its meaning is strengthened by change of voice, glance of eye, movement of hand; and we need only revolve in our thoughts a few homely instances to be assured how vain it is to dispart mind and body. A letter cannot compensate for an absent friend, and a bore is a person whose utterances may be foretold. A twicetold tale will weary, and words that passed almost unnoticed may return and rankle in solitude, and again dissolve like a dream when the speaker is beheld once more in the flesh. A child prefers a story told rather than read from a book, and the very word "lecture" is evilly associated. Gloom envelops a company when a person adopts the lecturer's tone, speaking in a manner once removed from the personalities of his hearers, solving the problem by the help of ready made wisdom instead of that generated by the immediate contact of minds. A great orator creates the illusion in each member of his audience that he is spoken to directly; and a letter writer of genius never loses contact with his correspondent, whether his theme be objective or subjective; whether it be Cowper analyzing his religious melancholy, or Horace Walpole describing the Gordon riots.

The conclusion is that mind and body express each other, and we do not know our fellow creatures by one alone. Because of the few surviving details of his life we do not know Shakespeare, though through the mouths of his characters we have his thoughts on every subject in the world and beyond. Much of the cloud of darkness surrounding Chatham has been dispelled by the discovery of his latest biographer, Mr. Basil Williams, that he was exceptionally grateful for acts of personal kindness. Modern critics like Mr. T. S. Eliot and Mr. J. Middleton Murry affirm that every mental process has its equivalent in the world of sense; indeed Mr. Eliot says that Hamlet remains obscure because Shakespeare failed to find something in the outer world corresponding to the hero's disgust at his mother's conduct. It pleases us to think that the essence of the immortal biography is contained in Dr. Johnson's stentorian call to his servant Frank for a clean shirt, when Boswell had pleaded successfully with Mrs. Williams and the road to the Wilkes dinner party lay open.

The lack of objective correlatives places Emily Brontë among the unknown. Yet the task must not be abandoned, even if we

make only the slight advance of realizing more fully the difficulties that beset us. If personality is the force proceeding from united soul and body made objective by the difficulties which stay it or which it overcomes, we can learn something by inquiring into the nature of the difficulties. We think of Cowper succumbing in his struggle with the wish to believe; FitzGerald self-banished from a world he found too hard; Swift finally baffled in his desire for power and place and retiring to die like a poisoned rat in a hole to use his own phrase; Charlotte Brontë vainly seeking love as a refuge from hypochondria: and in consequence we know much of all these. Then we turn to Gibbon or Wordsworth, both of whom realized their personalities objectively-the one in his history, the other in contemplating nature and giving to his thoughts enduring form. Again, we have a middle class such as Byron and Carlyle, who achieved great fame but remained miserable the one because of his lost social reputation, the other through imperfect faith and despair at the condition of the world. With Emily Brontë there is a break between the operations of her mind as her books reveal it and the few biographical facts that have come down to us. We know that she was the least accessible of the three sisters of genius in the remote Haworth parsonage. She refused all acquaintance beyond her family, and yet was passionately interested in the fortunes of the people about her. As Charlotte says: "She knew their ways, their language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but with them she rarely enchanged a word." At school in Brussels she spoke to no one, and although, with Charlotte, she spent her weekly holiday at the house of an English family, she remained throughout impenetrable to friendly advances. Heger remarked upon her capacity for argument, unusual in a man and rare indeed in a woman; adding that hers was a stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes or her own sense of right were concerned. Mrs. Gaskell described her as reserved in the least favorable sense of the word; that is, indifferent if she pleased or not. When she went as pupil to Roe Head and teacher to a school near Halifax, she succumbed to homesickness, and her year's absence in Brussels was nearly

cut short for the same reason. She loved liberty, she enjoyed passionately the lonely moors, and she loved wild animals because they were wild. Even in the small home circle she had a preference, and we doubt if she responded fully to the affection Charlotte lavished upon her. Charlotte described her as intractable, and observed that to advocate one side of a cause would ensure her adoption of the opposite. She began to write poetry without confiding in Charlotte, and was not pleased by Charlotte's chance discovery of her manuscripts. Perhaps her sister Anne, with a lesser mind, had a more receptive nature, and made a better companion to a woman of genius. To the end of Emily's short life the two played the game of make-believe which they called the Gondal Chronicles. No summary of facts should omit such harrowing details of her death scene as the silence she opposed to questions as to her state, and her refusal until too late to allow a "poisoning doctor" to come near her.

With every wish to estimate Emily favorably, it is hard to do so with the foregoing facts in mind. Exclusive family affection is not a commending trait, and one who persistently declines friendly advances is apt to forfeit human sympathy. In her last illness, had she no thought for the moral sufferings of her sisters when she refused to answer questions or see a doctor? And yet it is only fair to recall Charlotte's saying that she was full of ruth for others though without pity on herself. If we turn from Charlotte's direct sayings to her fictitious and therefore suggestive ones, we are equally baffled. Shirley Keeldar was supposed to represent Emily in happier circumstances, and yet, while external things such as the rich dresses she wore are much dwelt upon, we are not helped in the ultimate object of our search—a human soul made more beautiful on earth by the body.

There is enough to stimulate but not satisfy the imagination. We can picture the pleased expression on her face in solitude when anticipating her sisters' home-coming, the smile with which she greeted them, the especial look she reserved for Anne when they found themselves alone. On the reverse side we can picture the despair in her eyes when one after another came the harsh reviews of Wuthering Heights. But still we lack the actual collision of soul and sense with the outer world to make the vision real.

Life is greater than art, the artist's mind surpasses his work, and the crowd of men, indifferent to art, never desist to seek God in their fellow creatures, though they may know it not. The example of Emily Brontë suggests two problems especially prominent at the present day: personality and hero-worship. Carlyle taught us that hero-worship is the adamant below which unbelief cannot fall; and that if you convince a man he is in the presence of a higher soul his knees are automatically loosened in reverence. Lately Marcel Proust remarked that some people think of society as an Indian caste in which you take your place as you are born, but in reality all is due to personality: the humblest can become the friend of princes, and there are many princes whose acquaintance no one desires.

Carlyle preached the doctrine of work; he predicted a commonwealth of workers, and advised the man who had no work to hide himself; yet he privately admitted true good breeding to be one of the finest things in the world, and remarked the care of wellbred persons to avoid all unpleasant topics in conversation. The two are contradictory, for the effect of strenuous work-other than artistic—is to materialize, and good breeding can only thrive in the soil of leisure. The kind of character developed by the Victorian professional and business man is an answer to those who plead the dignity of work; and the modern desire for education in late life is an attempt to restore the balance of the mind which every profession inevitably disturbs. The duty of work is to overcome difficulties; the powers which it develops are the combative or competitive; whereas the right use of leisure is to promote the growth of the soul-and the greatest soul is that which has the greatest power to love. Good breeding implies that the material struggle has been concluded generations back, that there is no need to compete with others for means of living and so acquire the habit of preferring things to persons. That a leisured class by attaining a certain mental outlook becomes the symbol of a more perfect life, alone justifies its existence in our distracted modern world, and makes the sight of luxury side by side with poverty at all bearable; and the toiling millions still feel an instinctive respect for those who dress finely and bear themselves graciously and do no work, despite the Communist orator.

That leisure and accumulated wealth are daily put to the worst uses is a truth we will not stay to consider in our search for the conditions in which personality may develop. Something has been said of good breeding, but as the highest beauty lies in expression, and the world soon tires of perfect features that lack it, so the long-solved material struggle does but prepare the ground by eliminating gross desires. We return to Proust's saying, and also remember that Becky Sharp climbed the social ladder to be ultimately bored. The soul uses the refined body to suggest a higher beauty; for man seeks God in his fellow creatures, and it was a doctrine of the neo-Platonists that a beautiful person could not be wicked. Hence are those stories eternally fascinating which tell how gods or angels have come down to live with

men.

Thus the world labors to produce a race intermediate between God and man: the body on which generations of leisure have worked as with a chisel, the feelings when not blasted by pride responding to the sorrows of the lowest, the mind touched by those arts and philosophies which add thought to beauty. And to become a member of this race is the crown of all earthly effort, including art. Keats and Shelley were two of the most intense lyricists of all time, yet each laid aside his art before the close of his troubled life because the world would not listen. Surely this tribute of art to life proves that man's deepest desire is to be approved by man. And what exists scattered in the mass of men is brought to a focus in this selected intermediary race. Each carries with him the memory of a human friend transfigured, and all moral codes and material considerations shrink to nothing by contrast with the immediate presence of man. He may be thought insincere, for he neither argues nor contradicts, never speaks a distasteful truth, promises what he cannot perform, and will discard a friend for an unlucky word. Yet through this over-value of mankind we see dimly on the outer edge of society something of heaven on earth, of the reign of love. But always the law holds good that heaven reveals itself through the earthly beauty of line and color: and so we end where we began with Leonardo's saying of the smiling of women.

To the opinions of Carlyle and Proust which have been the