Books

Nicest set of people

Cohn Welch

do think the Fabians are quite the nicest set of people I ever knew.' So wrote E. Nesbit, herself a Fabian and surely a very nice person indeed, as readers of the delightful Wouldbegoods, Treasure Seekers and Railway Children could hardly doubt. She was married to Hubert Bland, also a Fabian but not such a nice person, though he must have had charms which time has obscured. His photograph, reproduced by Mr and Mrs MacKenzie, suggests not so much a nice person as a menacing mixture of drunken vulture, confidence trickster (complete with monocle and false mous- tache) and melodramatic seducer of inno- cent maidens. This last indeed he was: n.s.i.t., as debs' mothers used to say — not safe in taxis. His wife kindly befriended his victims and looked after the progeny, thus becoming nicer than ever.

But what of the rest? Were they really a nice set or were Miss Nesbit's standards lowered either by charity or lack• of famil- iarity with nicer sets still? Well, quite enough evidence to form an opinion is sup- plied by the MacKenzies. They are them- selves nice persons you may suppose, if fairness, narrative skill, enthusiasm, humour and an impartial interest alike in people and ideas, in gossip and ideology, in absurdities and aspirations, be any qual- ification.

Was H. G. Wells nice? What Bland pro- duced in the female line Wells later strove to seduce, much to the former's indignation. , He (Bland) is said actually to have pulled his illegitimate daughter Rosamund, another Fabian, off the train in which she was to elope with Wells, leaving Wells free to put the Fabian daughter of another early Fabian couple in the family way, and Rosamund free to marry Clifford Sharp, yet another Fabian, first editor of the New Statesman, a drunken womaniser and not even in other respects a nice man at all. The Fabians sound rather like the police force, as presented in a recent recruiting adver- tisement: 'Dull it isn't'.

Was the fair but luckless Rosamund in fact or in part Dora or Alice of the Wouldbegoods? And did the Fabians' pet Russian revolutionary, Stepniak, killed in a train crash, turn up in the Railway Chil- dren? One can hardly help wondering — but I digress.

Was Shaw nice? Well, in a sense it is possible to view his heartless, bloodless and mostly sexless philanderings as on an even scalier moral plane than Wells's disastrous

antics, which have at least the dubious dig- nity of being part of real life. Wells took what he wanted, as God advises the Spaniards to do, and• paid for it; yes, but others paid more, far more. Shaw took a little, took it often, paid a little. and gave a lot. What woman to whom he ever wrote one of those numberless irresistibly playful, affectionate, teasing, flirtatious billets doux but remembered it with a smile for the rest of her life? Much anyway can be forgiven a man who — a new one to me — acidly explained Annie.Besant's predisposition to martyrdom as offering the only way to become famous without ability.

Were the Webbs nice? Well, in the dic- tionary sense — fastidious, hard to please, precise — they were clearly very nice indeed. And I must confess to a great weakness for Sidney. Perhaps it is partly his appearance which endears, resembling in later life, though incongruously adorned with pince- nez, one of those old, indeterminate. whis- kery, lumpy, scruffy, flea-ridden, smelly lit- tle dogs which have the mysterious power to engender affection even in cold fish like Beatrice. He indeed actually used to curl up on her bony lap, causing her to reflect, perhaps justly if for the wrong reason, on what a pair of old sillies they were. Certainly his preoccupations and literary productions are boring, frowsy, wrong-headed and arid. Yet he never appears in this or any other book as anything less than human, friendly, good-tempered and decent.

His courtship of the beautiful but frozen Beatrice is really touching, with elements in • it of both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. He bids her not to sacrifice all to work: 'You would have dried up warmheartedness in order to get truth, and you would not even get truth.' He warns her 'not to crush out feeling', not to 'commit emotional suicide', `not to settle everything too confidently by pure intellect', to recognise the claims of instinct as a motive.

These are not typically Fabian noises. The MacKenzies refer to the 'emotional poverty' of the Fabians, which 'led them to ally themselves with those who were mat- 'O.K. We'll compromise : Grunwick's this morning and then on to Wimbledon.' erially impoverished'. If Sidney Webb was less impoverished than most of the others, it was perhaps because unlike them he had had a good lower-middle-class upbringing his was 'a happy family', he recalled.

Most of the dominant Fabians, as the , MacKenzies point out, had had to rebel against formidable or inadequate parents, to establish their place in the world by sheer will-power, to shed the social and religious assumptions of childhood. The struggle left them lonely, different, proud, conscious of superiority, reluctant to co-operate with others as equals. It also fatally flawed their thought, leading them all in different degrees to ignore or despise or even hate the family and all the human motives and affections which that institution embraces, cherishes, canalises and sanctifies. It thus turned all their good intentions to dust and evil.

Here was perhaps a bond between them; and certainly one is required to explain how such an extraordinarily disparate bunch of cranks, prim prigs, lechers, dry doctrinaires, wits, fogies, vegetarians, drunks and ped- ants could possibly cooperate with each other at all.

Another common link is their contempt for liberty and freedom of choice, as also for the ordinary people (average and sensual as Beatrice Webb always called them) who, given this freedom, would inevitably choose wrongly. This contempt shows itself in so many ways, long .before the Webbs and Shaw finally prostrated themselves before Stalin. They had been on the road to this diabolical Damascus all their lives.

The contempt shows itself in Shaw's early conviction that society would be changed only by those with superior brains and organising skills; in Wells's absurd Samurai; in the Webbs' determination to produce a flood of economists, political scientists and administrators, of superior people to build superior societies; in the Webbs' puzzle- ment and horror when confronted by America, to them a chaos as distasteful as it was incomprehensible. It shows itself even in the Webbs' passion. on the face of it humble or even noble, for disinterested social research. For, to their predestination-blinkered minds, all such research, however free, could only reach one conclusion — socialism. It was not a bus which at the LSE they intended to set in motion, but a tram.

The conversion of the Webbs to Com- , munism 'came as a surprise to many of their friends. Yet it was not the turnabout that it superficially seemed. The Soviet system touched deep-rooted elements in both their personalities — the streak of elitism and authoritarianism, intellectual dogmatism, the need for an all-embracing faith, the desire for a planned and efficient order, the belief in the rightness of the expert, the lack of sympathetic imagination for ordinary people ' Such were the defects which brought the nicest set of people to worship at the feet of murderers.