ians, and the _Essay on Criticism_--what a
regiment of witty lines to be written by a youth of twenty or
twenty-one!--much nearer being a great essay in verse than is generally
admitted nowadays. As for the _Essay on Man_, one can read! it more than
once only out of a sense of duty. Pope has nothing to tell us that we
want to know about man except in so far as he dislikes him. We praise
him as the poet who makes remarks--as the poet, one might almost say,
who makes faces. It is when he sits in the scorner's chair, whether in
good humour or in bad, that he is the little lord of versifiers.

XI

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

James Elroy Flecker died in January 1915, having added at least one poem
to the perfect anthology of English verse. Probably his work contains a
good deal that is permanent besides this. But one is confident at least
of the permanence of _The Old Ships_. Readers coming a thousand years
hence upon the beauty, the romance and the colour of this poem will turn
eagerly, one imagines, in search of other work from the same pen. This
was the flower of the poet's genius. It was the exultant and original
speech of one who was in a great measure the seer of other men's
visions. Flecker was much given to the translation of other poets, and
he did not stop at translating their words. He translated their
imagination also into careful verse. He was one of those poets whose
genius is founded in the love of literature more than in the love of
life. He seems less an interpreter of the earth than one who sought
after a fantastic world which had been created by Swinburne and the
Parnassians and the old painters and the tellers of the _Arabian
Nights_.

"He began," Mr. J.C. Squire has said, "by being more interested in his
art than in himself." And all but a score or so of his poems suggest
that this was his way to the last. He was one of those for whom the
visible world exists. But it existed for him less in nature than in art.
He does not give one the impression of a poet who observed minutely and
delightedly as Mr. W.H. Davies observes. His was a painted world
inhabited by a number of chosen and exquisite images. He found the real
world by comparison disappointing. "He confessed," we are told, "that he
had not greatly liked the East--always excepting, of course, Greece."
This was almost a necessity of his genius; and it is interesting to see
how in some of his later work his imagination is feeling its way back
fro