ress
and his _tire a quatre epingles_, so is an ordinary writer recognised by
his style.

If a man has something to say that is worth saying, he need not envelop
it in affected expressions, involved phrases, and enigmatical
innuendoes; but he may rest assured that by expressing himself in a
simple, clear, and naive manner he will not fail to produce the right
effect. A man who makes use of such artifices as have been alluded to
betrays his poverty of ideas, mind, and knowledge.

Nevertheless, it is a mistake to attempt to write exactly as one speaks.
Every style of writing should bear a certain trace of relationship with
the monumental style, which is, indeed, the ancestor of all styles; so
that to write as one speaks is just as faulty as to do the reverse, that
is to say, to try and speak as one writes. This makes the author
pedantic, and at the same time difficult to understand.

Obscurity and vagueness of expression are at all times and everywhere a
very bad sign. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they arise from
vagueness of thought, which, in its turn, is almost always fundamentally
discordant, inconsistent, and therefore wrong. When a right thought
springs up in the mind it strives after clearness of expression, and it
soon attains it, for clear thought easily finds its appropriate
expression. A man who is capable of thinking can express himself at all
times in clear, comprehensible, and unambiguous words. Those writers who
construct difficult, obscure, involved, and ambiguous phrases most
certainly do not rightly know what it is they wish to say: they have
only a dull consciousness of it, which is still struggling to put itself
into thought; they also often wish to conceal from themselves and other
people that in reality they have nothing to say. Like Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel, they wish to appear to know what they do not know, to think
what they do not think, and to say what they do not say.

Will a man, then, who has something real to impart endeavour to say it
in a clear or an indistinct way? Quintilian has already said, _plerumque
accidit ut faciliora sint ad intelligendum et lucidiora multo, quae a
doctissimo quoque dicuntur.... Erit ergo etiam obscurior, quo quisque
deterior_.

A man's way of expressing himself should not be _enigmatical_, but he
should know whether he has something to say or whether he has not. It is
an uncertainty of expression which makes German writers so dull. The
only exc