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Updated: June 17, 2025
I am not an enemy of King Demos, and I know that his earthly realm is at hand. May he replace and rule all kings until King Christ rules supreme among men. I wish him prosperity and glory, as Diogenes, I imagine, must have wished to Alexander.
We do not produce kings of that sort nowadays, but King Demos has his own vices, and is as easily blinded and swayed as Ahasuerus. In every form of government, monarchy or republic, there will be would-be leaders, who seek to gain influence and carry their objects by tickling vanity, operating on vices, calumniating innocent men, and the other arts of the demagogue.
The conclusion of this book and its predecessor, The Odd Women, marks the conclusion of these elaborated problem studies. The inferno of London poverty, social analysis and autobiographical reminiscence, had now alike been pretty extensively drawn upon by Gissing. With different degrees of success he had succeeded in providing every one of his theses with something in the nature of a jack-in-the-box plot which the public loved and he despised. There remained to him three alternatives: to experiment beyond the limits of the novel; to essay a lighter vein of fiction; or thirdly, to repeat himself and refashion old material within its limits. Necessity left him very little option. He adopted all three alternatives. His best success in the third department was achieved in Eve's Ransom . Burrowing back into a projection of himself in relation with a not impossible she, Gissing here creates a false, fair, and fleeting beauty of a very palpable charm. A growing sense of her power to fascinate steadily raises Eve's standard of the minimum of luxury to which she is entitled. And in the course of this evolution, in the vain attempt to win beauty by gratitude and humility, the timid Hilliard, who seeks to propitiate his charmer by ransoming her from a base liaison and supporting her in luxury for a season in Paris, is thrown off like an old glove when a richer parti declares himself. The subtlety of the portraiture and the economy of the author's sympathy for his hero impart a subacid flavour of peculiar delicacy to the book, which would occupy a high place in the repertoire of any lesser artist. It well exhibits the conflict between an exaggerated contempt for, and an extreme susceptibility to, the charm of women which has cried havoc and let loose the dogs of strife upon so many able men. In The Whirlpool of 1897, in which he shows us a number of human floats spinning round the vortex of social London, Gissing brings a melodramatic plot of a kind disused since the days of Demos to bear upon the exhausting lives and illusive pleasures of the rich and cultured middle class. There is some admirable writing in the book, and symptoms of a change of tone (the old inclination to whine, for instance, is scarcely perceptible) suggestive of a new era in the work of the novelist relatively mature in many respects as he now manifestly was. Further progress in one of two directions seemed indicated: the first leading towards the career of a successful society novelist 'of circulating fame, spirally crescent, the second towards the frame of mind that created Ryecroft. The second fortunately prevailed. In the meantime, in accordance with a supreme law of his being, his spirit craved that refreshment which Gissing found in revisiting Italy. 'I want, he cried, 'to see the ruins of Rome: I want to see the Tiber, the Clitumnus, the Aufidus, the Alban Hills, Lake Trasimenus! It is strange how these old times have taken hold of me. The mere names in Roman history make my blood warm. Of him the saying of Michelet was perpetually true: 'J'ai passé
Accustomed to clever malaperts like Miss Lloyd or Miss Reeve, whose experienced pouts and smiles under the sun-bonnet are a standing burlesque of innocence and girlishness, Demos was really delighted, for once and away, to see the real presentment of these things upon his stage.
The demos found voice first in the poetry of Walt Whitman who has a successor in Vachel Lindsay, the man who walked through Kansas, trading poetry for food and lodging, teaching the farmers' sons and daughters to intone his stirring odes to Pocahontas, General Booth, and Old John Brown.
It is likewise the business of the provincial council to examine the grounds on which any demos solicits the power of imposing local taxes: it proposes also general improvements for the whole province, and has the power of assessing the taxes necessary for carrying them into effect. Roads, barracks for gendarmes, prisons, hospitals, and schools, are objects of its attention.
However, the Greeks seem for the most part, between the heroic and historical ages, to have dropped the king or chief of each state, and only to have managed them by various councils of the chief heads of families, who were called aristoi, the best, while those who were not usually called into council, though they too were free, and could choose their governors, and vote in great matters, were termed demos, the people.
The Demos, too, being in America the one source of power, all the selfish ambition of the country gravitates towards it, as it does in despotic countries towards the monarch; the People, like the despot, is pursued with adulation and sycophancy, and the corrupting effects of power fully keep pace with its improving and ennobling influences.
But if debarred by his limitations from a resounding or popular success, he will remain exceptionally dear to the heart of the recluse, who thinks that the scholar does well to cherish a grievance against the vulgar world beyond the cloister; and dearer still, perhaps, to a certain number of enthusiasts who began reading George Gissing as a college night-course; who closed Thyrza and Demos as dawn was breaking through the elms in some Oxford quadrangle, and who have pursued his work patiently ever since in a somewhat toilsome and broken ascent, secure always of suave writing and conscientious workmanship, of an individual prose cadence and a genuine vein of Penseroso:
If demos be the spirit of the mob, then Canada has no faintest tinge of democracy in her; but inasmuch as the French colonists came in pursuit of a religious ideal and the English colonists of a political ideal, if democracy stand for freedom for the individual to pursue his own ideal then Canada is supersaturated with that democracy.
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