Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/200

 there are many kinds and grades of obscurity ranging all the way from the obscurity of ignorance and stupidity to the obscurity that comes of too much learning and of hair-splitting analysis,—all the way from an inability to think clearly down to an erudition with which the reader cannot keep pace. There is nothing to be gained by classifying and distinguishing, after the fashion of a school rhetoric, the various kinds of obscurity that it is possible to find in literature,—by dividing what is ambiguous from what is vague and again what is vague from what is really obscure; because, while it is possible to make such a classification to almost any degree of minuteness that you choose, all these different kinds of verbal turbidness go back to one or more of the four primal causes that stand in the way of clearness; and the important thing is to get these four causes definitely in our minds.