THE MAN BEHIND THE PEN
Bulwer's deservedly famous phrase, "The pen is mightier than the sword," beneath its surface application, if you think it over, has this further suggestion to make to the believer in literature—that, as the sword is of no value as a weapon apart from the man that wields it, so, and no less so, is it with the pen. A mere pen, a mere sword—of what use are they, save as mural decorations, without a man behind them?
And that recalls a memory of mine, which, as both great men are now drinking wine in Valhalla out of the skulls of their critics, there can be no harm in recalling.
Some years ago I was on an unforgettable visit to Björnson, at his country home of Aulestad, near Lillehammer. This is not the moment to relive that beautiful memory as a whole. All that is pertinent to my present purpose is a remark in regard to Ibsen that Björnson flashed out one day, shaking his great white mane with earnestness, his noble face alight with the spirit of battle. We had been talking of his possibly too successful attempt to sever Norway from Sweden, and Ibsen came in somehow incidentally.
"Ibsen," said he, "is not a man. He is only a pen."
There is no necessity to discuss the justice of the dictum. Probably, if ever there was a man behind a pen, it was Ibsen; but Ibsen's manhood concentrated itself entirely behind his pen, whereas Björnson's employed other weapons also, such as his gift of oratory, and was generally more dramatically in evidence. Björnson and Ibsen, as we know, did not agree on a number of things. Thus Björnson, like a human being, was unjust. But his phrase was a useful one, and I am using it. It was misapplied to Ibsen; but, put in the form of a question, I know of no better single test to apply to writers, dead or alive, than—
"Is this a man? Or is it only a pen?"
Said Walt Whitman, in his familiar "So Long" to Leaves of Grass:
Camerado, this is no book;
Who touches this touches a man.
And, of course, Walt was right about his own book, whether you like the man behind Leaves of Grass or not; but also that assertion of his might be chalked as a sort of customs "O.K." on all literary baggage whatsoever that has passed free into immortality. There is positively no writer that has withstood the searching examination of time, on whose book that final stamp of literary reality may not be placed. On every classic, Time has scrawled ineffaceably: