mouth. He felt a strong thrill in all his being when he came to the last words: "Monsieur Brion, it is with sincere emotion that I have the honor to ask the hand of Mademoiselle your daughter for my grandson."

Then Yan heard the grave voice of Monsieur Brion pronounce the words which made his heart warm.

"I do not think I deceive myself, dear Monsieur Duvignan, in declaring that Florence is quite disposed to become your daughter-in-law."

Then, suddenly, Florence rose.

"On one condition," she cried, and her eyes shone through tears.

Emile trembled. The deputy was startled.

Yan himself felt a great anxiety clutching at his heart.

"Yes, I wish to marry Monsieur Emile," said the young girl, “but-I repeat it-only on one condition. It is that Yan shall return to all his old habits, and be a Gascon peasant once more."

Saying this, Florence went to Yan, threw her arms about him and kissed him. "Speak your patois, Yan," she said, "dress like a peasant, eat the mesture, and laugh and sing with your good old comrades. Dieu bibos tres. I think I am going to be the mistress here," and she turned tenderly to Emile.

Florence had divined all the tortures of the old man.

And Monsieur Brion, who had learned a lesson at the election the day before, thought, "It's a good idea to conciliate the working-classes." He said cheerfully: "This dear child is right! Don't put yourself out of your old ways, Yan. Become a peasant again if it suits you better. There is a great deal that is good in the manners of our rural population."

Yan felt within him such a burst of happiness when he heard these words,

Gascon, "Oh, moun Dieu! Oh, moun Dieu !"

He clasped his hands and raised his eyes. He felt in his heart such a vehement spasm of joy that it stifled him. It seemed as if all the delights of Heaven had suddenly descended on this enchanted Bignaon. Every one wept. Every one embraced him. The same delirium turned all heads.

When Yan, in spite of his feeble limbs, felt a desire to move, Florence sprang up to aid him. Emile rose, and the deputy left his place. Even the servant was so overcome with emotion that he swallowed two glasses of brandy.

"But I did not suffer so very much," said Yan, who modestly wished to dissemble his joy. "No! I was quite comfortable, I assure you. If you would only allow me to take off this coat." And he went very slowly to get his old blue blouse that he had not worn for a month. Oh, it was like a bath of ease and delight to his old shoulders!

"There, now I am warm and so comfortable-and if you will allow me I will put on my sabots." And he found his heavy wooden shoes in the bottom of a closet, his comfortable sabots that each weighed two pounds at least.

"Ah, now how pleasant, how much better than those barbarous shoes of goat skin! And Gascon-do you want me to speak some Gascon to you? Dieu biban! how much good it does to my tongue. Oh, the angels must speak Gascon in Heaven!"

Florence answered him in his own tongue, laughing.

"See since they speak it already on earth!" said the old man gallantly.

He had been a wit, formerly, in Gascon. He held fast to the table with both hands, for his happiness made him dizzy.

"At the wedding I will sing you a

"Sing now," all cried together. "Well, first let me take a pinch of snuff." He took some tobacco and drew it in with the old delicious sensation.

He began to sing a joyous folk-song.

"On the bridge at Toulouse three maidens stood!"

His voice faltered, his head dropped on the table and he uttered a groan. A pain stabbed his heart.

"Papa-what is it?" cried Emile, un

easily.

"Oh, papa!" exclaimed Florence. Yan did not answer. His eyes were closed, and his face flushed.

"The doctor" said Monsieur Brion. "The curé!" murmured Yan.

Yan began to shiver. All his limbs shook like the branches of an old tree. "I want to live now," he said, "to live to be happy."

He made Emile take him to the crucifix in his room and he drank the holy water with fervor. But his knees bent under him. He felt the ebb of life. He wished to be laid in the spot where his old room had been situated-the room where he had been born and where his ancestors had died. It was no longer recognizable. A door and a bit of the old ceiling were all that remained. It was a sort of lumber-room in the new Bignaon-but Yan wished to go there. He gazed at that corner of the ceiling and did not move his eyes from that place.

A half an hour afterward a silvery bell sounded. Yan recognized that bell.

The priest, clothed in white, had brought for him, across the sunny fields, the pardon of God for his dying hour.

The silvery ringing came nearer and Florence trembled as if she were about to see Death enter.

"Papa, you must live!" she moaned. "No-it is better for me to die," said Yan with an attempt at a smile; "to die of joy that is not so hard." And he fixed his eyes once more on that familiar spot on the ceiling as if he knew that his soul would go that way.

His mind wandered a little after the priest had administered extreme unction. Two or three times they heard him say, "Bè Martin! Be Youan!" as if he toiled on vast plains with great dream oxen. Then he would make with his hands the movements of spinning and rolling up pieces of cloth.

But when the sun sank below the horizon among the purple clouds, Yan shivered. "Papa, papa!" cried Emile who felt the presence of the Great Mystery in the room.

In a few seconds, solemnly, on wings too pure for mortal eyes to see, to the sound of lyres too sweet for mortal ears to hear, the immortal part of Yan passed away. He went, no doubt to a renewed life, very simple and very happy, in some corner of the Gascon heavens, with the angels of his country, with the saints of his faith, with the lost ancestors-the brave and pious laborers from Bignaon to whom the good God had opened very wide the portals of His beautiful Paradise.

It is not a very far cry to the other side of Queen Victoria's first jubilee. But since then, or more strictly, perhaps, since the Third Reform Act of 1884, the future moralist will trace the decline of earnestness in England. It may be that the breaking down of barriers, and the diffusion of powers and rights over wider and ever wider circles of the community, account partly for the social change. The age has been prodigal of the symbols of emancipation. It has rattled the keys of liberty with childish joy in their possession, and the sound has been music in its ears. But experience has brought disillusion. Free thought and dissent have not unlocked the doors guarded by St. Peter. The ballot has not opened any gate save the floodgate of talk. The Elementary Education Act has not taught the nation how to learn. Trade unionism leaves unsolved the problem of the freedom of labor. And, temporarily, at least, this multiplication of the symbols, this busy imitation of liberty, has exhausted the energy of thought. The nation, as the catchword goes, has entered on its democratic inheritance, but in taking over its property from the trustees it has converted it into a limited company. The directors have lost their sense of responsibility to the country, and as yet there is but little indication that the shareholders are capable of supplying it.

The fact of this social change-this loss of earnest personal conviction, and the consequent paralysis of the brainpower of the nation-may be approached from several points of view. But from the literary standard, which alone is admissible here, the transition has a direct bearing on the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward. At the time when she was pondering "Robert Els

mere," the thoughtful few were concerned for the welfare of the unin structed many. Reform was a kind of religion. To Mr. Gladstone, indeed, in the various phases of his enthusiasm, it assumed the sanction of a crusade. The disintegration of the Liberal party for an idea corresponded in actual politics to the wreckage of happy marriages and betrothals with which Mrs. Ward's fiction is strewn. To reformers of Mrs. Ward's type life is real and earnest in a sense hardly conceivable to-day. We are all reformers nowadays. Save for a handful of pro-Boers, there is not a sound Tory in the land. But the mere diffusion of the spirit has weakened the spirit. The old distinction between "classes" and "masses" has disappeared-it is no longer the voice of enlightenment crying out in a wilderness of ignorance, no longer the reform-crusader armed against the hosts of darkness, no longer the national trustees inspired to help the nation against itself. It is rather a Babel of shareholders shouting at a general meeting. Nothing is done because no one is responsible, and in the mirror of literature, instead of the serious purpose of Mrs. Ward, we see the vaporings of Miss Corelli and Mr. Caine, or Mr. Kipling's verses about our "jolly good lesson," which reflect with such pathetic fidelity the meagre substance of modern reform. The difference is that the reformers of the Home Rule period in our history, however mistaken their wishes may have been, were at least able to formulate them definitely. There were ideas enough to go round, and each idea had its witness, or martyr. To-day the newspapers prate about the great heart of the democracy, and the inviolable sanction of its demands, but meanwhile the

ideas grow thin. They flit from society to society, and from organization to organization, and there is no one to dare and to die for them. We think in communities, as a Fabian has said, and men of action fail accordingly.

Perhaps Mrs. Ward is inclined to abstract and to idealize too much. The motive of most of her plots is the dominion usurped over the human mind by a passion more exacting than love, and, judged by the standards of to-day, her men and women are almost superhuman in the intensity of their emotions. But the fault is history's, not hers. As soon as the governing class, whether administrative or intellectual, from which her chief characters are drawn, were deprived of their old sense of "caste," and abandoned their responsible position before the invading democracy, the standard of emotion was lowered. Thirteen years ago, in October, 1888, the Quarterly reviewer drew the following moral from "Robert Elsmere":—

It is time English parents should thoroughly understand that this is the condition to which the Universities have been brought, and that if they send their sons to a college like St. Anselm's-to any college which does not practically establish a test for itself, like Keble-they expose them in the immaturity and excitability of their early manhood, to have their Christian faith deliberately undermined by the maturer intellectual force of a philosophical deist like Mr. Grey, or a hopeless sceptic like Mr. Langham. Mrs. Ward knows Oxford well. We have not observed that any protest has been raised against her representation of a college in the University, with its vivid portraiture of more than one wellknown character. This must be taken as an Oxford picture of Oxford influences in a great college, and we must needs say that a course of legislation which has placed such men as Mr. Grey and Mr. Langham in the position of tutors and guides of undergraduates is

a scandalous diversion of endowments left for Christian purposes.

It is not precisely the lesson which Mrs. Ward wishes to convey, but it is an instructive proof of the vital quality of her writing, and of the clear truth that underlies her realistic criticism of life. Thought has become attenuated since then. The individual conscience has been put into commission, and, except for problems of sex, the earnest novelist is out of court. The fact is that the battle of scepticism and belief which Elsmere had to fight out for himself, and which entailed, as warfare always entails, acute suffering on innocent non-combatants, is now decided by plebiscite, or arbitration, or by the easy verdict of indifference. The Elsmere throes are out of date. The present generation feels less, because the franchise of feeling has been universalized. When the law of averages is applied there is no room for a monopolist like Robert Elsmere.

Take Laura Fountain, again, and the ruin of Alan Helbeck's love story. An Edinburgh reviewer of October, 1901, states that Laura's suicide in "Helbeck of Bannisdale" does not strike him as "convincingly inevitable, or even probable," and this, he declares. "is due either to want of naturalness in the plot, or want of dramatic power in the authoress." The reviewer may be right, but I am rather inclined to ascribe the alleged failure in inevitableness to an emotional defect in the reader. Certainly, in "Eleanor," whose dramatic quality is to be tested by the final proof of dramatization, Mrs. Humphry Ward has found her way to the hearts of unnumbered readers. In both novels, "Helbeck" and "Eleanor," she treats of Roman Catholicism-in the later story with a restrained pathos of narration and a fine vividness in presentation which mark the advance of her powers. The subject is one pe

culiarly suited to her talents, because the Church of Rome, of all modern institutions, is the most conspicuous in resisting the disintegrating forces of anarchy and indifference. It is autocratic in the midst of democracy, and emotional in the reign of reason. Mrs. Ward herself, in her one and only preface (to the ninth edition of "David Grieve," says a word in season at this point:-"If we, in our zeal to include ideas among the material of imaginative presentation, make the mistake of supposing that the ideas are the whole of life, our work will come to nothing; and if you, in your zeal to escape the ideas which torture, or divide, or which present special difficulties to the artist, tend to empty your work of ideas be yond a certain point, it will also come to nothing." This zeal to escape ideas is characteristic of our reaction from earnestness.

The same defence is true of Marcella, who, in the novel called after her name, breaks off her engagement with Rae burn on account of her passionate sense of the injustice of the game laws. The cause was more adequate a few years ago, when "souls" and "slums" were virgin territory, than it is in these times of disillusion. To-day one inclines to agree with Raeburn's maiden aunt-one of the writer's many successful minor characters-that "Marcella ought to be absorbed in her marriage; that is the natural thing." Yesterday, when a few great women were leading the feminine movement to immediate goals which they did not foresee, the following scene was touched with real passion and truth. The dramatis persona are Marcella, her lover, and his grandfather; the topic of discussion is a petition for the convicted murderer of a gamekeeper:

Marcella did not believe him. Every nerve was beginning to throb anew with that passionate recoil against tyr

rany and prejudice, which was in itself an agony.

"And you say the same?" she said, turning to Aldous.

"I cannot sign that petition," he said sadly. "Won't you try and believe what it costs me to refuse?"

Amply

It was a heavy blow to her. as she had been prepared for it, there had always been at the bottom of her mind a persuasion that in the end she would get her way. She had been used to feel barriers go down before that ultimate power of personality of which she was abundantly conscious. Yet it had not availed her here not even with the man who loved her.

Lord Maxwell looked at the two-the man's face of suffering, the girl's struggling breath.

"There, there, Aldous!" he said, rising. "I will leave you a minute. Do make Marcella rest-get her, for all our sakes, to forget this a little. Bring her in presently to us for some coffee. Above all, persuade her that we love her and admire her with all our hearts, but that in a matter of this kind she must leave us to do-as before God!what we think is right."

He stood before her an instant, gazing down upon her with dignity-nay, a certain severity. Then he turned away and left the room.

Marcella sprang up.

"Will you order the carriage?" she said in a strangled voice. "I will go upstairs."

"Marcella!" cried Aldous; "can you not be just to me, if it is impossible for you to be generous?"

"Just!" she repeated with a tone and gesture of repulsion, pushing him back from her. "You can talk of justice!" He tried to speak, stammered and failed. That strange paralysis of the will-forces which dogs the man of reflection at the moment when he must either take his world by storm or lose it was upon him now. He had never loved her more passionately-but as he stood there looking at her, something broke within him, the first prescience of the inevitable dawned.

Mrs. Ward, at least, is not afraid of