The nervous strain of so much anxiety about his literary work wearied both mind and body, but he had his reward. The scholarly aptitude of every particle in the phrase, and the curious symmetry apparent in the great whole of the essay are due to a quality which he pushed indeed to excess, but never beyond the boundary that separates Right and Wrong; we admire in the product what we might criticise in the method, and when we judge as critics we are compelled as Englishmen and connoisseurs to congratulate and to applaud.
He agreed with Aristotle in regarding lucidity as the main virtue of style. And if he sometimes failed to attain his ideal in this matter, the obscurity was due to none of those mannerisms which are so deplorable in a Meredith or a Browning, but rather to the fact that he found great difficulty in ending a sentence as he had begun it. His mind outran his pen; and the sentence from his University sermon, “England must do her duty, or what will the harvest be?” stirring and patriotic as it is, certainly suffers from some such fault, though I cannot quite see where.
The Oxymoron, the Aposiopesis, the Nominativus Pendens, the Anacoluthon and the Zeugma he looked upon with abhorrence and even with dread. He was a friend to all virile enthusiasm in writing but a foe to rhetoric, which (he would say) “Is cloying even in a demagogue, and actually nauseating in the literary man.” He drew a distinction between eloquence and rhetoric, often praising the one and denouncing the other with the most abandoned fervour: indeed, it was his favourite diversion in critical conversation accurately to determine the meaning of words. In early youth he would often split an infinitive or end a sentence with a preposition. But, ever humble and ready to learn, he determined, after reading Mrs. Griffin’s well-known essays in the Daily American, to eschew such conduct for the future; and it was a most touching sight to watch him, even in extreme old age, his reverend white locks sweeping the paper before him and his weak eyes peering close at the MSS. as he carefully went over his phrases with a pen, scratching out and amending, at the end of his day’s work, the errors of this nature.
He commonly used a gilt “J” nib, mounted upon a holder of imitation ivory, but he was not cramped by any petty limitations in such details and would, if necessity arose, make use of a quill, or even of a fountain pen, insisting, however, if he was to use the latter, that it should be of the best.
The paper upon which he wrote the work that remains to us was the ordinary ruled foolscap of commerce; but this again he regarded as quite unimportant. It was the matter of what he wrote that concerned him, not (as is so often the case with lesser men) the mere accidents of pen or paper.
I remember little else of moment with regard to his way of writing, but I make no doubt that these details will not be without their interest; for the personal habits of a great man have a charm of their own. I read once that the sum of fifty pounds was paid for the pen of Charles Dickens. I wonder what would be offered for a similar sacred relic, of a man more obscure, but indirectly of far greater influence; a relic which I keep by me with the greatest reverence, which I do not use myself, however much at a loss I may be for pen or pencil, and with which I never, upon any account, allow the children to play.
But I must draw to a close, or I should merit the reproach of lapsing into a sentimental peroration, and be told that I am myself indulging in that rhetoric which Lambkin so severely condemned.
IV.
Lambkin’s Essay on “Success”
On “Success:” its causes and results