Graham
Wallas
was born in Monkwearmouth,
Sunderland in 1858. After being educated
at Shrewsbury School and Corpus Christi
College, Oxford, he moved to London
where he taught at Highgate
School.
In 1884 Wallas joined the Fabian Society.
He soon emerged as one of the three leaders of the group, or as George
Bernard Shaw put it, "one of the Three Musketeers".
With the support of the Fabians Graham Wallas was elected to the London
School Board in 1894 and chaired its School Management Committee.
In 1894
Wallas was elected to the London County Council
where he became a member of the Education Committee.
When Sidney Webb and
Beatrice Webb established the London
School of Economics (LSE)
in 1895, they asked Wallas to become its first director. Wallas declined
the offer but did agree to teach at the LSE and eventually became
professor of politics (1914-23).
Wallas argued for the humanizing of modern life and believed that
educators should pay more attention to human beings than institutions.
Wallas wrote several books on social psychology and politics including
Human
Nature in Politics
(1908), The
Great Society
(1914), Our
Social Heritage
(1921) and the Art
of Thought
(1926). Graham
Wallas died in 1932.
(1)
Beatrice Webb, diary entry (17th September,
1893)
Graham
Wallas, six foot with a slouching figure, good features and genial
open smile, utterly unself-conscious and lacking in vanity or personal
ambition. In spite of his moral fervour, he seems incapable of directing
his own life and tends to drift into doing anything the other people
desire. This tendency is accentuated by his benevolence, kindliness
and selflessness, which almost amounts to a weakness. He preaches
too, a habit carried over from his life as an usher and teacher of
boys. to his disciples he appears a brilliant man, first-rate lecturer,
a very genius for teaching, a suggestive thinker and a consciousness
writer.
It remains to be seen what else he will become beyond a skillful propagandist
and an admirable and most popular University Extension lecturer. If
enthusiasm, purity of motive, hard, if somewhat mechanical, work will
make a man of success, then Graham Wallas has a great career before
him. He has plenty of intellectual ability too - what he lacks is
deliberate concentration and rapid decision, what to do and how to
do it. A lovable man.
(2)
Kingsley Martin met Graham Wallas while
he was studying at Cambridge University.
Graham Wallas was the most kindly of human beings, immensely stimulating
and encouraging to the young. He was an eager rationalist, who resigned
from the school where he taught in Highgate because he disapproved
of religious instruction. He resigned from the Fabian Society in 1902
because, as he said, "the Webbs had an inadequate conception
of liberty".
(3)
Beatrice Webb, diary entry (25th July, 1894)
Spent two days (while Sidney was in London) alone with Graham
Wallas. Long walks after dinner on the moorland in the clouded twilight
of this stormy summer season - with the yellow of the setting sun
peering on the horizon between thick black clouds. Poor fellow, he
is in a dreary mood just now, overworked with organizing the Progressives
for the next School Board election - and himself standing for Hackney
- besides making his livelihood by lecturing.
Graham Wallas grinds on, making no personal claims, impersonal and
almost callous in his manner, an English gentleman in his relations
with women to whom flirtation, let alone an intrigue, would seem underbred
as well as unkind and dishonourable. All the same, he is not positively
unhappy, only perpetually overworked and living in a grey cloudland
of dutiful effort.
(4)
Beatrice Webb, diary entry (14th January,
1898)
Our old friend Graham Wallas has married - Ada Radford, a woman
of forty or thereabouts and one of a cultivated, public-spirited,
somewhat aesthetic middle-class family. She was educated at Girton,
became assistant mistress of High School, then secretary to a Working
Women's College, then a writer for the Yellow Book. I do not
take to her. She is obviously a good woman - sweet-natured (Graham
says humorous) with decision and capacity. With Madonna-like features,
good complexion and soft golden hair, she ought to be pleasant to
look at: but as a matter of principle she dresses in yellow-green
sloppy garments, large garden hat with bows of green silk - her hair
is always coming down - and generally speaking, she looks as if she
had tumbled up out of an armchair in which she had slept the night,
and her movements are aggressively ugly.
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