BEATRICE WEBB, OCTOGENARIAN
[The writer of this article, whose initials sire' not entirely • unfamiliar, was born on July 26th, 1856, Mrs. Sidney Webb (Lady Passfield) on janzarry 22nd, 1858, and Lord Passfield -as recently as 1859.] WE must admit that Beatrice Webb, whose eightieth birthday The Spectator feels impelled to celebrate, is a very notable woman. In the main mass of her work she is inseparable from the firm of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whom a Labour Government tried vainly to disguise as Baron and Lady Passfield. The collaboration is so perfect that her part in it is inextricable. I, who have been behind the scenes of it, cannot lay my hand on a single sentence and say this is Sidney or that is Beatrice.
Nevertheless there is in literature a separate Beatrice ; and later on there will be more. She is one of those terrible women who keep diaries. Sidney, the least autobiographical of human creatures, is no more capable of keeping a diary than I or you. I have never been able to find out where or when or how this diary contrived to get written, though I have spent months in Mrs. Webb's household and seen her working every day to the limit of human endurance at the great joint masterpieces all the time. But it exists ; and the world will some day learn what a very clever woman, quite free from any sort of sentimental veneration, thought of the celebrities, nonentities, obscurities, and real live wires who made up the public life of her time.
Besides, she was at work long before she collided with Sidney Webb. She had written a history of Co-operation, and thereby not only made the co-operators Class Conscious, but established the importance and success of Consumers' Co-operation as distinguished from the futile attempts at co-operative production which had had no chance against Capitalism. That was the sort of thing she liked doing, though all the joys of the West End and the country houses were open to her. She was a born industrial investigator, and was satisfied by nothing short of personal contacts with the personalities operating the proletarian side of industry. Hunting, shooting, dancing, and adventures in the marriage market, in which she was a desirable catch, were to her a waste of time when there were so many intensely important things to be investigated at the East End and in the manufacturing towns. When her relative Charles Booth financed his great enquiry into poverty to- prove that it did not exist and that Karl Marx's world-shaking description of it was a fable, she joined him, and instead of consulting wage-lists and official figures, disguised, herself and worked in sweaters' dens until her hopeless inferiority as a needlewoman and her obviously extreme eligibility as an educated managing woman to be the bride of young Ikey or Moses, the sons of the house, made further experiment in that direction impossible. But enough was enough. Marx won hands down.
It was this determination to sample movements and their leaders instead of reading about them that brought her into contact with the Fabian Society, which was making stir enough at the time to call for investigation. They were as usual a mixed lot, but with unerring judgement she fixed on Sidney Webb as a unique lump of solid ability without any complications. She had no difficulty in appropriating him with a completeness which was part of the fundamental simplicity of his nature; for she was an attractive lady; and when Sidney fell in love he did not do it by halves. Her family was amazed and scandalized, as she had seemed of all the young women in London the most certain to choose and marry a Cabinet minister, if not a Prime Minister. And in those days Cabinet ministers were not six a penny. Her choice needs no justification now. Cabinets have flamed and crackled and died down like thorns under a pot ; but Sidney Webb remains, piling up an authority and an eminence that have never been shaken. Asquith the contemptuous lived to canonize him.
In fact the sole drawback to her choice was myself, a useful member of Webb's Fabian retinue, but highly obnoxious to Beatrice for the technical reason that I could not be classified. All her interest was in social organization. Her job was the discovery of the common rules by which men bind themselves to co-operate for social ends. She had no use for exceptional people : degrees of ability and efficiency she could deal with, but the complications introduced by artists, Irishmen and the eccentric and anarchic individuals who infest revolutionary movements and have to be shot when the revolution succeeds were, from her point of view of social definition and classification, simply nuisances.
She would probably have got rid of me as most women get rid of their husbands' undesirable bachelor friends, but for one qualification which I possessed. I knew Webb's value. And so I was not only tolerated but heroically made much of until the joyous day when she discovered a classi- fication for me. I was a Sprite ; and in that category I became happily domesticated at holiday times with the newly-wed pair until my own marriage six years later.
We were all three heavily afflicted with what Tolstoy's children called Weltverbesserungswahn, and went on solving all the social problems, and being completely ignored by the Press whilst noodles' orations in the official key were solemnly reported at length, provided the orator was a parliamentary careerist. As Beatrice had made the co-operators class- conscious single-handed, the two Webbs proceeded by the same contactile method to do the same for the Trade Unionists by their History of Trade Unionism, and followed this up by extending the field to the whole Labour movement in their Industrial Democracy. In the famous Minority Report on the Poor Law, Beatrice was extraordinarily active, whilst the monumental seven volumes on Local Government kept steadily growing through miracles of investigation until the pair, having become the most skilled and best informed investigators on earth as far as we know, were ready for the great Soviet experiment, and in their advanced age were able to give the first competent account of the new social structures that are evolving in Russia, whilst the Press either screamed curses at the Red Spectre or represented the new Russia as an earthly paradise.
Meanwhile, not only does the diary go on ruthlessly : the diarist from time to time detaches herself from the firm to burst into autobiography in what promises to be a serial publication called " My Apprenticeship," with the design of teaching us all how to set about social investigation if our destiny, like hers, lies in that direction. Most of us care little for that, having neither any bent towards her profession nor much urgent Weltverbesserungswahn ; yet the treatise on method holds us as a unique volume of confessions, to say nothing of its record of contacts with all sorts and condi- tions of men, from the most comfortably corrupt and reac- tionary functionaries to the most devoted revolutionists of the gutter, or from Herbert Spencer, whom her genial unmeta- physical father entertained much as he might have kept a pet elephant, to all the parliamentary figures who passed as great, from Joseph Chamberlain to—well, to the present moment. And these are no mere staring and gabbling reminiscences, but judgements and generalizations which give depth to the narrative and value to the time spent in conning it.
It is amazing that such a woman should survive in appar- ently undiminished vigour after eighty years among fools and savages who will rise to nothing but ecstasies of murder : still, if only because she has proved that such a feat is possible to an able Englishwoman, The Spectator offers her its very -respectful congratulations by the hands of her ancient and
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