Chapter 5
Alys and I were married on December 13, 1894. Her family had been Philadelphia Quakers for over two hundred years, and she was still a believing member of the Society of Friends. So we were married in Quaker Meeting in St Martin's Lane. I seem to remember that one of the Quakers present was moved by the Spirit to preach about the miracle of Cana, which hurt Alys's teetotal feelings. During our engagement we had frequently had arguments about Christianity, but I did not succeed in changing her opinions until a few months after we were married.
There were other matters upon which her opinions changed after marriage. She had been brought up, as American women always were In those days, to think that sex was beastly, that all women hated it, and that men's brutal lusts were the chief obstacle to happiness in marriage. She therefore thought that intercourse should only take place when children were desired. As we had decided to have no children, she had to modify her position on this point, but she still supposed that she would desire intercourse to be very rare. I did not argue the matter, and I did not find it necessary to do so.
Neither she nor I had any previous experience of sexual intercourse when we married. We found, as such couples apparently usually do, a certain amount of difficulty at the start. I have heard many people say that this caused their honeymoon to be a difficult time, but we had no such experience. The difficulties appeared to us merely comic, and were soon overcome. I remember, however, a day after three weeks of marriage, when, under the influence of sexual fatigue, I hated her and could not imagine why I had wished to marry her. This state of mind lasted just as long as the journey from Amsterdam to Berlin, after which I never again experienced a similar mood.
We had decided that during the early years of our married life, we would see a good deal of foreign countries, and accordingly we spent the first three months of 1895 in Berlin. I went to the university, where I chiefly studied economics. I continued to work at my Fellowship dissertation. We went to concerts three times a week, and we began to know the Social Democrats, who were at that time considered very wicked. Lady Ermyntrude Malet, the wife of the Ambassador, was my cousin, so we were asked to dinner at the Embassy. Everybody was friendly, and the attachés all said they would call. However, none of them came, and when we called at the Embassy, nobody was at home. For a long time we hardly noticed all this, but at last we discovered that it was due to Alys having mentioned to the Ambassador that we had been to a socialist meeting. We learned this from a letter of Lady Ermyntrude's to my grandmother. In spite of my grandmother's prejudice against Alys, she completely sided with her on this matter. The issue was a public one, and on all public political issues, both she and my Aunt Agatha could always be relied upon not to be liberal.
During this time my intellectual ambitions were taking shape. I resolved not to adopt a profession but to devote myself to writing. I remember a cold, bright day in early spring when I walked by myself in the Tiergarten, and made projects of future work. I thought that I would write one series of books on the philosophy of the sciences from pure mathematics to physiology, and another series of books on social questions. I hoped that the two series might ultimately meet in a synthesis at once scientific and practical. My scheme was largely inspired by Hegelian ideas. Nevertheless, I have to some extent followed it in later years, as much at any rate as could have been expected. The moment was an important and formative one as regards my purposes.
When the spring came, we went to Fiesole and stayed with Alys's sister, who lived in a small villa, while Berenson lived next door in another small villa. After leaving her, we travelled down the Adriatic coast, staying at Pesaro, Urbino, Ravenna, Rimini, Ancona, and various other places. This remains in my memory as one of the happiest times of my life. Italy and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy. We used to bathe naked in the sea, and lie on the sand to dry, but this was a somewhat perilous sport, as sooner or later a policeman would come along to see that no one got salt out of the sea in defiance of the salt tax. Fortunately we were never quite caught.
By this time, it was becoming necessary to think in earnest about my Fellowship dissertation, which had to be finished by August, so we settled down at Fernhurst, and I had my first experience of serious original work. There were days of hope alternating with days of despair, but at last, when my dissertation was finished, I fully believed that I had solved all philosophical questions connected with the foundations of geometry. I did not yet know that the hopes and despairs connected with original work are alike fallacious, that one's work Is never so bad as it appears on bad days, nor so good as it appears on good days. My dissertation was read by Whitehead and James Ward, since it was in part mathematical and in part philosophical. Before the result was announced. Whitehead criticised it rather severely, though quite justly, and I came to the conclusion that it was worthless and that I would not wait for the result to be announced. However, as a matter of politeness I went to see James Ward, who said exactly the opposite, and praised it to the skies. Next day I learned that I had been elected a Fellow, and Whitehead informed me with a smile that he had thought it was the last chance anyone would get of finding serious fault with my work.
With my first marriage, I entered upon a period of great happiness and fruitful work. Having no emotional troubles, all my energy went In intellectual directions. Throughout the first years of my marriage, I read widely, both in mathematics and in philosophy. I achieved a certain amount of original work, and laid the foundations for other work later. I travelled abroad, and in my spare time I did a great deal of solid reading, chiefly history. After dinner, my wife and I used to read aloud in turns, and in this way we ploughed through large numbers of standard histories in many volumes. I think the last book that we read in this way was the History of the City of Rome by Gregorovius. This was intellectually the most fruitful period of my life, and I owe a debt of gratitude to my first wife for having made it possible. At first she disliked the idea of living quietly in the country, but I was determined to do so for the sake of my work. I derived sufficient happiness from her and my work to have no need of anything more, though as a matter of fact it was, as a rule, only about half the year that we spent quietly in the country. Even during that period, she would often be away making speeches on votes for women or total abstinence. I had become a pledged teetotaller in order to please her, and from habit I remained so after the original motive had ceased to move me. I did not take to drink until the King took the pledge during the first war. His motive was to facilitate the killing of Germans, and it therefore seemed as if there must be some connection between pacifism and alcohol.
In the autumn of 1895, after the Fellowship election, we went back to Berlin to study German Social Democracy. On this visit, we associated almost exclusively with socialists. We got to know Bebel and the elder Liebknecht. The younger Liebknecht, who was killed just after the first war, was at this time a boy. We must have met him when we dined at his father's house, although I have no recollection of him. In those days Social Democrats were fiery revolutionaries, and I was too young to realise what they would be like when they acquired power. At the beginning of 1896 I gave a course of lectures on them at the London School of Economics, which was at that time in John Adam Street, Adelphi. I was, I believe, their first lecturer. There I got to know W. A. S. Hewins, who considerably influenced me from that time until 1901. He came of a Catholic family, and nad substituted the British Empire for the Church as an object of veneration.
I was, in those days, much more high-strung than I became later on. While I was lecturing at the School of Economics, my wife and I lived in a flat at 90 Ashley Gardens, but I could not work there because the noise of the lift disturbed me, so I used to walk every day to her parents' house in Grosvenor Road, where I spent the time reading Georg Cantor, and copying out the gist of him into a notebook. At that time I falsely supposed all his arguments to be fallacious, but I nevertheless went through them all in the minutest detail. This stood me in good stead when later on I discovered that all the fallacies were mine.
When the spring came, we took a small labourer's cottage at Fernhurst, called 'The Millhanger', to which we added a fair-sized sitting-room and two bedrooms. In this cottage many of the happiest times of my life were passed. I acquired a great deal of knowledge that interested me, and my original work was praised by experts more highly than I expected. While I was an undergraduate I did not think my abilities so good as they afterwards turned out to be. I remember wondering, as an almost unattainable ideal, whether I should ever do work as good as McTaggart's. During the early years of my first marriage Whitehead passed gradually from a teacher into a friend. In 1890 as a Freshman at Cambridge, I had attended his lectures on statics. He told the class to study article 35 in the text-book. Then he turned to me and said, 'You needn't study it, because you know it already'. I had quoted it by number in the scholarship examination ten months earlier. He won my heart by remembering this fact.
In England, Whitehead was regarded only as a mathematician, and it was left to America to discover him as a philosopher. He and I disagreed in philosophy, so that collaboration was no longer possible, and after he went to America I naturally saw much less of him. We began to drift apart during the first world war when he completely disagreed with my pacifist position. In our differences on this subject he was more tolerant than I was, and it was much more my fault than his that these differences caused a diminution in the closeness of our friendship.
In the last months of the war his younger son, who was only just eighteen, was killed. This was an appalling grief to him, and it was only by an immense effort of moral discipline that he was able to go on with his work. The pain of this loss had a great deal to do with turning his thoughts to philosophy and with causing him to seek ways of escaping from belief in a merely mechanistic universe. His philosophy was very obscure, and there was much in it that I never succeeded in understanding. He had always had a leaning towards Kant, of whom I thought ill, and when he began to develop his own philosophy he was considerably influenced by Bergson. He was impressed by the aspect of unity in the universe, and considered that it is only through this aspect that scientific inferences can be justified. My temperament led me in the opposite direction, but I doubt whether pure reason could have decided which of us was more nearly in the right. Those who prefer his outlook might say that while he aimed at bringing comfort to plain people I aimed at bringing discomfort to philosophers; one who favoured my outlook might retort that while he pleased the philosophers, I amused the plain people. However that may be, we went our separate ways, though affection survived to the last.
Whitehead was a man of extraordinarily wide interests, and his knowledge of history used to amaze me. At one time I discovered by chance that he was using that very serious and rather out-of-the-way work Paolo Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent, as a bed book. Whatever historical subjects came up he could always supply some illuminating fact, such, for example, as the connection of Burke's political opinions with his interests in the City, and the relation of the Hussite heresy to the Bohemian silver mines. He had delightful humour and great gentleness. When I was an undergraduate he was given the nick-name of 'the Cherub', which those who knew him in later life would think unduly disrespectful but which at the time suited him. His family came from Kent and had been clergymen ever since about the time of the landing of St Augustine in that county. He used to relate with amusement that my grandfather, who was much exercised by the spread of Roman Catholicism, adjured Whitehead's sister never to desert the Church of England. What amused him was that the contingency was so very improbable. Whitehead's theological opinions were not orthodox, but something of the vicarage atmosphere remained in his ways of feeling and came out in his later philosophical writings.
He was a very modest man, and his most extreme boast was that he did try to have the qualities of his defects. He never minded telling stories against himself. There were two old ladies in Cambridge who were sisters and whose manners suggested that they came straight out of Cranford. They were, in fact, advanced and even daring in their opinions, and were in the forefront of every movement of reform. Whitehead used to relate, somewhat ruefully, how when he first met them he was misled by their exterior and thought it would be fun to shock them a little. But when he advanced some slightly radical opinion they said, 'Oh, Mr Whitehead, we are so pleased to hear you say that', showing that they had hitherto viewed him as a pillar of reaction.
His capacity for concentration on work was quite extraordinary. One hot summer's day, when I was staying with him at Grantchester, our friend Crompton Davies arrived and I took him into the garden to say how-do-you-do to his host. Whitehead was sitting writing mathemattes. Davies and I stood in front of him at a distance of no more than a yard and watched him covering page after page with symbols. He never saw us, and after a time we went away with a feeling of awe.
Those who knew Whitehead well became aware of many things in him which did not appear in more casual contacts. Socially he appeared kindly, rational and imperturbable, but he was not in fact imperturbable, and was certainly not that inhuman monster 'the rational man'. His devotion to his wife and his children was profound and passionate. He was at all times deeply aware of the importance of religion. As a young man, he was all but converted to Roman Catholicism by the influence of Cardinal Newman. His later philosophy gave him some part of what he wanted from religion. Like other men who lead extremely disciplined lives, he was liable to distressing soliloquies, and when he thought he was alone, he would mutter abuse of himself for his supposed shortcomings. The early years of his marriage were much clouded by financial anxieties, but, although he found this very difficult to bear, he never let it turn him aside from work that was important but not lucrative.
He had practical abilities which at the time when I knew him best did not find very much scope. He had a kind of shrewdness which was surprising and which enabled him to get his way on committees in a manner astonishing to those who thought of him as wholly abstract and unworldly. He might have been an able administrator but for one defect, which was a complete inability to answer letters. I once wrote a letter to him on a mathematical point, as to which I urgently needed an answer for an article I was writing against Poincare. He did not answer, so I wrote again. He still did not answer, so I telegraphed. As he was still silent, I sent a reply-paid telegram. But in the end, I had to travel down to Broadstairs to get the answer. His Mends gradually got to know this peculiarity, and on the rare occasions when any of them got a letter from him they would all assemble to congratulate the recipient. He justified himself by saying that if he answered letters, he would have no time for original work. I think the justification was complete and unanswerable.
Whitehead was extraordinarily perfect as a teacher. He took a personal interest in those with whom he had to deal and knew both their strong and their weak points. He would elicit from a pupil the best of which a pupil was capable. He was never repressive, or sarcastic, or superior, or any of the things that inferior teachers like to be. I think that in all the abler young men with whom he came in contact he inspired, as he did in me, a very real and lasting affection.
Whitehead and his wife used to stay with us in the country, and we used to stay with them in Cambridge. Once we stayed with the old Master, Montagu Butler, in the Lodge, and slept in Queen Anne's bed, but this experience fortunately was not repeated.
My lectures on German Socialism were published in 1896. This was my first book, but I took no great interest in it, as I had determined to devote myself to mathematical philosophy. I re-wrote my Fellowship dissertation, and got it accepted by the Cambridge University Press, who published it in 1897 under the title An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry. I subsequently came to think this book much too Kantian, but it was fortunate for my reputation that my first philosophical work did not challenge the orthodoxy of the time. It was the custom in academic circles to dismiss all critics of Kant as persons who had failed to understand him, and in rebutting this criticism it was an advantage to have once agreed with him. The book was highly praised, far more highly in fact than it deserved. Since that time, academic reviewers have generally said of each successive book of mine that it showed a falling-off.
In the autumn of 1896, Alys and I went to America for three months, largely in order that I might make the acquaintance of her relations.1 The first thing we did was to visit Wait Whitman's house in Camden, N.J. From there we went to a small manufacturing town called Millville, where a cousin of hers, named Bond Thomas, was the manager of a glass factory which had, for a long time, been the family business. His wife, Edith, was a great friend of Alys's. According to the Census, the town had 10,002 inhabitants, and they used to say that they were the two. He was a simple soul, but she had literary aspirations. She wrote bad plays in the style of Scribe, and imagined that if only she could get away from Millville and establish contact with the literary lights of Europe, her talent would be recognised. He was humbly devoted to her, but she had various flirtations with men whom she imagined to be of finer clay. In those days the country round about consisted of empty woodland, and she used to take me long drives over dirt tracks in a buggy. She always carried a revolver, saying one could never know when it would come in handy. Subsequent events led me to suspect that she had been reading Hedda Gabler. Two years later, they both came to stay with us in a palace in Venice, and we introduced her to various writers. It turned out that the work she had produced with such labour during the ten years' isolation in Millville was completely worthless. She went back to America profoundly discouraged, and the next we heard was that, after placing her husband's love letters over her heart, she had shot herself through them with the revolver. He subsequently married another woman who was said to be exactly like her.
1 with us we took Bonté Amos, the sister of Maurice Sheldon Amos; see pp. 143 ff.
We went next to Bryn Mawr to stay with the President, Carey Thomas, sister of Bond Thomas. She was a lady who was treated almost with awe by all the family. She had immense energy, a belief in culture which she carried out with a business man's efficiency, and a profound contempt for the male sex. The first time I met her, which was at Friday's Hill, Logan said to me before her arrival: 'Prepare to meet thy Carey.' This expressed the family attitude. I was never able myself, however, to take her quite seriously, because she was so easily shocked. She had the wholly admirable view that a person who intends to write on an academic subject should first read up the literature, so I gravely informed her that all the advances in non-Euclidean geometry had been made in ignorance of the previous literature, and even because of that ignorance. This caused her ever afterwards to regard me as a mete farceur. Various incidents, however, confirmed me in my view of her. For instance, once in Paris we took her to see 'L'Aiglon', and I found from her remarks that she did not know there had been a Revolution in France in 1830. I gave her a little sketch of French history, and a few days later she told me that her secretary desired a handbook of French history, and asked me to recommend one. However, at Bryn Mawr she was Zeus, and everybody trembled before her. She lived with a friend, Miss Gwinn, who was in most respects the opposite of her. Miss Gwinn had very little will-power, was soft and lazy, but had a genuine though narrow feeling for literature. They had been friends from early youth, and had gone together to Germany to get the Ph.D degree, which, however, only Carey had succeeded in getting. At the time that we stayed with them, their friendship had become a little ragged. Miss Gwinn used to go home to her family for three days in every fortnight, and at the exact moment of her departure each fortnight, another lady, named Miss Garrett, used to arrive, to depart again at the exact moment of Miss Gwinn's return. Miss Gwinn, meantime, had fallen in love with a very brilliant young man, named Hodder, who was teaching at Bryn Mawr. This roused Carey to fury, and every night, as we were going to bed, we used to hear her angry voice scolding Miss Gwinn in the next room for hours together. Hodder had a wife and child, and was said to have affairs with the girls at the College. In spite of all these obstacles, however, Miss Gwinn finally married him. She insisted upon getting a very High Church clergyman to perform the ceremony, thereby making it clear that the wife whom he had had at Bryn Mawr was not his legal wife, since the clergyman in question refused to marry divorced persons. Hodder had given out that there had been a divorce, but Miss Gwinn's action showed that this had not been the case. He died soon after their marriage, worn out with riotous living. He had a very brilliant mind, and in the absence of women could talk very interestingly.
While at Bryn Mawr, I gave lectures on non-Euclidean geometry, and Alys gave addresses in favour of endowment of motherhood, combined with private talks to women in favour of free love. This caused a scandal, and we were practically hounded out of the college. From there we went to Baltimore, where I lectured on the same subject at the Johns Hopkins University. There we stayed with her uncle, Dr Thomas, the father of Carey. The Thomases were a curious family. There was a son at Johns Hopkins who was very brilliant in brain surgery; there was a daughter, Helen, at Bryn Mawr, who had the, misfortune to be deaf. She was gentle and kind, and had very lovely red hair. I was very fond of her for a number of years, culminating in 1900, Once or twice I asked her to kiss me, but she refused. Ultimately she married Simon Flexner, the Head of the Rockefeller Institute of Preventive Medicine. I remained very good friends with her, although in the last years of her life I saw her seldom. There was another daughter who had remained a pious and very orthodox Quaker. She always alluded to those who were not Quakers as 'the world's people'. They all of them used 'thee' in conversation, and so did Alys and I when we talked to each other. Some of the Quaker doctrines seemed a little curious to those not accustomed to them. I remember my mother-in-law explaining that she was taught to consider the Lord's Prayer •gay'. At first this remark caused bewilderment, but she explained that everything done by non-Quakers but not by Quakers was called 'gay', and this included the use of all fixed formulas, since prayer ought to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. The Lord's Prayer, being a fixed formula, was therefore 'gay'. On another occasion she informed the dinner-table that she had been brought up to have no respect for the Ten Commandments. They also were 'gay'. I do not know whether any Quakers remain who take the doctrine of the guidance of the Spirit so seriously as to have no respect for the Ten Commandments. Certainly I have not met any in recent years. It must not, of course, be supposed that the virtuous people who had this attitude ever, in fact, infringed any of the Commandments; the Holy Spirit saw to it that this should not occur. Outside the ranks of the Quakers, similar doctrines sometimes have more questionable consequences. I remember an account written by my mother-in-law of various cranks that she had known, in which there was one chapter entitled 'Divine Guidance'. On reading the chapter one discovered that this was a synonym for fornication.
My impression of the old families of Philadelphia Quakers was that they had all the effeteness of a small aristocracy. Old misers of ninety would sit brooding over their hoard while their children of sixty or seventy waited for their death with what patience they could command. Various forms of mental disorder appeared common. Those who must be accounted sane were apt to be very stupid. Alys had a maiden aunt In Philadelphia, a sister of her father, who was very rich and very absurd. She liked me well enough, but had a dark suspicion that I thought it was not literally the blood of Jesus that brought salvation. I do not know how she got this notion, as I never said anything to encourage it. We dined with her on Thanksgiving Day. She was a very greedy old lady, and had supplied a feast which required a gargantuan stomach. Just as we were about to eat the first mouthful, she said: 'Let us pause and think of the poor.' Apparently she found this thought an appetiser. She had two nephews who lived in her neighbourhood and came to see her every evening. They felt it would be unfair if the nephew and nieces in Europe got an equal share at her death. She, however, liked to boast about them, and respected them more than those whom she could bully as she chose. Consequently they lost nothing by their absence.
America in those days was a curiously innocent country. Numbers of men asked me to explain what it was that Oscar Wilde had done. In Boston we stayed in a boarding-house kept by two old Quaker ladies, and one of them at breakfast said to me in a loud voice across the table: 'Oscar Wilde has not been much before the public lately. What has he been doing?' 'He is in prison', I replied. Fortunately on this occasion I was not asked what he had done. I viewed America in those days with the conceited superiority of the insular Briton. Nevertheless, contact with academic Americans, especially mathematicians, led me to realise the superiority of Germany to England in almost all academic matters. Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
Of the year 1897 I remember very little except that my Foundations of Geometry was published in that year. I remember also very great pleasure in receiving a letter of praise of this book from Louis Couturat, whom at that time I had never met, though I had reviewed his book The Mathematical Infinite. I had dreamed of receiving letters of praise from unknown foreigners, but this was the first time it had happened to me. He related how he had worked his way through my book 'armé d'un dictionnaire', for he knew no English. At a slightly later date I went to Caen to visit him, as he was at that time a professor there. He was surprised to find me so young, but in spite of that a friendship began which lasted until he was killed by a lorry during the mobilisation of 1914. In the last years I had lost contact with him, because he became absorbed in the question of an international language. He advocated Ido rather than Esperanto. According to his conversation, no human beings in the whole previous history of the human race had ever been quite so depraved as the Esperantists. He lamented that the word Ido did not lend itself to the formation of a word similar to Esperantist. I suggested 'idiot', but he was not quite pleased. I remember lunching with him in Paris in July 1900, when the heat was very oppressive. Mrs Whitehead, who had a weak heart, fainted, and while he was gone to fetch the sal volatile somebody opened the window. When he returned, he firmly shut it again, saying: 'De l'air, oui, mais pas de courant d'air.' I remember too his coming to see me in a hotel in Paris in 1905, while Mr Davies and his daughter Margaret (the father and sister of Crompton and Theodore) listened to his conversation. He talked without a moment's intermission for half an hour, and then remarked that 'the wise are those who hold their tongues'. At this point, Mr Davies, in spite of his eighty years, rushed from the room, and I could just hear the sound of his laughter as he disappeared. Couturat was for a time a very ardent advocate of my ideas on mathematical logic, but he was not always very prudent, and in my long duel with Poincare I found it sometimes something of a burden to have to defend Couturat as well as myself. His most valuable work was on Leibniz's logic. Leibniz wished to be thought well of, so he published only his second-rate work. All his best work remained in manuscript. Subsequent editors, publishing only what they thought best, continued to leave his best work imprinted. Couturat was the first man who unearthed it. I was naturally pleased, as it afforded documentary evidence for the interpretation of Leibniz which I had adopted in my book about him on grounds that, without Couturat's work, would have remained inadequate. The first time I met Couturat he explained to me that he did not practise any branch of 'le sport'. When shortly afterwards I asked him if he rode a bicycle, he replied: 'But no, since I am not a sportsman.' I corresponded with him for many years, and during the early stages of the Boer War wrote him imperialistic letters which I now consider very regrettable.
In the year 1898 Alys and I began a practice, which we continued till 1902, of spending part of each year at Cambridge. I was at this time beginning to emerge from the bath of German idealism in which I had been plunged by McTaggart and Stout. I was very much assisted in this process by Moore, of whom at that time I saw a great deal. It was an intense excitement, after having supposed the sensible world unreal, to be able to believe again that there really were such things as tables and chairs. But the most interesting aspect of the matter to me was the logical aspect. I was glad to think that relations are real, and I was interested to discover the dire effect upon metaphysics of the belief that all propositions are of the subject-predicate form. Accident led me to read Leibniz, because he had to be lectured upon, and McTaggart wanted to go to New Zealand, so that the College asked me to take his place so far as this one course was concerned. In the study and criticism of Leibniz I found occasion to exemplify the new views on logic to which, largely under Moore's guidance, I had been led.
We spent two successive autumns in Venice, and I got to know almost every stone in the place. From the date of my first marriage down to the outbreak of the first war, I do not think any year passed without my going to Italy. Sometimes I went on foot, sometimes on a bicycle; once in a tramp steamer calling at every little port from Venice to Genoa. I loved especially the smaller and more out-of-the-way towns, and the mountain, landscapes in the Apennines. After the outbreak of the war, I did not go back to Italy till 1949.I had the intention of going there to a Congress in the year 1922, but Mussolini, who had not yet accomplished his coup d'état, sent word to the organisers of the Congress that, while no harm should be done to me, any Italian who spoke to me should be assassinated. Having no wish to leave a trail of blood behind me, I avoided the country which he defiled, dearly as I loved it.
I remember the summer of 1899 as the last time that I saw Sally Fairchild until one afternoon in 1940, when we met as old people and wondered what we had seen in each other. She was an aristocratic Bostonian of somewhat diminished fortunes, whom I had first come to know in 1896 when we were staying in Boston. In the face she was not strikingly beautiful, but her movements were the most graceful that I have ever seen. Innumerable people fell in love with her. She used to say that you could always tell when an Englishman was going to propose, because he began: 'The governor's a rum sort of chap, but I think you'd get on with him.' The nest time that I met her, she was staying with her mother at Rushmore, the country house of my Uncle, General Pitt-Rivers. With the exception of the General, most of the family were more or less mad. Mrs Pitt-Rivers, who was a Stanley, had become a miser, and if visitors left any of their bacon and egg she would put it back in the dish. The eldest son was a Guardsman, very smart and very correct. He always came down late for breakfast and rang the bell for fresh food. When he ordered it, my Aunt would scream at the footman, saying that there was no need of it as there was plenty left from the scrapings from the visitors' plates. The footman, however, paid no attention to her, but quietly obeyed the Guardsman. Then there was another son, who was a painter, mad and bad, but not sad. There was a third son who was a nice fellow, but incompetent. He had the good luck to marry Elspeth Phelps, the dressmaker, and thus escaped destitution. Then there was St George, the most interesting of the family. He was one of the first inventors of electric light, but he threw up all such things for esoteric Buddhism and spent his time travelling in Tibet to visit Mahatmas. When he returned, he found that Edison and Swan were making electric lights which he considered an infringement of his patent. He therefore entered upon a long series of lawsuits, which he always lost and which finally left him bankrupt. This confirmed him in the Buddhist faith that one should overcome mundane desires. My grandmother Stanley used to make him play whist, and when it came to his turn to deal, she used to say: 'I am glad it is your turn to deal, as it will take away your air of saintliness.' He combined saindiness and Company promoting in about equal proportions. He was in love with Sally Fairchild and had on that account invited her mother and her to Rushmore. There was as usual not enough food, and on one occasion at lunch there was a tug-of-war between Sally and the artist for the last plate of rice pudding, which I regret to say the artist won. On the day of her departure she wished to catch a certain train but Mrs Pitt-Rivers insisted that she should visit a certain ruin on the way to the station, and therefore catch a later train. She appealed to St George to support her, and at first he said he would, but when It came to the crisis, he preached instead the vanity of human wishes. This caused her to reject his proposal. (His subsequent marriage was annulled on the ground of his impotence.1) In the summer of 1899 she paid a long visit to Friday's Hill, and I became very fond of her. I did not consider myself in love with her, and I never so much as kissed her hand, but as years went by I realised that she had made a deep impression on me, and I remember as if it were yesterday our evening walks in the summer twilight while we were restrained by the strict code of those days from giving any expression whatever to our feelings.
1 He married Lady Edith Douglas, sister of Lord Alfred.
In the autumn of 1899 the Boer War broke out. I was at that time a Liberal Imperialist, and at first by no means a pro-Boer. British defeats caused me much anxiety, and I could think of nothing else but the war news. We were living at The Millhanger, and I used most afternoons to walk the four miles to the station in order to get an evening paper. Alys, being American, did not have the same feelings in the matter, and was rather annoyed by my absorption in it. When the Boers began to be defeated, my interest grew less, and early in 1901 I became a pro-Boer.
In the year 1900, my book on the Philosophy of Leibniz was published. In July of that year I went to Paris, where a new chapter of my life began.
Letters
Pembroke Lodge Richmond, Surrey May 30, '95
Dearest Bertie
I hope yr Cambridge days had been useful though I don't exactly know in what way - I have asked you before, but forget yr answer, what yr dissertation is called - how do you think you are succeeding with it? How vividly I remember the first tidings of yr first success, before you went to Cambridge - when you rushed upstairs to tell Auntie and me - the dear dear Bertie of that day - and then the last oh the happy tears that start to eyes, at such moments in the old withered life to wch the young fresh life is bringing joy - Yet how I always felt 'these things wd not give me one moment's happiness if he were not loving and good and true'.
I came upon something of that kind yesty in a chance book Iwas reading - and am always coming upon passages in all kinds of books which seem written on purpose to answer to some experiences of my life - I suppose this is natural when life has been long. By the bye you have not yet said a word to Auntie about her little birthday letter - she has not said so, and she told me it was only a few lines, but such as they were she made an effort over illness to write them - the fact is that you take only the fag-end of the fragment of the shred of a minute or two for yr letters to us - and though it is pleasant now and then to look back to the full and talky ones you wrote in past days, they are not exactly substitutes for what those of the present might be! However as long as you have no wish for talkings on paper, wch at best is a poor affair, go on with yr scraps - I don't forget how very busy you are, but the very busy people are those who find most time for everything somehow - don't you think so? (What an ugly smudge!) As for talking off paper, you didn't intend as far as I cd make out when you went away, ever, within measurable distance to make that possible - Oh dear how many things I meant to say and have not said - about Quakers, of whose peculiar creed of rules we have been hearing things true or false - and about much besides. But it must all wait. What lovely skies and earth! and how glad you must have been to get back. Love and thanks to Alys.
Yr ever loving Granny
I hope you found my untidy pencilled glossaries wch were loose inside die book - I thought they wd help to more pleasure in the book when you read it. How I wish we cd have read it together!
Pembroke Lodge Richmond, Surrey (1896)
Dearest Bertie
You say you have 'settled' yr plans - please mention them in case P.L. [Pembroke Lodge] comes into them - Gertrude1 and bairns are to be here Sept. 1 to 16. I'm happy to say. U.R. in Scotland and elsewhere - so, that time wd not do - I can imagine the 'deeper Philosophy' and even 'L'Infini Mathematique' to be most interesting. It is rather painful dear Bertie, that knowing our love for Miss Walker, you still leave the death unmentioned. Nor do you say a word of dear Lady Tennyson's although so near you - Sir Henry Taylor called her 'very woman of very women' - no length of words could add to the praise of those five. I have sent for Green for Alys - a delightful history but not quite what I shd have liked as a gift to her.
1 Rollo's second wife.
Yr loving Granny
Auntie has a beautiful note from poor Hallam.
Pembroke Lodge Richmond, Surrey Aug. 11, 1896
Dearest Alys
We are delighted with the Bertie photo - It is perfect, such a natural, not photographic smile. As for you, we don't like you, and I hope Bertie doesn't, neither pose, nor dusky face, nor white humpy tippet this is perhaps ungrateful of Agatha but she can't help it, nor can I. When is or was your birthday? I forget and only remember that I said I would give you a book. I will try to think of one and then ask you if you have it, but not Green I think - something less solid and instructive - have you Henriette Renan's letters? Agatha has just read them and says they are beautiful. Of course, my dear child I should never think of giving my health or want of it as an objection to your going to America. I felt it was for yourselves alone to decide whether 'to go or not to go'. I trust it may turn out for Bertie's good. It is sad that the last of the eminent group of authors, Holmes and Lowell, are gone - but no doubt there must be men well worth his knowing, whether authors or not. It is quite true that I have earnestly wished him to be thrown into a wider and more various set of men and women than has been the case - but this is most to be desired in his own country. Harold and Vita1" came down - did I tell you? last week, such aa nice natural pleasant girl. Thanks for your nice note. What a pity about your cold! Is it any fault in the cottage? What a horrible season for crossing and returning! Will sea air be good for your indigestion?
1 My cousin Harold Russell and his wife.
Your always affectionate Granny
Pembroke Lodge Richmond, Surrey May 17, '98
My dearest Bertie
I shall think of you very much tomorrow and of happy birthdays long ago when she was with us1 to guide, counsel and inspire to all good and when you were still the child brightening our home and filling us with hope of what you might some day become. Dear dear Bertie has it been an upward growth since those days? Have the joys of life which are now yours helped you to be not less but more loving, more helpful, more thoughtful, for those whose lives may be full of sorrow illness pain and loneliness. All of us who have known what it was to have Granny's love and prayers and wishes - and who have the blessed memory of her wonderful example must feel, at times almost despairingly, how terribly terribly far away we are from her ideal and her standard of life - but we must strive on and hope for more of her spirit. You cannot think how very lovely everything is here just now and though the aching longing for her is awful, yet I love to look upon it all and remember how she loved it.
1 My grandmother had lately died.
Uncle Rollo is very unwell and has been for a long time. I was very anxious long ago about him when he was doing far too much, now he is ordered complete rest; - Perhaps you have been to Dunrozel. There has been an immense deal to do here and I have been quite overdone several times. Gwennie [Gwendoline Villiers] has saved me from a breakdown by working incessantly and helping in every possible way - It has been most painful to see the beautiful pictures go away and the house more and more dismantled and I shall be thankful when it is over. I am most glad that Uncle Rollo has several of the good pictures. They ought to be his and also I am grateful to Herbrand2 for giving the Grant picture of your grandfather to the National Portrait Gallery. I am sorry I have no present for you just yet but it has been simply impossible during this unceasing business. Give Alys very best love.
2 The Duke of Bedford.
God bless you dearest Bertie.
Your very loving Auntie
To Graham Wallas
The Deanery Bryn Mawr, Pa. Nov. 13, 1896
Dear Wallas
I have been meaning to write to you ever since the Presidential election, on account of a specimen ballot paper wh. I am sending you by book post. This document, I am told, is more complicated than in any other state: certainly it is a triumph. It seems to me to contain within it the whole 18th century theory of the free and intelligent demos, and the whole 19th century practice of bossism. Imagine using such a phrase as 'straight ticket' on a ballot-paper, and imagine the stupendous intellect of a man who votes anything else on such a ballot-paper. I have never seen a document more replete with theory of politics, or illustrating more neatly the short road from bad metaphysics to political corruption. The whole interest, in Philadelphia, centred about the election of the sheriff - Crow, the independent Republican, was making a stand against bossism, and strange to say, he got in, tho' by a very narrow majority.
I am sending you also some rather transparent boss's devices for allowing fictitious voters to vote. You will see that the vouchers I enclose enable a man to vote without being on the register. I was taken to a polling-booth in Philadelphia, and there stood, just outside, a sub-deputy boss, named Flanagan, instructing the ignorant how to vote, illegally watching them mark their ballot-paper, and when necessary vouching for the right to vote A Republican and a Democrat sat inside to see that all was fair, it being supposed they would counteract each other; as a matter of fact, they make a deal, and agree to keep up their common friends the bosses, even if they have to admit fraudulent votes for the opposite party. Americans seem too fatalistic and pessimistic to do much against them: I was taken by a man appointed as official watcher by the Prohibitionists, but tho' he observed and pointed out the irregularities, he merely shrugged his shoulders when I asked why he did not interfere and make a row. The feet is, Americans are unspeakably lazy about everything but their business: to cover their laziness, they invent a pessimism, and say things can't be improved: tho' when I confront them, and ask for any single reform movement wh. has not succeeded, they are stumped, except one who mentioned the Consular service - naturally not a very soul-stirring cry. One of them, who prides himself on his virtue, frankly told me he found he could make more money in business than he could save in rates by fighting corruption - it never seemed to enter his head that one might think that a rather lame excuse. However, everything seems to be improving very fast, tho' nothing makes the lazy hypocritical Puritans so furious as to say so. They take a sort of pride in being the most corrupt place in the Union: everywhere you go they brag of the peculiar hopelessness of their own locality. The fall of Altgeld and the defeat of Tammany seem to irritate them: it might so easily have been otherwise, they say, and will be otherwise next election. Altogether I don't see that they deserve any better than they get. The Quakers and Puritans, so far as I have come across them, are the greatest liars and hypocrites I have ever seen and are as a rale totally destitute of vigour. Here's a Philadelphia story. Wana-maker is the local Whiteley, enormously rich and religious. The protective tariff is dear to his soul. In the election of 1888, when New York was the critical State, it was telegraphed to the Phila. Republican Committee that 80,000 dollars would win the election. Wanamaker planked down the sum, New York State was won by a majority of 500, and Wanamaker became Postmaster General. Here is a New York tale. Jay Gould, in 1884, offered a huge sum to the Republicans. This became known to the Democrats, who next day had a procession of several hours past his house shouting as they marched: 'Blood! Blood! Jay Gould's Blood!' He turned pale, and telegraphed any sum desired to the Democrats. Cleveland was elected. - However, individual Americans are delightful: but whether from lack of courage or from decentralisation, they do not form a society of frank people, and all in turn complain that they would be universally cut if they ever spoke their minds. I think this is largely due to the absence of a capital. A similar cause I think accounts for the religiosity and timidity of their Universities. Professor Ely was dismissed from the Johns Hopkins for being a Xtian Socialist! There are possibilities tho': everybody is far more anxious to be educated than in England, the level of intelligence is high, and thoughtful people admit - though only within the last few years, I am told, apparently since Bryce that their form of government is not perfect. I think you will have, as we have, a very good time here. We probably sail December 30th, and strongly urge you to arrive before then. We shall be in New York, and want very much to see you, as also to introduce you to several nice people who will be there. If you have not yet written about the date of your arrival, please write soon. - This College is a fine place, immeasurably superior to Girton and Newnham; the Professor of Pol. Econ. oddly enough is a Socialist and a Free Silver man and has carried all his class with him tho' many of them are rich New Yorkers. Those I have met are intelligent and generous in their views of social questions.
Yours Bertrand Russell
Maurice Sheldon Amos (afterwards Sir) was my only link between Cambridge and Friday's Hill. His father, who died in the 8os, was a theoretical lawyer of some eminence, and was the principal author of the Egyptian Constitution imposed by the English after their occupation of Egypt in 1881. His mother, as a widow, was devoted to Good Works, especially Purity. She was popularly supposed to have said: 'Since my dear husband's death I have devoted my life to prostitution.' It was also said that her husband, though a very hairy man, became as bald as an egg within six weeks of his marriage: but I cannot vouch for these stories. Mrs Amos, through her work, became a friend of Mrs Pearsall Smith. Accordingly Logan, when visiting me at Cambridge, took me to call on Maurice, then a freshman just beginning the study of moral science. He was an attractive youth, tall, enthusiastic, and awkward. He used to say: 'The world is an odd place: whenever I move about in it I bump into something'
He became a barrister and went to Egypt, where his father was remembered. There he prospered, and after being a Judge for a long time retired, and stood for Cambridge as a Liberal. He was the only man I ever knew who read mathematics for pleasure, as other people read detective stories.
He had a sister named Bonté, with whom Alys and I were equally friends. Bonté suffered greatly from her mother's fanatical religiosity. She became a doctor, but a few weeks before her final examintion her mother developed the habit of waking her up in the night to pray for her, so we had to send her money to enable her to live away from home. Alys and I took her with us to America in 1896.
Bonté also went to Egypt, where she was at one time quarantine medical officer at Suez, whose duty (inter alia) it was to catch rats on ships declared by their captains to be free from such animals. She finally married an army officer who was at the head of the police force of Egypt. He had endured shipwrecks and mutinies and all kinds of 'hair-breadth 'scapes', but when I remarked to him, 'You seem to have had a very adventurous life', he replied, 'Oh no, of course I never missed my morning tea'.
Both brother and sister refused to continue to know me when I ceased to be respectable, but the brother relented in the end. The sister remained adamant.
c/o Miss Frigell Cairo November 6th, 1893
My dear Bertie
It is a great pleasure to hear from you and to be reminded that the right sort of people exist. Do you know that Brunyate has come out here to a law berth of £1200 a year? He is amiable, but a savage. He thinks apparently that no subject but mathematics can be of any difficulty to a really great mind. He sneered at Political Economy, in the person of Sanger, at Metaphysics in the person of McT. - and I fear did not spare yourself, telling me that Forsythe did not believe in your theories. I questioned Forsythe's competence; he said that F. was capable of judging any logical proposition. So I could only say that it took six months or a year to state any metaphysical proposition to a person who knew nothing about it. The beast seems to think that Trinity has fallen into the hands of mugs who give fellowships to political economists and metaphysicians for corrupt motives. However one ought to remember that some are predestined to damnation, and that instead of worrying oneself to set them right, one had better spend one's time lauding the G.A. for his inscrutable decrees, especially in the matter of one's own election. Sometimes I confess I have qualms that I also am a reprobate. What for instance Moore means by saying that the world consists of concepts alone, I do not know.
I should much like to discuss my own and your affairs with you. It seems to me that I at any rate fall further away as time goes on from the state of having definite and respectable ambitions. The worst of all is to feel flamboyant - as one does occasionally - and to see no opening for drilling - or even for being tried on.
I shall not really know what to think of this place till you and Alys and Bonté come and report on it to me from a dispassionate point of view. Meanwhile I think I am learning various useful things. I am only occupied at the Ministry in the mornings; and I have just arranged to spend my afternoons in the office of the leading lawyer here, a Belgian, where I think I shall pick up a lot. Meanwhile it is night, getting fairly cool, cheerful, and I have about enough to live on and come home in the summer. I also have plenty to do.
The plan of your book sounds splendid. Perhaps I shall be able to understand it when it comes out, but probably not. I think it possible that I may take up my mathematics again out here because - I wish I had said this to that b.f. Brunyate, there is no doubt that Mathematics is a less strain on the attention than any other branch of knowledge: you are borne up and carried along by the notation as by the Gulf Stream. On the other hand it is shiftless work, getting up a subject without any definite aim.
I am glad to hear that you are Jingo. But I think it is a good thing that we should win diplomatically, if possible, without a war - although the old Adam wants the latter.
This we now seem to have done, in the most triumphant manner. The Fashoda incident gives us a new position in Egypt; we now have it by right of Conquest, having offered fight to the French, which they have refused.
I very much wish I was doing anything of the same kind of work as you, so as to be able to write to you about it. I wonder if there is such a thing as mental paralysis, or if one is bound to emerge after all.
Your affectionate friend M. S. Amos
Cairo May 5, 1899
Dear Bertie
I have just got leave for three months and a half from the 9th of June. I shall be home about the 10th, and I am looking forward very much to seeing you and Alys. I shall unfortunately have to go to Paris during July for an examination, but I think I shall have long enough in England altogether to bore my friends. I hope you will give me a fair chance of doing so to you.
I was much struck by your lyrical letter about Moore. I have made it the text of more than one disquisition for the benefit of Frenchmen and other Barbarians, on the real state of spirits in England. I explain that our colonial and commercial activity is a mere pale reflection of the intense blaze of quintessential flame that consumes literary and philosophical circles. In fact that the true character of the present time in England is that of a Great Age, in which, under a perfect political system, administered by a liberal, respected and unenvied aristocracy teeming millions of a prosperous working class vie with the cultured and affluent orders of the middle rank in Imperial enthusiasm, loyalty to the Throne, and respect for learning - the same generous and stimulating atmosphere which has lent new life to trade, has had an even more stupendous and unprecedented effect on the intellectual life of the nation: this is especially seen in the Great Universities, which are not only, as heretofore, the nurseries of proconsuls of statesmen and of a territorial gentry of unrivalled liberality and elegance, but have within the last generation equalled and far surpassed all other seats of learning in Europe and America as centres of pure and abstract scientific inquiry. You should see the Frenchmen squirm. They can stand Spithead Reviews: they can just bear Fashoda, because they doubt where it is. But when it comes to new systems of Platonic philosophy, they tear their hair.
This is inexcusable frivolity. But it will be very nice to see you and Alys again and talk about all sorts of matters in all sorts of moods. Have you read Les Déracinés of Barrés?
Yours affectionately M. Sheldon Amos