hat, 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 Bjoernson, 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 Bjoernson 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 Bjoernson's employed
other weapons also, such as his gift of oratory, and was generally more
dramatically in evidence. Bjoernson and Ibsen, as we know, did not agree
on a number of things. Thus Bjoernson, 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:

This is no book;
Who touches this touches a man.

I raise the question of reality in literature in no merely academic
spirit. For those who not only love books, but care for literature as a
living t