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 can think of, be it Bunyan or Heine, Schopenhauer or Izaak Walton. One has but to cast one's eyes over one's shelves to realize, as we see the familiar names, how literally the books that bear them are living men, merely transmigrated from their fleshly forms into the printed word. Shakespeare and Milton, yes, even Pope; Johnson, Fielding, Sterne, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Dumas, Balzac, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe--their very faces seem to look out at us from the bindings, such vividly human beings were they, with a vision of the world, or a definition of character, so much their own and no one else's. One might almost call them patented human beings--patentees of spiritual discoveries, or of aspects of humanity, whose patents can never be infringed for all our cleverness.