e is so enormously impressed with the
difference between his readers' intelligence and his own that he
talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet
was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid?
But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does
not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think
that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming
with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like
himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of
this beautiful optimism. _Sordello_ was the most glorious compliment
that has ever been paid to the average man.

In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author
a mark of inward clarity. A man who is vague in his ideas does not
speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads
him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulae that every one
understands. No one ever found Miss Marie Corelli obscure, because she
believes only in words. But if a young man really has ideas of his
own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his
own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories
unknown to the rest of the world. Let us take an imaginary example.
Suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar idea
that all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were a
kind of evil intoxication, he might say to himself continually that
churches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixed
in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in
the minds of others. And suppose that in pursuance of this general
idea, which is a perfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a very
silly one, he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without its
theology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it became
instinctive and familiar, such a man might take up a pen, and under
the impression that he was saying something figurative indeed, but
quite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as this, "You
will not get the godless Puritan into your white taverns," and no one
in the length and breadth of the country could form the remotest
notion of what he could mean. So it would have been in any example,
for instance, of a man who made some philosophical discovery and did
not realise how far the world was from it. If it