Essays in Rebellion

When writers are so different, it is queer that every age should have a distinguishing spirit. Each writer is as different in style as in look, and his words reveal him just as the body reveals the soul, blazoning its past or its future without possibility of concealment. Paint a face, no matter how delicately or how thick; the very paint – the very choice of colours red or white – betrays the nature lurking beneath it, and no amount of artifice or imitation in a writer can obscure the secret of self