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Socialism, Capitalism and the Fiction of Lucas Malet:“The Spirit of the Hive”
As a socialist motif, the beehive gained currency the turn of the nineteenth century, associated with principles of altruism, decentralised organisation and cooperative labour. Lucas Malet had socialist sympathies and deployed the motif to articulate the inequalities of an exploitative capitalistic system. However, her conversion to Catholicism made her suspicious of the kind of utopian, cooperative society of which the beehive had become the emblem. This article breaks fresh ground in the scholarship on Malet. While her reluctance to align her faith and economic ideas might seem surprising to some, this discussion contends that Malet, believing in man’s fallenness, came to regard the idea of a perfect social whole as apocryphal in any terrestrial sense of the term. Her developing economic ideas, with reference to The History of Sir Richard Calmady and The Far Horizon, explain how the beehive and other similar corporate figures (including the human body and city banking house) operate in figurative shorthand for the idea of “the whole” in its social and spiritual appearances. In this way, the notion of “wholeness” and its antitheses, “fragmentation” and “dismemberment,” form part of the conceptual apparatus with which Malet articulates man’s proximity to the divine. [196 words]
socialism, capitalism, Catholicisim, the beehive motif, Lucas Malet, The History of Sir Richard Calmady, The Far Horizon
AS PRIVILEGED POLITICAL METAPHORS, bee and hive are frequently conceived as archetypes—universal symbols of collective industry, colonial enterprise and part/whole dynamics. At once capable of articulating vatic, godlike forms of elevated spectatorship and microscopal tableaux of individual organisms, these tropes form a conceptual testing ground for a large range of political problems and ideas. As a socialist motif, the beehive gained currency in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, apposite as it is to the principles of altruism, decentralised organisation and cooperative labour common to most socialist philosophies. As J. F. M. Clark points out, the insect world (particularly apian civilization) encouraged the view that socialism, mutual aid and other forms of social cooperation could be more powerful “engine[s] of social evolution” than the aggressive individualism perceived as dominant by conservative social Darwinists.1
Lucas Malet was one of many writers and thinkers who deployed bee and hive motifs to articulate the inequalities of an exploitative capitalistic system. Nonetheless while Malet harboured socialist sympathies, her conversion to Catholicism (formalised in 1902) made her suspicious of the kind of utopian, cooperative society of which the beehive had become the emblem. Given the zeal and religiosity with which socialist politics were pursued during the closing decades of the nineteenth century (including the emergence of a number of small-scale experiments in cooperative living), Malet’s reluctance to align her faith and economic ideas might seem surprising.2 To the contrary this article contends that Malet, believing in man’s fallenness, came to regard the idea of a perfect social whole as apocryphal in any terrestrial sense of the term. With reference to The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901) and The Far Horizon (1906), this discussion explores Malet’s developing economic ideas around the time of her conversion, arguing that bee [End Page 551] and hive motifs, alongside other, structurally similar corporate figures (including the human body and city banking house) operate as figurative shorthand for the idea of “the whole” in its social and spiritual appearances. In this way, the notion of “wholeness” and its antitheses, “fragmentation” and dismemberment” form part of the conceptual apparatus with which Malet articulates man’s proximity to the divine.
That Malet felt drawn to socialism during the fin-de-siècle heyday of British socialist politics is not surprising. Not only was socialism vociferously championed by many of her contemporaries in literature, but Malet’s father, Charles Kingsley, had been a leading proponent of Christian Socialism, a movement that sought to unite the cooperative success of schemes such as The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers with more democratic aspects of Christian doctrine. Indeed, if there was any doubt in Malet’s mind about the injustices of existing economic arrangements, her experiences as a rector’s wife in a large country parish certainly answered to them. In an undated letter to her brother-in-law, Clifford Harrison, Malet confides: “I am afraid I am becoming a bitter radical, socialist, anything. It makes me rage to see people actually want fire, food and clothes. I am thankful to say we are able to feed two or three people every day. … All we of the comfortable classes have more comfort in many ways than we really need. But the fine folks really do seem to have an excess of comfort. I don’t see how it is to be justified. They present an absurdity to the intelligence.”3
Though Malet’s socialist philosophy is somewhat undetermined, it is clear that she craves some more equitable model of economic organisation, an inclination that becomes clear in The History of Sir Richard Calmady. This earlier of the two novels under consideration offers perhaps the most vivid example of Malet’s conceptual scheme and it does so through the image of bodily dismemberment. It describes how, “during the closing years of the commonwealth [a] young royalist gentleman, Sir Thomas Calmady … relieved the tedium of country life by indulgence in divers amours.”4 The forester’s daughter, whom Sir Thomas had seduced, bore him an illegitimate son who was killed in a tragic accident: crushed beneath Sir Thomas’s “lumbering” carriage. “[H]olding the mangled and dying child in her arms” the forester’s daughter placed a curse on Sir Thomas and “his descendants, to the sixth and seventh generation, good and bad alike.” She declared “moreover, that as judgment on his perfidy and lust, no owner of [the estate] [End Page 552] should reach the life limit set by the Psalmist, and die quiet and christianly in his bed.”5 In 1842, after generations of tragedy in the Calmady family, Sir Richard II, the current incumbent of the Calmady estate, is born with a deformity. Terminating just above the knee, Sir Richard’s legs are reduced to “stumps” in which are “embedded” feet of normal size.6 The novel describes the trials of Sir Richard’s life, his attempts to re-member his malformed body first through the act of procreation (a foredoomed undertaking) and later through the reallocation of his fortune in a communal home for the maimed and deformed. Following a broken engagement with the infantile Lady Constance Quail, Richard undertakes a reactionary (and debauched) tour of the continent that concludes in Naples. There, he suffers a malarial fever in which he is visited by a “[h]ideous apprehension of universal mutilation, of maimed purposes, maimed happenings, of a world peopled by beings maimed as he was himself, but after a more subtle and intimate fashion—a fashion intellectual or moral rather than merely physical—so that they had to him, just now, an added hatefulness of specious lying, since to ordinary seeing they appeared whole, while whole they truly and actually were not.”7
Richard’s “universal mutilation” linked as it is to morality is a figure of fallenness of which he is the physical representative. For Richard, the human world is a hideous spectacle of incompleteness, reinforced by the apprehension of a primordial whole. He reflects that “the radical weakness of all human institutions … resides in exactly that effort to select and reject, to exalt one part as against another part, and so build not upon the rock of unity and completeness, but upon the sand of partiality and division.” “[S]ooner or later,” he remarks, “the Whole revenges itself.”8 This conflict of parts in the context of lost “wholeness” conflates the myth of The Fall with conceptualisations of decline and degeneracy associated at this time with Decadence. As the last enervated product of an historical line of wealthy aristocrats, Richard resembles Wilde’s Dorian Gray who, upon inspecting his ancestral portraiture, imagines that his “very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.”9 Through the dual image of aristocratic individualism and biological degeneration, the Wildean dandy, like Richard, becomes emblematic of the fin-de-siècle fragmented self.10
In Sir Richard Calmady, however, the ethos of excess and decay aligned in Decadent culture with aristocracy is countered by a socialist teleology that aims to reconstitute this fragmentation through the enterprise of social revolution. Still under the influence of his malarial [End Page 553] fever, Richard attends a performance of Verdi’s Ernani where he imagines the boxes in the dress circle and gallery—province of the aristocratic patrons—refashioned as wax chambers within a beehive:
Down there upon the parterre, in the close-packed ranks of students, of men and women of the middle-class soberly attired in walking costume, he recognised the working bees of this giant hive. By their unremitting labour the dainty waxen cells were actually built up, and those larvæ were so amply, so luxuriously, fed. And the working bees—there were so many, so very many of them! What if they became mutinous, rebelled against labour, plundered and destroyed the indolent, succulent larvæ of which he—yes, he, Richard Calmady—was unquestionably and conspicuously one?11
Richard’s nightmarish delusion of a “mutinous” swarm girded against “succulent larvae” echoes a broader historical body of writing deploying the beehive as an analogy for human organisation. Notably, this theatre scene resonates with Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees. Containing the allegorical poem “The Grumbling Hive” and a number of long explanatory annotations, Mandeville’s verse, subtitled “Private Vices, Publick Benefits,” argues that vice is an essential element of economic prosperity since “Fools only strive / To make an honest hive.” In the poem, an internal revolution, which aims to “rid / The bawling Hive of Fraud” takes place.12 This reform results in the impoverishment of the hive because on the one hand “vice nursed ingenuity” and on the other, as Phillip Harth points out, “the elimination of so many occupations concerned with the prevention or punishment of dishonesty gives rise to unemployment.”13
Though Malet does not endorse capitalistic individualism of the kind posited by Mandeville (in fact, she is diametrically opposed to it), she similarly regards the hive as a microcosm of national economic interests and the internal (class) conflict this necessarily involves. As a scene of apian antagonism or revolution, Richard’s delusion similarly echoes Book IV of Virgil’s Georgics. Virgil’s poem describes how the fighting swarms assemble for battle: “On their beaks [the bees] hone their stings” and congregate about their leader. Of the candidates for ascendency, “there are two kinds”: “the one aglow with golden flecks—the one you want—/its bright distinguished reddish mail; the other a sight, / the picture of pure laziness, its sagging paunch distended to the / ground.”14 Much like Richard, who considers that his aristocratic privilege renders him one of the number of “luxuriously fed” larvae occupying the boxes, the defeated candidate will be sacrificed (or so he believes). Richard anticipates that “time being fully ripe, the bees would swarm, swarm at last,—labour revenging itself upon sloth, hunger [End Page 554] upon gluttony, want upon wealth, obscurity upon privilege,—justice being thus meted out, and he, Richard, cleansed and delivered from the disgrace of deformity now so hideously infecting both his spirit and his flesh.”15 The bees, Richard imagines, are possessed of “corporate intelligence,” “corporate strength” and “corporate action” and it is precisely by way of this corporate enterprise that the bodily wholeness of the socialistic bees “mete[s] out” the physical deficiency of the disabled aristocrat.16 For him, the swarm becomes a virtuous whole, revenging itself upon the iniquities of a fallen, capitalistic society.
The rhetorical character of Richard’s delusions resembles that of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848). The Manifesto’s teleological certainty of social revolution and its emphasis on a unionised, incorporated resistance, for instance, is mirrored in Richard’s description of the swarm. Interestingly, Malet’s novel was published in the same year as Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee (1901), a poetic description of the social organisation of the hive. Like Malet, Maeterlinck’s prose is inflected with Marxist ideology.17 For Maeterlinck, as for Marx, social revolution and the redistribution of wealth are the inevitable result of industrial development. “Modern Industry,” Marx points out, “cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. … [The bourgeoisie’s] fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”18 Similarly, Maeterlinck says of the hive that the “exile has long been planned, and the favourable hour patiently awaited. … They leave it only when it has attained the apogee of its prosperity; at a time when, after the arduous labours of the spring, the immense palace of wax has its 120,000 well-arranged cells overflowing with new honey, and with the many-coloured flour, known as ‘bees’ bread,’ on which nymphs and larvae are fed.”19
It is at this “hour of the Swarm,” Maeterlinck remarks, that “we find a whole people, who have attained the topmost pinnacle of prosperity and power, suddenly abandoning to the generation to come their wealth and their palaces.”20 In the hive, as in human industry, it is the bourgeoisie’s agglomeration of capital that ironically sets the conditions favourable to social revolution. We know that Malet was reading Maeterlinck around the time of Sir Richard Calmady’s publication because she is one of the signatories of a letter to The Times (20 June 1902) criticising the censorship of Maeterlinck’s play, Monna Vanna (1902).21 Though Malet’s novel was not published until September 1901 (The Life of the Bee was published in May), given the timescales involved, [End Page 555] it would seem unlikely that she was directly influenced by the book but her conceptual scheme suggestively corresponds with Maeterlinck’s “the spirit of the hive”: a phrase he uses to describe the organising principle or internal economy of the hive. Like Malet, Maeterlinck points up the proximity of human and animal life and regards their industry as essentially kindred. In The Intelligence of the Flowers (1906), for instance, he points out that the “traps” and “machinery,” which in the name of commerce and combat humans construct, parallel the often unperceived enterprise of flowers. “All,” he remarks, “exert themselves to accomplish their work, all have the magnificent ambition to overrun and conquer the surface of the globe.”22
In “Apian Aestheticism: Michael Field and the Economics of the Aesthetic” Marion Thain argues that at the fin de siècle the motifs of bee and hive were used to negotiate Aestheticism’s problematic positioning between the cultures of aesthetic production and mass consumption. She points out that “apian discourse is founded on the age-old duality of bees and honey which are, after all, archetypal emblems of both economies of production (the busy worker bee) and consumption (the gift of sweet honey).”23 Thain briefly considers Malet’s theatre scene: “the economic realm of production and the aestheticist realm cannot coexist. One supports the other, but also threatens to devour it. The insatiability of this dual economy, once recognised, resolves itself into a turn to the masses and mass culture at the expense of a rarefied aesthetic world.”24
Certainly, the “bright-hued” drones exhibit a form of sartorial flam-boyance that is at odds with the “soberly attired” working bees but the consideration that these “indolent, full-fed” drones specifically emblematise aesthetic culture is doubtful. The larvae embody a form of indolence or aristos that is consistent with Decadence, but it is the working bees that are endowed with an aesthetic appreciation of the Opera. As Malet writes: “[t]hey were buzzing, buzzing angrily, displeased with the full-fed larvae in the boxes, because these last were altogether too social, talked too loud and too continuously, drowning out the softer passages of the overture.”25 Considering the interplay of class and (aesthetic) culture, one might well find evidence of an Arnoldian conflict (the Populace are poised between the will of their “sterner selves”—characterised by “bawling, hustling and smashing”—and the alien instinct of aesthetic appreciation, for instance).26 Yet, since the “brainless” larvae, careless of the “softer passages of the overture,” cannot legitimately be regarded as ambassadors of aestheticism, it is unlikely [End Page 556] that the proletarian’s “mutiny” bespeaks the triumph of mass culture over the “aesthetic world.” Of course Malet was concerned about the adulterating influence of mass consumption and economic necessity upon artistic production (and certainly the latter was a blight on her own career) but the rhetoric employed here is specifically Marxian.27 Arriving at the “ripe” historical moment of social revolution, the proletarian bees rise up against a decadent, enervated class of economic parasites and not a “rarefied” aesthetic culture.28
Chastened by his experiences in Naples, Richard repairs to the Brockhurst estate where he invests his fortune in a care home for the maimed and disabled. In this capacity Richard becomes acquainted with an eighteen-year-old factory hand, a boy who has been caught and wounded in a rotating mechanism. Using the language of fragmentation and dismemberment to highlight the ungodliness of the boy’s demise, Malet describes how “by the loose gearing, into the merciless vortex of revolving wheels … [the boy was] converted in a few horrible seconds from health and wholeness into a formless lump of human waste.”29 The factory, as an instrument of an exploitative capitalistic industry, lays waste to the boy’s body, the metonymy of his occupation (a mere “hand”) providing a grim foretaste of his bodily dismemberment. And yet, while the boy is, like Richard, a fragment of “broken human crockery,” the care home project and the spirit of collective organisation that underpins it offers hope for both Richard and its inhabitants. Indeed, it is through his preparations for the home that Richard grows intimate with his future wife, the feminist socialist Honoria St. Quentin. Honoria, responding to Richard’s plans for the care home, reflects: “Verily Richard Calmady’s sad family was a terribly large one, well calculated to maintain its numbers, even to increase! For neither the age of sacrifice nor of cannibalism is really over, nor is the practice of these limited to savage peoples in distant lands or far-away isles of the sea.”30
Honoria’s observation replicates the rhetoric of cannibalism that is prevalent in fin-de-siècle anti-capitalist literature. It is unsurprising that Honoria’s discourse should do so, since she is a self-proclaimed socialist remarking that “wherever the great systems of trade and labour, which build up the mechanical and material prosperity of our day, go forward, kindred things [mutilations] happen.” Honoria’s emphasis on familial attachments or consanguinity is particularly important because it is through the dual focus on socialistic organisation and family [End Page 557] attachments that Richard aims to restore the contemporary self to a condition of wholeness. He explains to Honoria:
I look at all such unhappy beings from the inside, not, as the rest of you do, merely from the out. I belong to them and they to me. … [I]t seems only reasonable to look up the members of my unlucky family and take care of them, and if possible put them through—not on the lines of a charitable institution, which must inevitably be a rather mechanical, stepmother kind of arrangement at best, but on the lines of family affection.31
Redemption in the form of consanguine affinity is, for Richard, redemption through the restoration of primal unity. He is clearly anxious about the degrees of separation between himself and his disfigured comrades. For instance, he rejects the role of “stepmother” because it does not suggest a blood relationship (and presumably because it also inscribes a form of hierarchy). Though Richard’s deformity is congenital, and the factory hand’s the result of an industrial accident, he nonetheless considers them both to be kindred symbols of an iniquitous social and economic system. Richard suggests that “[b]ecause, in essential respects, mankind remains—notwithstanding modifications of his environment—substantially the same, from the era of the Pentateuch to the era of the Rougon-Macquarts, there must always be a lot of wreckage, of waste, and refuse humanity.”32 It is fitting that Malet alludes to Emile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart series here (1871–1893) since her concept of “waste humanity” owes much to the Naturalist’s rendering of heredity and evolution.33 Notably in Germinal (1885), the child-collier Jeanlin who, “resembled some degenerate with the instinctive intelligence and craftiness of a savage,” is injured in a collapse at Le Voreux mine. Conflating the adaptive evolutionary basis of his degeneracy with the industrial milieu responsible for his injury, Zola writes: “the pit had made him what he was, and the pit had finished the job by breaking his legs.”34 Concentred, the enterprise of nature and capitalistic industry break Jeanlin’s bones in much the same manner that in Malet’s later novel biology and capitalistic industry engage in a similarly mutilative operation.
In her book Art and Womanhood in Fin-de-Siècle Writing (2011), Catherine Delyfer points out that Malet reconceptualises disability along the lines of Darwinian speciation. Explaining how random mutations potentially produce permanent, positive changes in a species, speciation is a fitting analogue of Richard’s disability because it offers a solution to the inherited curse infecting the Calmady family. Delyfer comments that in “The History of Sir Richard Calmady, Malet … asked [End Page 558] the reader to recognize the fecundity and revolutionary potential of non-normative bodies, which she envisioned as the true vessels of the new, the makers of the future.”35 Richard’s “non-normative” body delivers him from the indolence and privilege that is his inheritance from the aristocratic line of Calmadys preceding him. As Malet writes, “[b] y the fact of his deformity he was emancipated from the delusions of his class, was made one, in right of the suffering and humiliation of it.”36 Further to Delyfer’s reading of Richard’s disability, Richard’s body, capable of supporting multiple meanings, is self-reflexive; it is a site of ambiguity that through the fact of its ambiguity countermands the anatomy of containment or individualism that Malet aligns with fallenness. Indeed, doubled in a Velasquez painting of a “misshapen dwarf,” Richard’s disfigurement renegotiates the boundary lines of the body. The portrait, situated in the Brockhurst library,
represented a hideous and misshapen dwarf, holding a couple of graceful greyhounds in a leash—an unhappy creature … whose gorgeous garments, of scarlet and gold, were ingeniously designed so as to emphasise the physical degradation of its contorted person. … The desolate eyes, looking out of the marred and brutal face, met [Richard’s] own with a certain claim of kinship. There existed a tragic freemasonry between himself and this outcasted being, begotten of a common knowledge, a common experience.37
Following Richard’s epiphany, Julius March, an inhabitant of Brockhurst and cousin to the late Richard Calmady Sr., imagines that the painting is “no longer harshly evident either in violence of colour or grotesqueness of form. It had become part of the great whole, merely modulated to gracious harmony with the divers objects surrounding it.” Richard is “made one” by his deformity just as the Velasquez portrait appears to coalesce with the “great [spiritual] whole.”38 Opening up a channel of communication or “freemasonry” between himself and his inanimate double, Richard’s disfigurement indicates a disintegration of the frontier between the individual body and external world that runs parallel to the disintegration of property in the context of socialistic organisation. The disintegration of private property augured by Richard’s democratic body is paralleled by the geographical dissection of territory in Sandyfield village. Richard’s home for the maimed and disabled interrupts a succession of affluent properties: an interstice that “the aristocracy of the Row laments [since] [i]t shies at the idea of being invaded by more or less frightful creatures.” Declaring that his “waste humanity” must “neither hide themselves nor be hidden” he selects a property located “on the highroad, at the entrance of the … town.”39 Thus situated at the mouth of the community—the point from which [End Page 559] all traffic circulates—Richard places his disfigured “family” in organic relation with the town’s inhabitants. It is from this vantage point that the residents break down the boundary lines of property maintained by the aristocracy: a move that might be read as an attempt to restore the territorial unity that, three centuries before, the Acts of Enclosure had served to destroy.
Delyfer maintains that Sir Richard Calmady is a “socialist fable not unworthy of William Morris” and it is certainly true that Richard finds solace in the redistribution of his wealth and experience of collective organisation.40 Yet for Malet, socialism is only ever an approximation or likeness of that greater “wholeness” found in the reconciliation with God, the father. Explaining his system to Honoria, Richard concedes: “I rejoice in the … whole-hearted agitator, who believes that his system adopted, his reform carried through, the whole show will instantly be put straight.”41 However, “no reform is final this side of death. And no panacea is universal, save that which the Maker of the Universe chooses to work out.” According to Richard, unity in the form of socialist activity is foredoomed “because material conditions are perpetually changing, while man in his mental, emotional and physical aspects remains precisely the same.”42 In many respects Richard’s appraisal of socialistic reform mirrors the criticisms levelled at Charles Kinsley’s Christian Socialist project. In his article on the subject, Colwyn Edward Vulliamy points out that the “failure … of the Christian Socialist experiment was due to a misconception of the real economic conditions of the time, an exaggerated belief in the spirit of brotherhood, and the absence of a thorough knowledge of the market. It was found to be impossible to eliminate competition.”43 In Richard’s critique as in Vulliamy’s, it is man’s intrinsic individualism and the difficulties posed by a dynamic economic culture that precipitate the failure of socialistic enterprise. Malet’s view of socialism would certainly have been shaped by the inefficacy of her father’s own intervention but, as also seems probable, like Zola, she was uncomfortable with the hostile demonstrations of anarchist factions of the movement.
The Far Horizon, her 1906 novel, examines the transgressive, as opposed to cooperative, qualities of socialist anarchism in more detail. One of Malet’s more conspicuously “Catholic” novels, it describes the spiritual crisis of the recently retired bank clerk, Dominic Iglesias. Dominic, who had spent the larger part of his life in the service of his now deceased mother, unsuccessfully attempts to combat the ennui of his retirement. Striking up an unlikely friendship with the actress [End Page 560] Poppy St. John, and financing the work of an ungifted and parasitical playwright (who is, unbeknownst to either party, Poppy’s estranged husband), Dominic finds consolation in Catholicism: his mother’s faith. During this time, Dominic experiences a number of vivid dreams relating to his childhood and the disappearance of his father, who it appears was a social anarchist. In one particularly striking episode, Dominic’s dream takes the form of a socialist allegory featuring Pascal Pelletier, a friend of his father’s and a fellow anarchist. The dream depicts a “heavy ill-favoured tabby cat” that resembles Sir Abel Barking, the manager at Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking (Dominic’s former workplace), pouncing upon the sparrows washing at a stone basin in Dominic’s childhood garden. Merely a boy, Dominic tries unsuccessfully to intervene but “the pillar broke and the basin toppled over, pinning [the cat] across the loins.”44 Pelletier, who had been witness to the spectacle, sermonises: “[S]ing aloud Te Deum in praise of the glorious goddess of Social Revolution who has delivered the enemy of the people into our hands. This is no affair of cat and bird, but of the capitalist and the proletariat on which he battens. … Observe [the creature], let it suffer. … See, in the name of humanity, of labour, of the unknown and unnumbered millions of the martyred poor, I set a match to this good little fuse, and, with the rapidity of thought, blow blasphemous tyrant Capital into a thousand fragments of reeking flesh and splintered bone!”45
Pelletier makes a religious fetish of social revolution, singing the prayer Te Deum in exaltation of capitalism’s almost certain demise. In this way Malet reveals herself attuned to what Hendrick de Man would later call the “eschatological sentiment” of popular socialism—that is, both the religious character of socialist activity and a belief in a glorious final term of socialistic organisation.46 As we know, at the end of the nineteenth century, socialist propaganda frequently deployed biblical imagery and political activity often took ritualistic forms, most visible perhaps in the May Day celebrations.47 Declaring that he acts “in the name of humanity, of labour, of the unknown and unnumbered millions of the martyred poor,” Pelletier adapts the Trinitarian phraseology of “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the holy ghost” to similar ends. However, Malet’s principal motive is not to undermine the tactics of social anarchists (though she might well distrust them), but to expose socialism as an inferior “corporate” model to the divine conciliation with one God. The “fat-cat” capitalist and dynamite-loving anarchist are in debates relating to working conditions frequently the material of satire and Malet makes free with these allusions. Curiously, though, [End Page 561] she locates socialism and capitalism within a structurally equivalent, ideologically inverse, corporate framework.
In her work on the corporate personality in Dracula, Turley Houston cites the landmark 1897 case, Salomon v. Salomon & Co. Ltd. As she explains, Salomon, a shoemaker, converted his business into a limited liability company. Keeping all but six of the shares (at this time limited liability companies were required to have at least seven shareholders), Salomon sold those that remained to family members. When the company was placed in liquidation one of its creditors attempted to sue Salomon, the principal shareholder, for outstanding debts. Initially the court ruled on behalf of the claimant but this decision was repealed at Lords because in law the limited liability company is what is known as a “corporate personality”: a single, consolidated personality regarded as distinct from its individual members. Though Salomon was in “common sense” terms proprietor of the company, its legal constitution was such that he could not be held liable for the debt. Houston points out that the ruling had serious implications for the public image of corporate enterprise at the end of the nineteenth century and she suggests that the concept of corporate impersonality—that is, the deindividuation of members within a corporate structure—is one of the central anxieties articulated in Stoker’s novel. The story, for instance, features “two incorporated entities (Dracula and his vampires and Van Helsing and his followers), competing to the death for a complete monopoly on circulation and consumption.”48
The Far Horizon is Malet’s own experiment in “corporate impersonality.” The novel anatomises a life in which the lion’s share of the social, professional and emotional activity has been undertaken within, and in the service of, a corporate body. Moreover, Malet wants to posit an institutional dynamic within the banking sector that is a correlative of the socialistic hive-mind explored in Sir Richard Calmady. Like the proletarian bees of Richard’s hallucination, Dominic Iglesias is a worker in the corporate hive: Barking Brothers & Barking. He admits to actress Poppy that after his years of service: “I have lost … my humanity. I am a machine now, not a man. To the machine, work is life.” Employing Malet’s omnipresent rhetoric of waste, he continues: “Unluckily there is no rag-and-bottle shop where superannuated bank clerks of five-and-fifty have the very modest value of scrap iron!” Sacrificing his life in service of the corporate entity of the bank Dominic becomes, like Richard, “refuse humanity.” The bank “had eaten up the best years of his life, it is true. But, even in so doing, by the mere force of constant [End Page 562] association, the interests of the great banking house has come to be his own, its schemes and secrets his excitement, its successes his satisfaction. Fortunately the human mind is so constituted that it is possible to have an esteem, amounting to enthusiasm, for a body corporate, while entertaining scanty admiration for the individuals of whom that body is composed.”49
By his own admission, Dominic is deprived of his “humanity.” He is not merely witness to the spectacle of corporate impersonality but an expression of it—is effectively “eaten up” or assimilated into the operational and ideological territory of the Barking house. Certainly the concept of corporate personality is present for Dominic as he supports the view that Sir Abel Barking’s parasitical proprietorship in no way compromises the integrity of the “body corporate.” Through his allegiance to the house, Dominic submits to the “spirit of the hive” and, like the proletarian bee, pledges his labour to the greater good of the corporation. In many ways Dominic’s activity within the corporate structure of the bank anticipates the concept of swarm intelligence—that is: “the collective behaviour of systems composed of many individuals that interact locally … and that rely on forms of decentralized control and self-organization.”50 At first sight, the hierarchical structure of the city banking house might not appear a particularly convincing exemplar of decentralised organisation. Yet right down the structure of the bank individual agents are seen to act without direction on behalf of the corporation. As a clerk, Dominic features relatively low in the company’s pecking order but he nonetheless works to secure Barking’s interests against reckless speculation in South Africa even after his retirement. Alighting on a “long and evidently inspired article dealing with the floatation of a company just now in the process of acquiring control over extensive areas in South-east Africa,” Dominic begins to suspect that Barking Brothers & Barking have invested too extensively in the speculative projects in Africa.51 As Catherine Delyfer points out, Barking Brothers resonates with the merchant bank Baring Brothers & Co., which in the 1880s similarly over invested in Argentinian debt contracts.52 This ill-advised investment led to the bank’s collapse and, in turn, the Panic of 1890, as contemporary readers would have been aware. Presciently, to Dominic, Barkings’ “enterprise … presented itself as one of those gigantic modern gambles of which the incidental risks are emphatically too heavy.” He reflects that the “mere phantom of the thing hurt him as unseemly, as a shame and dishonour to those in their corporate capacity has benefitted him, and therefore as shame [End Page 563] and dishonour, at least indirectly, to himself. The thought agitated him. He needed to take council with some one; and so pushed by a necessity of immediate action uncommon to him, he … set forth to talk matters over with his old friend and former colleague, George Lovegrove.”53
This is perhaps misleading since Dominic’s allegiance to the bank is not an expression of reciprocal altruism but of corporate loyalty. Operating under a sense of “necessity” that is “uncommon” to him, Dominic exhibits a protective instinct that is consistent with hive mentality. Without mandate, the two former employees collude in a decentralised effort to protect the interests of the bank in the same way that agents within emergent systems act independently and instinctively to protect the integrity of that system. Following an invitation from Sir Abel, Dominic later returns to the bank in order to direct the effort to save it from financial collapse after investments in South Africa run awry. At first considering his decision to return, Dominic recalls his dream of Pascal Pelletier’s “very crude methods of adjusting the age-old quarrel between capital and labour.”54 In childhood Dominic “had not [in this dream] hesitated to save the ill-favoured chunk-faced grey cat—which bore in speech and appearance so queer a likeness to Sir Abel Barking,” nor would the adult Dominic turn his back on the banker. The “road to the far horizon,” Dominic reflects, “instead of leading in the opposite direction to the city banking-house … led directly into and through it.” His resolution to assist, Dominic acknowledges, will mean “time, labour, unremitting application, a wholesale sacrifice of leisure.”
In order to rationalise Dominic’s forfeit and his support for a corporation that by his own admission suffers from “wealth apoplexy,” we must return to Maeterlinck’s analysis of the hive.55 On the nature of the domestic bee, Maeterlinck avers: her “whole life is an entire sacrifice to the manifold, everlasting being whereof she forms part.”56 However, in apian civilisation “we find the humble-bees, which are like our cannibals. The adult workers are incessantly hovering around the eggs, which they seek to devour. … Among the humble-bees, for instance, the workers do not dream of renouncing love, whereas our domestic bee lives in a state of perpetual chastity. And indeed we soon shall show how much more she has to abandon, in exchange for the comfort and security of the hive, for its architectural, economic, and political perfection.”57 “The aim of nature,” Maeterlinck suggests, “is manifestly the improvement of the race” and by means of her absolute subordination and chastity, the domestic bee approaches evolutionary perfection.58 Despite Maeterlinck’s rejection of Catholicism, his prose is coloured [End Page 564] by this faith; indeed, the rhetoric of wholeness, sacrifice and everlasting perfection deployed here might as easily describe the liturgy of the Eucharist as apian evolution. In its pilgrimage to the Celestial City of evolutionary fulfilment, the individual bee is sacrificed to, and assimilated by, the “manifold, everlasting being whereof she forms part.”59 This, of course, reflects the Christological economy of salvation that describes the sacrifice of Jesus Christ who is similarly incorporated by the whole (of humanity) through the act of eating as symbolised in the Eucharist. Conversely, the humble-bee (analogue of the human savage) exists in a state of primal antagonism in which the bee’s aggressive orality is figured as cannibalism and not, as in Eucharistic model, unity. And so it is with Malet. “The age old quarrel between capital and labour” is for her an expression of primal enmity. Though a transposition of socialism’s “commercial cannibal,” the capitalistic cat is no unchallenged predator, but rather one party in a “quarrel” as old as capitalism itself. Like Maeterlinck’s bee, Dominic’s journey towards the “far horizon”—a term that might, itself, describe a spiritual or evolutionary telos—lies in the way of total identification, subordination and self-sacrifice. Interestingly, Barking Brothers & Barking is located on Threadneedle Street, home of the London Stock Exchange and Bank of England (and Barings Brothers were situated round the corner, in Bishopsgate). Commonly associated with the adage “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God,” Threadneedle Street is, ironically, the egress Dominic must thread “into” and “through” in order to arrive at the far horizon.60
If Maeterlinck’s cannibalistic humble-bee is an expression of primal aggression then its equivalent in the corporate structure of Barking bank is Sir Abel’s nephew, Reginald Barking. Joining the corporation from America where he had undergone “a phase of commonplace but secret vice,” Reginald, a rampant individualist, applies his “fiercely driving ambition” to the practice of speculative investment. Figuratively “hovering around the eggs [that he] seek[s] to devour,” Reginald endorses an investment policy that exploits the colonial territories: “Early in his career he recognised that the great sources of wealth and power lie with the younger countries, in the development of their natural and industrial resources, of their railways and other forms of transport. … His dreams of power and speculative activity directed themselves, consequently, to the British Colonies, and to those as yet [End Page 565] unappropriated spaces of the earth’s surface where British influence is still only tentatively present.”61
Financially involved in the extirpation of colonial capital, Reginald participates in a form of primitive accumulation—that is, the promotion of capitalistic industry through the original seizure of capital which might include natural resources. Just as the “millocracy” described in Marx’s “The Future Results of the British Rule in India” (1853) recognised the “vital importance” of transport links for British industry in India, so too is Reginald aware of the logistical requirements of his colonial enterprise. Marx points out that the “day is not far distant when, by a combination of railways and steam vessels, the distance between England and India, measured by time, will be shortened to eight days, and when that once fabulous country will thus be actually annexed to the Western world.”62 Yet at the fin de siècle, Reginald’s sights are set not on India but on Africa where at this time the development of rail links similarly served British interests. Yet despite Reginald’s aggressive colonising instinct, his speculation in Southeast Africa lands the ordinarily solvent institution in financial difficulty. It is implied that the events of the Second Boer War—for instance, the defeats of “Black Week,” during which time Barking’s losses are situated—had arrested British enterprise in the gold-rich Witwatersrand.63 Unlike Dominic who subordinates his own interests to those of the firm, Reginald contrarily “employ[s] the unimpeachable respectability and solvency of [Barking Brothers & Barking] as a lever towards the realisation of his own far-reaching ambitions.”64
The cooperative model of social or evolutionary development authorised by Malet and Maeterlinck is largely consistent with Herbert Spencer’s law of organic progress, which, as Regenia Gagnier explains, posits a kind of universal division of labour. Gagnier points out that “[u]nder the influence of Darwinian biology … Spencer had biologized the division of labor, making differences between people evolutionary or organically purposive.” She continues: “the logic of his system with respect to what he called the ‘higher races’ was toward increasing individuation, voluntary cooperation, and mutual aid in a division of labor and markets.” The savage, on the other hand, displayed “an impulse for immediate gratification.”65 A central metaphor of Malet’s book, the “far horizon,” describes a teleology of spiritual salvation that is paradigmatic. Replicating this spiritual model of corporation, the bank like the hive, moves towards more cooperative ways of operating and in so doing “rid[s] itself of a canker” in the form of Reginald [End Page 566] Barking. Reginald’s financial practice, described variously as “reckless,” “strenuous” and “self-seeking,” is as retrogressive as his biology is degenerate. Indeed, “a lizard-like young man” and the father of “two dry, pale children, whose contours were [similarly] less Raphaelesque than gnat-like,” Reginald’s bruising, corner-cutting methods of capital accumulation tend to the direct gratification of his financial appetite.66 In this way Dominic, a financier of intrinsically cooperative character, represents the evolutionary future of Spencer’s teleology while Reginald, the degenerate individualist, characterises the past. There are, however, important differences between Spencer’s treatment of the corporate body and Malet’s. In Spencer’s body politic, for instance, individuals are driven towards social cooperation through the operation of self-interest and not, as in Malet’s salvation-model of corporate unity, through the exercise of self-sacrifice. Spencer argues that the “corporate life must … be subservient to the lives of the parts, instead of the lives of the parts being subservient to the corporate life”: a statement which, though it implies corporate unity, describes a relationship of part-to-whole that is an inverse of Malet’s.67
Interestingly, the excision of Reginald, a “canker” in the corporate body of Barking Brothers & Barking, mirrors the elimination of individualism in the English national body during the Boer conflict. With respect to the war, Dominic considers:
A few persons, it is true, remembered Majuba Hill, and doubted the small boy’s [the Boer’s] immediate reduction to obedience. A few others dared to suspect that English society was suffering from wealth apoplexy and the many unlovely symptoms which, in all ages of history, have accompanied that form of seizure, and to doubt whether blood-letting might not prove salutary. … [Dominic had a] suspicion that the sobering and sorrowful influences of war might be healthful for the body politic, just as a surgical operation may be healthful for the individual body.68
In an apoplectic condition, the national body, like the financial body, operates under the effects of organic disease, the names of which are greed and individualism. The excision of the cankerous Reginald, and the letting of national blood at the Transvaal likewise protect the health of the organism. The English, Dominic reflects, are “a nation of individualists, each mainly, not to say exclusively, occupied with his own private affairs.” “With the vast majority,” he continues, “unity of sentiment is suspect, and patriotism a passive rather than an active virtue.” Yet the “stress of repeated disaster” inspires “unity of sentiment and patriotism.”69 In this way, Malet’s novel attributes that corporate stability to an expulsion of national blood. An imperial haemorrhage, [End Page 567] the Anglo-Boer conflict, brings about a shrinkage or consolidation of the body politic that may endorse de-colonisation.
It is tempting to read the egalitarian instinct of Malet’s writing as “religiously-inflected,” not least because nineteenth-century socialism often had roots in religious idealism (consider, for example, the popularity of the Labour Church during the 1890s). The problem with this assumption is that it suggests her faith and spirituality are merely means to a utopian socialist end. Contrary to this, Malet creates a religious narrative that establishes divine reconciliation with a single God as telos, and while experiments in collective organisation may prove instrumental to this end they remain subordinate to it. Malet’s conceptual scheme is complex and, as we have seen, in attempting to work through her feelings about the prevailing economic arrangements she conflates religious, biological and materialist discourses and ideas. While the binary of wholeness and fragmentation is one on which Malet’s system of values depends (since proximity to the divine is schematized in degrees of completeness), there are times when this scheme appears to break down. Richard Calmady’s malformed body becomes a cohesive, as opposed to fragmentary, presence and the proletarian bees’ corporate resistance, though proportionate, is revealed as “unworthy” and conflictual.70 This is not to suggest that Malet’s conception is poorly conceived—”wholeness” registers for her as a spiritual, not material, condition and external appearances, though symbolic are rarely defining. Malet does not want to show us how to make our economic arrangements, she wants to show us where to direct our revolutionary impulse and that is inwards.
Notes
1. J. F. M. Clark, Bugs and the Victorians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 100.
2. Amidst the expansion of British socialist politics in the 1880s and 90s, some factions of the movement staged small-scale experiments in cooperative living. Driven by ethical idealism these “communities of hope,” to borrow a phrase from Thomas Linehan, adopted various forms but shared the general aspiration of rejecting capitalistic organisation by living a simple, often spiritual life “based on co-operative principles in domestic economy and work.” See Thomas Linehan, Modernism and British Socialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 65, 67. Amongst the more notable of these was The Fellowship of the New Life, a Bloomsbury experiment in collective living which sought to foster “perfect character in each and all” exalting the spiritual and aesthetic over the base materialism of capitalistic organisation; quoted in Ruth Livesy, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 45. Like other experiments of its kind, the Fellowship, which included such noteworthy intellectuals as Havelock Ellis, Edith Lees and Ramsay MacDonald was disbanded in the late 1890s. [End Page 568]
3. Cited in Patricia Lorimer Lundberg, “An Inward Necessity”: The Writer’s Life of Lucas Malet (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 95–96.
4. Lucas Malet, The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance (New York: A. L. Burt, 1901), 31.
5. Ibid., 32.
6. Ibid., 71.
7. Ibid., 508.
8. Ibid., 537–38, 538.
9. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Robert Mighall, ed. (London: Penguin, 2003), 137.
10. Of course, there are several versions of the fragmentation narrative. Decadence as social atomisation, the discovery of the unconscious as psychological division and speciation as biological disjunction for instance, are different expressions of fragmentation in fin-de-siècle culture. Here I am interested in the fragmentation implied by Decadent and Judeo-Christian accounts of decline or fallenness, specifically in respect to an original (social/biological or theistic) whole.
11. Malet, Sir Richard Calmady, 527.
12. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees. Phillip Harth, ed. (London: Penguin, 1989), 76, 70.
13. Ibid., 69. Phillip Harth, “Introduction,” in The Fable of the Bees, Phillip Harth, ed., 19.
14. Virgil, Georgics, Elaine Fantham, ed., Peter Fallon, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4.76, 4.91, 4.92–94.
15. Malet, Sir Richard Calmady, 533–34.
16. Ibid., 529, 534.
17. In Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and in Capital, Marx himself used the bee to explore the differences between human and animal labour. Unlike Maeterlinck, though, Marx is reluctant to regard the hive as an analogue of human industry because of the serious functional and creative differences between the two. The impulse to generate “surplus” is, for instance a distinctly human phenomenon. See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Martin Milligan, trans. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1959), 75.
18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Samuel Moore, trans. (London: Penguin, 1985), 233.
19. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, Alfred Sutro, trans. (New York: Dover, 2006), 17–18.
20. Ibid., 16–17.
21. Malet’s name appears alongside William Archer, Pearl Craigie, Richard Garnett, Thomas Hardy, Frederic Harrison, Maurice Hewlett, Henry Arthur Jones, George Meredith, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Laurence Alma-Tadema, and W. B. Yeats.
22. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Intelligence of the Flowers, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, trans. (New York: Dodd Mead, 1907), 9, 8.
23. Marion Thain, “Apian Aestheticism: Michael Field and the Economics of the Aesthetic,” in Michael Field and Their World, Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson, eds. (High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2007), 224.
24. Ibid., 233.
25. Malet, Sir Richard Calmady, 526, 527.
26. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Jane Garnett, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 80.
27. Lundberg, “An Inward Necessity,” 34, 150. Separated (though not formally) from her husband, the rector, William Harrison, Lucas Malet relied on the income of her published work to pay for European travel that allowed her to live independently. Later on, Malet and her sister Rose would be encumbered by the debt of their brother Greville who died in poverty in Queensland, Australia. Increasingly in her career Malet was required to write out of financial necessity.
28. It may be that Malet had The Perfect Wagnerite, George Bernard Shaw’s 1898 commentary on Wagner’s The Ring Cycle, in mind when she penned Richard Calmady’s opera scene. Shaw, who reads Wagner’s opera as a socialist allegory, interprets the dwarf Alberic as a modern capitalist. He writes [End Page 569] “with his corrupting millions” Alberic wields his “invisible hunger-whip to force the labour of the dwarfs and to buy the services of the giants.” There are clear parallels between the dwarf-capitalist of Shaw’s commentary and the character of Richard who regards his deformity as a physical symbol of his indolence and parasitism. See George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung’s Ring, 4th ed. (London: Constable, 1926), 13.
29. Malet, Sir Richard Calmady, 640, 661.
30. Ibid., 640.
31. Ibid., 640, 636.
32. Ibid., 663–64.
33. In a magazine interview for The Young Woman: A Monthly Journal and Review, Malet cites Zola as one of a number of French writers who have shaped her writing: “I am much more given … to reading French than English fiction, and any little knowledge I may have of style and method I have so learnt.” See Frederick Dolman, “‘Lucas Malet’ at Home: A Chat with the Daughter of Charles Kingsley,” The Young Woman: A Monthly Journal and Review, 4 (1896), 149.
34. Émile Zola, Germinal. Leonard Tancock, trans. (1885; London: Everyman, 1991), 260.
35. Catherine Delyfer, Art and Womanhood in Fin-de-Siècle Writing: The Fiction of Lucas Malet, 1880–1931 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), 107.
36. Malet, Sir Richard Calmady, 607.
37. Ibid., 595.
38. Ibid., 34.
39. Ibid., 671.
40. Delyfer, Art and Womanhood in Fin-de-Siècle Writing, 84
41. Malet, Sir Richard Calmady, 663.
42. Ibid.
43. Colwyn Edward Vulliamy, “Charles Kingsley and Christian Socialism,” in Fabian Tracts 140175, 1908–1914 (London: Fabian Society, 1923), Tract 174, 12.
44. Lucas Malet, The Far Horizon (London: Hutchinson, 1906), 38.
45. Ibid., 39.
46. Hendrick de Man, The Psychology of Marxian Socialism, Eden Paul and Cedar Paul, trans. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1985), 139.
47. Stanley Pierson, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism: The Struggle for a New Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 226–27.
48. Gail Turley Houston, From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 117.
49. Malet, The Far Horizon, 31, 22. Catherine Delyfer suggests that Dominic’s claims of a machinelike existence resonate with Adam Smith, John Ruskin and William Morris. She points out that in The Wealth of Nations “the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations … generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become, while in the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853) Ruskin had blamed laissez faire economics for reducing the working man to the condition of a machine.” See Catherine Delyfer, “The Aesthete, the Banker, and the Saint: Economies of Gift and Desire in Lucas Malet’s The Far Horizon (1906),” in Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives, Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keates and Patricia Pulham, eds. (London: Routledge, 2015).
50. Claude Sammut and Geoffrey I. Webb, eds., Encyclopaedia of Machine Learning (New York: Springer, 2011), 946.
51. Malet, The Far Horizon, 156.
52. Delyfer, “The Aesthete, the Banker, and the Saint: Economies of Gift and Desire in Lucas Malet’s The Far Horizon (1906).
53. Malet, The Far Horizon, 157, 162.
54. Ibid., 302. [End Page 570]
55. Ibid., 302, 303, 156.
56. Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, 11.
57. Ibid., 12–13.
58. Ibid., 12.
59. Ibid., 11.
60. Matthew 19:24
61. Malet, The Far Horizon, 159.
62. Karl Marx,”The Future Results of the British Rule in India,” in Marx and Engels: Articles on Britain (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 197.
63. See André Wessels, Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902: White Man’s War, Black Man’s War, Traumatic War (Westdene: Sun Press, 2011), 43. In “Black Week” (December 1899) the British suffered three crushing defeats in the battles of Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso.
64. Malet, The Far Horizon, 160.
65. Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalisation: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 31.
66. Malet, The Far Horizon, 159, 160.
67. Herbert Spencer, “The Social Organism,” in Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative (London: Williams & Norgate, 1883), I: 401.
68. Malet, The Far Horizon, 155–56.
69. Ibid., 206.
70. Malet, Sir Richard Calmady, 530–31. [End Page 571]
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