.

Sometimes a man will come to stand for a whole nation, like Robert Burns
or Cervantes; or a great, half-legendary age of the world, like Homer;
or some permanent attitude of the human spirit, like Plato.

No fixed star, great or small, in the firmament of literature ever
got there without some vital reason, or merely by writing, however
remarkable. The idea that literature is a mere matter of writing is seen
to be the hollowest of misconceptions the moment you run over any list
of enduring names. Try any such that you can think of, and in every case
you will find that the name stands for something more than a writer. Of
course, the man had to have his own peculiar genius for writing, but the
peculiarity was but the result of his individual being, his own special
way of living his life or viewing the world.

Take Horace, for example. Does he live merely because of his unique
style, his masterly use of the Latin tongue? By means of that, of
course, but only secondarily. Primarily, he is as alive today as he
was when he sauntered through the streets of Rome, because he was so
absolutely the type of the well-bred man of the world in all countries
and times. He lived seriously in the social world as he found it, and
felt no idealistic craving to have it remoulded nearer to the heart's
desire. He was satisfied with its pleasures, and at one with its
philosophy. Thus he is as much at home in modern Paris or London or
New York as in ancient Rome, and his book is, therefore, forever
immortal as the man of the world's Bible.

Take a name so different as that of Shelley. We have but to speak it
to define all it now stands for. Though no one should read a line of
Shelley's any more, the dream he dreamed has passed into the very
life-blood of mankind. Wherever men strive for freedom, or seek to
attune their lives to the strange spiritual music that breathes through
all things--music that none ever heard more clearly than he--there is
Shelley like the morning star to guide them and inspire.

Think what Wordsworth means to the spiritual thought of the modern
world. In his own day he was one of the most lonely and laughed at of
poets, moping among his lakes and mountains and shepherds. Yet, as
Matthew Arnold said, "we are all Wordsworthians nowadays," and the
religion of nature that he found there for himself in his solitude bids
fair to be the final religion of the modern world.

It is the same with every other great name one