In The Summing Up, published in 1938 when he was sixty-four years old, Somerset Maugham inveighed against literary obscurity and extolled the virtue of clarity (his own peculiar forte). His sentiments were unlikely to endear him to many of the literati of the twentieth century, whose subtlety and complexity, some of them imagined, precluded clodhopping clarity. Maugham explained the source of the obscurity with which they wrote:

The author wraps his meaning in mystery so that the vulgar shall not participate in it. His soul is a secret garden into which the elect may penetrate only after overcoming a number of perilous obstacles.

This is very well said, and if its import were taken seriously half of contemporary literary fiction would never have been published and two-thirds of the teachers of the humanities would find themselves out of a job.

Nevertheless, there is in Maugham’s astringent view the suspicion of a potential for a philistine’s charter. Maugham himself could hardly be accused of philistinism: he was a discriminating collector of modern art, for example recognizing the genius of Gauguin before it was common knowledge, and he both loved and was knowledgeable about oriental art well before the taste for it became general. It is unlikely that many of the people who were condescending about him were able and willing, as he was, to read Racine in French, Calderón in Spanish, Dante in Italian, Goethe in German, and Chekhov in Russian (to say nothing of his