Of the other Essayists, Olivier had wrestled with the huge Positive
Philosophy of Comte, who thus comes in as a Fabian influence. William
Clarke was a disciple of Mazzini, and found Emerson, Thoreau, and the
Brook Farm enthusiasts congenial to him. Bland, who at last became a
professed Catholic, was something of a Coleridgian transcendentalist,
though he treated a copy of Bakunin's God and the State to a handsome
binding. Mrs. Besant's spiritual history has been written by herself.
Wallas brought to bear a wide scholastic culture of the classic type, in
which modern writers, though interesting, were not fundamental. The
general effect, it will be perceived, is very much wider and more
various than that suggested by Mr. Ernest Barker's remark that Mill was
our starting point.
It is a curious fact that of the three great propagandist amateurs of
political economy, Henry George, Marx, and Ruskin, Ruskin alone seems to
have had no effect on the Fabians. Here and there in the Socialist
movement workmen turned up who had read Fors Clavigera or Unto This
Last; and some of the more well-to-do no doubt had read the first
chapter of Munera Pulveris. But Ruskin's name was hardly mentioned in
the Fabian Society. My explanation is that, barring Olivier, the Fabians
were inveterate Philistines. My efforts to induce them to publish
Richard Wagner's Art and Revolution, and, later on, Oscar Wilde's The
Soul of Man under Socialism, or even to do justice to Morris's News From
Nowhere, fell so flat that I doubt whether my colleagues were even
conscious of them.
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