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.
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.