ABSTRACT
This is a novel ofvery considerable ability, though it falls short of the highest power. It is evidently written by a man who has a very intimate knowledge ofthe working classes, and not a little sympathy with them, though his own bias would appear to be aristocratic and aesthetic, 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 ofhis 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 her 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 inarticulate 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, blackguard 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 conversation 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 son, the clergyman, Mr Wyvern, and even Mrs Waltham, are by no means powerful sketches; while of the heroine, Adela Waltham,-who afterwards 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 ofcharacter intended, she might have become one of the most attractive heroines in modern fiction. As it is, the author hesitates, in his picture 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 confidence 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 ofpurpose 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.
