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 ?nd 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 MacCails, 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 ?nd 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
the autobiography of bertrand russell 152and 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 uninformed 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 su?ciently morti?ed. ‘Die to Self ’ is an old maxim; ‘Love thy neigh-
bour 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 di?cult; I wish I lived in a cloister wearing a hair shirt
and sleeping on a cruci?x. 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 deep-toned 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 sacri?ced 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 elabor-
ate, 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 ?t 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
‘principia mathematica’ 153art; 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
e?ciency, 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 e?ective 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 pos-
sible 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 ?nished 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-sacri?ce
(and too often sacri?ce of others), of sheer e?ort of will, of stern austerity in
repressing even what is intrinsically best, that goes into writing a book of any
the autobiography of bertrand russell 154magnitude. 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 ?nish soon, when suddenly I came
upon a greater di?culty than any I had known of before. So di?cult it was,
that to think of it at all required an all but superhuman e?ort. 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 ?nished, 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 experi-
ence 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 di?erence between the great eternal facts and the transient dross
of merely personal feeling. If you tell these things to your ?ne-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 ?lthy multitude is ruining civilisation. A certain man had the impu-
dence to maintain in my presence that every student ought to be made to
‘principia mathematica’ 155expound his views to popular audiences, so I lifted up my voice and testi?ed
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 appreci-
ate 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 door-yard bloomed’. This seems to me to show a deplorable
conventionality, both in taste generally, and in judgment of Whitman
specially.
When my book was ?nished, 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 ?lled 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 ?nest, rarest, most precious experiences. But this
is too large a theme!...
Yours very sincerely
Bertrand Russell
the autobiography of bertrand russell 156Friday’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 e?ect 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 recom-
mended to the man who wanted to found a new religion: Be cruci?ed, 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-in?icted and voluntary,
and the rising again, to the hopes of new cruci?xions, requires a considerable
e?ort of will. It seems to me that your di?culty 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 super?cial, more pusillanimous,
than in Europe; there is a triviality of feeling which makes real people very
rare – I ?nd 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
‘principia mathematica’ 157the ?ne 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 madden-
ing 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 had to be rescued, because Robertson began
to discuss whether God was made of green cheese or had whiskers – in?nite
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 pro?t in feeling unless one learns to dominate it and imper-
sonalise it. – For people like you and me, whose main business is necessarily
the autobiography of bertrand russell 158with 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, su?ering, and then dying, begins to su?ce
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
di?culty 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 su?ered 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 a?ections to centre too much in one
person; for a?ection is 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
‘principia mathematica’ 159the 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: a?ection 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 a?ection,
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 ?nds 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 consol-
ing is, that its tragedies are all in the past, and have the completeness and
the autobiography of bertrand russell 160repose 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 sacri?ced 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 ?nd 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 ?nds oneself 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 in?nite 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,
‘principia mathematica’ 161and because it increases human comradeship to su?er what others su?er. 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
