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