backgrounds of great buildings and curious gardens. But the work of
Newman and of Ruskin is a white art, like the art of sculpture.

I find myself every year desiring and admiring this kind of
lucidity and purity more and more. It seems to me that the only
function of a writer is to express obscure, difficult, and subtle
thoughts easily. But there are writers, like Browning and George
Meredith, who seem to hold it a virtue to express simple thoughts
obscurely. Such writers have a wide vogue, because so many people
do not value a thought unless they can feel a certain glow of
satisfaction in having grasped it; and to have disentangled a web
of words, and to find the bright thing lying within, gives them a
pleasing feeling of conquest, and, moreover, stamps the thought in
their memory. But such readers have not the root of the matter in
them; the true attitude is the attitude of desiring to apprehend,
to progress, to feel. The readers who delight in obscurity, to whom
obscurity seems to enhance the value of the thing apprehended, are
mixing with the intellectual process a sort of acquisitive and
commercial instinct very dear to the British heart. These
bewildering and bewildered Browning societies who fling themselves
upon Sordello, are infected unconsciously with a virtuous craving
for "taking higher ground." Sordello contains many beautiful
things, but by omitting the necessary steps in argument, and by
speaking of one thing allusively in terms of another, and by a
profound desultoriness of thought, the poet produces a blurred and
tangled impression. The beauties of Sordello would not lose by
being expressed coherently and connectedly.

This is the one thing that I try with all my might to impress on
boys; that the essence of all style is to say what you mean as