There is a strange sort of originality about McClintock; he imitates
other people's styles, but nobody can imitate his, not even an idiot.
Other people can be windy, but McClintock blows a gale; other people can
blubber sentiment, but McClintock spews it; other people can mishandle
metaphors, but only McClintock knows how to make a business of it.
McClintock is always McClintock, he is always consistent, his style is
always his own style. He does not make the mistake of being relevant on
one page and irrelevant on another; he is irrelevant on all of them.
He does not make the mistake of being lucid in one place and obscure
in another; he is obscure all the time. He does not make the mistake
of slipping in a name here and there that is out of character with
his work; he always uses names that exactly and fantastically fit his
lunatics. In the matter of undeviating consistency he stands alone in
authorship. It is this that makes his style unique, and entitles it to
a name of its own--McClintockian. It is this that protects it from being
mistaken for anybody else's. Uncredited quotations from other writers
often leave a reader in doubt as to their authorship, but McClintock is
safe from that accident; an uncredited quotation from him would always
be recognizable. When a boy nineteen years old, who had just been
admitted to the bar, says, "I trust, sir, like the Eagle, I shall
look down from lofty rocks upon the dwellings of man," we know who is
speaking through that boy; we should recognize that note anywhere. There
be myriads of instruments in this world's literary orchestra, and a
multitudinous confusion of sounds that they make, wherein fiddles
are drowned, and guitars smothered, and one sort of drum mistaken
for another sort; but whensoever the brazen note of the McClintockian
trombone breaks through that fog of music, that note is recognizable,
and about it there can be no blur of doubt.

The novel now arrives at the point where the Major goes home to see his
father. When McClintock wrote this interview he probably believed it was
pathetic.

The road which led to the town presented many attractions Elfonzo had
bid farewell to the youth of deep feeling, and was now wending his way
to the dreaming spot of his fondness. The south winds whistled through
the woods, as the waters dashed against the banks, as rapid fire in the
pent furnace roars. This brought him to remember while alone, that he
quietly left behind the ho