LONDON

JAMES NISBET & CO., LIMITED

22 BERNERS STREET, W.

1913

_First published in_ 1913




PREFACE


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. Artifice and imitation reveal the finikin or uncertain
soul as surely as deliberate bareness reveals a conscious austerity.
Except, perhaps, in mathematics, there seems no escape from this
revelation. I am told that even in the "exact sciences" there is no
escape; even in physics the exposition is a matter of imagination, of
personality, of "style."