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.  Francois 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.