【Courtesy to Readers – Clarity 】written by F. L. Lucas

Character, I have suggested, is the first thing to think about in style.  The next step is to consider what characteristics can win a hearer’s or a reader’s sympathy.  For example, it is bad manners to give them needless trouble.  Therefore clarity.  It is bad manners to waste their time.  Therefore brevity.

There clings in my memory a story once told me by Professor Sisson.  A Frenchman said to him: “In France it is the writer that takes the trouble; in Germany, the reader; in English it is betwixt and between.”  The generalization is over-simple; perhaps even libelous; but not without truth.  It gives, I think, another reason why the level of French prose has remained so high.  And this may in its turn be partly because French culture has been based more than ours on conversation and the salon.  In most conversation, if he is muddled, wordy, or tedious, a man is soon made, unless he is a hippopotamus, to feel it.  Further, the salon has been particularly influenced by women; who, as a rule, are less tolerant of tedium and clumsiness than men.  

First, then, clarity.  The social purpose of language is communication — to inform, misinform, or otherwise influence our fellows.  True, we also use words in solitude to think our own thoughts, and to express our feelings to ourselves.  But writing is concerned rather with communication than with self-communing; though some writers, especially poets, may talk to themselves in public.  Yet, as I have said, even these, though in a sense overheard rather than heard, have generally tried to reach an audience.  No doubt in some modern literature there has appeared a tendency to replace communication by a private maundering to oneself which shall inspire one’s audience to maunder privately to themselves — rather as if the author handed round a box of drugged cigarettes of his concoction to stimulate each guest to his own solitary dreams.  But I have yet to be convinced that such activities are very valuable, or that one’s own dreams and meditations are much heightened by the stimulus of some other voice soliloquizing in Chinese.  The irrational, now in politics, now in poetics, has been the sinister opium of our tormented and demented century.

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The article is interesting.  But the third paragraph I can't really get it.   At the second paragraph, why writer describe people as a hippopotamus.  what's mean?