"Mr. Kipling," said he, "has yet to learn that a man may know more of life staying at home by his mother's knee than swaggering in bad company over three continents."
Nor is successful literature necessarily the record of the successful temperament. Some writers, not a few, owe their significance to the fact that they have found humanly intimate expression for their own failure, or set down their weakness in such a way as to make themselves the consoling companions of human frailty and disappointment through the generations. It is the paradox of such natures that they should express themselves in the very record of their frustration. Amiel may be taken as the type of such writers. In confiding to his Journal his hopeless inability for expressing his high thought, he expressed what is infinitely more valuable to us—himself.
Nor, again, does it follow that the man who thus gets himself individualized in literature is the kind of man we care about or approve of. Often it is quite the contrary, and we may think that it had been just as well if some human types had not been able so forcibly to project into literature their unworthy and undesirable selves. Yet this is God's world, and nothing human must be foreign to the philosophical student of it.
All the "specimens" in a natural history museum are not things of beauty or joy. So it is in the world of books. François Villon cannot be called an edifying specimen of the human family, yet he unmistakably belongs there, and it was to that prince of scalawags that we owe not merely that loveliest sigh in literature—"Where are the snows of yester-year?"—but so striking a picture of the underworld of medieval Paris that without it we should hardly be able to know the times as they were.
The same applies to Benvenuto Cellini—bully, assassin, insufferable egoist, and so forth, as well as artist. If he had not been sufficiently in love with his own swashbuckler rascality to write his amazing autobiography, how dim to our imaginations, comparatively, would have been the world of the Italian Renaissance!
Again, in our own day, take Baudelaire, a personality even less agreeable still—morbid, diseased, if you will, wasting, you may deem, immense poetic powers on revealing the beauty of those "flowers of evil" which had as well been left in their native shade. Yet, it is because he saw them so vividly, cared to see little else, dwelt in his own strange corner of the world with such an intensity of experience, that he is—Baudelaire. Like him or not, his name is "made." A queer kind of man, indeed, but not "only a pen."
Certain writers have made a cult of "impersonality" in literature. They would do their utmost to keep themselves out of sight, to let their subject-matter tell its own tale. But such a feat is an impossibility. They might as well try to get out of their own skins. The mere effort at suppression ends in a form of revelation. Their mere choice of themes and manner of presentation, let them keep behind the scenes as assiduously as they may, will in the end stamp them. However much a man may hide behind his pen, so that indeed his personality, compared with that of more subjective writers, remains always somewhat enigmatic, yet when the pen is wielded by a man, whatever his reticence or his mask, we know that a man is there—and that is all that concerns us.
On the other hand, of course, there are companionable, sympathetic writers whose whole stock-in-trade is themselves, their personal charm, their personal way of looking at things. Of these, Montaigne and Charles Lamb are among the great examples. It matters to us little or nothing what they are writing about; for their subjects, so far as they are concerned, are only important in relation to themselves, as revealing to us by reflection two uncommonly "human" human beings, whom it is impossible to mistake for any one else; just as we enjoy the society of some whimsical talker among our living friends, valuing him not so much for what he says, but for the way he says it, and because it is he, and no one else, that is talking.
Again, there are other men whose names, in addition to their personal suggestion, have an impersonal significance as marking new eras of human development, such as Erasmus or Rousseau or Darwin; men who embodied the time-spirit at crucial moments of world change, men who announced rather than created, the heralds of epochs, men who first took the new roads along which the rest of mankind were presently to travel, men who felt or saw something new for the first time, prophets of dawn while yet their fellows slept.
Sometimes a man will come to stand for a whole nation, like Robert Burns or Cervantes; or a great, half-legendary age of the world, like Homer; or some permanent attitude of the human spirit, like Plato.