Conclusion: On the Soviet Union

Abstract

Although the experience of the War seemed to have dealt Spencerian notions of progress a death blow, Beatrice Webb’s indomitable will to believe did not permit her to relinquish the search for social redemption. She held onto the hope that yet to come was a salvation that would provide ‘the authoritative ethics associated with faith in a spirit of love at work in the universe’, as Fabian Socialism could not do. In the year that My Apprenticeship appeared, Webb wrote in her diary that although she had failed to solve ‘the problem of life’, she was possessed of ‘a growing faith that it will be solved by a combination of truth-seeking and personal holiness — of the scientific mind with the religious life’ (14 April 1926). She now imagined a leader who might unite the ‘intellect of an Aristotle, a Goethe or an Einstein with the moral genius of a Buddha, a Christ or a St Francis’ (14 April 1926). The peculiar search for faith, that recurrent theme in her mental life, continued to obsess and confound her. ‘I am perpetually brooding,’ she confessed in the diary, ‘on my inability to make clear even to myself, let alone to others, why I believe in religious mysticism — why I hanker after a Church.’