BOOKS OF THE DAY
Shaw's " Beatrice "
Beatrice Webb. By Margaret Cole. (Longrnans. 10s. 6d.)
IN this portrait of what she calls "the greatest woman I have ever known," Mrs. Margaret Cole has done well a job that was by no means easy. Yet it needed doing. There is a generation of youngish persons, even within the Socialist fold, for whom Beatrice Webb, apart from her Russian enthusiasm, is little more than a name, if a great name. For them the long and faithful career of distinguished and disinterested service needs to be set out, and set out against its complicated background of events and controversies. If, at times, it seems that the " rows " within the Fabian Society are dealt with almost too fully,- one recalls how vitally important they seemed at the time—not least to the Webbs, calmly as they always took them ; and, on the whole, the contemporary atmosphere is very neatly sketched in at each crucial stage.
The high points in the narrative are, inevitably, the youthful story and the final romance of "falling in love with Russia." It is hard to re-tell a tale once so superbly narrated in My Apprenticeship, but two points here strike me as being exceptionally well taken. First, the significance of Beatrice Potter's work as her father's companion and confidential secretary. Not only was she thereby trained in methodical organisation and the :ffectIve management of affairs, domestic and other. Even more important for her future work was the fact that she learned "to treat money as a business man treats it "; she learned to take risks and, when necessary, to cut one's losses. This knowledge, as Mrs. Cole justly observes, stood her in good stead in other spheres ; "she never suffered either from the timidity in action or the clinging to institutions and pro- jects after they have become useless or impossible of achievement which the history of the last two generations has, alas, shown to be such a common failure of Social Democratic parties and govern- ments founded on them : she had practical as well as intellectual courage." Secondly, Mrs. Cole does full And sympathetic justice to the decisiveness with which, on her marriage, Beatrice left her own world to enter fully into Sidney's ; "it was she who resigned her career—if only for a time—not Sidney." She took his name, and was slightly contemptuous, later, of public women who retained theirs, declaring this to be "confusing and inconvenient." She took on his friends, making herself part and parcel of the Fabian community. She did this easily and well because, from the start, here was a marriage of perfect companionship and abiding happi- ness. About this, the nonsense at one time summed up in A. G. Gardiner's ridiculous picture of "two typewriters clicking as one," has died of its own absurdity. Yet the fact presents the biographer with another major difficulty. Of her separate, individual life Beatrice Potter wrote an account which will live among the great autobiographies. It may be hoped that of her dual existence, Our Partnership, will in time give us an equally masterly picture. Mean- time, after her entry into that dual existence she had, as Mrs. Cole aptly says, "like the 'happy countries ' almost no personal history." The work she and Sidney did together, from that time on is in fact, her history. It is by intellectual standards that this remark- able woman must be judged, for it was her powerful intellect that made her what she was.
For final assessment of the work of the Webbs the time is not yet. Mrs. Cole, disclaiming modestly any attempt to write the "definitive life" which cannot be written until the stored wealth of the Diaries which, thanks to persistent insomnia, she never intermitted, is given to the world, also, and again wisely, disclaims any attempt to make a "definitive evaluation" of her work. She does, however, analyse certain intellectual characteristics in the make-up of this potent figure: elements that will survive to make her great as a person, no matter what the ultimate evaluation of her sociological contribution may prove to be. Of these, her total dis- interestedness is outstanding and lovely. She never had a personal axe to grind ; at her most Macchiavellian she was concerned wholly about public ends and indifferent to public recognition. Moreover, although subjected from time to time to attacks the more painful that they came from inside, she never bore malice or harboured the smallest sense of personal injury. She was cast in a large mould ; there was nothing petty about her anywhere.
When one comes to Mrs. Cole's summation of her intellectual gifts—her practicality, her originality and h..r "fundamental con- sistency "—one enters the field of argtiment, for which this is not the place. That she had these great qualities is not, I think, open to doubt: the tracing of the connection between Webbian Socialism up to 1932 and their ardent acceptance of Soviet Communism as a new civilisation is a task far too fascinating and too intricately involved with appraisement of their earlier outlook to be appro- priate here. Suffice it to say, meantime that this is—and for that one reviewer is deeply thankful—a good specimen of biography written with admiration and a worthy contribution to the Beatrice
Previous page
