Father Payne had been listening to some work of mine: and he said at the
end, "That is graceful enough, and rather attractive--but it has a great
fault: it is sometimes ambiguous. Several of your sentences can have more
than one meaning. I remember once at Oxford," he said, smiling, "that
Collins, one of our lecturers, had been going through a translation-paper
with me, and had told me three quite distinct ways of rendering a sentence,
each backed by a great scholar. I asked him, I remember, whether that meant
that the original writer--it was Livy, I think--had been in any doubt as to
what his words were meant to convey. He laughed, and said, 'No, I don't
imagine that Livy intended to make his meaning obscure. I expect, if we
took the passage to him with the three renderings, he would deride at least
two of them, and possibly all three, and would point out that we simply did
not know the usage of some word or phrase which would have been absolutely
clear to a contemporary reader,' But Collins went on to say that there
might also be a real ambiguity about the passage: and then he quoted the
supposed remark of the bishop who declined to wear gaiters, and said, 'I
shall wear no clothes to distinguish myself from my fellow-Christians.'
This was printed in his biography, 'I shall wear no clothes, to distinguish
myself from my fellow-Christians.' 'That sentence may be fairly called
ambiguous,' Collins said, 'when its sense so much depends upon
punctuation.'
"Now," Father Payne went on, "you must remember, in writing, that you write
for the eye, you don't write for the ear. A book isn't primarily meant to
be read aloud: and you mustn't resort to tricks of emphasis, such as
italics and so forth, which can only be rendered by voice-inflections. It
is your first duty to be absolutely clear and limpid. You mustn't write
long involved sentences which necessitate the mind holding in solution a
lot of qualifying clauses. You must break up your sentences, and even
repeat yourself rather than be confused. There is no beauty of style like
perfect clearness, and in all writing mystification is a fault. You ought
never to make your reader turn back to the page before to see what you are
driving at."
"But surely," I said, "there are great writers like Carlyle and George
Meredith, for instance, who have been difficult to understand."
"Yes," said Father Payne, "but that's a fault, though it may be a
magnificent fault. It may mean such a pressure of ideas and images that the
thing can hardly be written at length--and it may give you a sense of
exuberant greatness. You may have to forgive a great writer his
exuberance--you may even have to forgive him the trouble it costs to
penetrate his exact thoughts, for the sake of steeping yourself in the rush
and splendour of the style. But obscurity isn't a thing to aim at for
anyone who is trying to write; it may be, in the case of a great writer, a
sort of vociferousness which intoxicates you: and the man may convey a kind
of inspiration by his very obscurities. But it must be an impulse which
simply overpowers him--it mustn't be an effect deliberately planned. You
may perhaps feel the bigness of the thought all the more in the presence of
a writer who, for all his power, can't confine the stream, and comes down
in a cataract of words. But if you begin trying for an effect, it is like
splashing about in a pool to make people believe it is a rushing river. The
movement mustn't be your own contortions, but the speed of the stream. If
you want to see the bad side of obscurity, look at Browning. The idea is
often a very simple one when you get at it; it's only obscure because it is
conveyed by hints and jerks and nudges. In _Pickwick_, for instance,
one does not read Jingle's remarks for the underlying thought--only for the
pleasure of seeing how he leaps from stepping-stone to stepping-stone. You
mustn't confuse the pleasure of unravelling thought with the pleasure of
thought. If you can make yourself so attractive to your readers that they
love your explosions and collisions, and say with a half-compassionate
delight--'how characteristic--but it _is_ worth while unravelling!'
you have achieved a certain success. But the chance is that future ages
won't trouble you much. Disentangling obscurities isn't bad fun for
contemporaries, who know by instinct the nuances of words; but it becomes
simply a bore a century later, when people are not interested in old
nuances, but simply want to know what you thought. Only scholars love
obscurity--but then they are detectives, and not readers."
"But isn't it possible to be too obvious?" I said--"to get a namby-pamby
way of writing--what a reviewer calls painfully kind?"
"Well, of course, the thought must be tough," said Father Payne, "but it's
your duty to make a tough thought digestible, not to make an easy thought
tough. No, my boy, you may depend upon it that, if you want people to
attend to you, you must be intelligible. Don't, for God's sake, think that
Carlyle or Meredith or Browning _meant_ to be unintelligible, or even
thought they were being unintelligible. They were only thinking too
concisely or too rapidly for the reader. But don't you try to produce that
sort of illusion. Try to say things like Newman or Ruskin--big, beautiful,
profound, delicate things, with an almost childlike naïveté. That is the
most exquisite kind of charm, when you find that half-a-dozen of the
simplest words in the language have expressed a thought which holds you
spell-bound with its truth and loveliness. That is what lasts. People want
to be fed, not to be drugged: That, I believe, is the real difference
between romance and realism, and I am one of those who gratefully believe
that romance has had its day. We want the romance that comes from realism,
not the romance which comes by neglecting it. But that's another subject."