seemed a little curious to those not accustomed to them. I remember my
mother-in-law explaining that she was taught to consider the Lord’s Prayer
‘gay’. At ?rst this remark caused bewilderment, but she explained that every-
thing done by non-Quakers but not by Quakers was called ‘gay’, and this
included the use of all ?xed formulas, since prayer ought to be inspired by
the Holy Spirit. The Lord’s Prayer, being a ?xed formula, was therefore ‘gay’.
On another occasion she informed the dinner-table that she had been
brought up to have no respect for the Ten Commandments. They also were
‘gay’. I do not know whether any Quakers remain who take the doctrine
of the guidance of the Spirit so seriously as to have no respect for the Ten
Commandments. Certainly I have not met any in recent years. It must not, of
course, be supposed that the virtuous people who had this attitude ever, in
fact, infringed any of the Commandments; the Holy Spirit saw to it that this
should not occur. Outside the ranks of the Quakers, similar doctrines some-
times have more questionable consequences. I remember an account written
by my mother-in-law of various cranks that she had known, in which there
was one chapter entitled ‘Divine Guidance’. On reading the chapter one
discovered that this was a synonym for fornication.
My impression of the old families of Philadelphia Quakers was that they
had all the e?eteness of a small aristocracy. Old misers of ninety would sit
brooding over their hoard while their children of sixty or seventy waited for
their death with what patience they could command. Various forms of men-
tal disorder appeared common. Those who must be accounted sane were
apt to be very stupid. Alys had a maiden aunt in Philadelphia, a sister of her
father, who was very rich and very absurd. She liked me well enough, but
had a dark suspicion that I thought it was not literally the blood of Jesus that
brought salvation. I do not know how she got this notion, as I never said
anything to encourage it. We dined with her on Thanksgiving Day. She was a
very greedy old lady, and had supplied a feast which required a gargantuan
stomach. Just as we were about to eat the ?rst mouthful, she said: ‘Let us
pause and think of the poor.’ Apparently she found this thought an appetiser.
She had two nephews who lived in her neighbourhood and came to see her
every evening. They felt it would be unfair if the nephew and nieces in Europe
got an equal share at her death. She, however, liked to boast about them, and
first marriage 123respected them more than those whom she could bully as she chose.
Consequently they lost nothing by their absence.
America in those days was a curiously innocent country. Numbers of men
asked me to explain what it was that Oscar Wilde had done. In Boston we
stayed in a boarding-house kept by two old Quaker ladies, and one of them at
breakfast said to me in a loud voice across the table: ‘Oscar Wilde has not
been much before the public lately. What has he been doing?’ ‘He is in
prison’, I replied. Fortunately on this occasion I was not asked what he had
done. I viewed America in those days with the conceited superiority of the
insular Briton. Nevertheless, contact with academic Americans, especially
mathematicians, led me to realise the superiority of Germany to England in
almost all academic matters. Against my will, in the course of my travels, the
belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually
wore o?. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
Of the year 1897 I remember very little except that my Foundations of Geometry
was published in that year. I remember also very great pleasure in receiving
a letter of praise of this book from Louis Couturat, whom at that time I had
never met, though I had reviewed his book The Mathematical In?nite. I had
dreamed of receiving letters of praise from unknown foreigners, but this
was the ?rst time it had happened to me. He related how he had worked his
way through my book ‘armé d’un dictionnaire’, for he knew no English. At
a slightly later date I went to Caen to visit him, as he was at that time a
professor there. He was surprised to ?nd me so young, but in spite of that
a friendship began which lasted until he was killed by a lorry during the
mobilisation of 1914. In the last years I had lost contact with him, because he
became absorbed in the question of an international language. He advocated
Ido rather than Esperanto. According to his conversation, no human beings in
the whole previous history of the human race had ever been quite so
depraved as the Esperantists. He lamented that the word Ido did not lend itself
to the formation of a word similar to Esperantist. I suggested ‘idiot’, but he
was not quite pleased. I remember lunching with him in Paris in July 1900,
when the heat was very oppressive. Mrs Whitehead, who had a weak heart,
fainted, and while he was gone to fetch the sal volatile somebody opened the
window. When he returned, he ?rmly shut it again, saying: ‘De l’air, oui, mais
pas de courant d’air.’ I remember too his coming to see me in a hotel in Paris
in 1905, while Mr Davies and his daughter Margaret (the father and sister of
Crompton and Theodore) listened to his conversation. He talked without a
moment’s intermission for half an hour, and then remarked that ‘the wise are
those who hold their tongues’. At this point, Mr Davies, in spite of his eighty
years, rushed from the room, and I could just hear the sound of his laughter
as he disappeared. Couturat was for a time a very ardent advocate of my ideas
on mathematical logic, but he was not always very prudent, and in my long
the autobiography of bertrand russell 124duel with Poincaré I found it sometimes something of a burden to have to
defend Couturat as well as myself. His most valuable work was on Leibniz’s
logic. Leibniz wished to be thought well of, so he published only his second-
rate work. All his best work remained in manuscript. Subsequent editors,
publishing only what they thought best, continued to leave his best work
unprinted. Couturat was the ?rst man who unearthed it. I was naturally
pleased, as it a?orded documentary evidence for the interpretation of Leibniz
which I had adopted in my book about him on grounds that, without
Couturat’s work, would have remained inadequate. The ?rst time I met
Couturat he explained to me that he did not practise any branch of ‘le sport’.
When shortly afterwards I asked him if he rode a bicycle, he replied: ‘But
no, since I am not a sportsman.’ I corresponded with him for many years,
and during the early stages of the Boer War wrote him imperialistic letters
which I now consider very regrettable.
In the year 1898 Alys and I began a practice, which we continued till
1902, of spending part of each year at Cambridge. I was at this time begin-
ning to emerge from the bath of German idealism in which I had been
plunged by McTaggart and Stout. I was very much assisted in this process by
Moore, of whom at that time I saw a great deal. It was an intense excitement,
after having supposed the sensible world unreal, to be able to believe again
that there really were such things as tables and chairs. But the most interesting
aspect of the matter to me was the logical aspect. I was glad to think that
relations are real, and I was interested to discover the dire e?ect upon meta-
physics of the belief that all propositions are of the subject-predicate form.
Accident led me to read Leibniz, because he had to be lectured upon, and
McTaggart wanted to go to New Zealand, so that the College asked me to take
his place so far as this one course was concerned. In the study and criticism
of Leibniz I found occasion to exemplify the new views on logic to which,
largely under Moore’s guidance, I had been led.
We spent two successive autumns in Venice, and I got to know almost
every stone in the place. From the date of my ?rst marriage down to the
outbreak of the ?rst war, I do not think any year passed without my going to
Italy. Sometimes I went on foot, sometimes on a bicycle; once in a tramp
steamer calling at every little port from Venice to Genoa. I loved especially the
smaller and more out-of-the-way towns, and the mountain landscapes in the
Apennines. After the outbreak of the war, I did not go back to Italy till 1949. I
had the intention of going there to a Congress in the year 1922, but Mussolini,
who had not yet accomplished his coup d’état, sent word to the organisers of
the Congress that, while no harm should be done to me, any Italian who
spoke to me should be assassinated. Having no wish to leave a trail of blood
behind me, I avoided the country which he de?led, dearly as I loved it.
I remember the summer of 1899 as the last time that I saw Sally Fairchild
first marriage 125until one afternoon in 1940, when we met as old people and wondered what
we had seen in each other. She was an aristocratic Bostonian of somewhat
diminished fortunes, whom I had ?rst come to know in 1896 when we were
staying in Boston. In the face she was not strikingly beautiful, but her move-
ments were the most graceful that I have ever seen. Innumerable people fell in
love with her. She used to say that you could always tell when an Englishman
was going to propose, because he began: ‘The governor’s a rum sort of chap,
but I think you’d get on with him.’ The next time that I met her, she was
staying with her mother at Rushmore, the country house of my Uncle, General
Pitt-Rivers. With the exception of the General, most of the family were more
or less mad. Mrs Pitt-Rivers, who was a Stanley, had become a miser, and if
visitors left any of their bacon and egg she would put it back in the dish. The
eldest son was a Guardsman, very smart and very correct. He always came
down late for breakfast and rang the bell for fresh food. When he ordered it,
my Aunt would scream at the footman, saying that there was no need of it as
there was plenty left from the scrapings from the visitors’ plates. The foot-
man, however, paid no attention to her, but quietly obeyed the Guardsman.
Then there was another son, who was a painter, mad and bad, but not sad.
There was a third son who was a nice fellow, but incompetent. He had the
good luck to marry Elspeth Phelps, the dressmaker, and thus escaped destitu-
tion. Then there was St George, the most interesting of the family. He was one
of the ?rst inventors of electric light, but he threw up all such things for
esoteric Buddhism and spent his time travelling in Tibet to visit Mahatmas.
When he returned, he found that Edison and Swan were making electric
lights which he considered an infringement of his patent. He therefore
entered upon a long series of lawsuits, which he always lost and which ?nally
left him bankrupt. This con?rmed him in the Buddhist faith that one should
overcome mundane desires. My grandmother Stanley used to make him play
whist, and when it came to his turn to deal, she used to say: ‘I am glad it is
your turn to deal, as it will take away your air of saintliness.’ He combined
saintliness and Company promoting in about equal proportions. He was in
love with Sally Fairchild and had on that account invited her mother and her
to Rushmore. There was as usual not enough food, and on one occasion at
lunch there was a tug-of-war between Sally and the artist for the last plate of
rice pudding, which I regret to say the artist won. On the day of her departure
she wished to catch a certain train but Mrs Pitt-Rivers insisted that she should
visit a certain ruin on the way to the station, and therefore catch a later train.
She appealed to St George to support her, and at ?rst he said he would, but
when it came to the crisis, he preached instead the vanity of human wishes.
This caused her to reject his proposal. (His subsequent marriage was annulled
on the ground of his impotence.
2
) In the summer of 1899 she paid a long
visit to Friday’s Hill, and I became very fond of her. I did not consider myself
the autobiography of bertrand russell 126in love with her, and I never so much as kissed her hand, but as years went
by I realised that she had made a deep impression on me, and I remember
as if it were yesterday our evening walks in the summer twilight while we
were restrained by the strict code of those days from giving any expression
whatever to our feelings.
In the autumn of 1899 the Boer War broke out. I was at that time a Liberal
Imperialist, and at ?rst by no means a pro-Boer. British defeats caused me
much anxiety, and I could think of nothing else but the war news. We were
living at The Millhanger, and I used most afternoons to walk the four miles
to the station in order to get an evening paper. Alys, being American, did
not have the same feelings in the matter, and was rather annoyed by my
absorption in it. When the Boers began to be defeated, my interest grew less,
and early in 1901 I became a pro-Boer.
In the year 1900, my book on the Philosophy of Leibniz was published. In July
of that year I went to Paris, where a new chapter of my life began.
LETTERS
Pembroke Lodge
Richmond, Surrey
May 30, ’95
Dearest Bertie
I hope yr Cambridge days had been useful though I don’t exactly know in
what way – I have asked you before, but forget yr answer, what yr dissertation
is called – how do you think you are succeeding with it? How vividly I
remember the ?rst tidings of yr ?rst success, before you went to Cambridge –
when you rushed upstairs to tell Auntie and me – the dear dear Bertie of
that day – and then the last – oh the happy tears that start to eyes, at such
moments in the old withered life to wch the young fresh life is bringing
joy – Yet how I always felt ‘these things wd not give me one moment’s
happiness if he were not loving and good and true’.
I came upon something of that kind yesty in a chance book I was reading –
and am always coming upon passages in all kinds of books which seem
written on purpose to answer to some experiences of my life – I suppose this
is natural when life has been long. By the bye you have not yet said a word to
Auntie about her little birthday letter – she has not said so, and she told me it
was only a few lines, but such as they were she made an e?ort over illness to
write them – the fact is that you take only the fag-end of the fragment of the
shred of a minute or two for yr letters to us – and though it is pleasant now
and then to look back to the full and talky ones you wrote in past days, they
are not exactly substitutes for what those of the present might be! However as
long as you have no wish for talkings on paper, wch at best is a poor a?air, go
first marriage 127on with yr scraps – I don’t forget how very busy you are, but the very busy
people are those who ?nd most time for everything somehow – don’t you
think so? (What an ugly smudge!) As for talking o? paper, you didn’t intend
as far as I cd make out when you went away, ever, within measurable distance
to make that possible – Oh dear how many things I meant to say and have not
said – about Quakers, of whose peculiar creed of rules we have been hearing
things true or false – and about much besides. But it must all wait. What
lovely skies and earth! and how glad you must have been to get back. Love
and thanks to Alys.
Yr ever loving
Granny
I hope you found my untidy pencilled glossaries wch were loose inside the
book – I thought they wd help to more pleasure in the book when you read
it. How I wish we cd have read it together!
Pembroke Lodge
Richmond, Surrey
(1896)
Dearest Bertie
You say you have ‘settled’ yr plans – please mention them in case P.L.
[Pembroke Lodge] comes into them – Gertrude3
and bairns are to be here
Sept. 1 to 16, I’m happy to say. U.R. in Scotland and elsewhere – so, that
time wd not do – I can imagine the ‘deeper Philosophy’ and even ‘L’In?ni
Mathematique’ to be most interesting. It is rather painful dear Bertie, that
knowing our love for Miss Walker, you still leave the death unmentioned. Nor
do you say a word of dear Lady Tennyson’s although so near you – Sir Henry
Taylor called her ‘very woman of very women’ – no length of words could
add to the praise of those ?ve. I have sent for Green for Alys – a delightful
history but not quite what I shd have liked as a gift to her.
Yr loving
Granny
Auntie has a beautiful note from poor Hallam.
Pembroke Lodge
Richmond, Surrey
Aug. 11, 1896
Dearest Alys
We are delighted with the Bertie photo – It is perfect, such a natural, not
photographic smile. As for you, we don’t like you, and I hope Bertie doesn’t,
neither pose, nor dusky face, nor white humpy tippet – this is perhaps
ungrateful of Agatha but she can’t help it, nor can I. When is or was your
birthday? I forget and only remember that I said I would give you a book. I
will try to think of one and then ask you if you have it, but not Green I think –
the autobiography of bertrand russell 128something less solid and instructive – have you Henriette Renan’s letters?
Agatha has just read them and says they are beautiful. Of course, my dear
child I should never think of giving my health or want of it as an objection to
your going to America. I felt it was for yourselves alone to decide whether ‘to
go or not to go’. I trust it may turn out for Bertie’s good. It is sad that the last
of the eminent group of authors, Holmes and Lowell, are gone – but no
doubt there must be men well worth his knowing, whether authors or not. It
is quite true that I have earnestly wished him to be thrown into a wider and
more various set of men and women than has been the case – but this is most
to be desired in his own country. Harold and Vita4
came down – did I tell
you? last week, such a nice natural pleasant girl. Thanks for your nice note.
What a pity about your cold! Is it any fault in the cottage? What a horrible
season for crossing and returning! Will sea air be good for your indigestion?
Your always a?ectionate
Granny
Pembroke Lodge
Richmond, Surrey
May 17, ’98
My dearest Bertie
I shall think of you very much tomorrow and of happy birthdays long ago
when she was with us
5
to guide, counsel and inspire to all good and when
you were still the child brightening our home and ?lling us with hope of
what you might some day become. Dear dear Bertie has it been an upward
growth since those days? Have the joys of life which are now yours helped
you to be not less but more loving, more helpful, more thoughtful, for those
whose lives may be full of sorrow illness pain and loneliness. All of us who
have known what it was to have Granny’s love and prayers and wishes – and
who have the blessed memory of her wonderful example must feel, at times
almost despairingly, how terribly terribly far away we are from her ideal and
her standard of life – but we must strive on and hope for more of her spirit.
You cannot think how very lovely everything is here just now and though the
aching longing for her is awful, yet I love to look upon it all and remember
how she loved it.
Uncle Rollo is very unwell and has been for a long time. I was very anxious
long ago about him when he was doing far too much, now he is ordered
complete rest; – Perhaps you have been to Dunrozel. There has been an
immense deal to do here and I have been quite overdone several times.
Gwennie [Gwendoline Villiers] has saved me from a breakdown by working
incessantly and helping in every possible way – It has been most painful to
see the beautiful pictures go away and the house more and more dismantled
and I shall be thankful when it is over. I am most glad that Uncle Rollo has
first marriage 129several of the good pictures. They ought to be his and also I am grateful to
Herbrand6
for giving the Grant picture of your grandfather to the National
Portrait Gallery. I am sorry I have no present for you just yet but it has been
simply impossible during this unceasing business. Give Alys very best love.
God bless you dearest Bertie.
Your very loving
Auntie
To Graham Wallas
The Deanery
Bryn Mawr, Pa.
Nov. 13, 1896
Dear Wallas
I have been meaning to write to you ever since the Presidential election, on
account of a specimen ballot paper wh. I am sending you by book post. This
document, I am told, is more complicated than in any other state: certainly it is
a triumph. It seems to me to contain within it the whole 18th century theory
of the free and intelligent demos, and the whole 19th century practice of
bossism. Imagine using such a phrase as ‘straight ticket’ on a ballot-paper,
and imagine the stupendous intellect of a man who votes anything else on
such a ballot-paper. I have never seen a document more replete with theory of
politics, or illustrating more neatly the short road from bad metaphysics to
political corruption. The whole interest, in Philadelphia, centred about
the election of the sheri? – Crow, the independent Republican, was making
a stand against bossism, and strange to say, he got in, tho’ by a very
narrow majority.
I am sending you also some rather transparent boss’s devices for allowing
?ctitious voters to vote. You will see that the vouchers I enclose enable a
man to vote without being on the register. I was taken to a polling-booth
in Philadelphia, and there stood, just outside, a sub-deputy boss, named
Flanagan, instructing the ignorant how to vote, illegally watching them mark
their ballot-paper, and when necessary vouching for the right to vote. A
Republican and a Democrat sat inside to see that all was fair, it being sup-
posed they would counteract each other; as a matter of fact, they make a deal,
and agree to keep up their common friends the bosses, even if they have to
admit fraudulent votes for the opposite party. Americans seem too fatalistic
and pessimistic to do much against them: I was taken by a man appointed as
o?cial watcher by the Prohibitionists, but tho’ he observed and pointed
out the irregularities, he merely shrugged his shoulders when I asked why
he did not interfere and make a row. The fact is, Americans are unspeakably
lazy about everything but their business: to cover their laziness, they invent
a pessimism, and say things can’t be improved: tho’ when I confront them,
and ask for any single reform movement wh. has not succeeded, they are
stumped, except one who mentioned the Consular service – naturally not a
the autobiography of bertrand russell 130very soulstirring cry. One of them, who prides himself on his virtue, frankly
told me he found he could make more money in business than he could save
in rates by ?ghting corruption – it never seemed to enter his head that one
might think that a rather lame excuse. However, everything seems to be
improving very fast, tho’ nothing makes the lazy hypocritical Puritans so
furious as to say so. They take a sort of pride in being the most corrupt place
in the Union: everywhere you go they brag of the peculiar hopelessness of
their own locality. The fall of Altgeld and the defeat of Tammany seem to
irritate them: it might so easily have been otherwise, they say, and will be
otherwise next election. Altogether I don’t see that they deserve any better
than they get. The Quakers and Puritans, so far as I have come across them,
are the greatest liars and hypocrites I have ever seen and are as a rule totally
destitute of vigour. Here’s a Philadelphia story. Wanamaker is the local
Whiteley, enormously rich and religious. The protective tari? is dear to his
soul. In the election of 1888, when New York was the critical State, it was
telegraphed to the Phila. Republican Committee that 80,000 dollars would
win the election. Wanamaker planked down the sum, New York State was
won by a majority of 500, and Wanamaker became Postmaster General. Here
is a New York tale. Jay Gould, in 1884, o?ered a huge sum to the Republicans.
This became known to the Democrats, who next day had a procession of
several hours past his house shouting as they marched: ‘Blood! Blood! Jay
Gould’s Blood!’ He turned pale, and telegraphed any sum desired to the
Democrats. Cleveland was elected. – However, individual Americans are
delightful: but whether from lack of courage or from decentralisation, they
do not form a society of frank people, and all in turn complain that they
would be universally cut if they ever spoke their minds. I think this is largely
due to the absence of a capital. A similar cause I think accounts for the
religiosity and timidity of their Universities. Professor Ely was dismissed
from the Johns Hopkins for being a Xtian Socialist! There are possibilities
tho’: everybody is far more anxious to be educated than in England, the level
of intelligence is high, and thoughtful people admit – though only within the
last few years, I am told, apparently since Bryce – that their form of govern-
ment is not perfect. I think you will have, as we have, a very good time here.
We probably sail December 30th, and strongly urge you to arrive before then.
We shall be in New York, and want very much to see you, as also to introduce
you to several nice people who will be there. If you have not yet written
about the date of your arrival, please write soon. – This College is a ?ne place,
immeasurably superior to Girton and Newnham; the Professor of Pol. Econ.
oddly enough is a Socialist and a Free Silver man and has carried all his class
with him tho’ many of them are rich New Yorkers. Those I have met are
intelligent and generous in their views of social questions.
Yours
Bertrand Russell
first marriage 131Maurice Sheldon Amos (afterwards Sir) was my only link between Cambridge and Friday’s Hill.
His father, who died in the 80s, was a theoretical lawyer of some eminence, and was the principal
author of the Egyptian Constitution imposed by the English after their occupation of Egypt in
1881. His mother, as a widow, was devoted to Good Works, especially Purity. She was popularly
supposed to have said: ‘Since my dear husband’s death I have devoted my life to prostitution.’ It
was also said that her husband, though a very hairy man, became as bald as an egg within six
weeks of his marriage: but I cannot vouch for these stories. Mrs Amos, through her work, became a
friend of Mrs Pearsall Smith. Accordingly Logan, when visiting me at Cambridge, took me to call
on Maurice, then a freshman just beginning the study of moral science. He was an attractive
youth, tall, enthusiastic, and awkward. He used to say: ‘The world is an odd place: whenever I
move about in it I bump into something.’
He became a barrister and went to Egypt, where his father was remembered. There he
prospered, and after being a Judge for a long time retired, and stood for Cambridge as a Liberal.
He was the only man I ever knew who read mathematics for pleasure, as other people read
detective stories.
He had a sister named Bonté, with whom Alys and I were equally friends. Bonté su?ered
greatly from her mother’s fanatical religiosity. She became a doctor, but a few weeks before her
?nal examination her mother developed the habit of waking her up in the night to pray for
her, so we had to send her money to enable her to live away from home. Alys and I took her with
us to America in 1896.
Bonté also went to Egypt, where she was at one time quarantine medical o?cer at Suez, whose
duty (inter alia) it was to catch rats on ships declared by their captains to be free from such
animals. She ?nally married an army o?cer who was at the head of the police force of Egypt. He
had endured shipwrecks and mutinies and all kinds of ‘hair-breadth ’scapes’, but when I remarked
to him, ‘You seem to have had a very adventurous life’, he replied, ‘Oh no, of course I never missed
