FICTION.
THE WAR AND ELIZABE'flt*
MR. MANNERING, the redemption of whose "volatile, recalcitrant soul " is told in Mrs. Humphry Ward's pages, was a country gentleman of exquisite artistic and literary taste, deeply versed in the classics, who for nearly four years of the war was blind to its meaning, and went on purchasing costly antiques, defying public opinion, food control, and war legislation gener- ally, to the disgust' of his neighbours. He would not even allow his unmarried daughter to do any sort of war work. Both his sons were serving, and one was engaged to the daughter of a neighbour. Yet when that neighbour, a patriotic if commonplace man, did his duty as a Magistrate in reminding Mr. Mannering of the Government demand that he should plough some of his land and fell timber, the indignant dilettante threatened to disinherit his son unless he gave up his betrothed, and forbade his daughter to associate with the family. At the opening of the -story Mannering has engaged a lady secretary, a fine scholar, but also a patriotic woman. He finds her so invaluable in the preparation of his magnum opus on Greek vases that when she threatens to resign her post he bribes her to stay on by consenting to carry out the orders which he was prepared to resist by force. But Elizabeth's triumph has its drawbacks. Installed as agent and domestic dictator and able to make her terms, she excites the jealotuisr.of the Squire's daughters. Two of them already married suspect her of matri- monial designs on their father ; Pamela, the youngest, suspects her of endeavouring to detach a soldier lover. But the Squire's redemption is really effected by the death of his younger son, a simple, unaffected young hero, byfar the most engaging character in the book, who opens his father's eyes to the real moaning of the war, and disabuses Pamela of her unjust suspicions. The recon- ciliation brought about by his self-sacrifice cannot be read without emotion ; but the Squire's renewed proposal to Elizabeth follows somewhat abruptly on the harrowing scene at Desmond's deathbed. Elizabeth is a fine character, yet not altogether void of priggishness ; but she is a thousand times too good for the repentant Hedonist. One cannot avoid the conviction that not even the death of an heroic son would have converted a man 'who had remained bemused by his odious absorption in aesthetic pleasure for nearly four years. Also it -is strange that a man who was so sensitively alive to the beauty of the Greek classicashould have been so entirely irresponsive to the noble patriotism which culminates, as Lord Bryce once re- minded us, in the line:— sir slow& dpurros lia6vareat wept warpus.
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