Yet, as I have said, even these, though in a sense overheard rather than heard, have generally tried to reach an audience. The irrational, now in politics, now in poetics, has been the sinister opium of our tormented and demented century. I have put these three qualities in the order of the importance I assigned to them. There are two sorts of obscurity that you find in writers. One is due to negligence and the other to willfulness.
People often write obscurely because they have never taken the trouble to learn to write clearly.
This sort of obscurity you find too often in modern philosophers, in men of science, and even in literary critics. Here it is indeed strange. You would have thought that men who passed their lives in the study of the great masters of literature would be sufficiently sensitive to the beauty of language to write if not beautifully at least with perspicuity . . . . Another cause of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not, either from lack of mental power or from laziness, exactly formulated it in his mind and it is natural enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused idea.