y 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."

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--