imilarly, 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 b