entences, 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 peopl