Chapter 6
In July 1900, there was an International Congress of Philosophy la Paris in connection with the Exhibition of that year. Whitehead and I decided to go to this Congress, and I accepted an invitation to read a paper at it. Our arrival in Paris was signalised by a somewhat ferocious encounter with the eminent mathematician Borel. Carey Thomas had asked Alys to bring from England twelve empty trunks which she had left behind. Borel had asked the Whiteheads to bring his niece, who had a teaching post in England. There was a great crowd at the Gare du Nord, and we had only one luggage ticket for the whole party. Borel's niece's luggage turned up at once, our luggage turned up fairly soon, but of Carey's empty trunks only eleven appeared. While we were waiting for the twelfth, Borel lost patience, snatched the luggage ticket out of my hands, and went off with his niece and her one valise, leaving us unable to claim either Carey's trunks or our personal baggage. Whitehead and I seized the pieces one at a time, and used them as battering-rams to penetrate through the ring of officials. So surprised were they that the manoeuvre was successful.
The Congress was a turning point in my intellectual life, because I there met Peano. I already knew him by name and had seen some of his work, but had not taken the trouble to master his notation. In discussions at the Congress I observed that he was always more precise than anyone else, and that he invariably got the better of any argument upon which he embarked. As the days went by, I decided that this must be owing to his mathematical logic. I therefore got him to give me all his works, and as soon as the Congress was over I retired to Fernhurst to study quietly every word written by him and his disciples. It became clear to me that his notation afforded an instrument of logical analysis such as I had been seeking for years, and that by studying him I was acquiring a new and powerful technique for the work that I had long wanted to do. By the end of August I had become completely familiar with all the work of his school. I spent September in extending his methods to the logic of relations. It seems to me in retrospect that, through that month, every day was warm and sunny. The Whiteheads stayed with us at Fernhurst, and I explained my new ideas to him. Every evening the discussion ended with some difficulty, and every morning I found that the difficulty of the previous evening had solved itself while I slept. The time was one of intellectual intoxication. My sensations resembled those one has after climbing a mountain in a mist, when, on reaching the summit, the mist suddenly clears, and the country becomes visible for forty miles in every direction. For years I had been endeavouring to analyse the fundamental notions of mathematics, such as order and cardinal numbers. Suddenly, in the space of a few weeks, I discovered what appeared to be definitive answers to the problems which had baffled me for years. And in the course of discovering these answers, I was introducing a new mathematical technique, by which regions formerly abandoned to the vaguenesses of philosophers were conquered for the precision of exact formulae. Intellectually, the month of September 1900 was the highest point of my life. I went about saying to myself that now at last I had done something worth doing, and I had the feeling that I must be careful not to be run over in the street before I had written it down. I sent a paper to Peano for his journal, embodying my new ideas. With the beginning of October I sat down to write The Principles of Mathematics, at which I had already made a number of unsuccessful attempts. Parts III, IV, V, and VI of the book as published were written that autumn. I wrote also Parts I, II, and VII at that time, but had to rewrite them later, so that the book was not finished in its final form until May 1902. Every day throughout October, November and December, I wrote my ten pages, and finished the MS on the last day of the century, in time to write a boastful letter to Helen Thomas about the 200,000 words that I had just completed.
Oddly enough, the end of the century marked the end of this sense of triumph, and from that moment onwards I began to be assailed simultaneously by intellectual and emotional problems which plunged me into the darkest despair that I have ever known.
During the Lent Term of 1901, we joined with the Whiteheads in taking Professor Maitland's house in Downing College. Professor Maitland had had to go to Madeira for his health. His housekeeper informed us that he had 'dried hisself up eating dry toast', but I imagine this was not the medical diagnosis. Mrs Whitehead was at this time becoming more and more of an invalid, and used to have intense pain owing to heart trouble. Whitehead and Alys and I were all filled with anxiety about her. He was not only deeply devoted to her but also very dependent upon her, and it seemed doubtful whether he would ever achieve any more good work if she were to die. One day, Gilbert Murray came to Newnham to read part of his translation of The Hippolytus, then unpublished. Alys and I went to hear him, and I was profoundly stirred by the beauty of the poetry.1 When we came home, we found Mrs Whitehead undergoing an unusually severe bout of pain. She seemed cut off from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense of the solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me. Ever since my marriage, my emotional life had been calm and superficial. I had forgotten all the deeper issues, and had been content with flippant cleverness. Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that. The Whitehead's youngest boy, aged three, was in the room. I had previously taken no notice of him, nor he of me. He had to be prevented from troubling his mother in the middle of her paroxysms of pain. I took his hand and led him away. He came willingly, and felt at home with me. From that day to his death in the War in 1918, we were close friends.
1 See letter to Gilbert Murray and his reply, p. 159. Also the subsequent letters relating to the Bacchae.
At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person. For a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me. I felt that I knew the inmost thoughts of everybody that I met in the street, and though this was, no doubt, a delusion, I did in actual fact find myself in far closer touch than previously with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances. Having been an Imperialist, I became during those five minutes a pro-Boer and a Pacifist. Having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty, with an intense interest in children, and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable. A strange excitement possessed me, containing intense pain but also some element of triumph through the fact that I could dominate pain, and make it, as I thought, a gateway to wisdom. The mystic insight which I then imagined myself to possess has largely faded, and the habit of analysis has reasserted itself. But something of what I thought I saw in that moment has remained always with me, causing my attitude during the first war, my interest in children, my indifference to minor misfortunes, and a certain emotional tone in all my human relations.
At the end of the Lent Term, Alys and I went back to Fernhurst, where I set to work to write out the logical deduction of mathematics which afterwards became Principia Mathematica. I thought the work was nearly finished, but in the month of May I had an intellectual set-back almost as severe as the emotional set-back which I had had in February. Cantor had a proof that there is no greatest number, and it seemed to me that the number of all the things in the world ought to be the greatest possible. Accordingly, I examined his proof with some minuteness, and endeavoured to apply it to the class of all the things there are. This led me to consider those classes which are not members of themselves, and to ask whether the class of such classes is or is not a member of itself. I found that either answer implies its contradictory. At first I supposed that I should be able to overcome the contradiction quite easily, and that probably there was some trivial error in the reasoning. Gradually, however, it became clear that this was not the case. Burali-Forti had already discovered a similar contradiction, and it turned out on logical analysis that there was an affinity with the ancient Greek contradiction about Epimenides the Cretan, who said that all Cretans are liars. A contradiction essentially similar to that of Epimenides can be created by giving a person a piece of paper on which is written: 'The statement on the other side of this paper is false.' The person turns the paper over, and finds on the other side: 'The statement on the other side of this paper is true.' It seemed unworthy of a grown man to spend his time on such trivialities, but what was I to do? There was something wrong, since such contradictions were unavoidable on ordinary premisses. Trivial or not, the matter was a challenge. Throughout the latter half of 1901 I supposed the solution would be easy, but by the end of that time I had concluded that it was a big job. I therefore decided to finish The Principles of Mathematics, leaving the solution in abeyance. In the autumn Alys and I went back to Cambridge, as I had been invited to give two terms' lectures on mathematical logic. These lectures contained the outline of Principia Mathematica, but without any method of dealing with the contradictions.
About the time that these lectures finished, when we were living with the Whiteheads at the Mill House in Grantchester, a more serious blow fell than those that had preceded it. I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realised that I no longer loved Alys. I had had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening. The problem presented by this discovery was very grave. We had lived ever since our marriage in the closest possible intimacy. We always shared a bed, and neither of us ever had a separate dressing-room. We talked over together everything that ever happened to either of us. She was five years older than I was, and I had been accustomed to regarding her as far more practical and far more full of worldly wisdom than myself, so that in many matters of daily life I left the initiative to her. I knew that she was still devoted to me. I had no wish to be unkind, but I believed in those days (what experience has taught me to think possibly open to doubt) that in intimate relations one should speak the truth. I did not see in any case how I could for any length of time successfully pretend to love her when I did not. I had no longer any instinctive impulse towards sex relations with her, and this alone would have been an insuperable barrier to concealment of my feelings. At this crisis my father's priggery came out in me, and I began to justify myself with moral criticisms of Alys. I did not at once tell her that I no longer loved her, but of course she perceived that something was amiss. She retired to a rest-cure for some months, and when she emerged from it I told her that I no longer wished to share a room, and in the end I confessed that my love was dead. I justified this attitude to her, as well as to myself, by criticisms of her character.
Although my self-righteousness at that time seems to me in retrospect repulsive, there were substantial grounds for my criticisms. She tried to be more impeccably virtuous than is possible to human beings, and was thus led into insincerity. Like her brother Logan, she was malicious, and liked to make people think ill of each other, but she was not aware of this, and was instinctively subtle in her methods. She would praise people in such a way as to cause others to admire her generosity, and think worse of the people praised than if she had criticised them. Often malice made her untruthful. She told Mrs Whitehead that I couldn't bear children, and that the Whitehead children must be kept out of my way as much as possible. At the same time she told me that Mrs Whitehead was a bad mother because she saw so little of her children. During my bicycle ride a host of such things occurred to me, and I became aware that she was not the saint I had always supposed her to be. But in the revulsion I went too far, and forgot the great virtues that she did in fact possess.
My change of feeling towards Alys was partly the result of perceiving, though in a milder form, traits in her which I disliked in her mother and brother. Alys had an unbounded admiration of her mother, whom she regarded as both a saint and a sage. This was a fairly common view; it was held, for example, by William James. I, on the contrary, came gradually to think her one of the wickedest people I had ever known. Her treatment of her husband, whom she despised, was humiliating in the highest degree. She never spoke to him or of him except in a tone that made her contempt obvious. It cannot be denied that he was a silly old man, but he did not deserve what she gave him, and no one capable of mercy could have given it. He had a mistress, and fondly supposed that his wife did not know of her. He used to tear up this woman's letters and throw the pieces into the waste-paper basket. His wife would fit the bits together, and read out the letters to Alys and Logan amid fits of laughter. When the old man died, she sold his false teeth and refused to carry out his death-bed request to give a present of £5 to the gardener. (The rest of us made up the sum without any contribution from her.) This was the only time that Logan felt critical of her: he was in tears because of her hardheartedness. But he soon reverted to his usual reverential attitude. In a letter written when he was 3½ months old, she writes:
Logan and I had our first regular battle today, and he came off conqueror, though I don't think he knew it. I whipped him until he was actually black and blue, and until I really could not whip him any more, and he never gave up one single inch. However, I hope it was a lesson to him.1'
1 A Religious Rebel, by Logan Pearsall Smith, p. 8.
It was. She never had to whip him black and blue again. She taught her family that men are brutes and fools, but women are saints and hate sex. So Logan, as might have been expected, became homosexual. She carried feminism to such lengths that she found it hard to keep her respect for the Deity, since He was male. In passing a public house she would remark: 'Thy housekeeping, O Lord.' If the Creator had been female, there would have been no such thing as alcohol.
I found Alys's support of her mother difficult to bear, Once, when Friday's Hill was to be let, the prospective tenants wrote to inquire whether the drains had been passed by a sanitary inspector. She explained to us all at the tea-table that they had not, but she was going to say that they had. I protested, but both Logan and Alys said 'hush' as if I had been a naughty child who had interrupted Teacher. Sometimes I tried to discuss her mother with Alys, but this proved impossible. In the end, some of my horror of the old lady spread to all who admired her, not excluding Alys.
The most unhappy moments of my life were spent at Grantchester. My bedroom looked out upon the mill, and the noise of the millstream mingled inextricably with my despair. I lay awake through long nights, hearing first the nightingale, and then the chorus of birds at dawn, looking out upon sunrise and trying to find consolation in external beauty. I suffered in a very intense form the loneliness which I had perceived a year before to be the essential lot of man. I walked alone in the fields about Grantchester, feeling dimly that the whitening willows in the wind had some message from a land of peace. I read religious books such, as Taylor's Holy Dying, in the hope that there might be something independent of dogma in the comfort which their authors derived from their beliefs. I tried to take refuge in pure contemplation; I began to write The Free Man's Worship. The construction of prose rhythms was the only thing in which I found any real consolation.
Throughout the whole time of the writing of Principia Mathematica my relations with the Whiteheads were difficult and complex. Whitehead appeared to the world calm, reasonable, and judicious, but when one came to know him well one discovered that this was only a facade. Like many people possessed of great self-control, he suffered from impulses which were scarcely sane. Before he met Mrs Whitehead he had made up his mind to join the Catholic Church, and was only turned aside at the last minute by falling in love with her. He was obsessed by fear of lack of money, and he did not meet this fear in a reasonable way, but by spending recklessly in the hope of persuading himself that he could afford to do so. He used to frighten Mrs Whitehead and her servants by mutterings in which he addressed injurious objurgations to himself. At times he would be completely silent for some days, saying nothing whatever to anybody in the house. Mrs Whitehead was in perpetual fear that he would go mad. I think, in retrospect, that she exaggerated the danger, for she tended to be melodramatic in her outlook. But the danger was certainly real, even if not as great as she believed. She spoke of him to me with the utmost frankness, and I found myself in an alliance with her to keep him sane. Whatever happened his work never flagged, but one felt that he was exerting more self-control than a human being could be expected to stand and that at any moment a break-down was possible. Mrs Whitehead was always discovering that he had run up large bills with Cambridge tradesmen, and she did not dare to tell him that there was no money to pay them for fear of driving him over the edge. I used to supply the wherewithal surreptitiously. It was hateful to deceive Whitehead, who would have found the humiliation unbearable if he had known of it. But there was his family to be supported and Principia Mathematica to be written, and there seemed no other way by which these objects could be achieved. I contributed all that I could realise in the way of capital, and even that partly by borrowing. I hope the end justified the means. Until 1952 I never mentioned this to anyone.
Meanwhile Alys was more unhappy than I was, and her unhappiness was a great part of the cause of my own. We had in the past spent a great deal of time with her family, but I told her I could no longer endure her mother, and that we must therefore leave Fernhurst. We spent the summer near Broadway in Worcestershire. Pain made me sentimental, and I used to construct phrases such as 'Our hearts build precious shrines for the ashes of dead hopes'. I even descended to reading Maeterlinck. Before this time, at Grantchester, at the very height and crisis of misery, I finished The Principles of Mathematics. The day on which I finished the manuscript was May 23rd. At Broadway I devoted myself to the mathematical elaboration which was to become Principia Mathematics. By this time I had secured Whitehead's co-operation in this task, but the unreal, insincere, and sentimental frame of mind into which I had allowed myself to fall affected even my mathematical work. I remember sending Whitehead a draft of the beginning, and his reply: 'Everything, even the object of the book, has been sacrificed to making proofs look short and neat.' This defect in my work was due to a moral defect in my state of mind.
When the autumn came we took a house for six months in Cheyne Walk, and life began to become more bearable. We saw a great many people, many of them amusing or agreeable, and we both gradually began to live a more external life, but this was always breaking down. So long as I lived in the same house with Alys she would every now and then come down to me in her dressing-gown after she had gone to bed, and beseech me to spend the night with her. Sometimes I did so, but the result was utterly unsatisfactory. For nine years this state of affairs continued. During all this time she hoped to win me back, and never became interested in any other man. During all this time I tad no other sex relations. About twice a year I would attempt sex relations with her, in the hope of alleviating her misery, but she no longer attracted me, and the attempt was futile. Looking back over this stretch of years, I feel that I ought to have ceased much sooner to live in the same house with her, but she wished me to stay, and even threatened suicide if I left her. There was no other woman to whom I wished to go, and there seemed therefore no good reason for not doing as she wished.
The summers of 1903 and 1904 we spent at Churt and Tilford. I made a practice of wandering about the common every night from eleven till one, by which means I came to know the three different noises made by night-jars. (Most people only know one.) I was trying hard to solve the contradictions mentioned above. Every morning I would sit down before a blank sheet of paper. Throughout the day, with a brief interval for lunch, I would stare at the blank sheet. Often when evening came it was still empty. We spent our winters in London, and during the winters I did not attempt to work, but the two summers of 1903 and 1904 remain in my mind as a period of complete intellectual deadlock. It was clear to me that I could not get on without solving the contradictions, and I was determined that no difficulty should turn me aside from the completion of Principia Mathematical but it seemed quite likely that the whole of the rest of my life might be consumed in looking at that blank sheet of paper. What made it the more annoying was that the contradictions were trivial, and that my time was spent in considering matters that seemed unworthy of serious attention.
It must not be supposed that all my time was consumed in despair and intellectual effort. I remember, for instance, the occasion mentioned earlier when Maynard Keynes came to spend Saturday to Monday with us at Tilford.
In 1905 things began to improve. Alys and I decided to live near Oxford, and built ourselves a house in Bagley Wood. (At that time there was no other house there.) We went to live there in the spring of 1905, and very shortly after we had moved in I discovered my Theory of Descriptions, which was the first step towards overcoming the difficulties which had baffled me for so long. Immediately after this came the death of Theodore Davies, of which I have spoken in an earlier chapter. In 1906 I discovered the Theory of Types. After this it only remained to write the book out. Whitehead's teaching work left him not enough leisure for this mechanical job. I worked at it from ten to twelve hours a day for about eight months in the year, from 1907 to 1910. The manuscript became more and more vast, and every time that I went out for a walk I used to be afraid that the house would catch fire and the manuscript get burnt up. It was not, of course, the sort of manuscript that could be typed, or even copied. When we finally took it to the University Press, it was so large that we had to hire an old four-wheeler for the purpose. Even then our difficulties were not at an end. The University Press estimated that there would be a loss of £600 on the book, and while the syndics were willing to bear a loss of £300, they did not feel that they could go above this figure. The Royal Society very generously contributed £200, and the remaining £100 we had to find ourselves. We thus earned minus £50 each by ten years' work. This beats the record of Paradise Lost.
The strain of unhappiness combined with very severe intellectual work, in the years from 1902 till 1910, was very great.1 At the time I often wondered whether I should ever come out at the other end of the tunnel in which I seemed to be. I used to stand on the footbridge at Kennington, near Oxford, watching the trains go by, and determining that tomorrow I would place myself under one of them. But when the morrow came I always found myself hoping that perhaps Principia Mathematica would be finished some day. Moreover the difficulties appeared to me in the nature of a challenge, which it would be pusillanimous not to meet and overcome. So I persisted, and in the end the work was finished, but my intellect never quite recovered from the strain. I have been ever since definitely less capable of dealing with difficult abstractions than I was before. This is part, though by no means the whole, of the reason for the change in the nature of my work.
1 See my letters to Lucy on pp. 167 ff.
Throughout this period my winters were largely occupied with political questions. When Joseph Chamberlain began to advocate Protection, I found myself to be a passionate Free Trader. The influence which Hewing had exerted upon me in the direction of Imperialism and Imperialistic Zollverein had evaporated during the moments of crisis in 1901 which turned me into a Pacifist. Nevertheless in 1902 I became a member of a small dining club called The Coefficients', got up by Sidney Webb for the purpose of considering political questions from a more or less Imperialist point of view. It was in this club that I first became acquainted with H. G. Wells, of whom I had never heard until then. His point of view was more sympathetic to me than that of any other member. Most of the members, in fact, shocked me profoundly. I remember Amery's eyes gleaming with blood-lust at the thought of a war with America, in which, as he said with exultation, we should have to arm the whole adult male population. One evening Sir Edward Grey (not then in office) made a speech advocating the policy of the Entente, which had not yet been adopted by the Government. I stated my objections to the policy very forcibly, and pointed out the likelihood of its leading to war, but no one agreed with me, so I resigned from the club. It will be seen that I began my opposition to the first war at the earliest possible moment. After this I took to speaking in defence of Free Trade on behalf of the Free Trade Union. I had never before attempted public speaking, and was shy and nervous to such a degree as to make me at first wholly ineffective. Gradually, however, my nervousness got less. After the Election of 1906, when Protection ceased for the moment to be a burning question, I took to working for women's suffrage. On pacifist grounds I disliked the Militants, and worked always with the Constitutional party. In 1907 I even stood for Parliament at a by-election, on behalf of votes for women. The Wimbledon Campaign was short and arduous. It must be quite impossible for younger people to imagine the bitterness of the opposition to women's equality. When, in later years, I campaigned against the first world war, the popular opposition that I encountered was not comparable to that which the suffragists met in 1907. The whole subject was treated, by a great majority of the population, as one for mere hilarity. The crowd would shout derisive remarks: to women, 'Go home and mind the baby'; to men, 'Does your mother know you're out?' no matter what the man's age. Rotten eggs were aimed at me and hit my wife. At my first meeting rats were let loose to frighten the ladies, and ladies who were in the plot screamed in pretended terror with a view to disgracing their sex. An account of this is given in the following newspaper report:
Election Uproar
Rats let loose to scare women suffragists
Wimbledon fight
The Hon. Bertrand Russell, the suffragist candidate for the Wimbledon division, opened his campaign on Saturday night, when he addressed a crowded and rather noisy meeting in Worple Hall. A mixed reception was given to the chairman, Mr O. H. Beatty, a member of the local Liberal Association executive council, and the platform party, which included the candidate, Mrs Russell, Mr St George Lane Fox-Pitt, the unsuccessful Liberal candidate at the General Election, Mrs Philip Snowden, Miss Alison Garland, and many others connected with the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.
From, the outset it was apparent that a section of the audience about 2,000 - was hostile to the promoters. The chairman often appealed in vain for silence. Within ten minutes of the start a free fight took place in one corner of the hall, and five minutes elapsed before peace was restored. People jumped on to the forms and chairs and encouraged the squabblers.
At another stage two large rats were let loose from a bag, and ran about the floor of the hall among a number of ladies sitting in the front seats. For a moment there was great commotion, the ladies jumping on the chairs, whilst a number of men hunted the rats about the seats, and at last managed to kill them. After the meeting one of the dead rats was taken to Victoria Crescent and flung into the candidate's committee room.
The rowdyism of the meeting, however, was confined to a large crowd of irresponsible young men and youths, who ought never to have been admitted, and it would therefore be unfair to blame the general body of Wimbledon electors for the blackguardly conduct of the political rabble.
Mr Russell was greeted with loud applause and general interruptions, and, the latter being persisted in, the chairman remarked: 'Surely this is not the way that Wimbledon men and women greet a stranger.' (A Voice: 'Are we down-hearted?' and cries of 'No'.) A minute or so later the chairman again made an appeal to the rowdy section, and by asking them not to disgrace the name of Wimbledon he secured quietness for a time.
Air Russell declared that he stood first and foremost for the suffrage for women on the same terms as men, and on the terms on which hereafter it might be granted to men. (A Voice: 'Do we want petticoats?' and cries of 'No'.)
Proceeding, the candidate said he supported the present Government. (Cheers and uproar.) The most important of all the questions that divided the Liberal and Conservative parties was Free Trade, and a question closely associated with Free Trade was taxation of land values.
Mr Fox-Pitt rose, with a broad smile on his face. He wanted to tell them something about Mr Chaplin's history, but the meeting would have none of it, and he too gave up the task as hopeless.
Mrs Philip Snowden showed greater determination, and although at the start she was howled and jeered at, she was given a fairly good hearing. Mrs Arthur Webb, Miss Alison Garland, and Mr Walter MacLaren also spoke, and a resolution in support of Mr Russell was carried by an overwhelming majority.
The savagery of the males who were threatened with loss of supremacy was intelligible. But the determination of large numbers of women to prolong the contempt of the female sex was odd. I cannot recall any violent agitation of Negroes or Russian serfs against emancipation. The most prominent opponent of political rights for women was Queen Victoria.
I had been a passionate advocate of equality for women ever since in adolescence I read Mill on the subject. This was some years before I became aware of the fact that my mother used to campaign in favour of women's suffrage in the 'sixties. Few things are more surprising than the rapid and complete victory of this cause throughout the civilised world. I am glad to have had a part in anything so successful.
Gradually, however, I became convinced that the limited enfranchisement of women which was being demanded would be more difficult to obtain than a wider measure, since the latter would be more advantageous to the Liberals, who were in power. The professional suffragists objected to the wider measure, because, although it would enfranchise more women, it would not enfranchise them on exactly the same terms as men, and would therefore not, in their opinion, concede the principle of women's equality with men. On this point I finally left the orthodox suffragists, and joined a body which advocated adult suffrage. This body was got up by Margaret Davies (the sister of Crompton and Theodore), and had Arthur Henderson as its chairman. In those days I was still a Liberal, and tried to suppose that Arthur Henderson was somewhat of a fire-brand. In this effort, however, I was not very successful.
In spite of amusing and pleasant interludes, the years from 1902 to 1910 were very painful to me. They were, it is true, extremely fruitful in the way of work, but the pleasure to be derived from the writing of Principia Mathematica was all crammed into the latter months of 1900. After that time the difficulty and the labour were too great for any pleasure to be possible. The last years were better than the earlier ones because they were more fruitful, but the only really vivid delight connected with the whole matter was that which I felt in handing over the manuscript to the Cambridge University Press.
Letters
To and from Gilbert Murray:
Downing College Cambridge February 26, 1901
Dear Gilbert
I have now read the Hippolytus, and feel impelled to tell you how much it has affected me. Those of us who love poetry read the great masterpieces of modern literature before we have any experience of the passions they deal with. To come across a new masterpiece with a more mature mind is a wonderful experience, and one which I have found almost overwhelming.
It had not happened to me before, and I could not have believed how much it would affect me. Your tragedy fulfils perfectly - so it seems to me - the purpose of bringing out whatever is noble and beautiful in sorrow; and to those of us who are without a religion, this is the only consolation of which the spectacle of the world cannot deprive us.
The play itself was entirely new to me, and I have felt its power most keenly. But I feel that your poetry is completely worthy of its theme, and is to be placed in lie very small list of truly great English poems. I like best of all the lyric with which you ended your reading at Newnham. I learnt it by heart immediately, and it has been in my head ever since. There is only one word in it which I do not wholly like, and that is the word bird-droves. Metrically it is excellent, but a drove seems to me to be something driven, which spoils the peacefulness of the idea to my mind.
Yours ever Bertrand Russell
Barford, Churt, Farnham, Surrey March 2, 1901
My dear Bertie
I will not say that I feel pleased or delighted by your great enjoyment of my Hippolytus, because my feelings are quite different from that. It is rather that your strong praise makes a sort of epoch in my life and in my way of regarding my work. Of course I have felt great emotion in working at the Hippolytus; I have been entranced by it. And then the thought has always come to me, that there were dozens of translations of the Greek Tragedians in all the second-hand shops; and that I could not read any of them with the least interest; and that probably the authors of nearly all of them had felt exactly as I was feeling about the extraordinary beauty and power of the matter they were writing down. A translator, if he takes pains, naturally gets nearer to understanding his author than an ordinary reader does; and every now and again the poem means to him. something approaching that which it meant to the poet.
Of course all authors - in different degrees, but all enormously - fail to convey their meaning. And translators, being less good writers and having a harder task, fail even more deplorably. That is the normal state of the case. But what seems to have happened in our case is that you have somehow or other understood and felt the whole of what I meant to convey.
n do not mean that I had anything mysterious or extraordinary to say; but merely that, even in the case of a bad poet or the Man-in-the-Street when in certain moods, if you could really understand what was in his mind it would be something astonishingly beautiful compared with what one ordinarily gets from reading a very good poem. When I am bored with poetry, I constantly have die feeling that I am simply not understanding the man or he is not expressing himself, and that probably something very fine indeed is going on inside him. And in some moment of special insight one might see inside him and get the fine thing.
I see what you mean about 'Bird-droves'. I will try to change it, but I cannot think of anything better so far. The MS arrived all right.
Yours ever Gilbert Murray
Friday's Hill April 3, 1902
Dear Gilbert
In all our discussions on ethical subjects, I observe a difference as to premisses, a real divergence as to moral axioms. As I am very anxious to be clear on the subject of immediate moral intuitions (upon which, as is evident, all morality must be based), and as a divergence upon fundamentals raises doubts, I should like to make an attempt to discover precisely what our differences are, and whether either of us holds at the same time mutually incompatible axioms.
Our differences seem to spring from the fact that you are a utilitarian, whereas I judge pleasure and pain to be of small importance compared to knowledge, the appreciation and contemplation of beauty, and a certain intrinsic excellence of mind which, apart from its practical effects, appears to me to deserve the name of virtue. What I want to discover is, whether you too do not hold moral principles not deducible from utilitarianism, and therefore inconsistent with it. (It is important to observe that the method of Sidgwiek's Ethics, in which a number of commonly received moral axioms are shown to be roughly such as Utilitarianism would deduce as 'middle axioms', is fallacious if, with Sidgwick, we accept the general basis of Intuitionism - i.e. the doctrine that immediate intuitions are the only source (for us) of moral premisses. For, if such axioms are immediate deliverances of moral consciousness, they are to be accepted even in those exceptional cases in which they are inconsistent with Utilitarianism; and thus any axiom not rigidly deducible from Utilitarianism is inconsistent with it.)
I may as well begin by confessing that for many years it seemed to me perfectly self-evident that pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil. Now, however, the opposite seems to me self-evident. This change has been brought about by what I may call moral experience. The ordinary a priori philosopher will tell you that experience has nothing to do with morals, since it tells us only what is, not what ought to be. This view seems to me philosophically and practically erroneous; it depends upon the sensational theory of knowledge, which, alas, is held in some form by many would be a priori philosophers. Having recognised that, in perception, our knowledge is not caused by the object perceived, it is plain that, if perception is experience, so is any other genesis in time, due to whatever cause, of knowledge not obtained by inference from other knowledge. Now circumstances are apt to generate perfectly concrete moral convictions: this or that, now present to me, is good or bad; and from a defect of imagination, it is often impossible to judge beforehand what our moral opinion of a feet will be. It seems to me that the genuine moral intuitions are of this very concrete kind; in fact that we see goodness or badness in things as we see their colours and shapes. The notion that general maxims are to be found in conscience seems to me to be a mistake fostered by the Decalogue. I should rather regard the true method of Ethics as inference from empirically ascertained facts, to be obtained in that moral laboratory which life offers to those whose eyes are open to it. Thus the principles I should now advocate are all inferences from such immediate concrete moral experiences.
What first turned me away from utilitarianism was the persuasion that I myself ought to pursue philosophy, although I had (and have still) no doubt that by doing economics and the theory of politics I could add more to human happiness. It appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life, and that unless the contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs. But I do not believe that such contemplation on the whole tends to happiness. It gives moments of delight, but these are outweighed by years of effort and depression. Also I reflected that the value of a work of art has no relation whatever to the pleasure it gives; indeed, the more I have dwelt upon the subject, the more I have come to prize austerity rather than luxuriance. It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true. Again, in regard to actual human existence, I have found myself giving honour to those who feel its tragedy, who think truly about Death, who are oppressed by ignoble things even when they are inevitable; yet these qualities appear to me to militate against happiness, not only to the possessors, but to all whom they affect. And, generally, the best life seems to me one which thinks truly and feels greatly about human things, and which, in addition, contemplates the world of beauty and of abstract truths. This last is, perhaps, my most anti-utilitarian opinion: I hold all knowledge that is concerned with things that actually exist - all that is commonly called Science - to be of very slight value compared to the knowledge which, like philosophy and mathematics, is concerned with ideal and eternal objects, and is freed from this miserable world which God has made.
My point, in all this, is to suggest that my opinions would be shared by most moral people who are not biassed by a theory, Archimedes, I believe, was despised by contemporary geometers because he used geometry to make useful inventions. And utilitarians have been strangely anxious to prove that the life of the pig is not happier than that of the philosopher - a most dubious proposition, which, if they had considered the matter frankly, could hardly have been decided in the same way by all of them. In die matter of Art, too, I certainly have educated common sense on my side: anyone would hold it a paradox to regard Home Sweet Home as better than Bach. In this connection, too, it is necessary for the Utilitarian to hold that a beautiful object is not good per se, but only as a means; thus it becomes difficult to see why the contemplation of beauty should be specially good, since it is scarcely deniable that the same emotion which a person of taste obtains from a beautiful object may be obtained by another person from an ugly object. And a person of taste can only be defined as one who gets the emotion in question from beauty, not from ugliness. Yet all of us judge a person to be the better for the possession of taste, though only a blind theorist could maintain that taste increases happiness. Here is a hard nut for the Utilitarian!
All these arguments are at least as old as Plato; but I should like to know, when you have leisure, what answer a Utilitarian can make to them. The books contain only sophistries and lies - opinions possible, perhaps, to men who live only in the study, and have no knowledge of life whatever, but quite untenable by anyone who faces this ghastly world of ignoble degradation, in which only virtue is punished and vice lives and dies happy and respected.
Yours ever Bertrand Russell
14 Cheyne Walk Chelsea, S.W. November 27, 1902
Dear Gilbert
I have been reading the Bacchac over again, and it seems to me now a much greater play than the Hippolytus, more marvellous, indeed, than any play I have ever read, unless perhaps Hamlet and Lear. It has been growing on me gradually ever since I read it first; like all great things, it is impossible to see the whole of it, but new points perpetually strike one.
The strange mystic exaltation of the chorus is very haunting, and the way that their world of frenzy and beauty supports itself till just the end against the everyday world is extraordinarily powerful. As a whole, I confess, the play does not strike me as at all puzzling: it is surely intelligible enough how those to whom such divine intoxication comes are filled with fury against the sceptics who try to drag them back to common life. And it is a commonplace that the worship of beauty makes for anarchy. It would have been absurd to make Pentheus a sympathetic character; I suppose he represents the British Public and Middle Class Respectability, and the respectable, though they are undoubtedly morally superior to the worshippers of Bacchus, are yet obviously unlovable in the conflict which they stir up.
I think your metres, now that I have mastered them, are exceedingly fine and wonderfully suited to the emotions they are meant to express: although there is perhaps no single chorus as good as some in the Hippolytus, I think you have shown more skill than you showed there; and altogether you are very much to be congratulated. Do you not think you would do well to make more translations? The two you have done have both been to me a really great help in trying times, helping me to support faith in the world of beauty, and in the ultimate dignity of life, when I was in danger of losing it: without them I should have often found the day much harder to get through. Surely there would be many who would feel the same, and as you have the power you have also the duty, have you not? Each of us is an Atlas to the world of his own ideals, and the poet, more than anyone else, lightens the burden for weary shoulders.
I wish I knew how to reconcile the world of beauty and the world of morals: some virtues, it is true, are beautiful, but many do not seem so.
I have been reading the Republic, and I agree with Plato that tragic poets ought to make us feel virtue to be beautiful, and ought (on the whole) to avoid the praises of vice. His austerity in matters of Art pleases me, for it does not seem to be the easy condemnation that comes from the Philistine.
Yours gratefully Bertrand Russell
14 Cheyne Walk Chelsea, S.W. December 4, 1902
Dear Gilbert
I am glad my appreciation of your work is encouraging to you. Yes, an 'elegant leisure devoted to translating the classics' doesn't sound very nice as an epitaph! But one must choose more inspiring phrases to describe one's activity to oneself.
I have looked up again the chorus beginning 'O hounds raging and blind', and I still fail to find any difficulty in it. It seems very probable that the 'old bottles' is, as a matter of fact, the explanation of the savagery; but it is easy enough, if one wants such things, to find a psychological explanation. Have you never, when you were admiring the sunset, suddenly been jarred into 'Hell and Damnation, there are the so-and-so's come to call'? A country neighbour, under such circumstances, may easily be felt as a 'spy upon God's possessed'. And do you not know, when a Philistine breaks in upon a delicate imaginary world, the oscillation backwards and forwards between the exquisite mood one is loath to lose and rage against the wretch who is desecrating one's Holy of Holies? Do you know Blake's Defiled Sanctuary, beginning 'I saw a chapel all of gold', and ending 'So I turned into a sty, And laid me down among the swine'? This is from a worshipper of Bacchus who had been unable to combat his Pentheus. It was on account of the rapid alternation that I instanced Levine as a parallel. But I feel no doubt that it is the work of clarification that you have put into your translation that has made the Bacchae seem plain to me.
Yes, I know who the Storrs are and I can imagine that it is very hard for you to get away at present; it must make more of a burden on Mary when you are away. I am sorry you are sleepless and bedevilled. Sometimes sleepless nights are a time for thoughts that remain with one as a comfort through the day: I find darkness a help to isolating the essentials of things and fixing one's whole attention upon them. But I gather you do not find that compensation.
Alys is keeping well. The river shines like burnished bronze under the frosty sun, and the barges float dimly through the brightness like dream-memories of childhood.
Give my love to Mary, and write again when yon can find time. I like to hear how domestic matters go - how Rosalind is, and so on.
Yours ever Bertrand Russell
14 Cheyne Walk Chelsea, S.W. December 12, 1902
Dear Gilbert
It will suit us very well indeed to see you on Monday for luncheon and as early before it as you can manage to arrive. I shall expect you about 11-45. But it seems Miss Harrison will be gone; we have been urging her to stay, but she asserts (at present) that it is impossible. She begs you instead to go on to see her later, as soon after luncheon as you can manage, at an address which I do not know, but which she will no doubt divulge in due course. It will be perfectly delightful to see you, and I look forward to it very much; but I am sorry you will not find Miss Harrison. She has turned the tables on me by producing your poem in print; do bring me a copy on Monday. Could you not spend Monday night here? We shall be delighted to put you up, in case my Aunt Rosalind does not come to town; but we shall be dining out. London is a weary place, where it is quite impossible to think or feel anything worthy of a human being - I feel horribly lost here. Only the river and the gulls are my friends; they are not making money or acquiring power. Last night we made the acquaintance of the Mac-Cails, which we were very glad of. How beautiful she is! I had heard so much about his balance and judgment that I was surprised to find him a fanatic. But he is too democratic for me - he said his charwoman was more in contact with real things than anybody else he knew. But what can a charwoman know of the spirits of great men or the records of fallen empires or the haunting visions of art and reason? All this and much more I wished to say; but the words stuck in my throat. Let us not delude ourselves with the hope that the best is within the reach of all, or that emotion uniformed by thought can ever attain the highest level. All such optimisms seem to me dangerous to civilisation, and the outcome of a heart not yet sufficiently mortified. 'Die to Self' is an old maxim; 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' is new in this connexion, but also has an element of truth. From heaven we may return to our fellow-creatures, not try to make our heaven here among them; we ought to love our neighbour through the love of God, or else our love is too mundane. At least so it seems to me. But the coldness of my own doctrine is repellent to me; except at moments when the love of God glows brightly.
Modern life is very difficult; I wish I lived in a cloister wearing a hair shirt and sleeping on a crucifix. But now-a-days every impulse has to be kept within the bounds of black-coated Respectability, the living God.
Yours ever Bertrand Russell
I Tatti, Settignano Florence December 28th, 1902
Dear Gilbert
Our crossing and journey were uneventful and prosperous, and the beauty here is overwhelming. I do wish you had been able to come. We have had day after day of brilliant sunshine - hoar frosts in the morning, warmth that made sitting out agreeable in the day. Just behind the house is a hill-side covered with cypress and pine and little oaks that still have autumn leaves, and the air is full of deeptoned Italian bells. The house has been furnished by Berenson with exquisite taste; it has some very good pictures, and a most absorbing library. But the business of existing beautifully, except when it is hereditary, always slightly shocks my Puritan soul - thoughts of the East End, of intelligent women whose lives are sacrificed to the saving of pence, of young men driven to journalism or schoolmastering when they ought to do research, come up perpetually in my mind; but I do not justify the feeling, as someone ought to keep up the ideal of beautiful houses. But I think one makes great demands on the mental furniture where the outside is so elaborate, and one is shocked at lapses that one would otherwise tolerate. . . . I am glad you abandoned your plan of reading a mathematical book, for any book on the Calculus would have told you lies, and also my book is (I fear) not worth while for you to read, except a few bits. What general value it may have is so buried in technicalities and controversies that it really is only fit for those whose special business it is to go in for such things. The later mathematical volume, which will not be ready for two years or so, will I hope be a work of art; but that will be only for mathematicians. And this volume disgusts me on the whole. Although I denied it when Leonard Hobhouse said so, philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business. I do not know how to state the value that at moments I am inclined to give it. If only one had lived in the days of Spinoza, when systems were still possible. . . .
Yours ever Bertrand Russell
14 Cheyne Walk Chelsea, S.W. March 21st, 1903
Dear Gilbert
Your doctrine on beauty does not repel me in the least, indeed I agree with it strongly, except the slight sneer at specialists. Specialising is necessary to efficiency, which is a form, of altruism, and however narrow the specialist becomes, we ought to pardon him if he does good work. This I feel strongly, because the temptation to be interesting rather than technically effective is a dangerous one.
I shall be more glad than I can say when you come back; though I shall have nothing to give you in the conversational way. I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.
Yours ever B. Russell
To Lucy Martin Donnelly:
The Mill House Grantchester, Cambridge Telegrams, Trumpington May 23, 1902
Dear Lucy
. . . You will wonder at my writing to you: the fact is, I finished today my magnum opus on the principles of Mathematics, on which I have been engaged since 1897. This has left me with leisure and liberty to remember that there are human beings in the world, which I have been strenuously striving to forget. I wonder whether you realise the degree of self-sacrifice (and too often sacrifice of others), of sheer effort of will, of stern austerity in repressing even what is intrinsically best, that goes into writing a book of any magnitude. Year after year, I found mistakes in what I had done, and had to re-write the whole from beginning to end: for in a logical system, one mistake will usually vitiate everything. The hardest part I left to the end: last summer I undertook it gaily, hoping to finish soon, when suddenly I came upon a greater difficulty than any I had known of before. So difficult it was, that to think of it at all required an all but superhuman effort. And long ago I got sick to nausea of the whole subject, so that I longed to think of anything else under the sun; and sheer fatigue has become almost incapacitating. But now at last all is finished, and as you may imagine, I feel a new man; for I had given up hope of ever coming to an end of the labour. Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself. But the thankless muse will not share her favours - she is a jealous mistress. - Do not believe, if you wish to write, that the current doctrine of experience has any truth; there is a thousand times more experience in pain than in pleasure. Artists must have strong passions, but they deceive themselves in fancying it good to indulge their desires. The whole doctrine, too, that writing comes from technique, is quite mistaken; writing is the outlet to feelings which are all but overmastering, and are yet mastered. Two things are to be cultivated: loftiness of feeling, and control of feeling and everything else by the will. Neither of these are understood in America as in the old countries; indeed, loftiness of feeling seems to depend essentially upon a brooding consciousness of the past and its terrible power, a deep sense of the difference between the great eternal facts and die transient dross of merely personal feeling. If you tell these things to your fine-writing class, they will know less than if you hold your tongue.
Give my love to Helen. My advice to anyone who wishes to write is to know all the very best literature by heart, and ignore the rest as completely as possible.
Yours ever Bertrand Russell
N.B. - This letter is not for Carey!
Trinity College, Cambridge July 6, 1902
Dear Lucy
Many thanks for your very interesting letter, and for the excellent account of Harvard and Barrett Wendell. What a monstrous thing that a University should teach journalism! I thought that was only done at Oxford. This respect for the filthy multitude is ruining civilisation. A certain man had the impudence to maintain in my presence that every student ought to be made to expound his views to popular audiences, so I lifted up my voice and testified for a quarter of an hour, after which he treated me with the kind of respect accorded to wild beasts. - I suppose Wendell is better than his books: I was disappointed in his American literature. For, though I agree with him that America, like the Australian marsupials, is an interesting relic of a bygone age, I care little for the great truth that American writers have all been of good family, and that Harvard is vastly superior to Yale. And his failure to appreciate Walt Whitman to my mind is very damaging. He talks of Brooklyn ferry and so on, and quite forgets 'out of the cradle endlessly rocking', and 'when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed'. This seems to me to show a deplorable conventionality, both in taste generally, and in judgment of Whitman specially.
When my book was finished, I took ten days holiday. Since then I have been working as usual, except during four days that I spent with my Aunt Agatha at Pembroke Lodge, A strange, melancholy, weird time it was: we talked of merriment long since turned to sadness, of tragedies in which all the actors are gone, of sorrows which have left nothing but a fading memory. All the life of the present grew to me dreamy and unreal, while the majestic Past, weighed down by age and filled with unspeakable wisdom, rose before me and dominated my whole being. The Past is an awful God, though he gives Life almost the whole of its haunting beauty. I believe those whose childhood has been spent in America can scarcely conceive the hold which the Past has on us of the Old World: the continuity of life, the weight of tradition, the great eternal procession of youth and age and death, seem to be lost in the bustling approach of the future which dominates American life. And that is one reason why great literature is not produced by your compatriots.
At present, I am staying in College by myself: none of my friends are up, and when work is over, I have a great deal of leisure left for meditation. I have been reading Maeterlinck's works straight through: alas, I have nearly come to the end of them. Le Temple Enseveli seems to me very admirable, both as literature and as morality. I am simpleminded enough, in spite of Miss Gwinn and Mr Hodder's grave man's world (being I suppose, not a grave man) to think it unnecessary for literature to have an immoral purpose. I hate this notion of being true to life! Life, thank God, is very largely what we choose to make of it, and ideals are unreal only to those who do not wish them to be otherwise. Tell Miss Gwinn, with my compliments, that every word of St Augustine's Confessions is true to life, and that Dante's love for Beatrice is a piece of unadulterated realism. If people will not realise this, they are sure to lose out of life its finest, rarest, most precious experiences. But this is too large a theme! . . .
Yours very sincerely Bertrand Russell
Friday's Hill Haslemere September 1, 1902
Dear Lucy
Vanity in regard to letter writing is not an emotion to encourage! One's friends are sure to be glad of one's news, even if it is not told in the most gorgeous diction. But as a matter of fact I found your letter very interesting. Yes, one's people are very trying: they are a living caricature of oneself, and have the same humiliating effect that is produced by the monkeys in the Zoo: one feels that here is the unvarnished truth at last. To most people, their family is real in a higher sense than any later acquaintance, husband or wife even. You may notice that with Carlyle - his people in Annandale existed for him in a way in which his wife never existed till she was dead. People are less cased in Self as children, and those associated with childhood have a vividness that becomes impossible later - they live in one's instinctive past. This is a frequent source of trouble in marriage. - I haven't read the Elizabethans since I was an undergraduate; as I remember them, their chief merit is a very rich and splendid diction. The old drama is not a gospel to regenerate you, its world is too hopelessly unreal. Your own life, naturally, is a paper life, as you say, a life in which experience comes through books, not directly. For this disease, more books are not the remedy. Only real life is the remedy but that is hard to get. Real life means a life in some kind of intimate relation to other human beings - Hodder's life of passion has no reality at all. Or again, real life means the experience in one's own person of the emotions which make the material of religion and poetry. The road to it is the same as that recommended to the man who wanted to found a new religion: Be crucified, and rise again on the third day.
If you are prepared for both parts of this process, by all means take to real life. But in the modern world, the cross is usually self-inflicted and voluntary, and the rising again, to the hopes of new crucifixions, requires a considerable effort of will. It seems to me that your difficulty comes from the fact that there are no real people to speak of in your world. The young are never real, the unmarried very seldom. Also, if I may say so, the scale of emotion in America seems to me more frivolous, more superficial, more pusillanimous, than in Europe; there is a triviality of feeling which makes real people very rare - I find in England, that most women of 50 and upwards have gone through the experience of many years' voluntary endurance of torture, which has given a depth and a richness to their natures that your easy-going pleasure-loving women cannot imagine. On the whole, real life does not consist, as Hodder would have you believe, in intrigues with those who are already married. If one wants uncommon experiences, a little renunciation, a little performance of duty, will give one far more unusual sensations than all the fine free passion in the universe. But a life in books has great calm and peace - it is true that a terrible hunger for something less thin comes over one, but one is spared from remorse and horror and torture and the maddening poison of regret. For my part, I am constructing a mental cloister, in which my inner soul is to dwell in peace, while an outer simulacrum goes forth to meet the world. In this inner sanctuary I sit and think spectral thoughts. Yesterday, talking on the terrace, the ghosts of all former occasions there rose and walked before me in solemn procession - all dead, with their hopes and fears, their joys and sorrows, their aspirations and their golden youth - gone, gone into the great limbo of human folly. And as I talked, I felt myself and the others already faded into the Past and all seemed very small - struggles, pains, everything, mere fatuity, noise and fury signifying nothing. And so calm is achieved, and Fate's thunders become mere nursery-tales to frighten children. - Life here is always, in the summer, a strange phantasmagory: we had yesterday Grace, the Amos's, Miss Creighton, the Kinsellas, the Robinsons and J. M. Robertson, the man on whom Bradlaugh's mantle has fallen. Miss Creighton has to be rescued, because Robertson began to discuss whether God was made of green cheese or had whiskers - infinite for choice.
We have all been reading with great pleasure James on Religious Experience - everything good about the book except the conclusions. I have been re-reading the most exquisite of all bits of history, Carlyle's Diamond Necklace. He is the only author who knows the place of History among the Fine Arts.
Love to Helen.
Yours very sincerely Bertrand Russell
14 Cheyne Walk Chelsea S.W. November 25, 1902
Dear Lucy
Many thanks for your letter. I am grateful to you for writing about yourself: after all, people can tell one nothing more interesting than their own feeling towards life. It is a great comfort that you are so much better, and able to enjoy life again. All that you write about the little most people get out of experience is most true: but I was not thinking when I wrote, of 'experiences', but of the inward knowledge of emotions. This, if one is rightly constituted, requires an absolute minimum of outward circumstances as its occasion; and this it is that is required for the development of character and for certain sorts of writing. But there is no profit in feeling unless one learns to dominate it and impersonalise it. - For people like you and me, whose main business is necessarily with books, I rather think experience of life should be as far as possible vicarious. If one has instinctive sympathy, one comes to know the true history of a certain number of people and from that one can more or less create one's world. But to plunge into life oneself takes a great deal of time and energy, and is, for most people, incompatible with preserving the attitude of a spectator, One needs, as the key to interpret alien experience, a personal knowledge of great unhappiness; but that is a thing which one need hardly set forth to seek, for it comes unasked. When once one possesses this key, the strange, tragic phantasmagoria of people hoping, suffering, and then dying, begins to suffice without one's desiring to take part, except occasionally to speak a word of encouragement where it is possible.
I have not been reading much lately: Fitzgerald's letters have interested me, also the new Cambridge Modern History, where one gets a connected view of things one has read before in a very fragmentary fashion. Gilbert Murray's translations of Euripides are out, and I recommend them to you (published by George Allen). I have been trying to be interested in Politics, but in vain: the British Empire is unreal to me, I visualise the Mother Country and the Colonies as an, old hen clucking to her chickens, and the whole thing strikes me as laughable. I know that grave men take it seriously, but it all seems to me so unimportant compared to the great eternal facts. And London people, to whom the Eternal is represented by the Monthlies, to which they rise with difficulty from the daily papers, strike me as all puppets, blind embodiments of the forces of nature, never achieving the liberation that comes to man when he ceases to desire and learns at last to contemplate. Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.
Yours very sincerely Bertrand Russell
Lucy Donnelly's life had for many years centred about her friendship for Helen Thomas. When Helen became engaged to Dr Simon Flexner, Lucy suffered profoundly. The following letter was an attempt to comfort her.
14 Cheyne Walk Chelsea, S.W. 7th February, 1903
Dear Lucy
I have just heard of Helen's engagement and for her sake I am glad - it has always seemed to me that she ought to marry and that College life was distinctly a second-best for her. But for you, I know, it must be hard, very hard. It is a dangerous thing to allow one's affections to centre too much in one person; for affection always liable to be thwarted, and life itself is frail. One learns many things as year by year adds to the burden of one's life; and I think the chief of all is the power of making all one's loves purely contemplative. Do you know Walt Whitman's 'Out of the rolling ocean the crowd'? One learns to love all that is good with the same love - a love that knows of its existence, and feels warmed to the world by that knowledge, but asks for no possession, for no private gain except the contemplation itself. And there is no doubt that there are real advantages in loss: affection grows wider, and one learns insight into the lives of others. Everyone who realises at all what human life is must feel at some time the strange loneliness of every separate soul; and then the discovery in others of the same loneliness makes a new strange tie, and a growth of pity so warm as to be almost a compensation for what is lost.
Phrases, I know, do not mend matters; but it makes unhappiness far more bearable to think that some good will come of it; and indeed the facing of the world alone, without one's familiar refuge, is the beginning of wisdom and courage.
Forgive my writing so intimately; but the world is too serious a place, at times, for the barriers of reserve and good manners.
We shall hope to see a great deal of you when you come to England, as I hope you will do. And I shall be very glad to hear from you whenever you feel inclined to write.
Yours very sincerely Bertrand Russell
Churt, Farnham April 13, '03
Dear Lucy
It is impossible to tell you how like sunshine it was to me to hear that my letter had been a comfort. But alas! it is easier to see what is good than to practise it; and old as this observation is, I have not yet got used to it, or made up my mind that it really is true. Yet I have seen and known, at times, a life at a far higher level than my present one; and my precepts are very greatly superior to anything that I succeed in achieving.
Yes, the logic of life is a wonderful thing: sometimes I think of making up a set of aphorisms, to be called 'Satan's joys'; such as: Giving causes affection, receiving causes tedium; the reward of service is unrequited love. (This is the biography of all virtuous mothers, and of many wives.) Passions are smirched by indulgence and killed by restraint: the loss in either case is inevitable. And so on. But these bitter truths, though they deserve to be recognised so far as they are true, are not good to dwell upon. Wherever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure; a larger heart and a greater self-restraint, would put a calm autumnal sadness in the place of the instinctive outcry of pain. One of the things that makes literature so consoling is, that its tragedies are all in the past, and have the completeness and repose that comes of being beyond the reach of our endeavours. It is a most wholesome thing, when one's sorrow grows acute, to view it as having all happened long, long ago: to join in imagination, the mournful company of dim souls whose lives were sacrificed to the great machine that still grinds on. I see the past, like a sunny landscape, where the world's mourners mourn no longer. On the banks of the river of Time, the sad procession of human generations is marching slowly to the grave; but in the quiet country of the past, the tired wanderers rest, and all their weeping is hushed.
But as for me, I have felt no emotions of any kind, except on rare occasions, for some time now; and that is a state of things most convenient for work, though very dull. We are living a quiet country life: Alys is well, except now and then for a day or two. We read Montaigne aloud: he is pleasant and soothing, but very unexciting. To myself I am reading the history of Rome in the middle ages, by Gregorovius, a delightful book. Gilbert Murray, who is our near neighbour, has been telling me about Orphic tablets, and their directions to the soul after death: 'Thou wilt find a cypress, and by the cypress a spring, and by the spring two guardians, who will say to thee: who art thou? whence comest thou? And thou wilt reply: I am the child of earth and of the starry heaven; I am parched with thirst, I perish.' Then they tell him to drink of the fountain; sometimes the fountain itself speaks. Certainly a beautiful mysticism.
Yours very sincerely Bertrand Russell
Friday's Hill Haslemere July 29, 1903
Dear Lucy
It is impossible to tell you how glad I am that our letters have been a help to you. It is the great reward of losing youth that one finds onseself able to be of use; and I cannot, without seeming to cant, say how great a reward I feel it. You need not mind bringing a budget of problems; I look forward to hearing them, and to thinking about them. . . .
Yes, the way people regard intimacy as a great opportunity for destroying happiness is most horrible. It is ghastly to watch, in most marriages, the competition as to which is to be torturer, which tortured; a few years, at most, settle it, and after it is settled, one has happiness and the other has virtue. And the torturer smirks and speaks of matrimonial bliss; and the victim, for fear of worse, smiles a ghastly assent. Marriage, and all such close relations, have quite infinite possibilities of pain; nevertheless, I believe it is good to be brought into close contact with people. Otherwise, one remains ignorant of much that it is good to know, merely because it is in the world, and because it increases human comradeship to suffer what others suffer. But it is hard not to long, in weak moments, for a simple life, a life with books and things, away from human sorrow. I am amazed at the number of people who are wretched almost beyond endurance. 'Truly the food man feeds upon is Pain.' One has to learn to regard happiness, for others as well as for oneself, as more or less unimportant - but though I keep on telling myself this, I do not yet fully and instinctively believe it.
I am glad to hear that Helen is getting rested. It has been no surprise not hearing from her; but tell her not to forget me, and to write again when she is able. Seeing Grace just before her departure, the other day, seemed to bring America nearer. Usually, when I write to you or Helen, I feel almost as if I were writing to dead people whom I have read about in books - the whole place seems so remote, so plunged in memories of an utterly different person who occupied my body seven years ago, that I can hardly believe it to be real or inhabited by real people. But when you come over in the autumn, I shall doubt whether you have really been in America all this time.
The last four months, I have been working like a horse, and have achieved almost nothing. I discovered in succession seven brand-new difficulties, of which I solved the first six. When the seventh turned up, I became discouraged, and decided to take a holiday before going on. Each in turn required a reconstruction of my whole edifice. Now I am staying with Dickinson; in a few days I shall go to town and plunge into the Free Trade question (as a student only). We are all wildly excited about Free Trade; it is to me the last piece of sane internationalism left, and if it went I should feel inclined to cut my throat. But there seems no chance whatever of Chamberlain's succeeding - all the brains are against him, in every class of society. . . .
Yours very sincerely B. Russell
14 Cheyne Walk Chelsea, S.W. February 28, 1904
My dear Lucy
. . . Really the feeling of the worthlessness of one's work, where it is not justified, is the last refuge of self-love. It comes partly of too high an ideal of what one might hope to achieve, which is a form of pride; and partly of rebellion against one's private sufferings, which, one feels, can only be outweighed by some immense public good. But I know it is intolerably hard to drive self-love from this entrenchment, and I certainly have not yet succeeded. I do wish I could be with you, not only for the beauty of Sicily, but because it would be a great pleasure to see you, and because it would be so much easier to say just the things to build up in you the self-respect you deserve to have. You are really too modest altogether; but your friends' affection ought to persuade you that you have things to give which people value. I have not found myself, though, any way of banishing self except work; and while you are unable to work, it is very difficult for you.
I am glad Helen writes you nice letters. But I gather from what you say that her happiness is not great enough to exclude pains. That is a pity; yet perhaps it is a safeguard against greater pains in the future. This sounds a commonplace reflection, and I confess I think it better to have both pain and pleasure in an extreme degree than to have both soberly. But consolations are not to be rejected, even if they are commonplace . . .
There is not much news here, I have been very busy, but now my labours are practically ended. We go to Cambridge for two days this week, and Alys goes to visit Logan and look for sites at Oxford. I have been reading novels: Diana, and Beauchamp's Career, are the two I have read last. Meredith's psychology seems to me very good as a rule, though I didn't think Diana's betrayal was made credible. I fell in love with her at the Ball, and remained so through all her vagaries.
Last night I went to a remote part of London, to lecture to the local Branch of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. They meet in a Public House, but permit no drinks during their meeting. They seemed excellent people, very respectable - indeed I shouldn't have guessed they were working men. They were of all shades of opinion, from Tory to Socialist. The Chairman, when I had finished, begged them not to follow their usual practice of flattering the lecturer; but even so I got not much criticism. The Secretary explained this to me on the way home by saying my arguments had 'bottled them up'. I liked them all, and felt art increased respect for the skilled workman, who seems usually an admirable person.
In a fortnight I shall have done with fiscal things, and then I shall go a walking-tour in Devonshire and Cornwall, before settling down to Philosophy. MacCarthy will go with me.
write again as soon as you can. I feel there is much more to be said in answer to your letter, but Politics has rather scattered my thoughts. Try to keep up your spirits; and please don't imagine your life a useless one.
Yours affectionately Bertrand Russell
St Catherine's House First Class Private Hotel Fowey, Cornwall March 29, 1904
My dear Lucy
. . . As for work, I have not thought at all, either with satisfaction or the reverse, about my fiscal career, now happily closed - that whole episode seems to have just faded away. Also I have not thought much about philosophy; though when I do think of it, the thought is rather pleasant. MacCarthy, who was an ideal companion, left me about 5 days ago. Since then I have been alone, and have found the time most valuable. A great sense of peace comes over me as I walk over green hills by the sea, with nobody to consult, and nobody to be careful of. In a quiet instinctive way (very uncommon with me) I think through practical difficulties that had seemed insoluble, and lay up a store of peace of mind to last through the agitations and fatigues of ordinary life. When I am not thinking of the way, or the scenery, I am mostly thinking about people's affairs; trying to get the facts straight, and to decide how much I can do to better the facts. It takes a good deal of time and thought to imagine oneself in a certain situation, and decide whether one could be sufficiently impressive to effect a great result. My Self comes in in being flattered by my knowledge of people's affairs, and anxious to have their confidence; but I try hard to make Self in this form subservient to good ends.
Then, when I reach an Inn, the people are all interesting owing to the solitude of my walks; I observe their little ways, compare landladies, and listen to the local gossip and the trials of innkeepers' lives. I could write at length on this subject, but it would be rather Pickwickian. In this Hotel, we are a happy family party, and all dine together. As I came downstairs, a middle-aged woman was giving herself some final touches before the Hall looking-glass; she looked round quickly, and when she saw I was not the man for whom she was doing it, she went on as before. Another middle-aged woman, with an earnest manner and a very small waist, was in great form, because the young man had given her a bunch of white violets, which she was wearing. Then there was the inevitable old lady who dined at a table apart, and only joined the conversation occasionally, throwing in a remark about how sweet the spring flowers are; and there was the pompous man, who was saying, 'Well, my opinion is that the directors have just thrown away £12,000 of the shareholders' money'. Then there was myself, much ashamed of having no change of clothes among all these respectable people, and much despised by them for the same reason; and like the man at the helm in the Snark, I spoke to no one and no one spoke to me; but I was well amused. Yesterday I stayed at a place called Mevagissey, where there was a Parish Council Election going on. The landlady's daughter was laying my dinner when I asked her if it was a contest of Liberal and Tory.
'Oh no, Sir, it's only some of them wanted to put up a Doctor, and others said he wasn't a Mevagissey man, and had only lived 6 or 7 years in the place.'
'Disgraceful,' I said.
'Yes it is, Sir, ain't it? And they had a show of hands and he got the worst of it, but he demanded a poll and now the fishermen hope he'll be turned out.'
'Well, I said, 'he doesn't seem to have much chance.'
'You see, Sir, the people who are backing him are powerful people, they're fish-buyers, and some of the fishermen get their nets from them. Then he's backed up by what they call the Christians, the people who are against us poor innkeepers.'
Oho, I thought, now I'm getting it. 'Is he a Nonconformist?' I asked.
'Oh yes, Sir, he's not a churchman' - in a tone of great contempt.
Then I found his backers were also Nonconformists, that they had made their own money, were very kind to sober men, but very hard on drunkards; and that several pubs had been annoyed by them. I was interested to find that, in the common parlance of church-people 'Christian' is the antithesis to 'Churchman'. I found further from the Landlady that these monsters in human shape actually proposed a new drainage scheme and a new water supply, although die rates were already dreadfully high.
'How high?' I asked.
'I couldn't say. Sir, but I know they're dreadfully high.'
The Doctor was not elected; but I was consoled to learn that the parson had also been turned out. - These little distractions keep me from having a moment's boredom. . . .
Yours affectionately Bertrand Russell
Castle Howard York August 15, 1904
My dear Lucy
. . . This place is a large 18th century house, embodying family pride and the worship of reason in equal measure. It is a family party the Murrays, whom you know; Cecilia and Roberts - she, devoted to all her family, especially her mother, placid usually, but capable of violent sudden rage, in which she utters magnificent invective, though at all other times she is a fat good-humoured saint and (oddly enough) a Christian; Roberts (her husband) tall, thin, nervous, quivering like a poplar in the wind, an idealist disillusioned and turned opportunist; Oliver Howard, lately back from Nigeria, where he administered brilliantly a lately-conquered district, containing a town of 500,000 inhabitants, in which he was almost the only white man. He is smart, thin, delicate, conventional, with a soft manner concealing an oriental cruelty and power of fury, of which his mother is the occasion and his wife the victim - at least probably in the future. He is very beautiful and his wife is very pretty: both are Christians; she too is very smart and very conventional, but she has real good nature, and is on the whole likeable. They are very openly affectionate; in him, one dimly feels in the background the kind of jealousy that would lead to murder if it saw cause. Being very like his mother in character, he differs from her in every opinion, and relations are painfully strained. - Then there is Dorothy, who seems to me just like my grandmother Stanley - crude, sometimes cruel, plucky, very honourable, and full of instinctive vitality and healthy animalism, oddly overlaid with her mother's principles. Last there is Leif Jones,1 Lady Carlisle's private secretary, an infinitely lovable man: he does everything for everybody, has sunk his own career, his own desires, the hope of a private life of any personal kind: and all the family take him as a matter of course, and no more expect him to make demands than they expect the stones to call out for food.
1 Later Lord Rhayader.
Lady Carlisle conducts conversation in a way which makes it a game of skill played for high stakes. It is always argument, in which, with consummate art, she ignores relevancy and changes the issue until she has the advantage, and then she charges down and scatters the enemy like chaff before the wind. A large proportion of her remarks are designed to cause pain to someone who has shown independence or given ground for one of the thousand forms of jealousy. She has the faults of Napoleonic women, with less mendacity and more deliberate cruelty than in the case you know best, but with a desire to cause quarrels and part friends which is really terrible. On the other hand, she has really great public spirit, and devotes time and money to really important objects. She has a just sense of values, and a kind of high-mindedness - a most mixed and interesting character . . .
Yours affectionately Bertrand Russell
Audierne, Finistère October 3, 1904
My dear Lucy
This is not a real letter, but only a counter-irritant to my last. As soon as I got away I began to see things in their true proportions, and to be no longer oppressed by the complication of things. But on the whole, I think I shall have to avoid growing intimate with people I don't respect, or trying to help them: it seems to be a job for which I am not fitted.
Brittany is quite wonderful - it has a great deal of purely rural beauty, woods and streams and endless orchards of big red apples, scenting all the air; and besides all this, it has a combination of the beauties of Devonshire and Cornwall, We have been walking lately round the S.W. coast, places where the Atlantic rules as God. Every tiny village has a huge Gothic church, usually very beautiful; many churches stand quite by themselves, facing the sea as relics of ancient courage. At first I wondered how anyone could believe in God in the presence of something so much greater and more powerful as the sea; but very soon, the inhumanity and cruelty of the sea became so oppressive that I saw how God belongs to the human world, and is, in their minds, the Captain of an army in which they are the soldiers: God is the most vigorous assertion that the world is not all omnipotent Matter. And so the fishermen became and have remained the most religious population in the world. It is a strange, desolate, wind-swept region, where long ago great towns flourished, where Iseult of Brittany lived in a castle over the sea, and where ancient legends seem far more real than anything in the life of the present. The very children are old: they do not play or shout, like other children: they sit still, with folded hands and faces of weary resignation, waiting for the sorrows that time is sure to bring. The men are filled with melancholy; but they escape from it by drink. I have never imagined a population so utterly drunken; in every village we have seen men reeling into the gutter. Ordinary days here are as bad as Bank Holiday with us - except that I don't think the women drink much.
A very curious contrast to the Bretons was the proprietor of the last Inn we stayed at, at a place called St Guénolé, near the Pointe de Penmarc'h. He was tall and very erect, with a magnificent black beard, and quick, vigorous dramatic movements. We were wet, so we sat in the kitchen, where he was cooking the dinner with an energy and delight in his work which I have never seen surpassed. We soon found that he was a Parisian, that he had a sister married to a hotel-keeper In Lancaster, & another in the service of Lord Gerard (!) in Egypt; that he had been cook on a Far-Eastern liner, & that he had now at last saved up enough capital to start on a venture of his own. He told us that he was really a sculptor, not a cook, & that in winter, when no guests come, he devotes his time to statuary. He had a voice that would easily have filled the Albert Hall, & he used it as a dinner-gong. Indeed, at all sorts of times, from sheer good spirits, he would bellow some joke or some command through the Hotel, so that all the walls resounded. His cooking, needless to say, was perfect. We saw a poor fisherman come in & sell sardines to him for our dinner; a vast number were purchased for threepence, which, as far as I could discover, the miserable wretch immediately spent in the bar.
Yours affectionately Bertrand Russell
4 Ralston Street Tite Street, S.W. February 8, 1905
My dear Lucy
. . . Now that we are back in Chelsea, I often wish you too were here again, and when I walk the Battersea Park round, I miss you very much. There is much too much of the Atlantic. This year, when I go walks, it is usually with MacCarthy, whom I find wonderfully soothing and restful, full of kindly humour, which makes the world seem gay. George Trevelyan also I walk with; but he, though he maintains that the world is better than I think, maintains it with an air of settled gloom, by comparison with which my jokes against optimism seem full of the joy of life! His wife, by the way, is one of the most simply lovable people I have ever met. She has not much to say, and I often find the talk flagging when I am with her; but she is filled full of generous loves and friendships, and honest and sincere in a very rare degree. She is ignorant of the world, as everyone is who has met with nothing but kindness and good fortune: she instinctively expects that everybody she meets will be nice. This gives her the pathos of very young people, and makes one long to keep sorrows away from her, well as one may know that that is impossible. I have liked and respected other people more, with almost no desire to shield them from pain; but towards her I feel as one does towards a child.
We see a great many people now that we are in town. Last night we dined at the Sidney Webbs, to meet
Lion Phillimore
Mackinder, whom you doubtless remember - the head Beast of the School of Economics
Granville Barker, the young and beautiful actor, who has been producing Shaw's and Murray's plays
Sir Oliver Lodge, Scientist and Spiritualist
Arthur Balfour; and, greatest of all,
Werner, of Werner Beit and Co, the chief of all the South African millionaires; a fat, good-natured, eupeptic German with an equally fat gold watch-chain and a strong German accent (characteristic of all the finest types of British Imperialists), bearing very lightly the load of blood, of nations destroyed and hatreds generated, of Chinese slavery and English corruption, which, by all the old rules, ought to weigh upon him like a cope of lead. It was an amusing occasion. When everyone had come except Balfour and Werner, Mrs Webb observed that we should see which of them thought himself the bigger swell, by which came last. Sure enough, Werner came last; for though Balfour governs the Empire, Werner governs Balfour. Balfour was most agreeable, absolutely free from the slightest sign of feeling himself a personage, sympathetic, anxious to listen rather than to talk. He puts his finger in his mouth, with the air of a small child deep in thought. He is quite obviously weak, obviously without strong feelings, apparently kindly, and not apparently able; at least I saw nothing I should have recognised as showing ability, except his tact, which probably is the main cause of his success. He professed not to know whether the Government would last another fortnight; said he could not arrange to see Shaw's play, for fear of a General Election intervening. All this I took to be blarney. He drew me out about Moore's philosophy, and then listened to a lecture from Mrs Webb on 'the first principles of Government, for beginners'; at least that would have been an appropriate title for her dinner-table discourse.
Sir Oliver Lodge, though I had a prejudice against him on account of theological differences, struck me as delightful: calm, philosophic, and disinterested. Poor Mackinder made a bee-line for Balfour, but got landed with me, much to my amusement. It was a sore trial to bis politeness, from which he extricated himself indifferently.1
1 This dinner is also described by Mrs Webb in Our Partnership, p. 300.
I am not working now, but merely seeing people and enjoying myself. I have fits of depression at times, but they don't last long. I have had a fair share of other people's tragedies lately; some in which intimate friends have behaved badly, which is always painful. Others, which vex me almost more, I only suspect and have to watch their disastrous effects in total impotence. Who was the heartless fool who said that loving other people made one happy? Still, with all its pains, it does help to make life tolerable. . . .
Yours affectionately Bertrand Russell
Lower Copse Bagley Wood, Oxford June 13, 1905
My dear Lucy
. . . I did not remember (if I ever knew) that the Spectator had spoken of my writing; your allusion makes me curious to know what it said. I have not done any more of that sort of writing, but I have been getting on very well with my work. For a long time I Have been at intervals debating this conundrum: if two names or descriptions apply to the same object, whatever is true of the one is true of the other. Now George the Fourth wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley; and Scott was as a matter of fact the same person as the author of Waverley. Hence, putting 'Scott' in the place of 'the author of Waverley', we find that George the Fourth wished to know whether Scott was Scott, which implies more interest in the Laws of Thought than was possible for the First Gentleman of Europe. This little puzzle was quite hard to solve; the solution, which I have now found, throws a flood of light on the foundations of mathematics and on the whole problem of the relation of thought to things. It is a great thing to find a puzzle; because, so long as it is puzzling one knows one has not got to the bottom of things. I have hopes that I shall never again as long as I live have such difficult work as I had last year, and the year before; certainly this year, so far, my work has not been nearly so hard, and I have been reaping the harvest of previous work.
This place is a very great success. The house is pretty and comfortable, my study is so palatial that I am almost ashamed of it, and the country round has the typical English charm of fields and meadows and broad open views, with Oxford and the river besides. Alys seems to like the place thoroughly, and has been osi the whole much better than in town. I find it a great advantage being in touch with Oxford people - it is easier to keep alive my interest in work when I can bring it into some relation with human interests. I have had to take myself in hand rather severely, and being here has made it much more feasible. . . .
Do write to me again as soon as you can, and tell me about yourself and also about Helen. Your letters are always a great pleasure to me. Just now I am in the middle of a fit of work; but though I shall do my best, it is likely to stop soon. Life would be delightfully simple if one could enjoy all one's duties, as some people do; it would be simpler than it is if one always did the duties one doesn't enjoy. Failing both, it is complicated to a frightful extent. But I live in hopes of becoming middle-aged, which, they tell me, makes everything easy.
Yours affectionately Bertrand Russell
14 Barton Street Westminster August 3, 1905
My dear Lucy
You will probably have heard, by the time this reaches you, of the disaster which has befallen us all. Theodore Davies, bathing alone in a pool near Kirkby Lonsdale, was drowned; presumably by hitting his head against a rock in diving, and so getting stunned. It is a loss, to very many, which we shall feel as long as we live; and the loss to the public is beyond anything one can possibly estimate. But all other losses seem as nothing compared to Crompton's. They had been always together, they shared everything, and Theodore was as careful of Crompton and as tender with him as any mother could have been. Crompton bears it with wonderful courage; his mind endures it, but I doubt whether his body will. I am here to do what I can for him there is little enough except to sit in silence with him and suffer as he suffers. As soon as he can get away, I am going abroad with him. This is Miss Sheepshanks's house; she and the other inmates are all away, and she has kindly lent it to me. Alys was very much upset by the news. When we got it, we were just starting for Ireland, to stay with the Monteagles. It seemed best for her not to be alone, so I went over with her, and then came back here. She will be there another 10 days or more. They are kind good people, who will take care of her. Crompton's sorrow is crushing, and I hardly know how to bear it. But it is a comfort to feel able to be of some help to him. Theodore had very many devoted friends, and all have done everything they could; their sympathy has pulled Crompton through the first shock, but there is a long anxious time to come.
. . . I have written an article1 on George IV for 'Mind', which will appear in due course; there you will find the 'answer' . . .
1 The title was 'On Denoting'.
I am too tired to write more now, I wanted to write to you about Theodore, but I have no thoughts for other things.
Yours affectionately Bertrand Russell
Rozeldene, Grayshott Haslemere, Surrey September 3, 1905
My dear Lucy
Thank you very much for your kind letter. Crompton and I went to France for a fortnight, which was all the holiday he could get. I think it did him good. We stayed first with the Frys and then with the Whiteheads. I have not seen him since we got home 10 days ago. But I feel good hopes that he will avoid a complete collapse.
It has been, in a less degree, a rather terrible time for me too. It made everything seem uncertain and subject to chance, so that it was hard to keep any calm about all the goods whose loss one fears. And it brought up, as misfortunes do, all the memories of buried griefs which one had resolved to be done with. One after another, they burst their tombs, and wailed in the desert spaces of one's mind. And the case was one which admitted of no philosophy at all - I could not see that there was anything to be said in mitigation of the disaster. But I have got myself in hand now, and tomorrow I go back to work, after a week's tour by myself. This Sunday I am with my Aunt Agatha. We talk of long-ago things, of people who are dead and old-world memories - it is very soothing. It is odd how family feeling is stirred by anything that makes one feel the universe one's enemy. . . .
Yours affectionately Bertrand Russell
Lower Copse Bagley Wood, Oxford November 10, 1905
My dear Lucy
It was a great pleasure to hear from you again. I think letters are more important than one is apt to realise. If one doesn't write, one's doings and one's general state of mind cease to be known, and when a time comes for explaining, there are so many preliminaries that the task seems impossible in writing. So I do hope you will not be deterred by the fear of many words - it really doesn't do to wait till you are in extremis. What you say about Alys and 'my right living' rather makes me feel that there is something wrong - too much profession and talk about virtue; for I certainly know many people who live better lives than I do, and are more able to accomplish long and difficult duties without any moments of weakness. Only they make less fuss about it, and people do not know how difficult the duties are that they perform in silence.
I am grateful to you for writing about Helen. I understand very well the renewal of pain that comes when you see her, and the dread of entering the real life, with its tortures, after the numbness of routine. I am very sorry that it is still so bad. I wonder, though, whether any but trivial people could really find it otherwise. Life is a burden if those one loves best have others who come first, if there is no corner in the world where one's loneliness is at an end. I hardly know how it can be otherwise. Your problem is to face this with courage, and yet retain as much as possible of what is important to you. It would be easier to renounce everything once for all, and kill one's chief affection. But that leads to hardness, and in the long run to cruelty, the cruelty of the ascetic. The other course has its disadvantages too: it is physically and mentally exhausting, it destroys peace of mind, it keeps one's thoughts absorbed with the question of how much that one values one can hope to rescue without undue encroachment on the territory of others. It is horribly difficult. There is a temptation to let one's real life become wholly one of memory and imagination, where duty and facts do not fetter one, and to let one's present intercourse be a mere shadow and unreality; this has the advantage that it keeps the past unsmirched.
But to come to more practical things. I believe when one is not first in a person's life, it is necessary, however difficult, to make one's feelings towards that person purely receptive and passive. I mean, that one should not have an opinion about what such a person should do, unless one is asked; that one should watch their moods, and make oneself an echo, responding with affection in the measure in which it is given, repressing whatever goes further, ready to feel that one has no rights, and that whatever one gets is so much to the good. This must be, for example, the attitude of a good mother to a married son. Difficult as it is, it is a situation which is normal in the life of the affections, and a duty which one has to learn to perform without spiritual death. . . .
I have been seeing a good deal of Crompton Davies. . . . He is and will remain very profoundly unhappy, and I do not think that marriage or anything will heal the wound. But he is brave, and to the world he makes a good show. To his friends he is lovable in a very rare degree.
The Japanese alliance seems to me excellent - I am glad England should be ready to recognise the yellow man as a civilised being, and not wholly sorry at the quarrel with Australia which this recognition entails. Balfour's government has ceased to do any harm, having grown impotent. The general opinion is that Balfour will resign in February, trying to force the Liberals to take office before dissolving. Whatever happens, the Liberals are almost certain of an overwhelming majority in the next Parliament.
I am interested to hear that I have a disciple at Bryn Mawr. Two young men, Huntingdon at Harvard and Veblen at Princeton, have written works in which they make pleasing references to me. The latter, at least, is brilliantly able. . . .
Alys told me to say she had not time to write by this Saturday's mail - she is occupied with alternations of visitors and meetings, and rather tired. On the whole, however, she has been very well lately. She asked me also to tell you about Forster's 'Where angels fear to tread' it seems to me a clever story, with a good deal of real merit, but too farcical in parts, and too sentimental at the end. He is one of our Cambridge set; his age, I suppose, about 26. He seems certainly to have talent.
Dickinson's new book is out, A Modern Symposium. It is quite excellent. He does the Tories with more sympathy than the Liberals, but all except Gladstone and the biologist are done with much sympathy. Besides Gladstone, there are Disraeli, Henry Sidgwick, and various private friends - Bob Trevelyan, Ferdinand Schiller (Audubon), a compound of Berenson and Santayana, Sidney Webb, and some characters who are nobody in particular. You must certainly read it.
My work has gone very well this summer, in spite of a long interruption caused by Theodore's death. I have made more solid and permanent progress than I usually do. But the end of Volume II is as far off as ever - the task grows and grows. For the rest, I have been much occupied with other people's tragedies - some unusually painful ones have come in my way lately. What rather adds to the oppression is the impossibility of speaking of them - Still, I could hardly endure life if I were not on those terms with people that make me necessarily share their sorrows; and if the sorrows exist, I would always rather know them than not. Only I feel increasingly helpless before misfortune; I used to be able to speak encouraging words, but now I feel too weary, and have too little faith in any remedy except endurance.
Yours affectionately Bertrand Russell
Lower Copse Bagley Wood, Oxford January 1, 1906
My dear Lucy
I am very glad your sense of values prevailed over your run tan instinct, and I am sure your sense of values was right. Letters are important; I care about getting letters from you, and it is the only way not to meet as strangers when people only meet at intervals of some years. And generally, I am sure you are right not to give all your best hours to routine; people who do that infallibly become engrossed in routine, by which they both lose personally and do the routine less well. In this, at least, I practise what I preach: I spent the first hour and a half of the new year in an argument about ethics, with young Arthur Dakyns, who is supposed to be my only disciple up here, but is a very restive disciple, always going after the false gods of the Hegelians. (We were staying with his people at Haslemere.) His father is a delightful man, with a gift of friendliness and of generous admirations that I have seldom seen equalled; and Arthur has inherited a great deal of his father's charm. He is the only person up here (except the Murrays) that I feel as a real friend - the rest are rather alien, so far as I know them. . . .
I am looking forward very much indeed to your visit, and I do hope nothing will happen to prevent it. I shall not be very busy at that time, as I shall have been working continuously all the spring. I am afraid you will find me grown more middle-aged, and with less power of throwing off the point of view of the daily round. The efforts of life and of work are great, and in the long run they tend to subdue one's spirit through sheer weariness. I get more and more into the way of filling my mind with the thoughts of what I have to do day by day, to the exclusion of things that have more real importance. It is perhaps inevitable, but it is a pity, and I feel it makes one a duller person. However, it suits work amazingly well. My work during 1905 was certainly better in quality and quantity than any I have done in a year before, unless perhaps in 1900. The difficulty which I came upon in 1901, and was worrying over all the time you were in Europe, has come out at last, completely and finally, so far as I can judge. It all came from considering whether the King of France is bald - a question which I decided in the same article in which I proved that George IV was interested in the Law of Identity. The result of this is that Whitehead and I expect to have a comparatively easy time from now to the publication of our book, which we may hope will happen within four or five years. Lately I have been working 10 hours a day, living in a dream, realising the actual world only dimly through a mist. Having to go first to my Aunt Agatha on Hindhead, then to the Dakyns's, I woke up suddenly from the dream; but now I must go back into it, until we go abroad with old Mr LI. Davies and his daughter (on the 25th January). . . .
I found your kind present to Alys on my return today, but she has not had it yet, as she has gone to West Ham to canvass for Masterman. He is not the man I should have chosen, but she promised long ago, that she would help him when the election came on. The political outlook is good on the whole. The Liberals have done wisely, as well as rightly, in stopping the S. African Slave Trade in Chinamen. Campbell-Bannerman caused a flutter by declaring more or less for Home Rule; but today Redmond and the Duke of Devonshire both advise electors to vote Liberal, so Campbell-Bannerman has caught the Home Rule vote without losing the Free Trade Unionist vote. Exactly the opposite might just as well have happened, so it is a stroke of luck. But by the time you get this letter, the results will be coming in. The Cabinet is excellent. I am very glad John Burns is in it. But it may go to pieces later on the Irish question. However, I hope not. I breathe more freely every moment owing to those soundrels being no longer in office; but I wish I knew what majority we shall get. The question is: Will the Liberals be independent of the Irish? It is bound to be a near thing one way or other.
I hope you will enjoy Dickinson's Modern Symposium. You will recognise Bob Trevylan and Sidney Webb. I like the book immensely.
Do write again soon. Your letters are a great pleasure to me.
Yours affectionately Bertrand Russell
14 Barton Street Westminster February 18, 1906
My dear Lucy
. . . I have myself been horribly depressed lately. Margaret Davies is still in the depths of unhappiness, and needs a great deal of silent sympathy, which is much more tiring than the sort one can express. And I am as usual oppressed by a good many anxieties that I cannot speak about. I am looking forward to work, which is a refuge. But I tired myself out before starting for abroad, and I feel still rather slack, so I may find I need more holiday. Sometimes I think I should like never to stop work, if only I had die strength of body. Mathematics is a haven of peace without which I don't know how I should get on. So I am hardly the person to tell you how to avoid depression; because I can only give advice which I do not myself find effective. I have, however, two things which really make me happier - one is the result of the general election, which does mean that for the next few years at least public affairs in England will be more or less what one could wish; the other, more personal, is that my work has prospered amazingly, and that I have solved the most difficult problems I had to deal with, so that I have a prospect of some years of easy and rapid progress. I stayed a few days in Paris, and they got up a dinner of philosophers and mathematicians for me, which I found most agreeable - it was interesting to meet the people, and was sweet incense to my self-esteem. I was interested to observe, on a review of noses, that they were mostly Jews. They seemed most civilised people, with great public spirit and intense devotion to learning. One of them said he had read an English poem called 'le vieux matelot'; I couldn't think who had written anything called 'the old sailor' and began to think there might be something by Hood of that name, when the truth flashed upon me. I also saw Miss Minturn and Santayana in Paris, which I enjoyed. - I go back to Oxford the end of this week. Alys has been very well, not at all exhausted by her labours in West Ham. I shall hope for another letter from you soon.
Yours affectionately Bertrand Russell
Providence House Clovelly, near Bideford April 22, 1906
My dear Lucy
. . . I am down here in absolute solitude for the best part of 2 months, and find it so far a very great success. The country is beautiful, beyond belief - tangled sleeping-beauty sort of woods, sloping steep down to the sea, and little valleys full of ferns and mosses and wild flowers of innumerable kinds. I take a long walk every afternoon, and all the rest of the day and evening I work, except at meals, when I re-read War and Peace, which I expect will last me most of my time. On my walks I stop and read little bits of Walton's Lives, or something else that is exquisite. My work goes ahead at a tremendous pace, and I get intense delight from it.1 Being alone, I escape oppression of more things to think out, and more complicated decisions to make, than I have energy to accomplish; and so I am contented, and find enough to occupy me in work, and enough vigour to make work a pleasure instead of a torment.
1 It turned out to be all nonsense.
As for fame, which you speak of, I have no consciousness of possessing it - certainly at Oxford they regard me as a conceited and soulless formalist. But I do not now care greatly what other people think of my work. I did care, until I had enough confidence that it was worth doing to be independent of praise. Now it gives me rather less pleasure than a fine day. I feel better able than anyone else to judge what my work is worth; besides, praise from the learned public is necessarily for things written some time ago, which probably now seem to me so full of imperfections that I hardly like to remember them. Work, when it goes well, is in itself a great delight; and after any considerable achievement I look back at it with the sort of placid satisfaction one has after climbing a mountain. What is absolutely vital to me is the self-respect I get from work - when (as often) I have done something for which I feel remorse, work restores me to a belief that it is better I should exist than not exist. And another thing I greatly value is the kind of communion with past and future discoverers. I often have imaginary conversations with Leibniz, in which I tell him how fruitful his ideas have proved, and how much more beautiful the result is than be could have foreseen; and in moments of self-confidence, I imagine students hereafter having similar thoughts about me. There is a 'communion of philosophers' as well as a 'communion of saints', and it is largely that that keeps me from feeling lonely.
Well, this disquisition shows how self-absorbed one grows when one is alone! . . .
I am glad your country girl has married the painter. All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.
I am on the whole satisfied with Birrell. The Government have made some bad mistakes, but seem satisfactory in the main.
Write again when you can, and address here.
Yours affectionately Bertrand Russell
To Lowes Dickinson:
Little Buckland Nr. Broadway, Wors. Aug. 2, '02
Dear Goldie
. . . This neighbourhood, which I didn't know before, is very charming; ail the villages are built of a very good stone, and most of the houses are Jacobean or older. There is a great plain full of willows, into which the sun sets, and on the other side high hills. Our lodgings are in an old and very picturesque farm house. The place is bracing, and I have been getting through eight or nine hours of work a day, which has left me stupid at the end of it. My bode, and Moore's too probably, will be out some time in the winter. The proofs come occasionally, and seem to me very worthless; I have a poor opinion of the stuff when I think of what it ought to be, Whitehead turned up in College, but I got little of his society, as he was terribly busy with, exam-papers. It is a funny arrangement, by which the remuneration of dons is inversely proportional to the value of their work. I wish something better could be devised. - It would be most agreeable to live in Cambridge, and I daresay I shall do so some day; but at present it is out of the question. However, we shall be in town after September 15 for six months; I hope you will visit us during your weekly excursions to that haunt of purposeless activity and foolish locomotion. When I see people who desire money or fame or power, I find it hard to imagine what must be the emotional emptiness of their lives, that can leave room for such trivial dungs.
Yours ever Bertrand Russell
Address: Friday's Hill Haslemere
Little Buckland Nr, Broadway, Wors. 26 August, 1902
Dear Goldie
I was very glad of your letter, and I agree with all you said about the Paradiso, though it is many years since I read it. I feel also very strongly what you say about Italy and the North, though at bottom I disagree with you. I do not think, to begin with, that Dante can count as an Italian; Italy begins with the Renaissance, and the mediaeval mind is international. But there is to me about Italy a quality which the rest of Europe had in the 18th century, a complete lack of mystery. Sunshine is very agreeable, but fogs and mists have effects which sunshine can never attain to. Seriously, the unmystical, rationalistic view of life seems to me to omit all that is most important and most beautiful. It is true that among unmystical people there is no truth unperceived, which the mystic might reveal; but mysticism creates the truth it believes in, by the way in which it feels the fundamental facts - the helplessness of man before Time and Death, and the strange depths of feeling which lie dormant until some one of the Gods of life calls for our worship. Religion and art both, it seems to me, are attempts to humanise the universe - beginning, no doubt, with the humanising of man. If some of the stubborn facts refuse to leave one's consciousness, a religion or an art cannot appeal to one fully unless it takes account of those facts. And so all religion becomes an achievement, a victory, an assurance that although man may be powerless, his ideals are not so. The more facts a religion takes account of, the greater is its victory, and that is why thin religions appeal to Puritan temperaments. I should myself value a religion in proportion to its austerity - if it is not austere, it seems a mere childish toy, which the first touch of the real Gods would dispel. But I fear that, however austere, any religion must be less austere than the truth. And yet I could not bear to lose from the world a certain awed solemnity, a certain stern seriousness - for the mere fact of life and death, of desire and hope and aspiration and love in a world of matter which knows nothing of good and bad, which destroys carelessly the things it has produced by accident, in spite of all the passionate devotion that we may give - all this is not sunshine, or any peaceful landscapes seen through limpid air; yet life has the power to brand these things into one's soul so that all else seems triviality and vain babble. To have endowed only one minute portion of the universe with the knowledge and love of good, and to have made that portion the plaything of vast irresistible irrational forces, is a cruel jest on the part of God or Fate. The best Gospel, I suppose, is the Stoic one; yet even that is too optimistic, for matter can at any moment destroy our love of virtue.
After all this moping, you will be confirmed in your love of the South; and indeed I feel it too, but as a longing to have done with the burden of a serious life. 'Ye know, my friends, with what a gay carouse' - and no doubt there is much to be said for the Daughter of the Vine, as for any other of Satan's many forms. To Hell with unity, and artistic serenity, and the insight that perceives the good in other people's Pain - it sickens me. (And yet I know there is truth in it.)
Yes, one must learn to live in the Past, and so to dominate it that it is not a disquieting ghost or a horrible gibbering spectre stalking through the vast bare halls that once were full of life, but a gentle soothing companion, reminding one of the possibility of good things, and rebuking cynicism and cruelty - but those are temptations which I imagine you do not suffer from. For my part, I do not even wish to live rather with eternal things, though I often give them lip-service; but in my heart I believe that the best things are those that are fragile and temporary, and I find a magic in the Past which eternity cannot possess. Besides, nothing is more eternal than the Past - the present and future are still subject to Time, but the Past has escaped into immortality - Time has done his worst, and it yet lives.
I don't wonder you hate taking up your routine again. After one has had liberty of mind, and allowed one's thoughts and emotions to grow and expand, it is horrible to go back to prison, and enclose all feelings within the miserable compass of the prudent and desirable and practically useful - Pah! - But all good things must be left to the wicked - even virtue, which only remains spotless if it is kept under a glass case, for ornament and not for use.
I have been working nine hours a day until yesterday, living in a dream, thinking only of space; today I begin to realise the things that are in it, and on the whole they do not seem to me an improvement. But I hope we shall see you in town.
Yours ever Bertrand Russell
Churt, Farnham July 16, 1903
Dear Goldie
I enclose the translation, but I rather wish you would get someone with a better knowledge of French to look it over, as my French is not at all correct. And by the way, I expect mémoire would be better than article, but I am not sure.
I am glad you are writing on Religion. It is quite time to have things said that all of us know, but that are not generally known. It seems to me that our attitude on religious subjects is one which we ought as far as possible to preach, and which is not the same as that of any of the well-known opponents of Christianity. There is the Voltaire tradition, which makes fun of the whole thing from a common-sense, semi-historical, semi-literary point of view; this of course, is hopelessly inadequate, because it only gets hold of the accidents and excrescences of historical systems. Then there is the scientific, Darwin-Huxley attitude, which seems to me perfectly true, and quite fatal, If rightly carried out, to all the usual arguments for religion. But it is too external, too coldly critical, too remote from the emotions; moreover, it cannot get to the root of the matter without the help of philosophy. Then there are the philosophers, like Bradley, who keep a shadow of religion, too little for comfort, but quite enough to ruin their systems intellectually. But what we have to do, and what privately we do do, is to treat the religious instinct with profound respect, but to insist that there is no shred or particle of truth in any of the metaphysics it has suggested: to palliate this by trying to bring out the beauty of the world and of life, so far as it exists, and above all to insist upon preserving the seriousness of the religious attitude and its habit of asking ultimate questions. And if good lives are the best thing we know, the loss of religion gives new scope for courage and fortitude, and so may make good lives better than any that there was room for while religion afforded a drug in misfortune.
And often I feel that religion, like the sun, has extinguished the stars of less brilliancy but not less beauty, which shine upon us out of the darkness of a godless universe. The splendour of human life, I feel sure, is greater to those who are not dazzled by the divine radiance; and human comradeship seems to grow more intimate and more tender from the sense that we are all exiles on an inhospitable shore.
Yours ever B. Russell
Churt, Farnham July 19, 1903
Dear Goldie
Many thanks for sending me the three articles on Religion: they strike me as exceedingly good, and as saying things that much need saying. All your eloquent passages seem to me very successful; and the parable at the end I like quite immensely. I enclose a few remarks oa some quite tiny points that struck me in reading - mostly verbal points.
The attack on Ecclesiasticism is, I think, much needed; you if anything underestimate, I should say, the danger of Ecclesiasticism in this country. Whenever I happen to meet Beatrice Creighton I feel the danger profoundly; and she illustrates one of the worst points from a practical point of view, that even when a man belonging to an ecclesiastical system happens to be broad-minded and liberal himself, he takes care to avoid such a state of mind in others whom he can influence.
Why should you suppose I think it foolish to wish to see the people one is fond of? What else is there to make life tolerable? We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and the emptiness; sometimes a voice answers out of the darkness. But it is a voice of one drowning; and in a moment the silence returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful; the unhappiness of most people is very great, and I often wonder how they all endure it. To know people well is to know their tragedy: it is usually the central thing about which their lives are built. And I suppose if they did not live most of the time in the things of the moment, they would not be able to go on.
Yours ever B. Russell
Ivy Lodge Tilford, Farnham July 20, 1904
Dear Goldie
Yes, I think you would do well to republish your articles on Religion in a book. It is hard to say what one gathers from them in a constructive way, yet there certainly is something. I think it is chiefly, in the end, that one becomes persuaded of the truth of the passage you quote from Maeterlinck, i.e. that the emotion with which we contemplate the world may be religious, even if we have no definite theological beliefs. (Note that if Maeterlinck were not in French, he would be saying the same as In Memoriam, 'there lives more faith, etc.' This remark is linguistic.) You are likely to convince a certain number of people that the absence of a creed is no reason for not thinking in a religious way; and this is useful both to the person who insists on a creed in order to save his religious life, and to the person who ceases to think seriously because he has lost his creed.
Schiller, in his article, struck me as a pathetic fool, who had seized on Pragmatism as the drowning man's straw. I agree with you wholly that Philosophy cannot give religion, or indeed anything of more than intellectual interest. It seems to me increasingly that what gives one the beliefs by which one lives is of the nature of experience: it is a sudden realisation, or perhaps a gradual one, of ethical values which one had formerly doubted or taken on trust; and this realisation seems to be caused, as a rule, by a situation containing the things one realises to be good or bad. But although I do not think philosophy itself will give anything of human interest, I think a philosophical training enables one to get richer experiences, and to make more use of those that one does get. And I do not altogether wish mankind to become too firmly persuaded that there is no road from philosophy to religion, because I think the endeavour to find one is very useful, if only it does not destroy candour.
What is valuable in Tolstoi, to my mind, is his power of right ethical judgments, and his perception of concrete facts; his theorisings are of course worthless. It is the greatest misfortune to the human race that he has so little power of reasoning.
I have never read Lady Welby's writings, but she sent me some remarks on my book, from which I judged that she is interested in a good many questions that interest me. I doubt very much, all the same, how much she understood my book. I know too little of her to know whether I should understand her or not.
I think Shaw, on the whole, is more bounder than genius; and though of course I admit him to be 'forcible', I don't admit him to be 'moral'. I think envy plays a part in his philosophy in this sense, that if he allowed himself to admit the goodness of things which he lacks and others possess, he would feel such intolerable envy that he would find life unendurable. Also he hates self-control, and makes up theories with a view to proving that self-control is pernicious. I couldn't get on with Man and Superman: it disgusted me. I don't think he is a soul in Hell dancing on red-hot iron. I think his Hell is merely diseased vanity and a morbid fear of being laughed at.
Berenson is here. I shall be very curious to see what you say on Music. I have never made up my mind whether, if I were founding the Republic, I should admit Wagner or even Beethoven; but not because I do not like them.
I am working hard at Vol. II.1 When it goes well, it is an intense delight, when I get stuck, it is equally intense torture.
1 Which became Principia Mathematica.
Yours always Bertrand Russell
Ivy Lodge Tilford, Farnham Sep. 22, 1904
Dear Goldie
Thanks for sending me the enclosed, which I have read with interest. I think you state your position clearly and very well. It is not a position that I can myself agree with. I agree that 'faith in some form or other seems to be an almost necessary condition, if not of life, yet of the most fruitful and noble life'. But I do not agree that faith 'can be legitimate so long as it occupies a region not yet conquered by knowledge'. You admit that it is wrong to say: 'I believe, though truth testify against me.' I should go further, and hold it is wrong to say: 'I believe, though truth do not testify in my favour.' To my mind, truthfulness demands as imperatively that we should doubt what is doubtful as that we should disbelieve what is false. But here and in all arguments about beliefs for which there is no evidence, it is necessary to distinguish propositions which may be fairly allowed to be self-evident, and which therefore afford the basis of indirect evidence, from such as ought to have proofs if they are to be accepted. This is a difficult business, and probably can't be done exactly. As for faith, I hold (a) that there are certain propositions, an honest belief in which, apart from the badness of believing what is false, greatly improves the believer, (b) that many of these very propositions are false. But I think that faith has a legitimate sphere in the realm of ethical judgments, since these are of the sort that ought to be self-evident, and ought not to require proof. For practice, it seems to me that a very high degree of the utility of faith can be got by believing passionately in the goodness of certain things which are good, and which, in a greater or less degree, our actions are capable of creating, I admit that the love of God, if there were a God, would make it possible for human beings to be better than is possible in a Godless world. But I think the ethical faith which is warranted yields most of what is necessary to the highest life conceivable, and all that is necessary to the highest life that is possible. Like every religion, it contains ethical judgments and judgments of fact, the latter asserting that our actions make a difference, though perhaps a small one, to the ethical value of the universe. I find this enough faith to live by, and I consider it warranted by knowledge; but anything more seems to me more or less untruthful, though not demonstrably untrue.
Let me know what you would reply. Address here, though I shall be away. I am going tomorrow to Brittany with Theodore for a fortnight. I hope your sciatica is better.
Yours ever B. Russell
I Tatti, Settignano, Florence March 22, 1903
Dear Bertie
I have read your essay three times, and liked it better and better. Perhaps the most flattering appreciation to be given of it is that the whole is neither out of tune with nor unworthy of the two splendid passages you wrote here - I see no objection to this essay form. I have no wish of my own with regard to the shape your writing is to take. I am eager that you shall express yourself sooner or later, and meanwhile you must write and write until you begin to feel that you are saying what you want to say, in the way that you wish others to understand it.
The really great event of the last few weeks has been Gilbert Murray. I fear I should fall into school-girlishness if I ventured to tell you how much I liked him. You will judge when I say that no woman in my earlier years made me talk more about myself than he has now. Conversation spread before us like an infinite thing, or rather like something opening out higher and greater with every talk. I found him so gentle, so sweetly reasonable - almost the ideal companion. Even I could forgive his liking Dickens, and Tennyson. - He has been responsible for the delay of this scrawl, for he absorbed my energies. What little was left went to my proofs. Happily they are nearly done.
I am so glad that Alys is coming out. It is very good of her. I enjoy her visit, and be much the better for it. Dickinson will I fear suffer from the contrast with Murray.
I am in the middle of the Gespräche mit Goethe all interesting. What have you done with your paper on mathematics?
Yours ever B. B. (Berenson)
Grayshott Haslemere, Surrey Ja. 10, 1904
My dearest Bertie
I was so very, very sorry to hear that you were not at Dora's1 funeral. I felt quite sure you would be present and can only thiol; that something very definite must have prevented you. - I know you may feel that this last token of respect means little and is of no avail - but I am quite sure after all she did for you in old days and all the love she gave you that her sister and friends will have felt pained at your absence - if you could have gone. - Many thanks to Alys for her letter and the little Memorial Book she forwarded - I conclude you have one. - Perhaps you have never heard it at the grave of one you loved - but the Burial Service is about the most impressive and solemn - and especially with music is sometimes a real help in hours of awful sorrow in lifting one up above and beyond it. - I have had a kind letter from Dora's sister to whom I wrote as I feel most deeply for her - it is a terrible loss - she is alone and had hoped some day Dora would live with her. - I hope you wrote to her.
1 'Dora' was my former Swiss governess. Miss Bühler,
Miss Sedgfield2 is probably going on Tuesday to Highgate for a week and very much hopes to be at your lecture next Friday. - Perhaps you will see her but anyhow please ask Alys if she will look out for her. She has written for tickets. She asks me to tell you that she particularly hopes you are going to make it comprehensible to the feeblest intelligence - no angles and squares and triangles no metaphysics or mathematics to be admitted!
2 My aunt's companion.
Thank Alys very much for the enclosures which I was delighted to see they are very interesting and I should like some to send to a few who might be interested. But I don't like the sentence about Retaliation. The word alone is distasteful and I have just looked it out in Johnson - To 'retaliate' (even when successful so-called) is not a Tolstoyan or better a Christian maxim. - I hope your lectures will contain some sentiment and some ideals! - even from the low point of view of success they will be more effective if they do! - How I wish I could come and hear you - I will read you in the Edinburgh but it would be more interesting to hear and I never have heard you or Alys once!
with much love to you both and best wishes for your work in the good cause,1
1 The cause of Free Trade.
Your loving Auntie
Ivy Lodge Tilford, Farnham May 17, 1904
My dearest Bertie
I hope thee will not mind my writing thee a real letter on thy birthday. I try very hard always to keep on the surface, as thee wishes, but I am sure thee will remember how some feelings long for expression.
I only want to tell thee again how very much I love thee, and how glad I am of thy existence. When I could share thy life and think myself of use to thee, it was the greatest happiness anyone has ever known. I am thankful for the memory of it, and thankful that I can still be near thee and watch thy development. When thee is well and happy and doing good work, I feel quite contented, and only wish that I were a better person and able to do more work and be more worthy of thee. I never wake in the night or think of thee in the daytime without wishing for blessings on my darling, and I shall always love thee, and I hope it will grow more and more unselfish.
Thine ever devotedly Alys
Cambo Northumberland (July, 1904)
Dear Bertie
I want to tell you how very fine the last part of your article is. If I could now and then write like that I should feel more certainly justified than I do in adopting writing as a business.
When I get south again at the beginning of August I should much like to talk to you. I have much to ask you now. Tolstoi's letter in Times has set me thinking very uncomfortably - or feeling rather. It fills me with (i) a new sense of doubt and responsibility as to my own manner of life (ii) as to this of war. I feel as if we were all living in the City of Destruction but I am not certain as to whether I ought to flee - or whither.
It may all come to nothing definite, but it ought at least to leave a different spirit.
I have for long been too happy and contented with everything including my work. Then the intense moral superiority of Tolstoi's recusant conscripts knocks all the breath out of one's fatuous Whig bladder of self contentment.
1. In ½ a sheet do you agree with Tolstoi about war?
2. Where will you be in August?
Yours George Trevelyan
Cambo Northumberland July 17, 1904
Dear Bertie
I am deeply grateful to you for having written me so long and carefully considered a letter. But it was not a waste of time. I am deeply interested in it and I think I agree with it altogether.
On the other hand I hold that though you are right in supposing the preparation of war to be a necessary function of modern states, in the spirit and under the restrictions you name, - still one of the principal means by which war will eventually be abolished is the passive resistance of conscripts in the conscription nations (to whose number we may be joined if things go badly). It will take hundreds of years to abolish war, and there will be a 'fiery roll of martyrdom', opening with these recusant convicts of Tolstoi's. It is these people, who will become an ever increasing number all over Europe, who will finally shame the peoples of Europe into viewing war and international hatred as you do, instead of viewing it as they do now. Great changes are generally effected in this way, but by a double process - gradual change in the general sentiment and practice, led and really inspired by the extreme opinion and action of people condemned by the mass of mankind, whom nevertheless they affect.
Three cheers for Tolstoi's letter all the same. Also I think that any proposal to introduce conscription into England must be resisted on this ground (among others) that govt. has not the right to coerce a person's conscience into fighting or training for war if he thinks it wrong.
I think I also agree with you as to the duty of living and working in the City of Destruction, rather than fleeing from it. But a duty that is also a pleasure, though it is none the less still a duty, brings dangers in the course of its performance. It is very difficult, in retaining the bulk of one's property and leisure at the disposal of one's own will, to live in the spirit of this maxim: 'One has only a right to that amount of property which will conduce most to the welfare of others in the long run.'
I enclose a letter and circular. Will you join? I have done so, and I think we are probably going to elect Goldie Dickinson who expressed a willingness to join. There will certainly be perfectly free discussion and the people will be worth getting to know. There is no obligation, as of reading papers, incumbent on any member. I think the various points of view of the really religious who are also really free seekers after truth (a meagre band) is worth while our getting to know. They have expressed great hopes that you will join.
Yours ever George Trevelyan
8 Cheyne Gardens Tuesday Oct. 11, '04
My dear Russell
It did me much good to see you again. I had a tale of woe and desperation to pour out - vague enough and yet not enough so it seemed while I was revolving it this morning; but when I had been with you a little while I did not feel - well, magnificently wretched enough to use desperate language. I was reminded of so many things I had well worth having. And my trouble seemed nothing that rational fortitude and very ordinary precepts properly obeyed could not surmount.
I look to you to help me more than anybody else just now. I feel that all those refinements which you suspect often are half weaknesses and I too, help me. It is everything to me to feel that you have no cut and dried rules of what one man ought and ought not to say to another, yet I know how you hate a spiritual indelicacy.
Do not answer this letter unless you want to or unless you have anything you want to say. We can talk of so many things right to the bottom which is the blessing of blessings.
I want to stop in London for a fortnight or so and get some work done. Then I shall be better able to tell you how it is with [sic]. I must begin to hope a little before I can talk about my despair.
Your affectionate Desmond MacCarthy
41 Grosvenor Road Westminster Embankment Oct. 16, 1904
My dear Bertie
It was kind of you to write to me your opinion of L. H. [Leonard Hobhouse] pamphlet and I am glad that it coincides so exactly with my own. I quite agree with you in thinking that the fact that a 'mood' (such, for instance, as the instinctive faith in a 'Law of Righteousness', and my instinctive faith in prayer) is felt to be 'compelling and recurrent' has no relevance, as Proof of its correspondence 'with our order of things'.
I make an absolute distinction between the realm of proof (Knowledge of Processes) and the realm of aspiration or Faith - (the choice of Purposes.) All I ask for this latter World, is tolerance - a 'Let live' policy. In my interpretation of this 'Let live' policy, I should probably differ with you and L. H. - since I would permit each local community to teach its particular form of 'aspiration' or 'Faith' out of common funds. I should even myself desire this for my own children - since I have found that my own existence would have been more degraded without it - and as I 'desire' what we call nobility of Purpose, I wish for the means to bring it about. I know no other way of discovering these means but actual experience or experiment, and so far my own experience and experiment leads me to the working Hypothesis of persistent Prayer, I do not in the least wish to force this practice on other people and should be equally glad to pay for a school in which the experiment of complete secularisation (viz. nothing but the knowledge of Processes) was tried or for an Anglican or Catholic or Christian Science Establishment. All I desire is that each section or locality should, as far as possible, be free to teach its own kind of aspirations or absence of Aspirations.
Can you and Alys come to lunch on Thursday 10th and meet Mr Balfour? I am taking him to Bernard Shaw's play. Could you not take tickets for that afternoon? It will be well for you to know Mr Balfour - in case of Regius Professorships and the like!
Ever B. Webb
Private
Rozeldene, Grayshott Haslemere, Surrey March 20, 1905
My dearest Bertie
I am only writing today on one subject which I wish now to tell you about, - I have had and kept carefully ever since his death, your Grandfather's gold watch and chain - I need not tell you how very very precious it is to me as of course I so well remember his always wearing it.
But I should like very much now to give it to you - only with one condition that you will leave it to Arthur, - or failing Arthur to Johnny - as I am anxious It should remain a Russell possession. I do not remember whether you have and wear now any watch which has any past association - if so of course do not hesitate to tell me and I will keep this, for Arthur later on. But if not you could of course give (or keep if you prefer) your present watch away - as I should like to feel you will wear and use this one - not put it away. - However this you will tell me about.
Dear dear Bertie I should like to feel that you will always try to be worthy - you will try I know - of being his grandson for he was indeed one of the very best men the world has known - courageous - gentle true - and with a most beautiful childlike simplicity and straightforwardness of nature which is most rare - I like to think that you remember him - and that his last words to you 'Good little boy', spoken from his deathbed with loving gentleness, - can remain with you as an inspiration to goodness through life; - but of course you cannot remember and cannot know all that he was. - But if you will have it I should like you to wear and treasure this watch in memory of him - and of the long ago days in the dear home of our childhood.1
1 I have worn this watch and chain ever since 1949.
God bless you.
Your loving Auntie
I have just had the watch seen to in London — it is in perfect condition. I could give it you on the 28th. - Thanks for your welcome letter last week.
Vicarage Kirkby Lonsdale 27 July, 1905
Bertie
Theodore is dead, drowned while bathing alone on Tuesday in a pool in the Fells, stunned as I have no doubt by striking his head in taking a header and then drowned.
I shall be back in London on Monday. Let me see you some time soon.
Crompton
(Oct. 31?, '05)
Dear Bertie
I enclose photo which I trust will do.
I have some more of Theo which I want to shew you. when will you come for a night?
I have failed with —.2 She says she thought she could have done anything for me but resolutely declines to marry me so the matter is at an end.
2 The woman whom Theodore loved, and whom, after Theodore's death, Crompton wished to marry.
Harry and I are going to Grantchester next Saturday. I haven't managed a visit to Bedales yet.
I have prepared your will but think I will keep it till I see you and can go thro' it with you.
The loss of Theodore seems still a mere phantasy and the strange mixture of dream and waking thoughts and recollection and feet leave me in bewilderment but slowly the consciousness of a maimed existence remaining for me makes itself felt, as of a body that has lost its limbs and strength and has to go on with made-up supports and medical regimen and resignation to the loss of possibilities of achievement and hopes of sunny days.
I cling to you with all my heart and bless you for loving and helping me.
Crompton
Stocks Cottage Tring 23rd May, 1907
Dear Bertie
So now you have 'fought a contested election', which Teufelsdröck puts with the state of being in love, as being the second great experience of human life. I am the greater coward that I have never done the same, and probably never shall. I don't suppose a pair of more oddly contrasted candidates will be in the field again for another 100 years, as you and Chaplin.
What a sporting cove you are! Next time the Austrians conquer Italy you and I will go in a couple of red shirts, together, and get comfortably killed in an Alpine pass. I hardly thought you were such an adventurer, and had so much of the fine old Adam in you, till I came home (like old mother Hubbard) and found you conducting an election!!
I am very grateful to you for the article in the Edinburgh.1 It did the book a lot of good, and helped to pull up the sale, which began badly and is now doing well. It was, I gather from Elliot, a disappointment to you not to be able to do it at more leisure, and I want to tell you that I appreciate this sacrifice to friendship, and that it was a real service to me to have the review out in April.
1 A review of George Trevelyan's Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic.
I was very much interested in several things you said, especially the sentence at the top of p. 507 about the special function of the Revolutionaries. I did not guess who had written it till Alys told us, tho' I might have guessed it from your favourite story of Jowett's remark on Mazzini.
I hope you are both back in the academic pheasant preserve and that the quiet of Oxford is pleasant after such turmoil.
Yours fraternally George Trevy
67 Belsize Park Gardens Hampstead, N.W. 23 October, 1907
Dear Russell
I have just read your article on Mathematics (in proof) and can't resist writing to say how much I was carried away by it. Really it's magnificent - one's carried upwards into sublime heights - perhaps the sublimest of all! Your statement of the great thing about it seems to me absolutely clear and absolutely convincing; it gives one a new conception of the glories of the human mind. The simile of the Italian Castle struck me as particularly fine, and the simplicity of the expression added tremendously to the effect. What scoundrels the Independent editors were!1 And what fools!
1 They had refused to print the article.
I could go on writing for pages - such is my excitement and enthusiasm. It's terrific to reflect that I know you, and can speak to you, and even contradict you. Ohl - I shall have this engraved on my tombstone
HE KNEW MOORS AND RUSSELL
and nothing more.
Yours ever G. L. Strachey
57 Gordon Square London W.C. 3rd March, 1908
My dear Bertie
I see in the papers that you are to be made an FRS! What an honour I at your age too. Ever since I saw it I have have been strutting about swelling with reflected glory. It's the first sensible thing I ever heard of philosophy doing. One can understand that if one can't your books.
Seriously though I do congratulate you most heartily. I have always looked on an FRS as superior to any position on earth, even Archbishop or Prime Minister and the feeling still survives though I know a good many personally.
Yours affectionately Russell
Charing Cross Hotel October 4, 1908
Dear Russell
I was at Oxford for three days last week, and hoped until the last day, when I found it was going to be quite impossible, to drive out and see you and Mrs Russell. It was squeezed out by other necessities. I saw Schiller and spent a night at McDougall's most pleasantly. I would fain have spent a night with you, to make up for the rather blunt way in which I declined your invitation last June. I was done-up then, and am comparatively fresh now, but a daughter and a son have come over since then and, as normal, their needs have seemed more urgent than their parent's, so the time has proved too short for many things that I should have liked to accomplish. The son remains at Oxford, in A. L. Smith's family (tutor at Balliol). The rest of us sail in the Saxonia on Tuesday.
One of the first things I am going to do after I get back to my own library is to re-read the Chapter on Truth in your Phil. of M., which I haven't looked at since it appeared. I want to get a better grasp of it than you have of my theory! Your remarks on Dewey (sharp as your formulation is!) in the last Hibbert shows that you haven't yet grasped the thing broadly enough. My dying words to you are 'Say good-by to mathematical logic if you wish to preserve your relations with concrete realities!' I have just had this morning a three-hour conversation with Bergson which possibly may account for this ejaculation! Best regards to you both, in which my wife would join were she here.
Truly yours Wm. James
8 Grosvenor Crescent S.W. 26th April, 1909
Dear Bertrand Russell
It is a great pleasure to know that you are elected at the Athenaeum. My own balloting - In 1877 - was sufficiently anxious to make me always feel glad when any friend, however certain of success, is through the ordeal. I was not wanting on the occasion and spent a solid part of the afternoon there while your ballot was on.
Your membership will sensibly increase to me, and many others, the interest and pleasure of the Club.1
1 I can't think why, I never saw Sir George Trevelyan there.
I remain Yours very sincerely George O. Trevelyan
Eleven, Cranmer Road Cambridge May 27/10
Dear Bertie
The College Council decided today to offer you a lectureship in Logic and the Principles of Mathematics to continue for five years, the duties being
1. (i) to give a course (24 lectures) of lectures in each term,
2. (ii) to reside in Cambridge during term time -
Also provided that you are willing to satisfy certain conditions as to the number of hours during which you will be present in College (15 hours per week during term time, I think) they offer rooms in College and dinner (i.e. free dinner). The stipend is £200 per year.
All this is of course entirely unofficial - I need not tell you now delighted I am about it - It will give you a splendid opportunity to 'expose' the subject - just what is wanted.
By the bye, I ought to mention that there is no implication that the lectureship will be continued after five years. - Of course the whole difficulty in this respect comes from the extremely few students who, as far as it can be foreseen, will be taught by you directly in lectures - I confess to a hope that there may be much more to be done - now that we know our own subject - than any of us can guarantee at present. - But the offer is for 5 years and no more, directly or indirectly.
The Council has been very spirited, for at the same time we elected a 'prelector' in Biochemistry.
No more news at present.
Yours affectionately A. N. W.
Trinity Lodge Cambridge June 3, 1910
My dear B. Russell
We are delighted to hear that there is now more than a hope of having you among us for some time to come. Not a shred of credit can I claim for the step which we have so wisely taken, but I rejoice to have given the heartiest assent to the advice of your scientific friends. I can hardly hope to last out during the whole of your happy Quinquennium, but I may at least look forward to giving you an early and a hearty greeting.
With our united kindest regards to Mrs Russell.
Believe me to be most truly yours H. Montagu Butler
There cannot be many living who, like myself, saw Lord John Russell starting from the Hotel at Callender in 1850, through a good Scotch Rain, for 'Rest and be Thankful'. I wonder if you know those delightful regions.
Merton College Oxford April 11/10
Dear Mr Russell
Many thanks for your letter. I have no doubt that in what I wrote I have misinterpreted you more or less. And that makes me unwilling to write at all, only no one else seemed doing it. I shall look forward to reading the off prints of the article from the Revue and I will attend to what you have written in your letter.
I feel, I confess, some alarm at the prospect of you being occupied with politics, if that means that you will have no time for philosophy. Will it not be possible to combine them? If not it is not for me to venture to judge in what direction you feel the greater 'call'. The only thing I feel clear about is this that no one else will do your work in philosophy so far as human probability goes. And more than this I don't feel I have any right to say.
If you are able to write something for 'Mind' I am sure that it will be welcome to the readers thereof and not least to myself.
Yours truly F. H. Bradley
I have no idea as to who will get this Professorship. I hear that Webb's chances are thought good on the ground that the two clerics are likely to vote for him and Warren also. But nothing is really known.
Merton College Oxford April 20/10
Dear Mr Russell
I am really glad to hear that you have no intention of going permanently into politics which of course are very absorbing. It is quite another thing to get a temporary change of occupation and you must have worked very hard at philosophy now for some years.
Certainly in the study of philosophy, &, I presume, in many other studies, the having to work alone so much is inhuman & trying. And I do not see any remedy for it. The amount to which one can collaborate with another is so small. My health has always been too bad for me to get a change by way of another occupation, but I am afraid that I have been driven to take a great deal of holidays instead. Another occupation might have been better.
I am too stupid now to read your article even if I had it but I shall look forward to seeing it.
I have always had a high opinion of your work from the first, & I feel ao doubt whatever that philosophy would lose greatly by your permanent withdrawal. I don't see who else is going to do the work there, which you would, &, I hope, will do.
Yours truly F. H. Bradley