le. And as long as people are kindly and full of life, I shall
not complain; I would rather have that than a dreary high-mindedness."

Father Payne rose. "Oh, do go on, Father!" said someone.

"No, my boy," said Father Payne, "I'm boiling over with impressions--rooms,
carpets, china, flowers, ladies' dresses! But that must all settle down a
bit. In a few days I'll interrogate my memory, like Wordsworth, and see if
there is anything of permanent worth there!"

XLVIII

OF AMBIGUITY

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 s