The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [327]
After that is uncertain. I shall post card from place to place but dearie, do not expect letters … I am in splendid condition and thoroughly enjoying the work. With affection and bundles of kisses. Yours K.
It was not clear whether, in the event of any war, the workingmen and-women would feel a greater loyalty to their comrades or to their country. It was, however, clear that the General Strike needed planning and organising, though the image of a spontaneous uprising moved many minds.
Charles/Karl Wellwood was working energetically at the London School of Economics. He went to the lectures of the founding Fabian, Graham Wallas, who, as a principled agnostic, had resigned from the Fabian executive when the Society supported giving state aid to religious schools. Wallas’s book, Human Nature in Politics, analysed the psychology of politics. Human beings, he said, were descended from paleolithic men, and had preserved many instincts and inclinations which had helped their ancestors. Political philosophers had believed that humans were rational creatures. They had not studied the structures of impulse. He analysed the nature of friendship, the emotional response to political candidates and monarchs, the forming of groups, crowds and herds. He introduced students like Karl to the essays by William Trotter on the Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. Karl learned to think that men acted from irrational impulses, and that groups, crowds and herds behaved differently from individuals. He himself was an isolated individual, despite having signed the Fabian Basis, despite his socialism. He wanted to help the massed poor, but he did not know what to say when he met them, most particularly when they were in a group, or crowd.
Nevertheless, he undertook to lecture for the newly formed National Committee for the Break-Up of the Poor Law. This body, Beatrice Webb’s brainchild, had its offices between the Fabian Society’s premises and the London School of Economics, all just off the Strand. Their members overlapped considerably—they were all working to the same end. They hoped to be more realistic than the socialists. Beatrice Webb said that the vision of a socialist could stand as a long-term aim, but in the meantime something must be done with “the millions of destitute persons which constitute an infamous and wholly unnecessary accompaniment to an Individualist State.”
Individualist politics was difficult. There were meetings, conferences, summer schools, study groups and leaflets. There were sixteen thousand members, and branches everywhere. There were eleven paid employees and four hundred lecturers on call. The lecturers included, as well as Charles/Karl, Rupert Brooke, who travelled in a picturesque caravan from the New Forest to Corfe and back. He and his friend spoke engagingly on village greens and street corners. Beatrice Webb meant to bring about “a rapid but almost unconscious change in the substance of society.” Rupert Brooke was euphoric about human beings and human nature.
I suddenly feel the extraordinary value and importance of everybody I meet, and almost everything I see… that is, when the mood is on me. I roam about places—yesterday I did it even in Birmingham!—and sit in trains and see the essential glory and beauty of all the people I meet. I can watch a dirty middle-aged tradesman in a railway-carriage for hours, and love every dirty greasy sulky wrinkle in his weak chin and every button on his spotted unclean waistcoat. I know their states of mind are bad. But I’m so much occupied with their being there at all, that I don’t have time to think of that.
In 1910 also the Fabians held a summer camp. The camps were on the North Welsh coast—two weeks for the campaign workers who included a mix of Fabian Nursery, lower-class professionals,