“perhaps the one element of obscurity which it had lacked”

Another Edmund Wilson zinger, this one from the T.S. Eliot chapter of Axel’s Castle, which I’m reading on Google Books at the moment. Speaking of Eliot’s early hero Jules Laforgue, Wilson remarks:

“Laforgue’s friends procured him a post as reader to the Empress Augusta of Germany; and, falling under the spell of German philosophy, he brought its jargon into his verse, contributing thereby to Symbolism perhaps the one element of obscurity which it had lacked.”

[ADDENDUM: Note the use of “which” by Wilson, surely one of the most learned English prose stylists of the 20th century. I loathe the “which/that” police. The “which/that” police would put red ink on Wilson’s use of “which” there and change it to “that”. I’m not sure why people feel the need to distinguish carefully between when each word should be used. Even if you look at Fowler’s usually reliable and interesting English Usage book, he makes fun of people who use them interchangeably, but then it becomes clear that he has absolutely no clue as to what the rule ought to be, and simply makes things up on the fly. I propose that we simply use whichever one sounds better at any given point in a sentence. But like everyone else I continue to live under the reign of terror of the pseudo-intellectual “which/that” police.]