The difference of opinion between Mr. Brailsford and the New Republic about the policy which the Allies ought to pursue with regard to Austria-Hungary does not originate in any divergence in political values. We believe no less than he does in the creation of a League of Nations as the major political object of the war. For the western democracies all other objectives should derive their justification and importance chiefly from their tendency to help or hinder the formation and the survival of such a League. If nothing is done at the peace conference and thereafter to bring it into existence, the western democracies will, in a political sense, have lost the war no matter how complete the military victory gained by their armies over those of Germany. This League of Nations must, if it is to survive, constitute at least the beginning of an international society; and a society, national or international, consists fundamentally in groups of people who feel the need of cooperation, whose spirit of cooperation is expressed in some measure of definite community of purpose and who, when they differ, seek to adjust their differences by discussion and investigation. A new map of Europe would be either futile or mischievous without a new society of nations. The wisdom of all the territorial changes which may or may not result from the war, must be tested chiefly by their probable effect upon subsequent social relations among nations. If they create or perpetuate permanent grievances which act as a barrier to the discussion by peoples of their differences they cannot be justified. Conference is the only living alternative to war. The future of civilization depends on the substitution of international government obtained through conference by consent for trial by battle.

Mr. Brailsford and the New Republic agree, then, in principle. The difference between us is a question of method, although it is an enormously important question of method. In his opinion the policy of dismembering Austria-Hungary, if embodied in the treaty of peace, would wreck any chance of securing the willing consent of the German people now and hereafter to the settlement. They would regard it as an intolerable injury and an insufferable humiliation." It would, consequently, prohibit the formation of a League of Nations. In our opinion, on the contrary, the policy of emancipating the subject nationalities of Austria-Hungary from the military domination of the German-Magyar block, promises to remove perhaps the greatest single barrier which exists on the European continent to the eventual formation of a League of Nations and to the substitution of conference for war as the instrument for adjusting international differences and accomplishing international reformation.

We have reached this conclusion only after prolonged hesitation and the utmost reluctance. We distrust as much as he does the chauvinism and the indifference to the rights of minorities which has usually characterized the political attitude of the minor Slavic nationalities. Their aspirations have been used by those political leaders in the Allied countries who wished to impose an essentially punitive treaty of peace on Germany and to leave her defenseless against possible future attack. Their political pretensions were absolutist in spirit and offered an apparently poor prospect that they would use sovereign independence in a spirit of international accommodation. The federal alternative to independence was persuasive. It seemed at one time to offer an opportunity of dividing Austria-Hungary from Germany. Before the war powerful forces were at work within the Dual Empire on behalf of a federal solution. Moderate opinion was restive under the

prospect of as much permanent subjection to Germany as even the maintenance of the existing Empire was coming to demand, and this restiveness increased during the first two years and a half of the war. Important classes in Austria-Hungary, headed by the Emperor himself, were willing to offer large concessions to Allied liberalism and to Slavic national aspirations in order to prevent AustriaHungary from becoming a German satrapy. For these and other reasons a federal solution which brought with it an effective measure of autonomy for the subject nationalities, seemed to offer a more effective and cheaper method of counteracting German aggression than a policy of dismemberment.

The federal solution was, however, never free from one serious ambiguity. Did it involve the possible or partial control of the federalized Empire and its foreign policy by the representatives of a Slavic majority of the population? Or would the foreign policy of the Empire and consequently its army continue to be controlled by the Austrian-Hungarian ruling classs through the existing expedient of vesting responsibility for it in the Emperor? This ambiguity persists in the memorandum on war aims, adopted by the Inter-Allied Socialist Conference, which "does not propose the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary," but which does demand for the minor Slav nationalities the opportunity of substituting if they see fit " a free federation of Danubian States for the Austro-Hungarian Empire." If the federal solution brought with it a parliament which enabled the Slavs to exercise an influence on foreign policy commensurate with their numbers, or if it did not involve the perpetuation of the existing power of the German-Magyar ruling class to force the Slavs to fight on behalf of a foreign policy about which they were never consulted, then we would prefer federalism to dismember

ment.

As we understand it, however, the difference between federalism and dismemberment turns chiefly upon the agency through which is exercised this control of the foreign policy and the armed forces of the Empire. Federalism means the vesting of the hereditary kingship of all the states of the Empire in the Hapsburg family and in Hapsburg control of the foreign policy and of the national armies as a part of the Imperial and royal prerogative. If it meant anything less than that the Germans would object to federalism just as tenaciously and fiercely as they would object to dismemberment. What they want and need is the ability to compel the Austrian Slavs to fight for a foreign policy dictated from Berlin. The advantage which they have obtained and wish to perpetuate by keeping the Austria-Hungarian Empire intact is primarily military. The legal right to conscript these Slavic peoples not only insures the safety of the two Empires against any ordinary attack, but it makes of them the most formidable military force in Europe, one which is powerful enough to be used as the instrument of aggressive political purposes. As long as the German-Magyar hegemony persists in its present form, it tends to pervert every political into a military problem and to make a struggle for the Balance of Power dominate all other aspects of European politics.

Before the Russian Revolution there was a plausible reason for regarding the Dual Empire with toleration, if not with approval, in spite of its injustice to the Slavs and its alliance with Germany. Autocratic Russia, with its uneasy ambitions and its hordes of conscript soldiers, constituted a military danger, against which any prudent German statesman would be justified in erecting the most formidable possible military safeguard. If the war had terminated in 1916 with the result of placing the Russian autocracy in political control not only of Poland, but of Constantinople, an enlarged Rumania, an emancipated Bohemia, and a renewed Jugo-Slavia, the German peoples would have been left practically defenseless. They would have been justified in doing what they could to avoid such a consummation or to overthrow it. But the Russian Revolution, resulting as it has in republicanizing and disintegrating the older Russia, has done away with the threat from which the Germans suffered and the excuse for counteracting it by insisting on the military control of 30,000,000 Slavs. The most serious obstacle to the substitution of political for military considerations in rearranging the distribution of military and political power in Central Europe has been removed. The dismemberment of AustriaHungary will no longer involve the automatic aggrandizement of Black Russia. Neither will it involve any necessary or considerable insecurity for the German people. The danger of a Pan-Slav combination subordinated to the influence of a military autocracy has passed. The difficulty has now more than ever become that of protecting the disorganized Slavs against the power and the designs of their powerful, united and determined German and Hungarian neighbors.

It may be answered that German statesmanship has the future to consider. It must insist upon military control over the Austrian Slavs, because it cannot count upon the continued inoffensiveness of the huge mass of the Russian people. The answer is discredited by recent German policy in the East. That policy betrays, not the fear of being subjugated by the Slavs but a plain resolution to increase their subjugation. It was not designed to win the friendship or perpetuate the existence of an inoffensive Russian republic or to suggest a durable and equitable settlement of the national and racial problems of Central Europe or to promote the peace and security of the world. On the contrary, German statesmanship wrote a treaty which offered the Russian people a choice between subjection to German domination or a long process of national recovery and resistance which at the end might make the Russian masses more dangerous because better organized and more aggressive than they had been under the Tsar. It deliberately took advantage of the helplessness, the revolutionary disorganization and the political incompetence and credulity of the new Russia in order to begin the subjugation of the Lithuanians, the Poles and the Little Russians much as the Austrian-Hungarian combination had already subjugated the Bohemians and the Jugo-Slavs. Germany's policy in Russia is clearly the blood relative of the Austro-Hungarian policy towards its subject nationalities. It has justified the western democracies in associating the liberation of the border provinces from Germany with the liberation of the Czechs and the Croats from Austria-Hungary. It is no longer a question of tolerating the Hapsburg Empire as a dubious but excusable agency for the protection of German civilization against a threatening Pan-Slavism. Rather has it become a question of breaking up the Austrian Empire as a means of protecting the Slavs against a frank and preponderant Pan-Germanism. The Germans have erected their Eastern policy into an impassable barrier against the organization of a League of Nations, and in doing so they have only applied to the situation on their own border the principles underlying the Austrian Empire. By consenting to the Brest-Litovsk treaties, the Hapsburg Emperor Charles sealed the bond of subjection of his own dynasty to Pan-Germanism, committed himself finally to a policy of frustrating Slavic national aspirations

and accepted the German army as the mainstay of the Austrian Empire against Slavic insurrection.

He had sought, it is true, to escape from such a complete surrender of his independence, but circumstances were too much for him. Allied diplomacy offered him no sufficient support in his effort to regain his freedom of political action. But it is questionable how far such freedom was possible. Dubious as the behavior of Allied diplomacy was in the Prince Sixtus negotiations, its failure was the not unnatural result of the actual facts of Austria-Hungary's position with respect to Germany. The war would never have occurred had not German statesmen feared for the future of German influence in the Dual Empire. For this reason they either instigated or supported the fatal ultimatum to Serbia. Their only remaining chance of winning the war depends upon completing the conquest of their ally and upon the legal right to give wider application to the principle on which the Dual Empire rests. Surely the answer on the part of the western democracies is to support those minor Slavic nationalities in Austria-Hungary whose development would be frustrated by German success.

We are fully alive to the dangers and penalties of the adoption of such a policy. It will prolong the war and necessitate a larger measure of military victory before Germany will negotiate. Moderate Germans will for the present consider the imposition of such terms as insufferable and will resent them bitterly. If this resentment continues the peace of the world will be rendered insecure, and instead of a League of Nations we shall have a war after the war. But the alternative policy brings with it more injustice and no less insecurity. Now that the issue has been so sharply raised by Germany, how can Allied statesmanship consent to the perpetuation of the existing German-Hungarian political domination of the minor Slav nationalities? It is precisely the kind of oppression which the Germans are perpetrating against the Slavs, which is the most frequent and most irresistible cause of international unrest. No form of autonomy or federation under Hapsburg leadership which has yet been suggested will remove the cause of this unrest. It cannot be removed except by putting an end to a system which gives the German-Hungarian combination the legal right to force the Slavs to fight on behalf of a foreign policy over which they are not allowed to exercise any control. As long as any of the great states live by the exercise of this right, a League of Nations which included such a state would pay the same price for its inclusion as the American Union paid for the inclusion of slave states. An international league, if it is to survive, must provide particular peoples with the opportunity of self-development, secured by legal sanction. Is there any more drastic and intolerable way of balking national self-development than that of authorizing a ruling class or race to force subject peoples to fight against their will for a foreign policy which, in so far as it was successful, would confirm their subjugation?

But the war aim of dismembering Austria-Hungary would, according to Mr. Brailsford, have the intolerable result of redrawing the map of Europe on the lines of secret treaties, and this result would take place in spite of anything which the President could do to prevent it. Here again does he not fail to calculate sufficiently on the effect of the Russian revolution in altering the balance of political and economic forces? The execution of those treaties depended ultimately on the victorious and preponderant military force of autocratic Russia. That military force has ceased to exist. The only force which has taken its place is American economic and military power. If the Allies secure a military victory decisive enough to dismember the Dual Empire, they must depend on the American army to do the job. Suppose, then, that they used a victory won chiefly by American troops in order to put into effect treaties which violate the spirit and letter of the President's war programme. The President would, it is true, have no retort except that of withdrawing from a European system which rested on a basis of violence and injustice, but why should the retort be as ineffective as Mr. Brailsford insists? A victory won by American power will need American power to secure its fruits. Italy and France may not want a League of Nations, but they will want the security for a settlement of the war favorable to themselves which only a League of Nations can give. If America resumes her isolation and refuses to assume any responsibility for a new European system which, no matter how much the map is changed, restores the status quo ante of an unscrupulous competition for power, the settlement will have small chance of enduring for more than a few years.

Those Allied statesmen who are so willing to dispense with the idea of a League of Nations during the war will not be equally obdurate when it comes to writing a peace. If they are they will be superseded. In the absence of a powerful Russian army they will not dare to propose an Eastern settlement which, like that defined in the secret treaties, must rest on force rather than on consent. They cannot exert the force which the perpetuation of such a system would require. Their only chance of counteracting the existing preponderance of force which the Germans are capable of exerting in relation to all near Eastern political questions is to propose a solution which could be guaranteed by a League of Nations, and which would embody an honest effort to satisfy and to reconcile the complicated political and economic needs of that region. A solution of this kind would demand the union, so far as possible, of the CzechoSlovaks, the Jugo-Slavs, the Poles, the Rumanians, the Hungarians and the Bulgarians under one political authority. It would demand a constitution which would protect the national culture of those minorities whom it would not be geographically possible to unite politically with their fellow nationals. Finally it would demand a federal organization which would facilitate inter-state commerce and provide for military defense. If the new states were incapable of federating they could not preserve their independence for long, and it would be the general apprehension of this danger which would supply a strong motive for bringing federation into existence and trying to make it work. If such a federation could be formed it would have every advantage over a federation under Hapsburg leadership except that of tradition. For it would mean the satisfaction of national aspirations instead of their frustration. A Danubian federation which provided a place for the principle of national self-determination could endure. A federation under Hapsburg control which violated that principle would not endure.

There remains the no less formidable difficulty of the German resentment which the dismemberment of AustriaHungary must provoke. Will this resentment erect, as Mr. Brailsford believes, an impassable obstacle to the organization of a League of Nations? The answer to this question will depend upon the extent to which the resentment is justified by the actual harm which the German people will suffer as a consequence of dismemberment. The "subjective" test which Mr. Brailsford applies is not sufficient. Domineering people who convince themselves of the righteousness of some unrighteous but profitable institution or practice always resent it when they are forced to reform, but if the reform is justified their resentment disappears and

communication is ultimately resumed. In this particular case we are unable to understand why German resentment should prevent the Allies from seeking to right a wrong which is so closely connected with the origin of the war and upon whose perpetuation and development the Germans base their remaining hopes of victory.

Neither can we understand how any "true conference" can take place among the belligerents as long as either Germany or Austria will not abandon the right to force the Slavic peoples to fight on behalf of German Imperialism. A conference is profitable in so far as the conferees are ready to reach an adjustment of their differences based on a joint definition of purpose and an agreement as to what the pertinent facts are. The Germans are not ready to accept those principles which a League of Nations must embody or fail. They are not willing to substitute a politics of consent for a politics of power, and there can be no better proof of this than the importance which they attach to the right to conscript the Austrian Slavs. The exercise of that right is a peculiarly flagrant example of the very Machtpolitik which a League of Nations must destroy in order to live. As long as the Germans insist upon it, there can be no meeting of minds, no mutual confidence, no conference that would result in anything but unprincipled compromise. If the League of Nations is to endure it cannot begin by sacrificing justice to peace, particularly in a matter which penetrates to the heart of the problem of a European international concert.

The most serious objection to insisting on the dismemberment of Austro-Hungary is not the penalty of German resentment, for if the resentment is not justified it will eventually fade away. It is the danger of a possible abuse on the French front or in Asia or Africa of the measure of military victory without which dismemberment can not be brought about. In so far as victory is so abused, all the consequences predicted by Mr. Brailsford will follow, and there will be a real danger of abuse unless the Allies agree upon and publish a joint statement of war aims similar to that of the Inter-Allied Socialist Conference. But we have to deal with our difficulties in the order of their relative imminence and importance. Just at present the most important business of the Allies is not only to defeat the clearly aggressive purpose for which the Germans are fighting, but so far as possible to dry up the sources of their aggression. The Allies will not succeed as the automatic result of military victory in doing away with the international anarchy which makes for war, but by emancipating the Austrian Slavs they can put an end to the irresistible temptation of the German-Hungarian combination to play power politics. That is an obstacle to a society of nations which a military victory can remove, and which nothing but a military victory or a successful revolution can remove. The other danger of a vindictive treaty of peace which would perpetuate instead of undermining the politics of force will remain to be dealt with when it actually arises.

We do not place a low estimate on the seriousness of this danger. But on Mr. Brailsford's solution the human motives behind it would persist and obtain a different expression. The abuse by the Allies of military victory is not the only way of perpetuating the politics of force. Those individuals and classes in all the belligerent countries that profit by Machtpolitik will do their best in any event to keep war alive after the fighting is over. Whatever the outcome democrats will have to contend with all their resources against the determination of these Machtpolitiker to deprive the peoples of the world of the liberation from militarism which they crave as the result

1

of their colossal sufferings. In our opinion democrats will enjoy a better opportunity of winning their fight, in case they can manage as one of the aims of the war to free the Slavic peoples of Central Europe from German political and military domination. The achievement would in itself tend to release and invigorate the democratic movement throughout the world. It would deprive the exponents of power politics of the most effective arguments in favor of large armaments and a foreign policy which tried to counteract fear by aggression.

The true conference," in which alone, as Mr. Brailsford says, a durable League of Nations will originate, can hardly take place until after the fight between democratic and power politics has taken place in the several belligerent countries, and the democrats have won some measure of victory. The best we shall probably get out of the peace conference is the beginning of a League of Free Nations, which the Junkers all over the world will resolve to destroy and the democrats to confirm and develop. Democrats, if they want their society of nations, must win their domestic conflict, and when it is won call the nations together and enter into a true conference "-one in which the nations and classes represented will not be seeking to take advantage of each other or of the masses, but will be honestly trying to work out a basis of human cooperation. We hope and believe such a conference will eventually be called, but that the delegates which the existing governments will appoint to discuss terms of peace will live up to any such specifications is, we feel sure, as pathetic and baseless" an illusion as any idealist can cherish. They may and probably will be forced to build an informal and temporary fore-court through which the nations will eventually enter into their international mansion, but the mansion itself will have to wait until some of the bitterness of the war is tempered and until the Prussians within the gates are defeated. Let us not, then, sacrifice too much in order to obtain a quick conference in the vain hope that it will be a "true conference. There can be no true conference until the power politicians who control so many existing governments are superseded, and that will not take place during war. Only the processes of peace will enable men to restore to the world the needed opportunity to realize their longings for freedom, justice and truth. But let us be sure that peace means pacification that it deals in a thoroughgoing way with the issue as to the hegemony in Central Europe raised by the immediate outbreak of the war and emphasized by its whole military and political development. THE EDITORS.

CORRESPONDENCE

Bursting with Liberty

SIR: The two articles that have appeared in the New

Republic, An Independent College of Social Science and, what seems to be an ancillary discourse, Social Science and Culture, seem to me to evince a depressing sense of complacency. I cannot but feel that such ideas applied to any institution of learning would produce a place of doctrinaires only and vocationalists. Ex pede Herculem.

I question if a school without an administrative system would be possible. Surely men who have succeeded in the world of affairs ought to know best, also how to conduct, through a president and dean and committees, the running of a college; better surely than a group of specialists in

mere learning. And under the scheme proposed for the new so-called college, what would become of those rewards for the students' labors and those time-hallowed incitements to noble endeavor that are represented by grades and prizes and honors? Would Phi Beta Kappa grant such an institution a charter for a chapter? Hardly. I am reminded of Aristotle's remark about that charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, where the ass thinks himself as good as the rider, the pupil as the master, everything being about to burst with liberty.

Furthermore, the classical arrangement is needed for discipline. I admit the enthusiasm of certain present-day students for semi-journalistic and contemporaneous subjects, such as economics or modern literature. But there is undoubtedly a falling off in study for its own sake.

And how are these students when they come to write of their subject matter to possess any style? I have long observed that some journalists have a striking vocabulary, considering that they have had no university training; but, after all, the style is truly the man, as Buffon pointed out; and the philosopher Locke says that there are many sorts of men. There is no branch of study so suitable as the classical is to attain to the clearness of style which is necessary in so many ways to secure the meanings of authors to be as clear as they need.

And, worst of all, I believe that students working in such an unadministrated institution and in such a limited demesne would inevitably be filled with that unrest which threatens our incoming generations; class hatred, vulgar subject matter, sensational and crude detail, and violations of taste and standard. How far, indeed, would a public servant evolved from such a school be from a man like Gladstone, for example, who, under the benefits of a sound cultural training and the influence of the Christian womanhood of his queen, wrought so nobly to preserve the sobriety and dignity of the social order.

Perhaps we of the traditional order, confronted with this new scheme, will have to say if I may be permitted a bit of levity by way of conclusion-with the old man in Plautus, translating the passage into our familiar idiom: "To the extent to which my age permits and as there arises occasion to do so, I will push on my steps and hasten to get along. But how far away from easy 'tis for me I am not mistaken as to that."

But I am of those who are far from convinced of such a change in education.

S

Providence, Rhode Island.

ACADEMICUS.

Insignia for the Rejected

IR: Having heard of your reputation of taking up through your pages any case where right or justice has been denied, I would like to call your attention to the case of our boys who are anxious and willing to enlist in the service of their country, but have been rejected.

They are being subjected daily to mortification and humiliation, and are being mistaken and reproached as slackers by those who do not understand their position.

Should they not have some insignia to show that they have offered their lives, as well as their more fortunate companions who have been accepted? To relegate them to war work in airplane factories with old men and slackers, with no recognition, rank or uniform tends to break the boys' spirit and is a loss to the country.

A DISHEARTENED PATRIOT.

are

Nonsense, we say of 1886 in 1918, when even the meanest of God's creatures is aware that Miss Austen's and Miss Brontë's " points of similarity are exactly three: both were women, both wrote novels, the novels of both were published in the nineteenth century. Their " points of contrast " all the differences between the world of high comedy and the world of passion and of stormy landscape. Nothing could be more apparent and less important than both difference and similarity. Miss Brontë's inability to appreciate Miss Austen is a fact without significance. What she said of Miss Austen, whom she disesteemed, is not so wide of the mark as what she said of Thackeray, whom she admired. She deemed Thackeray's " an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognized," she regarded him as "the first social regenerator of the day," she said "he resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture." Her literary opinions are worth recalling only because they count so little in the total impression that she leaves, only because the same woman who could write of Thackeray so strangely could study his face, in an engraving sent her by Mr. George Smith, and make a good guess at his character.

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Charlotte Brontë, as we all agree now, was an in-andouter. She had her terrible off days. She could be innocently guilty of the Blanche Ingram scenes in Jane Eyre. When "punch" was her goal she could write like this: "Up the blood rushed to his face; forth flashed the fire from his eyes; erect he sprang; he held his arms out [shouldn't it have been "out he held his arms " out his arms he held"?]; but I evaded his embrace, and at once quitted the room." What do these things matter? Could she not also say, when in an infrequent mood of delicate fancy, and when a splendid midsummer shone over England," that " it was as if a band of Italian days had come from the south, like a flock of glorious passenger birds, and lighted to rest them on the cliffs.

."?

One likes to remember the passage in which Mrs. Gaskell tells of her visit to Haworth parsonage in 1853, the year before Miss Brontë's marriage: "But now to return to our quiet hour of rest after dinner. I soon observed that her habits of order were such that she could not go on with the conversation if a chair were out of place; everything was arranged with delicate regularity." And it is this orderly spinster who makes Jane Eyre, not long after her "thin crescent-destiny" has begun to enlarge, speak of "that something which used to make me fear and shrink, as if I had been wandering amongst volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground quiver, and seen it gape." A misplaced chair put her out, and her imagination was at home upon volcanic-looking hills! How did this imagination work its miracles? She has told us as much as she could tell. Mrs. Gaskell, surprised by the vividness with which the effects of opium are described in Villette, asked whether she had ever taken opium. Charlotte "replied that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted

when she had to describe anything that had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling asleep-wondering what it was like, or how it would be till at length, sometimes after her story had been arrested at this point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it happened." A flawed artist, no doubt, but one whose enormities, whose occasional magniloquence and unrealities and atrocious phrases, do not spoil our interest in her story, or keep us from seeing that her hatred of "tame, vacant life" was without flaw, that her books are an honest and often a splendid hymn in praise of the "good, true, vigorous" passion that strikes its roots deep and lives long. And let us not forget, however often people may bore us by repeating it, that she was a great innovator. She discovered the plain heroine. She discovered the frank heroine who sometimes told her love. In English fiction wasn't she one of the two pioneers in whose work we find the first impassioned rendering of the modern intimacy between man and landscape? As for Sir Walter Scott and Mrs. Radcliffe, much as their men and women observe and enjoy landscape, he did not try for and she did not achieve the degree of intimacy which is so high and so modern in the Brontës.

The other pioneer was Emily Brontë, born a hundred years ago, two years after Charlotte. Mrs. Gaskell's life revealed Charlotte Brontë, and since it appeared several hundred letters have been published. They better our acquaintance with Charlotte. In the letters to Miss Nussey we can learn, almost week by week, her first, second, third, fourth impressions of the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate, whom she was afterward to marry and love. Mrs. Gaskell told us ever so much less about Emily, and this little is still almost all that we know. Her published letters are still only two. Mme. Duclaux has added one unforgettable picture of Emily's dying. A hundred and thirty-eight poems, more than half of them discovered by Mr. Clement Shorter, have come to light. But of new material that is mere information we have next to nothing. It is not by any satisfactions of curiosity that her fame has grown. She is still as remote and unknowable as she was when alive.

This inaccessibility has helped her fame. Her eulogists have helped it. The impression made by Matthew Arnold's praise and by Swinburne's deepens all the time. M. Maeterlinck has added to theirs his own more penetrating and more curious praise. Miss May Sinclair has destroyed many myths in The Three Brontës, a delightful witty book, rich in insight and contagious generosities, though here and there a little fanciful, and mostly pitched in too high a key. With the newly discovered poems as a guide Miss Sinclair has mounted the stream and visited the springs of Emily's imagination. And yet, when we speak of Emily, the best we can do with any certitude is to repeat what Matthew Arnold wrote, that her "soul knew no fellow for might, passion, vehemence, grief, daring, since Byron died." She belonged, as do Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, to "the true aristocracy of passionate souls," and the passion in all three has a depth and reach and integrity far beyond Byron's. Her genius, austere, intense, mystical, made Wuthering Heights like a piece of granite that surprisingly grows, twisted and glowing, out on the moors that she loved with all her solitary heart, and where the high winds put the last touch to her isolation.

P. L.