What the reader, then, calls the clearness of a poem often means merely its freedom from those terrors which he, in his defence against them, attacks as obscurities. Clearness for him is really the suppression of everything in the poem over and above the average standard of comprehension--of everything likely to disturb normal ease. A poem, therefore, that really is potentially superior to the average standard of comprehension and which nevertheless conforms to it actually obscures its real meaning the more it observes this standard, _i.e._ the _clearer_ it is to the average reader. A poem that is potentially superior to the average standard of comprehension and which, disregarding it, fulfils all its potentialities, makes its real meaning clearer and clearer, as it retreats from this average, _i.e._ as it becomes more and more obscure to the average reader. The trouble is not with the reader or with the poem but with the government of criticism by the sales-principle, which must make an average standard of public taste allowing for the most backward reader of each of the three reading classes corresponding with the three different degrees of popular education. If a variable standard of comprehension were admitted, the poem would have the privilege of developing itself to the degree of clearness corresponding with the degree of comprehension in the reader most above the average. As the poet himself would thus be allowed as a possible reader of his own poem, it would be encouraged to attain its maximum, not its minimum, of real clearness; and the word _obscure_ would disappear from the vocabulary of criticism except to denote the obscurity of particular references. _Bad_ would be the only possible critical term by which a poem could be categorically dismissed: at the present time, regardless of the possible classification of a poem as _good_ or _bad_ according to the standards it suggests, it is enough for the critic to call a poem _obscure_ to relieve himself of the obligation of giving a real criticism of it. Here is an example, in the first eighteen lines of what might be called a modernist poem, of the ‘obscurity’ which would probably cause it to be put aside by the critic after he had allowed it the customary two-minute reading (for if the poet has obeyed all the rules, this is long enough to give a rough idea of what the poem is all about--and that is all that is generally wanted). Or if by chance the critic is ‘advanced’, serving such a limited public that his criticism is mere literary snobbery, he may pretend to understand it and dislike it equally, because he does not understand it; or, if he does, he may dislike it all the same because it is ‘too simple’ (a common charge against the ‘obscure’ poem when its obscurity is seen to have been only excessive clearness).