Time & Perspective Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s line is a neat little ambush: it flatters the weary reader while needling the writer’s vanity. On its face, it claims that “pains with style” and “readable” rarely coexist. Underneath, it’s a jab at a certain kind of literary self-regard - the author who treats prose like a glass sculpture, endlessly polished, finally displayed, and quietly useless for anyone who just wants to get through a paragraph without blood loss.

The trick is the phrasing. “Smallest pains” is deliberately stingy; he’s not even talking about Proustian obsession, just the basic effort of tending to style. Yet he still says that effort correlates with unreadability. That exaggeration is the point: Butler isn’t making a statistical claim so much as exposing a cultural pose. In late-Victorian literary life, “style” could become a badge of class and cultivation, a way to signal membership in the educated set. Readability, by contrast, smells faintly of the marketplace - newspapers, popular novels, mass taste. Butler’s cynicism is aimed at the snobbery that confuses difficulty with distinction.

There’s also a self-protective joke in it. Writers are forever accused of caring too much about the sentence; readers accuse them of caring not enough about the reader. Butler cuts both ways, implying that the more a writer performs “art,” the less they communicate. The subtext: style isn’t the enemy, performance is. The best writing hides its labor; the worst advertises it, like a price tag on every line.