Love Among the Statistics

OUR PARTNERSHIP (544 pp.)--Beatrice Webb, edited by Barbara Drake and Margaret I. Cole--Longmans, Green ($5).

Sidney Webb was shy and 31, Beatrice Potter* ardent and 32, when Cupid realized that they were made for each other. Courtship began at the Glasgow Co-operative Congress of 1890, where Sidney hewed one of Beatrice's political articles to pieces and rewrote it. In 1891, thrown into each other's arms at the Lincoln Cooperative Congress, they secretly plighted their troth. A year later they were off on their honeymoon--an impassioned examination of Dublin labor problems, rounded off with a joint appearance at the Glasgow Trades Union Congress.

Thus began one of the strangest partnerships in the annals of modern marriage, one whose children included the London School of Economics, the reconstitution of London University, and some of the fattest sociological tomes ever written.

Beatrice Webb died in 1943, aged 85; Sidney followed her last year. To the day of her death, Beatrice was at work on an autobiography based on extracts from her voluminous diaries. My Apprenticeship, which covered her first 30 years, appeared in 1926; Our Partnership, which carries on to 1911, is the next (and last) installment of the unfinished work. "The difficulty," Beatrice Webb realized, "is to tell the truth without being self-conscious about it"--and the result of her efforts is a natural account of a married life which, though it might sound like hell to most men & women, was heaven to the Webbs.

"The Other One." M.P.s called Sidney "Nannie" because of his bushy goatee. "Small . . . rotund . . . tapering [off into] diminutive hands and feet," he was a cartoonist's joy. But to his adoring Beatrice, "the Other One" was her lord & master, her "little boy," and "man of destiny" rolled into one. Sidney was never ill, never daydreamed, never had a nightmare, never suffered from moral qualms or neurotic doubts. He could read and write sociological statistics day in & day out, and still have strength to work on numerous committees, coolly and tirelessly conducting "endless intrigues to persuade those in authority to go his way."

He adored his wife, and the only other woman in whom he ever showed so much as "interest"' was a rugged member of the London Technical Education Board. Placed next to that noted Edwardian beauty, Lady Desborough, at dinner, Sidney only wondered why she had such a "silly trick of shutting her eyes."

Morbid Ways & Mortgages. Toiling at the side of this unruffled paragon of sociological purpose, Beatrice--who could herself outwork and outlecture most social workers of the era--felt feebly feminine and small, "a mere dilettante." After hours of involved research into feudal economy, say, Beatrice would be ashamed to find that her head ached and she had to lie down--while Sidney indefatigably continued to probe the intricacies of mortgage and land-tenure. But he was wonderfully sympathic and never impatient.

If she strayed into "panic" or "morbid ways"--e.g., smoked more than six cigarettes in a day or couldn't resist a stimulating cup of coffee with a meal--Sidney "firmly but gently pulled [her] back with deprecating chaff." When, out of sheer "vanity," she bought an extravagant dress for a dinner party with a countess, Sidney wagged his finger, warned her tenderly against "social climbing," and inspired her anew with "refreshing vistas of the past history and future prospects of the human race." Neither of them could imagine a more perfect union. " 'We ought to do good work,' he often says as we wander arm-in-arm together or I sit on his lap by the firelight, 'we have been so amazingly fortunate.' "

Dinner Traps. Beatrice was Sidney's superior in one respect--she was a perfect hostess. The Webbs entertained ceaselessly, but not for entertainment's sake. Cabinet ministers, foreign secretaries, labor leaders were put over the jumps at the Webb dinner table. Rough millionaires, fresh from the South African goldfields and avid to be philanthropic, signed on the dotted line; influential aristocrats, eager to include the intellectual Webbs in their salons, found themselves unexpectedly taking the chair at radical forums.

Each Great Man was shrewdly, often epigrammatically, summed up in Beatrice Webb's diary. Prime Minister Arthur Balfour--"how many women has he inspired with a discontent with their [husbands]" --was the "lifelong philanderer, never thoroughly in love . . . accustomed always to make others feel what he fails to feel himself." Hearty Lord Haldane divided his "vital energies . . . between highly skilled legal work and the processes of digestion." And of Bertrand Russell and his first wife, she remarked simply: "They sleep and dress in the same room, and they have no children."

Passion & Perturbation. Though prim and respectable, the Webbs were rarely shocked by new ideas. When lusty H. G. Wells advocated "free love," Beatrice, the perfect intellectual midwife, pondered the question with the coolest detachment. "[The idea] has often cropped up in my own mind," she noted, "and has seemed to have some validity. Friendship between particular men and women has an enormous educational value . . . [and] you do not get to know any man thoroughly except as his beloved. ... If you could have been the beloved of the dozen ablest men you have known it would greatly have extended your knowledge. . . . But . . . with all the perturbation caused by such intimacies, [would you] have any brain left to think with?"

Bernard Shaw's incessant firecrackers were more disturbing. No writer was more treasured than he by Fabian socialists like the Webbs--but why, when he ran for a seat on the London County Council, did he ruin his chances by "[teasing] the Catholics about transubstantiation,." abusing his own supporters, and declaring that "though a teetotaller, he would force every citizen to imbibe a quartern of rum, to cure any tendency to intoxication?"

Faith Undebased. The strongest element in Beatrice's mixed character was her piety. She gave allegiance to no church ("Jesus," she said, "seems to me . . . perhaps, not the most perfect embodiment of the ideal of faith"), but she loved nothing better than to pray in St. Paul's Cathedral. She, who insisted that all earthly things stand up to scientific test, abhorred the intellectual theologians who sought to "prove" the existence of God--an approach which she believed served only to "debase the purpose" of faith. Sidney never prayed; but Beatrice was certain that he, too, believed.

It was perhaps this avid desire for "a universal church" which caused the Webbs to be swept off their feet by the devout fervor of the founders of the Soviet Union. But in 1911, when this diary ends, the Webbs did not yet suspect the revolutionary upheavals that were to come. From her retreat in the "delightful countryside," Beatrice could look back over the furious past, and nostalgically recapture old memories of committees, boards, councils, intrigues and, above all, "the river Thames sweeping through the splendor and squalor of the birthplace of the 19th Century capitalist dictatorship."

* Not to be confused with Beatrix (Peter Rabbit) Potter, no kin.

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