In person Flecker was tall, with blue eyes, black, straight hair, and dark complexion. There was a tinge of the East in his appearance, and his habitual expression was a curious blend of the sardonic and the gentle. Until illness incapacitated him he was physically quite active, but his principal amusement was conversation, of which he never tired. He felt acutely the loss of good talk during his years abroad, in Syria especially. He was sociable, and enjoyed meeting and talking with crowds of people; but he had few intimate friends at Oxford, and, after he left England, little opportunity of making any. One of the few, Mr. Frank Savery, now of the British Legation, Berne, sends the following notes:
"My acquaintance with him began in January 1901, when
he was a lanky, precocious boy of sixteen, and lasted,
with long interruptions, until his death. His fate took
him to the Near East, mine took me to Germany: for
this reason we never met from 1908 to 1914, though we
never ceased to correspond. Largely because our intercourse was thus broken, I believe that I am better able
to appreciate the changes which his character underwent
in the latter years of his life than those who never lost
sight of him for more than a few months at a time.
"It was at Oxford that I first came to know him intimately. He was extraordinarily undeveloped, even for an English Public School boy, when he first went up in 1902. He already wrote verses—with an appalling facility that for several years made me doubt his talent. He imitated with enthusiasm and without discrimination, and, the taste in those long-gone days being for Oscar Wilde's early verse and Swinburne's complacent swing, he turned
xi
