phenomenal, and he once told me that its sale had reached 160,000 copies, adding modestly: "I suppose it is the only book of mine that will live." Modestly, and quite wrongly. His little book on Burke is, and will remain, a classic, and the same is probably true of the famous Essay on Compromise. The fate of the others is more doubtful, but so long as there are people who love a style which is "a pure well of English undefiled", they will surely always be read by the elect.

Many writers of late have commented on what they call Lord Morley's "vanity". Vain he certainly was about small things, such as precedence of place on ceremonial occasions; no man, even the greatest, is without weaknesses. But that vanity certainly did not extend to his own literary work; there never was a writer more modest in his estimate of his writings. When he heard that I had been invited by the Editor of The Nineteenth Century to write an appreciation of the Recollections he wrote:

I am downright glad that you care to have my book and care enough about it to think it worth an "estimate" or "appreciation". There is no man whose estimate will interest me more, for I know no other man whose competence and range of knowledge are so wide and well-practised. Perhaps this very thing makes me quake a little, but then I recall your great indulgence to me on many a past occasion and then I quake no more but possess my soul in patience till January.

I wish we could renew our old talks and hope very confidently that we shall. But just now the winds the other day caught me by the larynx and I must cultivate silence for a short season. (28th Nov., 1917).

66

I have said that he was a realist in politics, which is only another way of saying that he had little faith in an idealist interpretation of history. Towards the end of his life, indeed, he had little faith in Progress itself and still less in the working of a moral order in the world. During the War I spoke on one occasion of a Nemesis" in history. "Is there one?" he replied, to which I answered "I mean a moral judgment in history." "I know it's unfashionable among my friends to say it," he retorted, "but I doubt if there is one. And, more often than not, it's a vicarious punishment, if there's punishment at all. It's not the sinner who is punished but his innocent offspring, whether you're dealing with nations or with men. One generation sins, another genera

tion suffers for the sin."

On one occasion the conversation diverged to the Jews:

LORD MORLEY: Are you an anti-Semite?

J. H. M.: No. But I always feel they are different. There's something inscrutable about them.

LORD MORLEY: Ah yes. After all, they are Orientals. Minto said to me the other day "The-(naming a high Oriental potentate) is charming, supple, distinguished: But I feel I never know what he really thinks."

He was, as I have remarked elsewhere, shrewdly critical of Mr. Lloyd-George but, characteristically enough, he did not subscribe to the common criticism that he was too autocratic a Prime Minister in his ignoring of his colleagues in great affairs of State. Morley himself, indeed, when Secretary of State for India, was extremely averse to taking his Council into his confidence—one of them told me that no Secretary of State had ever consulted his Council less and that he had a habit of acting first and asking their opinion afterwards. The following is thus entirely consistent with his own course of action as a Minister:

LORD MORLEY: Curzon doesn't seem to carry weight. Why?

J. H. M.: Because Lloyd-George ignores him. The Prime Minister has usurped the functions of the Secretary of State. The Foreign Office is kept in the dark.

LORD MORLEY: But in a crisis no Cabinet as a whole is ever consulted. I never knew one that was. After all, at such moments as these, LL-G. is right in keeping all the threads in his own hands.

(30th July, 1920).

None the less Lord Morley, with a very human inconsistency, took an entirely different view when it had been his turn to be ignored, and nothing moved him to such wrath as the secret diplomacy, as he called it, of the three Ministers, Haldane, Grey and Asquith, whom he regarded as partly responsible for the sequence of causes which led to the outbreak of the War. As is perhaps pretty well-known, Lord Haldane wrote during the War and circulated privately among his friends a kind of political autobiography, some portion of which, but by no means all, has since been published under the title of Before the War. Lord Haldane circulated it to me, after having previously shown it to Morley, and, when I had read it, the latter asked my opinion of it. My opinion does not matter; the interesting thing is Morley's own. "The severest thing I can say about it," he commented, "is that it's

new to me. Why wasn't I told these things before as a colleague?"

Morley, whose acquaintance with French literature and French politics was peculiarly intimate, had known Clemenceau well, and of many stories of the most combatant of French politicians here is one which exhibits him in his most "tigerish" mood:

Clemenceau is a man who can hate. He hated Gambetta. I was dining with him at the Café de Paris on the night the news of Gambetta's death was being cried on the Boulevards. When he arrived-late-I said to him "Have you heard?" "Ah," he said nonchalantly, "I suppose you mean the death of Gambetta. It is not an event; it's only a piece of news.

One night in the appropriate milieu of the Senior (United Service) Club, of which he was an honorary member, we had a long talk about Napoleon and Wellington. It was an evening not easily to be forgotten, for it was barely a year before his death and, helping him into his coat (with characteristic kindliness he had first insisted on helping, with trembling fingers, me into mine), I was struck with a pang of apprehension at his emaciated arms, the emaciation of extreme old age, and at the frailty of his figure -in startling contrast to the brilliance of his talk at the table only a few minutes earlier. It was as though the mind, like an imprisoned spirit, was already poising for its flight from the fragile tenement of clay.

LORD MORLEY: I have been reading up Napoleonic literature. Do you remember Joseph Bonaparte's melancholy description of Napoleon: "My brother is not a great but a good man"? Surely a momument of fatuity of judgment! Napoleon is as great as he ever was. But Joseph's remark would not have been so foolish if he had limited it to Napoleon's work as a statesman. It was not creative. I should call it "good but not great." And Wellington spoke truly when he said Napoleon was not a gentleman. Tell me, Does Wellington's military reputation still stand high?

J. H. M.: Surely yes.

LORD MORLEY: Ah, I'm glad. Of him as a soldier I cannot speak, but I like his magnanimity. He knew how to be moderate in the hour of victory.

That evening, with its foreboding of deepening shadows, was the last time I saw him, although we corresponded almost to the end. I was rarely in England and, owing to my serving abroad, never except on leave and short leave at that. A few months before the end I wrote to him telling him I was home on leave, and

received in reply a letter the handwriting of which was graceful and flowing, as his handwriting had always been, but the tracery bore painful marks of extreme effort:

It has been a true pleasure to me to hear from you. I wondered if I had been at fault for our long intervals of silence. If so, my only excuse is that I have [been] physically languid and even my plainest duties fall back. Now when shall we meet? Where? Would Friday here at 7 be possible? Or Saturday evening? If not, then propose something, S. V. P. I should never forgive either you or myself if we did not meet-Yours always, M."

But the gods had willed otherwise. A critical situation suddenly called me back to Berlin. I never saw him again. JOHN H. MORGAN.

London.

EMILY BRONTË: THE PROBLEM

OF PERSONALITY

BY AUGUSTUS RALLI

EMILY BRONTE is among the great ones whom it is said that we do not know, and the curiosity that seeks to know more of a writer than his works reveal has been condemned as unworthy. We are told that since he has expressed his mind, and so given his best to the world, we should not hunt after mere personal details. That this objection sounds more plausible than it is, and the modern instinct to make biography intimate is not a mistaken one, is the task here set before us to prove.

To

Let us realize in the beginning that art is a social virtue, that the ultimate reward of all success is social success, and that man is incomplete till he has expressed not only his mind but his personality. The supreme fact of life is personality, and its expression can be attained only by contact with men and women. win battles, sway senates, discover new lands, write immortal verse: beyond all these, beyond even the mind's satisfaction in exercising its powers, is the approval of such as have done like things, is admission sought and won into the Paradise of this world-the kind glances of fair women and brave men. Disraeli's social success pleased him as much as his political, and there have been great men without personal magnetism, such as the American General Grant, or Jenner of vaccination fame. An aristocracy of pure intellect will never possess the earth, and the unkempt man of genius no longer excites admiring wonder. While man inhabits the earth he consists of body as well as mind; the ascetic ideal that despises the body as a clog to the spirit is rejected; and the modern culture of the body implies that it is a means of expressing the soul. Did not Leonardo da Vinci say that one of the two most wonderful sights in the world was the smiling of women?

Plato commended the spoken above the written word, because