es it is necessary to pierce
through the literal meaning to the real meaning, which the author has
purposely disguised under an inexact form.

Logically the problem is very embarrassing: there is no fixed external
criterion by which we can make sure of detecting an oblique sense; in
the case of the hoax, which in the present century has become a branch
of literature, it is an essential part of the author's plan to leave no
indication which would betray the jest. In practice we may be morally
certain that an author is not using an oblique sense wherever his prime
object is to be understood; we are therefore not likely to meet with
difficulties of this kind in official documents, in charters, and in
historical narratives. In all these cases the general form of the
document permits us to assume that it is written in the literal sense of
the words.

On the other hand, we must be prepared for oblique senses when the
author had other interests than that of being understood, or when he
wrote for a public which could understand his allusions and read between
the lines, or when his readers, in virtue of a religious or literary
initiation, might be expected to understand his symbolisms and figures
of speech. This is the case with religious texts, private letters, and
all those literary works which form so large a part of the documents on
antiquity. Thus the art of recognising and determining hidden meanings
in texts has always occupied a large space in the theory of
_hermeneutic_[141] (which is Greek for interpretative criticism), and in
the _exegesis_ of the sacred texts and of classical authors.

The different modes of introducing an oblique sense behind the literal
sense are too varied, and depend too much on special circumstances, for
it to be possible to reduce the art of detecting them to definite rules.
Only one general principle can be laid down, and that is, that when the
literal sense is absurd, incoherent, or obscure, or in contradiction
with the ideas of the author or the facts known to him, then we ought to
presume an oblique sense.

In order to determine this sense, the procedure is the same as for
studying the language of an author: we compare the passages in which the
expressions occur in which we suspect an oblique sense, and look to see
whether there is not one where the meaning may be guessed from the
context. A celebrated instance of this procedure is the discovery of the
allegorical meaning of the Beast i