by David Lodge
Throughout 1904, and much of 1905, he concentrated his efforts on trying to persuade the Fabians to re-examine and revise their precious ‘Basis’, the manifesto drawn up by Wallas, Shaw, Bland and other founding fathers of the Society, which had acquired for the Old Gang the same status as the Ten Commandments had for the Israelites. The main virtue of this document was its brevity, for it could be printed on a single sheet of paper, in spite of saying the same things several times in different ways. ‘The Fabian Society consists of Socialists,’ it began. ‘It therefore aims at the reorganization of society by the emancipating of Land and Industrial Capital from individual or class ownership, and the vesting of them in the community for general benefit.’ The next two paragraphs repeated the same objectives with very little additional detail, and confidently predicted that ‘the idle class now living on the labour of others will necessarily disappear, and practical equality of opportunity will be maintained by the spontaneous action of economic forces …’ It concluded: ‘It seeks to achieve these ends by the general dissemination of knowledge as to the relation between the individual and society in its economic, ethical and political aspects.’
The main feature of this document was its vagueness as to the means by which its aspirations were actually to be carried out, which was an advantage inasmuch as it encouraged many middle-class intellectuals who thought of themselves as progressive to put their names to it without any real fear of having to surrender their private property to the state, but a disadvantage in that it postponed indefinitely any action other than giving lectures and publishing pamphlets. And the definition of socialism in narrowly economic terms excluded mention of urgently needed social and cultural reforms – for example, ending the subjection of women. His radical views on this issue earned him the friendship and support of one of the leading female members of the Fabian, Maud Reeves, the wife of William Pember Reeves, the Agent General for New Zealand. They had come to England in the late nineties with good progressive credentials – he as a former minister in the New Zealand Liberal Government and author of a scholarly book on State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand, she for her participation in a successful campaign for female suffrage in her native country, the first in the world to give women this right. They were quickly welcomed in Fabian circles, where they already had several contacts, and although Reeves could not take an active role in the Society’s affairs because of his diplomatic status, Maud was not thus inhibited.
She was a vivacious, elegant, intelligent lady and he developed a friendship with her in which there was not an iota of the mutual sexual attraction that was always latent in his relationship with Edith Nesbit. Perhaps for this reason she was remarkably unguarded in discussing with him general issues to do with sex and marriage, once casually mentioning apropos of male conservatism in these matters that, ‘Will would never consider contraception and refuses even to discuss it.’ His inference from this and other remarks was that their sexual life had ended with the birth of their third child, a son, just before they came to England, and that this was not a source of grief to her. Certainly Pember Reeves did not seem like a man to set a woman’s pulses racing with desire: he had a long, lugubrious countenance like a bloodhound, looked older than his age, was morose in temperament, stiffly correct in manners, and very conscious of his status, all the more so when his title was elevated to High Commissioner. He had fallen out with his political colleagues in New Zealand and been removed from office, with the sop of a diplomatic post in Britain which he tried to make appear more important than it was. Notwithstanding his support for the cause of female suffrage, Reeves ruled his family as a patriarchal autocracy – or imagined he did. In fact Maud and her two teenage daughters managed to live fairly unrestricted lives by simply not asking his permission for doing as they liked – the young girls, for instance, going about London without chaperones – relying successfully on his imperceptiveness and official preoccupations to escape detection.
In spite of Reeves’s lack of personal charm the two families got on very well together, and Maud was particularly keen to develop her friendship with Jane, who had joined the Fabian as soon as Frank was weaned. Visits were exchanged, and the Reeves family spent a whole week in Sandgate in the summer of 1904, taking a house in the village to be near the Wellses. He enjoyed talking to their two girls, especially the older of the two, Amber, who was just seventeen and not only very pretty but also very intelligent. It was typical of her father’s essentially conservative temperament that he tried to discourage her from going to Cambridge when she left school as she wished, offering her instead the enticement of a presentation at Court and a ‘coming out’ in London. ‘As if I would want to be a debutante!’ Amber said scornfully as he walked along the shore with her and her sister Beryl one day. ‘Curtseying to Royalty in a white dress, and dancing with boring young men at balls night after night.’ ‘So you’ll go to Cambridge?’ he said. ‘Of course!’ ‘Good for you, Amber. What will you study?’ ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she said. ‘What do you think I should study?’
There was nothing he liked more than holding forth about education to a captive audience such as Amber and her sister provided, and he delivered an extempore lecture on the contrasting merits and limitations of the sciences and the humanities. ‘Ideally,’ he concluded, ‘you should be able to study both at university. But such is the prejudice of this benighted country that you have to choose between them, so I suppose it’s a matter of intuition – what sort of knowledge you desire most.’ ‘Tell Mr Wells that he ought to have been a finishing governess,’ Maud wrote in her thank-you letter to Jane afterwards, ‘How those girls revelled in him and how excellent was his influence!’
A year later, when they met at the Reeveses’ big house in Kensington, Amber told him she was going up to Newnham College in the autumn to read Moral Sciences. ‘What are they?’ he asked her. ‘Science isn’t moral or immoral – only the uses that are made of it.’ ‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with natural science, it’s the Cambridge name for philosophy,’ she said airily. ‘Philosophy, ancient and modern, with a bit of psychology thrown in. Plato and Aristotle, Bentham and Mill, Kant and Hegel. That sort of thing. I’m looking forward to it.’ ‘What made you choose that?’ he asked. ‘I was browsing in a bookshop in Charing Cross Road, and I happened to open a book by Kant where he demonstrated how to demolish the claims of the Roman Catholic Church by reason. I decided philosophy was the subject for me.’ ‘What’s the name of the book?’ he said, ‘I’d like to read that demolition myself.’ She blushed. ‘I’m afraid I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘I didn’t buy the book – I couldn’t afford it.’ ‘Well, you must look up the reference in the Public Library and send it to Mr Wells,’ said Maud, overhearing this conversation, ‘or he will think you’re just making it up to impress him.’ ‘Don’t be so mean, Mother! I’m not making it up!’ said Amber, and flounced out of the room. Maud raised her eyebrows and sighed. ‘Young girls! They’re so sensitive.’
For Maud the excitements of Fabian politics filled the place that love affairs occupied in the lives of other women with unrewarding husbands, and she enthusiastically supported him in his mission to reform the Society. ‘I’m not making much progress,’ he complained to her one evening in the autumn of 1905, as they were chatting after a rather boring paper by Sidney Webb on statistical analysis of the birth and death rates in the borough of Lambeth. ‘The Old Gang are blocking my attempts to have the Basis debated at a Special General Meeting. I sent a motion to the Executive, but it bounced back.’
‘That’s not the way to proceed,’ she said. ‘You should give a paper to the Society which is a kind of manifesto for change. Call it …’
‘The Faults of the Fabians,’ he suggested, as she hesitated.
‘Perfect. That would establish you as a leader of the movement for reform in the eyes of the membership. The Executive would have to respond.’
‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘I’m not a good public speaker. No, I�
�m not,’ he insisted as she began to demur. ‘I’ve no illusions on that score. I haven’t got the right voice for the job – it goes high-pitched and squeaky under pressure. And I can’t speak from notes or extempore like Shaw, in perfectly formed sentences – I have to write a speech in advance and read it out, which isn’t half so effective.’
‘If you write it, H.G., with passion and conviction, it will be effective,’ she said. ‘As long as you don’t gabble and swallow your words, which I admit you are prone to do when you are nervous. As long as you can be heard, you will be listened to.’
In the end he succumbed to her flattery and her enthusiasm, and agreed to give a paper on ‘The Faults of the Fabians’ in the New Year, on the 12th of January. But not long afterwards Balfour called a general election for the same month and the Executive decided that a talk on a subject of such controversial importance to the Society should be postponed to February when it would not be overshadowed by national politics. ‘In the meantime, if you have something less portentous to hand, Wells, to give us on January 12th, that would of course be very welcome, since the hall has been booked,’ Pease said. He did not fail to notice the slightly sarcastic choice of epithet, ‘portentous’. Although Pease had been among the first to invite him to join the Fabian there had always been an element of condescension in his manner, and of late, since his own intention to turn the Society upside down had become overt, the manner had become distinctly cool. But, as it happened, he did have something to hand, a magazine article he had just drafted entitled ‘This Misery of Boots’, which could be easily adapted for the purpose, and he accordingly offered it to Pease, who accepted the suggestion with a prim smile as he wrote down the title.
As he foresaw, it worked very much to his advantage that he delivered ‘This Misery of Boots’ before his more challenging critique of the Fabian. It was a light-hearted piece with a good deal of humour in it, but it also expounded the fundamental principles of socialism in a very accessible way, and it went down a treat with his audience. He began with a little vignette of his underprivileged upbringing, how his first infant apprehension of the wider world was the sight of people’s variously shod feet moving past on the pavement outside Atlas House, glimpsed through the high barred window of its underground kitchen, which perhaps explained his later preoccupation with boots as an index of quality of life. He then proceeded, in a kind of pastiche of Sidney Webb’s analytical method, to suggest that one in five of the population of these islands were suffering on account of their boots, and then discriminated between the various kinds of discomfort caused by new boots, badly fitting boots, boots made from unseasoned leather, the various species of chafe they produced, the different pains and injuries occasioned by uneven heels and worn soles, by splits and leaks and holes … The audience was laughing merrily until he reminded them that ‘these miseries of boots are no more than a sample. The clothes people wear are no better than their boots; and the houses they live in are far worse. And think of the shoddy garments of ideas and misconceptions and partial statements into which their poor minds have been jammed by way of education! Think of the way that pinches and chafes them!’ The audience applauded.
He continued with his parable. He knew a man (it was himself) who by good fortune had raised himself from the class who buy their boots and clothes out of what is left from a pound a week after food and accommodation have been paid for, into the class that can spend seventy or eighty pounds a year on them, so his feet are perfectly comfortable. But the thought of the multitudes so much worse off than himself in this matter of footwear gave him no sort of satisfaction. Their boots pinched him vicariously, because this misery of boots was not an unavoidable curse on mankind. ‘There is enough good leather in the world to make good sightly boots and shoes for all who need them, enough men at leisure and enough power and machinery to do all the work required, enough unemployed intelligence to organize the shoe making and shoe distribution for everybody. What stands in the way?’ What stood in the way was private property and private capital, which controlled the whole process from the acquisition of raw leather to the sale of the finished product in order to extract profit at every stage. Only Socialists had the remedy. ‘The whole system has to be changed, if we are to get rid of the masses of dull poverty that render our present state detestable to any sensitive man or woman. That and no less is the aim of all sincere Socialists: the establishment of a new and better order of society by the abolition of private property in land, in natural productions and in their exploitation … if you funk that, then you must make up your mind to square your life with a sort of personal and private happiness with things as they are, and decide that “it doesn’t do to think about boots.”’
The hall erupted in prolonged applause when he finished, and he saw Maud beaming approval at him from the front row as she joined in, with Jane beside her clapping for all she was worth, her eyes shining with pride. He took some questions, which he dealt with adequately, if not as adroitly as he would have wished, and then the meeting dispersed. ‘That was wonderful, darling,’ Jane said as he joined her, and Maud concurred: ‘Yes. Well done, H.G. It was the perfect curtain-raiser for “The Faults of the Fabians”.’
‘That may not go down so well,’ he said, warding off hubris.
But it did.
*
The general election resulted in a landslide victory for the Liberal Party, who won 400 seats to the Conservatives’ 129 and, taking into account alliances with other groups, had a working majority of 358. Most significant of all, from the Fabian point of view, was the election of 29 Labour MPs. For the first time socialism had a substantial representation in Parliament. This was a cause of some embarrassment to the Old Gang, because ten years earlier they had rebuffed an approach by Ramsay MacDonald when he asked the Executive to help finance the launch of a Parliamentary Labour Party, on the grounds that, given the dominance of the two major parties, this would be a waste of time and money, and they had used a large bequest in their possession at the time to found the London School of Economics instead. He felt the tide of events was now running with him. The huge Liberal victory indicated that the nation was disillusioned with the old order and eager for change, and the Fabian was in danger of being left behind by the wave of popular sentiment if it did not urgently remodel itself, and seize the historic opportunity. There could not have been a more favourable moment for him to deliver his talk on ‘The Faults of the Fabians’. Not surprisingly, the hall in Clifford’s Inn was packed on the appointed evening, the 9th of February.
From the outset of his talk he attacked the Society’s insularity and complacency. ‘I see our Society, with its seven hundred odd members, apparently under the impression that these seven hundred odd are the only thoughtful and authoritative socialists in existence in England,’ he said. ‘I want myself tonight to correct this extraordinary mistake some of us make.’ While the tone of ‘This Misery of Boots’ had been genially humorous, this second talk was written in a satirical mode. The Society, he said, ‘strikes an impartial observer as being still half a drawing-room society, which by a wild, valiant effort took a central office in a cellar in Clement’s Inn, and exhausted its courage in that enterprise’. (Laughter) He mocked the rambling, inconsequential information distributed to members, and deplored the failure to actively recruit new ones. ‘We don’t advertise, thank you: it’s not our style. We cry socialism as the reduced gentlewoman cried “oranges”: “I do hope nobody hears me.”’ (More laughter) All the faults of the Fabians could be traced back to its origins. ‘It met socially – to this day it meets socially. It has never yet gone out to attack the unknown public in a systematic and assimilatory way. At a certain stage in its development it seemed to cease. It ceased to grow, ceased to dream, ceased to believe in any possible sort of triumph for socialism as socialism. It experienced just that arrest of growth one sees in a pot-bound plant.’
Then he attacked one of the tablets of the law, the famous quotation attached to the Basis,
about the Roman General, Fabius Cunctator, from whom the Society derived its name: ‘For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.’ Though it was got up to look like a translation from some Roman historian, nobody had ever managed to find the source of this passage and it was generally admitted to be a fabrication. No one seemed to have noticed that it was also untrue. A little research in Plutarch revealed that Fabius never did strike – it was left to Scipio to carry the war against Hannibal victoriously to Africa, in spite of everything Fabius did to obstruct him. ‘You see how dangerous and paralysing the Fabian tradition can become. I don’t suggest for a moment it has become so, to any extent, in this society’ – the disclaimer of course deceived nobody – ‘I offer this merely as a warning.’ To have their precious piece of Fabian scripture turned against them in this way was a body-blow to the Old Gang – he glimpsed Pease looking stony-faced and Bland glowering at him through his monocle – but his erudite dispatch of its credentials amused and impressed the younger members. He concluded with a number of specific proposals: to publish a set of tracts to attract new members, to aim at a membership of 10,000 instead of 700, to increase revenue on the same scale, to give young members a more active role in the Society’s affairs, and to establish local branches throughout the country. He sat down to enthusiastic applause. After some discussion it was agreed that a Committee of Enquiry should be set up under his chairmanship to draft proposals for the reorganisation of the Society and revision of the Basis which would be put to a General Meeting.
