at follows, but that in speaking or writing we
have an obligation to put ourselves into the hearer's or reader's place?
It is _his_ comfort, _his_ convenience, we have to consult. To _express_
ourselves is a very small part of the business: very small and almost
unimportant as compared with _impressing_ ourselves: the aim of the whole
process being to persuade.

All reading demands an effort. The energy, the good-will which a reader
brings to the book is, and must be, partly expended in the labour of
reading, marking, learning, inwardly digesting what the author means. The
more difficulties, then, we authors obtrude on him by obscure or careless
writing, the more we blunt the edge of his attention: so that if only in
our own interest--though I had rather keep it on the ground of
courtesy--we should study to anticipate his comfort.

But let me go a little deeper. You all know that a great part of
Lessing's argument in his "Laokoeon", on the essentials of Literature as
opposed to Pictorial Art or Sculpture, depends on this--that in Pictorial
Art or in Sculpture the eye sees, the mind apprehends, the whole in a
moment of time, with the correspondent disadvantage that this moment of
time is fixed and stationary; whereas in writing, whether in prose or in
verse, we can only produce our effect by a series of successive small
impressions, dripping our meaning (so to speak) into the reader's
mind--with the correspondent advantage, in point of vivacity, that our
picture keeps moving all the while. Now obviously this throws a greater
strain on his patience whom we address. Man at the best is a
narrow-mouthed bottle. Through the conduit of speech he can utter--as
you, my hearers, can receive--only one word at a time. In writing (as my
old friend Professor Minto used to say) you are as a commander filing out
his battalion through a narrow gate that allows only one man at a time to
pass; and your reader, as he receives the troops, has to re-form and
reconstruct them. No matter how large or how involved the subject, it can
be communicated only in that way. You see, then, what an obligation we
owe to him of order and arrangement; and why, apart from felicities and
curiosities of diction, the old rhetoricians laid such stress upon order
and arrangement as duties we owe to those who honour us with their
attention. '_La clarte,_' says a French writer, '_est la politesse._'
[Greek: Charisi kai sapheneia thue], recommends Lucian. Pay your