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.

On the other hand, of course, there are companionable, sympathetic
writers whose whole stock-in-trade is themselves, their personal charm,
their personal way of looking at things. Of these, Montaigne and Charles
Lamb are among the great examples. It matters to us little or nothing
what they are writing about; for their subjects, so far as they are
concerned, are only important in relation to themselves, as revealing
to us by reflection two uncommonly "human" human beings, whom it is
impossible to mistake for any one else; just as we enjoy the society of
some whimsical talker among our living friends, valuing him not so much
for what he says, but for the way he says it, and because it is he, and
no one else, that is talking.

Again, there are other men whose names, in addition to their personal
suggestion, have an impersonal significance as marking new eras of human
development, such as Erasmus or Rousseau or Darwin; men who embodied
the time-spirit at crucial moments of world change, men who announced
rather than created, the heralds of epochs, men who first took the new
roads along which the rest of mankind were presently to travel, men who
felt or saw something new for the first time, prophets of dawn while yet
their fellows slept