Definitions

We have seen how Teutonic community yielded place to medieval fellowship, which was to await its own resurrection in the socialist Commonwealth. But meanwhile, what of the present? The present was capitalist to be sure, but did no counterpart to the communities of the past and the future exist in fin de siècle Britain? Did the seeds of community not slumber in the womb of commercial civilisation? The answer was yes on both counts: as the plaque in the Hammersmith Guesthouse in Nowhere made plain, the present also contained its share of the ‘spirit of association’, whose highest expression was in associations of a specifically socialist kind. They were the inheritors of the medieval ideal and harbingers of the international association to come, and their literary correlative, their natural imaginative offspring, was not the romance of the past or the future, but present-orientated propaganda. Contemporary socialist association was no longer unconscious, like the ‘primitive’ form of community, but neither did it embrace all of society, like Bax's conscious communism of the future: it needed the help of propaganda to get from the one to the other. The Victorian socialist community was, in fact, a paradox. It could not possess the natural, spontaneous communality of barbarism, and was in this sense recognisably modern. The freestanding, atomised individuals who composed it came together by choice; they were not born into a traditional community already held together by ties of kinship or custom.