Harold Nicolson

‘It would be impossible, I feel, to actually be as decadent as Lambert looked.  I split the infinitive deliberately, being in the first place no non-split diehard (oh, the admirable Mr Fowler!), and desiring secondly to emphasise what was in fact the dominant and immediate consideration which Lambert evoked.  I have met many men with wobbly walks, but I have never met a walk more wobbly than that of Lambert Orme.  It was more than sinuous, it did more than undulate, it rippled. At each step a wave was started which passed upwards through his body, convexing his buttocks, concaving the small of his back, convexing again his slightly rounded shoulders, and working itself out in a backward swaying of the neck and head. This final movement passed off more rapidly than the initial undulations, with the resulting impression of a face upturned generally, but bowing at rhythmic intervals, as if a tired royalty or a camel slouching heavily along the road to Isfahan…..’ 

and

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, I think, 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 able finally to cast the slough of symbolism. When I next met him he was still intensively concerned 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 singularly receptive was not very ‘muscular, had failed to extract any interesting synthesis from the confrontation of the universe with his own twitching heart: he had tried, and he had failed, to interpret conscious cognition by a single simple emotion But in his later period he did in fact succeed in conveying, an original analysis, implicit rather than expressed, of the diversity and interrelation of external phenomena: he was able to suggest a mood of subconscious perplexity sensitive to unapparent affinities. The conception of life as a repetition of self-contained and finite entities can be integrated only by the pressure of a compelling imagination; Lambe1t s imagination though mobile was not compelling: I suspect indeed that less power is required to disintegrate such entities, to suggest a world of atoms fortuitously whirling into certain shapes, to indicate a tremendous unknown, quivering below the crust of our convention.