have had an almost exaggerated distrust of what Mr. Arthur Symons has somewhere called "the plenary