mittee on the naturalization laws (1899). In 1911 he was promoted G.C.S.I.
Fitzpatrick married in 1862 Mary, daughter of Colonel Henry George Buller, commanding the 94th Foot, who survived him. Ill-health compelled her to leave India while the greater part of her husband’s career was still before him; but their daughters ably discharged the hospitalities of his various residencies and government houses. He died in London 20 February 1920, leaving two sons and two daughters. A civil servant’s greatness is necessarily merged in that of the service to which he belongs; but Fitzpatrick left on all who knew him the impression of a charming character, an inexhaustible energy, and a mind of exceptional acumen and breadth.
[The Times, 21 February 1920; Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), April 1897; private information.]
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
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