ABSTRACT
Demos: a Story ofEnglish Socialism, is a very clever study ofa not very beautiful phase ofartisan life. If there were no other good thing in the book besides the description in the first volume ofRichard Mutimer's library we should like everybody who has ever played with ideas of working-class education to read it for the sake of that description. Everybody has been telling us lately what we ought to read. The author of Demos has thought it worth while to tell us what the advanced artisan does read:-
[The quotation, from ch. 5, which follows, listing such authors as Malthus, Robert Owen, Thomas Paine and Voltaire, has obvious ironic connotations in the reviewing context of this 'Church organ'.] The character of Richard Mutimer, artisan, socialist, demagogue, and capitalist, is worked out from first to last in admirable consistency with this description of his mental constitution. He has virtues-moral and practical-and plenty of intelligence of a hard and useful kind. When we make his acquaintance as an artisan in his own family and among his own class, we form a favourable opinion of him. When accident puts money and power into his hands, his defects ofimagination, of tenderness, of refmement, become glaring faults. By the influences of prosperity he is moreover led into one or two distinct breaches ofhonourofwhich the worst is his casting offofthe girl he was engaged to marry. But he does not lose all integrity. Possessed of wealth, he loyally devotes his money to the cause of democracy, and starts mining works on his estate upon thorough-going socialistic principles. When the works are in full operation, the discovery of a missing will ousts him
from possession. House, lands, and money pass into the hands of an aristocratic idealist, who razes the socialistic settlement to the ground, and restores the reign of nature; and Richard Mutimer, after some further ups and downs, is killed by a mob. It is certainly a fault of the novel that it is too strongly coloured by sordid and painful elements. It would, however, be most unfair to give the impression that all the interest of the book depends upon skill in delineating the unbeautiful. One must wish, indeed, that at least one man's character had been as elaborately worked out on noble and sympathetic lines as are those of Mutimer and his associates on unsympathetic lines. Much more, for instance, might have been made of the interesting and original character ofMr Wyvern, the vicar of the parish where the works are set up; and Hubert Eldon, the aristocrat, is a great deal too sketchy. Mr Westlake, the cultivated socialist, is a very pleasant gentleman, but absolutely unpractical; and his wife Stella is the least intelligible character in the book, though apparently the one to which the author attaches the most profound significance. Stella apart however, the women's characters are strong, original, and beautiful enough to redeem the book from the charge of being too grim. We only wish Adela, the wife first of Richard Mutimer and afterwards ofHubert Eldon, had been allowed to finish her career without its being said of her that she had 'achieved her womanhood' in the moment ofaccepting her second husband. As she has been perfectly womanly throughout-in courage, purity, faith, and loyalty-the phrase is either meaningless cant or a weak denial of better sense that has gone before. Nothing can be clearer or more commendable than the moral ofthe story as a whole; which may be stated shortly as an illustration ofthe importance ofkeeping the two great commandments ofChristianity in their proper order. Mr Wyvem and Adela both cordially recognise the identity of the principle of socialism with that ofthe injunction to love our neighbour as ourselves: they only refuse to allow it precedence of the yet higher commandment. The deterioration of Mutimer's character is the obvious consequence of his denial of the higher commandment. Socialism passes through a sort of 'Jesuitism' into egotism, and all the fmer charities of life are crushed out, though his broad loyalty to his cause is not seriously impaired. Hubert Eldon is a creature of refined instinct, and his point of view is done full justice to by the vicar when he says, 'You, being you, I approve'-in answer to the young man's question as to his opinion ofthe wholesale destruction ofhis predecessor's works. But of Mr and Mrs Westlake and the honours accorded to them, we do not
