His sitting room was exquisitely decorated.
When I think of that room, I am again convinced there
was something cabotin about Lambert Orme:
people at the age of twenty should not have rooms like that.
He had painted it shiny black....
I did not see him again for some five years. He
went round the world, and sent me a postcard from
Yokohama. He was immensely impressed by the
beauty of American cities, and it was from them that
he first learnt to see life as a system of
correlated planes. It was several years, however, be-
fore his very real and original talent for association
was finally able to cast the slough of symbolism.
When I next met him he was still intensively con-
cerned with the relation between things and himself:
it was only in his final period that he became
predominantly interested in the relation of things
towards each other. His talent, which though singu-
larly receptive was not very muscular, had failed to
attract any interesting synthesis from the confront-
ation of the universe with his own twitching heart:
He had tried, and failed, to interpret con-
scions cognition by a single simple emotion. But,
in his later period he did in fact succeed in conveying
original analysis, implicit rather than expressed of the
diversity and interrelation of external phe-
nomena: he was able to suggest a mood of subcon
cious perplexity sensitive to unapparent affinities.
The conception of life as a repetition of self-con-
lined and finite entities can be integrated only
by the pressure of a compelling imagination: Lambert's
imagination though mobile was not compelling- I
suspect indeed that less power is required to disinte-
grate such entities, to suggest a world of atoms for-
tuitously whirling into certain shapes, to indicate a
tremendous unknown, quivering below the crust of
our convention. His later poetry succeeded because
of its influence to this unapparent reality, I am now
assured that some of his later poems were very re-
spectable.
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