Chapter 3
My father had been at Cambridge, but my brother was at Oxford. I went to Cambridge because of my interest in mathematics. My first experience of the place was in December 1889 when I was examined for entrance scholarships. I stayed in rooms in the New Court, and I was too shy to enquire the way to the lavatory, so that I walked every morning to the station before the examination began. I saw the Backs through the gate of the New Court, but did not venture to go into them, feeling that they might be private. I was invited to dine with the Master, who had been Headmaster of Harrow in my father's time. I there, for the first time, met Charles and Bob Trevelyan. Bob characteristically had borrowed Charles's second best dress suit, and fainted during dinner because somebody mentioned a surgical operation. I was alarmed by so formidable a social occasion, but less alarmed than I had been a few months earlier when I was left tête-à-tête with Mr Gladstone. He came to stay at Pembroke Lodge, and nobody was asked to meet him. As I was the only male in the househ&ld, he and I were left alone together at the dinner table after the ladies retired. He made only one remark: 'This is very good port they have given me, but why have they given it me in a claret glass?' I did not know the answer, and wished the earth would swallow me up. Since then I have never again felt the fall agony of terror.
I was very anxious to do well in the scholarship examination, and nervousness somewhat interfered with my work. Nevertheless, I got a minor scholarship, which gave me extreme happiness, as it was the first time I had been able to compare myself with able contemporaries.
From the moment that I went up to Cambridge at the beginning of October 1890 everything went well with me. All the people then in residence who subsequently became my intimate friends called on me during the first week of term. At the time I did not know why they did so, but I discovered afterwards that Whitehead, who had examined for scholarships, had told people to look out for Sanger and me. Sanger was a freshman like myself, also doing mathematics, and also a minor scholar. He and I both had rooms in Whewell's Court. Webb, our coach, had a practice of circulating mss among his classes, and it fell to my lot to deliver a MS to Sanger after I had done with it. I had not seen him before, but I was struck by the books on his shelves. I said: 'I see you have Draper's Intellectual Development of Europe which I think a very good book.' He said: 'You are the first person I have ever met who has heard of it!' From this point the conversation proceeded, and at the end of half an hour we were lifelong friends. We compared notes as to how much mathematics we had done. We agreed upon theology and metaphysics. We disagreed upon politics (he was at the time a Conservative, though in later life he belonged to the Labour Party). He spoke of Shaw, whose name was until then unknown to me. We used to work on mathematics together. He was incredibly quick, and would be half-way through solving a problem before I had understood the question. We both devoted our fourth year to moral science, but he did economics, and I did philosophy. We got our Fellowships at the same moment. He was one of the kindest men that ever lived, and in the last years of his life my children loved him as much as I have done. I have never known anyone else with such a perfect combination of penetrating intellect and warm affection. He became a Chancery barrister, and was known in legal circles for his highly erudite edition of Jarman On Wills. He used to lament that Jarman's relatives had forbidden him to mention in the preface that Jarman died intestate. He was also a very good economist, and he could read an incredible number of languages, including such out-of-the-way items as Magyar and Finnish. I used to go walking tours with him in Italy, and he always made me do all the conversation with inn-keepers, but when I was reading Italian, I found that his knowledge of the language was vastly greater than mine. His death in the year 1930 was a great sorrow to me.
The other friends whom I acquired during my first term I owed chiefly to Whitehead's recommendation. I learned afterwards that in the scholarship examination another man had obtained more marks than I had, but Whitehead had the impression that I was the abler of the two. He therefore burned the marks before the examiners* meeting, and recommended me in preference to the other man. Two of my closest friends were Crompton and Theodore Llewelyn Davies. Their father was vicar of Kirkby Lonsdale, and translator of Plato's Republic in the Golden Treasury edition, a distinguished scholar and a Broad Churchman whose views were derived from F. D. Maurice. He had a family of six sons and one daughter. It was said, and I believe with truth, that throughout their education the six sons, of whom Crompton and Theodore were the youngest, managed, by means of scholarships, to go through school and university without expense to their father. Most of them were also strikingly good-looking, including Crompton, who had very fine blue eyes, which sometimes sparkled with fun and at other times had a steady gaze that was deeply serious. The ablest and one of the best loved of the family was the youngest, Theodore, with whom, when I first knew them, Crompton shared rooms in College. They both in due course became Fellows, but neither of them became resident. Afterwards the two lived together in a small house near Westminster Abbey, in a quiet out-of-the-way street. Both of them were able, high-minded and passionate, and shared, on the whole, the same ideals and opinions. Theodore had a somewhat more practical outlook on life than Crompton. He became Private Secretary to a series of Conservative Chancellors of the Exchequer, each of whom in turn he converted to Free Trade at a time when the rest of the Government wished them to think otherwise. He worked incredibly hard and yet always found time to give presents to the children of all his friends, and the presents were always exactly appropriate. He inspired the deepest affection in almost everybody who knew him. I never knew but one woman who would not have been delighted to marry him. She, of course, was the only woman he wished to marry. In the spring of 1905, when he was thirty-four, his dead body was found in a pool near Kirkby Lonsdale, where he had evidently bathed on his way to the station. It was supposed that he must have hit his head on a rock in diving. Crompton, who loved his brother above everyone, suffered almost unendurably. I spent the weeks after Theodore's death with him, but it was difficult to find anything to say.1 The sight of his unhappiness was agonising. Ever since, the sound of Westminster chimes has brought back to me the nights I lay awake in misery at this time. On the Sunday after the accident, I was in church when his father, with determined stoicism, took the service as usual, and just succeeded in not breaking down. Gradually Crompton recovered, but not fully until his marriage. After that, for no reason that I could understand, I saw nothing of him for many years, until one evening, when I was living in Chelsea, I heard the front door bell, and found Crompton on the doorstep. He behaved as if we had met the day before, was as charming as ever, and insisted on seeing my children asleep. I think I had become so much associated with his suffering after Theodore's death, that for a long time he found my presence painful.
1 See my letter to Lucy Donnelly, Appendix pp. 183-4; also Crompton Davies's letter on p. 203.
One of my earliest memories of Crompton is of meeting him in the darkest part of a winding College staircase and his suddenly quoting, without any previous word, the whole of 'Tyger, Tyger, burning bright'. I had never, till that moment, heard of Blake, and the poem affected me so much that I became dizzy and had to lean against the wall. Hardly a day passed without my remembering some incident connected with Crompton - sometimes a joke, sometimes a grimace of disgust at meanness or hypocrisy, most often his warm and generous affection. If I were tempted at any time to any failure of honesty, the thought of his disapproval would still restrain me. He combined wit, passion, wisdom, scorn, gentleness, and integrity, in a degree that I have never known equalled. In addition to all these, his intense and unalterable affection gave to me and others, in later years, an anchor of stability in a disintegrating world.
His loyalties were usually peculiar to himself. He was incapable of following a multitude, either for good or evil. He would profess contempt and amusement for all the causes in which his friends excited themselves, laughing to scorn 'The Society for this' or 'The World League for Promoting that', while all the time he was a crusade in himself, for Ireland against England, for small business against big, for the have-nots against the haves, for competition against monopoly. His chief enthusiasm was for the taxation of land values.
Henry George is now an almost forgotten prophet, but in 1890, when I first knew Crompton, his doctrine that all rent should be paid to the State rather than to private landowners was still an active competitor with Socialism among those who were not satisfied with the economic status quo. Crompton, at this time, was already a fanatical adherent of Henry George. He had, as was to be expected, a strong dislike of Socialism, and a strong devotion to the principle of freedom for private enterprise. He had no dislike of the capitalist who made his money in industry, but regarded as a mere incubus the man who is able to levy toll on the industry of others because he owns the land that they need. I do not think he ever asked himself how the State could fail to become immensely powerful if it enjoyed all the revenue to be derived from landownership. In his mind, as in Henry George's, the reform was to be the completion of individualistic liberalism, setting free energies now throttled by monopoly power. In 1909, he believed that Henry George's principles were being carried out by Lloyd George, whose famous budget he helped to perfect.
At the beginning of the 1914-18 War he was solicitor to the Post Office, but his ardent agreement with the opinions of his wife, who was an Irish Nationalist and imprisoned as a Sinn Feiner, made his position untenable. He was dismissed at a moment's notice. In spite of the prejudice of the time he was almost immediately taken in as a partner by Messrs Coward, Chance & Co, one of the leading firms of City solicitors. In 1921, it was he who drafted the treaty of peace that established Irish self-government, though this was never publicly known. His unselfishness made any important worldly success impossible, since he never stood in the way of others acquiring credit for his work; and he did not care for public recognition and honours. But his ability, though it was not this that made him unforgettable, was very great,
what made Crompton at the same time so admirable and so delightful, was not his ability, but his strong loves and hates, his fantastic humour, and his rock-like honesty. He was one of the wittiest men that I have ever known, with a great love of mankind combined with a contemptuous hatred for most individual men. He had by no means the ways of a saint. Once, when we were both young, I was walking with him in the country, and we trespassed over a corner of a farmer's land. The farmer came running out after us, shouting and red with fury. Crompton held his hand to his ear, and said with the utmost mildness: 'Would you mind speaking a little louder? I'm rather hard of hearing.' The farmer was reduced to speechlessness in the endeavour to make more noise than he was already making. Not long before his death I heard him tell this story, with great detail and exaggeration, attributing his part in it to me, while I interrupted, saying, "Don't believe a word of it. It wasn't me, it was all Crompton,' until finally he dissolved in affectionate chuckles.
He was addicted to extreme shabbiness in his clothes, to such a degree that some of his friends expostulated. This had an unexpected result. When Western Australia attempted by litigation to secede from the Commonwealth of Australia, his law firm was employed, and it was decided that the case should be heard in the King's Robing Room. Crompton was overheard ringing up the King's Chamberlain and saying: 'The unsatisfactory state of my trousers has lately been brought to my notice. I understand that the case is to be heard in the King's Robing Room. Perhaps the King has left an old pair of trousers there that might be useful to me.'
His distastes - which were numerous and intense - were always expressed in a manner that made one laugh. Once, when he and I were staying with his father, a Bishop was also a guest - the mildest and most inoffensive type of cleric, the kind of whom it would be natural to say that he would not hurt a fly. Unfortunately his politics were somewhat reactionary. When at last we were alone, Crompton put on a manner that would have been appropriate to a fellow-captive on a pirate ship, and growled out: 'Seems a desperate character.'
When the Liberal Government came into office at the end of 1905, and Lord Haldane, fat, comfortable, and soothing, was put at the War Office, Crompton, very gravely, said he had been chosen to prevent the Generals from having apoplexy when Army reforms were suggested.
Motor traffic annoyed him by its imperiousness. He would cross London streets without paying attention to it, and when cars hooted indignantly he would look round with an air of fastidious vexation, and say, 'Don't make that noise!' Although he wandered about with an air of dreamy abstraction, wearing his hat on the back of his head, motorists became convinced that he must be someone of enormous importance, and waited patiently while he went his way.
He loved London as much as Lamb or Dr Johnson did. Once, when he was inveighing against Wordsworth for writing about the lesser celandine, I said, 'Do you like him better on Westminster Bridge?' 'Ah, yes,' he answered, 'if only he had treated it on the same scale.' In his last years we often walked together in London after dinner, he and my wife and I. Crompton would take our arms, if he were not holding them already, as we passed Wren's church of St Clement Danes, to remind us to look up at one of his favourite sights, the spire standing out dimly against the glowing blue of the evening sky. On these walks he would sometimes get into conversation with people that we met. I remember him engaging a park-keeper in an earnest discussion, perhaps of land values. The park-keeper was at first determined to remember both his class and his official position, and treated Crompton with respectful disapproval. Strangers ought not to be so ready to talk to strangers, gentlemen should not be so easy with workingmen, and no one should talk to officials on duty. But this stiffness soon melted. Crompton was truly democratic. He always spoke to his clerks or his servants with the same tone that he would have used to an important person such as one of the Indian Rajahs whose affairs he handled, and his manner in a two-roomed Irish cabin was exactly the same as in a party of celebrities. I remember with what grave courtesy he rose to bow and shake hands with our parlourmaid, on hearing that she came from the same district as his family.
By temperament he was inclined to anarchism; he hated system and organisation and uniformity. Once, when I was with him on Westminster Bridge, he pointed with delight to a tiny donkey-cart in the middle of the heavy traffic. 'That's what I like,' he said, 'freedom for all sorts.'
On another occasion, when I was walking with him in Ireland, we went to a bus station, where I, without thinking, made for the largest and most comfortable bus. His expression was quite shocked as he took me by the arm and hurried me away to a shabby little 'jalopie' of a bus, explaining gravely that it was pluckily defying the big combines.
His opinions were often somewhat wayward, and he had no objection to giving his prejudices free rein. He admired rebels rather more, perhaps, than was wholly rational. He had a horror of anything that seemed calculating, and I once shocked him deeply by saying that a war could not be justified unless there was a likelihood of victory. To him, heroic and almost hopeless defiance appeared splendid. Many of his prejudices were so consonant to my feelings that I never had the heart to argue with them - which in any case would have been a hopeless task.
With his temperament and opinions, it was natural that he should hate the Sidney Webbs. When they took up Poor Law Reform, he would say that, since everyone else rejected their attempts at regulation, they had at last been driven to organise the defenceless paupers. He would allege, as one of their triumphs of organisation, that they employed a pauper with a peg leg to drill holes for the potatoes.
He was my lawyer for many years - a somewhat thankless task which he undertook out of friendship. Most of his practice consisted of affairs of great importance, concerning Indian Princes, Dominion Governments, or leading Banks. He showed, in legal matters, unbending straightforwardness, combined with skill and patience - this last truly astonishing, since nature had made him one of the most impatient of men. By these methods, which inspired confidence even in opponents, he achieved results which ingenious trickery could never have achieved. I remember the stony expression which came over his face during the course of a legal consultation when someone suggested a course that was not entirely straightforward.
With all his underlying seriousness, he was almost invariably gay. At the end of a long day of exhausting and responsible work he would arrive at a dinner party as jolly as if he had already enjoyed a good dose of champagne, and would keep everybody laughing. It was in the middle of a dinner party that he died, quite suddenly, of heart failure. Probably he had known that this was liable to happen, but he had kept the knowledge to himself. Afterwards, his friends remembered slight indications that he had not expected to live long, but they had not been sufficient to cause active anxiety among those who valued him.
In his last years he spent much of his leisure in writing a book on philosophy, which he referred to disparagingly as his 'pie-dish' in allusion to an old man in a play who had only one talent, the making of pie-dishes, and only one ambition, to make a really good pie-dish before he died. After Greek poetry, philosophy had been, when he was young, his main intellectual preoccupation; when I first knew him, we spent much time arguing about ethics and metaphysics. A busy professional life had kept him, throughout his middle years, engaged in practical affairs, but at last he was able to spare some time for purely theoretical thinking, to which he returned with wholehearted joy. When the book was nearly finished he lost it, as people do sometimes lose the things they value most. He left it in a train. It was never recovered. Someone must have picked it up in the hope that it had financial value. He mentioned the loss, sadly but briefly, said that there was nothing for it but to begin all over again from the few notes he had, and then changed the subject. We saw less of him during the few months that were left before his death, though when we did see him he was as gay and affectionate as ever. He was spending most of his spare energy on trying to make up the work that was lost; but the pie-dish was never finished.
Another friend of my Cambridge years was McTaggart, the philosopher, who was even shyer than I was. I heard a knock on my door one day - a very gentle knock. I said: 'Come in', but nothing happened. I said, 'Come in', louder. The door opened, and I saw McTaggart standing on the mat. He was already President of The Union, and about to become a Fellow, and inspired me with awe on account of his metaphysical reputation, but he was too shy to come in, and I was too shy to ask him to come in. I cannot remember how many minutes this situation lasted, but somehow or other he was at last in the room. After that I used frequently to go to his breakfasts, which were famous for their lack of food; in fact, anybody who had been once, brought an egg with him on every subsequent occasion. McTaggart was a Hegelian, and at that time still young and enthusiastic. He had a great intellectual influence upon my generation, though in retrospect I do not think it was a very good one. For two or three years, under his influence, I was a Hegelian. I remember the exact moment during my fourth year when I became one. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco, and was going back with it along Trinity Lane, when suddenly I threw it up in the air and exclaimed: 'Great God in boots! - the ontological argument is sound!' Although after 1898 I no longer accepted McTaggart's philosophy, I remained fond of him until an occasion during the first war, when he asked me no longer to come and see him because he could not bear my opinions. He followed this up by taking a leading part in having me turned out of my lectureship.
Two other friends whom I met in my early days in Cambridge and retained ever since, were Lowes Dickinson and Roger Fry. Dickinson was a man who inspired affection by his gentleness and pathos. When he was a Fellow and I was still an undergraduate, I became aware that I was liable to hurt him by my somewhat brutal statement of unpleasant truths, or what I thought to be such. States of the world which made me caustic only made him sad, and to the end of his days whenever I met him, I was afraid of increasing his unhappiness by too stark a realism. But perhaps realism is not quite the right word. What I really mean is the practice of describing things which one finds almost unendurable in such a repulsive manner as to cause others to share one's fury. He told me once that I resembled Cordelia, but it cannot be said that he resembled King Lear.
From my first moment at Cambridge, in spite of shyness, I was exceedingly sociable, and I never found that my having been educated at home was any impediment. Gradually, under the influence of congenial society, I became less and less solemn. At first the discovery that I could say things that I thought, and be answered with neither horror nor derision but as if I had said something quite sensible, was intoxicating. For a long time I supposed that somewhere in the university there were really clever people whom I had not yet met, and whom I should at once recognise as my intellectual superiors, but during my second year, I discovered that I already knew all the cleverest people in the university. This was a disappointment to me, but at the same time gave me increased self-confidence. In my third year, however, I met G. E. Moore, who was then a freshman, and for some years he fulfilled my ideal of genius. He was in those days beautiful and slim, with a look almost of inspiration, and with an intellect as deeply passionate as Spinoza's. He had a kind of exquisite purity. I have never but once succeeded in making him tell a he, that was by a subterfuge, 'Moore,' I said, 'do you always speak the truth?' 'No', he replied. I believe this to be the only lie he had ever told. His people lived in Dulwich, where I once went to see them. His father was a retired medical man, his mother wore a large china brooch with a picture of the Colosseum on it. He had sisters and brothers in large numbers, of whom the most interesting was the poet, Sturge Moore. In the world of intellect, he was fearless and adventurous, but in the everyday world he was a child. During my fourth year I spent some days walking with him on the coast of Norfolk. We fell in by accident with a husky fellow, who began talking about Petronius with intense relish for his indecencies. I rather encouraged the man, who amused me as a type. Moore remained completely silent until the man was gone, and then turned upon me, saying: 'That man was horrible.' I do not believe that he has ever in all his life derived the faintest pleasure from improper stories or conversation. Moore, like me, was influenced by McTaggart, and was for a short time a Hegelian. But he emerged more quickly than I did, and it was largely his conversation that led me to abandon both Kant and Hegel. In spite of his being two years younger than me, he greatly influenced my philosophical outlook. One of the pet amusements of all Moore's friends was to watch him trying to light a pipe. He would light a match, and then begin to argue, and continue until the match burnt his fingers. Then he would light another, and so on, until the box was finished. This was no doubt fortunate for his health, as it provided moments during which he was not smoking.
Then there were the three brothers Trevelyan. Charles, the eldest, was considered the least able of the three by all of us. Bob, the second, was my special friend. He became a very scholarly, but not very inspired, poet, but when he was young he had a delicious whimsical humour. Once, when we were on a reading party in the Lakes, Eddie Marsh, having overslept himself, came down in his night-shirt to see if breakfast was ready, looking frozen and miserable. Bob christened him 'cold white shape', and this name stuck to him for a long time. George Trevelyan was considerably younger than Bob, but I got to know him well later on. He and Charles were terrific walkers. Once when I went a walking tour with George in Devonshire, I made him promise to be content with twenty-five miles a day. He kept his promise until the last day. Then he left me, saying that now he must have a little walking. On another occasion, when I was walking alone, I arrived at the Lizard one evening and asked if they could give me a bed. 'Is your name Air Trevelyan?' they answered. 'No,' I said, 'are you expecting him?' 'Yes,' they said, 'and his wife is here already.' This surprised me, as I knew that it was his wedding day. I found her languishing alone, as he had left her at Truro, saying that he could not face the whole day without a little walk. He arrived about ten o'clock at night, completely exhausted, having accomplished the forty miles in record time, but it seemed to me a somewhat curious beginning for a honeymoon. On August 4,19x4, he and I walked together down the Strand quarrelling. Since then I saw him only once, until I returned to Trinity in 1944, after he had become Master. When he was still an undergraduate he explained to me once that the Trevelyans never make matrimonial mistakes. 'They wait', he said, 'until they are thirty, and then marry a girl who has both sense and money.' In spite of occasional bad times, I have never wished that I had followed this prescription.
Bob Trevelyan was, I think, the most bookish person that I have ever known. What is in books appeared to him interesting, whereas what is only real life was negligible. Like all the family, he had a minute knowledge of the strategy and tactics concerned in all the great battles of the world, so far as these appear in reputable books of history. But I was staying with him during the crisis of the battle of the Marne, and as it was Sunday we could only get a newspaper by walking two miles. He did not think the battle sufficiently interesting to be worth it, because battles in mere newspapers are vulgar. I once devised a test question which I put to many people to discover whether they were pessimists. The question was: 'If you had the power to destroy the world, would you do so?' I put the question to him in the presence of his wife and child, and he replied: 'What? Destroy my library? Never!' He was always discovering new poets and reading their poems out aloud, but he always began deprecatingly: 'This is not one of his best poems.' Once when he mentioned a new poet to me, and said he would like to read me some of his things, I said: 'Yes, but don't read me a poem which is not one of his best.' This stumped him completely, and he put the volume away.
The dons contributed little to my enjoyment of Cambridge. The Master came straight out of Thackeray's Book of Snobs. He generally began his remarks with 'Just thirty years ago today . . .' or with, 'Do you by any chance remember what Mr Pitt was doing one hundred years ago today and he would then proceed to relate some very tedious historical anecdote to show how great and good were all the statesmen mentioned in history. His epistolary style is illustrated by the letter that he wrote me after the mathematical tripos in which I was bracketed seventh wrangler:
Trinity Lodge, Cambridge, June 13th 1893
My dear B. Russell
I cannot tell you how happy this grand victory has made us. Just 33 years have passed since I placed the Fifth Form Prize for Latin Prose in the hands of your dear Father at Harrow, and now I am permitted to congratulate his son and his own Mother on a remarkable Mathematical success which will be much appreciated in the College.
we knew your Mathematical ability but we knew also that you had not given your whole mind to Mathematics but had bestowed large parts of it on other, possibly even greater, subjects. If this had seriously spoiled your Mathematical position I should of course have regretted it, but I should have understood that there were solid compensations.
Now there is happily nothing but congratulation, and you will looK forward quietly to the Moral Science Tripos and the Fellowship without any misgiving that you have left behind you a Mathematical waste.
I must give myself the pleasure of writing just a few lines to Lady Russell and Lady Stanley. This will be a happy day for both of them.
Believe me to be, Most truly yours, H. Montagu Butler (Master of Trinity)
I remember once going to breakfast at the Lodge, and it happened that the day was his sister-in-law's birthday. After wishing her many happy returns, he continued: 'Now, my dear, you have lasted just as long as the Peloponnesian War.' She did not know how long this might be, but feared it was longer than she could wish. His wife took to Christian Science, which had the effect of prolonging his life for some twenty years beyond what might otherwise have been expected. This happened through her lack of sympathy with his ailments. When he was ill, she would send word to the Council Meeting that the Master was in bed and refused to get up. It must be said, however, that the Vice-Master, Aldous Wright, and the Senior Fellow, Joey Prior, lasted almost equally long without the help of Christian Science. I remember when I was an undergraduate watching the three of them standing bare-headed at the Great Gate to receive the Empress Frederick. They were already very old men, but fifteen years later they seemed no older. Aldous Wright was a very dignified figure, standing always as straight as a ramrod, and never appearing out-of-doors without a top hat. Even once when he was roused from sleep at three in the morning by a fire the top hat was duly on his head. He stuck to the English pronunciation of Latin, while the Master adopted the Continental pronunciation. When they read grace in alternate verses, the effect was curious, especially as the Vice-Master gabbled it while the Master mouthed it with unction. While I was an undergraduate, I had regarded all these men merely as figures of fun, but when I became a Fellow and attended College meetings, I began to find that they were serious forces of evil. When the Junior Dean, a clergyman who raped his little daughter and became paralysed with syphilis, had to be got rid of in consequence, the Master went out of his way to state at College Meeting that those of us who did not attend chapel regularly had no idea how excellent this worthy's sermons had been. Next to these three the most important person in the College was the Senior Porter, a magnificent figure of a man, with such royal dignity that he was supposed by undergraduates to be a natural son of the future Edward the Seventh. After I was a Fellow I found that on one occasion the Council met on five successive days with the utmost secrecy. With great difficulty I discovered what their business had been. They had been engaged in establishing the painful fact that the Senior Porter had had improper relations with five bedmakers, in spite of the fact that all of them, by Statute, were 'nec juvenis, nec pulchra'.
As an undergraduate I was persuaded that the Dons were a wholly unnecessary part of the university. I derived no benefits from lectures, and I made a vow to myself that when in due course I became a lecturer I would not suppose that lecturing did any good. I have kept this vow.
I had already been interested in philosophy before I went to Cambridge, but I had not read much except Mill. What I most desired was to find some reason for supposing mathematics true. The arguments in Mill's Logic on this subject already struck me as very inadequate. I read them at the age of eighteen. My mathematical tutors had never shown me any reason to suppose the Calculus anything but a tissue of fallacies. I had therefore two questions to trouble me, one philosophical, and one mathematical. The mathematical question had already in the main been solved on the Continent, though in England the Continental work was little known. It was only after I left Cambridge and began to live abroad that I discovered what I ought to have been taught during my three years as an undegraduate. Philosophy, however, was another matter, I knew in the country Harold Joachim, who taught philosophy at Merton, and was a friend of F. H. Bradley. Joachim's sister had married my Uncle Rollo, and I used to meet him occasionally at tennis-parties and such occasions. I got him to give me 8 long list of philosophical books that I ought to read, and while I was still working at mathematics I embarked upon them. As soon as I was free to do so, I devoted myself to philosophy with great ardour. During my fourth year I read most of the great philosophers as well as masses of books on the philosophy of mathematics. James Ward was always giving me fresh books on this subject, and each time I returned them, saying that they were very bad books. I remember his disappointment, and his painstaking endeavours to find some book that would satisfy me. In the end, but after I had become a Fellow, I got from him two small books, neither of which he had read or supposed of any value. They were Georg Cantor's Mannichfaltigkeitslehre, and Frege's Begriffsschrift. These two books at last gave me the gist of what I wanted, but in the case of Frege I possessed the book for years before I could make out what it meant. Indeed, I did not understand it until I had myself independently discovered most of what it contained.
By this time, I had quite ceased to be the shy prig that I was when I first went to Cambridge. I remember a few months before I came into residence, going to see my tutor about rooms, and while I waited in the ante-room I turned over the pages of the Granta (the undergraduate newspaper). It was May Week, and I was shocked to read in the paper that during this week people's thoughts were not devoted to work. But by my fourth year I had become gay and flippant. Having been reading pantheism, I announced to my friends that I was God. They placed candles on each side of me and proceeded to acts of mock worship. Philosophy altogether seemed to me great fun, and I enjoyed the curious ways of conceiving the world that the great philosophers offer to the imagination.
The greatest happiness of my time at Cambridge was connected with a body whom its members knew as 'The Society', but which outsiders, if they knew of it, called 'The Apostles'. This was a small discussion society, containing one or two people from each year on the average, which met every Saturday night. It has existed since 1820, and has had as members most of the people of any intellectual eminence who have been at Cambridge since then. It is by way of being secret, in order that those who are being considered for election may be unaware of the fact. It was owing to the existence of The Society that I so soon got to know the people best worth knowing, for Whitehead was a member, and told the younger members to investigate Sanger and me on account of our scholarship papers. With rare exceptions, all the members at any one time were close personal friends. It was a principle in discussion that there were to be no taboos, no limitations, nothing considered shocking, no barriers to absolute freedom of speculation. We discussed all manner of things, no doubt with a certain immaturity, but with a detachment and interest scarcely possible in later life. The meetings would generally end about one o'clock at night, and after that I would pace up and down the cloisters of Nevile's Court for hours with one or two other members. We took ourselves perhaps rather seriously, for we considered that the virtue of intellectual honesty was in our keeping. Undoubtedly, we achieved more of this than is common in the world, and I am inclined to think that the best intelligence of Cambridge has been notable in this respect. I was elected in the middle of my second year, not having previously known that such a society existed, though the members were all intimately known to me already.
I was elected to The Society early in 1892. The following letters of congratulation require an explanation of some phrases which were adopted in The Society by way of making fun of German metaphysics. The Society was supposed to be The World of Reality; everything else was Appearance. People who were not members of The Society were called 'phenomena'. Since the metaphysicians maintained that Space and Time are unreal, it was assumed that those who were in The Society were exempted from bondage to Space and Time.
c/ Hon. Sir Charles Elliott, KCSI, Lieut. Gov. of Bengal, India
Weds. March 9, 1892
Dear Russell
I have just heard by this morning's mail that you have joined us Hurrah. It is good news indeed. I mustn't let the mail go off this afternoon without a few words to say how glad I am, and how sorry not to be at Cambridge now to give you a fraternal handshake. You will of course get your own impressions, but it was certainly a true new life to me, and a revelation of what Cambridge really was.
It is just time for letters to go, so I'm afraid I can't write just now to tell you of my experiences. Theodore will tell you how I am getting on. I was very sorry to hear that you had not been well. Get all right quick. Don't let Webb1 kill you.
1 My mathematical coach.
Excuse these hurried lines. Confound those absurd humbugs, space and time, which have the impudence to pretend that they are now separating us. Whereas we know that they have nothing to do with that true existence in the bonds of which I was in the beginning am now and ever shall be
fraternally and affectionately yours Crompton Ll. D.
I haven't time to write to Sanger a proper letter, so would you mind handing him the enclosed scrawl?
Do write to me if you have time.
Devon St., New Plymouth, Taranaki, New Zealand.
17th May, 1892
Dear Russell
Many congratulations on the delightful news of last February, which - with a bondage to space and time perfectly inexplicable in apostolic matters - has only just reached me via India.
I am most awfully glad. I hope you have been told of our brother Whitehead's penetration, who detected the apostolic nature of yourself and Sanger by your entrance scholarship essays, and put us on the watch for you.
I wish I could get back for a Saturday night or so, and have it out with Theodore about Xtianity being the religion of love - just the one tiling which it isn't I should say. I don't see how the ideas of a personal God and real love can coexist with any vigour.
How about the Embryos?1 I hear that the younger Trevelyan (Bob) is very promising, and Green of Kings.
1 Our name for people we were thinking of electing.
I have innumerable more letters for the mail. I hope to see you in the middle of next January.
Yours fraternally, (Sgd.) Ellis McTaggart
Some things became considerably different in the Society shortly after my time.
The tone of the generation some ten years junior to my own was set mainly by Lytton Strachey and Keynes. It is surprising how great a change in mental climate those ten years had brought. We were still Victorian; they were Edwardian. We believed in ordered progress by means of politics and free discussion. The more self-confident among us may have hoped to be leaders of the multitude, but none of us wished to be divorced from it. The generation of Keynes and Lytton did not seek to preserve any kinship with the Philistine. They aimed rather at a life of retirement among fine shades and nice feelings, and conceived of the good as consisting in the passionate mutual admirations of a clique of the élite. This doctrine, quite unfairly, they fathered upon G. E. Moore, whose disciples they professed to be. Keynes, in his memoir 'Early Beliefs' has told of their admiration for Moore, and, also, of their practice of ignoring large parts of Moore's doctrine. Moore gave due weight to morals ana by his doctrine of organic unities avoided the view that the good consists of a series of isolated passionate moments, but those who considered themselves his disciples ignored this aspect of his teaching and degraded his ethics into advocacy of a stuffy girls-school sentimentalising.
From this atmosphere Keynes escaped into the great world, but Strachey never escaped. Keynes's escape, however, was not complete. He went about the world carrying with him everywhere a feeling of the bishop in partibus. True salvation was elsewhere, among the faithful at Cambridge. When he concerned himself with politics and economics he left bis soul at home. This is the reason for a certain hard, glittering, inhuman quality in most of his writing. There was one great exception, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, of which I shall have more to say in a moment.
I first knew Keynes through his father, and Lytton Strachey through his mother. When I was young, Keynes's father taught old-fashioned formal logic in Cambridge. I do not know how far the new developments in that subject altered his teaching. He was an earnest Nonconformist who put morality first and logic second. Something of the Nonconformist spirit remained in his son, but it was overlaid by the realisation that facts and arguments may lead to conclusions somewhat shocking to many people, and a strain of intellectual arrogance in his character made him find it not unpleasant to épater les bourgeois. In his The Economic Consequences of the Peace this strain was in abeyance. The profound conviction that the Treaty of Versailles spelt disaster so roused the earnest moralist in him that he forgot to be clever - without, however, ceasing to be so.
I had no contact with him in his economic and political work, but I was considerably concerned in his Treatise on Probability, many parts of which I discussed with him in detail. It was nearly finished in 1914, but had to be put aside for the duration.
He was always inclined to overwork, in fact it was overwork that caused his death. Once in the year 1904, when I was living in an isolated cottage in a vast moor without roads, he wrote and asked if I could promise him a restful week-end. I replied confidently in the affirmative, and he came. Within five minutes of his arrival the Vice Chancellor turned up full of University business. Other people came unexpectedly to every meal, including sis to Sunday breakfast. By Monday morning we had had twenty-six unexpected guests, and Keynes, I fear, went away more tired than he came. On Sunday, August 2, 1914, I met him hurrying across the Great Court of Trinity. I asked him what the hurry was and he said he wanted to borrow his brother-in-law's motorcycle to go to London. 'Why don't you go by train', I said. 'Because there isn't time', he replied. I did not know what his business might be, but within a few days the bank rate, which panic-mongers had put up to ten per cent, was reduced to five per cent. This was his doing.
I do not know enough economics to have an expert opinion on Keynes's theories, but so far as I am able to judge it seems to me to be owing to him that Britain has not suffered from large-scale unemployment in recent years. I would go further and say that if his theories had been adopted by financial authorities throughout the world the great depression would not have occurred. There are still many people in, America who regard depressions as acts of God. I think Keynes proved that the responsibility for these occurrences does not rest with Providence.
The last time that I saw him was in the House of Lords when he returned from negotiating a loan in America and made a masterly speech recommending it to their Lordships. Many of them had been doubtful beforehand, but when he had finished there remained hardly any doubters except Lord Beaverbrook and two cousins of mine with a passion for being in the minority. Having only just landed from the Atlantic, the effort he made must have been terrific, and it proved too much for him.
Keynes's intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool. I was sometimes inclined to feel that so much cleverness must be incompatible with depth, but I do not think this feeling was justified.
Lytton Strachey, as mentioned before, I first got to know through his mother. She and I were fellow members of a committee designed to secure votes for women. After some months she invited me to dinner. Her husband. Sir Richard Strachey, was a retired Indian official, and the British Raj was very much in the air. My first dinner with the family was a rather upsetting experience. The number of sons and daughters was almost beyond computation, and all the children were to my unpractised eyes exactly alike except in the somewhat superficial point that some were male and some were female. The family were not all assembled when I arrived, but dropped in one by one at intervals of twenty minutes. (One of them, I afterwards discovered, was Lytton.) I had to look round the room carefully to make sure that it was a new one that had appeared and not merely one of the previous ones that had changed his or her place. Towards the end of the evening I began to doubt my sanity, but kind friends afterwards assured me that things had really been as they seemed.
Lady Strachey was a woman of immense vigour, with a great desire that some at least of her children should distinguish themselves. She had an admirable sense of prose and used to read South's sermons aloud to her children, not for the matter (she was a free-thinker), but to give them a sense of rhythm in the writing of English. Lytton, who was too delicate to be sent to a conventional school, was seen by his mother to be brilliant, and was brought up to the career of a writer in an atmosphere of dedication. His writing appeared to me in those days hilariously amusing. I heard him read Eminem Victorians before it was published, and I read it again to myself in prison. It caused me to laugh so loud that the officer came round to my cell, saying I must remember that prison is a place of punishment.
Lytton was always eccentric and became gradually more so. When he was growing a beard he gave out that he had measles so as not to be seen by his friends until the hairs had reached a respectable length. He dressed very oddly. I knew a farmer's wife who let lodgings and she told me that Lytton had come to ask her if she could take him in. 'At first, Sir,' she said, 'I thought he was a tramp, and then I looked again and saw he was a gentleman, but a very queer one.' He talked always in a squeaky voice which sometimes contrasted ludicrously with the matter of what he was saying. One time when I was talking with him he objected first to one thing and then to another as not being what literature should aim at. At last I said, 'Well, Lytton, what should it aim at?' And he replied in one word - 'Passion'. Nevertheless, he liked to appear lordly in his attitude towards human affairs. I heard someone maintain in his presence that young people are apt to think about Life. He objected, 'I can't believe people think about Life. There's nothing in it.' Perhaps it was this attitude which made him not a great man.
His style is unduly rhetorical, and sometimes, in malicious moments, I have thought it not unlike Macaulay's, He is indifferent to historical truth and will always touch up the picture to make the lights and shades more glaring and the folly or wickedness of famous people more obvious. These are grave charges, but I make them in all seriousness.
It was in The Society that I first became aware of Moore's excellence. I remember his reading a paper which began: 'In the beginning was matter, and matter begat the devil, and the devil begat God.' The paper ended with the death first of God and then of the devil, leaving matter alone as in the beginning. At the time when he read this paper, he was still a freshman, and an ardent disciple of Lucretius.
On Sunday it was our custom to breakfast late, and then spend the whole day till dinner-time walking. I got to know every road and footpath within ten miles of Cambridge, and many at much greater distances, in this way. Ia general I felt happy and comparatively calm while at Cambridge, but on moonlight nights I used to career round the country in a state of temporary lunacy. The reason, of course, was sexual desire, though at that time I did not know this.
After my time The Society changed in one respect. There was a long drawn out battle between George Trevelyan and Lytton Strachey, both members, in which Lytton Strachey was on the whole victorious. Since his time, homosexual relations among the members were for a time common, but in my day they were unknown.
Cambridge was important in my life through the fact that it gave me friends, and experience of intellectual discussion, but it was not important through the actual academic instruction. Of the mathematical teaching I have already spoken. Most of what I learned in philosophy has come to seem to me erroneous, and I spent many subsequent years in gradually unlearning the habits of thought which I had there acquired. The one habit of thought of real value that I acquired there was intellectual honesty. This virtue certainly existed not only among my friends, but among my teachers. I cannot remember any instance of a teacher resenting it when one of his pupils showed him to be in error, though I can remember quite a number of occasions on which pupils succeeded in performing this feat. Once during a lecture on hydrostatics, one of the young men interrupted to say: 'Have you not forgotten the centrifugal forces on the lid?' The lecturer gasped, and then said: 'I have been doing this example that way for twenty years, but you are right.' It was a blow to me during the War to find that, even at Cambridge, intellectual honesty had its limitations. Until then, wherever I lived, I felt that Cambridge was the only place on earth that I could regard as home.