DEMO S.* Tars is a novel of very considerable ability,
though it falls short of the highest power. It is evidently written by a man who has a very intimate knowledge of the working classes, and not a little sympathy with them, though his own bias would appear to be aristocratic and msthetic, rather than democratic and scientific. Nothing can be more skilful than the sketch of the artisan family round whose fortunes the story of the book revolves. The chief character is very powerfully drawn, and though it is by no means a heroic character in any sense of the word,—for the fibre of his mind is essentially commonplace and poor,—there is in him a pathetic unconsciousness of the depth of his own insincerities, a power of recovery from them such as that complete unconsciousness often implies, and, again, a large mixture of coarse virtues, which render the sketch of Richard Mutimer a very striking and original creation. His mother, too, with ha narrow, complaining, and almost dumb integrity, her pitiable misery when she finds her family so enriched that she is completely separated from them by the new wealth, her inar- ticulate wrath when her eldest son breaks his engagement with the girl to whom he was betrothed, and her complete inability to adapt herself, even passively, to circumstances of any novel kind, is a very powerful picture of the nature which works in a particular groove, and will not bear taking out of that groove. The weak, pretty daughter, and the worthless, black- guard son, are less careful, but hardly less truthful studies,— the whole making up probably a fair moral average for families of the type intended,—a type, of course, neither of the lowest nor of the highest kind. But if the other figures in this tale of English Socialism had been anything like as powerfully sketched as these, the book would be one of the highest order of ability. As it is, we can hardly say so much for it as that.
Undoubtedly, its ability is considerable. The sketch of the one or two Socialist meetings which the author has occasion to describe, of the style of Socialist literature, and of the conversa- tion of Socialist agitators, shows an intimate knowledge of that field of action, though anything but a favourable bias towards it. But when the author comes to delineate middle-class life, his touch is far less powerful. Mr. and Mrs. Westlake are shadows, and the latter is a shadow who, if she could not have been made more than a shadow, should hardly have been introduced at all. It is a mistake to describe a poetess in whose kiss the heroine finds the bliss of an intoxicating rapture, when the author cannot show you even vaguely the nature of the enchantment intended. Again, Mrs. Eldon and her sou, the clergyman, Mr.
Wyvern, and even Mrs. Waltham, are by no means powerful sketches ; while of the heroine, Adela Waltham,—who after- wards marries the Socialist hero of the tale,—we can only say that she misses the mark at which the author aims, though it is quite evident that with a very few touches more, with a very little deeper insight into the kind of character intended, she might have become one of the most attractive heroines in modern fiction. As it is, the author hesitates, in his pic- ture of her, between a merely refined nobility and true spiritual devotedness of character, opening with the one, and apparently deviating into the other. We suspect that he means to paint a character which begins in faith, and losing faith, drops into mere faithfulness to her own early ideal, without that con- fidence in Divine help and guidance which could alone have sustained such faithfulness at the highest point. But he either shrinks from directly conveying this loss of purpose and faith, or else his imagination has failed him. It is certain that Adela Mutimer's character seems to waver between two different standards of moral aim, one of them mainly religious, the other, one of mere moral consistency and refinement. The total effect is, therefore, hazy, and falls short of what the reader is led to expect. Of the middle-class figures decidedly the best is Alfred Waltham, the combative Radical, who loves contradiction so dearly that he adopts views without any very serious conviction, which in later life he has to drop. Here is a specimen of his conversation :— "Alfred shortly betook himself to the garden, where, in spite of a decided freshness in the atmosphere, be walked for half an hour smoking a pipe. When he entered the house again, he met Adela at the foot of the stairs. 'Mrs. Mewling has just come in,' she whis-
• Demos: a Story of English SooiaLs/n. 3 vols. London: Smith and Fader.
pered.—' All right, I'll come up with you,' was the reply. 'Heaven defend me from her small-talk !'—They ascended to a very little room, which made a kind of boudoir for Adele. Alfred struck a, match and lit a lamp, disclosing a nest of wonderful purity and neatness. On the table a drawing board was slanted ; it showed a text of Scripture in process of illumination.'—` Still at that kind of thing !' exclaimed Alfred. My good child, if you want to paint, why don't you paint in earnest ? Really, Adela, I must enter a protest! Remember that you are eighteen years of age.'—' I don't forget it, Alfred.'—' At eight-and-twenty, at eight-and-thirty, you propose still to be at the same stage of development ?'—II don't think we'll talk of it,' said
the girl, quietly. We don't understand each other.'—' Of course not but we might, if only you'd read sensible books that I could give you.'—Adela shook her head. The philosophical youth sank into his favourite attitude—legs extended, hands in pockets, nose in air. So, I suppose,' he said presently, 'that fellow really has been ill ?' Adele was sitting in thought ; she looked up with a shadow of annoyance on her face. That fellow ?'—' Eldon, you know.'—' I want to ask you a qnestion,' said his sister, interlocking her fingers and pressing them against her throat. Why do you always speak in a con- temptuous way of Mr. Eldon ?'—' You know I don't like the indi- vidual.'—' What cause has "the individual" given you ?'—' He's a snob.'—' I'm not sure that I know what that means,' replied Adele, after thinking for a moment with downcast eyes.—' Because you never read anything. He's a fellow who raises a great edifice of pretence on rotten foundations.'—' What can you mean ? Mr. Eldon is a gentleman. What pretence is he guilty of ?'—' Gentleman !' uttered her brother with much scorn. Upon my word, that is the vulgarest of denominations ! Who doesn't call himself so now-a.days ! A man's a man, I take it; and what need is there to lengthen the name ? Thank the powers, we don't live in feudal ages. Besides, he doesn't seem to me to be what you imply.'—Adela had taken a book ; in turning over the pages, she said, No doubt you mean, Alfred, that, for some reason, you are determined to view him with prejudice.'—' The reason is obvious enough. The fellow's behaviour is detestable ; he looks at you from head to foot as if you were applying for a place in his stable. Whenever I want an example of a contemptible aristocrat, there's Eldon ready-made. Contemptible, because he's such a sham ; as if every- body didn't know his history and his circumstances Everybody doesn't regard them as you do. There is nothing whatever dishonour- able in his position.'—' Not in sponging on a rich old plebeian, a man
he despises, and living in idleness at his expense I don't believe Mr. Eldon does anything of the kind. Since his brother's death be has had a sufficient income of his own, so mother says.'—' Sufficient income of his own ! Bah ! Five or six hundred a year ; likely he Jives on that ! Besides, haven't they soaped old Mutimer into leaving them all his property ? The whole affair is the best illustration one could possibly have of what aristocrats are brought to in a democratic age. First of all, Godfrey Eldon marries Mutitner's daughter ; you are at liberty to believe, if you like, that he would have married her just the same if she hadn't bad a penny. The old fellow is flattered. They see the bold they have, and stick to him like leeches. All for want of money, of course. Our aristocrats begin to see that they can't get on without money now-a-days ; they can't live on family records, and they find that people won't toady to them in the old way just on account of their name. Why, it began with Eldon's father—didn't he put his pride in his pocket, and try to make cash by speculation ? Now, I can respect him : he at all events faced the facts of the case honestly. The despicable thing in this Hubert Eldon is that, having got money once more, and in the dirtiest way, he puts on the top-sawyer just as if there was nothing to be ashamed of. If he and his mother were living in a small way on their few hundreds a year, be might haw-haw as much as he liked, and I should only laugh at him ; he'd be a fool, but an honest one But catch them doing that ! Family pride's too insubstantantial a thing, you see. Well, as I said, they illustrate the natural course of things, the transition from the old age to the new. If Eldon has sons, they'll go in for commerce, and make themselves, if they can, millionaires; but by that time they'll dispense with airs and insolence—see if they don't.'"
The sketch of Alfred Waltham is by far the best, outside the region of the working class, in the book. But then, it is within the region of the working class that the unique power of the book shows itself.
Unquestionably, both Richard Mutimer and Emma Vine are drawn with real power ; and in the latter you have the nobleness of disinterested love, painted with as truthful and sympa- thetic a touch as if the writer's sympathies were wholly demo- cratic, instead of being, as they certainly are, aristocratic. She is so much more real than Adela Waltham, that we could wish his drift had enabled the author to make Emma Vine, and not Adele. Waltham, his heroine. There is a power in the picture of her mute patience, of her constancy, of her devotion to the dying sister and her little niece and nephew, of her uncomplainingness when she is deserted, and her power over the drunkard who is so willing to leave her children to Emma's care, which makes us regret the change of scene whenever the author carries his story away from Emma and her sewing- machine, to the sorrows of the more refined and hazier Adele.
Richard Mutimer is well painted from beginning to end. His acute ignorance, his keen vanity, his moral obtuseness, his conventional earnestness, his fundamental good-nature, the ease with which he deceives himself, his great capacity for ignoring and half-forgetting his own baser acts, and the easy good intentions which crop up again, almost before he has com- pletely abandoned his most disgraceful designs, his love for his frivolous sister, his secret reverense for his refined wife, his wish to convince her of his noble aims, even when he is per- fectly aware that she has only just succeeded in saving him from deliberate crime,—all these characteristics are painted with a power which makes Richard Mutimer, the Socialist leader, a real and living figure.
What the story needs, besides a more vividly painted heroine, is some spiritual and intellectual background with which the dream of Socialism can be contrasted. We supposed, at first, that Mr. Wyvern,—who clearly resembles one of George Eliot's agnostic clergymen,—such a one as Mr. Irvine, for example, in Adam Bede,—was intended to furnish us with this higher ideal of life and duty. But Mr. Wyvern soon falls into the background, and we have nothing but Hubert Eldon's dreams of art and Mrs. Westlake's dreams of poetry, to set over against Richard Mutimer's coarse and hesitating philanthropic selfishness or selfish philanthropy. tEitheticism appears to be the only alternative in the author's mind for the materialistic ideal in the realisation of which his Socialist hero so miserably fails. Demos is the book of a pessimist with no belief in the power of what are called progressive ideas, but also with little or no spiritual faith which might prove a higher motive-power than that of which equality and fraternity are the favourite watch-cries.
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