be hurt. He did not seem to be, as I put it very carefully. He is undisciplined
in thought, and mistakes his wishes for facts. He is also muddle-headed. He
says ‘facts’ are quite unimportant, only ‘truths’ matter. London is a ‘fact’ not a
‘truth’. But he wants London pulled down. I tried to make him see that that
would be absurd if London were unimportant, but he kept reiterating that
London doesn’t really exist, and that he could easily make people see it
doesn’t, and then they would pull it down. He was so con?dent of his powers
of persuasion that I challenged him to come to Trafalgar Square at once and
begin preaching. That brought him to earth and he began to shu?e. His
attitude is a little mad and not quite honest, or at least very muddled. He has
not learnt the lesson of individual impotence. And he regards all my attempts
to make him acknowledge facts as mere timidity, lack of courage to think
boldly, self-indulgence in pessimism. When one gets a glimmer of the facts
into his head, as I did at last, he gets discouraged, and says he will go to the
South Sea Islands, and bask in the sun with 6 native wives. He is tough work.
The trouble with him is a tendency to mad exaggeration.
July 1915
Tuesday
Yes, the day Lawrence was with me was horrid. I got ?lled with despair,
and just counting the moments till it was ended. Partly that was due to liver,
but not wholly. Lawrence is very like Shelley – just as ?ne, but with a similar
impatience of fact. The revolution he hopes for is just like Shelley’s prophecy
of banded anarchs ?eeing while the people celebrate a feast of love. His
psychology of people is amazingly good up to a point, but at a certain point
he gets misled by love of violent colouring.
Friday evg. I dined with my Harvard pupil, [T. S.] Eliot, and his bride. I
expected her to be terrible, from his mysteriousness; but she was not so bad.
the first war 263She is light, a little vulgar, adventurous, full of life – an artist I think he said, but
I should have thought her an actress. He is exquisite and listless; she says she
married him to stimulate him, but ?nds she can’t do it. Obviously he married
in order to be stimulated. I think she will soon be tired of him. She refuses to
go to America to see his people, for fear of submarines. He is ashamed of his
marriage, and very grateful if one is kind to her. He is the Miss Sands type of
American. [Miss Sands was a highly-cultivated New Englander, a painter and
a friend of Henry James and Logan Pearsall Smith.]
Hatch
Kingsley Green
Haslemere
Thurs. mg.
[Postmark 9 Sp. ’15]
My Darling
I was very glad of your letter this morning – such a dear letter. I wish I
could avoid getting unhappy. I can, if I have interests away from you and do
not stay on and on in the family atmosphere – but otherwise the feeling of
being a mere super?uous ghost, looking on but not participating, grows too
strong to be borne. By spending some days in town each week it will be all
right. The Lady18
has been explaining the situation to me, and is going to do
so further today, as she is taking me out for a picnic, while Mrs Waterlow
[her sister] goes to town. She says – and I believe her – that she was
unguarded with my brother at ?rst, because she looked upon him as safely
married, and therefore suitable as a lover. Suddenly, without consulting her,
he wrote and said he was getting divorced. It took her breath away, and rather
?attered her; she drifted, said nothing de?nite, but allowed him tacitly to
assume everything. Now she is feeling very worried, because the inexorable
moment is coming when his divorce will be absolute and she will have to
decide. Her objections to him are the following:
(a) He sleeps with 7 dogs on his bed. She couldn’t sleep a wink in such
circumstances.
19
(b) He reads Kipling aloud.
(c) He loves Telegraph House, which is hideous.
I daresay other objections might be found if one searched long enough,
they are all three well chosen to appeal to me. She is a ?atterer, and has
evidently set herself to the task of getting me to be not against her if she
breaks with him. But it is an impossible task. I am too fond of my brother, and
shall mind his su?ering too much, to forgive her inwardly even if she has a
perfectly good case. She says she is still in great uncertainty, but I don’t think
she will marry him. She would be delighted to go on having him for a lover, but
I feel sure he will never agree to that.
I must ?nish, as this must be posted in a moment.
the autobiography of bertrand russell 264Don’t worry about me. It will be all right as long as I don’t let my thoughts
get too concentrated on what I can’t have. I loved the children’s picnic, because
for once I was not a ghost. I can’t enter into the family life when you are
present, partly because you absorb my attention, partly because in your pres-
ence I am always paralysed with terror, sti? and awkward from the sense of
your criticism. I know that some things I do or don’t do annoy you, for
reasons I don’t understand, and it makes it impossible for me to be natural
before you, though sometimes it makes me exaggerate the things you hate.
But when I am not tired, I can surmount all those things. Owing to being
constrained and frightened when I am with you, my vitality doesn’t last long
at Garsington, and when it is gone I become defenceless against thoughts I
want to keep at a distance.
Thursday night
[Postmark London,
29 October ’15]
My Darling
I was glad to get your letter. I had begun to feel anxious. I am glad Lawrence
was so wonderful. I have no doubt he is right to go, but I couldn’t desert
England. I simply cannot bear to think that England is entering on its autumn of
life – it is too much anguish. I will not believe it, and I will believe there is
health and vigour in the nation somewhere. It is all hell now, and shame – but
I believe the very shame will in the end wake a new spirit. The more England
goes down and down, the more profoundly I want to help, and the more I
feel tied to England for good or ill. I cannot write of other things, they seem
so small in comparison.
Your
B.
Wednesday
[Postmark Nov. 10, ’15]
Eliot had a half holiday yesterday and got home at 3.30. It is quite funny
how I have come to love him, as if he were my son. He is becoming much
more of a man. He has a profound and quite unsel?sh devotion to his wife,
and she is really very fond of him, but has impulses of cruelty to him from
time to time. It is a Dostojevsky type of cruelty, not a straightforward every-
day kind. I am every day getting things more right between them, but I can’t
let them alone at present, and of course I myself get very much interested. She
is a person who lives on a knife-edge, and will end as a criminal or a saint – I
don’t know which yet. She has a perfect capacity for both.
[1915] Wed.
My Darling
I don’t know what has come over me lately but I have sunk again into the
state of lethargy that I have had at intervals since the war began. I am sure I
the first war 265ought to live di?erently, but I have utterly lost all will-power. I want someone
to take me in hand and order me about, telling me where to live and what to
do and leaving me no self-direction at all. I have never felt quite like that
before. It is all mental fatigue I am sure, but it is very intense, and it leaves me
with no interest in anything, and not enough energy to get into a better
frame of mind by my own e?orts. In fact I should ?ght against anything that
might be suggested to do me good. My impulse is just to sit still and brood.
I can’t do much till my lectures are over but that won’t be long now. If I
could get some one like Desmond [MacCarthy] to come to the country with
me then and make me walk a lot, I should get better. But everyone is busy and
I haven’t the energy to arrange things. I don’t do any work. I shall have to get
to work for Harvard some time but the thought of work is a nightmare. I am
sure something ought to be done or I shall go to pieces.
Irene [Cooper Willis] has just been here scolding me about Helen
[Dudley] – someone told her the whole story lately – that hasn’t made me
any more cheerful than I was before. Sense of Sin is one of the things that
trouble me at these times. The state of the world is at the bottom of it I think,
and the terrible feeling of impotence. I thought I had got over it but it has
come back worse than ever. Can you think of anything that would help me? I
should be grateful if you could. My existence just now is really too dreadful.
I know now that it is just an illness and it doesn’t any longer make me
critical of you or of anybody. It is my will that is gone. I have used it too
much and it has snapped.
You have enough burdens already – but if you know anyone who could
look after me for a while and order me about it would make a di?erence.
Your
B.
Sat. [1916]
I enclose a letter from Captain White. You will see that he feels the same sort
of hostility or antagonism to me that Lawrence feels – I think it is a feeling
that seems to exist in most of the people with whom I feel in sympathy on the
spiritual side – probably the very same thing which has prevented you from
caring for me as much as you thought you would at ?rst. I wish you could
?nd out and tell me what it is. It makes one feel very isolated. People with
whom I have intellectual sympathy hardly ever have any spiritual life, or at
any rate have very little; and the others seem to ?nd the intellectual side of me
unbearable. You will think I am lapsing into morbidness again, but that is not
so; I simply want to get to the bottom of it so as to understand it; if I can’t get
over it, it makes it di?cult to achieve much.
I had told White I was troubled by the fact that my audiences grow, and
that people who ought to be made uncomfortable by my lectures
20
are not –
the autobiography of bertrand russell 266notably Mrs Acland [whose husband was in the Government], who sits enjoy-
ing herself, with no feeling that what I say is a condemnation of the Govern-
ment. I thought after my last lecture I would point the moral practically.
I feel I know very little of what you have been thinking and feeling lately. I
have been so busy that my letters have been dull, so I can’t complain. But it
will be a relief to see you and to ?nd out something of what has been going
on in you. Ever since the time when I was at Garsington last, I have been quite
happy as far as personal things are concerned. Do you remember that at the
time when you were seeing Vittoz [a Swiss physician who treated her] I
wrote a lot of stu? about Theory of Knowledge, which Wittgenstein criti-
cised with the greatest severity? His criticism, tho’ I don’t think you realised
it at the time, was an event of ?rst-rate importance in my life, and a?ected
everything I have done since. I saw he was right, and I saw that I could not
hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy. My impulse was
shattered, like a wave dashed to pieces against a breakwater. I became ?lled
with utter despair,
21
and tried to turn to you for consolation. But you were
occupied with Vittoz and could not give me time. So I took to casual philan-
dering, and that increased my despair. I had to produce lectures for America,
but I took a metaphysical subject although I was and am convinced that all
fundamental work in philosophy is logical. My reason was that Wittgenstein
persuaded me that what wanted doing in logic was too di?cult for me. So
there was no really vital satisfaction of my philosophical impulse in that
work, and philosophy lost its hold on me. That was due to Wittgenstein more
than to the war. What the war has done is to give me a new and less di?cult
ambition, which seems to me quite as good as the old one. My lectures have
persuaded me that there is a possible life and activity in the new ambition. So
I want to work quietly, and I feel more at peace as regards work than I have
ever done since Wittgenstein’s onslaught.
From Stanley Unwin 40, Museum Street
London, W.C.
November 29th, 1915
Dear Sir
I notice with very great interest in the current number of The Cambridge
Magazine that you are planning to give a Course of Lectures on ‘The Principles
of Social Reconstruction’.
If it is your intention that the Lectures should subsequently be published in
book form, I hope we may have the pleasure of issuing them for you.
We enclose a prospectus of Towards a Lasting Settlement, a volume in which we
know you are interested. We hope to publish the book on December 6th.
Yours faithfully
Stanley Unwin
[This was the beginning of my connection with Allen & Unwin.]
the first war 267From T. S. Eliot Tuesday
[Jan. 1916.]
Dear Bertie
This is wonderfully kind of you – really the last straw (so to speak)
of generosity. I am very sorry you have to come back – and Vivien says
you have been an angel to her – but of course I shall jump at the opportunity
with the utmost gratitude. I am sure you have done everything possible and
handled her in the very best way – better than I – I often wonder how
things would have turned out but for you – I believe we shall owe her life to
you, even.
I shall take the 10.30, and look forward to a talk with you before you go.
Mrs Saich22
is expecting you. She has made me very comfortable here.
A?ectionately
Tom
From Charlotte C. Eliot 4446 Westminster Place
May 23rd, 1916
Dear Mr Russell
Your letter relative to a cablegram sent us, was received some little time
ago. I write now to thank you for the a?ection that inspired it. It was natural
you should feel as you did with the awful tragedy of the Sussex of such recent
occurrence. Mr Eliot did not believe it possible that even the Germans,
(a synonym for all that is most frightful,) would attack an American liner. It
would be manifestly against their interest. Yet I am aware there is still
a possibility of war between Germany and America. The more we learn of
German methods, open and secret, the greater is the moral indignation
of many Americans. I am glad all our ancestors are English with a French
ancestry far back on one line. I am sending Tom copy of a letter written
by his Great-great-grandfather in 1811, giving an account of his grandfather
(one of them) who was born about 1676 – in the county of Devon, England –
Christopher Pearse.
I am sure your in?uence in every way will con?rm my son in his choice of
Philosophy as a life work. Professor Wood speaks of his thesis as being of
exceptional value. I had hoped he would seek a University appointment next
year. If he does not I shall feel regret. I have absolute faith in his Philosophy
but not in the vers libres.
Tom is very grateful to you for your sympathy and kindness. This gratitude
I share.
Sincerely yours
Charlotte C. Eliot
[T. S. Eliot’s mother]
the autobiography of bertrand russell 268To Lucy Martin Donnelly,
Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College
34 Russell Chambers
Bury St., W.C.
10 Feb. 1916
My dear Lucy
I was glad to hear from you at Kyoto – as for Continents, there are so far
only 3 in which I have written to you – it is your plain duty to go to Africa &
Australia in order to complete your collection.
I do hope you will manage to come to England by the Siberian Railway. It
would be a great pleasure to see you, & I am sure that I could make you
sympathise with the point of view which I & most of my friends take about
the war.
You needn’t have been afraid about my lectures. Helen [Flexner] wrote me
quite a serious remonstrance, which amused me. I should have thought she
would have known by this time that social caution in the expression of
opinion is not my strong point. If she had known Christ before he delivered
the Sermon on the Mount she would have begged him to keep silence for fear
of injuring his social position in Nazareth. People who count in the world are
oblivious of such things. As a matter of fact, my lectures are a great success –
they are a rallying-ground for the intellectuals, who are coming daily more to
my way of thinking not only as regards the war but also as regards general
politics. All sorts of literary & artistic people who formerly despised politics
are being driven to action, as they were in France by the Dreyfus case. In the
long run, their action will have a profound e?ect. It is primarily to them that I
am speaking. – I have given up writing on the war because I have said my say
& there is nothing new to say. – My ambitions are more vast & less immediate
than my friends’ ambitions for me. I don’t care for the applause one gets by
saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change people’s thoughts.
Power over people’s minds is the main personal desire of my life; & this sort
of power is not acquired by saying popular things. In philosophy, when I was
young, my views were as unpopular & strange as they could be; yet I have had
a very great measure of success. Now I have started on a new career, & if I live
& keep my faculties, I shall probably be equally successful. Harvard has
invited me to give a course of lectures 12 months hence on the sort of things
I am now lecturing on, & I have agreed to go. As soon as the war is over,
people here will want just that sort of thing. When you once understand what
my ambitions are, you will see that I go the right way about to realise them.
In any large undertaking, there are rough times to go through, & of course
success may not come till after one is dead – but those things don’t matter if
one is in earnest. I have something important to say on the philosophy of life
the first war 269& politics, something appropriate to the times. People’s general outlook here
has changed with extraordinary rapidity during the last 10 years; their beliefs
are disintegrated, & they want a new doctrine. But those who will mould the
future won’t listen to anything that retains old superstitions & conventions.
There is a sharp cleavage between old & young; after a gradual development, I
have come down on the side of the young. And because I am on their side, I
can contribute something of experience which they are willing to respect
when it is not merely criticism. – Let me hear again soon – I am interested by
your impressions of the Far East.
Yrs a?y
B Russell
Have you read Romain Rolland’s Life of Michel Angelo? It is a wonderful
book.
To Ottoline Morrell Sunday aft.
[Postmark London 30 Jan. ’16.]
I have read a good deal of Havelock Ellis on sex. It is full of things that
everyone ought to know, very scienti?c and objective, most valuable and
interesting. What a folly it is the way people are kept in ignorance on sexual
matters, even when they think they know everything. I think almost all civil-
ised people are in some way what would be thought abnormal, and they
su?er because they don’t know that really ever so many people are just like
them. One so constantly hears of things going wrong when people marry,
merely through not knowing the sort of things that are likely to happen, and
through being afraid to talk frankly. It seems clear to me that marriage ought
to be constituted by children, and relations not involving children ought to
be ignored by the law and treated as indi?erent by public opinion. It is only
through children that relations cease to be a purely private matter. The whole
traditional morality I am sure is superstitious. It is not true that the very best
things are more likely to come to those who are very restrained – they either
grow incapable of letting themselves go, or when they do, they become too
violent and headlong. Do you agree?
Goodbye my darling. I am as happy as one can be in these times, and very
full of love. It will be a joy to see you again if you come up.
Your
B.
Trin. Coll.
Feb. 27 1916
My Darling
I believe I forgot to tell you I was coming here for the week-end. I came to
speak to the ‘Indian Majliss’ a Club of Indian students here. They were having
the autobiography of bertrand russell 270their annual dinner, about 100 of them, and they asked me to propose the
toast of ‘India’. Your friend Professor Shaheed Suhrawardy was there, and
spoke extraordinarily well. They had asked me because of the line I have taken
about the war – at least I suppose so. But when I came to speak an odd sense
of responsibility came over me. I remembered that after all I don’t want the
Germans to win, and I don’t want India to rebel at this moment. I said that if I
were a native of India I did not think I should desire a German victory. This
was received in dead silence, and subsequent speeches said that was the only
thing in my speech that they disagreed with. Their nationalism was impres-
sive. They spoke of unity between Moslems and Hindoos, of the oppressive-
ness of England, of sharp defeat as the only way of checking tyrants. Many of
them were able, very earnest, quite civilised. The man who spoke last was a
biologist, full of passion for science, just going to return to India. ‘I am
going’, he said, ‘from this land of prosperity to the land of plague and
famine, from this land of freedom to the land where if I am truthful I am
disloyal, if I am honest I am seditious; from this land of enlightenment to the
land of religious bigotry, the land that I love, my country. A man must be
more than human to love such a country; but those who would serve it have
become more than human.’ What a waste to make such men ?ght political
battles! In a happier world, he would probably discover preventives for chol-
era; as it is, his life will be full of strife and bitterness, resisting evil, not
creating good. All of them were fearless and thoughtful; most of them were
very bitter. Mixed in with it all was an odd strain of undergraduate fun and
banter, jibes about the relative merits of Oxford and Cambridge, and such talk
as amuses the English youth in quiet times. The mixture, which was in each
separate speech, was very curious.
Tonight I meet them again, or some of them, and give them my lecture on
education. I am very glad indeed to have got to know their point of view and
their character. It must be appallingly tragic to be civilised and educated and
belong to such a country as India.
Helen [Dudley] is coming to lunch. I hope I shall see Nicod; also
Armstrong23
. Yesterday I lunched with Waterlow24
which was dull.
I spoke to the Indians for half an hour, entirely without preparation or any
scrap of notes. I believe I speak better that way, more spontaneously and less
monotonously.
Trinity College
Sunday evening 19 Mar. ’16
My Darling
The melancholy of this place now-a-days is beyond endurance – the
Colleges are dead, except for a few Indians and a few pale paci?sts and
bloodthirsty old men hobbling along victorious in the absence of youth.
Soldiers are billeted in the courts and drill on the grass; bellicose parsons
the first war 271preach to them in stentorian tones from the steps of the Hall. The town at
night is plunged in a darkness compared to which London is a blaze of light.
All that one has cared for is dead, at least for the present; and it is hard to
believe that it will ever revive. No one thinks about learning or feels it of any
importance. And from the outer deadness my thoughts travel to the deadness
in myself – I look round my shelves at the books of mathematics and phil-
osophy that used to seem full of hope and interest, and now leave me utterly
cold. The work I have done seems so little, so irrelevant to this world in
which we ?nd we are living. And in everything except work I have failed so
utterly. All the hopes of ?ve years ago come before me like ghosts. I struggle
to banish them from my mind but I can’t. All our happy times are in my
memory, though I know it is better not to think of them. I know I must work
and think and learn to be interested in mental things, but utter weariness
overwhelms me in the thought. It is no use to keep on running away from
spectres. I must let them catch me up and then face them. When I have learnt
to work properly again, I shall feel more inward independence, and things
will be better. Ever since I knew you, I have tried to get from you what one
ought to get out of oneself.
46 Gordon Square
Bloomsbury
Tuesday night
[1916]
My Darling
I have not heard from you since the letter you wrote on Friday, but as I
only get my letters once a day now (when I call for them, in the morning) it
is not surprising.
I had a queer adventure today. Lloyd George was led to think he might
as well ?nd out at ?rst hand about the conscientious objectors, so he had
Cli?ord Allen and Miss Marshall and me to lunch at his place near Reigate,
fetching us and sending us back in his own motor. He was very unsatisfac-
tory, and I think only wanted to exercise his skill in trying to start a process of
bargaining. Still, it was worth something that he should see Allen and know
the actual man. It will make him more reluctant to have him shot.
I feel convinced the men will have to su?er a good deal before public
