Once upon a time there was a colorful section man in Hum 2. "He's not teaching anybody anything," complained another teaching fellow to John Finley, the lecturer in the course. "He's the closest thing to a mad man I know." "Ah," said Mr. Finley, "but he has flair."

There are competent people about--students and section men alike. But Finley, for 25 years Master of Eliot House, reserves his highest praise for those who possess the elusive and transcendent quality of flair. His own, of course, is legendary. In appearance he combines the best traits of Henry James' English gentleman and Robert Frost's New England farmer. Custom tailored three-piece suits with cuffs that really button set off a lined, craggy face. The white hair is long, sometimes over the collar, and the flaring bushy eyebrows suggest now an urbane devil, now a hoary Puck.

Finley's hallmark is his verbal legerdemain. To wit:

* On the appearance of two Radcliffe companions: "It is like the friendship of an armored tank and a lettuce leaf."

* On a doctoral dissertation: "Sometimes a thesis is a thesis; sometimes it is the length and shadow of a temperament."

Undergraduates sometimes suspect an elaborate show designed to dazzle them. But Finley's show does not play to special audiences, and it is continuous. Recalls Professor Cedric H. Whitman, a colleague in the Classics Department: "I hadn't seen John in a year. Then one day I met him on the street. His very first words to me were, 'Humanities 2 is like a mulch pile. Each year I throw in a few new ideas, and they sink down to the soil.'"

Ensconced in his panelled study, surrounded by teacups and undergraduates, Finley takes unabashed delight in describing the advantages of an earlier time, the time of which his entire manner is a gracious remnant. "In my day," he says, "college was like a dirt country road with grass growing in the middle. Now it is like Route 128, and graduate school is like a turnpike. But what if you don't want to go to Albany?"

Despite his distaste for modernism (Carpenter Center, he once said, resembles two pianos copulating), Finley himself works at mental urban renewal. Cambridge--Central Square and all--becomes "a jewelled necklace strung along the Charles." A stream of metaphors and classical allusions lends a rosy grandeur to what is, recasting it in more congenial form.

His favorite theme is O What a Wonderful World. "Life is a choice between goods--not between good and evil," he pronounces with genteel optimism.

Finley divides his time between two such goods. After graduating from Harvard in 1925 he became an instructor and finally a full professor in the Classics Department.

Since 1942 he has been, in addition, a Master of Eliot House--some would say Eliot House itself. As he tells incoming sophomores at the fall House Dinner, "Harvard is the best place in the world, and Eliot House is the best place at Harvard--so let's all be happy."

Even Finley, however, is not perfectly content. Within each of his two roles are tensions and ambivalences. And, the tendency over the years has been for the Master character to shove the Professor character off stage, to the regret of the latter. "I sometimes think I've scattered myself too thin," reflects Finley, who is now 63. Twenty-five years ago, he was a meticulous scholar. His three essays on Thucydides, soon to be republished as a book, are, says Glen W. Bowersock, assistant professor of Classics, "the most important articles on Thucydides in the last century." But Finley is now famous for his spirited performances in Humanities 2, where he has taught the first half, on the epic, since 1946.

The spectacle features Finley's distinctive double-clutch lecture shuffle: from the podium two steps to the left, a pause, an extension of the right foot accompanied by a sweep of the hand, a snap of the microphone cord, two steps back to the right, a resting of the right arm on the podium and a flourishing of the left arm in a classic pose. Some are amused. But by the end of the fall term, only 200 of the 500 students in the course were attending lectures.

The lectures are models of diffusion and infusion, delivered in a free-wheeling metaphoric style. Literature and life dissolve in a curious amalgam. At one time or another this fall, the peripatetic Finley was inspired to comment on pre-med students, suburbs, roller skates, Barbar the Elephant, and Vietnam. He has a peculiarly personal and philosophic view of General Education (he was chairman of the Gen Ed Committee from 1960 to 1965) as the wholesale marketing of truth and insight. But as one student protests, "Take a Finley-Finleyism like 'Tragedy is the brandy to the wine of epic.' Fine. It's beautiful. But what does it mean? Does one take the epic with dinner and tragedy with dessert?"

At times, Finley himself reflects upon the disparity between his present method and past achievement. After rereading the Thucydides essays, he commented. "The immersion into detail! How much I used to know."