achievement was already great and his promise, for his work still bore the stamp of youth, was incalculable.
Flecker’s Collected Prose (1920) contains, except The King of Alsander, a novel (1914), all the prose that he published in book form during his lifetime as well as a number of pieces reprinted from periodicals. Of the longer prose works here reprinted, The Last Generation, an entertaining but somewhat precious fantasy upon the end of mankind, is perhaps the most typical; but Flecker’s prose was of comparatively little importance. A great number of his private letters, which are of much interest, will be found in The Life of James Elroy Flecker (1925) by Geraldine Hodgson.
His two plays, of which he hoped much, were both published posthumously, Hassan in 1922 and Don Juan in 1925. Of these Hassan has already attained a celebrity, which is partly due to most effective staging. It is the work of a student of The Arabian Nights and Sir Richard Burton’s Kasîdah, but it is even more obviously the work of a poet of vivid originality, who is experimenting with dramatic forms, sometimes unsuccessfully, here and there with a startling sureness of touch. Flecker’s drama stands almost as far aloof as his verse from the stream of contemporary tendency. Had he lived he would have done much to revive the poetic and imaginative drama in England.
[Introduction to the Collected Poems; Geraldine Hodgson, The Life of James Elroy Flecker; Douglas Goldring, James Elroy Flecker, 1922; private information. See also Letters of J. E. Flecker to Frank Savery, 1926.]
FLEMING, Sir SANDFORD (1827–1915), Canadian engineer, the second son of Andrew Greig Fleming, of Kirkcaldy, Forfarshire, by his wife, Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Sandford Arnott, was born at Kirkcaldy 7 January 1827. After studying surveying in his native town he went to Canada in 1845. From 1852 onwards he took a prominent part in the railway development of Upper Canada; and from 1855 to 1863 was chief engineer of the Northern Railway. In 1864 he was appointed chief railway engineer by the government of Nova Scotia, and charged with the construction of a line of railway from Truro to Pictou. The government policy of constructing the line by a series of small contracts did not work well, as the tenders received were so far above Fleming’s estimate that he refused to entertain them. He was therefore requested by the government, in 1866, as the only method of getting them out of the imbroglio, to resign his position, and carry out as contractor the work on which he had hitherto been employed as civil servant. This offer Fleming eventually accepted, and he completed the line by 31 May 1867, with profit to himself, at a great saving to the government, and to the entire satisfaction of the government inspectors.
Fleming early advocated a Canadian trans-continental railway; and when in 1867 the construction of a railway from the River St. Lawrence to Halifax was made part of the federation pact, he was appointed by the newly formed Dominion government as its chief engineer. He at once began the construction of the Inter-Colonial Railway, and carried it to completion in 1876. His difficulties were not only those of construction through a country which was in great part unsettled; he carried on a continual struggle with the governments of the day, because they wished to award extravagant contracts to political favourites, while saving money on construction which Fleming considered essential. The great ‘battle of the bridges’, in which he insisted on iron bridges in places where the government desired wood, was finally won by Fleming. The struggle is told by him, with his invariable reticence and moderation, in The Inter-Colonial, a historical sketch, 1832–1876 (1876). Meanwhile, in 1871, the construction of a Canadian Pacific Railway was made a part of the bargain by which British Columbia was induced to enter the new Dominion, and Fleming was appointed engineer-in-chief. In 1872 he headed the ‘Ocean to Ocean’ expedition, by which a practicable route was found through the Yellow Head Pass [see George Monro Grant]; but in 1880 the government changed its policy, abandoned the plan of government construction, and formed an agreement with the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. It was the hardest blow of Fleming’s life. Over 600 miles of railway had been completed, the whole line had been surveyed, and most of the engineering difficulties overcome. All this work, together with vast subsidies of land and money, was handed over by the government to the new company, whose general manager, (Sir) William Cornelius Van Horne [q.v.], was a little inclined to undervalue the work of his predecessor. But, beyond resigning his position as engineer-in-chief of the government railways, Fleming made little protest.
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