e are not interested in old
nuances, but simply want to know what you thought. Only scholars love
obscurity--but then they are detectives, and not readers."

"But isn't it possible to be too obvious?" I said--"to get a namby-pamby
way of writing--what a reviewer calls painfully kind?"

"Well, of course, the thought must be tough," said Father Payne, "but it's
your duty to make a tough thought digestible, not to make an easy thought
tough. No, my boy, you may depend upon it that, if you want people to
attend to you, you must be intelligible. Don't, for God's sake, think that
Carlyle or Meredith or Browning _meant_ to be unintelligible, or even
thought they were being unintelligible. They were only thinking too
concisely or too rapidly for the reader. But don't you try to produce that
sort of illusion. Try to say things like Newman or Ruskin--big, beautiful,
profound, delicate things, with an almost childlike naivete. That is the
most exquisite kind of charm, when you find that half-a-dozen of the
simplest words in the language have expressed a thought which holds you
spell-bound with its truth and loveliness. That is what lasts. People want
to be fed, not to be drugged: That, I believe, is the real difference
between romance and realism, and I am one of those who gratefully believe
that romance has had its day. We want the romance that comes from realism,
not the romance which comes by neglecting it. But that's another subject."

XLIX

OF BELIEF

"I don't think there is a single word in the English language," said Father
Payne, "which is responsible for such unhappiness as the word 'believe.' It
is used with a dozen shades of intensity by people; and yet it is the one
word which is always being used in theological argument, and which, like
the ungodly, 'is a sword of thine.'"

"I always mean the same thing by it, I believe!" I said.

"Excuse me," said Father Payne, "but if you will take observations of your
talk, you will find you do not. At any rate, _I_ do not, and I am more
careful about the words I use than many people. If I have a heated argument
with a man, and think he takes up a perverse or eccentric opinion, I am
quite capable of saying of him, 'I believe he must be crazy.' Now such a
sentence to a foreigner would carry the evidence of a deep and clear
conviction; but, as I say it, it doesn't really express the faintest
suspicion of my opponent's sanity--it means little more than that I don't
agree