and the heights must have dared them, not merely as visitors, but as awestricken inhabitants.  Similarly, those who would write about the plain, the long, low levels of commonplace human life, must have dwelt in them, have possessed the dreary, unlaurelled courage of the good bourgeois, have known what it is to live out the day just for the day’s sake, with the blessed hope of a reasonably respectable and comfortable conclusion.

Probably it seldom occurs to us to think what a tremendously rooted life is needed to make even one lasting lyric, though the strangeness of the process is but the same strangeness that accompanies the antecedent preparation of a flower.

          How many suns it takes
          To make one speedwell blue—­

was no mere fancy of a poet.  It is a fact of the long sifting and kneading to which time subjects the material of its perfect things.

One could not get a better example of what I mean than Lovelace’s song To Lucasta, Going to the Wars, without which no anthology of English verse could possibly be published.  Why does generation after generation say over and over, and hand on to its children: 

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honour more.

Is it merely because it is so well written, or because it embodies a highly moral sentiment suitable to the education of young men?  No, it is because the sword and the pen for once met together in the hand of a man, because a soldier and a lover and a poet met together in a song.  One might almost say that Lovelace wrote his lyric first with his sword, and merely copied it out with his pen.  At all events, he was first a man and incidentally a poet; and every real poet that ever sang, whether or not he wielded the weapons of physical warfare, has been just the same.  Otherwise he could not have been a poet.

When one speaks of the man behind the pen, one does not necessarily mean that the writer must be a man of dominant personality, suggestive in every sentence of “the strenuous life,” and muscle, and “punch.”  Literature might be described as the world in words, and as it takes all kinds of men to make a world, so with the world of literature.  All we ask is that we should be made aware of some kind of a man.  Numerous other qualities besides “the punch” go to the making of living literature, though blood and brawn, not to say brutality, have of late had it so much their own way in the fashionable literature of the day—­written by muscular literary gentlemen who seem to write rather with their fists than their pens—­that we are in danger of forgetting the reassuring truth.

J.M.  Barrie long ago made a criticism on Rudyard Kipling which has always stayed by me as one of the most useful of critical touchstones.

“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.”