It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
