It was written for fame and money,
as the author very frankly--yes, and very hopefully, too, poor fellow
--says in his preface. The money never came--no penny of it ever came;
and how long, how pathetically long, the fame has been deferred
--forty-seven years! He was young then, it would have been so much to
him then; but will he care for it now?
As time is measured in America, McClintock's epoch is antiquity.
In his long-vanished day the Southern author had a passion for
"eloquence"; it was his pet, his darling. He would be eloquent,
or perish. And he recognized only one kind of eloquence--the lurid,
the tempestuous, the volcanic. He liked words--big words,
fine words, grand words, rumbling, thundering, reverberating words;
with sense attaching if it could be got in without marring the sound,
but not otherwise. He loved to stand up before a dazed world,
and pour forth flame and smoke and lava and pumice-stone into
the skies, and work his subterranean thunders, and shake himself
with earthquakes, and stench himself with sulphur fumes. If he
consumed his own fields and vineyards, that was a pity, yes; but he
would have his eruption at any cost. Mr. McClintock's eloquence
--and he is always eloquent, his crater is always spouting--is of the
pattern common to his day, but he departs from the custom of the time
in one respect: his brethren allowed sense to intrude when it did
not mar the sound, but he does not allow it to intrude at all.
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