The Keepers of the People

MORAL FERVOUR, CULTURE, PROGRESS, THE CAUSE

Four capitalised abstractions, always capitalised, always in the mouth of Lady Hammersmith or the Princess Agnes, and functioning as Jepson's shorthand for the entire vocabulary of late-Victorian earnestness — the platform, the subscription list, the Society for the Penalisation of Vice, "broadening the lives of my Eastern sisters on the higher plane." The last phrase is repeated, verbatim, five or six times across the novel; it is first spoken by Lady Hammersmith, lodges in the Princess Agnes's mind, and becomes the formula by which she describes her mission to herself for years. Jepson's method with all four words is the same: he never argues against them, he simply repeats them until they sound like noise, and then has Prince Ralph say "Words — bubbles — shadows."

A reader should register that the satire is not aimed only at women. Lady Hammersmith campaigns for the prevention of cruelty to animals, children and aborigines and strikes her own daughter; but the missionary is a coward and a liar by his own standards, the English press is "corrupt" and "time-serving" in her mouth and credulous in fact, and Lord Lisdor, the representative Englishman, is an idle adulterer with a good heart and no convictions whatever. Everyone in England is disposed of. Only Ruth survives the satire, and she leaves.

THE FLAME-COLOURED MANTLE

The sovereignty of Varandaleel, and the novel's one piece of pure symbol. It begins as the garment on the image of Indra — the Vedic king of the gods, the thunderer, the war-god, and a shrewd choice — and becomes the crown when a starving, mute stranger takes it off the statue and walks into the council of the chiefs wearing it, in the middle of their quarrel, and announces that he is the son of Indra. The sacrilege is the coronation; there is no other.

Follow it through the book and it gives the plot in five moments. The first Prince charges in it at the head of the cavalry and breaks the invasion. Prince Ralph wears it on his night rides, over mail and a burnished helmet, so that the people may see him dimly and believe. He wraps Latchimi in it when he carries her off from the spring. Prince Raleigh sits in it, crowned, on the throne of the court that dissolves Ruth's marriage. And on the last page it hangs from Ruth's shoulders at the wedding feast — "the honour never conferred on the ill-starred Princess Agnes." Whatever the mantle touches is made legitimate by being touched. That is the whole theory of authority in this novel, worn.