The main plot of _Demos_ is concerned with Richard Mutimer, a young socialist whose vital force, both mental and physical, is well above the average, corrupted by accession to a fortune, marrying a refined wife, losing his money in consequence of the discovery of an unsuspected will, and dragging his wife down with him,--down to _la misère_ in its most brutal and humiliating shape. Happy endings and the Gissing of this period are so ill-assorted, that the 'reconciliations' at the close of both this novel and the next are to be regarded with considerable suspicion. The 'gentlefolk' in the book are the merest marionettes, but there are descriptive passages of first-rate vigour, and the voice of wisdom is heard from the lips of an early Greek choregus in the figure of an old parson called Mr. Wyvern. As the mouthpiece of his creator's pet hobbies parson Wyvern rolls out long homilies conceived in the spirit of Emerson's 'compensation,' and denounces the cruelty of educating the poor and making no after-provision for their intellectual needs with a sombre enthusiasm and a periodicity of style almost worthy of Dr. Johnson.[11] [Footnote 11: An impressive specimen of his eloquence was cited by me in an article in the _Daily Mail Year Book_ (1906, p. 2). A riper study of a somewhat similar character is given in old Mr. Lashmar in _Our Friend the Charlatan_. (See his sermon on the blasphemy which would have us pretend that our civilisation obeys the spirit of Christianity, in chap, xviii.). For a criticism of _Demos_ and _Thyrza_ in juxtaposition with Besant's _Children of Gibeon_, see Miss Sichel on 'Philanthropic Novelists' (_Murray's Magazine_, iii. 506-518). Gissing saw deeper than to 'cease his music on a merry chord.']